Sakura Skye's Blog, page 3

What’s Good, 2016?!?

I hate resolutions so I won’t make any. What I will do is follow some really good advice (watch the video below) and set short term goals to reach an overarching goal for my 2016 New Year.

I already have a writing schedule for the next 6 weeks plotted out. I plan to stick to it. If I manage to do that then I should be able to meet my other, fiscal goals. I want to be more diligent about blogging and getting in touch with my readers. I have a tendency to go off the reservation a lot. So I have added blogging time to my writing schedule (which I did not do before). Also, ta-dah, gym time. I keep having little fits of regular gym attendance but nothing that sticks. So I have charted out shorter workouts at regular intervals that I know I can make, assuming I actually got any writing done.  And best of all…REST. Yes, I planned whole days with no writing or blogging or anything at all. Why? because It beats the hell out of being burned out and crabby.

If I stick to my guns for the next 6 weeks I should be well on my way to completing the 9 (yes, nine) novellas I have planned for this year. The projects in the works for January are

The Last Kiss: A M/M Romance
Tokyo Heat: An AMBW Romance

So wait for it! And I am wishing you all a very happy and successful 2016!

 

It Is Finally Here

I have officially “pulled the trigger” on this and hit the “publish” button on all of the major retailers. As always, I am a nervous wreck. I always feel like it’s not good enough, but if I don’t take a leap of faith and jump I will NEVER release anything. I am not Shakespeare and somehow only his prose seem “good enough”, but I did my best.

So this is my shameless begging. Please Read, Rate and Review my work! You can read a preview HERE. While you are there you can find links to my book in all of your favorite ebook retailers (Amazon, Nook, Kobo and Apple). As a writer, the best thing you can do for us is to rate and review us. So, please take the time to do so.

The $0.99 price tag is a LIMITED TIME offer, so PLEASE take advantage of it. Discovered picks up a few months after Desired and takes you on a fast-paced ride right until the end. You even get a sneak peak at Devoured, book three, and The Last Kiss, due out at the end of January! I’m a busy beaver!

If you haven’t read Desired yet you can read it for free HERE.

Thanks in advance to all of those who have supported me

 

 

3 Days Until Discovered Is Available

Consider it as my New Year’s gift to you. In three days I will be releasing  Discovered, my follow up novella to Desired. It picks up a few months after the end of Desired and takes you for a fast-paced ride as Leon and Ryder discover (wink, wink) that things are not as they seem in Black Creek and taking care of the pack may mean losing each other forever. No spoilers, but I will say that the book ends on a hopeful note, and I am already hard at work on the final (maybe) installment, Devoured.

For a limited time, Discovered will be $0.99 and available in all of the major online stores (Amazon, Kobo, Nook, iBooks).

Be sure to pick it up at the introductory price and leave me a review. Authors love that kind of thing. Desired, the first book in the series is FREE and available HERE, if you haven’t read it already. Please like it and review it.

I am literally itching to hit publish on this thing so, be kind, and thank you all for showing any interest whatsoever in my ramblings and my work.

Sex-spiration or How Tumblr Saved My Gay Love Life

AS I write this I am avoiding a rewrite on the final love scene of my next M/M romance Discovered. I am not avoiding it because it is so hideously bad that I am physically averse to reading it. Not at all. I am avoiding it because I am a writer, and despite all of our best intentions, we often avoid doing the very thing we need to do by doing something else that is similar but still doesn’t get the job done. But I digress…

When I started out writing fan fiction I did not write explicit scenes. I would write enough to let you know what was about to happen and then let the  reader fill in the blanks, picking up the story during the afterglow. It seemed like a safe way to go since I knew NOTHING about gay sex.

I have had enough trouble understanding my own body and what the bits and bobbles do without concerning myself with how two men make love. And while I have never found the idea of two men in bed horrifying, I was always happy to let the two (or three) parties concerned figure out all of the details without me.

Now I know some of you are thinking…PORN. Problem solved, right?

Did I mention that in real life I am actually a bit conservative? I am not a huge fan of porn at all. I have some issues with the industry as a whole and I do believe porn addiction (like video game addiction) is a real thing. So, like cigarettes, I just say no. Besides, try explaining your new fascination with butt plugs and anal lube to your friends over a mochaccino and let me know how that goes.

So I was listening to this interview with an erotica author who said that she got a lot of her inspiration from Tumblr. At the time, I had no real idea what Tumblr was or if it was just the new place on the internet where all the cool kids hung out. But I like to think I’m the kind of person who tries anything once. So I did. I turned the “adult content” filter off and whoa nelly. Did I get an education…and a lot of porn.

Lots and lots of porn…as in OMG I can’t believe there is so much porn!

Needless to say, I figured it out and with the help of some very informative YouTube videos on  “safety and maintenance”, the rest has been history. And by history I mean a series of commercially viable stories that I will never show to my family or friends because then I have to explain how I know so much about things like anal sex and fetish gear.

So…back to writing that scene I was avoiding. I hope you find it as much fun to read as I did to write. Be on the look out for Discovered, Book Two in the Black Creek Pack series in January. Sign up Here to get an email every time a new book drops from me.

 

5 Movies To Watch On Christmas

Happy Holidays…whatever you may be celebrating this season.

thenerdsofcolor

Finding something decent to watch on Christmas can often be a challenge. Reruns have no appeal, neither do cheesy holiday specials, and you probably couldn’t care less about sports.

Fear not. The following are five film suggestions that are appropriate not only for Christmas but basically any day ending in ‘y.’

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Everybody Dies or Why I Love Dr. Who & Hate Game of Thrones

Death is part of life, even fictional life.

That isn’t to say that we are always happy to see them go. Sometimes characters move us, inspire us, and are taken from us in a way that makes the truth of their “life” real for us. Sometimes the death of a character is the catalyst for the rest of the plot. Who could imagine the Hunger Games without the death of Rue?  And sometimes the death of a character is the product of lazy writing, where the writers/authors have written themselves into a proverbial corner and can’t think of a clever way to get out. So they kill off a character as an easy way to plug a plot hole or solve a conflict.

Then there are the pointless deaths.

Which brings me to Game of Thrones. With no disrespect to the original author of the epic fantasy that spawned the global phenomena, the HBO production lost me after the first season. I tried. I really did. I even went back during the second season to have a look, but couldn’t make it to the end.

One thing that I have learned about good storytelling is that there has to be somebody, somewhere, that the audience can root for. Even if that person is deeply flawed (think House) or makes horrible mistakes, or dies in the end, the audience needs something to believe in. The best stories are about people finding their moment of greatness, even in the midst of  horrific circumstances. Sometimes they find it in death, but they find it.

The problem with GOT for me was that there were no moments of greatness. All of the people who inspired me died horribly, and for no reason. The deaths were impactful in that they made me profoundly sad and disappointed, but they lacked the relevance that keeps me coming back for more. The end of the third season, even most of my die-hard GOT fan friends were fed up with the constant bloodbath and lack of anything truly good to root for. They still watched because they were invested, but the fervor was gone.

You don’t generally see the same sort of numbness among Whovians, of which I am one. I am currently on my 4th Doctor and 6th companion. And while people die, often, I am still going strong. Why? Maybe it’s because death doesn’t mean the end with the Doctor. I have seen “dead” people reappear two whole seasons after they passed away. Perhaps it’s because nobody dies without a good reason and one hell of a fight. You don’t feel like any death is simply cannon fodder. Maybe it’s because there is so much about the Doctor in all of his incarnations and all of his complexities that make you want to stand up and cheer.

This holiday season I will be waiting patiently for the Doctor Who Christmas Special to air, like millions all over the world. I will be knee deep in the Doctor Who marathon they have running for five days straight. I will watch many smart, clever, adorable characters meet their end while running around the universe with the  Doctor and even lose my Doctor a few times as well. But I will walk away feeling merry and bright. That is the stuff of good storytelling.

 

Happy Holidays to you and yours!!

 

Nerds Of Color Talk Star Wars

Source: NOCs of the Roundtable: Hot Star Wars Takes Awaken

If you haven’t seen it yet, I recommend you go see it. Even if you are one of those people who didn’t like the last few, it’s still a pretty good movie. If you have already seen it, feel free to join the conversation.

Two Indie Author Queens Do A Podcast

I love both of these ladies and I have learned so much from listening to both of their Podcasts. They know what they are talking about and so I pay attention to whatever they say about anything. Enjoy.

 

Where My Readers AT?

You don’t know because I haven’t told you, that I have been conducting a bit of a marketing experiment and have finally gotten some fascinating findings.

The issue here is whether to publish through Amazon exclusively or to make my books available as widely as possible. Being exclusive to Amazon has it’s perks, and that is why so many indie authors do it. They have a whole set of marketing tricks and algorithms that help boost their exclusive writers’ books sales. And, the pay is excellent. But, Amazon is not the only game in town, and with Apple dominating the tech industry every iPhone is also an e-reader and every iTunes/Apple user is a potential reader. So what is a girl to do?

I did an experiment. I made both of my books free and available across all platforms. I figured wherever I had the most sales I would use as my primary distribution. The results?

All of my M/M romance readers seem to be on Amazon. And my regular erotic romance flies off the shelf on Apple with a small trickle flowing out of Nook.  So here is the deal, the plan for 2016 is simple:

Since of all my M/M readers are primarily on Amazon I will publish my M/M romances on Amazon exclusively for 90 days because you good people seem to all be there.
Everything else goes wide. Find me where ever, I will be there. Sign up for my mailing list so you will know when new stuff drops and have all of the links to get it on your platform of choice. I will still put it out on Amazon as well, but I have to go where my AMBW romance fans are most likely to be.
In 2016, I have an AMBW romance trilogy that I plan to release and an M/M series that I plan to finish. As always that is in addition to my ghostwriting. The goal is to ghostwrite much less, and indie publish much more.

So, thank you to all of my readers who have picked up my free books, regardless of the platform you used. You have encouraged me to keep writing as Sakura Skye in 2016 and helped me gain much-needed data. I hope you enjoyed the books and come back for more.

The Problem With Yaoi Is…

If you are a fan of any gay-themed art at all, you would have come across the wonderful sub-genre of manga fiction called Yaoi. If you are a complete newbie, let me school you. Yaoi is a genre of manga that deal with romantic relationships between men. Most of the readers and writers of Yaoi are in fact women, so the stories tend to be highly romanticized, even to the point of fetishism. There is another genre of gay manga for men called Bara, but that is a different story all together.

So I think I told you all once how I stumbled into the world of m/m romance blind and in a daze. I, of course, was no better equipped when it came to Yaoi. For me, it never caught on for one reason.

Consent.

You see, in Yaoi, the pairings are usually hetero-normative in many ways. The “uke” or feminine partner is usually smaller in stature, younger, and “beautiful”. The “seme”, or dominant partner is also very handsome, but he is the aggressor in the relationship. He initiates the relationship and the sex. This is where it gets tricky.

In many cases, the sexual contact, at least initially, is not consensual.

Let me say that again.

The sexual contact is OFTEN not consensual, at least once.

The idea here is that the relationship reaches a boiling point where the seme just can’t hold it in anymore and takes the uke. Even if the uke was into the seme and was totally going to do him eventually, the uke seems almost honor bound to object to sexual contact at first. Of course, the poor uke is understandably shaken afterward, and in some cases tries to put some distance between himself and his attacker. But the seme is having none of that and proves his love by keeping the uke by his side rather than throwing him away after he got the booty. The uke, or course, relents and they all live happily ever after.

The problems with these kinds of story lines, and there are many variations on the theme, is that they contribute to a rape culture that says it’s okay to rape your victim if you love them. In fact, the rape is in a way, proof of your burning love and desire for the victim. It also muddies the waters on what is and is not considered consent. So much so that we have terms for these story lines. Non-consensual sex (rape) is called non-con, and dubious consensual sex (rape) is called dub-con. Regardless of the gender of the victim, this just creeps me out.

I know that Yaoi, coming from Japan, takes many of its cues from Japanese culture. I also know that many Japanese women feel pressured to at least pretend that they are not into sex. In a story where both partners are male but the same heterosexual norms are applied one of the partners has to say no at least once in keeping with “appropriate” sexual relations. But my concern is that the link between art and life is incredibly strong. Are we telling the women who read Yaoi that rape is a forgivable sin?

I am not saying that there aren’t plenty of Yaoi out there where both partners are ready, willing and eager to get it on, and do so with aplomb. But the genre is rife with non-con and dub-con and International fans, in particular, would do well to stay away from titles that romanticize sexual assault. Aggressive sex, even aggressive lovers can be charming and romantic, but no always means no.