Laila Blake's Blog, page 11

The Smell of Apples

The Smell of Apples is a little piece I wrote for Alison Tyler’s Smut Marathon and where it tied for first place. And as with a few of my pieces there, I thought I’d show it to you guys here as well. Thanks to anyone who voted for me!

It’s a bit on the adult side, so proceed with that in mind.

 

The smell of apples, slowly disintegrating in my fruit bowl always brings you back to me. It’s in the slightly acidic aroma they take on when the brown spots appear; and I start looking around for the last bees of the season, yellowing leaves and your flushed cheeks, your glossy, dilated eyes as your fingers clutch at my hair.

There is little left of our youth – the apple trees were cut down many years ago, and the land was covered in sweeping mono-cultures I don’t recognize. There was a pond once where we lay, watching dragonflies curl up their spindly tails in mating, but someone filled it in. My parent’s house is gone, too. We used to sit on the porch in shorts and tees far longer than the weather really allowed in that last fading summer before we left for college, flashing each other little bits of those forbidden patches of skin. They tore that down first; even before everything else went.

The village in which we grew up treats its sights like my brain tries to treat memories: slowly disintegrating, tearing them down and filling them in one by one, until I can barely remember what your cunt tasted like, and how you used to bite the fleshy root of your thumb to quell your moans. Your hands, wrists, and lower arms were always covered in bite-marks after spending an afternoon with me. The sight made me flush with pride; but then, you know that, and always flashed your hand at me over the next few days. So I would see, so I would remember.

That’s what I want to tell you most of all: I remember; you held on tighter than houses can, and ponds and even trees with their roots that reach deep in to the earth.

Sometimes, I bite my hand when I get off and it helps me stabilize the image of your face as I cum. There you are, smiling your cocky smile, one eye-brow in a perfect arch to order me on my knees. It was playful and almost innocent; I was your prisoner, your slave, your servant and I snuck out at night to be with you, to bury my face in your cunt under those apple trees.

I curled my tongue against your clit; you pulled at my hair, dragged me closer. There was strength in that grip; I remember that, too. It was a strength that overcame the cooling season, and anyone’s ideas of how a girl like you was supposed to behave. You were the brave one, always. And you held me there, safely pressed between your legs, so that I was free to get lost in you.

The smell of fallen fruit cannot be parted from you. I bite into an apple even now and all I taste is you. That’s why they always rot in my fruit bowl, and why still keep buying new ones.

A Happy Writing Sticker System

If there is anything I am rather wary of, it is one-size-fit-all solutions to increase writing productivity, writing quality or author visibility. I shrink away from flashy titles like Five Proven Ways to Sell your Book or Write faster in only 10 days! They feel like the diet pills of the writing community, and this time, we all participate in it because in our effort to lure ever more people onto our blogs, we come up with ever more hyperbolic statements.

I will try not to do that. But over the last weeks, I have been testing and developing a system that works for me better than any other so far, and I do want to share it in case it can help you, too.

For me, the first step in creating a writing routine was to hold myself accountable. And because we are fallible little humans who like to lie to themselves to create their own more comfortable reality, there are two main ways of doing so – to have a group or a person who reminds us and checks in, or to log every bit of writing we do.

I was always more drawn towards the latter. Being reminded to write and asked about my word-counts makes me defensive and pouty and all kinds of things that I do not have to subject an innocent person to. And so I tried different ways to log my writing. For a long time, especially at the end of last year, while I was finishing my first novel, Svenja Liv’s Wordcount Spreadsheets (http://svenjaliv.com/resources/) were a great help to me and I would still recommend them dearly. But over the course of this year, I quickly stopped updating.

This had several reasons:

I was working on several things and found it very hard to keep track of how much exactly I wrote in a day. Especially if I forgotone evening, it was almost impossible to reconstruct.
I was doing a lot of editing, which I couldn’t log in the same sheet in a satisfying way
Having a big fat zero on there for one day made me feel bad, especially when I did do things like editing, blogging or planning.

And there it was, once I started to feel bad about the system, there was no going back and I abandoned it. I tried smaller trackers in the following months, but mainly I stuck with just chugging along as best as I could – and I know I missed a lot of days in which I could have been more productive for it.

Now, I have a new method, a nice, old-school one. And yes, it is partly that I never had a sticker system when I was a kid, and because I am attracted to colours and the tactile sensation of peeling a sticker from the sheet, but those are just things that make it so helpful . And it does solve all the problems I had before. It’s also less exact – and I find this helps my OCD brain. I don’t like looking at odd numbers all the time. But anything between 900 and 1100 words and I award myself a little happy dot.

It’s also infinitely adjustable (well – I say infinitely, I personally have 5 different colour stickers, but there’s a row of white ones which you can paint in any colour. I use them to supplement the ones I am running low on, which is currently yellow, my co-writing colour.)

I actually had to make it longer the other day, and pasted a new sheet at the bottom. I have this crazy idea of just going on and on in a long snake full of markings of my writing. Like tree rings, that tell something about the seasons of writing: when fast writing prevails, when editing takes over etc. It’s fun!

That’s really all there is to it. And it’s a tremendous amount of fun. Here is my colour designation:

Red: Writing, by myself on a novel/per 1k.

Blue: Writing, by myself on a shortstory or snippet/per 1k

Yellow: Writing, together with my lovely L.C. Spoering/per 1k

Green: Editing/per chapter

Black: Planning/per hour

Especially for tracking Nano writing, of course, it might be more helpful to award points for 500 words so that 3 stars a day will pretty much get you through. And it makes for even more happy colourful stickers.

The Ultimate Book Tag

So, it’s no secret that I really love reading – what I love even more, actually, is talking about the books I read so, I’m always susceptible to book tags, and challenges. This one, I took from the beautiful Helena @ Accepted Wisdom.

My kitten Nookie on my colourful-book-series shelf. My organisational system leaves something to be desired.-

1. Do you get sick while reading in the car?

Violently so, yes, and within a minute, basically. I don’t drive myself and I also go months without driving as a passenger sometimes, so I even get sick without reading. I have to look out the window and watch myself move, or else.

2. Which author’s writing style is completely unique to you and why?

I talk about Haruki Murakami a lot, but his definitely is and that’s why I love his books so much. It’s not only that each book is a trip into a different kind of world, both stylistically, linguistically and just story-wise, but also that every time I pick up a new book, it’s like returning to that place. It’s lovely.

Other authors on this list, who’s books I’d recognize without a cover or any clue as to the author would be Nick Hornby and Christa Wolf.

3. Harry Potter Series or the Twilight Saga? Give 3 points to defend your answer.

This question fundamentally offends me and it always has. I don’t know why we still compare these two. One is Middle Grade adventure (slowly transitioning into YA) and the other is YA romance – the basis for comparison is slim at best. I also wouldn’t compare Eragon to To Kill a Mockingbird.

However, as the question is posed: Harry Potter, obviously. Look at the picture above. I’m actually right in in the middle of my pretty much yearly Harry Potter audio-book marathon; and although I see some flaws now where I saw none when I was younger, I still think it’s a beautiful book that encourages kids to be awesome, and I saw a lot of myself in Hermione (as pretty much every girl reading it). So much so that reading about her now gives me all kind of nostalgia for my younger self.

4. Do you carry a book bag? If so, what is it in (besides books…)?

I do not. I usually have a backpack and I am also now pretty firmly convinced on e-readers, so I don’t schlep multiple books around anymore, much as I always wanted to be Rory Gilmore.

5. Do you smell your books?

I actually try to avoid it. Yes, I know I belong to be shot, but it’s rare for me that I can afford the high quality books that smell good. Most of them make me not want to smell them.

6. Books with or without little illustrations?

I love illustrations and I actually have seen a slight increase in them recently – be it just little ornaments around the beginning of chapters. It makes me think people put care and thought in their books and I like it when text is broken up by a graphic and visually stimulating element.

7. What book did you love while reading but discovered later it wasn’t quality writing? 

There is the realization that it wasn’t that good and you don’t care – like, for me, the Earth Children Series by Jean M. Auel. Yes, some of it makes me cringe a tiny bit now, but that series still meant so much to me as a young teenager, and I still love the characters, it never left me with a bad feeling.

And then there is feeling somewhat let down – and that’s Dan Brown’s books for me. I really enjoyed the Da Vinci Code, I’m almost embarrassed to say, when I listened to the audio book. Then I wanted to give the book to my grandparents and I so bought it… and, yeah, it was a let down seeing in it writing without a trained voice artist to smooth over the prose.

8. Do you have any funny stories involving books from your childhood? Please share!

Most of my funny childhood stories are writing related, but here’s one that made me and my mother laugh recently. We were talking about reading to children, and she mentioned how much time she invested in doing that, how many books we read and how we all enjoyed it and I realized — I don’t remember this at all. Not one instance. I do remember vividly my father reading to us though, because he’s dyslexic and he would constantly read a wrong word without realizing it and that just lodged itself deeply in my brain. My mum was a little offended, hehe.

9. What is the thinnest book on your shelf?

I thought it would be Silk, by Alessandro Baricco (so good!), but it’s actually an exact tie between a learn-to-read-in-Spanish book called Marianela by Benito Pérez Galdos (adapted for student nivel 3 reading by Esmeralda Varón) and a German play I read in high school called Woyzeck by Georg Büchner.

10. What is the thickest book on your shelf?

It’s the hardcover edition of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, like with a lot of others. It makes me a bit sad, because that’s actually my least favourite in the series; also it’s an unfair advantage because I own very very few hardcover books. I have a feeling that on equal standing – soft-cover to soft-cover, my copy of Frank Schätzing’s The Swarm would actually win (according to goodreads, it has about 10 more pages, and as it stands is the second-thickest book on my shelves).

11. Do you write as well as read? Do you see yourself in the future as being an author?

I loved writing before I actually loved reading. Books were always around in my childhood but the real passion for talking about them, collecting and cataloguing them came later; writing was always there.

12. When did you get into reading?

It’s hard to say, like I said above, books were always abundant in my house and I probably took them a little bit for granted for a long time. I seriously got into reading around the time the first Harry Potter book showed up in my school library – long before the hype, then the Lord of the Rings trilogy had me in its grasp and… I started doing the 50 books a year challenge for the first time in 2005. So that’s when I got really serious and blogged in an old live journal about my process .

13. What is your favourite classic book?

English: Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham;

German: Kassandra by Christa Wolf

14. In school was your best subject Language Arts/English?

Naturally. In Germany, we elect two majors in our last two years of high school. I chose German and English lit and ended up with top grades in both. It was a great time reading a lot of great books.

15. If you were given a book as a present that you had read before and hated…what would you do?

I have actually come to a point in my life where I don’t care anymore. I have given people books they read before, and people gave me some and at this point, I’ll just tell them so that they can go get their money back. I have to say, though, as much as I love books – I find giving books as presents a very very personal thing, and rarely do it anymore unless I really know the person. And I mean really know them.

16. What is your favorite word?

Just one? This is hard. I would have to go with something like fragile or volatile. I also have a deep and intimate adoration of the f-word.

17. Are you a nerd, dork, or dweeb? Or all of the above?

I’m definitely a nerd, but I’m a dork, too. Of course, I am still a bit hazy on where all those words intersect, because I’m a geek too; I can’t get enough of science documentaries. And my friend calls me a dork when I make stupid puns, so… all the things!

18. Vampires or Fairies? Why?

Fairies. Self-servingly because I write about them – but the reason is that I am very fascinated with the concept of immortality (or near immortality) but I have never really been interested in vampires. All that death and blood sucking and stuff *shudders*. I like the way with fairies, they are connected to earth and nature and the magic all around us.

19. Shapeshifters or Angels? Why?

Shapeshifters. Mostly because I really dislike angels. I know it’s a bit trendy right now, but I want my PNR/UF/Fantasy etc. far away from religion. Call me a literary secularist.

20. Spirits or Werewolves? Why?

Werewolves, I admit shamefully. Here is the thing, I know they are overdone but I still feel like the genre/species has not reached its pinnacle yet, I think so much cooler stuff can be done with werewolves and I just love them; can’t stay away from writing about them.

21. Zombies or Vampires?

Zombies. I mean, they scare the crap out of me, but I really like them as plot devices for human characters. As with vampires – again, it’s rare that I find myself drawn to that species.

22. Love Triangle or Forbidden Love?

I am a deep, deep sucker for forbidden love and always have been. So that. It’s just an insta-connection for me. As for Love Triangles – I do think they get a bad rep right now because it’s always a girl who finds herself between two hot guys without any rhyme or reason to it all. I actually liked the love triangle in the Infernal Devices Trilogy, and I would love to see more variations of the trope — a girl between having feelings for a girl and a boy, or three people all having feelings for each other and getting together as three people who commit to each other, etc.

23. AND FINALLY: Full on romance books or action-packed with a few love scenes mixed in?

This is really difficult for me to answer because, I prefer to have things besides romance in books, yes. But I prefer that not to be action. I am just not a fan of action packed books. Even in the ones that have it and which I liked, I was usually drawn to the non-action parts. I like books with character development, and discussions, books that pick up on important issues, about family and friendship etc. I like my action to be used sparingly and to good effect rather than packed throughout the book.

I never tag people, I don’t know why – it makes me feel like I’m being imposing, but if you do pick it up let me know! And Lorrie, you should totally do this .

Lilt Podcast Episode 16

A new week and a new episode of Lilt, the chatty lit podcast with me and L.C. Spoering. Lilt is a short, weekly show about our experience of reading, writing and the publishing industry. We discuss books we like, writing concepts that interest us, and the ever-puzzling publishing game. We’ll also give tips on all things writing, editing and promotion – as always, this is a repost of the episode first uploaded to liltpodcast.

Also, please consider liking our facebook page!

 

Lilt — Episode 16

in which Laila and Lorrie discuss the difference between editing and rewriting, when the latter is necessary and how to do it.

Lilt Episode 16 – Laila Blake / Lorrie Spoeringmap :: {skin:’red’, animate:true, width:’500′, volume:0.4, autoplay:false, loop:false, showVolumeLevel:true, showTime:true, showRew:true, downloadable:true, downloadablesecurity:false, id3: false}

(If the application doesn’t work for, please click here for the audio-file!)

What about you? What is your rewriting story?

Our intro music was taken from the Free Music Archive:
GeeNerve - Pink Fish Signs (Take Two).

Thoughts too Long for Twitter: Anti-Feminists + Youtube comments

I have learned not to read the comments to pieces that move me, like I have learned not to make eye-contact with men at late-night train stations, like I have learned to walk a certain way, apologise when someone steps on my toe because I was in the way and talk a certain way when I’m harassed as to not provoke violence.

It doesn’t feel right not to look, though. And what I find are a barrage of men who come to comment when women dare to speak – to tell them that they are wrong, to shut up, and stop making them feel bad for the privilege they are so used to having, they can’t feel it at all.

They say: Feminist lie – men have it worse. Men have the dangerous professions. Men die in wars. More men are homeless. Men have it worse!

And I know that these commenters lack socio-economic understanding and the ability to link different facts to draw informed conclusions. I know that they don’t think about the fact that all those are parts of the exact inherently flawed way to look at gender and society that feminists try to fight against. I know they don’t know better and they clearly are incapable of ingesting the information necessary to understand this, as laid out in a million articles and videos.

But it still hurts. It hurts personally, even though it’s not my video. But the video made me cry with the amount of truth in it, the video was about me. And so it hurts. And I don’t want to get a point where I care so little that it doesn’t.

Maybe they are incapable just because they have never been taught to be aware of others in that way – to listen — really listen, without forming counter arguments in every pause for breath. Maybe they have been taught that the response to hearing something that makes you feel bad, is not to pause, to analyse and to extend compassion, but to release anger, to vent and redirect the bad feeling to others. Be that in youtube comments or in a mean right hook.

Because in a certain demographic, masculinity seems to be defined through ignorance, where books and thoughtfulness are for sissies, nerds and weaklings. Yeah. Nobody denies than men have it bad, too. But the difference is that they – the commenters, because how dare they speak for all men? – want everything to stay that way, and try to shut up anyone who might question those ridiculous provisions of gender.

[the videos I am referencing in particular, and which are very very worth watching are: Slam Poet Lily Myer's "Shrinking Women" and author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's "Why we should all be feminists".]

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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. I just read “Purple Hibiscus” – one of the best reads all year.

On Being a Writer

I decided to pursue writing as a valid and serious career option just a little over a year ago. I always wrote, messed around with stories and ideas, conducted long and intricate plays inside my head, but I had to make the decision to take myself seriously in order to stop self-sabotaging myself. And now it’s October, a year later, and I can’t believe how much has changed.

It must be the leaves turning brown and the days growing shorter that triggers the impulse to look back on the last months, to remember where I was a year ago: in the first quarter of By the Light of the Moon, then still titled Lakeside Rain, oscillating between hating every word I brought to the page, and not daring to believe I could actually finish it, even with the conscious, serious decision I had taken. I had a habit of talking it down until it sounded like little more than a smudge on my jeans; called it “the… you know, the thing.”

Today, I am back to revising the thing, writing some new chapters, editing others, drawing maps – generally preparing it for eventual and improved re-release; and takes me back to sitting here a year ago, in a cloud of anxiety vapours and insecurities. I made mistakes in the publishing process, I jumped fast and hard and catapulted myself into a world that I didn’t know. And still, I’m here – in this moment – and all I can feel is grateful for everything that has happened to me, for the all the things I made happen in the last months.

And I’m not just talking about the fact that By the Light of the Moon was picked up and published, or about the dozen short stories I had accepted into anthologies, or the novella that will come out next month. All those were necessary for me to believe in myself, to give me the strength to say: “Hey, this is valid. I’m not there yet, I may not be there for another three years, but it’s valid choice for my life and I can get there.”

But the aspect that really changed is me.

I spent years being afraid of manuscripts. As much as I loved writing, actual manuscripts were  terrifying to me – they showed off so well where my writing lacked, and my resolve. They seemed endless and soul-crushing and definitely not something within my reach.

Now, I am juggling 4 at the same time and it feels glorious.

In the last 12 months, I wrote 3 novels (3 more in collaboration with my lovely Lorrie), a novella and 26 short stories. I am currently revising By the Light of the Moon, after I finished the first draft of my YA coming-of-age novel Where the Wind Settles last week. At the same time, I am outlining my nanowrimo novel, a rock & roll romance. I am also waiting on the publisher’s edits on my erotic romance novella Driftwood Deeds, so that I can go over those. Together with Lorrie, we are polishing our zombie apocalypse romance After Life Lessons in preparation for a second beta reader run, have the edited first draft of our new PNR series Forest Fires out with a group of amazing beta readers right now, and are starting to write the sequel.

I have to take a deep breath just listing it all like that. I don’t have to grab a calculator and rack up word counts to know that I never, never would have believed myself capable of this. And I actually had to take a step back to realize it. In my day to day life, I still feel like I am not writing enough even when I manage 2000 words a day, I still feel like I could do more, that I want to get better. But I think it’s important sometimes to look back at how much I actually accomplished, how deeply writing has become my life – every day, whether it’s hard or not, whether I face rejection or approval. This is what I really wanted when unfinished manuscripts loomed darkly, whispering their truth: that I wasn’t a writer. I just wanted to be one.

I am. I am now.

Lilt Podcast Episode 15

A new week and a new episode of Lilt, the chatty lit podcast with me and L.C. Spoering. Lilt is a short, weekly show about our experience of reading, writing and the publishing industry. We discuss books we like, writing concepts that interest us, and the ever-puzzling publishing game. We’ll also give tips on all things writing, editing and promotion – as always, this is a repost of the episode first uploaded to liltpodcast.

Also, please consider liking our facebook page!

 

Lilt — Episode 15

in which Laila and Lorrie discuss book beginnings, how to hook people and the difficulty in discerning clear rules about writing at all.

Lilt Episode 15 – Laila Blake / Lorrie Spoeringmap :: {skin:’red’, animate:true, width:’500′, volume:0.4, autoplay:false, loop:false, showVolumeLevel:true, showTime:true, showRew:true, downloadable:true, downloadablesecurity:false, id3: false}

(If the application doesn’t work for, please click here for the audio-file!)

What about you? Do you have any strategies that actually help you?

What beginnings do you like?

Our intro music was taken from the Free Music Archive:
GeeNerve - Pink Fish Signs (Take Two).

An Interview with Chele Cooke

Chele and I go way back. We both finished our first full novels in short succession of each other, spent time together on the same online haunts and we are both soft little barely swaddled babies in the publishing industry.

Now, Chele is releasing that first book in her sci-fi series Out of Orbit and of course I agreed when she asked if I wanted to be part of her blog tour. I interviewed her about her book and the writing process as well as the decision to go into self-publishing. Enjoy .

Tell us a little bit about your book Dead & Buryd.

Dead and Buryd is a Sci-Fi novel probably best fitted for the New Adult age bracket. It’s half rebellion and action, and half character driven, including romance and complications in friendship. What I am really proud of with this book is that it’s accessible. You don’t need to be a die hard Sci-Fi fan to get into it.

In a brief overview, and not giving anything away, Dead and Buryd is the first part of the Out of Orbit series, where a planet has been invaded by another race. The planet’s inhabitants have been forced into servitude and are being treated like second class citizens. While they have always been fighting back, this book marks the start of the rebellion, as a slave they want to free turns out to have some pretty important information. There is a lot of elements of personal relationships in this book, which I think will draw in a more female readership… which I’m very happy about.

If your heroine were to describe the story, how would it differ from your description?

It would be a lot more neurotic, that’s for certain. Georgianna is rather scatterbrained a lot of the time, and while she’s been thrust into the middle of this plan to free Nyah, she’s not always entirely sure of what is going on around her. She’s very optimistic, she wants to believe the best, even in Adveni sometimes. Thinking about it, it would probably be quite amusing to see it entirely from inside her mind, as there are some elements that she does not expect at all. So her reaction would be entertaining to read.

What was your inspiration to write it?

I’d had the characters and the vague idea of the plot in my head for a while. I roleplay, and elements of this setting came from that. The setting and the general plot had been hashed over, but it took a lot of planning and rewriting to get it into what it is now. I loved the idea of a world that is controlled so heavily by these extreme weather patterns, and exploring how people would manage it. Once that was in place, the actual story came relatively easily.

What would you say was the most challenging part in the writing and publishing process?

Time management and promotion. However an author has come to being published, they’re expected to do a lot of their promotion. Unless you’re a big name, you’re probably not going to get posters around cities, so a lot of the promotion is down to pushing the book (and you as a writer) yourself. It takes a lot of time, and managing that alongside trying to write more stories has been really tough to balance out.

What prompted you to decide on self-publishing?

I’d been hearing a lot about self-publishing, and seeing people like Hugh Howey do it so professionally gave me the push to look into it as an option for a career. There is such a wonderful community of readers and authors out there, and the more I looked into self-publishing, I realised that I didn’t want to wait for an agent to give me a golden ticket because they thought the market was right. It’s been a lot of hard work, and financing a professionally created product is tough, but I’m really glad I took the step.

 

From the Blurb of Dead & Buryd:

A single life could liberate an entire race, but the life required may be hers.

Since the invasion of her home planet by the ruthless Adveni, Georgianna Lennox’s life as a Veniche medic isn’t as simple as it used to be. When a single infraction against the Adveni can lead to incarceration, slavery, or death, each life saved can bring harsh consequences.

A secret delivery into the infamous Lyndbury Prison Compound reveals that her friend Nyah has been sold into slavery, and Georgianna must decide how to weigh a single life against the risk to herself and others.

Caught between her duty as a medic, her family, and her promise to a friend, she puts her trust in a group of rebels, the Belsa. However, when the attempt to free Nyah uncovers a plan that could rid the Veniche of the Adveni for good, Georgianna struggles with the realisation that the people she trusted may have been using her for their own gain.

Unable to walk away, Georgianna finds herself pulled deep into a web of lies and cruelty that will either claim Nyah’s life… or her own.

Find out more about Chele on her website, where she also hosts a give-away of the book!

Taking Advice from Book Bloggers

I have a little confession to make – I love book bloggers. And it’s not just because I did that for a while when I was first in college (but as the community wasn’t so big and awesome as it is now and I didn’t have anyone to interact with, I stopped again when my work-load increased.) Especially now that I write for publication, I actually live vicariously through them because they are much more allowed to tell the truth, even in exaggerated and comedic form. I can’t that do anymore (*hem* except very very rarely and with very famous books). These days, I don’t post reviews on my blog except for book tours and when I’m specifically asked to, and in my goodreads account I tend to just not rate / not review the ones that would cause me to say some not so great things. It just feels tacky and self-motivated and I will be the first to admit that I read books differently now that I am published.

So yes, I haunt book blogs. I love them and I also am someone who takes their advice seriously (once I establish a similar-ish taste) and I’ve bought quite a few books based on recommendations. I don’t like gratuitous and vicious author-flogging (you know when you get the feeling a book was read knowing you’d hate it just so you can hate on it), but I value that book bloggers call out stuff like slut-shaming and “bad boys” that really are just abusive assholes, cases of plagiarism and other problematic things us more casual readers don’t notice.

Especially for me as a writer, they are also an amazing resource because they read more in one year than I do in five. Check out some of their goodreads reading challenges, they can go over 200 books a year. They see common tropes, repeating patterns and the difference between a well-done topic and a not-so-well-done one better than anyone outside the industry. And yes, they are outside the industry – they don’t have to think about whether something will sell – but really, purely whether they are enjoyable. And even if you don’t agree with everything they like or dislike, it helps you to gauge how those things will be received.

Especially nice are blog hops or memes that allow you to  check out sometimes hundreds of opinions on something. The Broke and the Bookish have a very popular weekly meme, for example but there are so many.

Last week, they asked bloggers to name their Top 10 Book Turn-offs, and further back in the archive you can find themes that make people pick up books or avoid them. It’s not just great fun to click through all the different blogs who post their answers, it gives you a nice over-view about how people really feel about what we write. So check those out.

Smut Marathon Challenge 5

I’m still in, running along with the other contestants of Alison Tyler’s Smut Marathon. The last few challenges didn’t really feel like complete little shorts to me and so I didn’t post them here, but this one — it made second place — fits just fine.

Mia is sitting on the bench outside again. That’s not her real name, I don’t think, but she has been occupying such a large part of my day, of my thoughts for so long, it stopped feeling appropriate to call her the girl, the girl who sits on a bench outside my shop. Sometimes she reads, sometimes it looks like she might be revising notes she took in class. A lot of the time, she just sits there, breathing. I image that she’s a lit major, one of those people who believes that you have to engulf yourself in the throngs of people to let inspiration come, and sometimes she does scribble things in a little black note book. At other times she just watches people, or lies back on the bench, her skinny knees at a steep angle and lets the world pass her by.
 
She doesn’t know I’m watching her. I run a small, tasteful adult store in a pretty part of town. We get angry letters from time to time, but we hold book signings and classes, and the window display is tame as it could get and so nobody managed to shut us down. Still, it means that the glass is covered in a protective film. From the outside, all you see is a gently lit display of some books and two suggestive plants in front of a pastel tinted background, but from the inside, the pastel film is transparent.
 
I watch her, and she has no idea.
 
It felt creepy once, but like with most things, repetition erodes inhibitions. She watches the shop, too. Sometimes, I’m even convinced that this is what she’s really after – a look at my customers, the way a person feels when they enter and exit an adult store. And like any fine researcher, she watches, rather than to venture into dangerous territory herself.
 
It’s an unseasonably hot day in June. She’s wearing a skirt that keeps riding up her naked legs, still creamy white at the very start of the summer. She stretches and leans back, and I watch her with my hand between my legs. The shop is open, but empty. I am surrounded by beautiful, sleek top-of the line vibrators, but I don’t reach for the merchandise; the door could open any moment, and the pressure of my fingers is enough to enhance the moment anyway.
 
I slip them into my shorts, exhale a breath of pure joy when I find the slippery heat, inviting my hand, engulfing it. There’s a room in the back where I should be doing this, but I can’t take my eyes off her. I imagine she knows exactly what she’s doing to me, that she sits there at least once or twice every week just for me.  It makes sense when I have three fingers deep inside myself.
 
Her name is Mia because that’s what I want to moan when I come, looking out the window at her face.