In May, I finally had the opportunity to attend Book Expo America, the publishing industry’s premier trade event. To say was Booklover’s Heaven is an understatement. It filled the huge Javitts Convention Center. And heaven isn’t for the idle. BEA was three days of constant walking, scouting out books and publishers, and schmoozing with industry people whose interests were similar to my own. People travel from all over the world to attend Book Expo America, and the event attracts not only writers and industry vendors but librarians and educators too. I never saw such an amazing array of people whose livelihoods revolved around books. As busy as BEA was, it has its benefits, the best of which is FREE BOOKS!

The TBR pile — books from BEA.

Which brings me to the photo you see here. It shows the books I accumulated at BEA that are related to erotic publishing. Some are hot erotic romances, some are GLBT memoir, fiction and nonfiction, and a couple of them are how to’s. They represent about a third of the books I brought home for BEA, but they constitute what’s going to be an entertaining summer-long project for me here at Pursed Lips. I’m going to blog about these books either individually or collectively by publisher as a way of illustrating just how vibrant the erotic word is today. I wasn’t surprised to see this much libris eroticis at BEA, but I was surprised by how open and enthusiastic people were about my particular authorial calling.

In fact, when I handed out my business card almost everyone wanted the card that featured Pursed Lips naughty illustration on it! And everyone was quite interested in meeting a blogger who focused on erotic literature.

So keep an eye out for upcoming entries about my discoveries. They won’t be the only thing I’ll blog about this summer but they will represent a fun summertime project.

First up? Gloria Vanderbilt’s much-anticipated novella, Obsession.

Enough with the absent landlord. I have returned to tell you that I put together a book trailer for my newest novel, Training Desire! Thanks to better software, it has special effects and a voice over! And thanks to that same better software, I’m still in the grips of its learning curve so you audio/visual tech types will easily spot that I need to learn more about, well, audio/visual fine tuning.

I’m also pleased to share word with you that erotic author Louisa Burton, known for her Hidden Grotto books, kindly hailed my book for evoking

“a world of sacred sensuality and dark intrigue that’s sure to appeal to those with a taste for erotic fantasy.”

Louisa’s books are wonderful reads and I’m grateful to earn her nod.

training-desire
Enjoy the video and, if it leaves you so inclined, check out Training Desire!

And nobody came? Thanks to current conservative agitation, we’re likely going to see just that: A renewed culture war that just doesn’t happen.

First conservative forces want to stage teabag protests around the country come April 15th but had no idea what they had stepped into when they started talking about “teabagging.” As Jon Stewart so aptly pointed out a couple of weeks ago. (You can stop watching after “perversion literate; it goes tangential at that point.)

Then Andy Cobb points the obvious. Because this is what we’ll all be thinking of when you teabag on tax day:

I mean, really: How can you present a serious protest when you aren’t even aware of that you’ve set yourself up for mockery? Teabagging isn’t just some esoteric sexual practice that John Waters threw into a movie. It was, but it hasn’t been for some time. Aren’t you people even aware that teabagging has its own wiki entry and has far more to do with online computer gaming than it does queer practices? Seriously, guys have been teabagging one another since Halo 1. Hell, there’s plenty of video examples on You Tube.

If that wasn’t bad enough, this week Rachel Maddow caught another mock-worthy conservative initative in the making:

Seriously. How can you people expect to be taken seriously about public policy? At the very least, hire someone who can tell you when you’re about to blow it. Take that pun as you will.

Because you can’t conduct a culture war when you’re culturally clueless. At least we’re finally seeing how ludicrously out-of-touch you are.

I’m pleased to announce that Ravenous Romance has released my newest novel, Training Desires. It’s a fantasy-based erotic romance that, over four books, will take us from rangthiath Mira’s innocent pleasure-giving beginnings and plunge us into an internecine conflict that will rip her from all she knows.

Think Jacqueline Cary (Kushiel’s Dart) meets George R.R. Martin (Song of Fire and Ice series) meets Anne Rice (Beauty series).

Mira’s world is an omni-sexual landscape where pleasure is ordained by the great goddess, Rangtha, and the people of her kith house cater to her worshipers in every way imaginable — without prejudice towards orientation or taste.

Which means there’s plenty of het, m/m, and f/f couplings. And that’s before Mira loses here virginity. Imagine the possibilities in future editions! Wonders await us all.

Born into the pleasure world of Kith House, Rangtha in the fading city of Nameda, Mira is poised to enter the ranks of the revered pleasure-giver. Her only goal is to serve her goddess, Rangtha, by giving her virginity to a worthy recipient.

Yet she’s an innocent, unaware of the strife that surrounds her. Rival mentors pit themselves one against the other. Rapacious citizens exuberantly bid for hers virginity. And shadowy factions — for good or for ill — see Mira as the symbol of the future.

Rarely has one so innocent had to stand up to dangers so blatant. But rarely has Nameda seen the likes of Mira, a celebrant determined to fulfill her goal according to the ways of her goddess.

Training Desires. Spinning Mira’s world into existence has been one of the most exhuberant writing experiences of my life and I hope you’ll help me make Training Desires a Ravenous Romance bestseller so I can continue to sping her world, and other equally exciting realms, into existence.

Because we all deserve pleasure.

At long last, I’ve brought Pursed Lips into the 21st century via WordPress. I’ve tried to preserve as much of the site’s overall look while turning clutter into consolidated clean lines and I still have some odds-and-ends wonkiness to clean-up, but the site is done enough to launch and I hope you find the results pleasing.

When I started blogging almost a decade ago (!), weblogs were primitive things. Believe it or not, the tools that allowed a comment section didn’t yet exist (well, outside of the alpha versions of Things To Come). Neither did blogrolls. Really, we just listed our links and wrote pointed little insights about them. If other bloggers wanted to comment on something you said, they linked to you and lent their two cents via their own blogs.

God, what cavemen we were back then!

The cavemen is me is going to be a tad agitated that I have to trust WordPress’s architectural over my own primitive (and often limited) coding instincts, but I’m delighted to have so many tools on hand. Special thanks to my good friend, Roger, who dragged me by the hair into modern times.

If you’re looking at PL via a blog feed, please come visit directly. And whether you’re a long time reader or have just discovered me, comment! Honestly, having caught the twitblog bug this last year, I can’t believe what a hermit I’ve been through the years. Maybe I’ll turn into a social butterfly now!

Regardless, I welcome your participation and camaraderie.

While I buried myself in finishing Desire’s Pursuit - now renamed Training Desire (w00t!) for Ravenous Romance, one of my self-imposed reading assignments was delving into Daniel Bergner’s The Other Side of Desire. The book’s garnered a lot of media attention, from the NY Times to Salon and NPR. Bergner even blogged over at Powells Books. Always game for an examination of sexual desire, I jumped on the book.

From the Times description of Bergner, I half expected the book to be something of an Average Joe’s look at sex, but what I got was sound reportage instead. Bergner profiled four different paraphilias — foot fetishism, female sadism, pedophilia, and amputee attraction, delving into each and their psychology with a fair amount of courage and curiosity.

Yet I came away with mixed feelings and a good deal of respect for what Bergner accomplished in Other Side. I found myself torn over the foot fetishist’s dilemma in his book. Here, a man was chose chemical castration to end his tormented arousal for feet, a fetish so strong that the mere mention of the word foot made the fellow hard. Regardless of context. My sex-positive side ached to see the guy cognitively talk himself into self-acceptance, but his shame was so strong and his arousal so inconvenient that he chose otherwise.

When Bergner moved on to female sadism, my first reaction was “The Baroness? Not again!” She’s a personage that pops up time and again in books when the author wants to explore sadism. Plus, she reminds me of actress Molly Shannon. A lot.

But I quickly saw what Bergner was doing: He was focusing on the rarest of creatures in the BDSM realm of things, the female sadist. And The Baroness is apologetically that.

To my surprise, Begner’s exploration at The Baroness’ side gave me a few unexpected finds. First, and perhaps most thought-provoking, when he quoted psychological schools of thought, he fell back on 19th-century KrafFt-Ebing and Hirschfeld, which stopped me in my tracks. You mean there isn’t anything more current? Really.

But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. It might mean that the sexual expression of recreational BDSM is so acceptable to the psychiatric profession that it isn’t worth exploring. That maybe it no longer rises to the level of paraphilia. If so, I find that refreshing.

Nonetheless, I suspect The Baroness will come across to the uninitiated as unduly extreme and S/M as the frightening whips-and-chains of old. Her tales of extreme play — especially the roasting of a human pig-on-a-spit — will cloud the minds of the uninitiated. They won’t see her sober compassion for the street outsiders of her neighborhood, her capacity for soulful lust and love.

Be forewarned: The Baroness is not for beginners.

Bergner really challenges his readers when he explores the nature of pedophilia. When we hear the word, we don’t think fetish, we think crime. Bergner himself struggles with the subject, walking a tightrope between objective reporting and the knee jerk of his own parental protectiveness. However, he uncovers some fascinating findings in the process. Unlike the BDSM section where the psychiatric literature is old and dated, much of the literature about pedophilia is current and ground-breaking, suggesting that the mystery of pedophilia could be unraveled by continued hard work. Some findings suggest the disturbing possibility that pedophilia, for repeat offenders, might be an inborn trait, but it’s clear that sex crimes aren’t a one-size-fits-all. For every hardcore, inborn pedophilia, God only knows how many are one-timers acting on impulse after having lost all sense of boundaries. All deserve prosecution. But we must at least consider that what leads a person down this path is a varied as any other sexual motivation.

Is pedophilia an uncomfortable topic to explore? Without a doubt. Is it so distasteful that it compels us to remain ignorant? I think not. Let’s be more courageous than that.

Bergner waxes most compelling when he examines amputeeism. At face value, an amputee attraction appears extreme, like a fetish twisted into the strangest of perversions. For the reader, it’s like a car-wreck — you can’t help but watch. However, Bergner pushes beyond the rubber-necking to show us that the oddest of fetishes isn’t necessarily superficial. Out of tragedy, a woman amputee finds identity and acceptance when she poses for fetishists. And when she meets a photographer who has longed loved amputees, couplehood forms. Out of the depth of human existence, mutual fulfillment arose and a happy ending was had.

Which left me to ask myself, “Who am I to judge?”

Perhaps that’s the best message of Bergner’s book. Sexual attraction is a complex and varied beast, and perhaps we should be less quick to slap an quick-and-easy label on every little variation. Yes, let’s keep a strong sense of criminal victimization for such acts as pedophilia. But let’s not throw out the baby with the bath water. Let’s be a touch more discerning and knowledgeable.

The Other Side of Desire is a good place to start.

I’m working on a long assessment of Daniel Bergner’s The Other Side of Desire for Pursed Lips, but int the meantime:

I’m thrilled to announce that Ravenous Romance chose to feature my novel, Blind Seduction, as its Book of the Day. It’s splashed across the website’s front page and I hope you’ll check it out!

About Blind Seduction:

Leslie, a happily married suburban wife, is expecting a quiet weekend in Maine when her husband Phillip whisks her away for their 10th anniversary getaway. But the moment he slips a blindfold over her eyes and undoes her blouse—as soon as she gets in the car—she realizes that a quaint B&B and a stroll on the boardwalk weren’t quite what he had in mind.

It turns out her trusted husband is more interested in B&D—bondage and discipline—and Leslie is shocked when he escorts her to an erotic retreat where no fetish is off-limits. At first, she willingly plays the part of his sex slave—handcuffs and a chastity belt certainly spice things up, after all. But as Phillip becomes more and more aggressive in his demands, could he push Leslie too far, too fast?

As the fun and games at the hotel start to turn scary, find out what happens when an ordinary couple tests the boundaries of their fantasies—and their devotion—on a weekend they’ll never forget.

Hope that whets your appetite for a good read! And I’ll return with that review before the weekend’s out. Promise.

As a card-carrying Borders aficionado (credit card, that is), I have the pleasure of letting those $5.00 Borders bucks coupons accumulate every month. Recently, I grabbed a pile of them, went to my local store, and bought Susie Bright’s new anthology, X: The Erotic Treasury. It was pricey at $35.00 dollars, but it’s not your average erotic anthology. It’s something more. It’s high-end.

High-end erotica. Sounds like “high-priced callgil.” In a way, it is.

It’s beautifully packaged book. First, it’s hardcover, which is pretty well unheard of for erotic fiction. Its boards have an onlay, a repeating floral pattern of black against a minutely speckled scarlet, and its endsheets carry the same pattern, white on black. Most exquisitely, it’s slipcased. Yes, slipcased. In 1/8th-inch boards that not only repeat the same floral pattern (but in scarlet on black), but with a large die-cut into its side.

The only thing missing in this baby is a colophon.

Susie’s book left me with a damn good case of book lust, and I’d like to see more high-end work like it. But that’s a tall wish — the publishing industry has been hit badly by the economic slide. Still, makes me think about my early years of book collecting when, as a recent college graduate, I was more likely to spend my money on a Donald Grant or a later-edition Arkham House title than a skirt or blouse for work.

I think about how fans of science fiction, fantasy, and horror fiction have a long history of small presses producing beautiful, limited edition books* and how they’ve supported them with their hard-earned dollars. If only erotica’s fan were like that, I’ve often wished. Of course, I know that’s unfair to those of you who love erotic fiction. We’ve never had an infrastructure like those genres — no conventions, no fanzines, not even a lasting history of support from the Big Houses of Publishing. It’s impossible to have a high end without infrastructure support.

But I’d love to see erotic fiction get its day in the sun, a day bright enough to support everything from the high end to common mass market paperback. (And e-book!) I’d love to have a shelf of attractive, finely-produced books of erotic fiction in my library.

I hope Susie’s book is just the start of it.

X: The Erotic Treasury is not a limited edition work.

As the snow flies, I’m celebrating the recent release of my new Ravenous Romance novel, Blind Seduction, and my gay romance tale, 10 Lords A Leaping. It’s a wonderful way to see out the year, especially as the snow flies here in New England.

It’s deeply rewarding to see ideas imagined and put to prose see publication, and I’m happy to be in the new media mix that’s the e-book world. (This, despite a home filled with printed books and the collector’s habits that go with it.)

For quite some time, I felt like my novels would never see the light of day. I couldn’t find a print publisher to save my life that was interested in any romantic erotic that stepped beyond light bondage and role-playing and into authentic BDSM storytelling. (This, despite the 20-plus year popularity of Anne Rice’s Beauty books.) But Carnal Desire Publishing and, later, Ravenous Romance, changed all that for me, for which I’m deeply grateful.

I’m also grateful to Lori Perkins at RR’s blog where she acknowledged me as a “prominent short story and e-book author who really knows the BDSM territory. In this novel, she’s written an amazingly romantic tale of a couple’s visit to an S&M retreat as an anniversary present.”

To top it all off, Ravenous Romance has bought my four-book fantasy series that follows a devotee to a goddess of sexual pleasure as she journeys from initiate to captive to outcast, only to return to avenge her goddess against a usurper. Lori calls it a cross between “Jacqueline Carey’s Kushiel series and Anne Rice’s Beauty books.” I’d add “with a dash of George R. R. Martin” for those of you who like multiple characters rotating through each chapter. Regardless, it’ll be exciting to see my Kith series into publication.

Before this entry threatens to turn this blog into a gratitude journal, let me wish you all a Happy and Prosperous New Year. And you can guess what my one resolution will be — BLOG MORE!

I didn’t plan a month-long absence but it evolved into a necessity, thanks to much writing and many family obligations. Sometimes, there’s only so much of me to go around!

But I’m happy to report that Ravenous Romance launched today, bringing its cache of provocative erotic romance to avid readers everywhere. You’ll find a handful of initial novels and short stories there in ebook and audio formats — with more to coming daily mid-month.

My first novel with Ravenous Romance, Blind Seduction, will drop December 20th. And I couldn’t be happier. The editors I’ve worked with appreciate solid, exciting story-telling, dedicate the resources to copy editing necessary to make a strong book exceptional, and are remarkably, enthusiastically open to most any erotic variation you can think of.

I’ve also contributed to what will be a Twelve Days of Christmas selection of short stories, scheduled to debut during the holiday season. Ambitious me, but I ran with Ten Lords A’Leaping, making it a hot, M/M tale of guys getting it on. Yum.

And I’ve almost completed my second novel for RR as well, a fantasy tale called Desire’s Pursuit that I hope will become a multi-novel series. More on that as it develops.

FYI, fellas: Yes, Ravenous Romance is primarily geared for women and, yes, you will find romantic elements in its offerings, but I can guarantee you that if you like the erotic word, you’ll enjoy this publisher’s titles. Personally, I haven’t had to scale back any of my erotic writing with Ravenous Romance; I’ve only had to expand the connectedness of my principal characters, an element that existed in most of my previous erotica, just to a lesser degree.

Hope you’ll check out the site and buy a couple of ebooks. Hey, it keeps us lusty writers working!