Embracing My Inner Pornographer - #strokefiction #taboo #elitistsnob

Photo by Alexander Krivitskiy on Unsplash

I have to apologize. Through most of my life as Lisabet Sarai (which began in 1999 when I published the first edition of Raw Silk), I’ve been something of an elitist snob. Despite having written a great many extremely filthy sex scenes, I’ve always considered myself as an author of “literary erotica”. If you’d asked me what I meant by that label, I’d have launched into a spirited explanation of how my work focused on “the experience of desire” and the “emotional and spiritual aspects of sexuality”, not just on the physical acts involved. I would also have talked about how much I hate the stereotypes of porn, and how hard I’ve tried to use original premises, perspectives and characters in my erotica. Finally, I’d mention (maybe a bit shyly) the fact that I view style and craft to be at least as important in erotica as sexual heat.

All of this is true. Nevertheless, if you listened closely, you might have detected a bit of defensiveness in my exposition. My work is not porn, reads the subtext. It’s not obscene. It has redeeming artistic value. Sure, Amazon might be ready to throw me into the adult dungeon along with the authors of Gang-bang at the OK Corral and Taking Daddy’s Big Cock Up My Ass, but my stories are different—more thoughtful, nuanced and complex, less exploitative and nasty. Better... or at least more socially acceptable.

Bull turds.

Nearly twenty years after coming out as an erotic writer, I’m starting to realize that as far as the world is concerned, I’m just as guilty of writing dirty stories as the author of Lezzie Virgins Violated by Extraterrestrial Octopi or Stealing My Sister’s Smelly Panties. The richness of my descriptions, the depth of my characterization, the vividness with which I evoke my settings—none of this changes the fact that, at the end of the day, I write what most people would call smut. Furthermore, my most dedicated fans read my stuff at least partly for the arousal, not because of its literary merit.

In addition, I’ve come to understand that my fears of being viewed as nothing more than a stroke author have held me back. There have been times, especially when I was aiming at a romance market, when I’ve censored myself, turning down the heat or at least mitigating the rawness in my tales for fear of alienating my readers. My fear and my snobbishness combined to make my work less than genuine.

A few years ago, I started to deliberately write stroke fiction. Now I have a 600-page plus boxed set of five books (Vegas Babes) that are basically wall-to-wall, no-holds-barred, every-combination-and-position sex. While these books do have a plot and what I hope are appealing characters, my main goals are to entertain my readers and to get them hot and horny. I have no deeper message, aside from the general position that sex is tremendous fun and everyone should get as much as they want.

I’m working now on the first book of a new stroke series, The Pornographer’s Apprentice. It’s both easier and harder than writing so-called literary erotica. On the one hand, I don’t have to censor myself (much – I’m so tempted to introduce taboo elements like sister-sister incest into the current book, but I do want to avoid the dungeon if I can). On the other hand, it’s sometimes a struggle to turn off my inner critic and just let my fantasies out onto the page. I really have to stop over-thinking things like narrative structure, balanced POV and the Aristotelian unities, because that just slows me down.

Aside from the volume of the sex and the eager horniness of my characters, these porn books are actually less transgressive than some of my more literary work. There’s some mild BDSM, but none of the edgy power exchange action that shows up in my earlier books. I don’t know whether that will change as I continue to explore this corner of my imagination. Having opened this can of worms, I’ll be interested to see what crawls out.

One thing I’d like to try is writing some futa fiction. I’m also personally turned on by some incest scenarios, despite the official prohibition. There are other forbidden but titillating topics that call out to me.

I don’t know if I’m brave enough to respond to those calls. I’m afraid my existing fans would drop me in disgust. Obviously I could create a new pen name for the taboo stories, but I already find managing one pseudonymous identity takes more time and effort than I have available.

Anyway, I’ll have to see where my Muse leads me. She has a very dirty mind.

Meanwhile I’m forced to acknowledge that the boundary between erotica and porn is sufficiently subjective and fluid that it might not exist at all.

Review Tuesday: Ekaterina and the Night by Maxim Jakubowski

Ekaterina and the Night By Maxim Jakubowski
Xcite Books Ltd. 2011

“Will you tell other women stories about me when we are over?” she asked Alexander.

He wanted to be truthful and say no, but already she knew him too well. He was who he was, and aware that the temptation would be too strong not to talk about her, to improvise tales of beauty and fury, of lust and longing, songs of adoration and missing.

This self-referential quotation encapsulates Maxim Jakubowski's latest novel – a book of tales about women, lust, love, and loss. Although ostensibly focused on the relationship between Alexander, an introspective British author, and Ekaterina, a wild-hearted Italian journalist decades his junior, Ekaterina and the Night spends at least half its time tracing these two characters' travels through the lives of other lovers and sex partners, before and after their brief, intense connection.

The novel begins with sixteen year old Ekaterina's decision to seduce her handsome, urbane tennis instructor. She considers that it's high time she discarded her virginity, but she changes her mind when confronted with the grossness of male lust.

The scene shifts to Alexander's early explorations in the world of women. Both sensual and sentimental, Alexander finds astonishing variety in the female body and soul. His heart breaks more than once as he treads the torturous paths of pleasure. Although he recognizes his own susceptibility, he still cannot resist falling for the women he fucks.

Twenty year old Ekaterina meets Alexander when she interviews him for an article. No sparks fly, at least at first. A creature of words as she is, he woos her long distance with missives both tender and obscene. When they next arrange an encounter, in the terminally romantic city of Venice, passion has snared them both.

Even from the beginning, though, both protagonists seem to believe their love is doomed – by geographic and social distance and even more, by the gap of age and experience that separates them. They call themselves Lolita and Humbert, although in fact they have little in common with Nabokov's creations. The fantasy scenario of the innocent and the beast inflames them, inappropriate as is.

Over the course of several years, they meet, infrequently, in fabled cities – Paris, Rome, New York – share a few days of ecstasy, then part. Because they expect their love to fail, it finally does. Ekaterina cuts Alexander out of her life completely. Alexander, who craves women like an addict craves drugs, moves on to other conquests. Time marches forward – but decades cannot completely erase the marks the two have left on each other's souls.

Ekaterina and the Night offers a third major character in Emma, the personification of the night referenced in the title. Emma is a harvester of souls, a sort of emissary or assistant to the angel of Death. Several chapters follow her as she arranges the demise of individuals she has been assigned to harvest, some of whom are minor players in the lives of Alexander or Ekaterina. Emma is extraordinarily beautiful and strangely compassionate despite her role in the universe. As the novel progresses (if one can use that term for a book that jumps back and forth in time the way this one does), Emma's trajectory has near misses with those of the other two protagonists, until finally she arrives for her appointment with the aging Alexander.

I found myself surprised at the book's rather sudden conclusion. I read it in ebook form; one characteristic of ebooks is that it's not always obvious when you're nearing the end. Based on the blurb, I expected a three-way encounter among Emma, Ekaterina and Alexander. That never happened. Instead, Ekaterina fades out of the book completely, despite her prominence in the title.

In fact, I should warn readers to ignore the blurb and the cover (a shapely, boot-clad foot with a steel cuff around the ankle), as both are totally misleading. There's no BDSM to speak of in this novel, and there's nothing particularly shocking about Alexander's and Ekaterina's relationship, as claimed by the blurb. I blame the publisher for this; I suspect people who purchase the novel based on the marketing information will be annoyed when they discover how different the reality is from the hype.

Maxim Jakubowski's style offers a refreshing change from more commercial erotic fiction. His prose is simultaneously dispassionate and full of sensory richness. One has the impression of looking through glass, imagining the smells, sounds and tastes rather than directly experiencing them. Indeed, I think the author is gazing through the lens of recollection, evoking cherished scenes from the past and filling in the details from oft-rehearsed memory – telling his favorite stories, as Ekaterina intuited that Alexander would.

As in previous books, Mr. Jakubowski lovingly describes the geographies in which his characters come together. Indeed, cities, cafés, and hotels are practically minor characters, each one distinct with its own individual personality. Occasionally I found his metaphors jarring (such as a comparison of a woman's nipple to a pizza crust), but overall his literate, observant prose is a pleasure to read.

And is Ekaterina and the Night erotic? Arousing? Yes, and no. The novel includes a great deal of sex – some tender, some raw, some brutal, some boring. The encounters range from transcendent to banal. After Alexander and Ekaterina break up, for example, she falls on hard times economically. To support herself and her lover, she works providing remote sex shows by web cam. There's a long scene in which, on camera and in return for a large amount of money, she allows herself to be taken anally for the first time. There's no pleasure or joy in this scene at all. Other chapters offer accounts of similarly disastrous, uncomfortable, or unpleasant sexual activity. These sections of the book detract from the delicious eroticism one finds elsewhere in the book.

Do not misunderstand me – this is not incompetence. I don't believe that the author intended these scenes to be arousing. Since they do not contribute much (in my opinion) to either the plot or the character development, I'm really not sure why he included them.

And did I enjoy the book? Again, I feel ambivalent. At its best, Ekaterina and the Night is a melancholy, nostalgic evocation of lost love and vanished youth, a meditation on the transforming power of sex and the connection between romance and death. At its worst, it is a set of barely connected vignettes that sometimes arouse and sometimes disgust the reader, but all too often seem rather pointless.

A reader who's looking for a traditional plot, with a core conflict, rise in tension, climax and a resolution, should probably avoid this novel. Someone seeking a more subtle emotional and intellectual experience may well enjoy it. Ekaterina and the Night isn't really a story. It's stories, plural, braided together and united by a wistful sense of remembered joy and a consciousness of mortality.

Review Tuesday: Giselle's Best Fetish Erotica (#erotica #kink #ReviewTuesday)

Giselle’s Best Fetish Erotica: 14 Kinky Sex Stories

By Giselle Renarde, 2016

Nobody does kink like Giselle Renarde. She has the wildest imagination when it comes to sexual scenarios; her erotic creativity (not to mention her daring) knows few if any limits. At the same time, she writes so well that she pulls you completely into her tales. You really don’t think about whether the sex is extreme; you’re just wonderfully aroused, as well as (quite often) surprised and delighted by the stories' unexpected resolutions. Her characters, even in her brief vignettes, feel distinctive and real. And her stories feel new, even when the premise is familiar.

If you get the sense that I enjoyed her short story collection, Best Fetish Erotica, you’re right. At the same time, I wonder if the book isn’t mis-titled. While the stories she has assembled here are not vanilla, most of them don’t fit my definition of “fetish”, namely an obsessive sexual preoccupation with a particular object or situation. Some of her characters are playing familiar sexual games, but others are discovering unexpected sexual proclivities for the very first time. Also, the majority of these tales feature individuals who are in established relationships. Often the kinky sex in which they indulge strengthens their emotional bonds. (This is especially true in “The Fattening Room” and “Black Lace and Wood”.) There’s more than a hint of romance in this volume.

On the other hand, if she’d titled the collection “Giselle’s Best Kinky Romance”, she probably would have attracted readers expecting silk scarves and Christian Grey clones. That’s definitely not the vibe here!

The book kicks off with “Night Nurse”, an astonishingly hot cross-dressing story. The incongruous contrast between the protagonist’s burly frame and his female uniform just makes the whole thing more arousing.

Next comes “Massive Attack”, a forced sex fantasy with surprise ending.

I’ve encountered the third story, “Must Love Dolls”, before. That’s not a problem; it is one of my all-time erotica favorites. When a couple orders a high-end sex doll, it transforms and deepens their relationship.

“That’s Not a Scrunchie” is a peculiar but thrilling exploration of female dominance. Don’t expect stilettos and leather; Pella is far more spontaneous and creative.

“A Thief in the Night” deals with sexual improvisation. A fantasy takes an unexpected turn, much to everyone’s eventual satisfaction.

“The Birds and the Bees” offers a riff on exhibitionism. “Don’t Break the Chain” is a very brief, eloquent commentary on a more “traditional” BDSM arrangement.

“The Fattening Room” is another standout. Lily-white Canadian Jeremy is engaged to voluptuous Nigerian Nneka. Though he loves her dearly, he’s terrified of visiting her native country for their wedding. His fiancée teaches him a lesson about the many definitions of beauty. The lush prose and complex emotions in this multi-cultural fable push it well into the realm of literary erotica.

“Black Lace and Wood” shares some features with “The Fattening Room”. It’s also a tale of a committed multi-cultural couple. I didn’t find it as enjoyable, possibly because of the negative feelings swirling around Rebecca’s infidelity and Navin’s stubborn refusal to forgive her. It is kinky, though, and will feel familiar to BDSM romance aficionados.

“In Tooth and Claw” is Giselle Renarde at her gender-bending best. After many negative encounters, the heroine has sworn off men. Yet something attracts her to her effeminate, cross-dressing colleague.

“Crush” offers a femdom scenario that was a bit too harsh for my tastes. Even though I don’t have balls, I find stories of their torture a bit squick-inducing. However, some readers may love it.

“Bless Me Father” explores the familiar fantasy of lusting after a priest—in gorgeous, arousing detail.

“Here Lies Rob in his Dirty Clothes” may be the most original tale in the collection. A photographer finds herself irresistibly drawn to a slacker who lives in a filthy apartment and rarely bathes. She takes him in a frenzy of inexplicable lust, atop a pile of dirty clothes. I’m something of a neat-nick myself, yet somehow this story grabbed me. I found the sort of irrational attraction portrayed to be eminently believable.

“Dogging the Law”, a humorous story with a twist, wraps up this solidly sexy collection.

All the tales in this volume are quite short. The whole book is only 128 pages in PDF form. Still, each one is rich and complete.

I recommend sampling one or two, just before bed.

Review Tuesday: White Flames by Cecilia Tan (#erotica #fantasy #lgbtq)

White Flames: Erotic Dreams by Cecilia Tan

Running Press, 2008

ISBN 978-0-78672-080-4

Hallelujah! That was my cry after reading the first two stories in Cecilia Tan's single-author collection WHITE FLAMES. Needless to say, my husband, reading in bed next to me, was a bit startled. When I explained, though, he understood completely.

With review commitments to several venues, regular crits for colleagues, plus a personal predeliction for erotica, I probably read a dozen erotic short stories a month. Most of these stories are adequate: reasonably well-written, moderately engaging, mildly arousing. Rarely do I encounter stories that I consider exceptional, stories that excite me in a literary rather than a physical sense.

What does it take for me to be excited by a story? Each case varies, but I look for an original premise, a unique voice, unconventional characters, and most of all, a treatment of sex more as an emotional or spiritual adventure than as a conjunction of body parts.

I'm delighted to report that, by my definition, many of the tales in Cecilia Tan's collection are exceptional.

Ms. Tan has a reputation for "speculative erotica", erotic fantasy and science fiction. It's easy to be original, one might argue, when one can build one's own worlds and write one's own rules. Yet almost half of the stories in WHITE DREAMS are contemporary erotica, with barely a whiff of fantasy.

Among my favorites is "Just Tell Me the Rules". A woman who is saving her virginity for marriage sends her housemate/fiance off on a business trip, only to have his best friend arrive at her door, a challenge to what she thought she wanted. Another delight is "Always", a down-to-earth tale of a loving threesome that begins with a scene all too familiar from my days in New England:

A raw spring day in Somerville, me in galoshes and a pair of my father's old painting pant with a snow shovel, cursing and trying to life a cinderblock-sized (and -weighted) chunk of wet packed snow off the walkway of our three-decker.

Vivid and concrete one moment, Ms. Tan can wax tender and raunchy the next:

Morgan's hands travel up my thighs like they come out of a dream. It never occurs to me to stop her. Sex with Morgan is as easy and natural as saying yes to a bite of chocolate from the proffered bar of a friend. Before her fingers even reach the elastic edge of my panties I am already shifting my hips, already breathing deeper, already thinking about the way her fingers will touch and tease me, how one slim finger will slide deep into me when I am wet, how good it feels to play with her hair on my belly, how much I want her. With Morgan, I always come.

Then there's "Baseball Fever", Ms. Tan's hilarious and highly explicit fantasy about a Yankee rookie for whom she has the hots: "This guy's got destiny. He fits right in with multi-ethic New York, too - half-black, half-white, cannily polite with the media but cocky as hell when he gets on the field." I'm not much of a sports fan, but when Tan brought Tiger Woods into the final scene of the fantasy, "just to make sure it's not 100% percent heterosexual", I laughed until my stomach hurt.

At first glance, one might dismiss "Halloween" as an instance of the overworked "girl meets dominant man of her dreams in a bar" genre. Tan brings new life to the old scenario, partly due to the kick-ass attitude of the world-weary Goth narrator. "The Hard Sell" is a tale of a modern woman longing to escape from the labels and slogans that society applies to everything and everyone around her - including the man who drives her into a frenzy.

Although WHITE FLAMES includes some excellent realistic pieces, I must admit that myth and magic lie at its heart. The middle hundred pages of the book are devoted to fantasy, starting with a stunningly erotic retelling of "The Little Mermaid" then flowering into more original tales. In "Bodies of Water", a team of archeologists discover an ancient ship on the floor of the Mediterranean. The discovery transforms them, both literally and figuratively. "Dragon's Daughter" is a fascinating tale of a Chinese-American girl who learns that she's an immortal who can travel through time and space to anywhere Chinese culture dominates.

This is the ignominy of the American educational system: that to speak the tongue of my ancestors I had to fight to be enrolled in a special college class and trudge to it every morning at 8:00. I didn't think I knew the words to explain what I was doing there, anyway... I had no words yet for worry or conflict or secret or dream.

Three amazing stories featuring the same characters - Stormclaw and The Lady in Black - conclude this section. Like so many characters in the today's wildly popular "paranormal" genre, Stormclaw and the Lady are "elementals" - creatures of wind and fire and earth. They are not just people with special powers, however. They are truly inhuman, incomprehensible to and uncomprehending of the mortals among whom they move. They are drawn to human passion, yet do not understand it.

These stories are lyrical and intense, strange and haunting.

He flies. He flies over clouds as dark as his hair, his eyes, his mood, as he thinks about her. Stormclaw is the dragon of the wind, coiling his power like a cyclone, soaring over night sky, moving eastward like a front of incipient weather. He sees without eyes, senses without skin, when he is the wind, considers without thought, and loves without a heart.

Stormclaw haunts seedy bars, taunting the men who drink there, trying to remember what it is that he seeks.

Stormclaw feels the first strike of the leather cat-o-nine cross his back like the first bite into a sour summer fruit, a rich and intense pleasure. He draws breath waiting for the next blow to fall, and as he exhales he feels Ravenhair's breath on his shoulder--they are like one animal, tensing and then letting go, and then gathering themselves again. Breathe in, tense for the strike, then let go as the pain rains down around you.

One of the delightful aspects of this collection is its inclusiveness. These stories embrace all orientations, without self-consciousness or politicizing. WHITE FLAMES offers FF, MM, FMF, and FFF tales, not to mention sexually-aware mermaids and robots. In Ms. Tan's worlds, desire is a universal force, not confined to any particular gender or even species.

The book ends with three science fiction tales, of which the best is "The Spark". What if the magical energy that seems to animate the gods and goddesses of rock and roll was a real, measurable force, that could be stoked, and shared -- and lost?

WHITE FLAMES includes a few stories that are hohum, but Ms. Tan hits the target far more often than she falls short. If you enjoy literary erotica that will make you wonder as often as it makes you sweat, I highly recommend this volume.

Review Tuesday: Coming Together Presents M. Christian (#erotica #charity #lgbtq) )

Coming Together Presents: M. Christian

By M. Christian

Coming Together, 2010

Is it unethical to review a book that I edited?

I’m not pretending disinterest. I am telling you right up front that I was the one who decided on the order of the sixteen stories in this anthology, to emphasize the contrasts and optimize the flow. I was responsible for tightening sentence structure, fixing spelling and punctuation issues, and removing excessive ellipses. I wrote the (admittedly enthusiastic) introduction.

I didn’t choose these stories, though. That was the author’s decision, as is the case with all of the Coming Together Presents charitable erotica series. M.Christian is solely responsible for the wonderful diversity in style, in theme and in sexual orientation you’ll find in these tales. He donated his considerable talent to benefit Planned Parenthood, which receives all proceeds from this book.

Well, I guess you can decide on your own whether to believe my review or not.

Coming Together Presents: M. Christian showcases the astonishing versatility of its author. A few of the tales (“Services Rendered”, “A Hard Night’s Work”) are straightforward tales of satisfying sexual encounters—the sort of thing you might expect from an erotica anthology. They’ll turn you on. They’ll make you smile. The former is M/F, the latter M/M. Mr. Christian likes to mix things up.

These two tales are great fun, but most of the stories in the book go deeper. “Last Tango in Paris, Texas” is a frenzied F/F tale with a bittersweet ending. “Grizzly” deals with a man coming to terms with his homoerotic desires. “Fragments”, a lyrical tale set in Barcelona, documents a female sculptor’s struggle to capture her conflicting desires in her art. “Evolution” is a beautiful, gut-wrenching piece about a lesbian couple where one member is transitioning from female to male.

M. Christian is well-known for his sci-fi and speculative fiction. This volume includes two science fiction pieces. One is the light-hearted polyamorous tale “On One Hand”. In the interest of avoiding spoilers, I won’t tell you the title of the other.

Broadly speaking, Coming Together Presents: M. Christian should be categorized as erotica. Some of my favorite stories, though, have little or no actual sex. “Missing Alice” is a romantic F/F tale about the difficulty in recognizing what you really want, with heartfelt kisses, but nothing more. “Four Views of Mount Fuji” believably evokes the sexual ambivalence of Japan—a country the author has never visited.

If you’re already an M. Christian fan but you haven’t read this book, you should add it to your bookshelves

If you’re not familiar with this talented author, the variety in this collection makes it a good place to start.

Either way, your purchasing the book will support a worthy cause.

(You can also help Planned Parenthood by buying my latest release, and by commenting on my recent charity Sunday Snog.)

Sneak Peek: Oysters and Pearls by Mitzi Szereto (#erotica #literature #zombies @MitziSzereto)

[One of my very first published stories appeared in Erotic Travel Tales, edited by Mitzi Szereto. I'm delighted to see help her get the word out about her latest book! ~ Lisabet]

Blurb

Acclaimed author Mitzi Szereto explores the many complexities of desire, love and lust in this rich and varied “best of” collection of erotically charged short stories compiled over the course of her literary career. In these seventeen provocative and often witty offerings, she travels expertly between genres with tales that explore both the light and the dark sides of sexuality. Oysters and Pearls gives the reader a glimpse into worlds that are as ordinary as they are fantastical and mysterious. Like a skilled lover, this sensuous and imaginative compilation will leave you wanting more.

Publication date: Nov. 15, 2016

Available in trade paperback and e-book

Published by Midnight Rain Publishing

Genres: Literary Erotica, Paranormal Romance, Fantasy

Length: 213 pages (print version)

Oysters and Pearls: Collected Stories is available at Amazon and other fine booksellers: 
 

https://www.amazon.com/Oysters-Pearls-Collected-Mitzi-Szereto-ebook/dp/B01M4GNRQR/

Excerpt

From “Bakewell, Revisited”

With the approach of lunchtime, the pub gets busier. I glance up from the muddy depths of my stout and notice a woman standing at the bar while the publican pulls a pint for another customer. Her fingers drum the aged wood—the only indication that she might be impatient for the man to get on with it and serve her. She’s dressed in typical country fare: brown corduroy jeans, beige Fair Isle sweater, earth-caked hiking boots. Probably one of those hale and hearty types on a walking excursion, although I see no evidence of the requisite rucksack and walking sticks. She shrugs her heavy brown coat from her shoulders and whips off her plaid scarf, which—surprise, surprise—has brown woven into it.

Wild waves of chestnut hair. Creamy skin. A rosy blush on the cheek turned toward me. I stop breathing.

It can’t be. It can’t.

But it is.

Drink in hand, she turns around, apparently searching for a suitable place to drop her over-garments and partake of her half pint of what looks to be cider. A ray of sun from the window by my head catches on the contents of her glass, turning it to liquid gold. She spies me at my lone table and her eyes widen. “Um, aren’t you—”

“Yes.”

Without waiting for an invite, she settles into the chair adjacent to mine. The chair with the wooden seat made shiny by generations of pub-crawling bottoms is now being made shiny by hers. The thought causes a fluttering that begins in my abdomen and spreads lower and lower until I have to cross my legs within the confined space to quash it.

“You all right? It’s been so long…” Mundane words, but nevertheless exciting. Her accent still has the north in it—that curious Derbyshire-Yorkshire crosshatching with the dropped thes, and the sommats in place of the somethings. But then, she probably never left here.

I nod. I don’t need to be reminded of how long it has been. The evidence shows in my face. My eyes. Not hers though. She’s still beautiful. Still young. Even after two decades I can taste my desire for her. It’s as strong as it was when we picnicked among the dead of Bakewell. I watch her lips move as she offers me small talk. I feel a dampening as they form the vowels and consonants that make up speech. A trickling in my armpits and groin, followed by a stirring. A pulsing. A staccato beating. “Do you still live here in Derbyshire?” I manage to ask.

“Never left,” she says with a smack of her lips, which have the delicate tincture of Belgian strawberries. “Why leave heaven?”

Heaven. Yes, it might be to some. It never was to me though. Not as long as my desire for her remained frozen on my fingers and tongue. Frozen in my genitals.

Advance Praise for Oysters and Pearls

“The strength of this collection lies in its imaginative grasp of the wide variety of cultures, landscapes and emotional engagement of the reader as well the sexual.” ~ Tobsha Learner, bestselling author of Picture This

“Mitzi Szereto is the dynamo of the erotic world. Writing, teaching, editing; all part of a day in the life of erotica’s most spicy personality.” ~ Maxim Jakubowski, The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica

“Lovemaking and the erotic are difficult areas to write about without being twee or self-conscious or embarrassing or just falling flat on your face. Few writers handle such material with the intelligence, joy and humor of Mitzi Szereto.” ~ Sir Arnold Wesker, FRSL, playwright and author

About the Author

Mitzi Szereto (mitziszereto.com) is an author and anthology editor of multi-genre fiction and non-fiction. She has her own blog of humorous essays at Errant Ramblings: Mitzi Szereto’s Weblog (mitziszereto.com/blog), and a web TV channel Mitzi TV (mitziszereto.com/tv), which covers the “quirky “side of London, England. Her books include Phantom: The Immortal (co-authored with Ashley Lister); Rotten Peaches and Normal for Norfolk (The Thelonious T. Bear Chronicles, a cozy mystery/satire series co-authored with celebrity author bear Teddy Tedaloo); The Wilde Passions of Dorian Gray; Pride and Prejudice: Hidden Lusts; Love, Lust and Zombies; Thrones of Desire: Erotic Tales of Swords, Mist and Fire and Getting Even: Revenge Stories. Her anthology Erotic Travel Tales 2 was the first anthology of erotica to feature a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She divides her time between the Pacific Northwest and the UK.

Review Tuesday : Neptune and Surf by Marilyn Jaye Lewis (#reviewtuesday #erotica #literature)

Neptune and Surf by Marilyn Jaye Lewis

Blue Moon Books, 2012

Sex is not simple. Marilyn Jaye Lewis' story collection, Neptune and Surf, offers readers a rich and wildly imaginative sampling of sexual shenanigans: public couplings, steamy birchings, violent ravishments, lewd tenderness. There is the soapy buggery of the pregnant woman in the shower; the butch nun's strap-on penetration of her recalcitrant pupil as her victim recites New Testament verses; even a lasciviously-inclined Great Dane.

What is most impressive about this book is the skill with which Ms. Lewis navigates the complex emotional landscape of sexuality. Her characters wander from shame to lust, from confusion to power, from anger to love, drawn to the flesh but never with complete understanding. Her nuanced portraits make the stories believable, even when the plots seem extreme or contrived. The shy, horny black sailor, the tough but tender-hearted half-Chinese hooker, the self-indulgent gangster's moll, these people linger in the reader's mind long after the details of their erotic encounters have faded.

Ms. Lewis' style is crisp and evocative. One smells the popcorn at Coney Island, hears the snap of the birch cane, shivers with Victoria, exposed and violated on the bridge above the swirling winter

river. The shortest of the three tales in the volume, "Gianni's Girl", is switch-blade sharp, laced with seductive danger. The deadpan dialogue crackles with barely suppressed violence. The plots of the

two novellas, "Neptune and Surf" and "The Merry Cure", use numerous temporal shifts which Ms. Lewis handles deftly, with admirable clarity. On the other hand, a more linear treatment might have made these stories even more effective. By the time the reader reaches the climax of "The Merry Cure", she has experienced so many thrilling trips to the past that the present feels a bit flat.

The sexual scenarios are inventive and explicit, described with eloquence and grace even at their most raw. Occasionally, one has the sense that a flashback or daydream is gratuitous, interjected purely for the purpose of adding yet another sex scene. In most cases, though, the sex unfolds organically, propelled by the psychologies and histories of the participants. Even within a single scene, there may be many moods, as the emotional balance shifts and mutates. Gentleness morphs to savagery. Terror melts to passionate arousal. The effect can be a bit overwhelming, leaving the reader with damp and breathless, head spinning.

That is the nature of sex, though. It touches us at every level. It makes us dizzy. It awakens our fears and insecurities, delusions and creativity. In the erotic realm we are both beastly and divine, and sometimes both at once. Ms. Lewis' work captures this truth, with sympathy and considerable craft.

Review Tuesday: First by Cheyenne Blue

First: Sensual Lesbian Stories of New Beginnings

Edited by Cheyenne Blue

LadyLit Publishing, 2015

Let me begin by admitting I’m biased. Ideally, a reviewer should approach her task with no preconceived opinions about a book (although I suspect that’s rare in practice), but when I pick up a book with Cheyenne Blue’s name on the cover, I expect it to be great. Given my prior experience with Cheyenne’s work, I can’t help myself. Of course, this sort of bias can be a double-edged sword. If the book turns out to be less than stellar, I might subject it to harsher criticism than a random volume from an unfamiliar author or editor.

In the case of First, I’m pleased to report that my expectations were more than satisfied. This impressively diverse collection rings all sorts of changes on the theme of first times and new beginnings. In “The Opposite of Darkness” by Harper Bliss, a formerly blind woman sees her long-time lover for the first time. Jeremy Edwards’s “The Talkies” chronicles a nervous silent film star moving into the new world of voice. Annabeth Leong’s “Roses and Thorns” portrays a female boxer’s first public fight, a contest that alters the emotional balance in her relationship with her butch partner. Rosie Bower’s gorgeously lyrical “Sea” depicts a woman’s first encounter with the ocean, in all its vast mystery. In “Whole Again”, Brenda Murphy takes readers into the cynical heart of a butch amputee veteran, a short order cook in a greasy spoon diner who lets down her guard just enough to take a lover for the first time since her leg was blown off.

New beginnings shine in Emily Byrne’s gritty and humorous “Repossession”. A woman divorcing from her wife is forced to deal with the bossy female bank officer who’s come to claim their jointly-owned house. Ms. Lydia Chang just happens to be an old fling, which makes the whole transition both harder and hotter.

Cheyenne Blue’s wonderful contribution, “Amelia”, imagines the famous aviator crash landing on a remote island in the Pacific, where she embarks on a new life with a fellow castaway. In this tale, the lush jungles and crystal lagoons of Amelia’s haven mirror the simple beauty of her connection with the supple, coffee-skinned Lae.

Jillian Boyd’s “Ghost of She” vividly portrays the reality of a broken heart, as well as the sweet, subtle process of its healing, while in Ivy Newman’s “The First Peonies”, the protagonist finally risks something more than a one night stand.

In Sacchi Green’s “Pulling”, the newness is understated. The heroine, a cowgirl over six feet tall, is drawn to a femme carny. This story is darn near perfect, from its razor-sharp characterization to its spot-on dialogue:

Her back was turned while she unclipped balloon fragments from the backboard. She’d shot me a little smile when I arrived, but there was something tentative about it, wary. Or maybe even nervous. I kind of liked the idea of making her nervous.

“So what does it take,” I asked, pressing right up against her ass and putting my hands on her hips, “for a big old farm girl to distract you?”

She turned right around into my arms and did a slow grind against me. “It’s been a while since I got that lucky,” she said against my chin. “What do you generally have in mind when you pick up slutty carnival hucksters?”

“Once I pick ‘em up,” I said, digging my hands into her round

asscheeks and raising her so that her breasts rested above mine, “my mind doesn’t have all that much to do with it.” Which was pretty much true. “But I’ve been known to offer to buy a girl dinner. To keep her strength up.”

You can tell the sparks are going to fly. (And believe me, they do!)

Despite all this variety, it happens that two of my favorite stories focus on first-time lesbian experiences. The tales could hardly be more different. In “Before the Bus Comes”, Tamsin Flowers serves up a clever, tongue-in-cheek treatment of a woman determined to experience the F/F intimacy she’s always fantasized about—because you never know when you’re going to get run over by a bus. In contrast, Vanessa de Sade’s “That Summer” offers a dreamy recollection of a long-gone summer when the precocious, bookish narrator first discovered she loved women. The story glows from within, a much-polished jewel gleaming in the sunlight of memory.

Let me say, by the way, that the literary quality of the stories in First in no way detracts from their erotic charge. Some stories are raw. Some are tender. Some are playful. Every one celebrates the succulent richness of female flesh in all its lush variety. In fact, this confluence of craft and heat would make this collection the perfect gift for someone new to lesbian erotica—a delicious first taste of all the flavors the genre can offer.