Janine Ashbless's Blog, page 137

Thrones of Desire

 
Bloody hell - is that not the most AWESOME cover for an erotica anthology EVER?! I've only just seen it and my heart is still racing. I love it! 
Thrones of Desire, edited by Mitzi Szereto, is out from Cleis Press in September. It includes my story, Of High Renown , which is romantic and full of clanky armour, and all about a knight who tries to be good but does something very bad.
And here's the full title/author lineup for the collection:

Hot as a Dragon's Blood – Eric Del Carlo Of High Renown – Janine Ashbless At the Sorcerer's Command – Kim Knox Silver – Anna Meadows In the Kingdom of Roz – Madeline Moore Key to the Queen's Elixi r – Jo Wu Here There Be Dragons – Ashley Lister Flesh and Stone – Sacchi Green Saints and Heroes – M. H. Crane Escape – Mitzi Szereto Eyekeeper – Aurelia T. Evans The Widow's Man – Nyla Nox Jericho – Megan Arkenberg The Last Sacrifice – Zander Vyne
Mitzi Szereto is the editor of Red Velvet and Absinthe and I think she's an editor not afraid to push the boundaries of erotica. She gives us stories that are challenging, sometimes dark, but are - above all - real stories. If RV&A is anthing to judge by, I cannot wait for this new anthology!

Eyecandy Monday

This is the beautiful, sexy picture that got Harley Moore of eBook Eros into trouble this week.

The whole sorry story is over on her blog. It just demonstrates how messed up some people are when it comes to sex.
:-(

There are times I just want to ... I dunno. Leave the planet, I think. Why can't the human race just grow up?

Write here, write now

 If you haven't seen this,  it probably means you're not on Facebook.Which is, coincidentally, now the second biggest thief of working time in my day, after spider soltaire.
*sigh*

I have, however, managed to drag myself away from it long enough to put up a page of notes for Heart of Flame , over on my website (as usual: main page, find "author's comments" button under the HoF cover). I've tried not to put in any spoilers, so they might not make too much sense unless you've read the book first.
Useful "Buy Heart of Flame at Samhain link" :-)
(Also available on Amazon)

Excerpt - Repaint the Night

 
I think this how vampires see the world.
Oops, anyway, taking a break from those filthy dirty vampires ...  today I'm going to post an excerpt from my short story Repaint the Night , which is out right now in Irresistible: erotica for couples, edited by Rachel Kramer Bussel.*  That's because Irresistible would make a fine Valentine's Day gift for someone, and if you live in the States you have time to order it, if you hurry!
The collection has a great author line-up, which you can find here. All the stories are about established couples proving that it's not just first-time sex that's blistering hot:
This Irresistible read features stories of couples turning their deepest fantasies into reality for uninhibited and imaginative sex. You'll delight in discovering all the exciting erotic possibilities, and ways of getting and staying turned on. Editor Rachel Kramer Bussel notes that the lovers in this daringly romantic anthology are "able to open up in the ways they do is precisely because they have another person to rely on, coax them, challenge them, tease them and seduce them into traveling down a new sexual path. Whether that means outdoor sex, kink, a trip to a strip club or a very sensual massage, we get to see how the layers of trust that have been built up get used to stoke the fire that burns between them."
Repaint the Night is about a woman who has a terrible fear of going outdoors after dark, due to an incident in her past. But on the last evening of a holiday, with the help of her husband, she decides to face her fear...
The first field beyond our garden fence is all grass, left tall and ungrazed, and slopes down to the hedge of tall hawthorn and oak trees at the bottom. Yellow wildflowers grow here and there among the feathery purple seed-heads of the grass. In the dark I can't make out any colors, but I can feel the soft brush of the hip-high grasses through my thin skirt, and just make out the dark line of the path that cuts through that pale pelt. I've got to be careful with my footing here, not like on the mown lawn; I walk close in Callum's footsteps.

There's a picture of this meadow over our bed in the cottage. I recognized the shape of the clustering hills, but there the naturalism ends. The grass is painted in fiery, aching reds and purples, as if it's burning.
That first day here, in the middle of the afternoon, Callum took me in his arms and nuzzled up against me. "I should lay you down here in the meadow," he growled, "and have my wicked way with you. Bring you home all pink and happy and stuck with grass-seeds."

I giggled and pressed up against him, then was impressed to find it was not entirely a joke on his part: there was a semi-hard erection stirring already in his jeans. The spring sunshine, I reasoned; the start of a week off together. The isolation. "I don't think the farmer would appreciate us flattening his hay," I pointed out, as Callum kissed my throat.

"Mmm..." He gripped my hips, pressing both thumbs just above my pubic mound, making me squirm deliciously. "You'd love it, Leah...."

I would love it, he was right. Well, part of me. I was excited by the thought of the freedom and the impropriety, but too much of me was self-conscious. "Don't be silly,' I giggled. 'We're overlooked here."

"What?" He nibbled at my earlobe. "There's no one in miles!"

"There's a bridle-path up the hill there, under the trees. We could be seen." I pushed him away. "Save it for the bedroom, Romeo." 

Callum sighed and bumped me against his crotch. "You're wasting a magnificent opportunity here, you know," he said, his lower lip thrust out boyishly.

I patted his stiffy in consolation, allowing myself a greedy fondle of his ball sac. "And it'll still be magnificent when we get back to the cottage. I promise."

"You expect me to walk that far with this?"

"For this," I answered, pulling his hand down to cup my sex and speaking with my lips brushing against his: "Yeah; you'll walk that far."

"I'd walk to the moon," he admitted.

That was in broad daylight. Now, in the dark and nearly a week later, we stand in the same field and there's no levity, no teasing. Sweat is crawling down the small of my back and my heart is smacking like a clenched fist against my breastbone. The night circles me and I hear its eagerness in my own shallow breathing. It's only Callum's warm grip that's stopping the great dark beast sinking its teeth into me.

For ten years I've been scared of the night. I close the curtains at twilight. I sleep with a bulb on in the hall and the bedroom door wide open. I won't open the front door at all after dark.

Isn't ten years too long?

Isn't it enough, now?


Excerpts from all the stories here Buy at Amazon US : Amazon UK *Wheee! I know something about RKB and Mischief Books! But we're not allowed to say any more about Mischief until the press release comes out. I'm biting my lip, people.

State of Grace

It's Confession Time!

K D Grace, author of the The Pet Shop and The Initiation of Ms Holly , and possesor of the naughtiest gardening mind this decade, asked me to tell The Story Behind the Story of Red Grow the Roses. How did I, of all people, come to write a vampire novel?

It's all here on her blog today! With another excerpt too :-)

Buy Red Grow the Roses at Amazon US : Amazon UK

(and no, you don't need a Kindle! There's a FREE "kindle for PC" (and Android, and iPad, and iPhone) app available just beneath the "buy" button.)

Out now!- Red Grow the Roses

It's here! - Red Grow the Roses is released TODAY on Kindle! My cruel, tender, filthy mutha of a vampire erotica novel is out on the prowl, in the dark, looking for blood...

Here's a excerpt. Wakefield has just something very very bad indeed; something that will detonate an explosion under the city's whole vampire society.  But this is a flashback to when he first became a vampire, back in the 1850s...

He remembers trying to reclaim his life, to pretend that nothing had changed – and the time his model Clara broke a lamp and cut her hand, and he'd come within a hairsbreadth of rape and murder before he even realised what he was doing. He'd fled, out here, to the asylum. It had been easy to purchase a lease upon a suite of the best rooms whose barred windows looked out upon the wild green sea of the rushes, whose heavy door could be bolted from the outside and never opened. He'd refused to see his father after the first visit and the only things that crossed his threshold went on a tray pushed through the flap in the door. Thirst  - an unending burning thirst for warm blood – had pushed him to raving.

He remembers the evening he had a visitor, unannounced. The bolts had grated back to admit a tall man, very well dressed, with a foreign look to his complexion but perfectly well-spoken. He'd explained his name was Reynauld, that he knew all about Wakefield's condition, and that he was here to help. Wakefield, crouched in a corner as he had been most of the day, banging his forehead dully off the plaster for the faint sense of relief it gave him, had been too stunned to realise what was strange about his visitor.

'Gwendolyn my dear – would you join us?' he'd said.

The cell door had opened for the second time and a young woman had walked in, bringing Wakefield scrabbling to his feet. He'd dimly judged her for a servant of some sort, because although her skirts were full she didn't wear a proper crinoline. Her dress was neat and respectable though, her gloves clean, and her large brown eyes had moved to Reynauld with simple, direct trust. When she'd divested herself of her grey bonnet she'd revealed dark hair neatly parted down the centre and drawn back into a bun. But it was only when the scent of her body – that warm, delicious scent part new-baked bread, part sex, part saffron – reached Wakefield and made his mouth run with water, that he'd realised that he hadn't been able to smell Reynauld at all. And though he could faintly hear her heartbeat, it was the only one audible in the room.

'You can't bring her in here,' he'd rasped, choking on fear and hunger and arousal. 'Please. My blood-mania...'

'Lesson One,' Reynauld had answered, unperturbed, signing the girl to sit in an armchair: 'You don't have to harm anyone.'

She'd looked Wakefield full in the face with a faint, complacent smile and slipped the buttons of her fitted woollen jacket. The tiny pearl buttons of the white blouse beneath had followed suit. Under that she was uncorseted and wore no shift: her stunningly big, firm breasts had emerged through the trimming of white lace to reveal for his inspection brown nipples with areolae the size of teacups. For a moment Wakefield had thought that he might actually black out. He'd been faintly aware that he was half-crouched, his erection straining painfully against the fabric of his trousers, his teeth bared in a rictus snarl. If he'd been himself he would have felt utterly ashamed, but as it was the only thing stopping him hurling himself on the girl was the tall cool presence at her side, one hand on  her shoulder. There'd been an indefinable something about Reynauld that chilled the hottest appetite.

'Please, do come and feed. Not the throat – never the throat or the insides of the thighs where the arteries are, never on a joint or over a bone. Your bites are self-sealing unless you strike a major blood-vessel. Choose soft tissue. Her breasts will do very well: she will enjoy it greatly. And she does have magnificent breasts, don't you agree?'

They were breathtaking.

Dazed, nearly drooling, Wakefield had stumbled forward to kneel before her and sink his teeth into one of those irresistible orbs. As the blood flooded his mouth he'd lost all sense of himself and his surroundings, his head full of a black rushing wind, his body – even the red-hot column of his cock – lost somewhere far away. He wasn't aware of anything but the delirious pleasure of the warm liquid in his throat.

It is after all the most primal of instincts: to suck.

Then, slowly, as his overwhelming thirst abated, he'd become aware of his surroundings once more. Aware that the girl was shifting beneath him, moaning sweetly, her hips undulating. Distracted, he'd lifted his head, but as she'd cupped and hefted her bosom he switched immediately to the other breast she offered him so eagerly.

'See,' Reynauld had murmured. 'She's more than willing to suckle you.' Pulling up the girl's many layers of petticoats and skirts, he'd revealed for Wakefield her plump stocking-clad leg, then her glossy pubic bush. She'd been wearing no drawers. 'Stroke her quim.'

He'd obeyed, dizzy with shock, easing his fingers into that pelt to find whorled skin and heat and moisture – slippery as marsh-mud, slippery as oil paint – delving that complex mysterious furrow until she tensed and heaved beneath him, crying out shamelessly in what was obvious even to him as her orgasmic crisis. And he'd tasted it too, in the blood he was sucking from her swollen teat: that first rush of a sharp flavour he was unable to compare to anything else until years later when he first smelled lime zest. The taste of her climax.

As she fell back, gasping and heavy-lidded, he released her breast to look down at her open sex. For the moment his need for blood was slaked and now another appetite demanded satisfaction. 'May I?' he'd asked hoarsely, squeezing the ridge of his trapped erection.

'I think she'd be most disappointed if you didn't,' Reynauld had answered.

So he'd freed his prick and pulled Gwendolyn's unresisting body to the edge of the chair and draping her legs up over his shoulders in order bring his ram to bear on the portals of her citadel. It was almost the first time he'd ploughed a living woman, and after Roisin she'd felt feverishly hot and padded like a cushion, her wet grip wringing his seed from his bulging scrotum in racking spasms of release. She'd climaxed for a second time too, under his assault, and he'd tasted it as he bit her.

'Remember this,' Reynauld had said as Wakefield slumped to his knees on the rug. 'We must bring them pleasure, not terror. We take what we need, but we ourselves are a gift to the living. Immortal guardians who confer our own blessing, in a balance of mutual joy.'

But Wakefield, despite the erection that thrust up unquelled from his loins, had at that moment been feeling nauseous: the same queasiness he'd felt so often after a model left him alone in the studio and he'd finished masturbating ferociously, spurting all over the costumes they'd worn for the sitting until his balls were empty and his head ringing. It was, he imagined, a spiritual nausea. He didn't believe the wonderful vision of the promised land that Reynauld described.

'Who are you, to try to tell me?' he'd groaned. 'I'd like very much to believe you, but I fear I do not, sir. This thing that I am – whatever that is – it is no blessing, but an offence against God Himself and against Nature.'

'Which leads us,' Reynauld had said with a certain relish, unbuttoning his own trousers and easing out into view an engorged member of intimidating proportions, 'to Lesson Two.'


Buy at Amazon US : Amazon UK

Eyecandy Monday

Red Grow the Roses is released TOMORROW, so no apologies for showcasing my muse for alpha-vampire Reynauld. Way back at the dawn of time, when I finished the first draft of this novel, I put up a post showing what all six of my vampires looked like, so if you want a reminder you can find them all here (and yes, "Jason" became "Ben"!).

The shadows whispered as they flowed in Reynauld's wake. He looked down into my face. 'Am I presentable?'

Of course, he couldn't check himself in a mirror. His reflection would be nothing but a blur, as if the glass were warped. I reached up a hand to pull a long blonde hair out of his small beard and studied him critically. Dark beard, dark brows, dark eyes, prominent cheekbones. I burned to kiss his lips but I didn't dare. He'd feel warm to the touch now, I knew, because he'd just fed. 'You look fine.'

'You're nervous.'

'Am I?'

'I can hear your heart, remember.'

I looked down, hoping he wouldn't see the yearning in my eyes. He didn't like neediness in his women. It was one of the reasons I'd stopped joining him in bed so often: I'd been too fond of being bitten and I'd needed to take control of that. 'I'm always nervous on these nights,' said I quite truthfully. 'I don't want you to get hurt.'

A smile escaped his lips on a breath: 'You worry for me, Amanda?' He touched my face, gently, then drew me into his arms to plant a kiss softly on my forehead and then my hair. I was right; his lips were warm. 'How can there be anything to worry about? You'll be there to look after me.'

Not always, thought I. Not forever.
    
Buy at Amazon US : Amazon UK

Shameful Thrills

Books are like buses - they all turn up at once!

On the same day that my vampire novel Red Grow the Roses is due out next week (7th Feb), Mischief Press is also releasing Shameful Thrills: girls who should know better on Kindle.

It contains my short story The Auction , and all I can say is that if every story in the collection is as hot and filthy as that one, it's going to melt your e-reader to slag. I really did not hold back for The Auction . The Mischief editor described it as "uncomfortably arousing" and "very much a raw and unfettered exploration of the thrill of shame."

Heh :-)

Quick summary: BDSM, slave auction, fem-sub, rough.

'We've got ourselves a pretty little copperhead here,' the auctioneer said, taking her elbow and steering her to the front of the stage. His other hand held a sweating beer bottle just as casually. He was a lanky man with a shaved head and tattoos that crawled over every bulge of his muscled arms, and he was miced up so that he didn't have to raise his voice to be heard. 'Looks shy, doesn't she?'

The crowd bayed and jeered.  

She dipped her head, her long hair falling over her face. She couldn't hide it any other way because her elbows were joined by a twist of rope behind her back, leaving her hands free but tethered helplessly low. The tautness of the rope forced her to arch her back and thrust out her tits and ass – just as they wanted.

'First time on the block,' said the auctioneer, grinning. His skin gleamed with sweat. 'Can you see that blush? She's practically a virgin.'  

I'll give you a longer excerpt next week...
Pre-order at Amazon US : Amazon UK

Critics

If you read my guest blog on Negative Reviews over at We Fancy Books, you might remember that I started with a rather bitter quote from Christopher Hampton.

I admit to a weakness for quotes - distilled shots of cleverness and wisdom, like miniatures of flavoured vodka. Today, I thought I'd share some other quotes I've found about critics - literary and otherwise. Enjoy!

"A good review from the critics is just another stay of execution."
Dustin Hoffman (1937-)

"If you are not criticized, you may not be doing much."
Donald H. Rumsfeld (1932 - )

"After all, one knows one's weak points so well, that it's rather bewildering to have the critics overlook them and invent others."
Edith Wharton (1862 - 1937)

"To avoid criticism do nothing, say nothing, be nothing."
Elbert Hubbard (1856 - 1915)

"Do what you feel in your heart to be right - for you'll be criticized anyway. You'll be damned if you do, and damned if you don't."
Eleanor Roosevelt (1884 - 1962)

"Honest criticism is hard to take, particularly from a relative, a friend, an acquaintance, or a stranger."
Franklin P. Jones

"Pay no attention to what the critics say... Remember, a statue has never been set up in honor of a critic!"
Jean Sibelius (1865 - 1957)

"Against criticism a man can neither protest nor defend himself; he must act in spite of it, and then it will gradually yield to him."
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 - 1832)

"Having the critics praise you is like having the hangman say you've got a pretty neck."
Eli Wallach (1915-)

"I never met anybody who said when they were a kid, "I wanna grow up and be a critic.""
Richard Pryor (1940 - 2005)

"People ask for criticism, but they only want praise."
W. Somerset Maugham (1874 - 1965)

"Criticism comes easier than craftsmanship."
Zeuxis (~400 BC), from Pliny the Elder, Natural History

"Don't pay any attention to the critics - don't even ignore them."
Samuel Goldwyn (1879 - 1974)

They don't sparkle

 
Hokay! - *deep breath* - this is it! My latest erotic novel: Red Grow the Roses, available NOW for pre-order! It's all about vampires. Well, no ... it's all about sex and power, and the players are vampires.

It is not romantic. It is not remotely nice. It is not Twilight .

Here's the 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.

Red Grow the Roses is a novel told in series of linked short stories. It's full-on erotica with (count the symbols down the cover!) tales covering group sex, fem-sub, fem-dom, bondage and whipping. (Something for everyone, eh?) There's pain, and there's blood, of course. There's love too, but it's rarely the healthy sort.  

And nobody sparkles.

Red Grow the Roses is out in Kindle format on 7th February, from brand new publisher Mischief. You're going to be hearing a lot more from them in the near future too!

Are you scared yet? I bloody am...