Rachel Kramer Bussel's Blog, page 116

My erotica story "Party On" in new Zane anthology Z-Rated: Chocolate Flava 3

My story about a sex party, "Party On," is included in the just-published anthology Z-Rated: Chocolate Flava 3 , edited by erotica superstar Zane.



Here's a blurb about it from Doubleday Book Club, the most fascinating part, to me, being that Zane's son has a story in this book!:

Zane, the Queen of Erotica, reigns over a supremely talented kingdom. In her latest eroticanoir.com anthology, the New York Times bestselling author invites you to partake in her sensual riches. Z-Rated: Chocolate Flava 3 gathers 26 tantalizing stories of desire unbound from today’s top writers—and Zane tops off the collection with “Mea Culpa,” a torrid tale of her own.

Open these covers to reveal too-hot-to-handle bedroom (and beyond) action from bestselling writers Allison Hobbs, N’Tyse, Cairo, Pat Tucker, Rachel Kramer Bussel and other favorites, along with Tiffany L. Smith (host of the Internet show 3 Chicks on Lit) and many enticing new voices. From cops to kleptos, from computer-age cool to pure animal heat, from big girls to buff brothers, from sneaks ‘n’ peeks to control freaks, these sultry scribes (un)cover every conceivable angle on love and sex!

You’ll even get a taste of the next generation, as the anthology opens with a story by Zander, the son of Zane. Clearly, talent runs in the family! So clear your schedule, lock the door, unplug the phone, light some candles, put on some Barry White, and devour these sizzling stories. You’re always in good hands with Zane. Explicit sex.

San Francisco erotic writing workshop postponed

My Good Vibrations San Francisco erotic writing workshop that was being held tonight is now postponed until my next visit. Will keep you posted. Sorry to disappoint anyone.

Free erotic audiobook samples

I just learned that on Amazon you can listen to free erotic audiobook samples from Audible, so below are links to my books that have been turned into audiobooks, and more are on the way!


The Mile High Club: Plane Sex Stories


Orgasmic: Erotica for Women


Fast Girls


Smooth: Erotic Stories for Women (stories about nudity)


Passion: Erotic Romance for Women


Obsessed: Erotic Romance for Women


Best Bondage Erotica 2011


Spanked: Red-Cheeked Erotica


Bottoms Up: Spanking Good Stories


He's on Top: Erotic Stories of Male Dominance and Female Submission


She's on Top: Erotic Stories of Female Dominance and Male Submission


Peep Show: Tales of Voyeurs and Exhibitionists


Caught Looking: Erotic Tales of Voyeurs and Exhibitionists


Best Sex Writing 2010


Best Sex Writing 2012: The State of Today's Sexual Culture

My hoarding essay "(Mostly) Not Ashamed" in Dancing at the Shame Prom

The anthology Dancing at the Shame Prom: Sharing the Stories That Kept Us Small , edited by Amy Ferris and Holly Dexter (Seal Press) is shipping now from Amazon and includes my essay "(Mostly) Not Ashamed," about hoarding, a follow-up to my Salon hoarding essay. The book will soon be in stores nationwide and I believe will be available as an ebook, but I'm not seeing that listed online right now. I will be reading from my essay on October 11th at 7 p.m. at the JCC in Manhattan at 334 Amsterdam Avenue at 76th Street (my name isn't listed on their site, but I am reading). It's $10 for members, $12 for non-members, with wine and cheese. Find out more at theshameprom.com and check out their Tumblr and share your own shame story at dancingattheshameprom.tumblr.com.

Here's the first three paragraphs of my essay, and please do check out the whole book. Aside from my participation, I'm truly eager to read the whole book as soon as I get my hands on it. Actually, I feel that way about all books by Seal Press, and plan to raid their offices tomorrow when I'm there (kidding, sortof).

I make a living writing about things that most people would find too private, personal and uncomfortable to reveal. I left law school for a career writing about sex and dating, in erotic fiction and first-person accounts. I've covered everything from my bukkake fantasies to hooking up with a Top Chef contestant to mommy play. I've posed nude and gotten hate mail. Being open about sex has never felt unnatural, but it took me a very long time to come to terms with the fact that I'm a hoarder, and even longer to share the word with others.

Hoarding, for most people, conjures up gruesome images. Mention it and you're likely to hear about the Collyer Brothers, who died trapped by their own stuff. Hoarding isn't something I take lightly, but I've finally learned that it's not something I can walk around feeling wracked by shame by or chained to my apartment, constantly sorting and cleaning and feeling guilty. Take me or leave me, but you can't take me without my stuff.

As I type this, I'm sitting in my "bed," which is now just a deconstructed mattress on the floor. The frame, which I've been meaning to throw out on the one designated day my Brooklyn apartment allows large items of trash, is tilted sideways against the wall in the middle of the room. Scattered around are hundreds of books and dozens of articles of clothing, along with random items like pillows and padded envelopes, an ironing board that used to support the mattress, an overturned chair, papers from the early 2000's, neatly placed in labeled files with names like "taxes" and "travel," from back when I made an attempt at organization.

My story "Flaunting It" in new ebook Too Fast for Love

The ebook Too Fast for Love: Opportunist Encounters just came out today, and is available for just $1.99 for 10 stories on Kindle or Nook. My couple celebrating their 27th anniversary exhibitionism and adventure Las Vegas story is called "Flaunting It" and here's teaser. I chose the Mandarin Oriental because that's where the negging PUA (pickup artist) tried to pick me up. I thought the setting was beautiful. I'm always on the lookout for a good setting, though I also think a "good" setting can be anywhere with the right wordplay. I will share more on that Monday night at my San Francisco Good Vibrations erotic writing workshop - if you know anyone in the Bay Area who wants to write erotica, please let them know!

Recently, though, while celebrating our twenty-seventh anniversary in Las Vegas (we celebrate every year, rather than simply waiting for the "big" anniversaries), we took our predilection for perversity to a new level. Aside from those women we'd bedded together, and a few steamy kisses at parties, I'd never been with anyone other than Brent, and definitely not another man. Oh, I'd looked plenty, online and off, and had my share of fantasies, but up until then, simply telling Brent about my naughtiest daydreams had been enough. That was my way of flaunting it, and whenever my friends would tell me about lusting after their coworker, lawn guy, painter, or plumber in hushed tones, I'd wow them with stories of brazenly flirting right in front of my husband, and how hard it made him. The logical extension of these flirtations was something I'd been nervous about, always balking at actually taking things to the next level, but something about turning fifty had made me just a little bit bolder. I knew I looked good for my age, could pass for ten years younger, if I wanted to, even though I'd let the gray overtake the brown.

Maybe it took that milestone to make me want to see what it was actually like to take another man to bed. The mere thought of it made me giddy with a kind of desire I hadn't felt since my earliest dates with Brent. We decided that we'd try it out and if I met a man who tickled my fancy, I could go as far as I desired, as long as Brent could watch. I donned a black silk dress that was in stark contrast to the jeans and t-shirts on the crowd in the casino at The Flamingo, where we were staying. We'd chosen the Mandarin Oriental, since it didn't have a casino, as the debut of the new me, and booked a room there in hopes of using it as a home away from "home," as it were. Taking another man back to the bed where I'd been intimate with Brent would be a bit much, even for me. I wanted a clean slate for what felt like losing a different kind of virginity. It took us a while to get out the door after our room service meal, though, because Brent was so obviously, achingly hard, I had trouble keeping my hands, not to mention my mouth, off of him. By the time I'd given him an extremely agile blowjob, followed by him returning the favor as I sat on his face, my hair was mussed enough to require another brushing...

Just as he put his glass down and reached for my hip, Brent got up and angled his way toward the bar. "Excuse me," he said as he jostled us. I thought I might come right there on the spot, with my boy-toy on my left, my husband on my right. Brent managed to convey all that he needed to in one lightning-quick, red-hot glance. I wanted to kiss him, then turn and kiss Andre, and if I'd thought Andre would've gone for a little triple play action, at that moment I'd have gone for it. Our little naughty experiment had turned me into a wild woman!

Instead I let Brent order his scotch while Andre's hand roamed. When we took a break, I headed toward the bathroom, where I found a text from Brent. "Go for it, baby," it said. "Take him back to the room and let me know when you're done. I wish I could be there to watch, but I'll be more than happy to hear about it." Just reading the words made me wet, my mind racing with possibilities as the hairs on my arms stood on end.

Oh my God. I wanted to ask if he was sure, I wanted to pause and analyze whether this was a positive step in our relationship. Okay, that's not exactly true; the rational, logical, organized side of me wanted to do that; the rest of me shivered in excitement, knowing I was about to taste and feel and touch a new man. That Brent wasn't just okay with what I was doing, but seemed as eager as I was, made me have even deeper respect for him.

I hurried back to Andre and settled myself flush against him. "Well, well, well," he said, smiling at me with those beautiful lips before using them to kiss the side of my neck, tenderly at first, then with a bit of tongue, followed by a light nipping of his teeth. I moaned softly, aware that we were probably the only people engaging in a public display of affection at the bar. "Nadine," he said, his voice husky and sweet. "You are so beautiful." I didn't hear a hint of "so beautiful for your age" or "so beautiful because I want to fuck you" in his voice. All I heard were those four words, and they in turn were beautiful to me.

Read my whole story and 9 others in Too Fast for Love: Opportunistic Encounters for only $1.99. I'm working on lots of hot new stories too, for my solo collection and other anthologies, just need to finish them up.

The Mile High Club audiobook

My anthology The Mile High Club: Plane Sex Stoires is now available as an Audible.com audiobook. See all my audiobooks

I want your sex diaries!

Now seems like a good time to remind you that I need more sex diarists for the book of all original sex diaries, out in 2013 from Ten Speed Press (yes, it pays). Ideally looking for people outside NYC, SF and Seattle but I'm open, also need more single people, men, people over 40, political conservatives, people with non-desk jobs and someone to write a Burning Man sex diary for the book (those are just some of the people I'm looking for, but I'm pretty open). First, read a few sex diaries so you know the style and what I'm looking for, then if you're still interested, email me at sexdiaries at nymag.com and tell me why you'd make a good candidate and I'll send you more info.

Dreams vs. reality

I woke up this morning from a very dirty dream, after a day involving little sleep, final edits on an article, and the sound of breaking glass as men attempted to get my new refrigerator up the stairs, to little avail, which in turn changed my night's plans from seeing my man to staying home to wait for them to get it up the stairs today. The dream was implausible, in some ways, being a dream and all, but the heart of it was something that took me by surprise. I don't dream much like that anymore, and I realized that a year ago, I probably would've somehow wanted to make the fantasy part of that dream come true on some level. I would've taken it as a sign that this is what turned me on, that I should seek it out.

This morning, I thought, This would make a perfect story. And maybe it will, if I write it. I don't take the act of writing for granted as I once did, after way too many half finished, three quarters finished, ninety percent finished stories that are still buried on my laptop, somewhere, half alive, half dead. I hope that dream will form the basis of a story that's different from ones I've written before, but more I realized that I'm the one who's different. I no longer think I can or should have everything I want, when I want it. I'm not a perfect lady who gets what her heart desires with the snap of my fingers, and, what's more, I don't want to be. I spent a long time thinking that's who I wanted to be; I had this model, this vision, for how to be a better person, but the frame, as Gabrielle Bernstein, would say, was all wrong. I was going after an utterly impossible dream, and I thought the way to do that was to be someone I'm not. Jealousy is a bitch like that.

I hate the not knowing, the in between, the uncertainty. I have no idea where I will wind up living or if I will achieve my biggest dream or if I will ever write a book. Maybe I'll just keep on doing the same old thing, but I hope not; my desire to not trod this same tedious path is part of why I'm hopping on so many planes in the next few months, in the hope that by changing my surroundings, I too will change. I don't know what that change will look like. I try to balance creative visualization with my penchant for unrealistic expectations. That girl with those wildly inflated sense of self and greediness about life is, I hope, dead and buried. That dream brought back a glimpse of her, and I don't begrudge her her dreams. At the time, I needed them; they gave me something to strive for, until they didn't.

This month has been full of disarray, of plans gone awry. I think the universe is trying to tell me that to do anything other than take life one day at a time is to set myself up for disappointment. I know it's something I need to learn to move forward, to surrender control in order to be grateful for the gifts I do have, the opportunities I make the ones granted to me by luck and whatever magic is out there. I don't always deserve it, but I'm trying to be someone who does. That dream reminded me that I can move on from a time in my life when I thought I deserved all sorts of things, into a time when I know that I deserve nothing, and if I get anything at all, it's not because I'm so special or wonderful, but because I was patient, and lucky, and hopefully ready to accept whatever it is purely and openly, without trying to figure out what comes next. Living in the moment is challenging, to make a drastic understatement. Sometimes it's not challenging at all, when things are going well, when I have those blissed-out moments I didn't finagle or con the universe into giving me. I wrote an essay this week that I sent off to an editor (hi, ultimate act of realizing I have no control over things), and I wrote about trying to force out the darkness, because I couldn't simply sit with it. It made me feel dead inside, heavy, so weighted down I didn't care what I had to do to try to purge it. I still have moments like that, sometimes, and the temptation to try to play G-d, to mastermind my way out of that emotional black hole, is incredibly strong. I don't have an answer, for today or tomorrow or next month or next year. And maybe that is, in fact, the answer. That I have to accept the things I can't control--and omg there are so fucking many of them--in order to grasp the things I can.

I can't control my dreams, and I wouldn't want to. I know they have messages I can't hear with all the white noise in my messy head during my waking hours. Sometimes they take a little longer to appreciate, and I have to make the choice in those first fuzzy morning moments (or, often, middle of the night moments) whether to embrace them or push them aside. This morning I let myself stay in that world, long enough to get a glimpse into some alternate me, to appreciate her, before coming back down to earth.

I wrote about The Wire cast Obama fundraiser on Martha's Vineyard

In addition to my Jawsfest writeup, I covered the Martha's Vineyard Obama fundraiser featuring the cast of The Wire for Daily Intel.

People pleasing vs. control freaking

I've been thinking a lot about people pleasing, which is a bad habit of mine I'm trying to break. At the same time, part of why I veer in that direction is that I'm afraid of being seen as a bitch, a control freak, a selfish brat. I'm not sure where the line is in between those, with making myself happy, which I know has to be a baseline before I can make anyone else happy, and demanding everyone around me bend to my will. My instinct is to retreat from people altogether, so that whatever I do won't affect them. I saw that divide fail fantastically two weeks ago, when I made what I thought was the right decision, but was so miserable I couldn't hide it. I also don't want to be so sure I'm right about everything that I discount other people's points of view, even when I don't like those people. I've been struggling with that too. I think part of why I have so many trips planned through the end of the year—Minnesota, DC, Dubai, Little Rock, Texas and Scottsdale, in particular (the Bay Area trip is a work trip)—is that I crave and need that freedom, that instinct to go wherever I want and not have to ask anyone's opinion or permission.

I'm grateful to see that I'm not the only one who owns up to people pleasing. Mandy Stadtmiller wrote a great piece at xoJane that I'm trying to embody, because I do often approach people, whether strangers or acquaintances, from a place of fear, from a place of feeling less than, and I think they can sense it. Her boss Jane Pratt admitted to it too. It's a tough habit to break when it's so deeply ingrained that you assume that whatever someone else thinks or wants you to do is automatically the better choice. I know I find myself barely even considering my own interests because I don't think they're valid, or if they are, they're weighted so poorly next to someone else's interests, they don't even count. Last year (which feels like many years ago!) I was in L.A. and was going to go to this Your Face Here Pop tART Gallery event; I had just read about it online and it seemed cool, and I was emailing with a friend of a friend who I was going to meet up with during my visit and he railed against the gallery and art stars and this whole scene I knew nothing about, and instead of checking it out for myself and seeing what I thought, I didn't go, in large part because he made it sound like only pretentious idiots would be into that. That's what I'm talking about.

It's a tension, undeniably, and I don't know how it'll play out in various areas of my life. I've been trying to push myself in new directions with my career, my travel, my thinking about a lot of things. I sometimes look back at where I was in January which was, in two words, a mess, and am so glad I have a little more control and groundedness, but some of that feels like it could slip away at any moment. Or rather, being mature and adult and just living with the not so pretty petty parts of life is a lot harder than whatever form of escapism I'm most drawn to on any given day. Sometimes, I don't know how to please myself, and that is probably the most frustrating thing for me of all. I know that the little things, like discovering the cheap and fast and easy public bus on Martha's Vineyard, made me feel at home, and I even discovered some Jawsfest attendees on the bus. I know that sitting in my favorite Brooklyn coffeeshop and randomly getting a card for a free drink makes me happy. I know that deciding to skip the Pussy Riot reading last night because I was exhausted and instead see Celeste and Jesse Forever made me happy. And I also know that every day is not all about making me happy, or at least, not about indulging, but I also know that the last few weekends have thrown me for a loop not so much because I spent money on things I didn't use, though that made me feel wasteful and ashamed, but because I felt like I was negating what I wanted to do in favor of what someone else wanted me to do. Hopefully there's a balance between those, but I think it's worth it to keep putting myself into unfamiliar and sometimes unnerving situations