NaNoWriMo 2011, Excerpt 2

Another excerpt from Escape From the Pleasure Planet. This is a few chapters later on from this bit.

It was a starry, starry night...

[Juliet] couldn't open her eyes, and she couldn't move. There was nothing but an inky haze. She couldn't access her mind map and she was confused. Was she awake or asleep? Was she dreaming?

Images flashed in her vision, their details obscured and indistinct. Faces that she didn't quite remember surrounded her. Voices echoed in her ears that she was sure she'd heard before. She sighed inwardly. Her mind was now a battlefield, the casualties of several years of memory repression and mental manipulation and the constant battle to retain things that she didn't want to forget. Neither side was winning. She couldn't remember anything distinctly any more, but the Nipisi could no longer keep her from remembering. It was going to take a lot of Nurses a very long time to sort this out.

She was sat in a seat in a large container. Through the small window to the side of her she could see nothing but blackness and thousands of tiny pricks of light, stretching away forever. Giant spheres passed them by as she watched. The vessel was moving at quite a speed. She was surrounded by people that she didn't know, not all of them even human, but no Nipisi anywhere. She was slightly scared, and sore. She rubbed her temples and her face was bruised and swollen. A man was watching her from a seat on the other side of the vessel with concern, and she hid her face away from and stared out the window intently. She didn't want to talk to him. She didn't want his concern. She wanted him to forget that she was there. She wanted to forget who she was.

A sphere – a planet – was coming into view if she peered in the direction that the vessel was going. A thrill of excitement shot through her. She'd always wants to come here, in a way. It was like a little curiosity in her that had never had the chance to voice itself. Even when she was happy, she had wondered what this planet would be like. Now that she was broken and unhappy, she needed to know. It was like a compulsion. The planet was vast, big expanses of purple in amongst writhing waves of gases obscuring something else, and to the north, she could see giant buildings of grey stone, similar to the ones that she knew from home. Here was a planet that was both alien and human. It was a curious juxtaposition, but she felt comforted knowing that she was not leaving home entirely behind, and yet here was a place that she didn't need to be reminded of it constantly.

She wasn't sure why she'd lied about her name on the boarding form. She just knew that she didn't want to be herself any more. She wanted to be somebody different, even if it was just for a little time. As the vessel came into dock on the planet, she felt a little surge of excitement and a little bit of terror. How long would she be here? She didn't know. Hopefully long enough to forget what she was leaving behind and build herself a life that she could live with.

The memory faded away and Juliet lay looking at the inside of her eyelids.

She'd changed her name? How had she forgotten that? And what had it been before?

Read More

Escape From the Pleasure Planet, a NaNoWriMo Novel

Not a terribly long novel at the moment, either. I haven't been writing for a few months because there's been a whole lot of stuff going on, but I'm currently chipping away at my National Novel Writing Month attempt. I've been taking part in NaNoWriMo for a few years, and I help to organise the meetings in Bristol & Bath and it's utterly the highlight of my year. Without NaNoWriMo I would never have got properly into writing. I would never have finished a novel, or found that I love writing Erotica, or met some of my dearest friends. It has in many ways changed my life. How many endeavours can you say that about?

I don't intend to post all of my novel, but I thought it'd be fun to post bits of it here, just to prove to you that I'm still alive, and that I'm trying my hand at something altogether more daunting than anything I've ever written.

Oh yes. This is tentacle fantasy set in space. And in the true spirit of NaNoWriMo, it's very rough around the edges. In fact, my tentacle monsters, seriously look more or less like this:

If you'd like to read more of that, go here. Seriously. Awesome.

For clarification, my be-tentacled (also telepathic) alien race are called the Nipisi, and they feed on sexual energy from each other and from humans. There are three classes: the Feeders, who have the joyous task of "harvesting" the energy, the Nurses, who look after everybody, and the Underlings, who are the servant class and generally get the shit jobs and get fed upon by everyone else. Well, most of them do...

~~~

When [Juliet] awoke, the room was dark. It was cold and damp and smelled unfamiliar. She could feel a breeze along the floor and the damp smell rose with each gust. Her skin goosepimpled and blushed. The comfy pants she had been wearing were gone. She was wearing a thin tunic like the one she sometimes wore when the Nurses checked her, and she was cold. Something was wrong.

A long, thin limb coiled under the tunic and up her back, delicately tracing her skin as it travelled upwards and out the top of the tunic. It coiled around her neck a few times and squeezed gently, knocking the air from her lungs.

“Don't scream.” The voice was raspy and rough and resounded harshly around her thoughts, bouncing off the mental walls in place to keep the Nipisi from the areas she didn't want probed, like her personality.

"What? Who are you?" She didn't need to say the words, thinking them was enough. The Nipisi heard. Juliet didn't need to see the pale and pasty body of the underling to know that it was him.

"Hush," said the underling, "you've seen this before."

"What?" Juliet was confused.

"I remember when you first arrived, so pink and fresh and weak." The voice was unpleasant and Juliet couldn't help but squirm. They were not the easy, smooth flowing words of a feeder or a nurse, they were unpractised and unskilled. She could barely believe he had his appendages wrapped around her but even as she thought, he was sliding one slick, bud shaped fist down her stomach and parting her thighs to slip between her legs, where her lips were moist and waiting, a side effect of the drugs which the Nurses fed her after each harvest.

"No," she said. The underling squeezed her neck, choking off her air, using the moment also to wrap a thick coil around her breasts, teasing her nipples so that they swelled beneath his touch, hard and sensitive.

"You don't have a choice," said the underling. Juliet wasn't sure what to do. He was right, to an extent, her body would react to his touch as though he were [a feeder], but her mind recoiled from the thought of him feeding from her. It was dirty and disgusting. He was an underling. She was far too prized a possession to be fed from like this.

"Are you?" he asked. "Aren't you just a plaything of your master, to be harvested and fed upon just as I am? What's so wrong with my touch that I disgust you so?"

"You're not right," she thought weakly, "you're not allowed to taste me, you may be no better than me but you're not my equal."

"Wrong." The fist pentetrated her and she let out a hiss of air as it expanded and filled her, caressing her insides and causing a muffled moan to escape her lips. Unfurling from around her neck, the underling continued his upwards journey, pulling on her hair and dragging around her mouth to gag her. She bit down by the underling was undeterred.

"Feisty," he said, drawing out of her cunt and plunging back in, sending a fibril further back to probe the delicate pucker of her anus. "Do you like it there too?" he asked, lubricating her with his own vile fluids before diving in, causing Juliet to nearly double over with pain and surprise. She loved it there, she really did, but she didn't want him to know that. She couldn't let herself be taken and used by an underling like this.

She could feel him battering against the inside of her head, trying to find the walls which made her dislike him so, trying to pierce and penetrate her mind so that he could invade her body and release the pleasure that he needed to feast upon. Juliet considered her options. She could allow him access and give herself over but know that she would be reviled amongst her peers as a slut, one that enjoyed debasement from all Nipisi kind. He was not strong enough to overpower her.

“You once were. You were once a happy little whore, fucked and owned and taken by any that wanted you,” replied the underling, squeezing on her breasts and gently, so gently stroking her ass and her cunt and making her quiver with unwanted lust and desire. “There, I can feel it. You want me. You want to be overpowered and fucked like this. You're a filthy whore, just like me.”

Juliet's eyes were slits, tears forcing themselves out, her body shaking and sweating as the underling tried to work out what it was that would make her submit to him. She flailed her hands and he grabbed them, pulling one then the other behind her back.

“You don't have any more limbs to restrain me with,” she thought triumphantly. Releasing her aching cunt, he forced her to her knees, pulling on her wrists so that pain shot through her arms and into her shoulders. She tried to cry out but his fist in her mouth made her choke.

“Don't try me, slut.” A thrill of excitement ran through Juliet before she could clamp down on it and hide it from the creature. “That's what you get off on,” he said. He pushed her down into the floor, stroking her splayed ass as she choked and gagged and tried to breathe. The tone of his voice had dropped a couple of semi-tones and his low bass growl reverberated inside Juliet's bruised mind and stroked the aching walls of her conscious, rumbling quietly in a way which made her knees shake.

He had found the spot inside her that no Nipisi had touched in years.

Read More

Crawl Home, Slut

I can hear the swish of the flogger as he paces the room behind me. All I can see is the pillow crammed underneath my chin but I don't need to see him to know that he's cross. He's been cross ever since I walked through the door. He didn't speak to me as he cuffed me to the bed. Sometimes he'll let out this huff of irritation and that's all I've heard from him and now I am bored. I'm not in the mood for this but I'm the sub, not the sir. It's not my call.

The flogger lands on my bare ass with a thud and I flinch, but I don't respond. He has to hit me harder than that if he wants a reaction. He know this, and hits me again. I bury my face in the pillow and try not to think about why he's so annoyed. I know what this is about. A flurry of blows rain down on my thighs and back and I settle into the soothing warmth that accompanies the dull pain. It's not until he starts deliberately hitting me between my shoulder blades where he know it stings most that I even let on that it hurts.

“Bastard,” I say quietly. Ouch.

He pauses at my remark and swishes the flogger some more. A heavy blow lands on my ass and I yelp at the sudden shock.

“I can't believe you went to him.”

There it is. There is the source of the annoyance.

Swish. Thud.

“Did he treat you well?”

Silence.

“I asked you a question. You will answer.” I sigh into the pillow.

“No.”

“Pardon? I didn't hear you.” The anger in his voice is palpable but ineffectual. I am numb, save for the warmth of my assaulted ass and thighs.

“No sir, he didn't,” I say louder.

Swish. Thud. Yelp.

“Was he a conceited asshole, like I said?” I exhale again, breathing through my gritted teeth and drawing on the pain to try and provide feeling to my words.

“Yes, sir, he was every inch the bastard you predicted,” I say. I am impassive, no longer hurt by that knowledge. It did hurt, it hurt like fuck. But that was before. I have shut down and am no longer affected by his actions. I just left it all behind. That won't spare me the consequences though.

“And you went to him anyway.”

Silence.

“Whore.”

The flogger batters on and on relentlessly, harder and harder until I am clenching my ass to try and absorb the blows, gripping the rope with balled fists and beating my feet against the cuffs. Tears are welling up in my eyes but I shut them, determined that I will take this punishment as I should, without fuss and without tears.

“You. Deserve. Everything. You. Get.” he hisses between blows, the exertion of the beating making him pant. “You filthy whore,” he adds maliciously. I've never seen him this angry. I'm actually starting to get a little bit scared. I don't think I can take much more of this pounding but I'm too proud to use my safeword and I always have been. Today will not be the day that he bests me. Tears are streaming from my slitted eyes and I can't help but sob. I've learned my lesson.

He stops suddenly and I am stunned by the silence. It feels loud after the volume of the flogger. My body is on fire, stinging and aching and overheating. Sweat glistens on my skin. It itches but I can't get at it to wipe it away. My nose is running. My muscles slowly uncoil and I sag against the bed.

As I start to relax, I break down. I can't keep all this tension pent up inside me. It flows out of me in a rush of desperate, tired tears. I deserve everything I get, but that doesn't make it any easier to live with.

A gentle hand against my inflamed skin makes me jump. His fingers are almost painful in their softness as he massages my sore back, caresses my flushed ass, strokes my aching thighs. He draws his fingers down to my cunt, which betrays me with its wetness. He pushes two fingers inside me and draws them slowly in and out. I breathe heavily through parted lips, struggling against the pain, exhaustion and arousal. I want him. I want him to fuck me. I want him to fuck me while I'm tear-stained and broken and I will be his once more. He knows it's true. We've been here before.

Leaning down next to me, he takes his fingers out and trails them along my skin.

“You're mine,” he says. The certainty with which he says it makes me shiver. Or maybe that's the touch of his hand on my body.

He plunges his fingers back inside me roughly. I cry out.

“I fucking own you, you hear me?” He pumps my cunt a few times. “This is mine. Not yours to give to anyone else. Mine.” He grabs my hair and looks into my make up streaked face. I expect him to say something but his expression is contorted with rage. He is too angry to speak. He throws my head back onto the pillow and climbs off the bed. I hear the clink of his belt as he undoes it and pulls down his trousers. He pushes my shoulders down into the bed as he climbs on top of me once more.

“I'm glad he hurt you,” he hisses into my ear, his solid weight on my stinging flesh almost more pain than I can cope with. He is slick with sweat. It runs onto my back, cooling my skin. “Perhaps next time you'll remember who your friends are.”

Wrapping his arm under my waist, he picks me up and shoves his cock inside my sodden hole unceremoniously. He slaps my ass and I choke on a sob. This twisted tangle of pleasure and pain is my perfection. He knows that's why I do it. I do it for the thrill. He and I both knew that man would fuck me over and I would come back here desperate and beaten. But he knows that's how I want it.

“I wish he could see you now, you fucking slut.” There it is again, the anger. But he gets off on this too. He gets off on seeing me debased and berated like this.

He fucks me hard and carelessly, not interested in my enjoyment. I muffle my cries of pain. He is cementing his ownership of me, flaunting his dominance over my mind, body and emotions. I bury my head in the pillow and let him get on with it. When this is over, things will be fixed and we'll move on. Until the next time, at least...

He comes without fanfare. He's done. That's it. He strokes my hair briefly, and then he's gone. I hear the door slam as he leaves me, still cuffed to the bed. Dripping. Aching. Broken. Messy.

His.

Read More

August Erotic Meet, Soho

There are now a number of write-ups of the Erotic Meet around the web, and you can find some of them here:

Annie
Joe/John
JoshJilly Boyd

And here's mine: It was great to see so many people, most unfamiliar but some I knew. It is a real credit to Annie that the Meet has come on such a long way since there were eight of us in a pub in May!

The new venue is fantastic, cosy but large enough, and you can actually hear yourself think. As great as everyone has said the bar staff were, I wasn't all that impressed, but that's not really important – the drinks weren't hideously expensive, so what else do you want?

Starting the evening by getting everyone to introduce themselves was an excellent idea. It's amazing to see so many different uses of erotica represented.

My most valuable conversations were with Rebecca Bond and her friend Parv, and Daniel Doherty, and were about websites. I'm still trying to work my way around hosting and HTML and how to establish a brand that truly represents me. I've been talking to a lot of people with websites - Annie built her own from scratch and Rebecca paid someone to do it for her but was very clear about she wanted. I think I'd like to build mine but know I need some help...

I would have liked to have spoken to a few more people about self-publishing and writer craft, which are my pet subjects. It is becoming apparent that the best way to get stuff out of these meets is to have some stuff you know you want to bring up but to be flexible because you never know who you're going to meet. (A particular highlight was Inky. He's a cuddly legend.) Since you're all reading this, I shall ask now: what kind of blog posts about self-publishing and writer craft are you interested in reading about? I like to talk about editing (and often lack thereof) in a general sense but I also like to use other people's work to demonstrate my opinions – is that the kind of thing that would be useful to people?

One thing did become clear – I could do with a business card. People kept asking for one. So I guess I should definitely get my website sorted out in time for the next Meet!

Read More

Review of The Sevarian Way by Justine Elyot

I was instantly caught by the cover and the blurb of this novella:

In space, no one can hear you scream, so you can spank as hard as you like.

What's not to like? The story is that of a Commander and an Ensign - who are forbidden from BDSM practises by their own culture - exploring the kinky practises of an extinct race on a deserted planet. It's a gloriously original idea, brilliantly executed.

It's refreshing to read an author that really captures the appeal of BDSM. Elyot exposes the heart of the dom/sub relationship, often leaving me with a lump in my throat as I empathised with Suka's reactions and thoughts about her experiences at the well educated and inventive hands of her Commander. There are various scenes of different kinky practises and they are realistic and engaging with a futuristic edge. I found myself getting very jealous of the characters at times – there are definitely things that go on that I'd love the chance to get a go at. I finished the story pining to be able to meet the race that the pair are exploring and experience things the way they do.

Beyond the story, what really caught me is the language. Here is an author with an extensive vocabulary, the likes of which I haven't read anywhere else in the erotic genre. Elyot proves that you can write erotica with intelligent, literary flare. I'll definitely be reading more of her work.

Conclusion: Futuristic yet realistic, with pant-moistening play, stunningly written. 4.5 out of 5 stars.

The Sevarian Way is available from Total E-Bound and Justine Elyot's website is here.

Read More

Wise Words from Around the Web

I recently discovered Keyboard Hussy and her wonderfully, refreshingly opinionated blog about her exploration into the world of self-publishing. One post in particular has really inspired me, and it's this one. In it, the author discusses the pros and cons of worrying about poor self-published authors, and concludes that she's just going to get on with her own writing, rest of us be damned. I agree that good writers will ultimately triumph over rubbish ones. I left a little comment thanking her for her thoughts and got a reply from someone else which I liked so much that I am posting it here. I'm not sure he's right about everything, but I do think what he says is quite insightful, and it's given me something to think about.

~~~~

Elenya,

“You know, your point about not caring and just getting on with writing has totally made my week. Why worry about what you can’t change when you can worry about how you’re going to one-up them all by being awesome?” (This was quoted from my comment.)

Yoda to Luke:

Control, control. You must learn control!

You’ve got it. You, and only you, control you destiny. Which doesn’t mean you shouldn’t listen to other people. You should. But you should analyze what they are saying, and what it means to you.

"You're pretty heavy for a small guy."

Take my prediction that Brick and Mortar book stores will be mostly dead by the spring of 2013. To most writers this sounds pretty scary. To me it sounds like a huge opportunity.

I write odd stuff. I’m working on a non-fiction book about agriculture in the Province of Ontario. While it’s mostly about Ontario, it will be of interest to farmers, and farm equipment fans worldwide. It’s not the sort of thing that traditional publishers would publish unless a government grant was going to cover the publishing costs. Since I’m my own publisher, and I’m publishing it as an EBook, my costs are pretty low, so I should make out by going totally electronic.

Genre fiction writers will also do well. The latest Harry Dresden book just came out. We bought the EBook version, it arrived on our IPad the morning of the release, we didn’t even have to leave the house to get it.

On June 14, 2011 I ordered David Weber’s How Firm a Foundation from Amazon. It will arrive in the Kindle App in my IPad on September 13, 2011, saving me fuel to drive to the store, time, and $13.03 in cost. Oh yeah and it weighs several pounds less. I have over 500 books on my IPad including De Bello Gallico and Other Commentaries by Julius Caesar in English and Commentarii de Bello Gallico by Julius Caesar in Latin thanks to Project Gutenberg.

So keep pushing. If my predictions are right, we are on the verge of a new age for artists (with artist being used as a word defining a creator of any sort, whether of a classical sort of artwork, i.e. painting, sculpture, stained glass, mosaic, etc., of written works, i.e. poet, fiction or non-fiction writer, of music, i.e. singer, singer/songwriter, musician, of well, just about anything that requires creativity, which is a pretty wide range of endeavour.

Of course the publishers would have you believe that we are coming upon a huge disaster. What they don’t want you to know is that out of a $10.00 EBook sold by a publisher, you will get about $1.00, while out of a $2.99 EBook sold by you directly through Amazon you will make $2.09!

Think. You would only have to sell half as many EBooks through Amazon direct to make a living as through the publisher. Another way of looking at it is that you are giving the publisher $5.98 for each EBook sold if you allow them to have EBook rights.

Do the numbers add up?

They of course will tell you that this is standard with all new contracts. You should sit back and think. If they want the rights so badly, just how valuable are they to you instead, and why shouldn’t you keep them, and tell the publisher to drop dead?

Anyway, it’s two hours past bed time, and I have some heavy duty editing to do tomorrow.

Have fun, and keep on writing. YOU are in control. Show them how good you are.

Wayne

The commenter's website is here, by the way, should you be interested in looking.

~~~

What do YOU think? Please let me know!

Read More

Thoughts on the Bristol Erotic Meet

This post originally on the fabulous Erotic Meet website.



So it turns out that local legend has it that there is real human skin on the door of The Hatchet. Many thanks to Lucy Felthouse for pointing out that slightly grim bit of history.

Annie has already done a fabulous job of summarising what went on at the recent Bristol Erotic Meet, so I shall point you at her rather than rehash what she's said. I’m just adding a few points about what I got out of the meet.

It was really great spending the evening with Annie, Erotic Moonbeam and Smut Muppet as we're all coming at erotica from different angles. I spend a lot of time thinking about writer craft and publishing these days and it was really good to discuss those themes. I imagine I shall ask the same questions at the London meet as I don't tire of talking about these subjects! We talked about other stuff too (such as website coding and honesty when reviewing work by other people) but these are the things that stood out to be as particularly interesting:

Fiction vs Real Life: A reader doesn't know whether what you're writing did or didn't happen. Which is quite freeing, as it means you can write whatever is in your head, real or otherwise.

Professionalism vs Enthusiasm
Lots of people write erotica simply because they want to, and other people write it because they want to make money out of it. There is nothing wrong with either camp, but the attitude that goes behind each camp is different. What bothers me is there is generally no way of telling between one and the other when you're buying fiction until you start reading.

I left feeling rather patted on the back in many ways. It's nice to bounce ideas off other people and find that you've been going in the right direction all along. Especially when the company is so attractive. ;)

It was really good of Annie to come all the way over for the meet and there had been a lot of interest so the number of people that turned up was a little disappointing. I guess it's still early days for the Bristol meet and I hope we'll have lots more fabulous people at the next one.

Read More