Extra Growls

So, I have been thinking of rejuvenating my horribly neglected blog with a few Silver Werewolf side stories. I thought I’d told it all but, hey, I miss those wolves and I miss writing fiction (non-fiction projects are eating my life right now). 

So this is just a place holder, but just to say, I am thinking on that.

Balls

We’re celebrating our sticky fingered love of David Beckham over on Erotica Cover Watch and Lust Bites. I thought I would dive off on two tangents. The first is to tell you how much I love Alison Jackson and her unsettling fake images of celebrities. Becks is a regular subject. Here’s a glimpse of a dirty American David.

David I just love to look at. But I only ever adored one footballer enough to actually like watching him play football.

Eric Cantona, who called football a spontaeous art form and was pretty enough to make me believe it.

Sheer Lust

People are rightly excited about the lovely cover of this book. I am so pleased to have a solo guy on the cover as you will know if you read my complaints elsewhere. Not that I find wet men as exciting as certain people. I like a bit of glisten more than a soaking. But I’m happy with this cover.

I’m less happy about the copy edits made to my story in this book. For some reason the authors never got galley proofs of Lust At First Bite. During the galley stage authors get to have a say (although not the final say) in any editorial changes. But this time the galley stage got missed, for some reason, which means it wasn’t until I got the book in my hands that I saw that every instance of the word ‘cunt’ had been changed to the cringey bad-erotica no-one-says-in-real-life ’sex’. Eurgh. And totally OOC for my viewpoint character.

I think not using the word cunt in stories about explicit sex is a bit lame – but I would have changed the word for something else if I had known it was a problem for Black Lace (this month). I really dislike the word ’sex’ used for genitalia. Mainly because people just don’t say that. (Maybe it is okay in a historical.) But even if they did, Blake, who is the viewpoint character in this story would never say anything as clumsy and non-direct. It might seem like a small thing, but it is really quite gutting to see your character’s dialogue and internal monologue trashed by lazy editing and the type of word choices I associate with the crasser end of erotica.

God, I’ve probably really offended anyone reading this who does use the word ’sex’ like that. Sorry. It is a blend of it being OOC and a personal dislike too, but I do have issues with the word just because it is used a lot in erotica and pretty much never IRL. I think too many erotica writers use it as crutch – and I don’t like seemingly like I am one of them.

So, to make me feel better, when you get your hands on a copy of Lust At First Bite (what is with that title – two puns?), which was out on Thursday, in UK and just in time for your Xmas gift vouchers in the US, please print out this page and stick the following cunty extracts into my story Left Hand Man – just so as I feel less like a crappy writer.

1. I knew I couldn’t give her the due pounding she would’ve enjoyed with a busted arm. But I still show her something, holding her legs apart with my body and using my mouth on her hot witch’s cunt until she’s writhing, pulling against the cuffs on her wrists. When I think she’s on the brink, I stop.

2. Oh god, you know, I love my faithless wife. Always will. And I do tell her I’ve never cheated except with a witch – and it doesn’t count with a witch – but, oh, no one, no one feels like Lilith. Nothing feels like a witch’s cunt desperate for your cock inside it.

I draw back. I just leave the tip of my dick inside her. Her cunt pulses begs like the hungry maw of a baby bird. ‘Say “please”. Say “please, Blake, fuck me”.’

‘I could rip your fucking arms off.’

‘You could say “please, Blake, fuck me”.’ I slide my cock up the ravine of her cunt and swirl the head on her swollen clit.

She meets my eye. ‘Please, Blake, fuck me.’

Down I go. Down and in.

‘Please, Blake, harder. Hard.’

I do as she asks. It feels amazing. I don’t know if it is the ecstasy of my painless working right arm, the way it feels baring my weight. But god. God!

‘Please, Blake. More, harder. Fuck me harder, please. Please!’

I fuck her and fuck her and each thrusts seems to make her yell out for more and make me harder inside her.

When I crest, she’s there too. She brings it. Crying out in chains and stockings. Her cunt pulses, slick, clenching around me.

3. Less than an hour in a vampire castle and I’m fucking an undead bitch. What the hell is wrong with me? Sure I’m missing my faithless vow-breaking wife, but it’s not like this is going to help. Course I shouldn’t be here. I don’t do vamps. But I’m full of drugs, right? It’s the drugs made me do this. I’m panting. She puts her hands on my chest, sliding under my sling and stroking my nipples hard. Her cunt works my cock like nothing I’ve ever felt and it’s then that I get an unexpected flash of clarity. She is way, way too good at this. Vampires don’t fuck like human’s do. Don’t fuck like this. She said so herself. They bite each other. So how did this one learn to fuck human men this well.  I think of her mouth – the way I’d felt like she must have sucked a million cocks…

There used to be a thing of vamps biting whores way back in the day. They were out alone at night. Easier. Weaker. Friendlier. People care less about them. Makes sense. Same reason serial killers often pick on them as victim of choice.  So now a lot of the female vamps you meet these days were whores when they were human. (So they have mouths for sucking twice over.) But even so, if I was ever getting fucked by a woman who was once a rich man’s favourite whore, a woman whose cunt he’d pay witches to protect…

‘Oh god,’ I say, ‘it’s you.’  She clenches around me hard enough to stop me thinking anything for a second.

Shit. Shit. I can’t fight the way she’s making my cock feel and the pills and her drug – whatever the fuck that actually was, god, why do I have this strange weakness to take unknown substances when I’m in pain?

She’s the fertile vamp. I can’t, won’t, mustn’t go over edge. But the wind is so strong…

‘I know who you are.’

She laughs and her cunt tightens again, drawing me still closer to doom.

One other rankle (I hope all that smut has cheered you through this posts general whinginess) is that I didn’t have Blake smoking in this story. And if you’ve read any of the other werewolf books you’ll know Blake smoking is very much part of any Blake scene. So if you could just pencil in a bit about that when you’ve finished pasting I’d be completely happy.

My Own Candyman

Just because…

Skinflint

Lately economising has been in style. Staying at home knitting is the new hanging out of cocktails bars. Make do and mend is in vogue. Needlework, home cooking, domestic arts of all sorts are getting more and more popular.

Actually this has been around for a while. The domestic goddess has been on the rise for some time. But the twin pressures from the enviroment and the economy seem to have made this cross between fifties housewife glamour and purtianism feel far more relevant than mere nostaglia.

I have a soft sticky sopt for all these things. I love to knit and sew, but I am quite bad at them, so I welcome the move from glamour as the driving force to utility. Last night a started a jumper, despite my usual tendancy to stick with scaves and shawls and other things that avoid the dreaded making-up. The ice cream colours I have chosen, the cotton yarn and the sleeveless pattern should be clues as to how long I feel this effort may take me.

I also feel drawn, almost hopelessly to this. I also want to make a crumble, put on a jumper when it gets cold instead of the heating and peruse Sainsburys Basics range

And this mood, I swear, has nothing to do with my last royalty cheque. Which was so small I am thinking of seeing if it will collide with another tiny royalty cheque at high speed and unlock the secrets of the universe.

PS I hate to ask, but The Silver Collar is languishing on Amazon US since it got a one star review. One star! If you are American – or buy from US Amazon and feel The Silver Collar is worth more than that, perhaps you could rush to the rescue.

Erotica Cover Watch Launch

Hey tiny readership. Today me and my next door neighbour Kristina Lloyd are launching Erotica Cover Watch, a blog to highlight the sexism in the cover designs of erotica books. It promises to be funny, snarky, world-changing and also to ROCK!

Please take a look.

Only I Can Give You Tiemcock

As what happened to prompt the last posts seems to have started me using this blog like a blog – I shall now carry on

A while ago I gave a talk at the London Literary Fesitval about my work. (No, really – I did.) And one of the speakers introduced me to the concept of Tiemcock. And also to the concept of Doctor Who Cat Macros.

She showed this series – the original Doctor Who Cat Macros thingie and a work of fine genius. (If you click one link today – click this one)

And then since I can has internetz I went looking for more. Oh, the fun I’ve had. Oh, the work I haven’t done.

The main live journal community is ihasatardis. The main trouble with is that unlike usual LOLcats blogs they put each macro behind a cut. And the macros are hit or miss. But when they hit, they hit! So prepare to waste your days.

What Women Want

Kristina Lloyd and I are launching a new blog on Thursday (come back then for details) and I think the reaction to it might be interesting. However I have decided to kill my career early by taking issue with Black Lace editor Adam Nevill’s choice of ‘The Private Undoing of a Public Servant’ as ‘one of the best erotic novels published in recent times’ over on Lust Bites. The book or its author get no less than three mentions in the interview. And the lukewarm reaction to the book is taken as evidence that women don’t really want to read stories where the female protangonist is dominant.

Adam says:
Fem dom is massive with male readers but seems to have passed female readers by. I’d say The Private Undoing of a Public Servant by Leonie Martell is one of the best erotic novels published in recent times – it’s a very vivid, intelligent and arousing story, as much as an investigation, into male submission and female dominance. But the reaction to it has underwhelmed me. I think it will endure and become a classic, but in its own time, it has had a normal reception. So group sex, and even extreme submission to the opposite sex, seem to be high on the agendas of male and female fantasy.

Now as I said in a comment over on Lust Bites, this is an extremely problematic assertion. Adam is a male editor of a line of books for women (something that is talked about in detail in the interview) and he cites this as a particularly good Black Lace book. Now it maybe a personal favourite of his – but good Blace Lace, it ain’t. In fact I was surprised this wasn’t published by BL’s brother Nexus ( a for-men imprint). And just look at the cover:

It maybe highly literary in style (or, at least written in second person – literariness is in the eye of the beholder) but is very much a male view of female dominant sexuality. The female protagonist is almost unreadably pompous, cool, aloof and inhuman, asserting that the hero (I’ll get to him) has never met anyone like her before because she is reading a Bataille novel (nothing screams ‘I’m interesting’ like surrealist porn).

And the hero, god, the hero of this book is a 53 year old politician (and, sorry, wasn’t a BL author recently not allowed to make her female cougar character older than 35). I love female domination. It’s my thing. I was excited when I bought this book that it would be an amazing story about my favourite subject. But I am not going to go for loving descriptions of a 53 year old man being foot-wanked by a beautiful aloof ice queen. That’s the first sex scene. Hello! Female pleasure? Hello!

(And it’s a small point I know – but both of the book’s Amazon reviews are from men clearly looking for a fix of hot dominatrix porn.)

And women not going for this book is meant to prove women would rather submit?

Maybe women would rather read about female pleasure would be more accurate. Submission will always be a popular fantasy. But I don’t think it’s the only way women enjoy sex and power.

I will be completely honest, Private/Public came out around the same time as my own Equal Opportunities – a book about a dominant women who likes men in wheelchairs and a male wheelchair user. Private/Public got a significantly larger media push than my own book, including an extract in men’s mag Arena (another question mark over just how aimed-at-women this book is).  But I’m not really bitter – not since I won that cock.

Most of my books deal with female dominance in some ways, just without those tired stereotypes and stereotypical lack of hard male bodies and hard male cock so often found in the male-reader-orientated femdom books. And I think female readers like what I do. It’s not as popular as snarling brutes – but it’s an interesting furrow nonetheless

From Tumperkin
The other thing about Madden’s heroes though, is that they are described as so very purely appealing to the eye in a way that – usually – only heroines are described. Like it’s their function to be pretty. This is most obvious in her Silver Werewolves trilogy. The hero, Alfie, is a pure sex-object. Although he’s all dominant and alpha-ish, he’s also just relentlessly used by everyone for sex. It’s weirdly hot and not a little subversive.

I actually think is it somewhat dangerous to take the reaction of female readers to a book like this (no matter how literary its stylings) as evidence that women do not want to read about women on top. Submission will always be popular – but I think it is a shame not to give female domination is due as a female fantasy as a result of the reaction to a book which is a highly problematic example of what women want.

Making female domination stories appeal to women means focussing on female pleasure and leaving the latex lingerie and the aging politician with his passion for a dominatrix back in the male fantasy it came from.

How not to rush to the rescue

I’m over on Lust Bites today making my last post. It’s an excerpt from The Silver Cage – the final book of The Silver Werewolves trilogy. In that excerpt we see what is happening to Alfie and Leon while they are imprisoned by The Divine Wolf.

Iris is of course rushing to rescue her furry Fido. Or she mostly is. She can’t help getting a little distracted here and there. Mostly by her memories

One night on a full moon sweep not far from here. They’d left Jude burying a hound’s body and chased another out into open country. Panting and screaming with exertion they’d eventually had to let it go.

They’d both thrown themselves on the ground to try and get their breath. And then Blake had been on top of her, flushed as sweat-sticky as she was.

‘It’s when you’re like this,’ he’d said through ragged breaths, ‘nothing in your mind but how much you want to kill, that I most want to be inside you. Feel that dirty heat and hate.’

Iris didn’t reply. She knew the lust burning into her from his eyes was reflected right back. She pulled her dark red combat fatigues down and shifted, opening her legs under Blake’s hard narrow hips.

Iris had moaned, thrust her hips up onto him, bringing him deeper, harder, home. She’d arched her back and rolled her head – showing her neck to him – and he’d dipped. He pushed his head into the well, pressed his tongue to her skin in the almost pitch dark and then pulled back, startled, ‘Fuck!’

‘What?’

‘Iris, you’re bleeding. Your neck.’

‘What? Well it must just be from the fight.’ Earlier that evening the hound Jude was now burying had sprung from the trees and slammed into Iris’s from behind, flooring her.

Blake was still inside Iris, He swirled his hips making her moan. ‘Claws or jaws, Iris?’ And then with a smooth soft motion, he drew his silver gun from his shoulder holster and held it to Iris’s temple.

Iris felt a vicious rush of fear like a shock wave. Her eyes were tight on Blake’s. The two of them had played all sorts of games with guns since then, put this had been the very first time Blake had held a gun to her head. It felt strangely normal.

‘Claws or jaws?’ Blake said again, fucking her now, harder than ever inside her.

Iris couldn’t speak. All she could feel was the gun on the side of her head and Blake’s cock inside her. Both steel-hard, invading. Blake came with a cry and then pushed his face back into the wound at her neck, slipping one hand between her legs and stroking her clit, keeping the gun tight in place with the other. After Iris had come he’d said, ‘Okay, I have some kit at Tobias’s his house that can test for lyc saliva in your wound. You’re not going to run, are you?’

‘Why would I run?’ Iris had said, staring up at his wild, hard face.

‘Because if it turns out that lyc bit you, I’ll have to shoot you.’

*

Comment to win a book or something, I expect…

Silver Werewolves on Amazon US
Silver Werewolves on Amazon UK
More about the books

Ouch!

Yes, ouch! I mean really. There’s getting a bad review and there’s getting review of a novella collection you are in that specifically points out that you are bad and the other two stories are good.

I was expecting a challenging and enjoyable reading experience, and for the most part, I was not disappointed.

(Emphasis mine) and that ‘most part’ mention goes on to become rather painful when she gives the wonderful Anne Tourney and Madelynne Ellis *glowing* reviews for their contributions: ‘I loved this story’, ‘magnificent contribution’. (Anne and Madelynne are both good friends of mine and both their stories in this collection are completely wonderful and deserving of the praise they get here.)

But for me, well, the tone is rather different.

I found this tale amusing but a bit incoherent. There’s no real plot arc, just a series of episodes, many of which involve pleasurable but not particularly meaningful sex.

Though this tale revolves around creatures of the night, I searched in vain for any serious darkness.

Would it be unprofessional and Anne Rice like to argue back here. Point out that paranormal stories don’t *need* to be heavy on the dark. Anyone who has read any of my Silver Werewolves will know I try to keep things firmly in the real world. (And would it seem like sour grapes if I pointed and laughed at the phrase ‘creatures of the night‘?)

God, I’m not sure why I’m wallowing in this on my supposedly “promotional” blog. Except that this same reviewer savaged Equal Opportunities a while back (could she have a problem with *me* – you have to wonder?), and that book ended up doing rather well for me. Up to and including winning me one of the most prestigious prizes for erotica and getting amazing reviews from – among others – sex and disability groups.

So I am now waiting for an award for this story as a mauling from Lisabet Sarai seems to be my lucky charm!