Do The Write Thing

By Allison Wonderland

Allison, I said to myself, take the advice of Virginia Chance and stop procrasturbating, would you please?

When I volunteered to participate in Share the Love, I was delighted to be among the authors coming together for Coming Together.

And then I sat down to write—about my ideas, my inspirations, my motivations—and I couldn’t think of a single “profound” thing to say.

I mean, I can’t say that writing for Coming Together makes me feel like an audaciously awesome altruist. It’s true, sure, but sort of narcissistic, don’t you think? Like, I’m so vain, I probably think this post is about me. (Don’t I, don’t I?)

Dismayed, I delayed, until I had no choice but to get back on the write track.

Okay, so why do I write for Coming Together?

Well, in P!nk think, it’s “wrong in all the right ways.”

I think erotica is something of a guilty pleasure, not just for the readers but for the writers as well. We’re a perpetually prudish society that thinks Salt-n-Pepa are out of season—in other words, let’s not talk about sex. But it’s hard to feel guilty when you’re giving. When I give a poem or a short story to a Coming Together anthology, I’m donating differently, and I think the same goes for those who consume our collections.

I’ve been a phil-anthro-pist since 2008, contributing to five CT anthologies. Proceeds from the sale of these anthologies are donated to Amnesty International (At Last), Conservation International (Al Fresco), V-Day (Into the Light), ONE (As One), and the Coalition for Positive Sexuality (By Hand), all veritable charitable organizations.

Basically, I get a big bang out of beneficence. I also get the privilege of sharing the spotlight with the cliterary elite—each collection is a potpourri of creativity, showcasing the diversity of perversity.

Now I’d like to share a snippet of “Quite Contrary,” my short story from the masturbatory medley that is Coming Together: By Hand…

****

No candles.

Check.

She never understood how truncated wax could generate a romantic ambiance. And she is quite certain that her beige voile curtains, a wedding present from her mother-in-law, are not flame retardant.

No music.

Also check.

She cannot possibly expect to concentrate with the husky voice of a husky male crooning about desire and devotion. She will feel as though someone is in the bedroom with her, supervising, scrutinizing, salivating.

She crosses to the table displaying her china doll collection. Carefully, she rotates the stands, ensuring that the dolls’ line of vision is obstructed by the paisley print pattern adorning the walls.

To further safeguard against voyeurs, she jiggles the doorknob to make sure it’s locked. Though she has the house to herself, another resident could return at a moment’s notice and neglect to announce his arrival.

Her eyes survey the room, pausing to inspect Chester, the hibiscus plant suspended near the window. Mentally reviewing her morning agenda, she recalls that at 9:05, shortly after breakfast, she tended to her companion. This comforts her, for she cannot have a dehydrated plant hanging over her head.

Satisfied that everything is in order, she approaches the bed, folds down the coverlet, and lowers herself onto the sheets, crisply ironed and boasting hospital corners.

She glances at the alarm clock. 10:10. She has several hours before she must begin getting ready for her surprise party, where she will be forced to smile and feign appreciation for a blouse she will want to exchange and a gift certificate for a beauty treatment she did not even know she needed.

In the interim, she will have a private party.

She has spent months pondering the commemoration of the five decades she has coexisted, however discordantly, with the rest of the human race.

And there is only one gift that will suffice.

She has a surfeit of degrees, framed and fastened to the walls of her office. She has an abundance of accolades, conferred upon her by colleagues who both envy and extol her novel analyses of English literature. She has a doting daughter, who is attending a nearby university and following in her mother’s footsteps. She has a husband, too, but their relationship, while amicable, has been tempered by routine and familiarity, and he is more often her buddy than her lover. And, of course, she has Chester.

But what she doesn’t have, what she’s never had, is an orgasm.

****

I’d like to invite you to our protagonist’s private party:

http://www.eroticanthology.com/byhand.htm

And then, I’d like to invite you to go f*** yourself.

But before you go, please take a moment to enter my giveaway. All you have to do is comment on this entry by March 1, after which I will select at random one winner to receive the e-book The Bad Girl’s Sweet Kiss, which contains my f/f story “Getting Her Rox Off.”

Curiouser and curiouser,

Allison Wonderland

About the author:

Allison Wonderland has been writing erotic fiction and poetry since 2007. Her specialtease - er, specialties - include lesbian erotica, vanilla erotica, and erotic romance. Find out what else she’s into and up to at http://aisforallison.blogspot.com.

Nymphosium

By Raziel Moore

The following is a dialog between personae; my personae to be exact. Truth to tell, stuff like this goes on in my head all the time, but rarely split so definitively between voices. Let’s say I’ve taken some artistic license with myself, after a couple glasses of decent wine, and a serious lounge on the couch.

Raziel: Smut writing doesn’t pay the bills for a lot of us. I would wager for most of us. And for folks like me writing has to live in a hobby status. That makes for erratic writing schedules and stretches of various lengths where you can’t write due to ‘life’ or having fallen out of the habit. I’m in one of those stretches now, ever hopeful to emerge soon, but I don’t want to talk about the travails of hobby-smutwriting. I want to talk about the dichotomy in some writers – well, this one in particular – between the professional and writer self.

Monocle: Jesus Christ you talk a lot. It’s no wonder we haven’t gotten a good dirty story out in so long. You’re so fucking analytic about everything you’re not paying attention to your dick any more. I just want to fuck something with words. Ok, someone. Ok, many someones. Is that too much to ask?

Raziel: Sometimes it is a lot to ask. Sometimes the rational throttles the perverse.

Monocle: Oh, bull. You’ve spent many an hour slaving away at work with a hard-on. The sensual and the empirical are not always either/or.

Raziel: Indeed. Well, it helps to enjoy what you do. I do science-y stuff professionally, and, frankly I find a lot of what I do stimulating in a pretty sensual way.

Monocle: Science is Sexy, as they say. But we don’t get turned on by the nitty gritty of code or models. The real almost erotic stuff is where you are discovering something new. Where we remove one more layer of Mother Nature’s diaphanous gown.

Raziel: Er. Something like that. I don’t usually think about it quite that way when I’m working on it though.

Monocle: But I do.

Raziel: Granted. The issue is that there comes a point where I do have to get buried in the code or the reference search, or other blood and guts of the work, and that’s not very sexy while I’m doing it. Maybe after. And then there’s the opposite…

Monocle: You mean like when sensation and lust grow so strong you can’t think rationally at all?

Raziel: Well, there are times when you get so wrapped up in the doing that nothing else really exists. It’s kind of analytic fugue state, where entire afternoons can disappear in what feels like a few moments.

Monocle: Yeah, well, I usually can’t last an entire afternoon, but it sounds pretty damn familiar. Except analysis is the thing that disappears, overwhelmed by sensation and emotion, and ends with climax instead of data tables.

Raziel: It seems that if you go far enough to the extreme of either side, it curves around to meet in some kind of common ground.

Monocle: Like politics?

Raziel: Don’t even start with that analogy. I’m trying to concede a point.

Monocle: I know how hard that is.

Raziel: All right, so learning about the world, or studying the universe is like an extension of your senses via instrumentation. In some ways, the discovery of something new has a similar thrill to the disrobing of a body; secrets hidden within revealed, and all that. The poetic side of the description of science does have a lot of sexual semiotics; unveiling, probing, revealing, penetrating mysteries.

Monocle: Now you’re talkin’. See, it’s no surprise that some scientists are pervs at heart. And vice versa.

Raziel: Empiricism is more closely related to sensualism than I might have thought.

Monocle: And that’s one reason I write that stuff. Same mind, same drives, different – but really not that different – application.

Raziel: And it tends to go better with collaborators, too.

Monocle: Now who’s being a perv? But I catch your meaning. Of course I tend to prefer writing about pairings of people (or entities). The interweaving and interaction of desire and discovery between two (or more) is what I like to feel when I write, usually, but not all the time.

Raziel: Oh, brilliant! I see a segue coming!

Monocle: Stop with the ‘brilliant’. Don’t be narcissistic. But yes, sometimes the story is not strictly about coupling, such as in the one story I have so far in the Coming Together collections. It’s called “Start Without Me”, a short one in Coming Together by Hand – about masturbation.

Raziel: Though strictly speaking, it’s also about voyeurism and loss of control.

Monocle: Perennial favorites. And we get to show a little excerpt as well, like this:

****

I almost drop my armload of supplies along with my jaw at the bedroom door. “Go ahead and start,” I’d said. And you have.

You do have your little crooked smile on, below half lidded eyes, pillowed head propped up and looking at me. But I don’t have to guess you’re naked under the covers. No. There you are, lying in the middle of the bed, pale and beautiful, and spread. Your knees wide apart and bent, I catch your crimson-painted toes digging into our matching comforter. Because you have started without me.

In all the years we’ve been together, I’ve never seen, never watched you masturbate. Nor you me, for that matter. I mean, we each know the other does it, but it never comes up in conversation. It’s for when one of us is too tired, or not in the mood, or out of town, or the other of us is too horny to wait. But now, here, right in front of me, you’re touching yourself, playing yourself, and it is the fucking hottest thing I’ve ever seen. I know I’ve said something, probably a curse word, but I don’t know what it was.

"You said I should start . . .” Your breath catches on the last word, because your wet finger has just crossed over your clit, and I can see the shiver pass through you. You smile at me, wickedly, challenging me. My heart and cock both lurch.

I almost drop the wine and the other supplies again while setting them on the bureau. Only a fraction of my attention is on what I’m doing. Everything else is focused on you. My eyes take you in. You look at me, sultry, wanton, yet private—I’m an observer, not a cause, of your pleasure.

One hand gropes your breast, tickling your own side then coming up to circle and tweak one nipple and then the other. Your movements are subtly different than what I do when I touch you there. Of course. You know precisely what to do to get the stimulation you want. I try to make a note of each difference for later.

I look down along your quivering belly, watching your breathing interrupted by the little shucks of pleasure you give yourself. The fingers of your other hand slide between the folds of your slick, flowing cunt. I absently begin disrobing, following the urging ache between my own legs, eyes fixed on your wet fingers delving, dividing, teasing yourself.

And you are turning yourself on. I can see it, hear it in your sighing voice, scent it from across the room. Your hips undulate, not like you are trying to entice me, but because you’re getting yourself hotter. You’re getting me hotter, too.

I’m naked, I think, naked enough, anyway; cock free and pointed where it wants to be. I step to the foot of the bed and get on, approaching one knee after the other until I am kneeling between your widespread legs. I know you can see what you’re doing to me. How much I want you. You pause, fluttering. I see the tiny spasm in your wanting cunt.

“Come inside,” you beckon me.

***

Monocle: One thing we can actually see here is just a bit of the battle between intellect and sense. Clearly our narrator is not going to be able to last very long just observing, just thinking. But I won’t spoil it.

Raziel: Good idea – invite the reader to read. I should note that Coming Together: By Hand benefits the Coalition for Positive Sexuality, a grassroots, not-for-profit, activist organization providing teens with candid sex education materials.

Monocle: And it has a bunch of other really excellent stories about wanking.

Raziel: Crass.

Monocle: Guilty. But, as they say, there’s more! I’ve done my share of philanthropy, too. A while ago, I edited a little anthology about the carnivorous, consuming aspects of love – called Hearteater ( published by Republica Press, where my other collections also live - http://www.republicapress.com/Monocle.aspx). It’s a fantastic little mixture of poetry, short stories, flash fiction, and graphic design (suitable for the Valentine month – if you’re equally into the macabre as the lovey-dovey), and its proceeds all go to the charity WaterAid (http://www.wateraidamerica.org/), because water is life.

Raziel: You could go into sales as well as smut with that, you know.

Monocle: Don’t tempt me.

Raziel: I also think we can reward the patient reader, who’s stuck with this wine-fueled multiple personality dialog with a giveaway. At the end of the month, one person who comments below will win a free copy of any one of the e-book anthologies I have over at Republica (which offers a variety of e-book formats).

Monocle: So write us something down there. Where’s the line between your intellect and your rutting beast? How do you reconcile the two? And please, please, I want the lurid details.

Raziel: Of course you do.

Monocle: I’m out of wine.

Raziel: Let’s remedy that…

Do Not Adjust Your Screen

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News and giveaways!

Greetings!

Just wanted to let everyone know that my monthly newsletter is now up on my website. Just go to http://www.lisabetsarai.com/news.html for information on new and upcoming releases, new contracts, and of course my monthly contest.

For July you can win a copy of my upcoming release Fire in the Blood, the day it comes out! See the newsletter for details!

No sooner did I post the newsletter, though, than I realized I had forgotten to mention some more good news. I just heard that Alessia Brio has accepted my story "Trespass" for the charity erotica collection Coming Together: By Hand. This is one of my favorite short stories, but alas it has been rejected by several editors who considered it to be too dark.

All proceeds from this collection will support The Coalition for Positive Sexuality, a non-profit organization dedicated to providing informative, accurate information on sex for teens.

For more information about all the Coming Together titles, visit EroticAnthology.com.