Memoirs of a Sex Goddess (#self-confidence #conformity #joy)

I'm not beautiful. Never have been. I've got a long face (a “horse face”, some would call it) and I'm so myopic I've worn coke-bottle glasses since I was seven years old. For most of my life I've been plumper than what is currently fashionable. Throughout childhood and my teen years I was awkward and socially inept, the shy, smart girl whom most guys avoided, either out of disinterest or feelings of inadequacy.

Then, when I reached my mid-twenties, I suddenly became a sex goddess.

I'd had a few boyfriends, including one multi-year relationship in graduate school that fell apart because he wasn't ready for a commitment. After we broke up, I moved out of the group house where he and I had been living with three other guys (that's another story!) and moved into a tiny apartment of my own. And that's when it all started.

All at once, or so it seemed, men began crawling out of the woodwork – men who wanted me. Friends became lovers. Strangers became lovers. I seemed to be broadcasting pheromones or something, because despite my average looks and body, I apparently inspired desire in a significant fraction of the male population.

I didn't understand this change, but I can't pretend I didn't like it. This was after the Pill and before AIDS – sex was much safer and more spontaneous than it could possibly be now. Though I was still fundamentally shy, somehow I found the courage to let go and experiment. I had some delicious adventures. I experienced some profound connections. I learned that most men were as insecure about their sexual attractiveness as I'd been about my own, not to mention deeply grateful to encounter a woman who honestly enjoyed making love.

My sex goddess period didn't last all that long – a few years, at most – but it changed my life and my perceptions of both the world and myself. I realized that looking sexy isn't nearly as important as feeling sexy. This turns out to be true on both sides of the gender divide. Some of my most skilled, imaginative, attentive and caring lovers were guys you'd never look twice at - guys who'd certainly never make it onto the cover of a romance novel!

Furthermore, I concluded that society's rules about sexual behavior can be seriously destructive of relationships and of happiness. Nice girls don't like sex, we're told, or at least, they don't admit they do. We're encouraged to feel guilty and ashamed of our own healthy desires, to hide or suppress our “improper” needs. We're all terrified to be labeled sluts. Meanwhile, men are left feeling frustrated, confused, and concerned about turning the women they want into “sex objects”.

This is not a positive situation – although I suspect that the level of mutual dissatisfaction experienced by modern men and women is one reason for the popularity of erotic romance!

I've been married for more than three decades at this point, but I've taken the lessons of my sex goddess years to heart. Desire should celebrated, not denied. I'm not advocating unthinking promiscuity or total irresponsibility, but I do believe it's worth the effort to honestly examine our choices about sex. If you weren't worried about what “other people” would think, would you choose differently?

I use these insights (plus my rich trove of personal erotic memories) whenever I sit down to write erotic romance. My heroines, for the most part, aren't reticent about sex. They're lusty, self-confident women who are comfortable claiming their own pleasure. Sometimes, they're more open to sex than they are to love. It's the heroes' job to demonstrate that they need both.

I write to primarily to entertain my readers, not to convey some sort of deep message. Still, if there were a consistent moral to my work, it would be this:

Don't listen to the voices that try to make you feel selfish or guilty. Believe that you're entitled to love and to pleasure. There's a sex goddess inside each one of us. We just have to release her.

P.S. The image at the top of this post is a sketch by my mother, who was a sex goddess in her own right.

Don't Be a Sheep (#bdsm #creativity #conformity)

Fitting in. Being popular. Looking hip. When you’re a teenager, that’s what you want more than anything. I was no different from any other teen, back then or today. I’d have long arguments with my mother about why she wouldn’t buy me nylons until I was thirteen, or why I had to wear ugly snow boots to school, or why I couldn’t shave my legs yet.

“But Mom,” I’d whine. “All the girls wear stockings.”

“So what?” she’d respond. “Why do you need to be like everyone else? Do you want to be a sheep?”

The disdain in her voice made it clear that conformity for its own sake was something she held in very low regard. Arguments based on following the prevailing views or actions of the majority almost never succeeded.

At the time, I found her insistence on individualism annoying and frustrating. As I grew older, though, I realized that this was some of the best advice she ever gave me. I’ve made some unconventional choices in my life. I’ve done things “most people” wouldn’t even consider. And all things considered, I think I’m happier and more fulfilled because I haven’t followed a standard, mass-approved path.

“Don’t be a sheep” applies to my writing as well. I don’t choose what I am going to write based on what’s currently hot in the market. In fact, I take perverse delight in challenging the current literary fashions, taking stereotypes or genre tropes and turning them on their heads.

That was the genesis of my new erotic romance The Gazillionaire and the Virgin. Some time after the release of FSOG, I was chatting with my blog mates. One of my friends said, “If I read about another romance about a brooding, dominant gazillionaire hunk and a shy, inexperienced virgin, I think I’ll upchuck.”

Great title, I thought. But what if the obscenely rich gazillionaire was the heroine? And the hero was virgin?

That was all it took to send me off on a genre-busting quest to create a sexy and romantic tale about a woman who has it all and the inexperienced but naturally dominant nerd she falls for.

I can almost hear you thinking. A virgin hero in erotic romance? How could that possibly work? I don’t want to read something so weird. Everyone likes alpha heroes— like the guys in thousands of other BDSM erotic romance novels.

My answer? Be a bit adventurous. Give The Gazillionaire and the Virgin a try. If you like BDSM-themed erotic romance with both heat and heart, I think you’ll enjoy it.

Don’t be a sheep.

Buy Links (Ebook and Print)

Amazon US

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B01B76B95K/

Amazon UK

http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B01B76B95K/

Barnes & Noble

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-gazillionaire-and-the-virgin-lisbet-sarai/1123327821?ean=2940157884932

All Romance

https://www.allromanceebooks.com/product-thegazillionaireandthevirgin-1974313-354.html

Kobo

https://store.kobobooks.com/en-us/ebook/the-gazillionaire-and-the-virgin

Smashwords

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/611337

Google Books

https://books.google.com/books?id=qCF4CwAAQBAJ

Excessica

http://www.excessica.com/books/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=6&products_id=1011

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28766414-the-gazillionaire-and-the-virgin

 

The Moving Finger

By M.Christian

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on; nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it. -- The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

I may have said this before but it's always worth repeating: here's a hearty thank you to Lisabet for the opportunity to write a little piece for her excellent blog.

This time, Lisabet has asked me to write a bit about the how my newest novel, Finger's Breadth, came to be.

In a nutshell, Finger's Breadth is ... well, maybe too weird for a nutshell (perhaps even too much for a coconut shell) but I'll give it a shot. Basically, it's a near-future gay erotic horror/thriller with a hefty dose of social commentary. Less-than-basically, it's a series of characters dealing with "the cutter:" the nickname given to a mysterious figure drugging random men and amputating the first digit of their little finger.

I told you it was weird.

In many ways I see Finger's Breadth as a thematic sequel to my previous novel, Me2. In that book I had a lot of fun playing with the idea of identity. Less-than-basically that because of peer pressure, mass-produced lifestyles and fantasies, we are all becoming more or less interchangeable.

I say "thematic sequel" because after writing Me2 I was itching to challenge myself with a new project – one that allowed me to explore human nature again. With Finger's Breadth, I tried to reach down even deeper and get even dirtier with how we relate to one another: socially, sexually, you name it.

The seeds that would eventually sprout become Finger's Breadth came from a wide variety of sources – or threads that would become the quilt if you don't like plant metaphors – but, botany or fabric, they have more in common than you might think. One of them came from my fascination good versus evil. Yeah, yeah, I know: lots of people have done – and will do – the exact same thing. But I've always been frustrated at how cowardly a lot of authors have been on the subject -- cowardly, because very few people seem to be willing to honestly look at the question.

I did a bit of that in an old story of mine, called "Counting," where a man has the shocking revelation that his lover, who he'd always thought of as a revolutionary hero, was simply someone who enjoyed killing – and, though intelligence or circumstance, was simply killing for the 'right' side.

The world is simply not full of people who wring their hands together and cackle manically. Most of the time the either don't think about their actions, justify them in some way, or take a twisted form of pride in being that kind of person. What complicates the situation even more is how each of these states can slip and slide – often in the space of a few minutes.

For example, I've always wanted to do a book – maybe my next one – about a man who accidentally hurts another person. But instead of living with the guilt he goes out of his way to prove to himself, and the rest of the world, that the person harmed deserved it in some way. What would make the book fun to write would be putting the poor fellow, and the reader, through an emotional and spiritual roller coaster: with each revelation the unfortunate victim going from lily-white innocent to dark-hearted monster to troubled-soul to disturbed-psycho.

With Finger's Breadth I played a lot with that: where no one is really good or evil, black or white, victim or victimizer. People have their own reasons for what they do, and often the "purity" of their thinking does that very same slip and slide across their emotional landscape.

Another thread -- or kernel -- came from peer pressure. Alas, that term has been thrown around far too much ... so much that it's lost a lot of its power. Overused or not, though, we all are governed by the need to conform. Sometimes that conformity is obvious, but other times its so subtle we may not even be aware of it. In its darkest manifestation the end result is "just following orders" but there are many other disturbing shades of it. With Finger's Breadth I wanted to really explore the power of conformity – even pushing it to the point where, as the number of amputations rises, men would begin to self-amputate to fit in. Like I said, I told you it was weird.

But there are other manifestations of peer pressure – and as I wrote the book I discovered more and more places in the characters' lives (as well as our own) where it tugs and pushes and pulls us around. I'm not going to chat about those – read the book, damnit – but let me just say that, as with Me2, it took me a few months to get over writing Finger's Breadth ... and it has altered how I look at the world, and more importantly the people, around me.

The final thread (or kernel) -- or at least the final one I want to chat with you about today -- that came into writing the novel is that sexuality, gay or straight or bi, is not always a bright world with an orgasmically shiny sun high in the sky – but rather there's a very strange dimension to the human sex drive. Barebacking, in particular, was a jumping off point for Finger's Breadth but it wasn't the only sexual behavior that inspired me. For those who don't know, "barebacking" – or at least one form of it – is for people, particularly gay men, to participate in unprotected sex. The reasons for it are extremely varied but two types kept nagging at me: when it was done as a thrill-seeking behavior – Russian Roulette with HIV – and when it was done as a sexual rite-of-passage. The last one nicely dovetails with the whole peer pressure thing again: that people would willingly infect themselves to fit in.

Even though these jumping-off points for the book seem a bit dark – and I'm the first to admit I didn't write Finger's Breadth to be a shiny, happy novel – I also want to say that many of the characters in the book found at the end of it that they'd had their eyes opened. Yes, often that awakening is a harsh one – like having a painful peak behind the curtain of how we all act and react together as social animals – but in most cases they leave the book seeing everything a bit clearer.

A part of writing this book is that I also wanted to leave the reader with a moment of clarity. Maybe I'm being pretentious in that I want to change how people look at the world, but I tell myself that – success or failure – it's still worthwhile to try.

But a larger part of Finger's Breadth came not because of any mission but because – like with everything I write – I though the idea would be lots of fun to explore, the novel loads of fun to write. And, guess what, I did have a fantastic time writing the book – and I can only hope that anyone else, moment of clarity or not, will enjoy it as well.

******

You can get your own copy of Finger's Breadth at Amazon.com and read my review here. ~ Lisabet