M/M erotic fiction, for the uninitiated, is, in its strictest terms, romantic erotica written largely by women for women and born out of the slash fiction world. But publisher ManLoveRomance Press isn’t satisfied with that definitional origin. MLR Press believes that although M/M fiction isn’t traditional gay fiction and that it is erotica intended for the romance reader, it’s meant for male and female consumers. And male authors are as welcome in their stable of writers as women.

At BEA, I attended Laura Baumbach’s signing of her M/M action suspense novel, Mexican Heat. I’d visited the MLR Press booth earlier in the show and promised to stop by for the book — with every intention of putting it high on my reading list. Why? Because, coming from LGBT origins, I wanted to see what differences existed between queer erotic and M/M romances. And honestly? MLR Press nicely blurs the line, blending the best elements of erotica and romance together into, if Mexican Heat is any indication, an enjoyable read.

Consider Mexican Heat’s synopsis:

Tough, street-smart SFPD Detective Gabriel Sandalini is willing to do whatever it takes to bring down West Coast crime boss Ricco Botelli — including a dangerous, deep undercover gig as one of Botelli’s hired guns. But Gabriel’s best laid plans may come crashing down around him when he falls hard for the sexy, suave lieutenant of a rival Mexican drug lord. Turns out his new love interest may have a few secrets of his own: secrets that could destroy both men and the fragile bond between them.

Now, I gotta tell ya: If not for BEA and my interest in M/M, I probably would’ve overlooked Mexican Heat. Why? Because I’m not really into organized crime/cop/action dramas. It’s not my preferred cup of tea. But Baumbaugh and co-writer Josh Lanyon really pulled off a good one here. Mexican Heat’s hard-boiled, bare knuckled prose worked as well in its sex scenes as it did in the depicting the drug cartel crime world. And when the story turns to love, the authors pull off a proficient, subtle change in tenor, one so tempered that you’ll hardly noticed. And they know how to pace a story, whether it’s keeping the action plot moving, reveling on the romantic possibilities, or depicting hot man-on-man sex. Bravo.

And this exercise has taught me something, too. I’m overlooking a lot of good books if I don’t stretch my parameters. That, in general, I better not judge a book by its cover or copy because I’ll miss out on a lot of good reads. Note taken.

Tonight, Monday, July 27th at 9:30 p.m. All Romance eBooks interviews me for its What’s Hot in Romance show on BlogTalk Radio. Thanks to host Cat Johnson, I had the opportunity to talk about my books, erotica and erotic romance, the migration of small press to ebooks, and a touch of erotic book history as well!

But What’s Hot isn’t all about me. I share the spotlight with fellow authors Earl Sewell and Kat Martin. Somehow, All Romance eBooks rounded us up during Book Expo America, a HUGE cattle drive of a publishing industry event. Talk about expert wrangling!

If you can’t make the actual 9:30 show, not to worry. You can download the podcast and enjoy it at your leisure. Be sure to check out their previous shows as well!

Gloria Vanderbilt’s novella, Obsession, makes for a curious and stimulating read. But it’s not the kind of stimulating read you might expect from an erotic work. Rather, it’s more of an intellectual exercise in emotional intelligence in the guise of erotic read.

I’d seen all the buzz about Vanderbilt’s novel and I no doubt wanted to read it. After all, I’d like to think that when I’m Vanderbilt’s age, I’d be capable of writing intriguing and provocative fiction. And when I met Gloria Vanderbilt at her BEA book signing, she graciously told me that this book meant a great deal to her. Granted, she was probably indulging me in the social graces she’s known for, but that doesn’t mean she wasn’t sincere.

I’m not sure what I expected when I cracked the spine and opened Obsession. I’d heard about its BDSM content and the speculation that always arises when an author explores out-of-the-mainstream sexuality. What I got was an entertaining and challenging read.

Beginning as a semi-epistolary work, Obsession details the repressed widow Priscilla Bingham’s discovery of a cache of letters that reveals her late husband’s extramarital kinky endeavors. Each letter is more explicit and detailed than its predecessor and draws you in to a secret world of covert sexual extravagance. Written by Priscilla’s rival, the mysterious, sexually-free Bee, the letters seem to pose a side of her late husband that Priscilla never knew.

A New York Times article about Vanderbilt’s book poses whether Bee is a figment of Priscilla’s imagination or vice versa. But I think there’s something deeper going on here. As I read the book its prose became increasingly dream-like. Alternating between Priscilla and be, it seemed to nearly become a fugue.

And then it struck me: Perhaps I was seeing two sides of the same coin. Wife and mistress, Madonna and whore, doppelgangers of a single self, split apart by the agony of grief. Perhaps Priscilla and Bee are the Ego and the Id, respectively, each driven to seek the other, not out of jealousy but because, unable to survive alone, continued life is only assured by their ultimate reunion.

The world in which Bee exists – and that which Priscilla wants to access – is, in fact, the Janus club. And Janus is the Roman god of doorways a two-faced deity whose visages peers out in opposite directions. More than once, Janus has served to a represent BDSM practices, and here, I suspect, it symbolizes the doorway through which the divided selves can step through and rediscover one another.

Of course, my theory could be total hogwash. Vanderbilt has reportedly written and recorded a new ending for Obsession in audio book form, presumably a less abrupt and more expansive conclusion. But any book that can make you stop and wonder what it’s really all about, what’s really underneath the facade of sexual extravagance, is a book worth reading. And I’m still struck by the sense of wonder whenever I think about Gloria Vanderbilt’s Obsession.

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.