I had fun last night. No, not that sort, something far better. I went to one of the live shows of Welcome to Nightvale (if you’re not familiar with it then, frankly, you should stop reading this right now and go and get caught up, it should only take about 24 hours!)
Don’t believe me, here’s a very blurry photo of the event:
On the way in we had to shuffle single file through the doors and present our tickets. It was only as we passed through the doors that two thoughts occurred to me:
“Hmm, I wonder if they’re going to do bag searches?”
And,
“Oh fuck I hope they’re not doing bag searches!”
A quick mental inventory revealed that yesterday, or indeed on most days of the week, my normal bag, the one I take to the office and that sits under my perfectly normal desk, will contain (amongst other things):
"Turns out it was my blowjob not yours on my top."
"What the fuck?!?"
"Blood! Blood, not blowjobs. Fucking autocorrect."
"I don't even know how those two things got confused."
"Me neither, see you in traumatising."
"I worry about you sometimes."
Over the past year my phone seems to have developed a rather macabre sense of humour. It’s a bit like the squiggly blue lines in Microsoft Word. Not the vulgar red of a spelling error, or snooty green of grammatical fail. But rather a suggestion that perhaps instead of “industrial cone crusher” you meant to write “industrial bone crusher”.
But niggling at the back of my mind is the thought of my phone turning around one day and screaming :
“You! I learned it from watching you.”
So to assess the damage here are the words my phone has learnt from me:
#69dlw
#anyexcuse
#crapreadingmaterial
[the hashtags go on for a while… highlights include]
I have a confession to make, I am in recovery from a behavioural disorder. One perhaps even worse than my decade of almost vegetarianism and the scurvy incident. The truth is I was once, no, not even once, I was repeatedly… a Morris dancer (I shan’t recount my exploits here but I will just mention that I once took part in a successful sixteen man vandals, including a full Litchfield hay). So when presented with the prospect of reading Morris dancing erotica (no, wait, that sentence doesn’t scan) how could I possibly refuse?
Spring in My Step is a pretty vanilla piece by my usual standards. It’s also surprisingly short at a little over a hundred pages (yes I read in paperback mostly, don’t judge me). But what it loses in length it makes up for in cheery ease of reading. There’s a good hearty pace to the story that treads the line between dragging on too long and making you feel like you were cheated. You also get a fair amount of banging for your buck. There are a good number of sex scenes for the length and these are well handled although tending slightly towards the shorter side. Good fun but not earth shattering; sexy whilst managing to avoid getting too mechanical.
Perhaps more impressively is the amount of plot going on. Yes it does come down to girl meets boy, girl suspects boy’s a bit of a twat, but mix in a documentary film maker, inter-Morris side politicking and it’s actually pretty busy. I enjoyed it, although I do wonder whether my pre-existing familiarity with ‘squires’ ‘border’ ‘hays’ and ‘baldrics’ made it an easier read than for someone who’s soul hasn’t been tainted by English folk traditions.
There are other criticisms too, lots of the characters are relatively functional and the main conflict in the piece hinges on the narrator caring a little bit too much about the politics of Morris dancing, but at this point I’m really scraping the barrel.
Spring in My Step is worth reading if nothing else than for the novelty of having read it. And if someone you care about suffers from the affliction of Morris dancing, well, I can’t say this will help, but it will certainly make for an interesting Christmas Present.
Words can have a powerful effect on people, we all know this, but it’s sometimes surprising how indifferent we are about how we use them. Sometimes the way we phrase something can have almost as much meaning as the words themselves.
For example. It’s not possible, in life to achieve absolutely anything. Somethings just aren’t possible (no matter how hard you try, that jet-ski just won’t work on lava, I’m sorry!). But the way we would naturally construct that sentence in English is, “You can’t do anything.” Which, depending on your emphasis can be cripplingly critical. But this isn’t just limited to what we say about other people.
In gaelic you wouldn’t say “I am sad,” you would say, “I have a sadness on me.” In Italian you are never hungry, you only, “have hunger.”
It’s an interesting rabbit hole to peer down and it’s sometimes worth taking a moment to be mindful of how you express things.
A couple of weeks ago I had the pleasure of doing some rope practice with somebody. We did a hip harness and ended up doing a close to the ground and rather brief suspension from it. It turned out that this was their first time being suspended and afterwards I thanked them for letting me be a part of their first suspension. Not, “thank you for letting me tie you up.”
I don’t mean this in a condescending ‘look I have given you the gift of agency, aren’t I nice’ kind of way. I think it’s just as important to be mindful of this on the other side too. For example, when I talk to people about my first spanking, there is absolutely no doubt in my head that it was my experience, one that was fascinating and transformative and one that I was very happy to share with the other person. But it was mine Dammit!
Except of course it wasn’t. Because life is never that simple, and words usually aren’t enough. Which is all the more reason to use them carefully.
Well, it was bound to happen. As soon as I started looking at doing reviews I knew the day would come when I read a book and just didn’t like it.
I will preface this firstly with the vague excuse that this is just my opinion and you may enjoy this book a lot more than me. I’ll also stress that Stately Pleasures definitely falls into the category of erotica rather than erotic romance, so a lot of what’s to come is essentially irrelevant in many respects. I didn’t really like this book, but not to the extent that it could join Jeremy Clarkson or Rupert Cox on my unfinishable books’ pile of shame. But there are some things that bothered me:
I think the choice of perspective is something you only really notice when it doesn’t fit. Unlike romance, it seems the considerable majority of erotica is written from the first person, so Felthouse’s choice of third person is a bold move but one that I found uncomfortably distancing. This was coupled with what felt like a great setup that wasn’t fully followed through. I don’t want to post plot spoilers, but for me there wasn’t enough weight behind the central plot device. The characters felt like they were all pretty much on the same page which makes for great happy sex, but undermines the overall tension of the piece.
Lastly, I just didn’t really buy into the characters. No this isn’t necessarily important, but I felt from an early stage that the book’s core theme of two fit blokes and a curvy lady suffered a little from not making the characters distinctive enough. (I’d be tempted to call them Thing 1 and Thing 2, but that’s both a Freudian and Zeussian nightmare!) This may also be just due to my perspective. I mean, whilst I’m a never say never kind of guy, I think a simple abundance of cocks and hunky manflesh doesn’t make the top ten on my bucket list. In which case, well, that’s my fault and please feel free to ignore me. Also I’m not saying that there isn’t a good variety of activities in here, in fact many of the scenes are pretty good, particularly with their focus on sensuality, and there’s a healthy proportion of kinky stuff going on as well (and no I’m not going to clarify what I consider a ‘healthy’ level of kink the same way I’m not going to tell you how long this piece of string is).
Stately Pleasures is a light piece of escapism that felt a little too light for my tastes. There’s lots of kinky fun in here and the protagonist is explicitly described as a realistically proportioned human being, which is always a plus in my book. I’d say that, for me, it over-stayed its welcome by about a hundred pages, but, as I think we’ve established, this is probably just because I need to learn to stop worrying and love more cock.
Have I said the word cock enough in this review? Perhaps not… COCK!
When I started reading this book I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to follow the plot, having not read the predecessor. I needn’t have worried. I’m not saying that this book falls into the “Plot? What plot?” category just that it’s not a deeply involved plot. The important things are resolved in media pretty swiftly and, frankly, if by the end of the first chapter you don’t know what’s going on, you’re probably not old enough to be reading this sort of smut.
The story fits into that deliciously vague category that blurs the lines between fact and fiction. Depending on my mood this book can be read as:
Autobiography (with name changes)
Embellished autobiography.
Complete fiction.
And I really don’t care. Because what this book really does well is giving itself a sense of grounding. I’m not saying I think every last detail necessarily happened, but it’s described with a richness and general air of something that could have happened. In terms of the plot itself it focuses on a trio in a slightly complicated BDSM relationship that really sits at the heart of this story. Tyler does a fantastic job in making this understated conflict underpin the entire story. Yes there are lots of kinky shenanigans along the way, but she manages to tread the line between dull and melodramatic expertly.
So what about the sex?
Well there’s plenty of it and it’s a lot of fun. There’s a strong presence of kink and a hell of a lot of spanking and the prose carries this with immersive weight and realism. That said it does feel a bit, how can I say, easily interrupted.
You see this is the one real flaw with this book. Yes I’m familiar with the idea that lot’s of erotica books take a structure of one sex scene per chapter, but the chapter divisions crop up far too frequently for my taste. And this isn’t for lack of sex, there’s plenty of that, but an evening’s bedroom session that might last one chapter in many novels can be split into two or sometimes three. Each time this breaks the flow and whilst the narrative voice never feels discordant, it’s noticeably more abstract at the opening of a chapter than when deeply involved in the good stuff. The simple truth is that a (mathematically rigorous) 51/3 pages per chapter just doesn’t quite feel like enough.
But this is only a relatively technical flaw in what is otherwise a very enjoyable and well written book.
My arms ache, my palms and fingers are raw, I’m kind of sweaty and have just spotted some interesting bruises on one arm. Yes, that’s right, I’ve been roping again… (and in case you were wondering I re-checked the spelling of that last sentence about eighteen times).
Rather than try to shoe-horn a link to erotica and writing into this I just thought I’d brain fart some thoughts on what I like about rope.
I think a large part of it is the people. The rope scene (or at least that of it that I’ve been exposed to) seems to be characterised by happy people. I mean, when people are doing rope, an awful lot of the time the most noticeable things going on are smiles, and laughter. There’s a very real sense of playfulness about things. Not that I’m suggesting these things are in any way lacking in other kink circles it just seems to be… more with rope folks. Like somebody’s been playing with the graphic equalizer on the stereo. The song is the same, but right now there’s an awful lot of treble filled with squawks of glee.
One of the things I’m really coming to love about the kink world is its endless ability to present me with situations that I never thought I’d encounter.
Unfortunately as previously discussed, I’m not always the best at recognising situations and, when I do, can often be pretty poor about articulating my desires. Whilst my immediate answer is often “Umm…” When, with the benefit of a few hours (or days) thought the answer is far more likely to be a definite “Holy fuck yes that sounds like fun!”
This particular incident took some real processing because I had to disentangle how much of this was me and how much was stuff that I’ve read.
For many years I was something of an armchair kinkster. An odd by-product of that is that sometimes I’ll be incredibly turned on by the idea of something not because of some unspecified deep-seated longing, but because I read about it in a book by a quite good writer and, well, quite frankly there are people out there who could make tooth extraction sexy [that last bit was a lie, this is impossible and please please nobody ever try to eroticise this, I don’t think I could handle it]. I make no secret of the powerful influence Penny Birch had on my as an adolescent and pony play is something of a recurring theme, leading to the following thought process.
That sounds like fun.
Wait, does it really or is it just because I’ve read about it?
What do you mean?
Has reading this stuff… changed me?
But it still sounds like fun yeah? So what’s the difference?
As Part of her blog tour for the release of Undone, Kristina Lloyd answered a few questions about, well, everything.
When did you first start writing fiction?
In school, like most people. I wrote stories for class and plays for my friends to perform in. All the plays were about people watching TV and then, woah, shit gets weird! I didn’t start writing creatively, and independent of prompts from others, until I was in my early twenties. And of course, I wrote some fairly awful stuff because I knew nothing and was trying too hard.
When did you first start writing erotic fiction?
Several years after the fairly awful stuff! Combining sex and writing, two things I’m very keen on, suddenly seemed like a great idea. I sold the first piece I sent out and had shorts and two novels published over the following few years. Then I quit writing erotica for a while and returned to the genre when my novels were re-issued.
When writing “Undone” what made you choose the diary format? What were the advantages and disadvantages?
Lana, my protagonist and the diary writer, says she needs to write a journal to help keep her head together and to create a record events that might prove useful if the police call her in for questioning.
However, why I chose to give Lana a diary narrative is a whole different issue, and not one I can delve into without spoiling the story. Sorry! Lana’s diary isn’t a regular detailing of the day’s events. She’s writing in flashback at the start and is taking several days to record earlier events. The diary format allowed me to splice very recent events with earlier events so there are hints of what lies ahead while the story is being told via the diary. The tricky bit was trying to keep track of what was happening when. I effectively had two timelines: the actual order of events; and what’s currently happening in Lana’s life as she writes.
I used a less overt, journal-style format in my third book, Split. Narrative and structure can inform stories in some very interesting ways.
What advice would you give to a novice author?
Never forget your reader. Learn your craft and use all the tricks you can to draw people into the amazing world you want to share.
Tea or Coffee?
Tea, please. Green, loose leaf.
Biscuit or Cake?
Biscuit if I must! I don’t have much of a sweet tooth so the biscuit that’s closest to a savoury item. Is a salty cracker a biscuit?
Handcuffs or rope?
I can’t have both? As objects, handcuffs. As hot, kinky stuff that makes me melt over and over, and is also very versatile, rope.
Kristina Lloyd writes erotic fiction about sexually submissive women who like it on the dark, dirty and dangerous side. Her novels are published by Black Lace and her short stories have appeared in dozens of anthologies, including several ‘best of’ collection, in both the UK and US. She lives in Brighton, England.
About Undone
When Lana Greenwood attends a glamorous house party she finds herself tempted into a ménage à trois. But the morning after brings more than just regrets over fulfilling a fantasy one night stand. One of the men she’s spent the night with is discovered dead in the swimming pool. Accident, suicide or murder, no one is sure and Lana doesn’t know where to turn. Can she trust Sol, the other man, an ex-New Yorker with a dirty smile and a deep desire to continue their kinky game?
The Perfect Submissive is published by Xcite books and is available now.
What’s the difference between erotica and erotic romance?
Some of it comes down to elements such as plot, emotional depth and pacing… erotica should have none of these. Or rather, it should have these but they shouldn’t be taking centre stage.
The Perfect Submissive makes for a perfect submission in this category (was that too far to reach for a pun? Yes, yes it was).
The Perfect Submissive’s setup is pleasingly simple, a nice hotel with a special ‘fifth floor’ for special clients, all of which is explored through the eyes of new staff member Jess and graphic designer Sam as they both become the prey of the proprietor Laura Peters.
The plot is minimal, the cast of characters large enough to give variety but small enough to be both manageable and distinctive. But overall everything about this book has a slightly stripped down feel. There’s no painfully florid prose, no endless chapters of emotional turmoil and heartbreak. This is definitely a book that fits into the one chapter at a time category of erotica, and has a levity of style and forgivingness of plot that works well for this.
But that’s not to say that this book feels in any way incomplete. It’s just that it’s focus isn’t on crawling deep into your brain to play with your heart-strings. Instead it sets out to be something altogether different. It sets out to be fun. And it succeeds, the adventures related in this book never carry anything other than a sense of play, yes it’s kinky painful play, but it has a real feeling of escape, of being in another world where nothing truly bad can happen… at least nothing you don’t secretly want. Put simply this book goes on my list of “Happy BDSM” titles.
Now with the one chapter at a time books the sex scenes are key. And The Perfect Submissive does deliver. There is a truly impressive creativity at work here so that each scene feels fresh and original. The build-up of tension and sensation is well executed.
The only criticism I can level is that sometimes scenes felt like they concluded rather abruptly. I’m not talking magical spontaneous out of nowhere orgasms, but there are times when the incredible responsiveness of the characters leads to the temptation to skip back a page or two to read it all over again.
Overall though this is an enjoyable fun sexy read that succeeds by not trying to be anything else.
Also being a massive rope geek how could I (k)not love a book with a single-line reef knot on the cover?
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