Showing posts with label Melusine. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Melusine. Show all posts

Friday, 13 October 2017

Big reveal - and a new cover

cover by JH

I'm going for it. I'm going to do the self-publishing thing!

I've had THREE publishers kick the bucket on me this year and I'm fed up. So I'm going to take my reverted works and publish them directly, starting with The King's Viper above, so that they are easily available to readers at low low prices.

I know what you're all thinking - "Janine, that's not a proper genre cover!" Well, I don't care. I never liked romance covers much, and I don't want to get lost in the crowd, and it's not as if I've ever made huge sales in Romance anyway. So I'm going to build myself a brand. Blue covers for Romance, red covers for Erotica.

If all goes well with this first one my plans - after some very careful checking of my contracts - are:

Romance:
The King's Viper (ex-Ellora's Cave, Game of Thrones stylee political fantasy)
Heart of Flame (ex-Samhain, Arabian Nights fantasy)
Bound in Skin (ex-Cat Scratch Books, Victorian werewolf novella)
The Grief of the Bond-Maid (ex-Storm Moon Press, Viking magic novella)

Erotica:
In Appreciation of Their Cox (ex-Ellora's Cave rowing short)
Melusine (ex-Sweetmeats Press, fantasy short)
A Wicked Muse (collection of short story reprints, mostly from Cleis)

Horror:
That Ought to Crawl (short stories)
The Collected Gillian Troth Stories (2 vols, paranormal satire)

That should keep me busy for some time! We'll see how it goes...

"What about Named and Shamed?" you might ask. "What about the Fierce Enchantments collection? Haven't they reverted too?"

Heheheh - I've slightly different plans on that front. Watch this space!
😈

Friday, 18 July 2014

Melusine - the spoilers



I posted an excerpt from my latest published story Melusine on Monday ... but I will readily admit it's really not clear that this is definitely a paranormal story. In fact the only clue is the name in the title, which you may or may not know, gentle reader.

The tale is medieval, and European rather than British.


I was only only vaguely aware of the Melusine fairy tale myself, until my flying day-trip to Luxembourg in 2012 - because there she is counted as a (pseudo)historical figure, the wife of the reputably historic Count Siegfried (922-998 CE), and is credited with magically creating the Bock castle overnight.

Still standing, in portions


It is said that Melusine can still sometimes be spotted swimming about in the river, in either human or serpent form.



I'd been waiting to write about her ever since that day. And when the call popped up to write a long short story for Sweetmeats Press with the theme "drenched" ... well, that was my chance!


The story in its simplest form is that a nobleman marries a beautiful fairy maiden, but she agrees only on condition that she gets to spend one day of the week on her own. He must not intrude on her solitude that day, nor must he ever ask her what she's up to.


Of course, many years (and several children) later, curiosity gets the better of him and everything goes to pieces. It always does in stories - see Cupid and Psyche, or Bluebeard, for example.


It was an chance for me to write a rare female-dominant story and, even rarer, one about a married couple with a full - and filthy - relationship.



















 Melusine is available NOW as an e-book

Amazon US : Amazon UK

It is part of the collection Drenched from Sweetmeats Press, also available in e-form and soon to be released in paperback:
Amazon UK


Monday, 14 July 2014

Blue Monday

Every Monday I post a rude bit from one of my stories, for your entertainment.


Today's snippet is from my (longish) short story Melusine. It's a supernatural fem-dominant tale, based on a medieval legend, with a modern setting. 
In this scene, uptight accountant Martin is sitting on a sun-lounger by a pool, trying to pretend he isn't secretly gawking at Lucy as she swims.

 


The open pages on his lap were a blur. He’d never read another word again, he knew. There was nothing in his head but this Lucy’s divine body; half-seen, half-mystery. Wholly bewitching. Then he heard her light footfalls and saw a blur of tan skin and unnatural green, and he knew she was standing in front of him.

Martin raised his gaze and, with immense effort, looked her in the face.

No sunglasses now. Her eyes weren’t blue, as he’d imagined, but olive green, and her long dark lashes were starred by pool-water. Her face … she was just as beautiful as he’d hoped, but he was also relieved to see that she wasn’t as young as her body had suggested; her face had the planed look of a woman well out of her first youth, all angles and cheekbones. Except for her lips, which were full and curved in an asymmetric half-smile.

Martin could feel his heart hammering.

She was looking at him. Not just his face, either. She looked him up and down, as if assessing him, and he felt heat charge up to his face and down to his crotch. Did she see a respectable trim man in casual clothes—or a furtive, middle-aged lecher? He knew he couldn’t possibly leave now, because if he stood up she’d see he had a hard-on. Quite possibly that was obvious already, but he didn’t dare check. Her coolly judging expression made him squirm inside with shame, but it did nothing to quell his surging erection.

Without a word, she lifted her towel and ran it across her wet hair. Tarnished darker by water, a few strands were already turning back to gold—but that wasn’t what registered. What mattered to Martin was that in attending to her body right there in front of him, she had somehow granted permission to look. So he did.

Dear God.

Was she even human, to look like that? He was a Londoner; he’d married an English girl, he was used to English bodies—pale, fleshy, buttery-soft, sweetly imperfect, and always slightly self-doubting. Not this golden-tan litheness, this confidence, this taut athletic ideal. Lucy had the body of an Olympic gymnast and the assurance of a supermodel. The inner slopes of her delectable breasts—not huge, not small, just utterly perfect, like some impossible lycra-wrapped treasure—were jewelled with water droplets that shivered and ran and begged to be touched, and her waist was so slender that his hands ached to circle it. Those long long legs rose to a tilted pelvic girdle, one hip cocked, the twin ties of her bikini bottom dripping diamonds and tantalisingly vulnerable.
   
He wanted to lick those water drops. He wanted to touch those breasts and feel their softness and their weight. He wanted to put his hands on those hips and feel the movement of her frame, the way they rolled, as if mere engineering would make her real somehow, make her a thing of earthly possibility. Make her comprehensible to his English sensibilities.

His cheeks burned as he met her gaze again.

Coming to some private decision, this vision flung her towel down across his lap. “Oil me,” she commanded.

“Huh?”

“Oil me.” Her voice had a husky edge, a slight European accent. She tossed the bottle of sun-oil from her other hand onto the towel and Martin gasped as it smacked right on his burgeoning cock. But the blow did not register as pain; he was beyond that now. He grabbed at the bottle automatically. He was not, however, swift enough to react before Lucy moved in on him, swinging round to present her back and ass and sinking down to straddle his thighs.

He had just enough self control not to swear with shock and delight. He couldn’t stop the noise, half earthy grunt and half groan, that escaped his throat, though. And he heard her laugh softly.

Jesus. This can’t be real.

She smelled of chlorinated pool water. Most of it was going on the towel, but she was dripping on his papers and his trousers and his shirt. He found he didn’t care. He didn’t care about anything except the fact that she was sitting astride him, her spread bum-cheeks nestling on his crotch, her strong, slender back presented for his touch. He could see the drops running down the declivity of her spine, right there in front of him, an inch from his raised hands.
   
This is crazy. Holy hell Martin, don’t mess this up! He couldn’t imagine what had he done to deserve this, in this life or any other, but he had no intention of rejecting this gift from the gods. Carpe diem, you idiot!
    
So he flipped the lid of the bottle and squirted sun-oil over her shoulders, though when it came to laying a hand on her he actually held his breath, as if she were some dream bubble who might burst and vanish. But her back was solid and smooth beneath his palm, and not even cool from the pool but warm with her body heat.
   
He began to stroke the oil across her skin.

“Mmm,” she purred, arching her spine.

“Okay?” he stammered.

“Oh yes. Nice.” She wriggled under his grasp, thrusting her bum out a little more, with consequences beneath the draped towel that Martin did not dare think about. His brain had locked down to a tiny circle of focus: her body, alive and lithe under his hands, and the slick slide of skin on skin. The concave of her waist, the flare of her hips, the ripe peachy curves of her ass, unconcealed by the string of her thong … Not that he dared touch those. He caressed the oil into her back for as long as he could, dizzy with the scent of sun-lotion.

“Shoulders?” he asked. His mouth was so dry the word sounded woolly.

“Shoulders. Legs. Everywhere,” she answered, grabbing the bottle from where it rested at his hip and squirting a line of oil down her thigh.

“Uh. Right.” He felt drunk, and clumsy, and unreal. He smoothed his hands down her thighs as far as he could reach toward her knees, leaning into her. Down, and then back up again, smooth as cream—and as he reached her hips she lifted herself a little, raising the perfect heart-shape of her bottom clear of the towel to allow those hands easy access below. “Oh God,” he breathed, cupping her butt like he was holding the world in either hand.

“Don’t talk.”

He nodded frantically, though she couldn’t see him. He would have done anything she demanded, so long as he could go on touching that incredible body. Legs, bum, hips—and then, under her guiding hands, round to the front, up from her hips to her waist, over her stomach, back down to her inner thighs, up again, down again. He could hear her sighs of pleasure, feel the heave of her ribs and the press of her groin upon his. His cock was like an iron bar now beneath the damp towel, his hands were thrumming with warmth, and his head was full of the scent of her—chlorine and sun-screen, like the incense of some pagan goddess, making his heart pound. Breathing deeply, he shut his eyes, pouring all his concentration into his hands and his crotch. She writhed back against him, squirming her hips deliciously.

“Up.”

“What?” he whispered, his lips in her wet and tangled hair.

“Up here.” Pulling down the stretchy fabric of one bra cup, she directed a squirt of oil over her left breast.

Oh God what if someone comes up and sees? flitted through his accountant’s mind, half a breath before Martin let out a guttural noise entirely beyond his control and ran his hand in, taking possession of the orb, squeezing and smoothing and stroking. Lucy whimpered, but it was no protest. Her nipple, refusing to be soothed by his caresses, rose up hard and stiff beneath his warm palm, its halo puckered. He didn’t wait for an invitation to find its twin; he had both breasts now, both breasts, and this incredible golden nymph was gasping and writhing in his lap, and it was like he had won the lottery and gone to heaven and been crowned king of the universe. And he still couldn’t believe it.

“Oh yes.” Lucy reached down to the arms of the sun-lounger, grabbed and jerked. That was when the cushioned back collapsed away behind him; a shove of her ass in his midriff sent him off-balance. Instantly his deference reasserted itself; the panicked thought that he’d done something wrong, that he was going to have to pay for his trespass. He felt those fabulous tits slip from his grasp as she rose up, wriggling into a new position and pressing him down. Somehow he found himself flat on his back, with her bum above him dark against the brilliant sky.
   
Her ass, cheeks parted and thighs bracketing his head, her sex covered only by the narrowest strip of wet day-glo green.
   
If anyone walks by now -
   
She put her head down onto the towel and rubbed her face over the mound of his erect cock.




Melusine is available NOW as an e-book

Amazon US : Amazon UK

It is part of the collection Drenched from Sweetmeats Press, also available in e-form and soon to be released in paperback:
Amazon UK

Wednesday, 2 July 2014

Line up, line up!

Woot woot!
Wanna see a BRAND NEW cover?


Drenched: an anthology of wet 'n' wild erotica is a collection of long short stories with a water theme, out from Sweetmeats Press very soon. Here's the table of contents:

Melusine by Janine Ashbless
Every Friday for ten years, Martin’s beautiful wife has left their home to spend the night somewhere else. Now, Martin can bear it no longer, and he is out to uncover the mind-blowing truth…no matter what the cost.
The Pool Party by Primula Bond
In the hills of southern France, an empty villa and luxurious pool provide two friends with unforeseen temptations...
Naiad by Justine Elyot
Told in the style of a modern myth, Naiad is a wet and wild tale of an urban nymph returning to her element.
Hard to Swallow by Lisette Ashton
A radio station's ambitious receptionist is enthralled by the voluptuous bottles of mineral water carried by all the DJs. There’s nothing like cool water for a dry throat, but it takes more than water to quench a burning lust!
A Divine Solution by Vina Green
In the midst of the worst drought in decades, a young wife bursts the dam of her desire and, in doing so, discovers that she might just save her whole community...

I'm very excited about this - not just because I adore Sweetmeats' books and production values, but because it looks like the stories will work very well together! Justine and I were clearly sharing psychic wavelengths, and part of my story features a French villa with a pool too ;-)

Drenched is out this month, on the 15th:
Amazon US : Amazon UK



And here's the full line-up for The Sexy Librarian's Big Book of Erotica, too:
 
  • Bix Warden - Foreword 
  • Rachel Kramer Bussel - Book Swap
  • Lillian Douglas - Sensate Silicone
  • Janine Ashbless - Three Legs In The Evening
  • Michael Lewis - The Contest
  • Chase Morgan - The Secret Game
  • Tamsin Flowers - POW! It's Shibari Girl!
  • Kristina Wright - Vivi and the Magic Man
  • Heidi Champa - Second Look
  • Kay Jaybee - Taped
  • D.L. King - Lauren's Journey
  • Emily Bingham - A Perverted Fairy Tale
  • Kate Maxwell - The Skilled Technician
  • Allen Dusk - Shades of Desire
  • Salome Wilde - Moonshine Ballad
  • KD Grace - Cherries In Season
  • Olivia Archer - The Perfect Massage
  • Lynn Townsend - Full Frontal Neighbor
  • Katya Harris - The Whole of Me
  • Kelly Maher - Notes On A Scandal
  • Sommer Marsden - Appetizer
  • Angela Caperton - Mikhael
  • Rose Caraway - The Mating Chamber
It's out on August 12th.
Look out for news of blog tours and podcasts :-) 2014 is shaping up to be a busy year for me ... oh boy!

Amazon US : Amazon UK

Monday, 31 March 2014

Eyecandy Monday


Yesterday evening (well, 3a.m to be precise) I subbed Sons of Summer.
Today's job is to revise, edit and sub a contracted short story on the theme of Drenched. Hence the eyecandy :-)
No pressure then.

Wednesday, 12 February 2014

COVER REVEAL! - Fierce Enchantments


This is it! The official cover for the third published collection of my erotic short stories, due out in Autumn from Sweetmeats Press!

I love it - dark, sexy, fantastical, and uncompromising. Perfect for the contents!

Here's Sweetmeats' "coming in 2014" catalogue :-) I keep going back and smiling at this page. I've got a story included in their forthcoming Drenched anthology too, by the way.

As to the title ... I wanted, of course, a reference to my previous two collections, Cruel Enchantment and Dark Enchantment. It's my signature dish, as it were. We went temporarily up to These Fierce Enchantments because we thought it'd be less confusing for prospective purchasers - but Sweetmeats' new American distributor (we have a US distributor! Yay!) asked for it to go back down to the simpler version. Publishing is a complex business, with many people having their say... and now you know.
:-)

I am so excited about this!

Wednesday, 4 December 2013

Wassup?


Okay, a round-up of what's going on in World of Ashbless:

  • I have seen the final cover art (give or take) for Cover Him With Darkness. And it's okay! (If you knew how hard I fought for "okay" and how goddamn picky and awkward I am, you'd be able to tell how pleased I sound typing this). I will reveal it ... next week!
  • Regarding publication dates for that novel, I haven't been given anything official, but I have to get my marketing questionaire filled in and back to Cleis by March 1st, so I'm guessing April or May 2014.
  • I have been asked to write a horror story (under my other name) for an anthology to be launched at FantasyCon UK next year. Yay! Time to flex the old Grim & Grisly muscles again...
  •  Today I signed a contract for a short story to be written for a Sweetmeats anthology on the theme of "Drenched" - out next year. My story will be called Melusine.
  • An extract from Jump or Fall, one of my fave kinky stories, is to be used (subject to publisher approval) in a non-fiction BDSM project of Shanna Germain's. I think it's still a bit sekrit so I will say no more for the moment...
  • Assuming a break before another angel novel, my next project will be writing a contemporary shortish D/s which will go to Ellora's Cave. I've had this story outline for years and I want to do it... plus I have contractual obligations to fulfil ...