Giselle Renarde's Blog, page 24

Bridie's Diary, from the #Lesbian #Diaries Series

Last month I brought you Ariadne's Diary. This month we've got Bridie, and the books couldn't more different.

Ariadne's Diary is pretty porny, about a young woman crushing on an older one. Bridie's Diary is about an older woman crushing on a younger one. So maybe they're not so different after all. I guess the difference is tone rather than content. Both contain plenty of sex, but Ariadne strikes me as more smutty, whereas Bridie is more literary.

Or maybe the tone of both books is exactly the same. Authors are terrible judges of their own books.

All I know is that, at this point in my life (midlife), I identify with Bridie far more than Ariadne.

I'm glad things work out for her. I hope it's not a spoiler to say that her future's looking bright by the end of the book.

Bridie’s Diary
by Giselle Renarde
Series: The Lesbian Diaries
Book: 2

Bridie never expected to find herself in this position at midlife: leaving her husband and moving to the ends of the earth, purchasing her childhood home, falling in love with her tenant...

Ness is everything Bridie is not. She’s young and bold and artsy and trans. Bridie can’t fight the attraction. It’s addictive. It’s overwhelming.

But when Bridie’s best friend shows up to remind her what life was like when they were lovers, she’s torn between fresh possibilities and familiar passions. Will Bridie choose the old or the new? Or will life choose for her?

Lesbian fiction from award-winning queer Canadian author Giselle Renarde.

Get it from Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/987942?ref=GiselleRenardeErotica
Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=Fgi5DwAAQBAJ
Kobo: https://www.kobo.com/ca/en/ebook/bridie-s-diary
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07ZJSPY4F?tag=dondes-20
Barnes and Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/bridies-diary-giselle-renarde/1134377075?ean=2940163374076

Radish readers can read the serialized version here: https://radish.app.link/eNqKBykw50Giselle Renarde
Canada just got hotter!

The Magician and Me #Tarot #Writing #MidlifeCrisis

from Modern Witch Tarot by Lisa Sterle
I'm coming home to things I loved as a teenager. Tarot is one of those things.

When I can't sleep, I listen to tarot podcasts. One night, I listened to a podcast about calculating your birth card. I knew about significators--cards you use to signify yourself or other people--but I'd always used the card associated with my astrological sign as mine.

My birth card (Major Arcana card you get to by adding down your birth date, month and year until you have a number that's less than ten) turned out to be... The Magician.

I wasn't feeling particularly magical when I made this discovery. This past year has been full of grief, depression, anxiety, and plenty of other deep feelings. I've been in midlife crisis mode, big-time. I've made sweeping changes and questionable choices.

Where work is concerned, I wondered: "What is the point?" My books are still selling, but only the old ones. When I write something new, I can't seem to convince more than 3 people to buy a copy.  It's disheartening, it really is.

Life felt like something that was happening to me, not something I was actively engaged in. When I was numb, I didn't care whether I lived or died. When my feelings came back, I had too many all at once. Too many emotions, too strong. What's preferable? Feeling too much or feeling dead inside?

When I realized The Magician was my birth card, it opened up something inside me. Couldn't have come at a better time, because I was really starting to feel like I had no control over my life. Huge choices and life events all seemed to be in other people's hands, and I felt like I was just waiting for others to make a move so my life could finally begin.

The Magician doesn't wait around. The Magician makes things happen. He is me. I can manifest my will here on earth! I can do it!

One of the tarot podcasters I listen to and love is constantly saying that nothing's fixed in stone--if you don't like the direction your life is going, you can change it. For some reason, that had never occurred to me. I felt like I just had to wait around until something happened, and hope it was something good.

The Magician card convinced me that I have a part to play in my own life. I don't have to feel like everyone else is running the show (though, realistically, I still do, most of the time). I have the option of making choices and acting on those choices. I can choose which direction I want my life to go.

Even that much is progress. A few months ago, I felt like I had no life left in me.

Giselle Renarde
Canada just got hotter!

Den of Beatrix: #FirstTime #Lesbian #Erotica #Audiobook

Den of Beatrix
First Time Lesbian Erotica
by Giselle Renarde

Perdy’s never been with a woman, but that doesn’t mean she isn’t interested. When a loudly lesbian cashier starts working at the local drugstore, Perdy is instantly attracted. There’s only one problem: Perdy’s married. What will her husband of fifteen years think of her desire? And, if she makes a move, will beautiful Beatrix bring Perdy into her lair?

Buy Now from:
Audible US
Audible UK
Audible FR
Audible DE

Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/audiobooks/details/Giselle_Renarde_Den_of_Beatrix?id=AQAAAECMPVF9zM
Nook: https://www.nookaudiobooks.com/audiobook/246360/den-of-beatrix
Kobo: https://www.kobo.com/us/audiobook/den-of-beatrix
Audiobooks.com: https://www.audiobooks.com/audiobook/den-of-beatrix/354137
Scribd: https://www.scribd.com/audiobook/388114934/Den-of-Beatrix-First-Time-Lesbian-Erotica

Or check to see if your local library system's digital audiobook service carries this title! Giselle Renarde
Canada just got hotter!

Ariadne’s Diary: I’m in Love with my Teacher!

If you follow me on Twitter, you've heard me mention the "lesbian smut books" I've been writing.

This is the first in that series.

The series is called "The Lesbian Diaries" and it premieres with my novel "Ariadne's Diary."

I've written three "Lesbian Diaries" so far, and Ariadne's is by far the smuttiest. If you're looking for erotica with lots of sex scenes, this is it. The story's about an 18-year-old student who can't keep her panties on around her sexy teacher. Her brain turns to mush thanks to Ms. Bambini's magnificent breasts, which spells trouble for her grades. She might not even graduate--that's how dire her situation has become.

Luckily, Ms. Bambini is willing to help... in any and every way possible.

If you need a break from everything that's going on in the world, I hope you'll turn to my new book for a dose of escapism.

Enjoy this first-in-series. Every book will feature different characters and situations, but they will all be written in diary form.

Ariadne’s Diary
I’m in Love with my Teacher!
by Giselle Renarde
Series: The Lesbian Diaries
Book: 1

Ariadne is desperate for love, and she wants her teacher to give it to her.

Ms. Bambini’s about as buxom as they come. Just the sight of her in those silky white blouses and black leather skirts sends Ariadne’s brain to fantasy land. How can anyone be expected to concentrate with Ms. Bambini at the head of the class?

When Ariadne’s grades slip into the danger zone, Ms. Bambini offers up some most unusual tutoring sessions. Ariadne never imagined her life would head down such a torrid path, but will Ms. Bambini’s help become Ariadne’s downfall?

Lesbian fiction from award-winning queer Canadian author Giselle Renarde.

Buy Now from Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/958701?ref=GiselleRenardeErotica
Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=vOOvDwAAQBAJ
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07XZJ9FBT?tag=dondes-20
BN: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/books/1133609166?ean=2940163338610
...and many more ebook retailers!

Read at Radish: https://radish.app.link/0FAhbwlh6Z

The paperback should be available soon.Giselle Renarde
Canada just got hotter!

The Mind That Cried Storm

Thunder and lightning woke me at five, this morning. Fireballs in the sky, crashes of sound and energy that reverberated through my bed. Storms are phenomenal, when they're happening outside your own mind.

Inside? That's another story.

I had a few bad months, mentally and emotionally. Well, more than a few bad months. But I had a few REALLY bad months. Depression and anxiety teamed up to poison my mind with all kinds of inaccurate thoughts. I kept imagining scenarios where everything went wrong, and reacting to them as though they were real. They weren't real. My mind created them out of nothing. My thoughts were not reality-based, and yet I responded to them as though they were.

One day I cried for 8 hours straight. I kind of reached my breaking point.

A friend of mine, who happens to be a doctor, recommended a workbook called Mind Over Mood to help me implement cognitive behavioural therapy techniques. It was exactly what I needed, because it teaches you to look at those thoughts, to examine them for accuracy, to determine whether real-life evidence supports them.

In most cases, for me, the anxiety thoughts had almost zero basis in reality.

While I was doing my worksheets, I didn't feel like they were helping me. I still felt anxious, I still felt insecure and unsettled. But the act of observing obviously changed me, over time, because these past few weeks should have been killer, and I've gotten through them with considerably more ease than anticipated.

I have my mother to thank, in large part. She doesn't know the meaning of the word "anxiety." Her philosophy is that she'll deal with stuff as it happens. No sense worrying about things that may never come to pass.

My mother's had a series of medical appointments throughout the spring and summer, culminating in a biopsy for which my siblings and I nervously awaited results. My mom wasn't nervous, though. "What's the point in being nervous? I'll just waste all this time when I could be doing other things. When I find out what's going on, then the doctors will tell us what to do."

We got the results last week. My mom has cancer. It always takes a while for these things to sink in, for me. I don't know whether I'm still in that numb stage, or whether Mind Over Mood truly did prepare me for this. Or maybe my mother prepared me by setting an example of not worrying. It isn't put on, with her. She is a truly happy-go-lucky person. She trusts her doctor. She trusts that the chemo and other therapies will do their job, and she'll be just fine by this time next year.

I hope she's right, but, more than that, I trust that she's right. Part of this is intuition. I woke up the morning of her appointment thinking, "It'll be cancer, but it'll be fine." It's just hard to trust intuition when its cousin, anxiety, has so often led me astray.

If you want more from me, consider following my music and anecdote site, A Friendly Musical Visit Every Day. I really do post there every day, and it pleases me so much to get visitors.


Giselle Renarde
Canada just got hotter!

Did that really happen? #SecretConfessions #Erotica

A few months ago, I devoured a book of funny little stories about living with roommates. The reason I picked up The Roommates: True Tales of Friendship, Rivalry, Romance, and Disturbingly Close Quarters is that I've never lived with people. Well, I lived with family, growing up, but I've lived alone all my adult life.

I was curious about the lifestyle. I wanted to know what it was really like to have roommates. One of my sisters has lived with tons of friends, fellow university students, even strangers. And has she got tales to tell! That's what I hoped to find in this book.

And I totally did! Truth stranger than fiction--that sort of thing. Do you ever experience something in your life and go, "Man, if I wrote this in a story readers would say, THAT COULD NEVER HAPPEN"? I love stuff like that.

(By the way, I just looked up The Roommates on Amazon and it had nothing but poor reviews, so I left a positive one.  Do you ever love a book, then see all these terrible customer reviews and wonder if you're stupid or something? Like, what did I miss?)

Anyhoo...

My first book of erotic confessions is now available as an audiobook. Secret Confessions is a veritable smorgasbord of erotica: 36 stories in all!

I've written a lot of letter-style erotica over the years. That's pretty much how I started my career in this industry. Are all my confessions true? Ummm... no. Are some of them true. Well... yes.

What's the appeal of confessional erotica? It's gotta be the curiosity factor. I'm curious about roommates because I've never had roommates. Readers are curious about sex because they've never had sex.

Wait... that doesn't sound right. Maybe readers just want to know what's going on in other people's bedrooms. Maybe they want to draw ideas from other people's experiences. Maybe they haven't had THAT kind of sex. Maybe they have had that kind of sex and want to read about other people's experience of same--good, bad or mediocre.

I'm upfront in my Confessions books about some stories being true and some being false. Actually, some are in between as well. Some are things I wish had happened.

Ultimately, how much would a reader care if a story they thought was true wasn't really?

If you told me none of the stories in The Roommates were true, it honestly wouldn't matter to me. I was entertained by the book. That's good enough for me.

I'm the same way with ghost stories. I think I've mentioned before that I love those "my real ghost story" TV shows. Do I necessarily believe everything the interviewees tell the camera? I kind of think I don't believe or disbelieve them. I don't think people are lying, but I also know TV is there to entertain me, and a lot of that entertainment involves deception.

So, what's your take on true sex stories, or true anything stories? Why do people crave them? And does it matter if they really are true?

Listen to SECRET CONFESSIONS, narrated by me--Giselle Renarde! Look for it at Audible or wherever you normally get your audiobooks!Giselle Renarde
Canada just got hotter!

I Watched Her Wash a Cucumber #Lesbian #OfficeSex #FoodSex #Erotica

I Watched Her Wash a Cucumber
Lesbian Erotica
by Giselle Renarde
ISBN: 9780463186954

The first time I caught Nazrene from Accounting washing a massive field cucumber in the bathroom sink, I wondered what on earth she planned to do with it. The third time I caught her, she took me up to the rooftop garden on our office building and she showed me!

Buy now from Smashwords! https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/950682?ref=GiselleRenardeEroticaGiselle Renarde
Canada just got hotter!

We don't talk about these things: #Sex, #Taboo & 90210

I've been re-watching Beverly Hills 90210 on DVD.

I just finished the first season and I'll tell you this: I remember watching EVERY SINGLE ONE of those episodes when they originally aired in 1990.

Yesterday I got to the episode that has lived inside my brain since I first watched it: the one where Dylan and Brenda have sex for the first time. It's been almost 30 years since I first watched this episode and I still remember tons of lines from the show. Like how after they have sex for the first time Brenda makes the hotel bed and when Dylan tells her she doesn't have to do that she says, "What will the maid think?"

That line has stayed with me all these years. I don't know why.  I just like it.  It would make a good book title, wouldn't it?  The butler did it! What will the maid think?

Okay, something else about that episode has stayed with me too.  Something more personal.

My parents knew I loved 90210 even though, being a preteen when it first came on the air, I was a tad young to be watching it.  Maybe not by today's standards, but I don't have kids so what do I know about today's standards?

Anyway, I've mentioned before that my mother worked nights and my father was always passed out by the end of Entertainment Tonight.  That meant I got to watch 90210 (and everything else that came on after 7:30) without parental supervision. And THAT meant I didn't experience the awkwardness of having my mom glaring uncomfortably in my direction as teenagers on TV discussed the risks and rewards of having sex.

Thank goodness for that, because sex was a taboo topic in my household. Still is. Nobody ever discussed sex when I was a kid.  Nobody ever discusses it now. I'm very close with one of my sisters. We've never talked about sex.  Not once.

My mom did give me "the sex talk" (which was more awkward than informative) but here's what prompted that discussion:

When my mom announced that she was pregnant with my youngest sister, I was mad as hell.  This wasn't your typical sibling rivalry or whatever kids go through when they're afraid a new baby will usurp their Favourite Child crown. I already had other siblings. I hadn't been upset about their existence.

This one was different. I was ten years old and already I had more than enough experience raising children.

You know, I had an epiphany a couple months ago. I heard the word "neglect" and started thinking about the way definitions shift over time.  When I was a kid, I would have defined child neglect as, like, taking off for two weeks and leaving your kids to fend for themselves. I wouldn't have considered myself or my siblings neglected. There was always an adult body present in the house. Now I realize that if that adult body is not conscious, it doesn't count. If one parent is out of the house and the other is perpetually drunk and you've got a 7-year-old running the show, yeah, sadly, that's neglect.

Ouch.  I hope my mom never reads this.  It would kill her.  She is such a devoted parent.  Being a mother is the most important thing in her world.  I know she did what she thought was best for us, always, but living in a domestic violence situation with an alcoholic made life really difficult for all of us.

Not only was I raising myself and my siblings, but I was babysitting a parent as well.  I remember that I always had to wake myself up during the night to go downstairs and check the kitchen. My dad had a habit of coming to late at night or early in the morning and cooking when he was barely conscious. He would put something on the stove or in the oven, then pass out again.  One of my responsibilities was to get out of bed at regular intervals to make sure there was nothing burning downstairs.

So when my mom announced that she would be having another baby, my little 10-year-old brain did its little 10-year-old version of screaming, "How dare you stick me with another kid?" I felt like she was spitting out babies for me to look after. I was so mad.

For whatever reason, my mom was convinced I was angry about her pregnancy because I didn't clearly understand where babies came from.

When I heard this theory, everything inside me did a little 10-year-old version of going: "You have got to be fucking kidding me!" Her theory seemed so juvenile and irrelevant. I had bigger fish to fry.

Of course, I didn't communicate to my mother WHY I was mad.  It would have hurt her feelings, for starters.  More than that, we didn't talk about feelings in my family.  That was a taboo even bigger than sex. I chose to sit through the awkward sex talk rather than admitting to my mom that, at 10 years old, I was already too worn out to take care of another kid.

A few days after that highly memorable Brenda-and-Dylan-have-sex episode of Beverly Hills 90210 first aired, my mom confronted me on the topic. She told me I wasn't allowed to watch the show anymore. Apparently that episode had caused an uproar. Moms across America (and Canada too, I guess) were pissed these two teen characters on a TV show discussed the possibility of having sex, had sex, were happy about their decision, and nothing bad happened.  Everybody knows that when teens have premarital sex on TV, their genitals are supposed to shrivel up and fall into a bucket of boiling lava.

Anyway, the hoopla around this episode was such that my mother heard about it and confronted me on the issue.  I remember her exact words: "I heard that Dylan and Brenda had sex!"

And you know what I said?

"No they didn't."

I lied for them.

I lied for Dylan and Brenda.  I did it to protect their reputations.  No, that's not true.  I lied because I wanted to keep watching the show.  Mind you, one of the perks of being a neglected child is that, between raising someone else's kids and making sure the house doesn't burn down, you can really watch whatever you want on TV.


Giselle Renarde is an award-winning queer Canadian writer. Nominated Toronto’s Best Author in NOW Magazine’s 2015 Readers’ Choice Awards, her fiction has appeared in well over 100 short story anthologies. Giselle's juicy novels include Anonymous, In Shadow, Cherry, Nanny State, Seven Kisses, and The Other Side of Ruth.Giselle Renarde
Canada just got hotter!

I Chase Straight Girls #Lesbian #Erotica

I Chase Straight Girls
Lesbian Erotica
by Giselle Renarde
ISBN: 9780463101124

Mona’s not afraid to admit that she preys on straight girls. Her latest business venture of painting homes has put her in close contact with yummy mummies like Crystelle, whose husband obviously hasn’t been paying her the attention she deserves. Mona knows she can snag any woman, and she’ll have this one before the job is done!

Buy now from Smashwords! https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/950061?ref=GiselleRenardeEroticaGiselle Renarde
Canada just got hotter!

The Finer Things A #Spicy #NewAdult #Romance Short

The Finer Things
A Spicy New Adult Romance Short
By Giselle Renarde
ISBN: 9780463515204

As soon as Melanie arrives home for summer break, she remembers why her parents' maid Sinta is her favorite person in the world. When Melanie meets Sinta's dreamy son, Jansen, he offers her a summer job at the factory where he works. She's amazed how good it feels to work hard and go home exhausted -- and making out in the parking lot during their lunch hour is just the icing on the cake! But how far will they go in a car?

Buy it from Smashwords! https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/949185?ref=GiselleRenardeEroticaGiselle Renarde
Canada just got hotter!