24 March 2007

Desire's Dream is now out!

Yay!

The last thing Ruth Cavanaugh wants in her life is a man who thinks he can control her. So why is she having lust filled dreams about Jake Fitzgerald, a man who values control above all else? Jake can't believed prickly but sexy Ruth has invaded his dreams so thoroughly. He's happy she's there, but what can he do to convince her she's got the wrong idea about him? He has a few ideas and they all involve letting go of control once and for all. He's more than willing, but is she?

You can buy it here.

And if you join my newsletter by the end of this weekend, you go into a draw for a copy of Cream: The Best of the Erotica Readers and Writers Association edited by Lisabet Sarai. The link is to your right in the sidebar.

Have a good weekend!

23 March 2007

Review of Ghostly Desires

Last year Forbidden Publications published a short of mine called Ghostly Desires. It's a lesbian erotic romance which as a genre seems less popular in the romance world than gay male romance. Fallen Angels Review did a review of it in December that I've only just found out about! Five Angels!

This book was excellent. My only complaint is it left me wanting more ... I think the author's writing style and choice of genre is excellent. I hope to read more from Keziah Hill and I hope all of the books are just as well written and leave me craving more.
(Thanks Amanda H!)

That'll teach me to do more regular searches on myself. It all came about because Denise Rossetti posted on the RWAustralia elist that Dogpile is a better search engine than Google.

So I put my name in and up popped the review. Thanks Denise! I've written another essentially lesbian tale for eXtasy (although there's a bit of m/f action as well) called Playing with Trouble.

I'm going to write something about lesbian erotic romance on the blog soon. Do you like reading about women falling in love and having hot sex? If you do, who are your favourite authors?


Thirteen Things about why I love autumn

It's Thursday somewhere in the world even though I'm late.

  1. It’s cooler
  2. I can do exercise and not feel like I want to die
  3. The air in the morning is so crisp and invigorating I feel full of energy
  4. I can wear jumpers and heavier trousers that I feel more comfortable in
  5. I can wear scarves and shawls
  6. The turning trees are spectacular where I live
  7. Many roses flower again and their colour and smell is more intense
  8. I start sleeping more deeply
  9. As a consequence I’m more likely to have erotic dreams (yay!)
  10. As a consequence I’m more likely to get story ideas
  11. It’s my birthday season
  12. It’s cooler
  13. Did I mention it’s cooler?


  14. Links to other Thursday Thirteens!
    1. (leave your link in comments, I’ll add you here!)




Get the Thursday Thirteen code here!


The purpose of the meme is to get to know everyone who participates a little bit better every Thursday. Visiting fellow Thirteeners is encouraged! If you participate, leave the link to your Thirteen in others comments. It’s easy, and fun! Be sure to update your Thirteen with links that are left for you, as well! I will link to everyone who participates and leaves a link to their 13 things. Trackbacks, pings, comment links accepted!



22 March 2007

Ellora's Cavemen

Ellora's Cavemen: Seasons of Seduction I

Jory Strong , Delilah Devlin , Lillian Feisty , Denise Rossetti , Allyson James , Sherrill Quinn

Hop over to Ellora's Cave and get the latest Cavemen. Two of my writing colleagues Denise Rossetti and Lillian Feisty are featured in some sizzling tales of erotic romance.



21 March 2007

More poetry

The Ache of Marriage - Denise Levertov

The ache of marriage:

thigh and tongue, beloved,
are heavy with it,
it throbs in the teeth

We look for communion
and are turned away, beloved,
each and each

It is leviathan and we
in its belly
looking for joy, some joy
not to be known outside it

two by two in the ark of
the ache of it.

Born in England and lived in America for most of her life Denise Levertov was Russian and Welsh. I love her poems.

Labels:

20 March 2007

Reading poetry

I need to read more poetry. I think every writer does. It's important to get out of the rut of linear words and read something more fluid and sometimes obscure. I sat in bed last night and read some Robert Lowell and this line leapt up at me:

I want words meat-hooked from the living steer (from the Nihilist as Hero)

It's violent and horrible and expresses exactly the way I'd like words to punch the page from my mind.

18 March 2007

Leap of Fate out now at Cobblestone Press!

LEAP OF FATE by Antonia Pearce

Love, Fate and Death. Three powerful forces that rule the universe. But are they really mutually exclusive?


IPB Image


Available at Cobblestone-Press, LLC


What would you do with twenty-four more hours with the lost love of your life?

Merryn Porter finds out when a freak accident kills her as she saves her best friends on their wedding day. Unaware she’s dead, she’s also forgotten the bride’s brother died ten years earlier. She does remember he broke her heart.

Luke Hanson has been waiting in limbo to atone for rejecting his beloved Merryn and Fate cuts him a deal: twenty-four hours to make up for her suffering. If he succeeds, she gets another shot at life.

A miracle really, but everything has a price…

17 March 2007

Blue Mountains Music Festival

I mentioned in a previous post I wanted to see Luka Bloom at the Blue Mountains Music Festival today. Well, I did and he was wonderful. There something about men in their fifties I'm loving at the moment. They've got to some place of wry acceptance of their lives which makes them much more human and good to be with. They're now how we wanted them to be in their 20s and 30s. But they couldn't be and we were off on our own ego driven frolics. That's one of the best aspects of ageing - you do tend to let go of your ego. All the silliness you once thought was important, goes by the wayside and you're able to look at men, who once you would have been judgmental and impatient with, as humans just trying to exist on the planet, muddling along. Just like you. Just like me.

Luka Bloom falls into the category of the thinking woman's sex symbol. Along with other men like Harvey Keitel and Paul Kelly. Imperfect, fallible and irresistible. The kind of man you want to get drunk and talk with all night with before falling into bed to have clumsy, hilarious sex, then get up in the morning and take up talking where you left off. Or maybe you didn't. These kind of men talk a lot.

(BTW, go immediately to the Paul Kelly site and watch a clip of him, Kev Carmody and John Bulter sing the anthemic song From Little Things Big Things Grow - a song about aboriginal rights.)

The song Luka Bloom is most famous for (I think) is Monsoon, and he sang it while the heavens opened and drenched all those not under the marquee. I don't think anyone minded too much. That song has the effect of reducing me to a puddle anyway. And he also sang a classic Australian song by Hunters and Collectors, Throw Your Arms Around Me, another song that can reduce me to a puddle.

Other great performers where Pacific Curls, a Maori/NZ Scots women's group who were gorgeous and Kate Miller-Heidke who had the most incredible range. Sounds a bit like Kate Bush.

I'll wander up the road later and take in some more fun.

16 March 2007

Nautilus

Barbara Samuel has written a post about feathers and why they are important in her life. He blog is one of my favourites and I thank Mel for guiding me to it. I loved Barbara's column in Romance Writer's Review, the monthly magazine from Romance Writers of America so I was happy I could continue reading her wonderfully spiritual words of wisdom about writing, cooking and the other important events of life.

Her post made me think about my own talisman, the nautilus. If you look up Wiki, you'll find a post on the marine creature which is interesting, but I love the image of the nautilus as an empty shell. It's perfect, but it also looks like a puzzle or a refuge. It symbolises a traveling out and a burrowing in which I find comforting and full of possibilities.

I suppose it's a bit like me. I like to engage with the world with passion and excitement but then I have to retreat to recoup. Mars in Cancer. I'm very watery. When I'm not being a stolid, earthy Taurus.

I wrote 252 words yesterday. Better than nothing which is what I've written today. I feel a burrowing nautilus moment descending.

15 March 2007

Psychopathy and writing

I had dinner last night with a good friend who's a forensic psychologist. We were talking about psychopaths (as you do) and got onto Tony Soprano. I've only watched a couple of episodes of The Sopranos, but think I might have to have another look.

It's claimed one of the common characteristics of psychopaths is their lack of empathy and remorse. Some also say they don't experience shame. My friend and I wondered about that. We've both worked in the prison system and came across many people who could be considered psychopathic, but have quite a significant emotional life. Their emotions are chaotic, and fall into that general anti social personality disorder range, but the main thing they had in common with other people was their ability to feel shame. It's their reaction to it that sets them apart.

When most people feel shame, it's unpleasant. Maybe they've done something to hurt someone and they feel ashamed. Generally their reaction would be to feel guilt and then remorse and mostly want to make it up to the person they've hurt. They may not act on those feelings but they do feel them.

The people I worked with in the prison system felt shame if they did something hurtful to another person, but their immediate reaction was to fall into rage. They blamed that other person for their unpleasant feeling and wanted to punish or destroy them. They didn't feel guilt or remorse and certainly didn't feel the need to make reparation to the other person.

We've all come across people like that in our lives. They may not be criminals, but they have a tendency to blame others and want to punish them for making them feel ashamed for their own bad behavior. It's the reasoning behind the violent man blaming his wife or girlfriend for his violence. She bought it on herself for making him feel ashamed.

Why am I writing about this? It's good to have well rounded characters in your work, including villains. A cardboard cut out psychopath is less interesting than a psychopath who loves his mother and is fiercely protective of his family. His bad behavior is all the more shocking if we can see him as someone having complex emotional reactions that make him sympathetic.

Thursday Thirteen


Thirteen Things about me at the moment


  1. I hate block cheese
  2. For the last few days I've had heart palpitations every time I have sugar
  3. I'm reading Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
  4. I've finally figured out how to put an image in a Yahoo post (it took forever!)
  5. I need a new kitchen
  6. I have two writing projects I'm agonising over
  7. I worry I'll never get anything finished
  8. My garden is out of control but does look beautiful
  9. I really want to see Luka Bloom on Saturday at the Blue Mountains Folk Festival
  10. A print of the Lady and the Unicorn from the Musee de Cluny is near my desk and when I'm looking for words I often stare at her
  11. I'd like more discipline
  12. I'd like to do more exercise
  13. I'd like more self acceptance

    Links to other Thursday Thirteens!
    1. (leave your link in comments, I’ll add you here!)




Get the Thursday Thirteen code here!


The purpose of the meme is to get to know everyone who participates a little bit better every Thursday. Visiting fellow Thirteeners is encouraged! If you participate, leave the link to your Thirteen in others comments. It’s easy, and fun! Be sure to update your Thirteen with links that are left for you, as well! I will link to everyone who participates and leaves a link to their 13 things. Trackbacks, pings, comment links accepted!



10 March 2007

Newsletter

I've set a Yahoo group for to send out a newsletter. It will be quarterly or when I have a new release. You can join at the link on the right or email me and I'll add you to the list. I'll run an opening competition so stay tuned!

08 March 2007

My desk

Over at Cobblestone-Mainstreet we've been posting pictures of our various desks. This is mine. It was taken at about 6.20am so it was still dark. I'd just had breakfast. Not as messy as Jenny Crusie's but not is minimalist as Lynn Viehl . I don't like the look of those wires. Must tidy them up.

I've been plugging away at one of my works in progress. Getting there, getting there. Kill your babies. That's on my mind lately. Don't fall so in love with your words or your ideas that you can't let anything go. Be ruthless.

p.s. Happy International Womens' Day!

07 March 2007

Survey on erotica

Do you read erotica? One of my favourite erotica writers remittance girl needs to know something about your erotica reading habits. It's completely anonymous and would help her complete her masters and also maybe provide some much needed information on the erotica readership. There isn't much information around. While you're there, do yourself a favour and read some of rg's stories. They're wonderful.

02 March 2007

Thinking and writing and the Queen

I've been doing more thinking than writing recently. That and reading too. I finished Emily Maguire's Taming the Beast yesterday and found it on the whole good and disturbing. It evokes emotion so to me that means a book has worked at some level. Maguire is an Australian writer and Taming the Beast is billed as an erotic work of fiction.

It is erotic in a nihilistic way, which I don't mean as a criticism, since a story about a fourteen year old girl who has a destructive, sadomasochistic affair with her English teacher, then resumes the relationship some years later, is bound to be fairly bleak. In a way it's a standard story - sexually abused girl goes on to become promiscuous and destructive, always looking for her original lover. Maguire's writing is almost good, in that there are sections that are terrific, poignant, horrifying and funny. There are other sections where she over explains, sounding a bit to much like a therapist. But I was completely engaged. She has a second book just published call The Gospel According to Luke on my TBR pile.

I've also seen The Queen which was wonderful. The actor who played Tony Blair got him perfectly. And I'll go an see anything with Helen Mirren. Of course, the real Queen and I share the same birthday (21 April) so I have instant sympathy for a fellow Taurus, even if she is obscenely wealthy and I'm a republican.

But I would like to do more writing. The problem of commitment continues.