For your shelf-ish desires

I thought I'd pop in with some recommendations for scurrilous books I've been reading under lockdown. First, a couple of new ones:

A Curious History of Sex is by Dr Kate Lister of Whores of Yore fame and it's a publication I backed on Kickstarter. Sex and Sexuality in Victorian Britain is by our international goth correspondent Violet Fenn and has just been released this last week. Both are easy-reading non-fiction, written with wit and a real fondness for their subject matter, and are to be recommended for any historian's bookshelf. Buy them and annoy your friends by reading out Interesting But Dirty Facts 😉😉😉

Buy A Curious History of Sex
Buy Sex and Sexuality in Victorian Britain

Not so new is the immense graphic novel Lost Girls, authored by my writing hero Alan Moore and painted by Melinda Gebbie. Originally an extraordinarily expensive trilogy that has been out of print for a few years, it's now a single-volume edition (with extra material) currently on sale via their eBay shop at an astounding £20 (+P&P)!

So if, like me, you have been waiting to find an affordable copy, THIS IS YOUR CHANCE to read about Alice (of Wonderland), Wendy Darling and Dorothy Gale meeting as adults on the eve of WW1 and regaling each other with the "true" versions of their famous adventures. Careful with this one - it's very beautiful and artsy and intelligent (and very hot), but strong stuff even for porn and I'm slightly surprised it hasn't been banned. Moore rather famously does not give a shit what anyone thinks and does not believe in censoring art.

Buy Lost Girls

Hardcore Inspiration

I swore when I went to Edge-Lit, that this year I wouldn't buy ANY books!

I only bought 6! I think that's pretty good 😄😄😄

And this is how Simon Bestwick signed his ...

Okay okay!

Dirty 30 Vol.3

Heads-up/cover reveal here for the next anthology I'm involved with - it's The Sexy Librarian's Dirty 30 Vol.3, which is due for release on May 24th, and is edited of course by the wonderful Rose Caraway.

In SLD30 Vol.2 I had a story from Norse mythology - Sweet Hel Below. This time round I've switched it up and tried my hand at a Western: Sourdough. I may have been watching a lot of Westworld at the time!)

You can read a brief extract from my new story HERE

And another one...

My second cover reveal in a week, lol

For anyone following my non-erotic work, my story The Price of Passage - which is about Aeneas'  escape from the sack of Troy - is due to appear in Legends Vol.3 out 25th May this year. Wheeeeee!

David Gemmell passed away in 2006, leaving behind a legacy of memorable characters, epic settings, and thrilling tales. The Legends series of anthologies, of which this the third and almost certainly final volume, is intended to pay homage to one of fantasy fiction's greatest writers. With stories written especially for the books by some of the finest fantasy authors from Britain and beyond, the series also acts as a fund raiser for the David Gemmell Awards.

It's a massive honour for me to be featured in this anthology alongside so many great fantasy authors!

Preorder link for paperback and limited-edition hardback

Sinister Ducks

This has been doing the rounds online 😉

Which of course made me think of the GREATEST DUCK SONG OF ALL TIME



(written by Alan Moore, probably after some funny mushrooms I'm guessing)

"Everyone thinks they're such sweet little things
Ducks, Ducks! Quack, Quack! Quack, Quack!
Soft downy feathers and nice little wings
Ducks, Ducks! Quack, Quack! Quack, Quack!
But there's a poison I'd like to administer,
You think they're cuddly but I think they're sinister.
Ducks, Ducks! Quack, Quack! Quack, Quack!
Ducks, Ducks! Quack, Quack! Quack, Quack!

What are they doing at night in the park?
Think of them waddling about in the dark.
Sneering and whispering and stealing your cars,
Reading pornography, smoking cigars.

Nasty and small, undeserving of life.
They smirk at your hairstyle and sleep with your wife.
Dressed in black jackets and horrible shoes,
Getting divorces and turning to booze.

Forcing old ladies to throw them some bread.
Who could deny they'd be better off dead?
Look closer and you may recoil in surprise,
At web-footed fascists with mad little eyes.
Ducks, Ducks! Quack, Quack! Quack, Quack!
Ducks, Ducks! Quack, Quack! Quack, Quack!
Ducks, Ducks! Quack, Quack! Quack, Quack!
Ducks, Ducks! Quack, Quack! Quack, Quack!"

Now that's a portrait from life

Edward Burne-Jones: Portrait of Katie Lewis Reading a Book, 1886

2018 in the rearview mirror

This is my annual post where I look back at the cultural touchstones of the year.

Best Movie:

I saw very few films this year, sadly, because my regular movie-buddy upped and moved to Nottingham, and then I moved house, so was too busy on most weekends with Painting Everything White.

Of the paltry 13 I saw on the big screen, my faves were:

1) Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

2) Avengers: Infinity War

3) Deadpool 2

Best Book:

Sapiens just bowled me over - it's a history of humankind which focuses on the big forces not the events, and has a way of taking everything you thought you knew and framing it in completely unexpected ways. All I can say is that the section on the development of share-based capitalism was riveting, which was one hell of a surprise to me, I can tell you!

Best TV:

We finally finished watching Breaking Bad this year! I've also enjoyed the second series of Westworld, the first few series of Justified, Inside Number 9, Black Mirror, Altered Carbon, The Terror ... but my greatest love this year went to two very different series:

A piratical romp:

And a philosophy-based sitcom:

Best DVD/Download:

I actually managed to catch up on a few movies I should have seen at the cinema (The Quiet Place, I Fight Giants, Black Panther) but my fave off-the-shelf finds were a Bollywood horror:

And a piece of 1970s family entertainment complete with embarrassing blackface and execrable SFX.:

Best Music:

Oh pooey, I've let my musical tastes fall into a bit of a rut this year! There were new albums from old faves Frank Turner and Muse, but I've only been to one live gig 😞

New-to-me bands whose CDs I've been listening to are: Heilung, Madisen Ward and the Momma Bear and Greta Van Fleet...





Best Picture:

Elon Musk is busy devolving from Bruce Wayne into Doctor Octopus, but THIS WAS AWESOME:

May 2019 be the year we start to raise our collective selves from the gutter to the stars...

L00t

Here's my book-stash from FantasyCon 2018:

Plus the ones I brought home for Mr Ashbless:

Goddamnit, I need more shelf-space now... :-(

New bookcase!

Let there be rejoicing - for I have a big new bookcase! We had to replace the radiator to fit it in, so it's a major achievement ;-)

But now I have two free shelves to put my photo albums in - which should last me most of the rest of my holidaying life!

What, those books temporarily on the top shelf? That's the overflow from my To-Read Pile.

This is my ACTUAL To-Read Pile:

Mr Straw's House

This ordinary-looking townhouse in Worksop hides a secret - it's a time capsule from the 1920s! The Straw family moved in in 1923, and when the father died in 1932 his widow and two surviving sons made a decision to change NOTHING. When the last son died in 1990, the National Trust acquired the house and all its contents, down to the coats hanging in the hall and the medicated toilet paper. And it's all still there to see:

The 1920s an era that I'm fascinated by for horror-gaming reasons. But the other reason I love this place is that one of the brothers was a total book-hoarder :-D

He'd buy them, read them, wrap them in newspaper and then store them underneath the furniture. It all looks embarrassingly familiar:

This is exactly what my house would have looked like if I'd been born a bit further back and more eccentric.

You have to phone ahead to book a tour of Mr Straw's House - see details here

OMG look at the size of that thing!

It's the paperback version of The Erotic Writer's Thesaurus and it's ENORMOUS!

And yes, I have a back-cover quote:

The Erotic Writer's Thesaurus

Okay, okay - despite all my protestations, this is me doing a book review.

The Erotic Writer's Thesaurus, a true labour of love* by Terrance Aldon Shaw, deserves to be the exception to my rule. 513 pages in PDF,  10,000 entries, countless cross-references (okay, I didn't count) and several pages of notes on such tangential topics as lists of gun-types, the strange modern dislike of the word "moist," and the difference between "demur" and "demure," as well as a beautiful little opening essay on the usage of the word "ass" - this is such a useful resource for anyone writing about sex or romance that it feels like a huge relief to have it at my electronic fingertips at last.

What it is not is just a list of filthy words, although GOD YES we all do occasionally need a synonym for "cock" at some point in our sex scenes. A sprawling range of um, relationship-related terms, covering everything from Mascara to Yawn is presented for our educational delight (and now that I have this book, hopefully I will never have to bash out such a clunky descriptor as "relationship-related" again!). It also functions as a dictionary, so you can look up the meaning of, say, "Irrumation" should you so desire, and includes nearly 2000 usage examples. Just browsing it is inspirational.

It rocks.

Some caveats: it is an idiosyncratic work in which the author's voice and opinions comes across strongly in the expanded notes and topics, take it as you like. Reader opinions may differ on, say, whether a particular word is derogatory, or biologically accurate. I'd always avoid describing an adult woman as a "girl," say, except within dialogue, but of course many people do that and intend no slight. Language is a living, mutable, constantly evolving thing and one of the skills an author must have is choosing the right words to convey not just meaning, but also nuance and character.

TAS is also American, and although there are many inclusions from different sources (Hindi, African-American, Portuguese, Yiddish, Elizabethan, etc - all helpfully flagged as such) and he's done his research, I noted in my uncorrected review copy some question-marks when it came to British slang (which have been fixed in the latest PDF).  That's probably inevitable in a single-author work, and to be honest it's probably all but impossible to write accurately in another culture's idiom. This book will hopefully help you flange it, though. (See!)

 The Erotic Writer's Thesaurus is the dog's bollocks 👍👍👍 and I will absolutely be buying it in paperback. It will become a well-thumbed treasure.

AMAZON US : AMAZON UK

The Online Version is on TAS's website

---

* Love (n): adoration; affection; ardor; attachment; beyond admiration; caring; craving; devotion; Eros...

Just read the smut

Dicewriting: not a review

I'm a roleplaying geek. I like dice. A lot.

I even have a gothic dice-tower to roll them down!

And what's more, I was present at the conception of this book:

Zak Jane Kier

Last year at Smut in the City: Leeds, Zak Jane Keir gave us a writing exercise where we each generated the ideas for a story using random rolls of an ordinary dice/die (a d6, as we like to say in RPG circles). It was an extremely successful workshop, and she was begged by several of us to write a whole book.


And now she has - you can buy it on Amazon!

The premise of Dicewriting for Erotica and Erotic Romance is straightforward; simple story outlines are generated by the dicerolls, but it's entirely up to your fervid imagination as a writer what that story looks like. I'm always going to tend to fantasy/paranormal for example, but you might not want to touch that with a 10-foot pole...

See what I did there?

Your mileage of course may vary, but randomised elements have always been very effective story triggers for me - our writing group, The Deadliners, used them all the time - because I naturally tend to approach plots as jigsaw puzzles, and this is a creative puzzle-solving exercise. So I can guarantee Zak's fab little book is going to get a lot of use!

Now all I want is a hardcore geek version which will allow me to roll my d10s 😉

My library brings all the boys to the yard

I have finally overcome the Box Mountain! All the books are on the shelves in our new library...

Well, except the three stacked boxes - which are all photo albums, and to shelve them I need to fit in another bookcase, which means getting that stupidly long radiator removed. It's a long-term project, that.

Do you like my car-boot-sale-rug of naked Greeks? 😍

There's even shelf-space for my collection of holiday gods:

NEXT: getting all the LARP kit sorted...

Fortress of books

This is the main stack of books we've just moved into the new house. It's quite big.

There's about 40 boxes here and another 15 scattered elsewhere... and I have to get them onto these waiting shelves:

If you find my crushed body beneath a fallen stack, let them know it's the way I would have wanted to go!

(Well, if I can't die during sex. That's the ideal, obviously...)

2017 in the rearview mirror

This is my annual post where I look back at the cultural touchstones of the year.

Best Movie:

I watched 20 movies on the big screen in 2017 - a rather low number for me (and TBH we intend to see Jumanji this week, but somehow I suspect it won't be a major highpoint). In retrospect the five I enjoyed the most were (in order):

Hidden Figures

Dunkirk

The Ritual

Logan

The Last Jedi

Worst movie of the year? Hands-down it was Valerian and the city of a thousand planets, a SF wannabe-epic-that-just-looks-embarrassingly-dated that I believe I described on Facebook as "a gilded turd".

Book of the Year:

It was about time I got round to this:

And it did not disappoint. Fascinating and eye-opening in its detail, it is also (I believe) profound in its insights and supremely relevant to the world regime we find ourselves in now.

Best TV:

Two standouts this year: hard SF masterpiece The Expanse on Netflix:

And we started trekking through the whole of Breaking Bad on boxed set too. I'm loving it!

Best Music:





I belatedly discovered Muse. Don't laugh.

Quote of the Year:

May we all persist through 2018...

XXX
Janine

Cleverotic

If you are a reader or writer of smart, literate erotica or erotic romance (and if you aren't, what are you doing on this blog, HEY MUM?) ... you might like a look at a new site called Cleverotic / Cleverotica, which is trying to set up a readers' database of such books:

If you like a little protein with your escapist cotton candy; if you think smart is sexy and brawn needs a brain, sate your psyche and your senses by delving into the literary offerings showcased here. Cleverotic.com is for lovers of intelligent, steamy romance and scorching-hot, smart literature.

Owner Evelyn Bliss is asking for people to nominate books they've enjoyed reading, or have written, so do go contribute.

And of course if you are a fan of erotica that titillates the brain as well as the naughty bits - it's always a good idea to check out Erotica for the Big Brain's annual best-of lists.

Happy one-handed reading! 😁😈😍