Sommer Marsden's Blog, page 77

It's Monday

and I obviously survived my surgery (wolf whistle). I am still slow and stupid and drugged, but trying to get some work done today. Mostly eating Jell-O, drinking water and taking my stupid making pills as prescribed.

That is the full and exciting update. Thanks to everyone who emailed me and tweeted and facebook etc etc etc.

Now off to try and squeeze some edits in before I doze off like the sex goddess I am.

XOXO
Sommer
p.s. Today I am part of TRR's event that is giving away lots of good stuff. If you're here due to the anniversary giveaway...hi! If not, you can still register and participate here. You can get a crack at your own good stuff :)

Alrighty, I'm siging off until...

I have no idea. Surgery is tomorrow at 11.30, so give me some good vibes if you can spare 'em. I am oddly, not so freaking out. Yet. I might, I might not, I guess only the next 24 hours will tell.

Boy, I hope my nurse looks like that. But I hope she keeps her ass of sterile stuff until *after* my surgery ;)

Now that my yammering about my bum gall bladder and impending surgery is at an end (hollah! amen! hallelujah! and testify!) I will yammer about something more awesome. Like this. A su per 5 star review for The Best of Sommer Marsden from Jade Magazine. Click it! It gets bigger...heh:

And for what it's worth, thanks to all who have listened to me bitch, gripe, worry and all that jazz, offering unending support, humor and good thoughts. Y'all--on my twitter feed, FB lineup and email--are my 'co-workers'. You're who I spend my day with, so thanks for putting up with me. You rock!

See you when the drugs wear off :)

XOXO
Sommer

How this whole week is making me feel in general...

You've had those weeks, yeah? Behold the power of the frog.

Maybe if I go make another cup of coffee, I will feel better. Thanks to those of you who have sent me well wishes for my surgery. And Dakota Rebel sent me a kick ass 'recovery kit'. Cookies and socks. What is not to love?? Last night reminded me why I really need to have this done. Four attacks between 5.30-11.30. Busy night! Despite all that pain, I am still nervous as fuck to have it done.

I'm really going to need those cookies when it's over. And wine. Whenever I am cleared for wine I want a vat. :)

XOXO
Sommer

I'm the...

Interview at Booked Up and a giveaway, too. They are not giving me away, but a shiny advanced release ebook (print is out in April) of RESTLESS SPIRIT. Yay! Happy Monday!

I just found out my surgery is Friday. They asked me lots of scary questions. And yet I am chipper and using these ~~~> !!!! I believe this is called denial. Or a psychotic break. Tomato/Toe-maH-toe :/

Go read, go enter, go wine! Oops. That's a typo, but I'm leaving it. I meant go win :)

XOXO
Sommer

I feel like...

Baking today. But I don't know what. Decisions, decisions.

I'm also flitting about editing, tweaking, tidying, etc. But at a snail's pace. I've also gabbed with a bunch of family. So ya know...today should be filed under "Pot Pourri" (for $200, Alex).

Happy Sunday :)

XOXO
Sommer

Hey, Automagically does another magic trick! and Bleh, not another one!

Earning a 5 star, Blue Ribbon Review at Romance Junkies. Woo and hoo! And abracadabra too! Here's a snippet of Automagically:

"You need to make Caleb Mahoney fall in love with you."

"Why the fuck would I do that?" Evie asked. She tugged her own shocking purple hair and enunciated. "I. Am. Done. With. Men."

"No you're not. You're pissed at men, right now," Lanie said. She was the only one drinking a cold drink. That was Lanie. Rule breaker, heartbreaker, and if you made her do the dishes, plate breaker.

"I am not pissed. I'm livid. I'm angry. Mortified, horrified, sanctified. Wait. That's not right. Anyway, I'm a whole slew of –fieds and I am done with them. All."

"Look at him," Annie sighed, falling under Lanie's evil spell of hot-men-itis. "He is so…" She waved her hands around and squinted. "Large," she finished.

Evie waved her own hands around, mocking her hunk-struck sister. "He might not be large where it matters. It could be like a short stack of nickels for you all you know," she said.

Lanie almost spat out her soda and she clamped a hand over her mouth. "Bite your tongue."

"I'm just saying," Evie said and shrugged. Problem was, when she looked up, their giggling had drawn the attention of the big, studly, handsome, kind and now-smiling wall of man known as Caleb.

She tried not to smile back. Failed.

Annie stared hard and cocked her head at him. But his eyes stayed on Evie. "He's so not small down yonder," Annie said softly as if dazed. And she was supposed to be the shy one!

Evie gave up and put her head down on the table. She could just wait here to die. That would work.

Lanie tapped her on the shoulder and snickered.

"What?" Evie growled.

"He's still looking at you. He thinks you're cute. Even though your hair is the color of a crayon."

"Just the front," Evie said.

"Whatever. Come on. Make him fall in love with you."

"Why?" Evie raised her head and stared at her little sister. The girl was nuts. But she was also fun, clever and a talented witch.

Lanie shrugged. "Because you can. Spell him. Make him love you, toy with him, ditch him. Then you can be super-kind and we'll all get together, make sangria and do a forgetful spell. He won't remember any of the pain of heartbreak the way you do."

"Why don't you just skip all those steps and do the forgetful spell on me?" Evie asked.

Lanie shrugged. "Won't take, probably. You being a witch and all. It's harder to fool your brain than his."

"I don't want to hurt Caleb. No matter how much I say I hate all men. Caleb is a decent guy. We've had Sudoku wars for god's sake. And once played I Spy in a rain storm because no one was here but us and it was pouring down rain. So…"

"See," Annie piped in. You're not so down on men after all."

"Shut up, Annie," Evie said.

Lanie touched her sister's arm. "You need to work through this. If you punish Gil by proxy, so to speak, you might heal faster. It has to hurt, Eves. I mean, you were picking out wedding dresses and shit."

It did hurt. She had been picking out a dress. She had a gorgeous ring—that she threw at him when he left—and they were to go to the Virgin Islands for their honeymoon. It had all gone down the drain because of a twenty-year-old baby-sitter, his poor judgment and the fact that he thought with his pecker.

"Of course it hurts," Evie said, swallowing hard. She was okay with the pain and the anger. But the sadness that crept in when she stopped being pissed for even an instant was overwhelming. She loathed it. It felt too much like weakness.

"So blow off some steam. Caleb's a big boy. He'd probably enjoy the boffing and the fun and then we'll make sure he doesn't feel the pain part."

"Like you are," Annie said quickly, rubbing Evie's back in small circles.

That small kindness set her off and she put her head down so no one, not her sisters and especially not Caleb, would see her tear up.

When Evie finally raised her face to the table she said, "No. No way, no how. It's unethical and the Universe will totally bite me on the ass for it. I will pay for it in the long run."

"Not if we don't do any long-lasting damage. Not if we don't cause harm. And since we will fix him so he feels no pain, there is no harm," Lanie said as if it was the most fucking logical thing in the world.

"No. It's wrong," Evie repeated.

Caleb walked up and topped her off with hot coffee. "On the house. You look like you could use a pick me up, Evie," he said, giving the other two only the briefest of nods.

He smiled and Evie felt something warm come to life in her chest, her gut and yes…her pants. She shook her head and managed a weak, "Thanks, Caleb."

"Let me know if you need anything," he said before he turned and walked away. A huge man who was somehow light on his feet like a cat burglar.

"Seriously?" Annie sighed.

"Oh, Evie, you'll barely have to spell him at all," Lanie laughed. "It'll be like shooting fish in a barrel."

"Hush."

"Word travels fast. He knows you're single and he knows what he wants when he sees it."

"Hush," Evie said again, but somewhere in her brain, her muddled mind was turning over the idea. What could it hurt, right? A little fun, a little fucking, no strings, a bit of magic and a clean slate when all was said and done.

It could work.

In other news, Smashwords is falling under PP's sword at the moment too. I do have to say how much I appreciate Mark Coker's long and in depth letter regarding the debacle and the standard response of "Then get a new provider". It is easy to say, much harder to do. However, I said this morning on Twitter and I'll say it again, somewhere out there is a financial mind with the chops to 'build a better mousetrap" as far as building a rival to PP. Nothing breeds invention faster than discontent. And a whoooooole lot of folks are suffering some mad discontent right now over what's going down and the Big Brother attitude of some online financial providers (or demigods??). So, I think we'll be seeing some changes in the near future in the form of serious competition.

I could be wrong, but damn, I hope I'm not. I hate people telling me what to do. Unless there's a paddle and an orgasm involved.

XOXO
Sommer

Happy 16th

to me and the man. It's kind of balmy and rainy today, but 16 years ago when we got hitched it was cold as balls and windy as hell. And I was 24. Seems like a million years ago...and just yesterday.

Here's to 16, 18, 50 more.

XOXO
Sommer

How I became a dirty writer and why I have the right to continue...

I was about thirty-two when I fell ass backwards into writing erotica. I was researching for a mystery and found, by accident, (for real!) an erotica site. I'm nosy. I read the story. And I thought. I wonder if...The rest is history. So that means next month I will have been an erotica writer for 8 years. For five of those years a prolific one who earned enough to help my family financially.

There was a building up time. Lots of diligent writing for very low pay. Until I got my name out there. I paid my dues. But above all, I love what I do, so I worked hard. Damned hard.

I won't get into the line between pornography and erotica. I believe if you are a smart person who's paying attention and reading the right things, *you* know the difference. I don't have to give you a bulleted list between fly-by-night, bang-it-out-to-see-what-I-can-earn works and the ones that some very well respected authors (established and newbies alike) put an enormous amount of effort and self into.

Yes, I said self. I put myself into my work. I put my own personal kinks into what I write. My own emotions. My own humor. And my own special brand of damaged fuckedupedness. Yes, I know that last one is not a real word, but I am a writer and it's a word I have used for my own amusement for a very long time.

I have received emails from couples whose sex lives have taken off because of my writing (so they report), or thanks to the collection of works I've been lucky enough to appear in with other great writers. My own sex life went from already awesome to please wear goggles and a helmet for your safety when I started writing.

I have been lucky enough to hear from readers and writers over my most emotional work (probably MY ENDING in my opinion) to my dirtiest, kinkiest ([yet still emotional, ironically] LEARNING TO DROWN).

I cherish every reader letter, every review, every compliment I have been given from the likes of Violet Blue and Alison Tyler to Mary from Idaho and John from Kansas. And I mean that.

Beyond the honor I feel at putting out healthy, fun and sex positive works--and getting to rub elbows with others who write that way--is the love of what I do. Laying words down on paper, building worlds, letting my characters speak to me about what gets them off, what crushes their spirits and what makes them feel alive. I. Fucking. Love. It.

It is not all real...and it is not all fiction. What it is is my job and my passion and yes, friends and neighbors, my right. I have the right to pen my smut. I have the right to publish it. I have the right to wax poetic about spanking and lust and even the dreaded 'psuedo incest' should I choose to. "Pseudo incest" is not illegal. In fact, if you have ever watched a soap opera..raise your hand.

If memory serves from my high school years, many a soap opera has involved taboo and illicit love that have carried plots for weeks, months...*years*. Illicit as in someone falling in love with their step father, brother-in-law, adopted brother (known or otherwise), or some other someone who was supposed to be off limits, blah blah, blah. I recall a few of these taboo love stories from my youth. I also recall all the women in the neighborhoods (grandmothers, aunts, and lord even the men) having spirited, shocked but yes, giddy conversations about how that tramp so and so was trying to woo her mother's husband.

How about Flowers in the Attic (and the sequels, mind you)? Have you read it? Hell, not only did every girl in my sophomore year of (Catholic Girls') high school read it, we had the pages dog eared and pen marks to help folks find the good parts.

Because it was fun and WRONG and titillating and shocking and...good. It was also not (and yes, we realized it!) real. It was fiction. And that book, in case you missed the memo, contains brother and sister incest. Real. Not pseudo. I bet you could find that book anywhere you wanted to right now. Right this moment. I betcha.

Now Paypal is saying no to things that are not illegal. And the trickle down is wending its way through all the small ebook retailers and who knows...might get to the big guns too. Bookstrand has taken a hit and rolled with it. ARe is in the process of reorganizing. One of my own publishers has been put on alert.

I can see the incest thing. I can see that, and I can honor it. Incest in many states (it used to be most but I'm not so sure now) is illegal. Pseudo incest is not. It is two non-blood relations having sex. That's it. Nothing more. Nothing less.

BDSM is also on some of the hit lists I have seen. BDSM when practiced safely is a perfectly healthy expression of sexuality. It is, in fact, in many cases a wonderful symbiosis and a gorgeous thing if the people involved care for one another and build their sexual world in conjunction with each other.

Non-consensual anything is wrong. Fine. Great. Cut it. So that's two points on which I concur: real incest and non-consent. However...that's not where the line was drawn. It was just "BDSM".

It's staggering to me that they'd possibly come after BDSM between consenting adults. For some people a spanking is as effective as candlelight and wine is to another. It's all how you're wired. And I'm allowed to be wired how I'm wired. And yes, you are allowed to be wired how you are. If you want candlelight and cuddles, I will applaud your choice and wish you well (and I will mean it). But please don't tell me or my characters that they can't be tied up or spanked because it offends you.

So there will be people who will say, "But you are a kinky person. A dirty girl. You like *that stuff*."

Um. Not really. Not *always*. I'll tell you a secret. I have written detailed stories about fetishes that do zero for me. I don't, personally, *get* them. In fact, writing about them as if I embrace them for myself is how I try to *get* them. It's my way of understanding things I don't understand. So to answer that age old question "have you done everything you've written about?" AND blow that argument out of the water right now: No. I have not done it all. I do not understand it all. But I do believe in your right to have whatever gets you off. As long as it's not hurting anyone.

What's going on right now in our little erotic sphere is people saying: I don't like that. And because I don't like that, I am cutting you off at the knees. I am severing my service because I don't appreciate your sexual preferences.

Which to me sounds very much like discrimination. I said to the man, rather tongue in cheek, but it's not far off base at this point, it's like a financial service company (we'll call it that to be all clinical and shit): "We're Christian you may not use our services to purchase that statue of Buddha. "

Um...?

My long and rambling and trying-to-stay-calm point is this. Erotica, in the right hands, is amazing literature that can make you feel a range of emotions. Not just horny. It can amplify your sex life or even give it the paddles if it's suffered an untimely death.

But beyond all that flowerly fluff, it is legal. And we are now entering into terrain where people are trying to severely limit and hobble things that are not against the law, just...'unseemly' to some. So what's next? No bodice rippers? No sex in regular fiction? Ever read Lisey's Story by Stephen King? If I am remembering correctly, there is some kinky ass not always nice sex in there. How about the gruesome murders and torture various other nauseating and horrifying things that happen in other genres of fiction...is that not unseemly to some? So when are they coming for that stuff?

See, you might be saying "Bah! Erotica! I don't read it. Or write it. So what?"

Well, when they're done with erotica, what's going to come next? That's the real question. There's always a next if something is successful. Because when you don't stand up from the get-go the message is: it's okay.

So is it? Is it okay?

Yay!

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Very pleased to say I'm a part of these new collections that are part of Harper Collins new Mischief line. Right now I'm in At Your Mercy and Exposure. Both found HERE. And I was so super excited to see the snippet for At Your Mercy is my story Claws. Possibly my favorite story so far this year.

There are more collections to come and good news and all kinds of awesomeness like Justine Elyot and Charlotte Stein being over there too. Woo and hoo. :)

That's your hump day update...humpdate?

XOXO
Sommer

From the naughty mind of one of my favorite writers...

Welcome to Justine Elyot. So glad to have her here in my lair. I mean...*ahem* blog.

And away we go...

XOXO
Sommer

~~~~

Anti-Heroic

It's brilliant to be here with one of my all-time favourite eroticists, the gorgeous Sommer! Thank you very much, Sommer, for having me. I'll try to keep the place tidy for you.

Heroes are one thing. Granite jaws, barrel chests, a good heart and a cool head are all very well. Clothe it in cowboy duds or a military uniform and I might want to give it a a whirl. But I'm not really a hero-worshipper.

For me, it's always been about the anti-hero. (Villains too, but that's another subject.) A man with tragic flaws, steeped in angst, but too complex for flat-out badness – that's a man I want to read about. Especially if he wears a lot of black.

The character of John Stone in my Carina Press novel Under His Influence is nobody's definition of a hero. In fact, for most of the book, he comes across as a very bad man indeed. But he has some obscure motivations behind his behaviour, motivations that don't become clear until my female characters, Anna and Mimi, are caught in his web. I don't expect him to be everyone's cup of tea, but he's certainly mine (Earl Grey, if you're asking.)

Here he is at work:

She touched her finger to his lips. He kissed it.

"I said yes," she repeated, that word of affirmation giving him permission for everything and anything.

"Right," he said, and there was a world of purpose behind him now. He stood, helping Anna up and led her, hand closed around her wrist, out of the room and towards the staircase.

"Your room." The bed was enormous, but the even bigger room contained almost nothing else – just dark wood furnishings so anonymous that they would fit well in any hotel. Had he cleared out all traces of Saskia, she wondered? But she dismissed the idea. Saskia was not going to hang over the bed and watch them make love for the first time. Saskia did not live here any more.

"My room," he smiled, throwing off his jacket and spinning Anna into him in that dancer's hold he had first tried out on the shores of the lake. "Your room," he said, his voice low. "If you want it to be."

Anna was blinking, wondering if the implication of his words was as enormous as it seemed when he dashed the breath from her mouth with another kiss. ​Her lips were starting to sting now; John needed a shave and he was not one for light kissing – these were devouring, ravishing, hungry kisses, swallowing her up inside them until the burn of his stubble faded into irrelevance beside the answering burn at the pit of her stomach.

"I want to undress you," he said, and Anna supposed that in theory she could have objected, but something told her that his wishes were not negotiable, not when his eyes looked like that. She leaned back against his forearm and tried to keep her breathing steady while he unbuttoned the white cotton work blouse, following his deft fingers with a kiss at each newly revealed part of her – dropping his lips on her throat, her collarbone, the hollow of her breasts between her bra cups, finally exposing her belly and sliding a hand around her hip, stepping back, drinking her in.

"God, Anna," he said, then he was kissing her neck, shoulders, face, while a hand kneaded the lace covered mounds of her breasts, finding and circling the nipples with deadly accuracy. His fingers found the zipper of her short light-tweed skirt and soon it was dropping over her slender hips to the floor, leaving her standing in only her underwear and summer slingbacks. When occasional thought cohered in Anna's head, it was thankfulness for the Sunday afternoon she and Mimi had spent depilating, moisturising, clipping, trimming and polishing their bodies in front of Dirty Dancing. She was as buff and smooth as she would ever be, so that John's exploring hands would encounter little resistance in their journey. "You're fucking beautiful."

She shuffled out of the shoes and stood on tiptoe so that she could reach his mouth with hers, longing to have them joined once more. He obliged, running hands down the hollow of her back, cupping her bottom with a squeeze that made her moan. Quick as a flash, his hand was between her thighs, tugging at the knicker elastic, sliding inside, finding her wet, as he knew he would.

His other hand unhooked her bra. "Come on," he ordered gruffly. "Bed."

She lay amidst the puffy peaks of the duvet, watching him avidly while he tore off his shirt and trousers, revealing the extent of his desire for her when his boxers followed suit.

"I'm not waiting for you another minute," he vowed, diving on the bed at Anna's side, then leaping astride her, covering her body with his and ravaging it with kisses and caresses.

"Oh please, oh please," gasped Anna, running her hands all over him, grinding her hips against his in mindless need, opening up for him, offering him everything she had and was. He wrenched down the knickers, rubbing his cock in the juices he found there while she disposed of the inconvenient wisp of fabric with her toes.
"So ready for me," he hissed in her ear, sounding almost pained by the weight of his longing for her. "Do you want this, Anna?"

I don't know about Anna (actually, I do) but, y'know…hello…

If you're tempted to read on, it's available from CARINA PRESS.