On 12th April 2012, I appeared on Channel 5 News (UK) to speak about erotic fiction and the rise of eReaders.
Elizabeth Black Shares the Story Behind ‘Don’t Call Me Baby’
The idea for my novel, Don’t Call Me Baby, had been forming in my head for many years. It’s based on my own sexual explorations when I was in college in the 1980s. When I was a freshman I was still a virgin and I wanted to be rid of that albatross before I turned 20. Losing my virginity was a huge event for me, and I wanted to choose the right man for my first lover. I didn’t date in junior high school or high school so I was a bit afraid.
I had always been attracted to men quite a bit older than me, most notably my teachers. So when I met the man who would become my first lover I wasn’t surprised he was a college professor. He also went against my type. I prefer my men tall, dark, and handsome but he was of average height, blonde, but cute. I met him when I was a high school student visiting colleges. I spoke to him about the college’s communications department and lack of a theater department. I chose the college (which will go unnamed) precisely because it had no theater department. I didn’t want to be tempted by a likely dead-end major. The irony was that I eventually chose fine art as my major. Go figure. I did later enjoy a brief career as a stagehand that was quite lucrative for me. Those were fun times.
Jake (not his real name) was sarcastic, sexy, and very popular with the women on campus. That should have clued me in. I fell hard for him but it turned out he didn’t feel quite the same way about me. It was lust at first sight for both of us, though. See, at the time I was really looking for love but I couldn’t find it. Plenty of men wanted to have sex with me but that’s all they were interested in. I turned them down, much to their irritation. Jake seemed to be different.
He wasn’t.
Catherine Stone, the protagonist in my novel, Don’t Call Me Baby, suffers from the same disillusionment. She doesn’t have the bad luck I had when looking for love. She thinks of sex the same way I do – giving your body to a man (or woman) is the greatest gift you can give. The problem is it’s easy to get hurt doing that sort of thing. I was badly hurt. Catherine wasn’t. She has more control, confidence, and intuitiveness than I had at her age.
I had no idea at the time many men were fascinated with virgins. Snagging a virgin was a great notch to put on your bedpost. I became a notch as far as Jake was concerned. When you the reader meet Catherine in Don’t Call Me Baby, she had given away her virginity two years prior. You won’t learn about her Jake (named Chris), but she mentions him in passing. When I write a second book about her sexual explorations I’ll delve into her experiences with her virginity. I’m not sure how she will handle herself, but I’m sure she’ll have a level head on her shoulders like she usually does.
Catherine is a force to be reckoned with. She’s not and never will be a cougar. She prefers her men with a little snow on the roof. She is very comfortable with her sexuality, and she likes to bed numerous men, but she’s really looking for love. Does she confuse sex with love? Not really, although sex is a very strong pull. Most men can’t keep up with her and her openness about sexuality and relationships. She does meet her match and you’ll get to know him in the book. Once she meets him and trusts him, she gives herself over to him completely. Like many women, not only is she looking for someone who cherishes her body, she wants a man who respects her, cares about her, enjoys her company, and challenges her.
Does Catherine sound like a woman with whom you may identify? Then you will enjoy Don’t Call Me Baby.
BLURB:
DON’T CALL ME BABY is a fast-paced, quick-witted, sexy, novel about a young woman exploring her sexuality and the cultural mores she collides with on a daily basis.
It’s 1983 in Maryland and Catherine Stone is sex on wheels. She plays the field the way men have done for eons. Not content to strive for her MRS degree like so many young women her age, she seduces men of all stripes, married college professors, theatre students, virgins, complete strangers who intrigue her. She has already cost one man his job.
She asks herself lots of questions on her search to enjoy her sexuality. Why don’t other women enjoy their sex as much as she does? Why do so many women and men look down on sexually free women, calling them sluts while sexually free men are called studs and Lotharios? She bucks at the double standards. Catherine has made no commitment to any man. She’s free to explore and she gladly does so. No man can tie her down and no woman’s judgment will stop her from playing the field to her heart’s content.
Does she meet her match in a new man who introduces her to sexual bliss she has never before experienced? When she tries multiple partners and bondage for the first time as a submissive, she believes she’s found the sexual bliss she is looking for, and with a man who not only introduces her to the fineries in life but also cares about her like no man ever has before.
EXCERPT:
The moment Eric left, Catherine stripped to her cotton underwear, and climbed into bed. Horny as hell, she grabbed her vibrator, and slid it in. Being so wet and aroused from making out with Eric, her vibrator had no difficulty sliding inside her. That vibrator was a birthday gift from her first boyfriend, Chris. While the relationship ended badly, especially when he was fired from his instructor job at Quincy because of her, she did get some nice gifts from him. This vibrator being one of them.
Her pussy made slurping sounds as she slid the vibrator back and forth. She pulled it out, and pressed the tip against her clit. She rocked against her bed as she rubbed the tip of the vibrator against her clit. As she pulled on her nipples, she fantasized about Eric’s strong hands against her small, firm breasts. His fingers felt so good as they pinched her hard nipples. With an image of his broad shoulders and firm biceps as his arms encircled her, she flashed onto her memory of Ryan’s admiring gaze. Both Ryan and Eric had the most amazing dimples, and that was her weakness – gorgeous men with dimples. She thought of Ryan eyeing up her legs as she displayed them during their first meeting. That memory drifted into her memory of DJ’s lazy gaze upon her through his thick hair. She enjoyed the attention, and she knew she was going to get more of it before this camp closed for the summer. When would she be lucky enough to get Ryan and DJ in her bed the way she enjoyed Eric? She remembered the feel and taste of Eric’s lips and tongue in her mouth, and with the memory of his hands on her body and his mouth on hers, she came hard against the vibrator. Ramping up the speed with a twist of the controls, her orgasm exploded so hard she doubled over in her bed. She came in hard waves, up and down, rocking her hips in time to her thundering heartbeat. With Eric on her mind, she drifted off to a deep sleep.
BUY LINKS:
Amazon Kindle
http://tinyurl.com/dont-call-me-baby-kindle
AllRomanceeBooks
http://tinyurl.com/dont-call-me-baby-are
Smashwords
http://tinyurl.com/dont-call-me-baby-smashwords
About Elizabeth Black:
She lives in Massachusetts next to the ocean with her husband, son, and four cats. Her articles, erotic books and short stories have been published by Naughty Night’s Press, Romance Divine, Circlet Press, Ravenous Romance, Xcite Books, Sexis Magazine, Alternet, Good Vibrations Magazine, and nuts4chic.
Elizabeth Black – Blog and Web Site
http://elizabethablack.blogspot.com/
Elizabeth Black – Facebook
https://www.facebook.com/elizabethablack
Elizabeth Black – Twitter
http://twitter.com/ElizabethABlack
Elizabeth Black – Amazon Author Page
https://www.amazon.com/author/elizabethblack
Vampires Just Got Hotter in the New Janine Ashbless Novel, Red Grow the Roses
Blurb:
“Maybe you’ll be lucky. Maybe he’s not human. He’ll take you in his arms and you’ll feel his strength – a strength that makes it impossible to fight him. But you’ve already lost the will to resist, that moment he looked into your eyes and showed you all his hunger and his promise. You knew then. You knew that this is what you are for – what we are all for – with our warm beating hearts and our aching sexual needs.
We are for them.”
There are six vampires in the city. Ageless, terrifyingly beautiful and always hungry – not just for blood but for the other pleasures the human body offers. Sadistic chanteuse Estelle; feckless Ben; Roisin, the mirror-ghost; Wakefield, haunted by his own damnation; Naylor, the most feral of them all.
And Reynauld is the Good Shepherd, the one who holds them all in check. But his grip on his own humanity is fading, and when Wakefield accidentally kills a woman and Naylor gets the blame, a power-struggle erupts between the city’s immortal undead.
Red Grow the Roses tells of bloodlust and sexual desire; for vampires the two are indistinguishable. These transgressive, startling stories draw the reader down the darkest and most seductive paths of pleasure – to where the monsters are waiting.
Excerpt
‘I don’t feed from humans,’ Wakefield hissed, trembling.
‘That’s what I heard. I just find it hard to believe.’ Rolling onto her knees, she reached for the discarded rose he’d cut for her. ‘Nasty sharp thorns these things have got,’ she mused, laying the stem across her bare breasts. With a twitch she drew it down, scoring her flesh with half-a-dozen needle-pointed thorns, shuddering as the pain burned through her. Pin-points of blood rose on her pale skin and swelled, a string of rubies decorating the white flesh and the roseate nipples. ‘Ah,’ she groaned.
Robert Wakefield seemed to grow taller; his hard-on bulged. She could taste the coppery tang of her victory.
‘Tell me; have you ever whipped a girl with your roses, Mr Wakefield?’ Lilla began to crawl backwards from him on hands and knees, arse swaying, breasts wobbling. ‘Maybe one of your servants? The parlour maid perhaps? You ever taken a bunch of roses and whipped their tits?’ She put on a country accent for her next words, her voice suddenly breathlessly innocent but at the same time teasing: ‘Oh Mr Wakefield, you wouldn’t be thinking of doing that to a poor innocent girl? I couldn’t bear that sir – it’ll hurt something cruel. You wouldn’t want to ruin a helpless maid, would you, sir? You wouldn’t want that on your conscience?’
Inhumanly swift, he lunged and grabbed the front of her bodice and yanked her up to slam her against one of the wrought-iron pillars. Eagerly Lilla extended her hands over her head, thrusting her breasts out so that he might feed. But he didn’t, not right away. He looked down at her with a face hollow with hunger, and then he took hold of her long drawers at the waist and snapped the drawstring with one tug of his wrists. He tore the damp, clinging cotton from her thighs to bare her sex, and then he tied her wrists with the twisted strips and secured her to a ornamental bracket high on the pillar, hauling her up onto her toes. She said nothing, words robbed from her by anticipation, lips parted about her shallow breaths.
His face mask-like, his eyes burning, he plunged his cold fingers between her thighs and up inside her, breaching the gates of her sex to take the measure of her heat, the slick of juices, the yielding sucking flex of her tight hole. Lilla writhed on his hand, twisting helplessly with each thrust of his wrist, and he watched her breasts jiggle and bounce, their pink points dewed in red. His teeth were so extended now that his upper lip did not hide them.
‘Oh please,’ she gasped. ‘Please – bite me!’
*****
Buy Links:
http://www.mischiefbooks.com/books/red-grow-roses/
http://www.allromanceebooks.com/product-redgrowtheroses-679540-144.htm
Author Bio:
Janine Ashbless is a multi-published author of erotica and erotic romance. Her first collection of erotic fairy, fantasy and paranormal stories, Cruel Enchantment, was published in 2000 by Black Lace. Red Grow the Roses is her sixth novel. Her stories have been published by Spice, Black Lace, Nexus, Xcite, Racy Pages, Cleis, Ellora’s Cave and Samhain, among others. She was Jade Magazine’s Erotic Fiction Writer of the Year 2009. Janine loves goatee beards, ancient ruins, minotaurs, trees, mummies, having her cake and eating it, holidaying in countries with really bad public sewerage, and any movie or TV series featuring men in very few clothes beating hell out of each other. She lives in England.
Author site/blog link:
http://www.janineashbless.com
http://www.janineashbless.blogspot.com
Getting My Hands Dirty
I drive myself crazy writing sometimes. I’m tunnel-visioned, and I don’t always know when to call a halt. I’ve kept my head down for the first three months of this year. I’ve written hard, and long, and lots — plus the PR. But there comes a time when a girl just has to get her hands dirty before she can write another word. This is that time!
My husband and I spent a good chunk of our day working in our veg patch – well our future veg patch. At the moment there are only a few over-wintering cauliflower and broccoli plants remaining, and a strawberry patch sorely in need of cleaning. At the moment the whole of 2012’s veg garden can be contained in two large draining trays and part of one mini greenhouse, all zipped in for extra warmth. But in a few months, my-oh-my, you won’t recognize the place. We’ll have sweet corn higher than our heads, tomato plants ladened with a dozen different varieties from all over the tomato growing world; we’ll have tee-pees of climbing beans and peas, vines of yellow and green courgettes and multiple varieties of brassicas. That’s not even counting the soft fruit and the dwarf root stock apple trees. I know, I know! Now I’m just bragging!
We’ve got trays of seeds planted and sitting on water bottles in the kitchen (our low tech, unorthodox
system to speed up germination.) What has already germinated has had a week or two to grow on in the house and was transplanted today into our mini greenhouses, which are now soaped, scrubbed and sporting new plastic covers. My husband has potted eight large pots of seed potatoes (with our limited space, we grow spuds in pots), and the dreaming and scheming of what will go where is well under way.
As we scrubbed and planted and labelled seed trays, the resident blackbird made short work of any worms that were uncovered as we cleaned the patio and did a bit of weeding in the main bed. He and the Mrs are feeding chicks, so he came and went, each time filling his beak full to overflowing. When he wasn’t hunting and gathering, he was perched in the ash trees above our garden singing loudly just in case any other blackbird should doubt this this nice piece of real estate, where he gets fed currents and meal worms on demand, belongs to him. I hope my timing is good. I hope that by the time the chicks fledge I’ll have large courgette leaves and tee-pees ladened in runner beans for them to scurry about underneath and hide.
The whole back garden is alive. There are three starling nests in the eaves and a nuthatch coming and going on a regular basis, as well as tits and doves and wood pigeons, who brazenly nip at the leaves of the cauliflower plants whenever they feel like it.
My husband has convinced the people who run the canteen at his office to save him their coffee grounds. All winter long, several times a week he came home bearing a large yellow plastic bucket full of coffee grounds, which he spreads over the garden. We joked about the worms being hyped up on caffeine. And I still smile to think about my husband, the very dapper business man, walking to and from his office several times a week carrying a large yellow bucket.
Tonight I feel better. Tonight I feel more like my writerly self again. What is it about
getting my hands in the earth that is so healing? Perhaps it’s a different kind of creativity, a kind in which I’m really only a facilitator. I can make sure the conditions are right. But what it takes for a paper thin, nearly weightless, not much bigger than the head of a pin, tomato seed to grow into a chest-high plant ladened with heavy, meaty, luscious fruit, well that’s something else altogether, and something that astounds me and amazes me every single time it happens. A new season is just beginning. The process is just getting started, and I’m like a kid at Christmas time, just waiting for it all to unfold again.
Shay Briscoe: Artist in Transition
I’m very excited to welcome the talented Shay Briscoe to my site today. Shay is one of the three lovely artists who gave me a very special gift for the launch of my latest novel, Body Temperature and Rising. Shay, along with Fuschia Ayling (who was my guest recently) and Jess Pritchard (who will hopefully be my guest in the near future) volunteered to illustrate three scenes from my novel, three scenes that I planned to read at the launch party. At the time they were exhibiting some of their work at Sh! Portobello. I was elated with their offer, and my guests and I were totally enthralled with the end result! It is a total pleasure to have Shay on my site today to tell us a bit about himself and to share a little of his wonderful work with us. Welcome, Shay!
KD: Have you always known you wanted to be an artist?
SB: I only really got into art around three years ago, upon meeting the lovely Fuschia Ayling and realising that I don’t have to be a good painter to be a good artist. I was a chef for a long time before I started making art, though I knew that cheffing was not the career I wanted. When I discovered my passion for art at the age of twenty-one, I finally knew what I wanted to do with my life!
KD: Tell us a little bit about yourself. Shay.
SB:I grew up in Gloucestershire in a large family. When I was eighteen I began coming
to terms with the fact that I was transgender and slowly took steps to become the boy I should have been born as. I currently study fine art at Kingston University, and I am engaged to fellow artist Fuschia Ayling. I have a very nice ferret called Floppy, and I have serious love for dinosaurs, Greek mythology, playing stupid games on my laptop, cats, trivia and deep sea creatures. It may not come as a surprise after reading this that I have Asperger Syndrome.
KD: Why did you choose to make sexuality the central theme in your artwork?
SB: I don’t think that it was really a choice – it seemed natural for my artwork to center upon something so significant in my life. Making work about my gender is very therapeutic for me. It lets me get out all the stresses of living in a body that doesn’t feel like my own. And also, it means I can hopefully educate others about people like me, against whom there is still a lot of prejudice. Sex is something that we all experience, so it is something that everybody can relate to in some way.
KD: Where do you get your inspiration?
SB:My inspiration comes from everything around me. Random images from the internet, new
stationary, lines from books, funny shaped leaves, television adverts, labels from clothes, children’s toys, song lyrics, going to exhibitions, gawping out of the window, packaging, smells, tastes, textures, so many things! The world in general is a very inspirational place.
KD: What’s the hardest thing about being an artist?
SB: The days where all your creativity seems to have disappeared and you feel like it’ll never come back. That, and the worry that I’ll never make enough money to live!
KD: Who inspires you as an artist?
SB: My favourite artists are Egon Schiele and Yayoi Kusama, I take a lot of inspiration from both. Also, when I read the books of Neil Gaiman (Neverwhere, The Eternals, American Gods) and Paul Stewart and Chris Riddell (The Edge Chronicles), I get a massive urge to get into the studio!
KD: What is the best thing about being an artist?
SB: Being able to do whatever I want and it counting as work! I love that I am allowed to create literally anything, and discover new ways of doing things that I hadn’t thought of before. I like being able to express what I feel inside in ways that I couldn’t using just words.
KD: What are you working on now?
SB: I’m currently developing an idea which will involve a book and possibly a film. I don’t want to say too much yet, but hopefully it will be a success! I’m also making a couple of condom packet pillows, which I’m enjoying greatly.
KD: Future plans?
SB: I want to continue exploring the subjects of gender and sexuality and how they impact upon my life. Further on into the future, my ambition is to return to my love of street culture and open a shop that sells t shirts, designer toys and accessories that I make myself, along with pieces from other artists. Hopefully as well as the shop I’ll be able to exhibit my work in galleries… That’s the long term plan anyway!
Thank you, Shay, for sharing a little of yourself and your work with us, and very best of luck in all that you do!
Where you can find Shay: