Tag Archives: erotica

Demon Lovers – An Anthology

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And what a kickass anthology it is, too!   So I’m glad that when Holly and Lori with Ravenous Romance emailed to ask if Dave and I (aka Kilt Kilpatrick and Inara LaVey) wanted to edit an anthology of succubus and incubus stories for Ravenous that we said yes, desite very busy schedules.

How busy, you ask?

Well, we didn’t just have full plates; we had “all you can eat” buffet piled high type plates. And yet… the idea of reading other peoples’ work and putting together an anthology sounded like fun.  And it was.

We sent out a call for submissions (Submit!!  All Kneel Before General Zod!) both as an open calls via social networking, as well as emails to specific writers we knew would be perfect for this book.  We got an amazing response and ended up with a selection of sometimes funny, sometimes scary, always sexy stories from thirteen talented authors (listed here in no particular order):  Lisa Lane, Kat Sheridan, Elena Derring, Red Hanner, Ray Garton, Anastasia Greumach, Angela Cameron, Olivia Cunning, Loren Rhoads, Courtney Sheets, Elizabeth Black, Kilt Kilpatrick, and yeah, my alter ego Inara has one in there too.  

Anastasia, btw, is as of yet too shy to reveal her secret identity so we will leave her unlinked. 🙂 

Demon Lovers is available for sale at Ravenous Romance and just came out for Kindle at Amazon

too!

And for a little taste of what’s inside…

They come for you in your sleep…

The Succubus, nocturnal seductress of men; the Incubus, the perfect male no woman can resist; enticing demon lovers who haunt your bedroom, slip into your fevered dreams and drag you into delicious sins of the flesh…

Demon Lovers is a fresh new collection of seductive, frightening, hilarious, adventurous, sumptuous, thrilling stories of succubae and incubi from today’s hottest and most exciting authors in paranormal erotica!

A girl with something extra finds her match in a mysterious carnival jack; in Victorian London, a celebrated singer with a secret plays a dangerous game of cat and mouse with a lover; girl sleuths at a finishing school must solve a series of deadly seductions before they are the next to succumb; a female UPS driver discovers that the most unlikely of prospects can lead to an unforgettable erotic encounter; to gain an ancient treasure lost to the Arabian Desert, a roguish archeologist in 1927 must gamble on surviving a seductive Moroccan she-demon! You can find these and many more hot paranormal tales in Demon Lovers!

 

THE BUS LIMPS ON…

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Well, we’re at our Day Five Stop at Kissa Starling’s blog but with a few technical difficulties that we can’t fix at the moment, so to make sure people know where to find EM Lynley’s website, I’m posting an extra advert here at the Den, including a sell link for her wonderful book SEX, LIES, AND WEDDING BELLS.

UPDATE!  Links all fixed and the bus rolls on!!!

Ripping the Bodice Cover!

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Or ‘Squeeee!!!’  EIther expression works.  Anyway, I just got the jpg of my new book cover with Ravenous Romance and am VERY happy with it.  To quote my own sell sheet:

Got sex and romance on the brain? So does Cassandra Devon. She also has hard-boiled private eyes, dashing pirates, jet-setting super spies and other sexy rogues entertaining her in her surprisingly explicit subconscious. All these erotic daydreams make it hard to stay focused on Cassandra’s current dilemma: namely, rebuffing the advances of Connor, a wild Irish rascal who wants to play the starring role in her fantasies. Cassandra is only interested in getting together with Raphael, the tall, dark and handsome man of her dreams. May the best romance hero win!


Walter Mitty meets Erica Jong in this wickedly funny and sexy hot comedy-romance from the author of Succubusted.




My original cover concept was this:


A play on a stereotypical historical romance cover from the ’80s: our heroine, Cassandra (lots of long, wavy dark brown hair) bent over backwards in the steely armed embrace of a tall, dark auburn-haired, muscular man kissing her neck. He’s either bare-chested or dressed in dashing pirate/cavalier garb. Cassandra, however, has her green eyes covered with glasses and is reading a romance novel, cover clearly visible, over the man’s shoulder. Her expression and interest are clearly more on the book than the man holding her.


While I still love my idea, I am equally fond of the cover the Ravenous artists came up with.


Ripping the Bodice will be out on Ravenous Romance…(drumroll) tomorrow!  So if you like comedy, romance and a little bit…okay, a lot of sex, please check it out!

Until Ripping the Bodice and What Women Really Want in Bed are Finished…

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My posts will be short and sweet, sort of a demented writer’s diary.  Stream of consciousness while I’m taking breaks from figuring out how many different ways to describe various sexual and sensual scenes without getting a: bored or b: boring.

Do manhoods really throb?

How much fire can one nether-region generate?

And how many different words are there for genetalia of both genders without being twee or too crass?

I mean…love button? Manly staff/rod/member?  All throbbing, of course.

My reading research has brought to light that male genetalia throbs when the sexual tension is high, whilst females tend to pulse.  Heat surges into groins willy nilly and nipples harden into buds.  The phrase ‘her nipples stabbed into his chest’ brought a giggle from me.  I mean…ouch!

Don’t get me wrong; I’m having a blast writing my various Ravenous Romance novels and I do think I’ve managed to create some sexy and well written erotic AND romantic stuff.  I’ve also read quite a few excellent and arousing stories and novels.

But stabbing nipples?   Very James Bond villainess if you ask me.

For the record, one of the most erotic scenes ever filmed is the first kiss between Cora and Nathanial in LAST OF THE MOHICANS.  And unfortunately for all you men out there, Nathanial also set our expectations for devotion fairly high.  I mean, we all want a guy who will fight his way through scads of blood-thirsty Hurons to save us from being slaughtered JUST in the nick of time, looking really sexy and hot (and with great hair!) at the same time.  Right, ladies?  I know I do!

Back to the land of erect…well…everything.  🙂

My First Story for Ravenous Romance

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I just got word that my first story for Ravenous Romance will be published on December 1st, the day the site officially launches.  Needless to say (oh, okay, I DO need to say it!), I’m totally chuffed that my story Succubusted has been chosen to be part of the big day. I’m publishing under the pen name Inara LaVey (the first name is for all you Firefly fans and the second because it appeals to my inner Goth) – ‘Dana Fredsti’ doesn’t work for either romance or erotica.  Or erotic romance, for that matter.  At least I don’t think it does.

I have been learning a lot about the distinctions between romance, erotica and erotic romance from readers and writers of the various genres, some of whom have been kind enough to give their recommendations and also guide me to sites like Romance Wiki, specifically the sub-genre page. I’ve definitely learned that readers of romance, regardless of genre, have very definite expectations from these genres (how many times can I use the word ‘genre’ in one paragraph, you ask?).  If it’s labeled romance, be it paranormal, contemporary or erotic, it had better have a satisfactory emotional story arc between the two main characters.  Fair enough.  I’m going to be very careful when it comes to describing my various books so readers will know what they’re getting.  Trust me – you don’t wanna get romance readers or writers mad at you.  They can be scary.  🙂

I’ve downloaded a couple of books from Ellora’s Cave, specifically Dragon’s Warrior and The Hunters: Declan and Tori, by Shiloh Walker. The little I’ve had time to read of Walker’s work tells me I’m gonna enjoy both books.  Her writing style (in these two books) is terse, action packed and sexy, and she manages to create vivid and believable characters very quickly.  These are short books – one is 137 pages, the other 165 – so her ability to draw a reader into her worlds so quickly is definitely a plus.

The most frustrating thing is knowing I have limited time to read because of my writing deadlines and I do love to read…  So I’m not downloading anything else until I finish these two books, as well as the last few chapters of Jean Henry Mead’s Senior Sleuth mystery, A Village Shattered, which is so far a cracking good mystery!  Jean will be my guest December 2nd on the second stop of her upcoming blog tour and I’m delighted to host her.  And not just because her lead character’s name is Dana. 🙂

Passion’s Purple Prose or Bookish Factoid #5

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It’s Thursday morning and I’m riding the L Muni car into work.  Sitting about five rows in front of me is a teenage boy with headphones on, the volume on his music pumped so high I can hear it from where I’m sitting.  I am fighting a nearly unbearable urge to go up to him, lift one side of the headset and yell, “CAN YOU HEAR ME? BECAUSE YOU WON’T BE ABLE TO IN A FEW YEARS, YOU IDIOT!”  But that would involve getting out of my seat and having to stand the rest of the long, crowded ride to Embarcadero Station, so I’ll continue to resist the urge.  But jeez Louise, isn’t the point of headsets, iPods and Mp3s so you can enjoy whatever you’re listening to without inflicting it on other people?  And wait a sec…nope, teenage boy with headset, I impugned you falsely.  It’s actually a pre-teen girl with an iPod, her earplugs dangling off her shoulders so she can share her music with her friend.  And the rest of us.  Now I’m thinking more along the lines of earplugs as garrote.  Does this make me a bad person?  No, just the antithesis of a morning person who resents having to listen to crappy music before I’ve had my first cup of coffee. It takes my nerve endings a while to crawl back into their sheathes in the mornings.  I don’t wake up bright and chipper when I’m forced to leave my bed at the command of an alarm clock.  And while I’m not what I’d consider homicidal as a rule, infringing on my personal space (and yes, this includes auditory assault) makes me think bad things.  The voices tell me it’s a GOOD thing.

And boy, am I off track for my post today!  Yes, it’s Bookish Factoid #5 time!

When thinking of ideas for stories and books for Ravenous Romance, I went through a suitcase full of my old writing.  We’re talking stories and partial novels from grade school (including my epic one paragraph short story THE END OF THE SUN) through my ’20, back when everything was either handwritten or typed on my handy IBM Selectric.  I used to stay after work at the IRS (yes, I worked at the IRS back in the day) and type up our Murder for Hire scripts, short stories, and whatever else Maureen and I were trying to sell/produce, including two spec Moonlighting scripts.  As a side note, we didn’t sell the Moonlighting scripts, but we did get invited to the wrap party.  We had good food and drink and were treated to the sight of a young, drunk Bruce Willis boogying on the dance floor and periodically pumping his fist in the air, shouting “Fuckin’ A!”

Maureen and I also had a bunch of outlines for original TV series, movies of the week, and other projects. I have all of them, including a completed script for a romantic comedy heavily influenced by Romancing the Stone and The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.  We originally wrote this for an independent producer in San Diego who wanted to make an erotic romance with a decent script.  Not quite porn, but certainly not the light headed fluff we turned out.  He wasn’t interested in the script, so Maureen and I came up with the bright idea of filming it ourselves. One video camera, no lights, and a group of gung-ho actors later, we actually filmed a decent portion of the script, filling up three 6-hour videotapes. We even went on location, spending a day at the Strawberry Creek Inn (thank you, Jim and Diane!), which was owned by my ex parents-in-law.

I don’t remember why we stopped filming, but it’s probably just as well.  The results were about as amateurish as you’d expect given our ‘let’s put on a show’ mentality.  I have a camera!  We can use your barn…’

But as embarrassing as it is to watch some of this (I cringe whenever I’m on screen), I’m still proud of the moxy it took to fill those three tapes and the fact we had actors willing to give us their time because they liked our script and enjoyed (I hope) working with us.  Plus we fed them lots of home baked chocolate chip cookies.

I still have these tapes and I still have the script.  And when I got an email from Ravenous saying they were looking for serialized novels, I pulled out the script, scanned and sent them the first 25 pages with explanation, and received a positive response. So it looks like it’s going to finally fulfill its original purpose as a more adult romantic comedy.  And I’ll have a chance to take out some of the truly sophomoric jokes originally we originally put in that now make us wince, especially when we think of how funny we thought they were at the time.

Bookish Factoid #4

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When we were 13 or so, my friend Cindi and I were both enamored with Richard Lester’s Three and Four Musketeers (movies he made in order to get the backing to make Superman, btw).  Cindi had a crush on Michael York’s D’artagnan, later transferring her affections to Richard Chamberlain’s suave Aramis (Richard was still in the closet as far as we were concerned), while I had the hots for Rochefort, Cardinal Richelieu’s wicked one-eyed henchman (played by a 50-something Christopher Lee, better known for his portrayal of Dracula in several Hammer horror films and as Bond villain Scaramanga, the Man with the Golden Gun).  We started our own musketeer fan fiction, creating our own characters and inserting them into the world of 17th Century France.  My character was Constance Du Vallon (bet you didn’t know Porthos had a sister, did you?) and Cindi’s was Roxanne Du Bois, wealthy young heiress and the object of desire amongst most of the young men of her acquaintance.  Of course Constance knew how to swordfight and Roxanne was happy-go-lucky and flirtatious.  As we grew older and matured, so did the little vignettes we would write for our own and each other’s characters.   Let’s just say that reading many bodice ripper romances influenced the direction our writing would take, although sans explicit descriptions.

I spent New Year’s Eve at Cindi’s house one year.  Her parents were out at their own party (or having one at the house; I can’t remember which) so we commandeered their mobile home parked in front of their house in Point Loma. We had alcohol.  I don’t remember how we got it, although I do believe we snuck it out of the house.  We had fudge and other food not meant to mix with booze. When the new year rolled around, Cindi was in the bathroom throwing up and I was happily stuffing my face with fudge.  I remember yelling “Happy New Year!” and Cindi responding with something along the lines of “Bleargh.” I don’t think I even had a hangover.  Ah, for the metabolism of my youth…

Cindi reminded me of this incident recently when we got together for a book meeting.  Cindi is the author of several books, including Red Hot Tantra, What Men Really Want in Bed and The Bedside Orgasm Book.  We are co-writing the sequel to What Men Really Want in Bed, not surprisingly named ‘What Women Really Want in Bed.”  Somehow it seems fitting that our little bodice ripperlettes have led us to this point.

A Heart to Heart

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I am working on Champagne right now, a character-driven novel based on a short story I wrote.  It’s due January 1st and while I loved writing the story, the novel has been proving a bit more problematic.  See, I’m a genre writer.  Mysteries, horror, fantasy… where things blow up, people get killed, zombies munch on the living, dames wisecrack…y’know, there’s lots of action.  I’ve got 6 more genre erotica-romance books lined up after Champagne, all of which will involve all of the above and then some.  I’m particularly hyped up about a (wait for it) post-apocalyptic romance (Dave calls it my Cozy Catastrophe series) in which I plan on first destroying most of civilization with a nasty virus and then letting my hero and heroine have all the fun of living off the remnants while outrunning a crazy ex-surfer turned warlord who’s taken over La Jolla. 

I mean…c’mon!  This is fun stuff we’re talking! 

But…that’s two and two-thirds books down the line.  First I have to finish Champagne and then tackle a semi sword and sorcery project. 

During the drive to and from San Diego, however, my brain and creativity took a giant leap forward into Post Apocalypse land.  With Dave as a sounding board and co-enabler (he loves post apocalyptic books and movies as much as I do), I came up with a skeleton outline for the entire book, picked out locations along the road for my characters to hide in and/or run the gauntlet of unpleasant surprises hiding there, had chunks of dialogue and character quirks spring in entirety from my mind like Athena from Zeus’s forehead. I could almost waking dream myself into scenes and watch them unfold like a movie; something I haven’t been able to do since I was in my early teens.  It was amazing and inspiring…and just so much friggin’ fun figuring out just what symptoms the nasty disease would manifest in its victims, what horrors I could unleash on the survivors, and how much fun they’d still have shopping for free in abandoned stores.  And yes, sex all of this up ’cause this is genre erotica romance, after all!  

But first I have to finish Champagne.  So that’s what I’ve been working on. 

I had a mini-tantrum this afternoon after spending a half hour on one paragraph.  “I HATE these characters.  They’re boring.  No one gets eaten or blown up. They just talk and have sex in picturesque places.  Feh!”  

I then stomped around the house a bit, had a glass of mineral water and sulked.  Then I came back and sat down with my iBook, where my characters in Champagne were waiting for me with sad, hurt expressions.  “We’re interesting,” they told me.  “Just because we’re not being chased by zombies or being amateur sleuths doesn’t mean we can’t lead rich, full lives that other people will enjoy reading about.”  My lead character took me aside for a moment and said, “Why don’t we try THIS…” and whispered a few things in my ear, some ideas of where we could take the story.  “I’ll do my best to be entertaining if you remember that we’re from your imagination.  We’re your kids too…even if we don’t use crossbows or swordfight.”  

And she was right. I originally created these characters because I loved them, even the annoying ones.  And it’s not fair to them to shove them to the back of my mind just because a new toy is prettier and shinier (and lets me destroy most of civilization!).  So I made a bargain with the inhabitants of Champagne – that I would accord them the same attention and enthusiasm as other, more action packed projects.  And in return they would continue to work with me to create the most interesting and entertaining world possible for them to occupy. 

And I promise to leave them alone when I destroy the world…  

Whew!

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Wednesday night I sent off three more ideas (short paragraphs on each) to an online publishing company I’ve currently got a four book contract with. And yes, I know that’s a badly constructed sentence. It’s Friday, it’s been a long week. I’m only human, people! This was the same night I took a break from doing anything I didn’t want to do and wallowed in old Dark Shadows movies. I didn’t feel like working on my book, but it was easy enough to scribble (is there a comparable word for ‘scribble’ when one is typing?) down some ideas, two of them based of off stuff I’d started writing years ago to stave off boredom at work (and oh, do I miss having a job that left enough down time for boredom to set in…), the other something that started percolating when I drove past the Madonna Inn on the drive back from Los Angeles.

For all my caterwauling about outlines and synopsises, I’m finding it easier to toss ideas down on paper (or computer screen). It took me a half hour tops to do these three paragraphs and about a minute to dash off an email to the two editors at Ravenous (two lovely women who I had the pleasure of meeting when they were out for the RWA Cence a couple weeks ago). I went to bed feeling pleased with myself – I’d catered to my inner child (I WON’T work tonight! I want an Oompa Loompa NOW, Daddy!) and satisfied my inner task master (I wanna see RESULTS, people!). Yay, me!

So today I checked my email when I got to work and there it was: an email from the editors saying they loved all three ideas and when could I deliver the finished books?

GAH!!!!

In that moment I realized I now had six 200 page novels to write, not to mention my co-writing project (What Women Really Want in Bed) with the lovely Cynthia Gentry (more on my history with Cynthia another post!) due February 1st (and if any ladies out there would like to take our survey, please let me know!). I had a mild freakout, but then realized once February 1st is past, I have a very reasonable writing schedule. Well, not VERY reasonable (three months per book), but definitely workable. Champagne is the most difficult to write for me because it’s in a genre I’ve never attempted beyond the original short story and that was written as a gift. So my initial GAH!!!! subsided to a workable *gulp!*

I’m actually really excited about this. I still have two other projects (including the sequel to Murder for Hire: The Peruvian Pigeon) I want to work on and a full time job. But I also have a creative fire lit inside me that I haven’t had in years. I think about writing all the time (when I’m not thinking about food, sex or exercise). Little sparks of ideas keep igniting…and I keep saying to myself ‘wow, that would make a GREAT book..’ And then I remind myself I have to finish the ones I’ve contracted for already. And THEN I scribble the ideas down anyway.

Yes, there will be lots of sex in the short novels. But no more than you’d find in a Laurel Hamilton Anita Blake Vampire Hunter novel..actually, probably less since she’s been writing sex scenes that go on for THREE CHAPTERS, leaving those of us who love the first half dozen books in the series to ask ‘where’s the action, Laurel? More butt kicking, less butt…er…never mind.’ I probably won’t have my mom read most of these. But she knows I’m writing them and I like to think she’s proud of me for getting the work and has enough faith in my writing ability to know the finished products will be well written. Right, Mom?

Er…Mom?

I’ll get back to you on that.