J.L. Peridot's Blog, page 4

Fresh Find: Anyone at Hand by Ella Braeme

Welcome to Windfall, GA

She needed a husband to get rid of her boyfriend. The grump obliged.

"Such a fun, sweet story. A fresh spin on the fake marriage trope!"
���Susan K.

Sometimes the only way to end a relationship is to jump right into a new one. But when Shanae married Bo for just that reason, she found herself trapped with the town grump. Will she ever get on his good side?

This novella is a warning to all those who like small towns for a romantic weekend trip only. Don't marry the local guy. The one who makes you want to stay.

Anyone At Hand is the second book in Ella Braeme���s Married in Windfall series. It has all the charms of a small town romance, with a marriage of convenience and a delicious grump. If you like the small town vibe with a little heat, then you���ll love Anyone At Hand.

To find out whether Shanae and Bo will end up happily married after, get your copy today.

About the author

Hey there! I am Ella Braeme and I create romances as mini-vacations for women who need a little breather every now and then.

contemporary romancesmall-townopen-door, steamyset in the Deep Southinterracialshort novellas

There have been times in my life that were stressful. In these, I relied on romance novels and novellas to keep my head straight. Now that things have calmed down, I enjoy giving back by writing for others.

Visit Ella Braeme's website

Status Update: May 2023

I blinked and the last three months disappeared.

No, wait, that's not right. That would imply I had my eyes shut the whole time when, really, I've been busier than the Golden Orb spider weaving her web in my garden. There was a male spider there who is not there anymore, and I suspect something R-rated and subsequently murderous might have happened.

Best not think about that too much.

Here's what's been happening...

Yet We Sleep, We Dream

In early April, I found a sensitivity reader for this manuscript just as I was on the verge of giving up. Their report arrived the other day and, despite what I said in my newsletter yesterday about working up the courage to pour over it, I still have not.

Today, though. Today I shall have a hearty meal AND THEN open it up, because one thing I have learned is to never read feedback on an empty stomach.

Project Lacewing

"Lacewing", the novelette project I've talked about here and there, is now in drafting. Ahead of schedule, no less! I had planned to start this in July, but a few lifestyle concerns fell into place, allowing me to attempt this writing sooner. That's all I'll say about both this project and those concerns for now, but if the next couple of months go smoothly, I'll be able to tell you more.

Actually, no, I do have one thing to share: I've been using vim to work on this manuscript, and it's been great. I love it and have no excuses, because I know what people who don't use vi think of those who do ���� But it brings me joy. (For anyone curious, I'm using it with Junegunn Choi's goyo.vim in a fullscreen terminal window -- ahh, bliss!)

Other notesOut and about:

In April, I visited Coffee Time Romance to chat about O, swear not by the moon. Here's the feature.

Headspace digestives: Deep Work by Cal Newport The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction by Ursula K. Le Guin No One is Too Small to Make a Difference by Greta ThunbergThe culture of uncare by Sally WeintrobeAI and the American Smile by Jenka GurfinkelWIP board:Yet We Sleep, We Dream, a chaotic Australian space-fantasy comedy romance where children of a changing climate meet the old gods of a long-dead world. Awaiting sensitivity review."Lacewing", a post-collapse time-travel science fantasy romance. Draft in progress."Satine". The collection has been cancelled, but there is something coming on this front. Stay tuned.Sunset on a Distant World, a reverse age-gap adult-coming-of-age sci-fi bodyguard romance. Under revision.Key dates:12 MAY: Visiting Coffee Time Romance24 JUL: Visiting Amber Daulton's blog12 AUG: Visiting Coffee Time Romance23 SEP: Yet We Sleep, We Dream release25 SEP: Visiting Lyndi's Adventurous Friends12 OCT: Visiting Coffee Time Romance

Consent is sexy

Consent is sexy. Any writer who says otherwise just hasn't done their research. In real life, it's no fun being kissed when you're not into it, and it certainly doesn't feel good kissing someone who doesn't want you. How can we call any steamy activity enjoyable at all if one (or both) parties isn't present and accounted for?

Seeking consent can be as fleeting as a look and a nod; as enticing as a whispered invitation and breathless answer; as point-blank as a written contract followed by the sound you make when your heart is pounding and you're ready to leap off the precipice.

It's a dance that may transpire quickly or play out over a song or three. It's a crucial and, at times, exciting part of flirting and foreplay. It doesn't get as "will they or won't they" as in that moment between posing the question and getting the answer.

Modern romances like Helen Huong's The Kiss Quotient, Sarah Smith's Faker, Stefanie Simpson's A Good Night's Sleep, and Skye McDonald's Nemesis show brilliant examples of consent, building the tension between two characters.

By the way, the Quick & Dirty Romance podcast has a great episode about this. Have a listen: Consent is Sexy.

Originally published in Dot Club #24 (December 2020)

Yet We Sleep, We Dream ��� cover reveal

Love triangles get bent out of shape when restless gods come out to play.

Relationships are complicated enough when only humans are involved ��� something the crew of the starship Athenia know plenty about. These children of a changing climate are no strangers to conflicts of the heart. And it seems there's a lot of conflict going on, even out in space.

When an alien dust finds its way on board, the veil between realms begins to fray. Old gods of a long dead planet resume their own romantic bickering while ancient magic wreaks havoc across the ship. Grudges resurface, friends turn to enemies, unrequited love turns to passion ��� or does it? It's kinda hard to tell with everyone at each other's throats.

Gentles, perchance you wonder at this show; but wonder on, till truth make all things plain. Yet We Sleep, We Dream is a romantic space-fantasy inspired by Shakespeare's endearing hot mess, A Midsummer Night's Dream.

"I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was."��� Bottom, A Midsummer Night's Dream

Yet We Sleep, We Dream by JL Peridot
Publication date: 23 September 2023
Genres: Adult, SFF, Romance

Contains:

Friends to loversSecond chancesAussies in space (casual swears)Sex, weed & waking dreamsHot robot love action

Gamedev diary: Slowly returning to this project

It's been a long while, but my mind is slowly returning to gamedev pursuits. Having recently finished Beauty and the Beast: Hidden Object Fairy Tale, I realise where I was going wrong with my original attempt at Project H, and why my approach made the project stall in the research and drafting stages.

To start off with, while I'm still new at this stuff, it's probably too much to expect to tell a big story integrated with sophisticated artwork. Best to aim small, focus on the basics, just try to have a little fun. Sorry, eighty-percent-finished urban fantasy script, looks like you won't see the light of day until I learn to tell your story properly.

Other than researching and cogitating, there's not a lot I can do on Project H while there's still so much to prep for Yet We Sleep, We Dream. But that's fine ��� little by little, one step at a time, we'll get there.

By the way, there'll be an intimate cover reveal for Yet We Sleep, We Dream in Dot Club and on this blog in a few days, which is the point where I'm feeling this novel is actually real ��� really, really real.

Yet dreaming, yet awake

Many writers say they write because they can't help it, they have so many stories inside them that need to get out. Perhaps to some degree that's how it is for me too. But mostly I write to make sense of life.

In building worlds, I'm forced to zero in on details I might absorb without consciously acknowledging. I'm forced to contextualise and analyse characters' experiences to tell coherent stories. Writing is a way to make sensible shapes from an otherwise murky brain soup.

Yet We Sleep, We Dream is something of a redemption project for my sixteen year old self, a first-generation Southeast Asian migrant to Perth who just couldn't get her head around William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, even after digesting a live performance and a school term's worth of class notes.

Yes, this blasted play has vexed me for over two decades, but studying it now through the lens of a writer... I get it, I think. It's not just about high-as-fuck twenty-somethings (or were they supposed to be teenagers?) running around in the forest. It's about love and the irrational things it makes us do. It's about having no choice but to yield to such inexplicable forces of nature, because creatures susceptible to love are immaculately and beautifully flawed.

But this project was more than just a way to thank my English teachers for being so patient. It was also, in a small way, a kind of wish fulfillment.

According to the Bureau of Meteorology, Australia's climate has warmed by an average of 1.4��C since national records began in 1910. We've seen increases in sea surface temperatures, more frequent extreme heat events, reduced wet season rainfall in the southern regions, increased rainfall in the northern regions, rising sea levels, and increased ocean acidity, more extreme fire weather and longer fire seasons, and decreased snow in the country's alpine regions.

That's a lot to take in. And it's only going to intensify if we do nothing to reduce our emissions. Of course, government and industries are sort of doing something now, but there's always the question of whether it'll be enough and in time. And what we lose if there's a shortfall. Thinking about this is alarming and depressing.

One of my favourite authors once called science fiction an ultimately optimistic genre because it imagines we have a future. It might not be a great future, but it's still a future... Though I'm starting to wonder if I imagined this, because I can't find a source for that quote.

But anyway, imagining a future helps. In the case of this book, even though it's a fictional and obviously fantasy future, it helps.

I picture University students on a summer excursion in deep space, studying a dead planet that never survived its Anthropocene. But in the dust and ashes of that once-great civilisation, the students find hope for their own warming world. I don't know if I believe in magic or gods that engage in idle banter with pitiful humans, but I do love the idea of finding hope and happy endings.

Yet We Sleep, We Dream is a romantic space fantasy, launching 23 Sep 2023.

Still fresh at 91

Adriana Kraft is visiting today to share an endearing anecdote about people enjoying their vibrant sex drives later in life ��� and rightly so!

Her (their) new book, Swingers Light Up Vegas is available now on ebook.

At 90? Really?

by Adriana Kraft

In case you missed it, Movie Star Rita Moreno, 91, recently owned up on TV to becoming aroused while filming her latest movie. The scene? A men���s football locker room featuring, you guessed it, virile hunks changing clothes.

Meanwhile, I was recently chatting with a librarian friend about the erotic romance my husband and I co-author under our pen name, Adriana Kraft���at our age. My friend laughed and told me about an elderly woman who came to her library each week to request specific books. When she warned the woman how explicit one of the books was, the woman drew herself up and proclaimed, ���I���m not dead yet!���

Both these women ��� Rita Moreno and our librarian���s patron ��� are three to four decades older than the happily married pair who star in our brand-new release, Swingers Light Up Vegas. Dan and Ginger have been swingers since their children grew up and left home a few years back, and they���re in Las Vegas to celebrate Ginger���s fiftieth birthday.

Swinging at 50? Feeling sexy (and desirable) at 50? Hardly a stretch of the imagination. There are lots of swingers age 50 and older. In some larger cities, there are clubs specifically by and for the older swing set, who���ve often aged out of more general lifestyle gatherings.

I think our fictional couple could easily have found such a club on their Las Vegas trip ��� in fact, they were referred to it by somewhat older friends back home in the Midwest. We���ve created this short story to feed reader fantasies with a taste of the swing lifestyle. If you like this teaser, we hope you���ll come back for more!

Swingers Light Up Vegas by Adriana Kraft

What happens in Vegas...

Swingers Dan and Ginger head to Las Vegas to celebrate Ginger���s fiftieth birthday. Through their friends back home, they���ve scored a free week at a posh Vegas resort condominium. They fill their days with every iconic Las Vegas experience they can dream up. But by night? They���re determined not to leave Vegas without sampling what it has to offer in the erotically charged swing lifestyle. A Vegas swing club beckons ��� will it live up to their fantasies?

Release Date: January 30, 2023
Length: 5,500 words
Tags: Short Story, Erotic Romance, Swing Lifestyle, Later in Life, LGBTQ

Buy this book
Or get it free with Adriana Kraft's newsletter

Excerpt (NSFW!)

���I hope we���re making up for Melinda and Alan having to cancel on you at the last minute.��� Michael nuzzled Ginger���s ear. ���I���m sure glad you guys decided to continue on to the club. Melinda texted us right after she texted you, hoping that we���d be here tonight. Perhaps it���s karma.���

���Perhaps.��� Ginger glanced down at Lai���s small hand, which was lightly brushing her other thigh.

���You like?��� Lai asked softly.

Ginger nodded. She squeezed Lai���s bare thigh in response. Lai wore a micro skirt which had done little to conceal a tiny bare pussy.

���You want?���

Ginger swallowed. ���Oh, yeah.���

Lai moved Ginger���s fingers slightly until Ginger could touch the wetness between Lai���s thighs. ���You feel me?���

Ginger nodded, unsure of the protocols at this club about intimate contact in the large meeting area and dance floor.

���Later,��� Lai said, resting Ginger���s hand on her knee. ���I must stay focused on your husband now.���

About the authors

Adriana Kraft is the pen name for a married pair of retired professors writing erotic romance and erotic romantic suspense together. We like to think we���ve broken the mold for staid, fusty academics, and we hope lots of former profs are enjoying life as much as we are. We believe that love is love is love, and we often feature bisexual women and m��nage in our erotic romance stories. Together we have published more than fifty erotic romance novels and novellas to outstanding reviews.

During our academic careers, we lived in many states across the Midwest. We love to travel, so when we retired, we sold our house and took off in our motor home across the country. We now make our home in southern Arizona, where we enjoy hiking, golf, and travel, especially to the many Arizona Native American historical sites.

We���ve featured the swing lifestyle in a number of our erotic romance stories. We penned this short story to give readers a quick taste of swinging ��� erotically charged, always, and a safe place for bisexual women to express the full range of their sexuality. We���ve written an entire series of novellas set in the lifestyle, entitled Swinging Games. We hope you���ll check them out! And as always, reviews are the lifeblood of romance authors, so we hope you���ll leave one for us.

Adriana Kraft's Website
Adriana Kraft's Blog
Adriana Kraft on BookBub

Finding your voice

They say the best way to find your writing voice is to write. Which is true, but there's more to it than that. People can write for years and still be parroting things they've read without cultivating a style of their own.

Nothing wrong with that if it's what you want to do, but if you're looking for your own voice as a writer, you'll have to work at it. Here are four of my favourite writerly practices:

Write a lot. As in, write many different things���prose, poetry, fiction, non-fiction, reports, emails, explainers���and for each thing, write plenty of it. The more you practice writing, the more fluent you become at putting your thoughts in order and expressing them with style.

Explain the hard thing. Usually when something is "hard to explain", it's because we don't already have a stash of words and phrases that we can draw from. The more "hard things" we try to articulate, the more creative and affirmative we're forced to be with our thoughts and our language.

Re-write other people's stuff. You don't have to make a big deal of it or even tell them you're doing it. The aim is to put yourself in a situation where you can study what someone else is trying to say, scrutinise how they've said it and why they've said it that way, and experiment with making big and/or small changes to their wording. This is an exercise in both technical skill and empathy.

Consume, consume, consume. Not just books, but many different forms of media. Learn to read like a writer, collecting inspiration, analysing things you like (and dislike), and building a mental stash of words and phrases you can get creative with when the opportunity comes up.

Originally published in Dot Club #21 (June 2020)

My blog is now findable on the fediverse

blog.jlperidot.com is now findable and followable on the Fediverse.

Search for @jlperidot@blog.jlperidot.com in your Fedi platform of choice (eg. Mastodon, Micro.blog, Friendica, Misskey, etc.), or enter your Fediverse address on my Bridgy Fed page to follow. Fingers crossed I've set this up correctly and everything will just work.

Behind the scenes

I'm using a service called Bridgy Fed, a free and open source website that acts as a translator between indie websites and the federated social network. If you have a Mastodon account, it can cross-post content for you.

Or if you're more hands-on with the technical side of your website and domain, it can connect your site directly.

What's the Fediverse again?

Fediverse.Party explains it well:

It is a federated social network running on free open software on a myriad of computers across the globe. Many independent servers are interconnected and allow people to interact with one another. There's no one central site: you choose a server to register. This ensures some decentralization and sovereignty of data. Fediverse (also called Fedi) has no built-in advertisements, no tricky algorithms, no one big corporation dictating the rules. Instead we have small cozy communities of like-minded people. Welcome!

What if I don't want to follow using Fedi?

No sweat ��� the RSS feed is still up and running (and still the most reliable source of blog updates). Check out my Favourites for a shortlist of RSS feed readers.

Fresh Find: Holiday Horrors for Charity

'Twas the Fright Before Christmas in Deathlehem is a holiday horrors anthology, raising funds for the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation. Founded in 1988, the organisation aims to prevent HIV infection in children and eliminate pediatric AIDS through research, advocacy, and treatment and prevention programs.

Any disease is a horror, even moreso when children are affected. This anthology, published by Grinning Skull Press last December, features seventeen stories by seventeen authors, raising money to support a worthwhile cause.

'Twas the Fright Before Christmas in Deathlehem
An Anthology of Holiday Horrors for Charity
Adult, Horror

'Twas the fright before Christmas,
nightmares fill my head,
the creatures, they're a-prowling
'til everyone is dead���

Welcome back to Deathlehem, where���

���a stranger grants a grieving father's Christmas wish���
���charitable acts are purely self-serving���
���a man plans his last Christmas in a post-apocalyptic world���
���a serial killer targets the wrong victim���
���sometimes it's better not to go home for the holidays���
���and more!

Seventeen more tales of holiday horrors to benefit The Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation

Authors and works in order of appearance:

Janet Alcorn, The Fine Print
Dane Cobain, Black Solstice
R.A. Clarke, The Chimney
Mike Marcus, Convicted
Liam Hogan, Last Supper
Nathan D. Ludwig, Part and Parcel
Evan Baughfman, Pond Person
D.J. Kozlowski, Not a Creature Was Stirring
C.L. Hart, Silent Scream
Lisa H. Owens, Christmas in Four Parts
James Jenkins, End of the Line
Villimey Mist, The Yule Lads are Coming
Paul O���Neill, Spirt of the Season
Dino Parenti, A Christmas Snuff Story
Matt Starr, Little Helpers
D.S. Ullery, That Christmas Feeling
Bam Barrow, Mad Shadow

Get this book via Amazon