Cheyenne Blue's Blog, page 21

Cowboy Lust

Crikey! “Cowboy Lust” which hits the shelves soon will be featured in Time magazine’s summer reading (July 9 issue).

Whatever anyone thinks of “50 Shades of Boring”, it has raised the profile of erotica in the media. And that is a good thing.

In other news, my contributor’s copy of “Girl Fever: 69 Stories of Sudden Sex for Lesbians” has arrived and I’m enjoying dipping in, finding stories by old favorites and writers who are new to me.

Randomosity: Why does Oz digital TV have to have such a crappy signal? (always in the middle of Dr Who).  And Wimbledon fortnight starts on Monday. That’s my eyeballs glued to the screen at 3am for the next couple of weeks.

Jennifer Byrne on Erotica

Calling all Aussie writers and readers of erotica – Jennifer Byrne of the wonderful ABC “First Tuesday Book Club” is hosting an additional four shows Jennifer Byrne Presents at 10.00pm on Tuesdays on the ABC. Each show discusses a particular reading genre. The first one has already screened (it was crime), but the second one is next Tuesday, 12 June, and it’s about erotica!

Here’s the blurb about the show in general:

Jennifer Byrne Presents is a series of special episodes screening on specially selected Tuesdays at 10pm. A panel of leading authors and expert celebrity guests join Jennifer for investigations into some of the most popular reading genres, they reveal the conventions, controversies, and titles that have helped shaped the literary landscape.

As a huge fan of TFTBC (and of Jennifer Byrnes), I’m very interested to hear what she has to say. Rather pessimistically, I’m not expecting to hear good things – I’m sure I don’t need to tell anyone reading this about the common perception of erotica. I’m sure the tedious 50 Shades of Dull… er Grey, will be mentioned, a book which is NOT helping the average person’s view that erotica is badly written one-handed jollies. C’mon, Jennifer, you’re better than that! Don’t let me down.

Those outside of Oz can probably catch it afterwards via the above link.

Talking of the First Tuesday Book Club, I’ve got tickets to go to The First Noosa Book Club in a couple of weeks. I’m very excited! It’s one of the highlights of Oz TV and it’s coming to Noosa, just up the road.

Girl Fever

Ohhhh, I’m spinning from tits to arse. So much to do right now. Stories to edit (mine), stories to edit (other people’s), a sample chapter to edit that I hope will lead to more work, and yeah, stories to WRITE. However instead of all of that, I’m sitting with a bourbon and coke, a Dr Who re-run, a box of Panadol, a snuggly fleece blanket, and the horrible feeling I’m getting a cold (but I did get off my arse to book flights to Melbourne. Yay, Melbourne. World’s greatest city!).

However, sick or not, this needs shouting about.

“Girl Fever” is here. Not the sort of fever that’s currently making my head explode – a far better kind.

“Girl Fever: 69 Stories of Sudden Sex for Lesbians” edited by Sacchi Green has hit the shelves. 69 stories from a plethora of fantastic writers (and a couple by yours truly). I haven’t received my copies yet, so I can’t comment on specific stories, but anything that has Shanna Germain, Rachel Kramer Bussel, Allison Wonderland, Nikki Magennis, Jeremy Edwards, and Sacchi herself between the covers is going to be excellent.

Sacchi has contributor bios on her blog here, . Apparently I’m one of those who chose to remain seductively silent. Those who know me are well aware I’m neither seductive nor silent, so that’s a bit of a mystery. *g*

There’s also a review on Erotica Revealed.

Here’s the start of one of my stories in this collection, “I Wish I Knew You”.

I wish I knew you like she does.

It’s Sunday morning and I’m sitting on the rear deck with my husband. He’s reading the paper and grunting about some perceived incompetency in the Obama administration. It’s spring and the Rocky Mountains look so damn beautiful in the sun that I want to hold the picture in my head to look at when life moves back to winter.

Jed doesn’t see the Rockies; he doesn’t see me.

After I’ve served breakfast, I sit opposite him sipping a coffee. I’m not drinking in the mountains now; I’m looking east, toward the house across the laneway.

I sneak a glance at my watch; it’s nearly 9:00. Jed rustles the paper, makes another derogatory remark about Obama.

The house opposite abuts the laneway, so when the upstairs drapes twitch and slide back, I can see clearly into the bedroom – your bedroom.

False Creek Ferry

I have a second story out in ebook form from JMS Books.

False Creek Ferry. Oooh look – a cover!

Beth and Leigh are total opposites. Beth has a steady job as an accountant, a reliable income, and a path up the corporate ladder. Her girlfriend Leigh lives for the moment, working on the ferries in False Creek, Vancouver. She eschews a conventional job, preferring freedom over a steady income, and her big heart means she often has very little for herself.

Can this mismatched pair find common ground?

You can read a longer excerpt over at JMS Books.

I’m rather fond of this story. Leigh and Beth are fictional, but the bright little ferries that bob like toy boats on the water, are not. I stayed at my sister’s apartment on False Creek a few years ago, and used the little ferries often. The car stayed in the parking lot and it didn’t even cross my mind to take a bus. I’d walk or take the ferry, or both. So maybe Leigh isn’t so fictional after all – there’s a bit of me in her, maybe more so than my other characters.

I don’t think that’s a bad thing.

.

Ten Aussie Novels to Read Before You Die

No, there’s no list as yet, but as anyone who watches the First Tuesday Book Club on the ABC probably already knows, you can vote for your favourites. The final list will be showcased on FTBC in December.

Go! Check it out! And vote.

If your favourites aren’t on the list (two of mine weren’t), you can vote via email – bung your picks in an email to bookclub@abc.net.au.

My picks? “Cloud Street” and “Breath”, both by the incomparable, magical, lyrical Tim Winton and an old one – “My Crowded Solitude” by Jack McLaren.

Dublin Buy and Sell

I have a story out in e-book form by JMS Books, a publisher of GLBTQ titles. The story, “Dublin Buy and Sell” is a lesbian romance, set in Ireland. Frances has been alone since her lover, Aisling, left her for a girl with cropped hair and a tongue stud. Urged by her best friend to “get fit, get a life, get a lover,” Frances responds to a personal advert in the Dublin Buy and Sell from a bi-curious woman seeking a first time experience.

Ebooks are a new one for me — all of my previous acceptances have been in print anthologies, websites, or newsletters (promotions and the like). I’ve never had an ebook, with my name on it out there.

Anyway, the point of this post is to ask, shamelessly but nicely, if my trusted friends group (that would be you) would be so awfully kind as to click on the below link, poke around a bit, like it on Facebook, Twitter or whatever else those funny buttons are on the top, and maybe recommend the story to anyone they think would be interested.

Take a look at it here, read the excerpt, poke around the site. There’s a lot of great reading on JMS Books.

Cheers and Beers xox

Writing in Shades of Gray

Currently, I'm reading a memoir, "How to Make Gravy" by the wonderful and incomparable Paul Kelly. Kelly is an Australian singer-songwriter, much beloved by Aussies but not so well known elsewhere. He's been around since the late 70s, and has a huge repertoire of work. The memoir is fascinating, well written and gives a great insight on Kelly's career, but that's not the point of this post.

In the last couple of weeks, I discovered a story of mine was copied without my knowledge and posted on a site, "credited" to me ("I'm just posting this for my friend, Cheyenne Blue"). I'm still working on getting that removed.

However, this isn't the first time it's happened. Another original story of mine was posted on a bulletin board "to share" (I got that removed by emailing the site owner). Another story was stolen, the names of the characters were changed and it was posted on a fanfiction site with no acknowledgement to me whatsoever. That's gone too.

Paul Kelly writes in his memoir that he has borrowed things in his songwriting. Titles. Phrases. Chord sequences and riffs. A phrase a friend once said about Anastasia always changing her mind. The song title "Don't start me talking" was taken from a song by the same name of Sonny Boy Williamson (1955), which also inspired Elvis Costello to use it as the first line in "Oliver's Army".

I have reused snippets. Sometimes consciously, sometimes I've only realized it after the event. Very occasionally sentences, more often just a pairing of words or a fragment. Most often from my own writing (there's one particularly sentence, I realize to my shame, I've used three times in three different stories).

I've seen it in other writers too. Other stories, that I've thought "That reminds me of so-n-so's story". Once I came across a story where the sex scene was a word for word copy of the sex scene in another story – by the same writer, so it was her own writing she was reusing, but it was a couple of pages long, not a couple of paragraphs. Curiouser and curiouser!

There are some quotes that are so instantly famous that the reader recognizes them as being from something else, even if they are unaware of the source. They have become like a cliché – a sequence of words the writer didn't invent, but uses anyway. Did you recognize "Curiouser and curiouser" as being from "Alice in Wonderland:? Chances are you realized I didn't come up with the expression, even if you didn't remember its source.

There are legal definitions for acceptable use of others' works, which govern quoting from, critiquing of, parody, public domain and a myriad of other reproductions. Clearly, in my examples above, the reposting of my stories without permission is a clear breach of copyright. As titles cannot be copyrighted, Paul Kelly's and Elvis Costello's reuse of the title "Don't Start Me Talking" is obviously fine. But what about those conscious or unconscious borrowings of fragments, sentences, twinned words?

To me, much of this comes under the heading "lazy writing". It's bloody lazy of me to use the same sentence to describe a beating heart in three separate stories. We all have our comfort language we like to use (ask my betas how often I use sticky/stickiness, for example); that's a well-worn groove that it's too easy to fall into. Lazy. However, is it lazy of me when I read a book and a pair of words jump out at me – maybe a perfect description, maybe I just like the sound of them together- but for whatever reason the words get stored away in my head to reappear later, almost certainly in a different context from the original use.

I don't think I'm being lazy, when I remember a phrase someone has said and I file it away for later use. A friend once was recounting a story which included the phrase "My ex was up a ladder in Lekemba" and I immediately thought, what a fantastic title for a story that would make. It's jotted down in a file I have for such snippets – potential titles, opening lines, phrases, concepts, ideas. If you ever stumble across a story with that title, there's a good chance I'll have written it! Lekemba, btw, is a suburb of Sydney.

Writers (and songwriters, and other creative beings) are largely filters. They take something they've seen, heard, experienced, imagined, read, watched, dreamed, fantasized, and they process it through their head until it comes out in their own words. Even though I've never murdered someone, been pregnant, traveled in space or done many of the things I've written about in my erotica, I've experienced those things via other mediums (or simply in my head) sufficiently that I'm able to filter those experiences and come up with something of my own. It depends on how wide the mesh of the filter is as to what gets through.

So, dear friends, what is acceptable? Reusing pairs of words, sentences, paragraphs? From your own or other people's work? Pinching a title? What about plots? Dialog? A sex scene? What is acceptable, in your view? And if it's acceptable in the public eye, do you consider it acceptable from the point of view of your own integrity?

Don't start me talking, I could talk all night.

Vamp Erotic

I don't think vampires will ever go out of fashion. There's another new vampire ebook out currently, Vamperotic" which includes my story "The Taste of B Negative"

So why, when there's so much vampire erotic out there, should you buy this ebook?

Good stories, almost free (it's a 99c download for Kindle). Great stories. Great authors.

My story, "The Taste of B Negative" is a story I've had sitting around for a while. It was hard to place — not erotic enough for some markets, not romantic enough for others. An edgy feel, a twist in the tail. I like it. It's a story I'm proud of (well, I'm proud of all of them). One I look back at and think, "Yeah. I dun good".

Check it out!

Cowboy Lust: Erotic Romance for Women

I have neglected to talk about a recent acceptance. My story "Under the Southern Cross" will be included in "Cowboy Lust: Erotic Romance for Women" edited by Delilah Devlin.

In some ways this is a first for me — it's my first "erotic romance" story as opposed to "erotica" (or smut or porn or literary erotica, or whatever label you care to slap on my stories). It was tons of fun to write this story, so much so, that when I finished I found it had ballooned to a whopping 3,000 words over the limit. Brutal editing ensued, and luckily Delilah liked the result enough to include it.

Here's the droolworthy cover:

And here's the Table of Contents and introduction from Delilah. "Veteran erotica writer"? Moi? Well my first published erotica story was in 2001, so I guess that makes me a veteran in this game!

Why I’ve Never Had an Abortion

I’m linking to this most excellent post by LittleReview – Why I’ve Never Had an Abortion. This is the post I wish I’d written. Every time I try to write something like this, I end up sounding inflammatory.