S.M. Johnson's Blog, page 3

A Chance to Win Dare in the Dungeon

Good morning, my Darklings...

I have a little Giveaway going on via Amazon. It's super simple - click THIS LINK to Amazon and follow my Amazon author page, and you'll be entered in the contest. There are multiple winners, selected randomly by Amazon, The odds are 1 in 10, so that's not too shabby. Contest runs until July 28, 2016 or until all prizes have been claimed.

Never fear if you're not a winner - pretty sure I'll be doing more giveaways before the release of The New Dungeon this fall.

Hope your day is fantastic in all ways possible.

SM Johnson ~ excerpt Secret, Secret by JJ Roman (AKA Jeff Johnson)

"Someone out there is listening to the same song, feeling the same way that I do." ~ Better Than Ezra, I Do.

We are all tiny cogs spinning busily on this planet we call Earth. We eat and sleep, laugh and play, think and argue and forgive. Make-up, make out, make love, make money, make time, make peace, make up stories. And we do all of these things alone in our heads.

I think the alone part is part of the allure of intimate bonding, and a big reason why we love discovering someone who is able to articulate their circumstance in a way that allows us to breathe a sigh of relief and think, "yeah, me too - exactly that."

For me, those "I feel that way too!" moments are usually given to me by musicians and writers. I'm not denigrating visual arts, not at all - but I'm a wordsmith and a lyrics whore, so words are my thing. Especially words sung to me by voices that soothe. Mat Kearney, Pat Monahan, Mike Rayburn, Rob Thomas, Matt Nathanson, Jason Wade, P!NK. Corey Taylor, Sia, Brent Smith, Isaac Slade, Nate Ruess... wow, I could go on and on! (These are the voices that make up the bulk of my writing play list, in case you were interested).

However you find connection, isn't it fantastic when hearts speak to hearts?

As an author, I try to contribute to heart-speak. A decent portion of my erotica character points of view come from the side of the submissive, the one who seems to be giving rather than taking, the one who gives up the power, versus the one who wields it. For some reason these are the characters that live most clearly in my head, with their insecurities and vulnerabilities on display - and the intricate feeling of balancing lust and trust.

I suppose this is why it takes me a good deal longer than some authors to complete a book. I'm not happy just kicking out any old 3,000 words in a day or what have you - I need to mull things over, think through scenes from the POV character, really dig in and figure out not only what he's feeling, but what he wants to feel.

To my family, all this soul searching looks like napping. Ha-ha, family. No, I'm WORKING. With my eyes closed. I SWEAR. (Oops, might have fallen asleep for just a few seconds/minutes/hours...)

There's an interesting thing happening in the new Dungeon book (still untitled) - Jeff is exploring his post-accident fantasies through writing. Which means that the new book contains, essentially, a story within a story. Roman starts using Jeff's stories as a kind of inspiration for their BDSM play, which for Jeff is both exhilarating and mortifying. He always had the impression that Roman never paid much attention to what he was writing...

And this means that you, my dear darkling readers, get a bonus story called Secret, Secret by JJ Roman - along with the next Dungeon book.

There was an excerpt of Secret, Secret in Dare in the Dungeon, and just because I'm a sweetheart, I figured I'd tease you a little here with a reprise of those bits. I hate to give a way too much of a new book, you know? For some reason it slows me down to share too much.


Secret, Secret by JJ Roman
Luke Wellspring snapped his fingers, and said, "You will follow me to the punishment room, and when we arrive, you will apologize to the Mistress for your offensive mouth."
"Yes, sir," Breeze said, aware that there was little choice in the matter. Every offensive word had been the utter truth, but no one cared about that because the Mistress would pay a lot of dollars for her little fantasy.
Whatever.
Still, he couldn’t afford to fuck it up. He could serve his time at the prison, or here at the Manor House, and that meant his choice came down to no choice at all.
He crawled on hands and knees, following Mr. Wellspring through the labyrinth of underground rooms everyone referred to as the catacombs, until Wellspring opened the dark red door of Room Number 2.
Mick, Breeze's trainer, was in the center of the room waiting for them. In front of Mick, at waist height, was a large hook attached to a chain.
Breeze almost pissed himself. Surely the mention of 'the hook' had been an idle threat, meant to scare him, right? He wasn't… didn't want to… couldn’t possibly…
There were three chairs set up about five feet in front of the hook. The Mistress he'd offended sat in the center one.
Breeze glanced at her, but in all honesty couldn’t keep his eyes from darting back to the hook. The chrome gleamed in the overhead spotlights, and for a second Breeze thought it actually sparked with electricity. He took a deep breath. No wires. That meant no electricity and it was just his dread ramping up his imagination.
Mick wouldn't hang him on that thing. It would damage him, maybe even kill him, wouldn't it?His skin was suddenly too warm for the room. Moisture collected under his arms and beneath the hair on his forehead.
Luke Wellspring addressed the Mistress. "Breeze is fairly new here, and I'm afraid he has difficulty falling into the proper submissive mindset. Clearly he will require some retraining. He is terribly sorry he offended you, and would like to offer you an apology and the opportunity to punish him for his error."
Breeze understood perfectly what was expected of him now. He crawled to the Mistress's feet and kissed the toe of her red stiletto, then turned his head and rubbed his cheek on its shiny surface. He felt her cruel, glittering eyes burn holes into his back. "Mistress, beg pardon," he said. "Please, if you would, punish this slave and find it in your heart to forgive him."
He would have rather choked on her shoe than refer to himself in the third person, but he suspected it was the sort of debasement she would enjoy. He already knew she was a man-hater, and unless he seriously underestimated Mick, it was going to be impossible to go into genuine submissive headspace with this woman in the room.
She leaned forward and reached a hand toward him. Breeze had to fight not to cringe away. Her scarlet fingernails were sharp like talons, and she'd already used them to hurt him. She held his head up by the chin, and, without warning, gave his mouth a hard slap. He felt his the soft tissue inside his lower lip rupture against his teeth, and burned with humiliated pain, but said, "Thank you for the correction, Mistress."
"You're welcome." She reached her free hand toward him, still holding his face, and he had a sudden vision of her rupturing his eyeballs with her wicked nails, but she only ran her fingers through his hair, the talons scraping rather pleasantly over his scalp. She stared into his face, his eyes, for an eternity, but finally said, "Very well, slave. If you take your punishment with graceful humility, I will consider forgiveness."
'Forgiveness' was code for still being willing to pay for the honor of his debasement.
Wellspring sat down on the chair to her left. "Go to Mick and submit yourself for punishment."
Breeze turned away from them and crawled toward Mick, keeping his knees spread enough to expose all his parts to Wellspring and the Mistress, just the way he'd been taught. He stopped directly in front of the trainer, and ignored the hook as much as possible as he pressed his lips to Mick's boot and said, "The slave presents for punishment, sir."
"Look at me, slave." Mick's eyes glittered almost as much as those of the Mistress. "Do you present yourself with free will?"
"Of course, sir."
"Do you agree that the slave needs punishment for his behavior?"
"Yes, sir."
"And what behavior is the slave being punished for?"
"Insolence. Offending a Mistress with words."
"Very well," Mick said. "The slave may stand."
Breeze bumped the hook as he got to his feet, and it swayed between them. There was a round steel ball over the tip of the hook and could have kissed anyone in the room on the mouth, he was so grateful. He didn't want to be impaled on that thing, but at least now he had the sense that it wouldn’t kill him.
Mick guided him a few steps to the side. "The slave is to present his hands to be bound."
All this formality. Mick was much friendlier in private. Breeze silently offered his hands to Mick and let his vision go out of focus as the trainer tied his wrists together with white silken cord.
The Mistress spoke, her imperious tone cutting across the room. "Tie the slave's hands to his balls.""Oh, she's evil," Mick said, very, very quietly. And then wrapped the silken cord around Breeze's scrotum, and used a free end to attach wrists to balls, leaving just a few inches of slack.
Now if Breeze tried to use his arms to maintain balance, he'd give his ballsack a horrendous tug.
"What a lovely predicament. Quite brilliant, my dear," Wellspring commented, as relaxed as if he were at the symphony.
The Mistress leaned her head toward him, speaking in a stage whisper. "I do love cock and ball torture. If you ever need fresh ideas, give me a call."
Breeze shuddered, remembering the very specific agony of her fingernails biting into the tiniest bits of scrotal flesh. She'd also liked pinching the skin of his inner thighs and the whirls inside his ear. Little, evil excruciating pinches. They were what started him feeling aggravated with her in the first place.
"Oh! I almost forgot. I have the most darling little nipple clamps here."
Breeze had to stop himself from rolling his eyes. Sure, she almost forgot.
The Mistress dug into her purse. "Ah-ha. Found them. Come here, slave."
Breeze risked a look at Mick, who nodded.
Mick wasn't cruel, but all of them, trainers and slaves, were here because they'd been convicted of criminal behavior, and if Mick wanted to serve his sentence at the Manor House instead of in prison, he had to do what was expected of him. In this case, he was expected to torture Breeze for the amusement of the mistress.
Breeze didn't have to be here at the Manor House. He could have served four years in actual prison, the debt of his restitution dollars accruing at a heinous interest rate while he did whatever he needed to survive. A per diem charge for food and shelter costs would be added to his final bill, making him indebted to the system for the rest of his life.
Or.
Or he could work off his restitution at Wellspring Industries, and the per diem would be waived. The judge explained this in his private chamber, in the presence of Breeze and his lawyer. And when Breeze asked to know the details of the work, the judge excused the lawyer.
Breeze understood there was no way this could be legal. And still he signed the work contract offered by the judge, and a confidentiality contract that would send him directly to the beginning of his prison sentence if he so much as uttered a single word to anyone about the nature of the work.He asked the judge one question, and one question only. "How much do you get paid for making this referral?"
The judge winked and said, "Enough to make it worth the risk."
Breeze thought his lawyer would be more surprised at his choice, but the lawyer didn't seem to care one way or the other.
When he saw the hook waiting and the Mistress's gleaming evil smile, Breeze wondered if prison wouldn’t have been the better choice.
It was a moot point now. the Mistress had called him.
He dropped to his knees and knee-walked across the space between them.
She pinched each nipple in turn and then fastened the clamps. The sudden sharp pain made him suck in a breath. He trembled for a few seconds, until she indicated he was to return to Mick. He turned away and she said, "Stop." Breeze stopped, still trembling. "I want to look at that hole before it gets hooked." Her cool hands spread his buttocks apart, and Breeze knew his face turned red. He could feel her eyes crawling over his hole. Her grip on his ass cheeks shifted, one hand letting go, the other moving to hold him apart, fingers and thumb on opposite cheeks. It was like telepathy, how he knew what was coming next.
One sharp fingernail traced his crack, causing a dreadful shiver all the way up his spine. He made a noise as she poked it just inside his anus, the sting like a harbinger of torn flesh. She wiggled it, hurting him, and said, "Yes, the slave should be frightened," then removed it and continued the trail to the underside of his balls, where she curled all four fingers beneath the silk ties and dug them into the sensitive flesh so hard that tears came to his eyes.
Women dominants were terrifying. A man would hurt you, Breeze found himself thinking, yes, of course. A sadist is a sadist is a sadist and all of that. But they didn't hate your parts the way sometimes females did.
Mick must have seen the tears spill onto Breeze's cheeks. He said, "Return to me, slave," in a firm tone that was not to be argued with. Breeze went to him with relief. "Stand and face the Mistress."
Breeze stood still, all his attention on the evil nipple clamps, as Mick fastened a wide leather strap around his chest, snugged it under his arms, and bucked it tight at his back. The strap had a thick loop at the front, and, Breeze realized when Mick attached chains, one at the back as well. Mick used a remote control to raise the chains and hold them taut. It forced Breeze to stand straight and tall.Mick murmured an explanation. "The strap will help you stay upright, because lord knows the hook won't. Be still now."
It felt very lonely standing alone, facing an audience, knowing the hook was behind him. He kept his eyes lowered as he'd been trained, but could feel their eyes devouring his helpless nakedness, hungry for the rest of the show.
When Mick came back, he was wearing gloves and holding a jar of the thick greasy cream he liked to use as lube. He'd mused out loud to Breeze once, "Reminds me of the good old days, when all you needed to get laid was a room at the bathhouse and a can of Crisco. Except then came the bad old days." Breeze was too young to have known any of those times, and not gay enough to have done a ton of research. But he'd understood that the comment was a way of waxing nostalgic for gay sex in the pre-AIDS era.
"Okay," Mick murmured. "Let's do this. Try to relax."
Yeah, as if.
The lube was cool and silky between his ass cheeks, and Breeze was thankful that Mick applied it liberally. Mick's hands smoothed along his ass crack, gloved fingers sliding into his anus, massaging him and opening him at the same time. He heard the clank of chains and then felt the wide, rounded end of the hook press against his hole. He tensed on purpose, then pressed outward with his sphincter. Mick insisted in training that doing this made the insertion of objects into his anus easier and less painful.
Breeze never found accepting objects into his anus easy.
He didn't this time, either.
His groan ended with a little cry as the ball-tipped hook pushed hard against his hole but didn't find entry. "Take it, Breeze," Mick commanded, giving Breeze's butt cheek a hard slap. The slap shocked the breath out of him, and he inhaled, then pushed as he exhaled, and the hook entered him. For the first second he thought he could bear it, but then Mick made some adjustment that made it go so much deeper that his knees buckled.
He instinctively tried to jerk his hands loose from their bindings, then cried out in shocked surprise and retched from the sharp tug at his testicles. He was immediately horrified because he didn't want to lose it like this in front of the Mistress, who would only pay her bill if he offered graceful humility.
"That's a boy," Mick soothed, stripping off the gloves and running his fingers lightly down Breeze's spine. "Get your feet under you now."
Breeze obeyed, and then his heart stuttered as the hook dug into him from something Mick was doing with the remote control.
The pressure inside of him grew so intense that he thought he was being lifted off the floor, Again came that instinct to use his hands, and again he hurt himself.
And again he cried out from the sudden sharp pain.
When Mick was done adjusting the height of the chains, Breeze was on his toes, the hook so far up his ass it felt like it dragged against his spine, and he thought, this is going to kill me.
His head was wrenched up by a fist in his hair, and he found himself staring at Mick's face through tear-blurred eyes. He smiled as though Breeze's tears pleased him. "Is the slave ready for his punishment?"
Breeze went still. There was to be more? More than this?

[end excerpt]

SM Johnson ~ Do reviews help readers?

How do I find great books to read?

How do you find books to read?

Amazon makes a lot of suggestions to me, and I get tons of book blurb promos from Facebook. If something gets my attention I usually follow a link to Amazon and check out the reviews (starting with the low star reviews) or see what people have to say about that title on Goodreads.

Five star reviews are meaning less and less to me, as a reader, at least.

It feels like every writer has sisters, friends, fans, and god only knows who else spewing out so many five star reviews that it's impossible to judge a book by its star rating. It's as if reviews are no longer geared toward readers, and are now just a mechanism authors use to game the system.

I can't even tell you guys how many terrible books I've given up on because the characters are flat, the narrative is boring, and the overall quality of a good read just isn't there. I really don't want to be with a character from the moment the alarm goes off, they roll out of bed, brush their teeth, shower, get dressed, drink coffee, put their cup in the dishwasher, etc etc etc. Unless they're thinking really strange and wonderful things, I don't need to be present for the drivel. I also don't need the same three sentence description of every person our character runs into on the street or in the office.

It is a task and a skill to leap into the narrative, to keep the pace moving, to allow your readers to assume that characters shower and dress and eat and poop.

I know it's a task and a skill because I work at it every day - the editing out of drivel and building smooth transitions from scene to scene. Keeping to the important bits is not as easy as it seems.

But the five star reviews of drivel are starting to get on my nerves. Give me a good solid wordy three star review - tell me what worked, what maybe didn't.

Not every book is a five star read. One good clue is when every single review starts with "This is the hottest book I've ever read." I start reading, kind of excited, only to be disappointed by an amateurish effort. There might be a really hot or perverse sex scene at some point, but if the narrative is shallow and poorly executed, I'll never get to it. When on page one, the main character divulges, "There are three things about me that are utterly true: I detest the alarm clock, and I love coffee more than life."

Pages later I'm still wondering what the third thing is. Maybe that the narrator doesn't know how to count? And the problem is... if you give me an idiot main character on page 1, I'm probably not going to make it to page 15 before I give up.

Sometimes I feel like authors are putting more time and energy into marketing and promotion than they put into writing their books.

So how do we find books that are actually good? The John Sandfords or the Stephen Kings of the erotica genre? That's what I want. A fascinating narrator who won't allow me to leave until the full story is told. A story can have a thousand great reviews, but if the narrative is boring, I'm not going to keep reading. I just don't have that kind of time. I've started downloading the samples from Amazon, and that does help me know what I'm getting into before I pay for a book.

I would like to find reviewers to follow who have liked books that I also liked. I enjoyed the Dear Author site, but there was some crazy blow up over there, and I haven't been back for awhile.

I've stumbled into some YA reads that have been great, and I'm finding that I typically tend to like books by the big publishers, too. Not because of the marketing, but the actual content of the books, the quality of the writing.

I am by no means a perfect writer. I'm the one who had a gay guy get a straight girl pregnant, remember?  So my characters have had their share of TSTL moments. It's an art, not a science, and sometimes we miss the mark.

None of my books have hundreds of 5-star reviews. And that's okay. The only time I've worked to solicit reviews was for the UnCommon Bodies anthology, and requesting reviews was part of the deal. Other than that, if they loved it or hated it, almost all of my reviews come from an organic response on behalf of the reader. And I have to say, I prefer it that way. They are honest. Sometimes brutally honest, but you know what? I can take it. And quite often there's some merit in a critical review.

I'm still learning how to write great books.

SM Johnson ~ Say Their Names

Listen, I'll be honest. I have been attempting to articulate a response to the The Pulse murders during the Pride celebration in Orlando... and I just... can't.

I don't have the words.

Please search out the names and photographs of the murder victims. Look at their beautiful faces, look into their eyes. Say their names out loud. Give each of them a moment of your respect and love. Give each of them a piece of your heart. It could have been my best friend. Or me. Or you. My daughter, your daughter or your son.

Just searched out a link for you. Someone else is asking you to say their names, too. Please do.


~SM

SM Johnson ~ Love Letters ~ Intensity

Life should be intense.

Not every day or every minute, but intensity makes us feel deeply, care deeply, and work passionately.

Whoa. I am loving the adverbs this morning. Allow me to revise that sentence.

Intensity makes us feel, care, and work with passion.

And passion makes life worth living.

I have spent the last 10 months rushing through my life in a mad dash from place to place, rarely able to be still, relax, or settle. I have written a half a million words of academic papers, which feels somewhat insane now that I am back to noveling.

Noveling is so much easier.

And yet academics have allowed me to experience growth in areas I didn't even know I was lacking. My awareness of the human condition has expanded, as well as my understanding of many things good, bad, and ugly. I had one wonderful professor who adroitly challenged me in things I already believed I did well, and made the challenge in such a way that she brought me to self-reflection rather than making me feel defensive.

That's talent, let me tell you.

The most valuable lessons for me all involved self-reflection. I am not always wrong, but I'm not always right, either. I went into my Master's program with some degree of arrogance. I believed I had more years and more legitimate experience than most of my co-students. I believed, in fact, that my level of experience in my day job put me about level with my professors.

Today this notion is absolutely laughable.

I had a lot of experience in one tiny arena. My professors have a wealth of experience in many different arenas, and minds that are capable of thinking well outside the box, far beyond what I was capable of. I hate boxes, and yet I discovered that I had put myself into a really tiny one.

The discovery of all that I didn't know was exhilarating. Terrifying.

Intense.

And all of this I hope to bring into my books.


Have a great week, my lovely Darklings. And be sure to pay attention to all of the things in your life that make you feel, care, and work with passion!

~SM

SM Johnson ~The New Dungeon ~ Excerpt

Excerpt from The New Dungeon, Dungeon series book 5
Zach
 He wasn't quite asleep at a little after three in the afternoon when Thomas crawled into the bed and curled up around him. "Cry, mamá del gato, you'll feel better if you let it out."
The endearment was an insult, but an affectionate kind of insult. Zach was mama cat and Dare was kitten, and Zach wasn't sure if that made Thomas the alley cat or the panther or what. He snorted. Duh. The Tomcat, probably. He was so dense sometimes. "I can't cry. I don't cry. Not for them. I have to keep my distance or I can't do my job."
"But you all locked up, lover. I can feel how tense you are. Tight in this curled little ball. Hurt. You need to break this silly no crying rule."
Thomas' fingertips pressed into the muscles of Zach's back, digging hard through his thin t-shirt, kneading ten small circles, at first so focused that it was painful, and Zach groaned out loud, gripped the edge of the mattress on his side of the bed, and started to pull himself away.
"No, mama cat." Thomas said with a stern tone. "You get more comfortable, maybe, stretch out on your stomach. Otherwise, you be still for me."
There was a sudden tension then, maybe in the room, maybe in Thomas' voice, and it was a the command of a Dom to a sub. But Dare is the sub, said a little voice inside Zach, though he let himself think about it for a few seconds, how nice it would be to just shut off his brain and obey. And so he rolled to his stomach, stretched out his legs, and waited.
Thomas straddled Zach's hips and started on Zach's upper back again, his strong fingers insisting the tightness away. Zach closed his eyes and hummed a little as Thomas moved on to the muscles of his shoulders, and then that particularly pained area in between his shoulders and his neck. The massage was so painful right there that he cried out, didn't know if he could stand for Thomas to continue, but Thomas shushed him, ordered Zach to move his arms from folded beneath his head to straight along his sides, fingers pointed toward his toes, and kept on with the massage.
"I thought a massage was supposed to be relaxing," Zach said through gritted teeth. "It feels more like you're killing me.""Oh, you a regular comedian, Zach," Thomas answered. "This is deep muscle work. It doesn't always feel good, no. But you be loose like an overcooked chiliwhen I'm done."
By the time Dare got home from work, Zach was definitely loose, almost dozing. Dare's voice from the doorway was soft, questioning. "Zach? Are you okay?"
Zach opened his eyes.
Dare stood at the bedroom doorway, his suit coat over his arm, his crisp blue dress shirt wrinkled, his tie already loosened. He looked more rumpled than usual. And, well, he looked stressed. Or worried. Worried about Zach? Or worried about Zach and Thomas having been together without him?
"Not okay," Thomas answered before Zach could get words out. "I got his body relaxed, but his head's still locked up, spirit's still gone. Our mama cat's not right at all."
Dare dropped his suit jacket on the floor and crawled onto the bed, cuddling in so that Zach was now surrounded by his lovers. Dare stared into his eyes. "What can we do? How can we help?"
Zach shook his head, and closed his eyes, shutting Dare out, shutting both of them out. He didn't know. He needed, he needed… sleep, or food, or sex, or laughter. But he didn't feel like any of that. He didn't feel like moving. He felt empty. Or what Thomas said, locked up. Frozen. Yeah, Thomas was exactly right. He couldn’t think what to tell them, much less make his brain formulate sentences that he could spit out his mouth. He tried to think. Nothing. I don't know. I don't care. I can't… I don't know. There was just… nothing. Blank. "Make me…" he got that much out in words, then nothing else.
"I can make you," Thomas said, and his voice was so strong, so sure.
"Make you what?" That was Dare. "Dinner? A drink?"
Zach shook his head. My head. My heart. So empty. But he found the right words all of a sudden. "Make me feel something."
Everything happened in slow-motion, then. Thomas, tugging his hair, turning his head. "Open your eyes, Zach. Look at me."
Zach obeyed.
"Do you mean it? You want me to make you feel something? I have a beautiful flogger here, and believe me, chico, I can make you feel it."
Was that what he was asking for? Physical pain? For Thomas to take him like Thomas took Dare, bring him to submission, bring him, maybe, to tears? "Will it help me?"
Thomas shrugged, but when he spoke, his voice had the confident rolling cadence of the Hispanic gangster-dominant Thomas had been playing when Zach and Dare first met him. Arrogant. Dangerous. "We haven't done this before. It might. I think it would be good for you, chico, mi novio, but what do I know? I'm just a kinky bastard, and we all be different. Dare loves the flogger, you might hate it. And you never wanted this from me."
"But you want to do it."
"Sí."
Zach held his breath, staring into Thomas' eyes. Yes, Thomas wanted to flog him. And order him to his knees. And bind him, and scare him, and push him, and dominate him. All of it. Zach knew it. Thomas never made any real secret of his wish for both Zach and Dare to submit to him. But Dare's the submissive one. Zach let that thought spin around in his head for a few seconds. And Dare liked it. And Zach liked watching it happen for Dare, liked how it made Dare's eyes soft and his cock hard, liked how being submissive made Dare able to relax and stop thinking and stop worrying so much.
"Do you want me to flog you, Zach? Yes or no?" The Hispanic playact was gone, and now it was a serious question.
Zach pulled his head away from Thomas so he could look at Dare. Would Dare see the question that Zach wanted, no, needed, to ask? He'd never know, not exactly, because the moment he turned his head, Dare's lips were pressed against his, and Dare's hand cupped his cheek, and the kiss was sweet and tender. As Dare pulled away, he whispered, "Thomas is good. Don't be afraid."
Zach rolled his whole body to face Thomas. "Yes."

SM Johnson ~ Love Letters ~ H is for Homestretch!

I. Am. Almost. Done. With. Grad. School.

And it was almost as grueling as I expected.

There have been wonderful moments. Great colleagues. Amazing connections. A whole new life, no kidding. And as terrifying as it was to begin this journey, it's been worth every challenging step and every dang student loan.

I never ever ever thought I'd receive a Master's degree. And no, it's not a degree that has anything at all, really to do with writing. But yet, here I am.

Life, why you do these things?

Yes, I expect to be writing regularly again, very soon. Books, not blog posts (wink).

Thank you all for finding other books to read while I've been on this hiatus. I am confident, as always, that there is room for all of us to pursue this writing gig. After all, it takes me a day or two to read a book and a year or more to WRITE one.

And thank all of creation for that - because when I have a little down time, I want to read great books.

A few more weeks, my Darklings, and perhaps I will kickstart my writer motivation with an excerpt from the new Dungeon book! Watch for it.

~SM

School Winds Down... and Life Ramps Up!

Good evenings, Darklings!

Just a quick update... a few more assignments to tweak and wrap up and I will be done with grad school - whoo-hoooo and Yay!

Yanno... I'm probably never going to have my old life back, much as I enjoyed it, but new horizons are interesting and interesting is fascinating in a whole new way.

I have been learning and growing in directions I never could have imagined

It's been a while since I released a full-length novel, and it will be awhile still. On deck is the 5th Dungeon installment, still untitled, and also a re-write of DeVante's Coven (fingers crossed on a fall 2016 release for both, but no hard and fast promises), and eventually the novel version of Reserved in 2017.

I had coffee with with "Chill"  today - a semi-autobiographical character from my dark novel Jeremiah Quick - and I am pleased to report that he is alive and well. So my apologies, my friend, for killing you in my book - I honestly never knew what became of you. Getting killed off in a book is sort of an unfortunate side-effect of having been in the life of a novelist. (shrug). No offense, I hope?

I am overall a little brain fried, so I'm going to stop here. But I never forget about you, my Darklings, and after a very busy April and May I expect to be able to post more often!

~SM

SM Johnson ~ Review ~ Finding Home by Jackie Weger

As my week winds down, I find myself seeking the sort of isolation that an introvert needs to re-energize. What I am doing right now is at my clinical internship is like... man, it's hard to explain. It feels like I've been given an opportunity to learn about something that could very well become my passion.  I've been exposed to such amazing and brilliant and valuable people, and they astound me.

But still. Social. And introverts can only take so much social. So when my week ends, I'm looking for good books. And this week I found a great one!

This one isn't dark or dreary or erotic. It isn't my usual fare whatsoever.

And yet -  delightful! I'm not going to rehash the plot, you can follow the links to Goodreads for that, but imagine if Dicey from Homecoming and Dicey's Song  (Cynthia Voigt) had been an adult searching for a good man to fall in love with her and take her and her siblings into his humble home.

Finding Home by Jackie Weger is kind of like that.



Phoebe's voice took a bit for me to get used to - or rather, took a bit for me to embrace her as an adult, because honestly, she sounds enough like I remember of Dicey to trip me up. I say this as a compliment - so don't go thinking this is a cheap knock-off - because Finding Home is definitely a story all it's own.

This book has spit and vinegar and and character and wit. I found myself laughing out loud several times. I read it in one extremely enjoyable sitting, and I highly recommend it for that moment when you're looking for a fun, engaging, and humorous male/female romance.

I won't be forgetting Phoebe and Gage anytime soon.

SM Johnson ~ Love Letters ~ Gearing up for Zach's Dungeon tale, with a dose of gratitude

So I was reading a sad and ungrateful letter of goodbye from an indie author, making an exit from the cruel, saturated-with-erotica indie publishing world... a prolific author, might I add, who has saturated the market with over 70 "books" since 2012, and isn't being paid his or her just rewards for all of this heavy-duty "work." I mean, if E.L. James can become a millionaire with just three books, why can't I? I know - E.L. James was a freakish fluke, right? Yeah. And don't forget the Twilight woman. That was a fluke, too. And JK Rowling. Total fluke.

As far as I'm aware, none of the above wrote and published 70 "books" in three years.

Oh. Why do I keep putting the word "book" in quotation marks? Just because it has a cover, a blurb, and a price tag, a book it does not make. 55 pages without a beginning, middle, and an end, or a plot and story arc that builds somewhat logically between the beginning and the end cannot be called a book. It is a cheat, a strategy to make money from readers.

Publishing 20 or more such works a year? A blatant chase after a dollar, and this does not an author make. This makes one-dimensional characters. Stories without plot. Wooden, ridiculous, cheesy-sounding dialogue. And whether a slew of 5-star reviews are solicited or outright faked, readers won't be fooled for long.

No wonder this person is disillusioned.

E.L. James is no wordsmith. Gods. Ack. Terrible, terrible writing. But she wove a good story and the market, the readers, responded to that. They forgave her Anastasia's stupidity. Stephanie Meyers - same deal. Bella is the lamest doormat female main character in the history of literature, I swear, (admittedly in my own opinion) and her writing was only slightly better than terrible, at least as far as I remember the first book, but she DID manage the art of storytelling. And that matters. Do I dare criticize Rowling? Oh yes, I do. The first two HP books were amazing, but each subsequent book was far, far too long. Does anyone recall how absolutely fucking NOTHING EVER HAPPENED the whole first term every year, except for Harry whining about various things? Every single one of them could have been cut by 100 pages, if not twice that. But she had a gift for language, writing, and telling an engrossing story.

And why did I choose these three writers to pick on? Because they wrote their stories quickly. It's not necessarily agonizing over every word that makes a so-so writer or story-teller into a great one. But it is spending a rather long and detailed time working on ONE COMPLETE STORY that transforms a mediocre writer into a better one - one that has a chance to be successful.

Calling yourself an author and shoving 20 or more pieces of fluffy, half-assed, first draft crap into the indie market every year and expecting to make a great living as a writer - that's a mistake. These are exactly the people saturating the market, the writers who are forcing readers to pay for the privilege of wading through the slush pile. These are the writers who exhaust readers, and convince them to turn back to traditional publishing houses for their next purchase. Let someone else go through the slush pile this time around.

I think...

This is the best moment in my lifetime to be an author.

I started writing the first draft of DeVante's Children in 1991, finished it in 2001, and got my first publishing contract in 2009. It never sold all that well, and I took my rights back and re-wrote it and re-published it just last year. The novel may be dear to my heart, but it's not my best-seller, and may never be. Often a first book just never does all that well. But it's okay. I have other books to write.

Do you think in all that time I didn't want to give up? Do you think I was never disheartened by how slim my chances of making it were? There was no "Indie Publishing", no Smashwords, no Kindle, no self-publishing to Amazon. I sent queries to countless editors and publishing houses and received rejections letters, or worse, no response at all. I wrote. Re-wrote. Wrote a second vampire book. Wrote a book called Assassin Jaxx that I may never fix up enough to publish.

I still have gratitude.

I have gratitude for the published authors who were kind to me and encouraged me along the way, and gratitude for Torquere Press and Rebel-Satori Press, the two publishers who took a chance on me and my work, and through whom I learned about editing and publishing. I have gratitude for Mark Coker and the Smashwords Styleguide, for teaching me how to format a Word document for e-publishing. Gratitude for all the people who helped me learn graphic design along the way - because that is not one of my talents, I promise you.

But I hold the VERY MOST AND HIGHEST REGARD for the readers who buy my books every day, every month. My goal is and always will be to sell one book a day. If I am selling one book per day, I call that success.

I've been writing novels and stories since 1991.

I have six published novels. Above the Dungeon. Out of the Dungeon. Three in the Dungeon. Dare in the Dungeon. DeVante's Children (revamped), and Jeremiah Quick.

The Dungeon novels and related short, The Story of Hawk and boy, are my best-sellers, every month. Four novels and one short story. And one of those novels is free, everywhere, all the time. So that's actually 3 novels and one short story that make up the bulk of my writing income.

No 70+ title backlist for me. I'm just not that prolific. I'm kind of picky about my published work, actually. I want story. I want backstory. I want full-fledged real-people sorts of characters. I want a beginning, a middle, and an end. I don't always create a perfect, happily ever after kind of ending, but I don't promise to. I like to leave things open, I want you to continue the story in your head, at least for awhile.

So let's get down to the nitty gritty. Let's talk about the money, because isn't that what everybody really wants to know?

I make, on average, enough money from my writing to pay the cable bill. Including the fancy, expensive movie channels, the wifi, and three extra cable boxes. It's probably a bigger bill than you think it would be.

I make that month in and month out, without new releases, without promotion, with no effort on my part whatsoever, except that I took the time to write some pretty freaking decent books. Some months I make a little more than that, and that's really fun, but I don't count on it. To tell you the truth, I don't count on any of it. Mostly I write for my own pleasure. I wrote for a long time with little hope of publishing, ever.

If I were chasing dollars, I'd write more faster, but this is what I know - I can't write more faster. My books come at a certain pace, and if I try to rush that pace, I write crap books. I tried out a serial called The King and the Conquered - lunch time bites - I figured I'd write them fast, slam them out, charge a buck a piece or a buck-fifty, make some quick dollars.

A couple of less-than-glowing reviews later I realized this was a fuck-over for my readers. I don't write serials. I write novels.

So be it.

The next Dungeon novel is coming, I promise. I've got a good start on it. This is Zach's story, and I know a lot of what happens, but with grad school being my primary focus, it's going to take some time. Usually I get a fair bit of a rough draft completed in November's novel writing challenge, but this past November I had way too many school projects and papers coming due, and no chance to write fiction. Dare in the Dungeon was released in Sept of 2014, and this is getting to be a long time to wait for the next book, but all I can do is ask for patience.

In the meantime... any ideas as to what the heck I should title this one? If you do, leave a comment, cuz I got nothing so far. My working title is The New Dungeon (because Roman's Club is under new management and experiencing a membership revival) but I'm not particularly in love with that as an actual title. We'll see a good bit of Zach and Thomas and Dare in this book, and there might be an actual love interest for Dare's obnoxious cousin, Maddox-call-me-Doc. Can you imagine? And OF COURSE we'll be visiting Jeff and Roman (wink)... or perhaps they'll come to visit New York? Hmm.... and, as much as it pains me to ever leave anyone out, Vanessa and the baby will be pretty-much off-screen.

One of the difficulties I have with writing the series is that I always want to catch up with everybody, and that tends to get either lengthy and tedious, or pulls in too many points of view to make a nice, cohesive story (which is one reason I will choose to keep Vanessa off-screen, these are M/M books, and Van is out of place). So here's another question I'd be delighted to hear from you guys about... which points of view do you love or hate? Do you prefer to read BDSM scenes from the Dominant's point of view, or the submissive's? I'll tell you up front - there's going to be a fair amount from Zach and from Doc (does Doc worry you? Heh. Trust, I'm going to surprise you all again, and I think you'll like it). Do you like to hear from Roman, or from Jeff? Or a bit of both? Remember - Jeff is the only first person point of view in the series, and oddly enough, I can't write Jeff in 3rd, he always has to stick out in 1st person, even though it's strange. And hmm.... have we ever had a Thomas POV?

Now it's way past my bedtime. Goodnight my Darklings. Sleep tight.