Why?

:-)

DL King and Friends: public reading!

US editor D. L. King is over in Britain this month, and (assuming she didn't get swept out to sea at the  Blackpool reading last night) will be battling through rain and wind to head up a public reading in London next week:

28th November, 6.30 for 7pm start, 

at 

Sh! Women’s Erotic Emporium, 57 Hoxton Square, London, N1 6PB 

She's gathered some of the authors from her anthologies.  The lineup is:

Jacqueline Applebee (reading from Where the Girls Are)

Janine Ashbless (reading from Carnal Machines)
Jacqueline Brocker (reading from Under Her Thumb)
Ciara Finn (reading from The Sweetest Kiss)
K. D. Grace (reading from Voyeur Eyes Only)
Remittance Girl (reading from The Sweetest Kiss)
NJ Streitberger (reading from Seductress)

You can read an excerpt from my steampunk story The Servant Question (which is, unusually for me, both filthy and extremely silly humorous) here.

Everyone welcome (guys, bring a gal-pal) - full details here but please book places ahead because although the Hoxton shop is a LOT bigger than  the Portobello one, space is still limited :-)

There's a small charge but there will be CUPCAKES  and CHAMPAGNE too! And we will sign stuff and chat and look flustered the way writers do when caught out in public. All in the setting of London's most fabulously female-friendly erotic shop.

Buy Carnal Machines at Amazon US : Amazon UK

My Next Big Thing!

Time for a Revelation!

John Martin (1789-1854): The Great Day of His Wrath

Ahem. I'm so sorry. Can't resist the pun. And I am a bit over-excited :-)
Last week, reviewer Angie Dobson of Love, Romances and More poked me into taking part in a bloghop on the theme of "The Next Big Thing." She gave me some questions to answer, and I thought it an excellent opportunity to tell you about the contract I've just signed. I'm writing a novel all about angels, Nephilim, and war in Heaven!

(And steamy passion too, of course.)

What is the working title of your book?

The Book of the Watchers 1: Cover Him With Darkness


Where did the idea come from for the book?

I wrote a short story, Cover Him With Darkness (excerpt here), which was published in Red Velvet and Absinthe (edited by Mitzi Szereto) last year. This July Brenda Knight of Cleis Press got in touch with me, saying, “I wondered if you would be at all interested in the possibility of expanding a story … I have read it again and again…”

Cover Him With Darkness is a story full of unanswered questions: a young woman falls in love with a prisoner her family have guarded for thousands of years, hidden in a cave in the mountains of Eastern Europe. Is he a Greek titan? A Scandinavian god? A Biblical fallen angel? Is he good or evil? Why must he be kept enchained in darkness? What will happen to the world if he’s loosed?

Brenda asked me if I could carry on from the short and make it into a novel. I said, “Well, it depends who the prisoner is. If he’s one thing, his continuing story will make a novel. If he’s another – well, the repercussions of him being freed are so massive and so dreadful, that it’d be better as a trilogy.”

I wrote proposals for both. Brenda leapt at the idea of the trilogy. Which means that my hero – well, anti-hero, because I promise you he’s not going to be all sunshine and puppies after being tormented for thousands of years – is one of the fallen angels from Genesis.

“When man began to multiply on the face of the land and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that the daughters of man were attractive. And they took as their wives any they chose.  The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of man and they bore children to them. These were the mighty men who were of old, the men of renown.”  (Genesis 6:1-2,4)

What genre does your book fall under?

Dark romance … with lashings of religious conspiracy and a whole lot of heresy. Let's be clear: this is not one of my hardcore erotica books. It's going to be more akin (in heat level) to Heart of Flame, but darker in tone.

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

“Twilight meets The Da Vinci Code.”
(Oh eeeeeeeeeek. Frankly, that’s enough to make any writer feel faint.)


Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

It’s going to be published by Cleis Press. I’m delivering the manuscript by August 2013.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

You do the math … this is actually the first time I’ve been contracted (and paid) for a book I haven’t written yet! Yeah ... I'm scared. But incredibly excited too!

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

One of my heroes could be played by Tom Wlaschiha  (seen recently in Game of Thrones)
He’s the mortal guy fighting for my heroine’s soul.

Milja, my East European heroine, might be played by Olga Kurylenko (seen in Quantum of Solace)

As for my angelic/demonic anti-hero, it’d have to be someone capable of looking really wicked. Aidan Turner? Richard Armitage? (both in The Hobbit) Ian Somerhalder? (Vampire Diaries)

But I’m not sure yet. My sexy heroes are usually dark-haired. I’m seriously thinking of making this one a burning bloody redhead.


Who or What inspired you to write this story?

The original story was written for a standard anthology call. But it was just one of those tales that  seemed to write itself – it only took a couple of days, I was so inspired. I started with the mental image of a dangerous male prisoner being tended to by a very innocent young woman, and then just pursued the mythological possibilities from there.

“Bind Azazel hand and foot and cast him into the darkness. And lay upon him rough and jagged rocks, and cover him with darkness, that he may remain there forever.” (The Book of Enoch)

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

Fallen angels. Fallen Angels! How much meaner and sexier can you get? Also, by volume three . . .  I think we’ll actually be looking at the end of the world.
:-)

---

It's a bloghop, so now it's my turn to poke some of my favourite authors! I've sent them the same questions and they will be answering them next week.

Jennifer Denys - jennifer-denys.blogspot.co.uk/
Shanna Germain - http://shannagermain2.wordpress.com/blog/
Kay Jaybee -  http://kayjaybee.me.uk/
Kristina Lloyd - http://kristinalloyd.wordpress.com/

Eyecandy Monday - Angels

 
I've a particular reason for this week's Eyecandy theme. BIG news! All will be revealed on WEDNESDAY!

One guy ... there are guy-angel pics out there, but I tend to find them ... not to my taste.

All My Life

I blame Dr Mosh for this one being in my head all week.
DONE, DONE - AND I'M ONTO THE NEXT ONE

Or maybe it's just the state of my writing. I'm on a set of deadlines until August 2013. Of which, more later this week...

Still, it's better than the alternative!

P.S: Dave Grohl speaks:
"I'm very fond of giving oral sex to women. It's a pleasure-giving experience - giving someone something that they'll remember for the rest of their lives, and if you do it right they will."

What a guy :-)

The Dark Arts

TRIGGER WARNING: sex and death and Victorian misogyny

I often post about Victorian paintings, and I'm delighted every time I come across another example of sexuality, kinkiness or downright perversion creeping into the respectable world of the fine arts. This sneakiness is a source of delight and much head-scratching for me (Is it unconscious? Is it rank hypocrisy? Is it deliberate subversion? Is it pure capitalist opportunism?).

Ernest Normand (1859-1923): The Bitter Draught of Slavery

[click to expand pictures]

But while choosing another Orientalist picture to share last week, I was reminded that I have several examples on file of pictures that I've deliberately avoided posting in the past, because they actually step over the boundary of Kinkdom into areas that are, to my mind, genuinely disturbing. I'm not talking about the "slave market" subgenre of paintings like the one above, which is certainly predicated on what we would now recognise as BDSM leanings in the prospective viewer/purchaser.

I'm not even talking about mere depictions of dead bodies, as here:

George Frederic Watts (1817-1904): Found Drowned

(I think this would have been intended to provoke feelings of pity, and raise awareness of grim social realities, even though it looks romanticised to us. "Found Drowned" is about a very specific form of suicide. Self-harm, like all forms of human behaviour, conforms to societal templates, and at that time a young woman throwing herself into the Thames would almost certainly have done it because of sexual disgrace - she's fallen pregnant out of wedlock, and all viewers of the painting would understand that.)

But there are paintings, particularly by the Orientalists, that I keep tucked away in a file tastefully titled "Victorian Snuff."

Here's one.

Z Rozkazu: On the orders of the Padishah (1881)

 It looks at first like a rather beautiful reclining nude on an oriental divan. Take a closer look and you can see that the woman - a member of the padishah's harem, clearly - has been strangled with a red silk cord. In her death throes she's clawed at the cushions and knocked over an occasional table. This isn't social commentary: this is necrophilia.

And again:

Theodore Jacques Ralli (1852-1909): Ah! Jalouse Entre les Jalouses

The murderer this time is a woman. One harem resident has had a violent fight with her rival - there goes the occasional table again - and put her in her place for good. She now contemplates the scene, along with the viewer. 

And if you are feeling particularly sadistic:

Ferencz-Franz Eisenhut: Before the Punishment (1890)

Two concubines lie naked in the stocks, on a beautifully depicted carpet, awaiting punishment for some undefined (and probably arbitrary) transgression. What that punishment will entail is strongly implied by the guard behind them, busy oiling his sword, and the spread sheet beneath their heads. The titilation of this painting lies in the emphatic sexuality of the women, and their utter helplessness before the murderous whim of their master.

But don't think it's always women who end up dead:

Jean-Leon Gerome (1824-1904) : The Heads of the Rebel Beys at the Mosque of El-Hasanein, Cairo.

Admittedly, these male corpses aren't sexualised. That would be "deviant," after all ...

Is it just a tad ironic that respectable upper-class Westerners should choose to express their disapproval of "oriental cruelty" by hanging fabulously attractive pictures of it in their homes?

But hey, I'm a big fan of irony.

Paperback writer

And those are my author copies of The King's Viper, published 2011 as an e-book and now available as a paperback!

This means that all but one of my published books (ARE YOU LISTENING, HARPERCOLLINS?) are now out in Glorious Luxury Dead Tree Version. This makes me incredibly happy - I am very fond of dead tree products.

Yes, I know. I know that e-publishing is the future.  I know that it is the very-near-future-in-fact-face-it-the Right-Now of the erotica genre. "Shelves and print don't matter anymore," I was told last week by someone with their finger on the pulse.
I'm sorry ... but I can't help it. It just doesn't seem real until I can hold it in my hands.

Maybe I've watched too many archaeology programmes on TV and can't buy into a scenario unless there is physical evidence. Maybe somewhere at the back of my mind is a picture of future people picking over the ruins of our civilisation and finding the buried remains of the British Library (or the Library of Congress). I want the future alien people in their silver tutus and their slinky leotards to be able to count up the dusty volumes of my books and say "Ah - Janine Ashbless. She wrote..." and get the number right.

It's not much to ask ...
;-)

Eyecandy Monday

Life is a cabaret...

*Very Happy Mood!*

I went to my first ever burlesque show this weekend - staged as part of this national tour - and thoroughly enjoyed it. Burlesque is stripping, there's no two ways about it. But it's "artistic" stripping - with fancy costumes (some of which I'd LOVE to own), humourous commentary, fine singing acts .... and circus performance too. The biggest ovation of the night went to the hula-hoop act, which was breathtaking.

The other thing I liked was that the women preforming displayed a range of body-shapes which were, for want of a better way of putting it, "real." Curvy thighs, big bums, breasts of various sizes (all of them untouched by silicone). And all of them deployed sexily!  It was, from the viewpoint of female audience members who weren't necessarily there for purely lecherous purposes, cheering and revelatory and empowering. (The audience, by the way, was skewed toward the female.)

And tassel-dancing just makes me laugh :-)

No word of a lie

Probably the single most common error in erotic writing, judging by my experience of editing.
;-)

Talking dirty

It's said that most people cannot stand the sound of their own recorded voice. I am certainly no exception! In order to get me to record an audio snippet from Of High Renown, from the Thrones of Desire anthology, editor Mitzi Szereto had to defeat me in armed combat, tie me naked in the desert for a week (I bit the head off a passing vulture at one point), and finally bribe me with a night of passion with Jon Snow.

At that point I finally failed my Will Save and capitulated.

So here I am in all my horrendous audibility. But it's not just me, of course:

• ASHLEY LISTER reads from Here there be Dragons - a fabulously gritty tale in which sex is about power and betrayal as much as about lust.
• AURELIA T. EVANS reads from Eyekeeper - a twisty story of witch-burning and a brutal power struggle
  
• JANINE ASHBLESS reads from Of High Renown - a story of rape and redemption
• JO WU reads from Key to the Queen’s Elixir - a heartbreaker of a story about long-lost love
• MITZI SZERETO reads from Escape - a story you can't quite believe is going to have a happy ending
• NYLA NOX reads from The Widow’s Man - a bittersweet femdom tale about betrayal
• SACCHI GREEN reads from Flesh and Stone -  a squirmy-hot tale of frustrated desire
  
• ZANDER VYNE does the clever thing and gets someone else to read from The Last Sacrifice - a story of gods and monsters and high destiny.
  

All author readings

---

By the way, I probably haven't mentioned it here yet, but a big chunk of Piers Anthony's foreword is devoted (approvingly!) to my story as an example of how traditional male and female fantasy themes can be entwined and subverted. Which is rather cool!

Although I will say that Of High Renown is probably one of the most girly, "feminine" stories I have ever written. Goodness knows what came over me ... I think I was in the middle of some sort of hormone attack.


Buy Thrones of Desire at Amazon US : Amazon UK
Kindle US : Kindle UK

Remember - you don't need a Kindle to read kindle-format books! You can do it on a PC!

Heart of Flame out in paperback!

Georges Rochegrosse (1859-1938): La Schiava e il Leon

Ugh ... I was up until 5.30 a.m. It was a very important date, after all. The paperback release of Heart of Flame! Oh, and some foreign election.
:-)

To celebrate my book release and my immense relief, here's an excerpt from Heart of Flame. Which, please note, is Arabian Nights romantic adventure and not, strictly speaking, erotica ... but it has some very steamy scenes nonetheless.

And a lot of arguing. This is by no means the last, or the worst, row my hero and heroine have...

---

 It took several hours pursuing the tracks of the magical mount, but she caught up with him eventually. She saw the Lion Most Strong from a good way off, standing motionless in the middle of the broken landscape with its silver body catching the sunlight, and as she neared she saw that it stood with one heavy paw on the chest of a supine Rafiq, pinning him to the ground. His waterskin lay to hand. He had crooked an elbow over his face to shield it from the afternoon sun, and she was perversely annoyed that he wasn’t struggling, even though he’d been held captive for hours and must have given up long ago. She would have liked to have seen him struggle and rage.

When she was ready she approached on foot and ordered the Lion Most Strong to stand back. It released Rafiq, who let out a grunt of surprise. He struggled up onto his knees, blinking at her, his face crusted with sand. ‘Taqla,’ he groaned.

She stepped in as he lurched to his feet and punched him as hard as she could in the face. At the last moment he saw her fist and flinched away so her knuckles stuck him only a glancing blow, which was perhaps a good thing because she managed to skin her knuckles on his teeth and split his lip even so. He staggered a little. She clenched her stinging fist, shocked how much it had hurt her and blaming him for that too.

‘Bastard! Thief!’

‘Taqla—’ He lifted a hand in dismay to his bleeding lip.

‘You stole my Horse! You dumped me in the desert! You son of a whore!’ She was burning too hot with fury to judge her attacks; when she struck again at his face he grabbed her wrist and pulled her hard against him, seizing the other hand as it flailed and wrestling both wrists behind her to pin them at the small of her back. She was still too angry to be afraid. ‘How could you?’ she spat. ‘After everything?’

‘Taqla!’ he shouted as she twisted furiously in his arms; “Shut up! Stop it! Listen to me!’

‛I hope street dogs eat your corpse!

‛Stop!’

She stopped struggling to draw breath, snarling. He was very strong and held her easily, his face over hers.

‘Taqla, I’m sorry.’ His eyes burned. ‘Listen. Listen. I haven’t betrayed you. Believe me.’

‘You left me!’

‘I had to take the Horse. I am sorry, but I need it to find the house of the djinni. I had no choice. I would have returned it when I could.’
 
‛Tell me your ass is made of solid gold and you shit diamonds! Shall I believe that too?’

He shook his head, teeth bared. ‛Taqla—I left because I couldn’t bring you with me and see you hurt.’

‘Me—hurt? Haven’t I saved your life before now? Haven’t you needed me every step of this journey?’

‘Yes!’ He turned his face aside so he could spit blood into the sand, then caught her gaze again, his eyes hot with anguish. ‘Yes. I’ve needed you. But this is different. There’s so much chance of you getting killed-’

‘You think I’m afraid?’

‘No. Never. Taqla, listen to me: I couldn’t see you hurt for my sake. I couldn’t bear it.’

‘We had a bargain,’ she snapped. ‘We were in it together. You get what you want and I get what I want.’

He shook his head as if in pain, and when he spoke again it was under his breath. ‘I read the scroll.’

‘What?’

‘The spell in the Scroll of Simon.’

She felt like she’d been kicked in the stomach. ‘Oh,’ she said, while the import of his words sank in and the desert seemed to reel about her. It had never occurred to her that he would be able to read Greek. She was suddenly horribly conscious of the way he was holding her up tight against his hard body. ‘No,’ she whispered, trying to shrink away from him. She couldn’t move an inch.

John Singer Sargent 1856-1925

‘How could I let myself hurt she who loves me the most?’

‛I ...’

‛Look, I saw you drowned in the swamps of Basra. I couldn’t do that to you again—not now. I couldn’t let you risk your life out of love for me.’ His voice was soft, all shouting done.

‘No, you’ve misunderstood…’

‘Taqla, why are you afraid of admitting it?’

‘I … It isn’t like that…’

‘Isn’t it? What is it like then?’
 
She groaned. His lips curved, self-deprecating, as if knowing he was inviting another blow.
 
‘I think I know exactly how it feels. Taqla, is it not obvious that I’ve been falling in love with you this whole time?’
 
She went still, her eyes widening.
 
He smiled lopsidedly because of his split lip. ‘I’ve been like a man sliding down a sand dune, trying to keep on my feet and all the time falling. Can’t you see that?’
 
She tried to speak but for once had no words. Not even when he bent his head and kissed her through her veil. She felt the warm softness of his lips on hers and the ghost of his breath through the silk. Her heart slammed painfully in her chest, sending the blood roaring through her head.
 
Quietly, while his lips still held hers, he let go of her wrists. One hand stayed to hold her close to him, but the other rose to touch her face through the folds of her headscarf. Then he drew back a little so he could look into her eyes. She could read his intent. She knew what he was going to do and the voices of warning were roaring in the back of her mind, but still she didn’t resist when he gently drew down the fold of her veil and bared her face.

---

Buy e-book at Samhain : Buy paperback at Samhain
Amazon US paperback  :   Amazon US kindle  :  Amazon UK Kindle

Eyecandy Monday

It's 5th November, which is Bonfire Night here in the UK. So this Eyecandy is brought to you in the interests of Health and Safety: play safe folks! Don't mess about with the fireworks! Keep a firefighter handy for emergency conflagrations!

Personally I can't wait until it's all over for another year, and the dog is no longer so scared to go outside that he pisses in the kitchen . . .
:-(

Magna!

Having small relatives over to visit does have one advantage: you get to take them to see cool stuff . . . like fire tornados.

I love November

Wooohooo - it's November!
No, I'm not growing a moustache. I'm the Guest Author of the month at the Erotica Readers and Writers Association, which is a huge honour. It also means that for a whole month three of my stories are up there in their unwholesome entirety for you to read.

And I picked three of my personal favourites, which means you'll find some very edgy and dirty themes there!

• Sun Seeking - Ness has dumped her boyfriend and is on holiday alone in the Greek Islands; she gets picked up by a mysterious woman who wants to show her ... some of the sights
• Scorched - Emerald is cheating on her boyfriend with their flatmate: a story of betrayal and retribution.
• The Red Thread - Ari is ... well, let's just say that this is my ultimate something-scary-in-the palace-cellar story!

Enjoy!