Welcome to this month’s edition of Charity Sunday. As always, for every comment I receive on a Charity Sunday post, I will make a donation to my selected cause for the month.
In general, I avoid partisan political causes for Charity Sunday, since I know that individuals differ in their opinions. Given that I am an author, however, and that pretty much all of the people who will visit this post are either readers or other authors, I am hoping that my choice today will not be considered controversial.
Today I’m shining the spotlight on AABB – Authors Against Book Bans. This is a coalition of authors and other individuals involved in the publishing industry to oppose censorship. To quote from their website:
We unequivocally support the availability of diverse voices on our library shelves, in our schools, and in our culture.
Despite the rather evangelical tone of their mission statement, the people from AABB are really practical. They keep track of the raft of current efforts, at both the state and federal level in the U.S., to remove “objectionable” or “inappropriate” or “obscene” (etcetera) books from libraries, schools and bookstores. They muster popular support against such laws, talk to legislators and to the public, and generally press for common sense approaches that address parents’ or other individuals’ legitimate concerns while not curtailing the freedoms written into the U.S. Constitution.
One reason I’m supporting AABB today is that my former home state, Massachusetts, just enacted a landmark law that protects freedom to read. I’m very proud, and I want to celebrate.
https://authorsguild.org/news/authors-guild-celebrates-massachusetts-freedom-to-read-law/
So this month I will donate two dollars to AABB for every comment I receive on this post.
Meanwhile, for my excerpt, I have a bit from Damned If You Do, a paranormal romance whose heroine is an erotic romance author. Believe me, Wendy Dennison’s steamy books would definitely be banned by the censorship vigilantes!
Excerpt
Her four dollar cup of Americano, now cold, tasted like muddy pond water. With a bitter sigh, Wendy Dennison, aka romance stalwart Gwen Diamante, iconized her browser and popped up her work in progress. The word count in the bottom status bar accused her of sloth and incompetence. She should know better than to check her sales stats and reviews before she’d produced at least a couple thousand words. Nothing sapped her motivation for writing a new book as much as surveying the tepid response to her last one.
Maybe another coffee would help. Extravagant, yes, but she needed a kick in the butt to get her out of her slump. She signaled to the cute college guy behind the counter, pointing to her cup. “Can I get another hit, Eric?”
The gangly kid grinned at her. “Coming right up, Wendy.” A mass communications major at the University of Pittsburgh, he treated her like minor royalty. Clearly he thought it was the ultimate in cool to be serving a real live published author. If he only knew the truth.
Wendy typed a four line sentence and scowled at her laptop screen. She highlighted the second clause and swapped it with the first. After staring at the page for a few minutes, she hit “Undo”. She turned the first clause into a participle instead, then tried replacing a pronoun with the character’s name. That didn’t really help either.
Eric removed the stale cup to her left and set down a steaming, fragrant mug in its place. “Two sugars, right?”
Still wrestling with her recalcitrant prose, Wendy gave him a cursory nod. Then she realized how impolite that must seem. “You’re a darling. Thanks so much!” The barista pushed his shaggy brown hair off his forehead and beamed at her. Wendy’s black mood brightened a bit.
With pierced earlobes, Black Sabbath tee shirts, and artfully threadbare denims, Eric had a sort of punk sex appeal. Wendy let herself imagine how he’d look naked—all wiry limbs and pale skin, with a bushy nest around his cock, which would be long and slender, like his tall, lanky, not-quite-mature body. Hard, of course. Young guys always were. He’d be willing to wait though, to give her pleasure before taking his own. She saw him kneeling between her spread thighs, wearing a worshipful expression. He leaned in to flick at her clit before running his tongue firmly along the cleft between her swollen lower lips. Oh my God! Did he have a stud embedded in his tongue?
“Can I get you anything else?”
Eric’s voice hauled her back to reality.
“Oh—um— ” Blood heated her cheeks, especially when she realized how damp her panties had become. What was she thinking? He was young enough to be her son!
“We’ve got a special on cream cheese brownies. Two for one.” He lowered his voice to a seductive purr, apparently aware he was tempting her.
Wendy recalled both her financial constraints and her depressingly accurate digital bathroom scale. “I really shouldn’t,” she replied, determined to do the right thing.
“C’mon. You need the energy to fuel your creativity! Eat one now, and take one home for later.”
“Well…” Saliva pooled in her mouth as her resolve wavered. She could always skip dinner. “I did have a salad for lunch…”
“Two sinfully rich double fudge cream cheese brownies, coming up.” Her youthful admirer gave her another grin. “Don’t worry. They’re small.”
She turned back to the computer, scrolling back to read the previous few paragraphs. The tension between her heroine and her hero sizzled, but somehow she couldn’t get them out of flirting mode and into bed together. They resisted her every attempt to move them in the directions prescribed by her outline.
Maybe she should switch genres. Try some sweet romance for a change. Or a cozy mystery. Those seem to be selling pretty well these days.
She knew from experience, though, that she’d never succeed in keeping the sex out of her books. Her imagination naturally flowed in carnal directions. Especially these days, now that Tom was out of her life.
She didn’t miss his company that much, to be honest—just his body. He was a selfish, egotistical ass who in seven years of marriage had never once taken her seriously. He’d always laughed at her “little hobby”, even when she’d quit her day job at the newspaper to write fiction full time. When she’d been named “Romance Author of the Year”, he had dismissed that as a fluke. “It’s lucky I make a good living,” he used to jest. “Without me, you’d be just another starving author.”
Well, he’d been right about that part. The settlement had left her with the house—and the mortgage—while he moved out to California to shack up with his new girlfriend, a well-known cover model who’d been one of his clients. Should have known better than to marry a lawyer, she thought for the umpteenth time. She survived on her royalty checks, but just barely, and was constantly looking for ways to economize. For instance, she worked in this usually quiet coffee shop every afternoon, taking advantage of its free WiFi, so she could cancel the pricey cable package Tom had subscribed to.
Of course, she could give up romance entirely and look for a job. A real job, as Tom would have put it. The notion made her slightly nauseous. Who’d hire a forty-two year old, anyway, a woman who’d been out of the workforce for half a decade?
Thank you for visiting! Please do leave a comment. And if you’re tempted to learn more about Wendy, you can find the buy links on my website: https://www.lisabetsarai.com/damnedifyoudobook.html
