Janine Ashbless's Blog, page 122

Eyecandy Monday

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Yeah yeah yeah ... this is not quite my usual brand of eyecandy for a Monday. But Mischief Books are officially launching new covers for most of their e-books this week, and in my opinion they are WHOLE lot better. I love my new cover!

This is the old cover for Red Grow the Roses , by the way:



You can do that with e-books. You can relaunch a title looking sharper, more up-to-date, or more mainstream whenever market conditions demand.
(Guess which market phenomenon prompted this lot, heh?)

Here's the old cover for Underworlds , and the new more dark-romancey version:


Buy at Amazon US : Amazon UK

Old cover for The Visitor , and the new:

Buy at Amazon US : Amazon UK


Old cover for Shameful Thrills , and the new:


Buy at Amazon US : Amazon UK
Old cover for Exposure , and the new:

Buy at Amazon US : Amazon UK

It may seem trivial (and often all about font) but the fact is that people ARE drawn to books by their covers. A book that looks tacky, old-fashioned, aimed at somebody else entirely, or so cheap that clearly even the publisher didn't give a damn ... it's never going to sell, no matter how great the contents.

Yes, even when it's on a Kindle.

After all, there are millions of books out there ... readers have to pick somehow.

Why?

:-)

DL King and Friends: public reading!

US editor D. L. King is over in Britain this month, and (assuming she didn't get swept out to sea at the  Blackpool reading last night) will be battling through rain and wind to head up a public reading in London next week:

28th November, 6.30 for 7pm start, at Sh! Women’s Erotic Emporium, 57 Hoxton Square, London, N1 6PB 
She's gathered some of the authors from her anthologies.  The lineup is:

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

You can read an excerpt from my steampunk story The Servant Question (which is, unusually for me, both filthy and extremely silly humorous) here.

Everyone welcome (guys, bring a gal-pal) - full details here but please book places ahead because although the Hoxton shop is a LOT bigger than  the Portobello one, space is still limited :-)

There's a small charge but there will be CUPCAKES  and CHAMPAGNE too! And we will sign stuff and chat and look flustered the way writers do when caught out in public. All in the setting of London's most fabulously female-friendly erotic shop.

Buy Carnal Machines at Amazon US : Amazon UK

My Next Big Thing!

Time for a Revelation!

John Martin (1789-1854): The Great Day of His Wrath
Ahem. I'm so sorry. Can't resist the pun. And I am a bit over-excited :-)
Last week, reviewer Angie Dobson of Love, Romances and More poked me into taking part in a bloghop on the theme of "The Next Big Thing." She gave me some questions to answer, and I thought it an excellent opportunity to tell you about the contract I've just signed. I'm writing a novel all about angels, Nephilim, and war in Heaven!

(And steamy passion too, of course.)

What is the working title of your book?

The Book of the Watchers 1: Cover Him With Darkness


Where did the idea come from for the book?

I wrote a short story, Cover Him With Darkness (excerpt here), which was published in Red Velvet and Absinthe (edited by Mitzi Szereto) last year. This July Brenda Knight of Cleis Press got in touch with me, saying, “I wondered if you would be at all interested in the possibility of expanding a story … I have read it again and again…”

Cover Him With Darkness is a story full of unanswered questions: a young woman falls in love with a prisoner her family have guarded for thousands of years, hidden in a cave in the mountains of Eastern Europe. Is he a Greek titan? A Scandinavian god? A Biblical fallen angel? Is he good or evil? Why must he be kept enchained in darkness? What will happen to the world if he’s loosed?

Brenda asked me if I could carry on from the short and make it into a novel. I said, “Well, it depends who the prisoner is. If he’s one thing, his continuing story will make a novel. If he’s another – well, the repercussions of him being freed are so massive and so dreadful, that it’d be better as a trilogy.”

I wrote proposals for both. Brenda leapt at the idea of the trilogy. Which means that my hero – well, anti-hero, because I promise you he’s not going to be all sunshine and puppies after being tormented for thousands of years – is one of the fallen angels from Genesis.

“When man began to multiply on the face of the land and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that the daughters of man were attractive. And they took as their wives any they chose.  The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of man and they bore children to them. These were the mighty men who were of old, the men of renown.”  (Genesis 6:1-2,4)

What genre does your book fall under?

Dark romance … with lashings of religious conspiracy and a whole lot of heresy. Let's be clear: this is not one of my hardcore erotica books. It's going to be more akin (in heat level) to Heart of Flame , but darker in tone.

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

“Twilight meets The Da Vinci Code.”
(Oh eeeeeeeeeek. Frankly, that’s enough to make any writer feel faint.)


Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

It’s going to be published by Cleis Press. I’m delivering the manuscript by August 2013.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

You do the math … this is actually the first time I’ve been contracted (and paid) for a book I haven’t written yet! Yeah ... I'm scared. But incredibly excited too!

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

One of my heroes could be played by Tom Wlaschiha  (seen recently in Game of Thrones)
He’s the mortal guy fighting for my heroine’s soul.


Milja, my East European heroine, might be played by Olga Kurylenko (seen in Quantum of Solace)



As for my angelic/demonic anti-hero, it’d have to be someone capable of looking really wicked. Aidan Turner? Richard Armitage? (both in The Hobbit) Ian Somerhalder? (Vampire Diaries)


But I’m not sure yet. My sexy heroes are usually dark-haired. I’m seriously thinking of making this one a burning bloody redhead.


Who or What inspired you to write this story?

The original story was written for a standard anthology call. But it was just one of those tales that  seemed to write itself – it only took a couple of days, I was so inspired. I started with the mental image of a dangerous male prisoner being tended to by a very innocent young woman, and then just pursued the mythological possibilities from there.

“Bind Azazel hand and foot and cast him into the darkness. And lay upon him rough and jagged rocks, and cover him with darkness, that he may remain there forever.” (The Book of Enoch)

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

Fallen angels. Fallen Angels! How much meaner and sexier can you get? Also, by volume three . . .  I think we’ll actually be looking at the end of the world.
:-)



It's a bloghop, so now it's my turn to poke some of my favourite authors! I've sent them the same questions and they will be answering them next week.

Jennifer Denys - jennifer-denys.blogspot.co.uk/
Shanna Germain - http://shannagermain2.wordpress.com/b...
Kay Jaybee -  http://kayjaybee.me.uk/
Kristina Lloyd - http://kristinalloyd.wordpress.com/

Eyecandy Monday - Angels

 
I've a particular reason for this week's Eyecandy theme. BIG news! All will be revealed on WEDNESDAY!




One guy ... there are guy-angel pics out there, but I tend to find them ... not to my taste.

All My Life

I blame Dr Mosh for this one being in my head all week.
DONE, DONE - AND I'M ONTO THE NEXT ONE

Or maybe it's just the state of my writing. I'm on a set of deadlines until August 2013. Of which, more later this week...

Still, it's better than the alternative!

P.S: Dave Grohl speaks:
"I'm very fond of giving oral sex to women. It's a pleasure-giving experience - giving someone something that they'll remember for the rest of their lives, and if you do it right they will."

What a guy :-)

The Dark Arts

TRIGGER WARNING: sex and death and Victorian misogyny


I often post about Victorian paintings, and I'm delighted every time I come across another example of sexuality, kinkiness or downright perversion creeping into the respectable world of the fine arts. This sneakiness is a source of delight and much head-scratching for me (Is it unconscious? Is it rank hypocrisy? Is it deliberate subversion? Is it pure capitalist opportunism?).

Ernest Normand (1859-1923): The Bitter Draught of Slavery[click to expand pictures]

But while choosing another Orientalist picture to share last week, I was reminded that I have several examples on file of pictures that I've deliberately avoided posting in the past, because they actually step over the boundary of Kinkdom into areas that are, to my mind, genuinely disturbing. I'm not talking about the "slave market" subgenre of paintings like the one above, which is certainly predicated on what we would now recognise as BDSM leanings in the prospective viewer/purchaser.

I'm not even talking about mere depictions of dead bodies, as here:

George Frederic Watts (1817-1904): Found Drowned(I think this would have been intended to provoke feelings of pity, and raise awareness of grim social realities, even though it looks romanticised to us. "Found Drowned" is about a very specific form of suicide. Self-harm, like all forms of human behaviour, conforms to societal templates, and at that time a young woman throwing herself into the Thames would almost certainly have done it because of sexual disgrace - she's fallen pregnant out of wedlock, and all viewers of the painting would understand that.)

But there are paintings, particularly by the Orientalists, that I keep tucked away in a file tastefully titled "Victorian Snuff."

Here's one.

Z Rozkazu: On the orders of the Padishah (1881) It looks at first like a rather beautiful reclining nude on an oriental divan. Take a closer look and you can see that the woman - a member of the padishah's harem, clearly - has been strangled with a red silk cord. In her death throes she's clawed at the cushions and knocked over an occasional table. This isn't social commentary: this is necrophilia.

And again:

Theodore Jacques Ralli (1852-1909): Ah! Jalouse Entre les JalousesThe murderer this time is a woman. One harem resident has had a violent fight with her rival - there goes the occasional table again - and put her in her place for good. She now contemplates the scene, along with the viewer. 

And if you are feeling particularly sadistic:

Ferencz-Franz Eisenhut: Before the Punishment (1890)Two concubines lie naked in the stocks, on a beautifully depicted carpet, awaiting punishment for some undefined (and probably arbitrary) transgression. What that punishment will entail is strongly implied by the guard behind them, busy oiling his sword, and the spread sheet beneath their heads. The titilation of this painting lies in the emphatic sexuality of the women, and their utter helplessness before the murderous whim of their master.

But don't think it's always women who end up dead:

Jean-Leon Gerome (1824-1904) : The Heads of the Rebel Beys at the Mosque of El-Hasanein, Cairo.
Admittedly, these male corpses aren't sexualised. That would be "deviant," after all ...

Is it just a tad ironic that respectable upper-class Westerners should choose to express their disapproval of "oriental cruelty" by hanging fabulously attractive pictures of it in their homes?

But hey, I'm a big fan of irony.

Paperback writer

And those are my author copies of The King's Viper , published 2011 as an e-book and now available as a paperback!

This means that all but one of my published books (ARE YOU LISTENING, HARPERCOLLINS?) are now out in Glorious Luxury Dead Tree Version. This makes me incredibly happy - I am very fond of dead tree products.

Yes, I know. I know that e-publishing is the future.  I know that it is the very-near-future-in-fact-face-it-the Right-Now of the erotica genre. "Shelves and print don't matter anymore," I was told last week by someone with their finger on the pulse.
I'm sorry ... but I can't help it. It just doesn't seem real until I can hold it in my hands.

Maybe I've watched too many archaeology programmes on TV and can't buy into a scenario unless there is physical evidence. Maybe somewhere at the back of my mind is a picture of future people picking over the ruins of our civilisation and finding the buried remains of the British Library (or the Library of Congress). I want the future alien people in their silver tutus and their slinky leotards to be able to count up the dusty volumes of my books and say "Ah - Janine Ashbless. She wrote..." and get the number right.

It's not much to ask ...
;-)

Eyecandy Monday

Life is a cabaret...
*Very Happy Mood!*

I went to my first ever burlesque show this weekend - staged as part of this national tour - and thoroughly enjoyed it. Burlesque is stripping, there's no two ways about it. But it's "artistic" stripping - with fancy costumes (some of which I'd LOVE to own), humourous commentary, fine singing acts .... and circus performance too. The biggest ovation of the night went to the hula-hoop act, which was breathtaking.

The other thing I liked was that the women preforming displayed a range of body-shapes which were, for want of a better way of putting it, "real." Curvy thighs, big bums, breasts of various sizes (all of them untouched by silicone). And all of them deployed sexily!  It was, from the viewpoint of female audience members who weren't necessarily there for purely lecherous purposes, cheering and revelatory and empowering. (The audience, by the way, was skewed toward the female.)

And tassel-dancing just makes me laugh :-)

No word of a lie

Probably the single most common error in erotic writing, judging by my experience of editing.
;-)