Tag Archives: Janine Ashbless

The Telling of Tales: D.L. King and Friends Read to Me

Ever since Wednesday night’s readings at Sh! with D. L. King and friends, I’ve been thinking about the power of reading stories to each other. I was there to read a bit from one of my own stories, but more importantly I was there to sit back in a roomful of enthralled people and just listen to some of the wonderful authors who have stories in anthologies edited by D. L. King. I couldn’t have asked for more wonderful story-tellers:

Jacqueline Applebee (Where the Girls Are)

Janine Ashbless (Carnal Machines)
Jacqueline Brocker (Under Her Thumb)
Ciara Finn (The Sweetest Kiss)
K. D. Grace (Voyeur Eyes Only)
Remittance Girl (The Sweetest Kiss)
NJ Streitberger (Seductress)

The stories ranged from fem dom to vampire to steam punk. There was even a bit of mythology and voyeurism thrown in for good measure. It was a tremendous pleasure to see D.L. King again, and I felt very honoured to be included to read with some of my heroes in the world of erotica. I was literally transported by each story. The thing is, not only were the stories outrageously sexy and sensual, as you’d expect, but the stories were beautifully woven to pull in the listeners, to allow them to get lost in the tale. I was completely captivated.

Since Wednesday night, I’ve been thinking about how much I love being read to, thinking about why there’s so much more magic in a story read out loud. Some of my earliest memories are of sitting on my mother’s lap while she read to me. I didn’t care what she read. It was the sound of her voice, the way she made the characters come alive, the way the story made me wonder and think and try to picture in my little-girl head a world so much bigger than the Wyoming lumber camp we were living in at the time, a place where the Swiss Family Robinson were surviving and thriving on their lost island, a place where kids, not much older than I, rode gorgeous black horses and solved scary crimes and chased spooky ghosts.

When my mother wasn’t reading to me, my grandfather, who lived with us, was telling stories of his youth, of near-misses with rattle snakes, of catching the biggest catfish ever and of the horse that no one but he could tame. And my dad had his own tales to tell, of practical jokes played on siblings, of dogs that bit, of destructive tornados.

My family knew the magic of story, and they shared that magic with me. The magic of a good story, the magic that compelled our ancestors to sit around a banked fire and listen to the histories of the tribe, listen to the tales of the family, listen to the myths and folk lore collected over generations is a living, breathing magic that still makes my heart race when I think about it.

Unlike our ancestors, we have it all written down now. We have access to a good story anytime. And yet the magic is never more powerful than when the story is read out loud. The power of story spoken goes bone deep and touches parts of us that are much older than our physical selves, parts of us that have roots around campfires sat beneath a sky full of stars.

Wednesday night, we all sat in the bright pink glow of Sh! basement, sipping fizz and listening to sexy tales, tales that offered yet another layer of magic, the magic and the mystery and the celebration of human sexuality told in a thousand creative ways in a thousand intricately woven tales. We listened to stories of what moves us, what makes us squirm, what transports us beyond ourselves while at the same time connects us most deeply to our own flesh.

Perhaps I’m just shamelessly navel-gazing this morning, waiting for my coffee to kick in, but the D.L. King/Sh! version of gathering around the ancestral hearth to listen to stories being shared made me think again about those things that connect us most deeply to our humanity, the sharing of story by word of mouth and the celebration of our sexuality. It seems to me that sex and story go hand in hand, and the community that celebrates both is a community I’m very proud to belong to.

 

Fairy Tale Filth and Lush Illustrations: Janine Ashbless Shares the Story Behind Named and Shamed

It’s a pleasure to be here on your blog, K D!

I thought I’d talk a bit about Tansy, the heroine of my filthy fairytale novel Named and Shamed.

Here’s the backcover blurb:

Once upon a time, a naughty girl called Tansy stole a very precious manuscript from a kindly antiquarian. But all of the world’s ancient and powerful magic, lost for centuries, has returned…and now there is much more at stake than a few sheets of parchment!

Thus begins a rude and rugged fairytale the likes of which you NEVER read when you were little! Poor Tansy is led though the most pleasurable trials and the most shameful tribulations as her quest unfolds before her. Orgasmic joy and abject humiliation are laid upon Tansy in equal measure as she straddles the two worlds of magic and man.

And this is how she describes herself:

“Most men get no further than some reference to Amazons as they paw at me, because at six feet tall and with a rack like this I can’t help but invite the comparison. I’ll never be skinny but I keep active, which means I end up with a taut waist, but I’m still plenty curvy in other places. Add to that my red hair — not an insipid ginger but ferociously bright metallic waves — and pale skin that explodes into freckles all over my shoulders and arms at the first touch of summer, and I get a lot of attention from a certain type of guy. Not necessarily the sort of guy I want, to be honest. Pretty much every man who goes for me has this submission fantasy and they want me to wrestle them to the floor or crack a whip over their ass. Goddamn. That’s not my preference. I want someone who can look me in the eye and not be intimidated. I want a guy who can make me feel overwhelmed.”

Tansy isn’t anything like my previous female protagonists. When I started writing this book I was told to aim at a default male readership – whereas normally I write for publishers whose readership is at least nominally female. So I had to give this some thought. Named and Shamed is a BDSM novel, and Tansy spends the plot discovering quite how deep her submissive kink goes, and how much punishment and humiliation she can take. In a normal stroke-novel it’d be easy to make her a blank cipher, a passive innocent who is used as a pawn by the dominants.

But that wouldn’t work for my fairytale plot. Tansy is not at all passive. She’s a woman on quest. She’s out to save herself, and her friend and lovers. She has to be intelligent and decisive and incredibly courageous, or else she’s going to get nowhere. She can’t be a cipher. And yet she has to enjoy the most extreme and challenging submission: whippings, bondage, public humiliation, and rough sex with two, three, or more (including some monstrously non-human). Stuff that, let’s face it, most normal people couldn’t cope with.

So I’m not saying Tansy is a realistic female character. Far from it: she’s my porn ideal of what a woman should be like. She loves sex, of course. But more than that, she’s got no emotional baggage. Despite a kink for public degradation, she’s not messed up, or insecure, or needy. If she makes a mistake and screws things up – which she certainly does – she always takes responsibility for fixing things afterwards. Kindly, and intensely protective of her cousin Gail, she is quite capable of love, but she has no emotional dependence on anyone else for her own validation. She’s completely self-actualized. She can do almost anything – and have almost anything done to her – and it doesn’t cause any damage to her ego, any loss of self-worth.

“A pleasure to meet you, Tansy.” The Gaffer lifted his gaze from an unabashed consideration of my boobs and looked me in the eye. Without blinking, he added. “You’ve done well for yourself there boy. She’s pretty. Magnificent knockers.”

It was a test, of sorts. A calculated slap in the face, to see how I would react. I flushed and giggled, dropping my gaze coyly. I could feel my pussy swelling at the compliment. Because it was a compliment — degrading and crude and offensive, it was still an acknowledgement of my desirability by the most important man in the room. I got it. In times of trouble, scared people look for leaders. It just so happens that the sort of guy who wants to be a leader is usually a tool of the first order, but that doesn’t matter to them. Even if he chooses to impose some sort of weird elder-tree cult it doesn’t matter, as long as he leads. I knew that with a single word from this man I could be on my knees in this back bar, tugging open his flies and sucking his cock while he sipped his pint with a complacent smirk and everyone looked  on.

I wet my lips.

Her resilience, both physical and mental, is off the scale. She regrets nothing, and she can’t be broken – at least, not for more than a night.

It’s not a bad ideal. I admire her, actually.

Though I’ve got to admit I never met a woman like her.

😉

xxx

Janine

www.janineashbless.blogspot.com

http://sweetmeatspress.com/

Buy links:

http://1eroticaebooks.com/erotica/named-and-shamed/prod_2896.html

http://1placeforromance.com/erotica/named-and-shamed/prod_7834.html

These e-versions include 19 illustrations by John LaChatte, as does the paperback:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Named-Shamed-Janine-Ashbless/dp/0957003781/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1337623893&sr=1-3

http://www.amazon.com/Named-Shamed-Janine-Ashbless/dp/0957003781/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1337623953&sr=1-1

Named and Shamed is also available on Kindle, but without interior illustrations.

We’re The New Naughty Novelists

The Daily ExpressKD Grace, 50, lives in Surrey with her husband Raymond, 51, a chemical engineer. They don’t have any children. Her latest novella Surrogates is available on Amazon and www.mischief.com.

Erotic writing is like any other. You simply do your research and use your imagination. Just because a story features a threesome or a woman having an affair with her gardener doesn’t mean that’s what I’m up to myself. There’s nothing less glamorous than my job writing erotica. I sit at the dining table in my trainers and tracksuit with not a pair of stockings in sight.

My husband loves what I do and vetoes my male characters to make sure I get the tone right. Even before I did this for a job we couldn’t have spent more time thinking about sex than we already do. Yet being an erotic author has made me aware that we’re the exception and that lots of people don’t make sex a priority in their relationships.

Although I don’t write about my own experiences I do pay homage in my novels to my love of sex outdoors – the fear of being caught makes it far more exciting. Being outside is far more atmospheric than posh hotels or bedrooms.

Read the entire article at Express.co.uk.

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.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B006PW46O8/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=lucyfelthouse-21&linkCode=as2&camp=1634&creative=19450&creativeASIN=B006PW46O8

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B006PW46O8/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=lucyfelt-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B006PW46O8

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

 

Janine Ashbless Tells the Story Behind Red Grow the Roses

It’s my pleasure to welcome the amazing Janine Ashbless to my site today to share with us the story behind her sizzling, intense new vampire novel, Red Grow the Roses. Welcome, Janine. Do tell!

Hi KD – how great is it to be here on your blog!

You asked me for the story-behind-the-story of Red Grow the Roses, my new vampire-erotica novel. So here goes…

I wrote Red Grow the Roses because I was asked to. I was working for Black Lace at the time, and I was just happily starting on a new book of short stories, when the editor mentioned to me that he wanted only one paranormal title for 2010, that it “has to be vamps,” and did I want to write it?

My first thought, to be honest, was, “Me? You’ve got the wrong person!” I had written one vampire short for BL, but I’m actually on record telling the world I didn’t like vampires (This was in the days before True Blood, you have to remember. I’m now a huge fan of True Blood. I am not a huge fan of Twilight):

“Vampires do nothing for me. I mean – I am happy with them as predators, or as vehicles for introducing dominance and/or a little necrophilia to an erotic story; it’s when the author wants to use them as characters that my eyes glaze over. Why? It’s epitomised by a montage scene in Interview with a Vampire where the years pass over New Orleans. In these centuries human beings with their pitiful short lives have created beautiful art and architecture, established complex societies and communities, turned swampland into a thriving city. What have the vampires, with their eternal youth and their physical superiority and their accumulated experience, achieved? Well, they’ve killed some people and drunk absinthe. And one of them plays the piano a bit. Boring, boring bastards.” (From the Lust Bites blog)

But I said “Yes”. And then I sat down and thought about how I could do it. How to get a handle on vampire characters. How to write this from the heart and the head and the groin.

• I didn’t want to do a Laurell K Hamilton rehash.

• I didn’t want to write “human-girl-falls-for-immortal-vampire-Dom-and-gets-turned”. That’s been done too often before. (And, it turns out, after.)

• In Bram Stoker’s Dracula, there’s a real sense of spiritual horror about the vampire. He’s genuinely uncanny and disturbing. He’s dead. He’s cut off not just from human society, but from the grace of God. He has charisma, but the prospect of being turned by him is terrible. How could I recapture that sense of disquiet, for a readership that no longer automatically believes in God, and thinks that being immortal and super-powered sounds pretty cool, really?

• What I really wanted to write was short stories. I think erotica (though not romance) works best, for me, in short story form. That way you can have variety of characters and situations and kinks. And the poor reader doesn’t have to read the book at one sitting, and end up with wrist-cramp, just to get to the next bit of plot.

So, I thought, I’d write a book of short stories. Each would stand alone. Each would have a different protagonist and a different writing style. Each would feature a vampire, and together they’d add up to a single overarching storyline. They’d almost all be written from the point of view of the human beings whose lives are touched (and sometimes wrecked) by something both horrific and seductive. And I’d make it really bad to become a vampire, because yes they’re powerful and immortal – but as they get older, not only do they become more magical, but they lose their minds and their resemblance to humanity. The oldest vampire in RGtR is nearly incorporeal; she drifts about in mirror glass and other reflective surfaces, and is more like a predatory ghost than anything else.

How to tie the different stories together? Well, I’d do what I’d wanted for many years and structure it around the enigmatic folk song Green Grow the Rushes. That song creeps me out even before I start imagining what it references. You know the one:

I’ll sing you Ten-O,
Green grow the rushes-O!
What is your Ten-O?
Ten for the Ten Commandments:
Nine for the Nine Bright Shiners:
Eight for the April Rainers:
Seven for the Seven Stars in the Sky:
Six for the Six Proud Walkers:
Five for the Symbols at your Door:
Four for the Gospel Makers:
Three, Three the Rivals:
Two, Two the Lily-White Boys, clothed all in green-O.
One is One and all alone
And ever more shall be so.

Each line would get a relevant story. That’d make it a real challenge to write! And I’d call it “Red Grow the Roses.”

The whole concept came to me in a feverish rush. After that it was just a case of filling in the blanks (like: how many vampires, what would make each one stand out from the rest, what sexual themes did I want to cover?).

So that’s what it is. Eleven different short stories, with points of view ranging across male and female, innocent to knowing to bitter; written in first second or third person; each narrative shedding light upon the others. One is a fairy tale. One is a romance. One is hardcore female humiliation. One is brutal male-sub. One is all Victorian Gothic corporal punishment. One is themed entirely around the names of rose cultivars.

Black Lace stopped publishing just before I finished writing this book. It would have been too long and too offbeat for them anyway, I suspect! (I turned down another publisher later because I was told to cut out the backstory between sex scenes). But now Red Grow the Roses has found a home with new publisher Mischief – and hopefully on many a Kindle.

It’s my scary, bloody, dangerous pride-and-joy.

xxx
Janine Ashbless

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:

‘Oh, Doug. Is that how you ended up in the Church?’

‘I thought that if anyone knew about these things, if anyone had the answers, it had to be them.’

Unable to comfort him, she leaned in and kissed his lips softly. She was surprised and gratified when he took her hand and guided it to his groin, back to his erect cock.

‘Cerri,’ he mumbled, kissing her deeper. His hard-on jumped under her fingers, giving no sign of flagging, no sign that he’d already emptied all chambers. Uneasiness stirred in the back of her mind even as she ached to pull him into her. He’d stayed stiff as a pole all the way through his story.

The nasty suspicion, once formed, grew to monstrous proportions. Pushing him back, Cerri bent for a closer look. And there it was: yes. On the underside of his cock, near the base: two dints in the flesh, one a little higher than the other. Puncture-marks. ‘Fuck,’ she said hoarsely: ‘You’ve been bitten.’

‘What? No, I -’

‘You’ve been bitten already.’ She stared into Doug’s uncomprehending eyes, her voice rising. ‘He’s already had a piece of you!’

‘But I haven’t – I don’t – When?’

‘This afternoon,’ said a silky voice behind them. ‘Funnily enough, I don’t usually feel hungry during the day, but you were just so fucking sweet and irresistible. And the look on your face…’ Cerri scrambled round and saw the speaker, the vampire Naylor: beautiful, glittering and jagged as razor-wire. He was nested in the angle of the landing ceiling, arms spread like a blasphemous crucifix, clinging to the plaster by a network of dark tendrils that emerged from his flesh like cobweb, melding him with the shadows. ‘Rather like that look now,’ he finished with a ghastly smirk.

She knew she hadn’t seen him until that moment. She knew they’d been through every room of the house and if he’d been there he couldn’t have remained hidden. Not if he were human, anyway. ‘You were in the house all the time,’ she said, feeling sick. ‘We didn’t seal you out. You were already here.’

‘Uhuh. I’ve been here since last night. Not as clever as you think, are you girly?’ He slithered down from his impossible perch and landing on the carpet lightly, the shadow-tendrils hissing as they dissolved. Doug scrambled to his feet, yanking up his trousers and holding them with one hand. The other one sketched a cross in the air.

‘In Jesus’ name -’

‘Didn’t work last time, won’t work this. You’ve too many doubts, little God-botherer. Plus,’ he added acidly, ‘I think the fact you’ve just hosed your scuzz all over your witch girlfriend’s tits might count against you. Pretty impressive, by the way – the spunk-show, I mean. And,’ he admitted with a long hard glance at Cerri, ‘the tits. I’d like to bite them off.’

‘Don’t you touch her!’ Doug barked. Cerri came up behind him and put her hand on the small of his back.

‘You should go, Naylor. You’ll only be making trouble for yourself.’

He tilted his head, an odd smile dancing in his eyes. ‘I should be angry with you, witch-bitch. You get in my way. You’ve gone and spoiled my dinner.’ His eyes, green as poison, narrowed as they flicked back to Doug. ‘But you know what? I’m not angry. You two just went and told me a lovely story. The most interesting story I’ve heard in years. And that’s why I’m going to play Mr Nice.’

Buy links:

http://www.amazon.com/Red-Grow-the-Roses-ebook/dp/B006PW46O8/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1328179252&sr=1-1

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Red-Grow-the-Roses-ebook/dp/B006PW46O8/ref=sr_1_10?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1328098712&sr=1-10

Personal links:

www.janineashbless.blogspot.com

www.janineashbless.com