K.C. Carlton's Blog

A lovely 4 star review of the Winging It audiobook

Review of the Winging It audiobook posted 25th November 2015 by Chocalicious:

“Fascinating listen”

This book, a very graphic account of James (Jimmy) Carlton, weaves a story of a bisexual man — beginning with his life in the ‘50’s in England, and we learn about his struggles with his sexuality. In addition to learning about his numerous trysts, we get a glimpse of the metamorphosis in societal views.

Later in his life, Jimmy gets a second chance at life after nearly dying, and he starts on a new life, and he ends up a lay brother in a California monastery.

Who would have thung, right? ☺

A fascinating read, no doubt!! Highly recommended!!

 

Writing Erotic Christian Romance

I was a guest blogger on The Artist Unleashed on Wednesday. I strongly recommend that blog, run by Jessica Bell and Rasana Atreya, to anyone who hasn’t yet come across it. You can find my post (and subscribe to the blog) here.

And, for those who don’t like clicking through, here is the text:

When I tell people that I write erotic Christian romance I get some interesting responses, the gist of which is, “If it’s Christian, it can’t be erotic. Not as in rude.” I find that fascinating when I think about the amount of sex in the Bible, but it seems to me that the idea people in the West have today of Christianity bears little resemblance to anything taught by Jesus or followed in the Church’s first few hundred years. What we have now is a conception of Christianity that I can only describe as “milksop”. Christ was a revolutionary, but when his teaching became mainstream – when Christianity started to become the official religion of state after state – what he taught was adapted to give rulers what they thought they needed to maintain the obedience of the ruled.

To give just one – relatively recent – example: the church was at the centre of Poor Law operations in England in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and Poor Law Officers insisted on chastity outside marriage and came down hard on any woman who dropped a sprog while unmarried, but the reason for that had nothing to do with Christianity and everything to do with the parish’s desire not to risk having another mouth to feed.

John Lynch is a fellow Mandrill Press author (and, indeed, our administrator) and I’ve had some interesting conversations with him about the ambivalent or negative feelings many people in Britain have towards farmers. John believes that this is a hangover from 250 or 300 years ago when enclosures forced the labouring poor off the common land they had worked for so long and into the manufactories or down the pit. (One of his historical novels, set in the northeast of England in the 1760s, deals with that very subject).It was, by and large, the big landowners who made and benefited from those decisions but it was usually farmers who had to put them into effect and so it was farmers who ordinary people blamed. More to the point of this post, John pointed out to me something that as a non-Arabic speaker I would never have seen for myself: that Barabbas was in fact Bar Abbass and that Bar Abbass means Son of God. The original story was that the Jewish people were offered two Sons of God, one who preached turning the other cheek and one who demanded violent uprising and that they made the wrong choice. The drawback to that from a ruler’s point of view would be that either choice involved the overthrow of the ruling power and no ruler was going to stand for that – and so Bar Abbass became Barabbas and a Son of God was turned into a bandit. Forgive me, therefore, if I choose not to define my religion by the misrepresentation it has been subject to over the centuries.

I’m a Christian (and just admitting to that in 21st Century Britain invites derision and questions about my imaginary friend). Does being a Christian mean I can’t have filthy thoughts about men – and, sometimes, women – and the things I find nice to do with them? It seems that in the minds of many people it does, which is a pity because I’ve had those thoughts all my life and still do and I wouldn’t be without them.

I know there are Christian Romance writers who pretend sex outside marriage does not exist and while I may respect what they do I can’t imitate them. My characters don’t find it necessary to be married before giving themselves to each other, and I don’t find anything in the Gospels to say that Jesus would have condemned them. There are things that don’t happen in my books – the temptation to commit adultery may be strong but it is never given in to (see the Seventh Commandment); rape is only covered once and the rapist faces a violent end; when Pearl turns to prostitution her mind rebels and she suffers a breakdown – but beyond that there are few limits. The human ability to imagine and put into effect sexual practices that would astound others (and often astound themselves) is almost unlimited; I try to write about it. (Readers have on occasion asked about some activity they found particularly risqué: “Have you done that yourself?” Dear Reader, the answer is almost always, “Certainly have. More than once if you really want to know. I recommend it. ”)

I said something recently on Goodreads and in my blog that I’ll say again here: God made us the sexual beings we are and God made sex between people who love each other a joy so great that nothing exceeds it; it was humans and the society they created that told us that God didn’t really want us to be that way. That, really, sex was temptation and God wanted us to avoid it. See if you can find where in the Bible God expresses that wish – because I can’t. In fact, the moment He saw that Adam and Eve had covered their genitals he knew that Humankind was on a downward slope.

You’ll find my books on this page and I won’t dissect them all here (though I will invite you, if you find what I say interesting, to subscribe on that page to my mailing list). What I will say is that I don’t want to offend anyone (Is that milksop? Or just good manners?) So instead of posting anything explicit here I’m going to point you at two audio extracts from Winging It and one from Pearl’s a Sinner. Listen to as much of them as you feel able to. If you get a short way into the first and think, “Oh, my God! No! I can’t read this filth” then I’m not your kind of writer. But if you find yourself wanting to read or hear more…well, you know where to find me, don’t you?

And, finally, let me say that I love hearing from people who agree with what I say – but I love it even more when someone gets in touch to tell me I’m a filthy trollop who shouldn’t dare use the word Christian to describe herself. Do you have anything you want to tell me?

The Audio Extracts

In this one (it’s Chapter 26 of Winging It), the protagonist’s sister muses on what light a short story (I published it as A Perfect Solution) throws on Jimmy’s truthfulness when he wrote Winging It. Just how much did he leave out? Writers should perhaps not be moved by their own work, but I can’t help being moved by this: There is nothing in this book about “mighty love-hammers” or “thrusting thighs” because I wanted to write a story about love. Love, even sexual love, is not about those things. It’s about tenderness. Affection. Closeness. Intimacy. When two people who love each other come together to make love, they become one person. Self is put aside. Sex without love is a waste of time. Trust me: I have had enough of it to know.

This extract from Winging It tells us how hard Jimmy resisted God’s call. He fought to remain a non-believer – and he lost.

Finally, this extract is from Pearl’s a Sinner.

Have I caught your attention? You can subscribe to my mailing list here:

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Mandrill Press: Three Very Different Writers

I lifted this off the Mandrill Press blog. I felt entitled to, since I’m mentioned — and it says it’s a warning about me. The nerve! It was written by fellow Mandrill Press author, John Lynch — though that should be clear when you read it.

Mandrill Press: Three Very Different Writers
What to expect from the three Mandrill Press authors

Our regular readers know this, but there has been a significant influx of new subscribers to the site over the past few days and – given the very different writing styles and worldviews of the three Mandrill Press authors – it’s probably a good idea to set out for the new subscribers exactly what they can expect to see here.

John Lynch

My name is John Lynch, I’m (with Suzie Hopkins) one of the two founders of Mandrill Press, and I handle all of the admin for the three of us so the chances are that you will hear from me more often than from anyone else. I write contemporary fiction and historical fiction as well as non-fiction and working as a writer for hire. You’ll find a description of my currently published books here. Of the three of us, I like to feel that I’m least likely to cause offence because I don’t write what the others call “erotica”.

SF Hopkins

Suzie Hopkins is Canadian but currently lives in Abu Dhabi where she is a Marketing Manager. You can find details of her published books here. I mentioned erotica earlier; some of Suzie’s books are quite frankly and straightforwardly rude (The Binding and The Transformation of David) while the best way to describe a book like Lovers in Their Fashion is to say that it’s a strong contemporary romance that does not shrink from describing its characters’ sexual doings. In detail. Oh!

KC Carlton

I suppose, if I’m honest, that to tell you about Kat Carlton (and that could, perhaps, be rewritten as “to warn you about Kat Carlton”) is the reason for this post. Kat writes what she calls Erotic Christian Romance (see her books here) and her work is explicit. If seeing the word “Christian” makes you think, “Oh, well, if it’s Christian it can’t be too filthy”, you had better read what Kat says here. And here. As well as love between man and woman, Kat specialises in LGBT and M/M – that is, love – physical love – between two men. If this is not for you, I suggest you stick to the other two.

There you are. You have been warned. Now I’ll stand back and just say, take a look at the books. See what we have that you might like.

Enjoy!

Late Starter. A free M/M story by KC Carlton

He’d heard the whispers most of his life. No one ever said it to his face – you’re more careful than that when the person you’re talking to is captain of the school rugby team, a blindside flanker and handy with his fists when aroused and later, in the adult world, people are more polite, at least on the surface but he knew what they said. “Queer” was the word in those early days – “gay” had not yet come into fashion and the question they asked among themselves (no one ever said it to him) was: is he or isn’t he?

If anyone had summoned up the courage to pose the question directly to him, he’d have said “No”. No, I’m not queer. I’m just like everyone else. Just like you. And he’d lived that life – the life like theirs; he’d dated girls (good-looking girls, girls other boys wanted and couldn’t get, because that’s what happens when you’re a sporting hero) and eventually he’d married one of them, done his duty by her, fathered children and put the necessary effort into raising them.

There had been temptations. A meeting, a social event, a pub or a restaurant or someone’s home and there would be that sense of being appraised. He’d look up and see in the eyes of some man he didn’t know a question, always the same question: are you? Or aren’t you? He’d learned how to blank that look without even thinking about it, sending the message, “No, I’m not. You’ll have to look elsewhere.” And sometimes the message would come back, “You don’t fool me,” but no one ever tried to take it further because what would have been the point? Whatever his inclinations might be, if he didn’t want to he didn’t want to.

When he looked back now, it seemed like an awful waste of so many opportunities. Because however much he’d tried to fool other people he’d never fooled himself. The answer to the question “Are you or aren’t you?” would have been “Yes. I am.”

Had Julie known? They’d certainly never talked about it and if their life together left her unsatisfied she’d never said so. If she knew that sex with a woman was a duty thing for him, she must also know that he did his best. All right, she had divorced him in the end but not until the children were grown and gone into the world; her affair with a younger man she met at work and not doubt about his sexuality had been the catalyst and it had ended in tears. She’d sent out feelers through their daughter: was there any chance he’d take her back? The answer was no, but when their children had married he and Julie had stood together like the best of friends, thick as thieves his sister said, but by that time he’d had so many years of practising a false front it would have been harder to let the truth show.

He’d never hit her, after all – never even thought of it and it came as a surprise when she told him what went on in other marriages. “Eric has battered Pat since the beginning.” He didn’t understand that. To him there was nothing lower a man could do and it was always cold towards Eric after that.

He hadn’t hit the children, either – not once – that was something else that never occurred to him to do.

He didn’t regret those things – in fact it pleased him to know that he’d set the children such a good example, that he left violence on the rugby field and in the playground. When he looked back, there were few things he regretted. Really, just the one.

He thought it would have been different if he’d been born a generation later. Gay Pride marches, civil partnerships, openly gay people in high positions. The best referee in the 2015 rugby World Cup was gay, for heaven’s sake, and everyone knew and nobody minded. What a difference a few decades make. He’d been in his twenties when homosexual acts between consenting adults in private had been made legal, and older than that before the sniggering stopped. If, in some quarters, it ever had.

So that was his regret – that he’d suppressed his inclinations, refused to acknowledge his true nature. When his life ended, he would never have experienced the one thing he longed for: to love and be loved by another man. And when he said loved he meant physically loved. Fucked, if you wanted to be crude about it. Really, by now, the physical aspect should be unimportant but it wasn’t. He wished with all his heart that he had, just once, returned the gaze of one of those men, touched hands, found a room – let’s be frank, a bedroom – and undressed and let what would happen happen. Now that it was so late in the day, the longing was almost too much to bear.

Who could say how much of this was to do with the conversation he had had only three days earlier?

‘How long do I have?’

‘Realistically? Three months. At the most. Maybe less.’

‘There’s no hope?’

‘If we’d found it a year ago, perhaps. As it is…I’m not going to lie to you. There are things we could do but I couldn’t promise that you’d win more than another few weeks and you wouldn’t thank me for them because the treatment would be as bad as the disease. Worse, probably.’

‘Best leave it, then.’

‘You’re not a poor man. The best advice I can give you is to try to enjoy the time that’s left. Take a holiday. Go on a cruise. But do it soon, now in fact because in a month or so you’re going to need a hospice.’

So here he was, lying by the pool in the most expensive resort hotel he’d been able to find in the Maldives. He knew he didn’t look like a dying man – not yet – and he thanked God for that. The time would come soon enough when he’d want to hide away from other people. Just as, in a sense, he’d hidden all his life. Well, it would come when it came; he’d take his regret and his unfinished nature to the grave.

He’d made sure his will was as he wanted it to be. Julie would be well looked after and the children would be grateful for their inheritance. He’d told Julie and she’d wanted to take charge, find another specialist with a more optimistic prognosis, get a second and a third opinion, examine other forms of treatment. He’d said “No”. Then she’d said she’d come on holiday with him, look after him, go on walks together so that he didn’t come to grief on his own. He’d said “No” again. He’d brought with him books he’d always wanted to read and never got round to. He planned to eat the best food he could find and drink wine better than any he’d tasted in the past. He may be about to die with his most cherished longing unsatisfied but he’d be damned if he’d go into eternal darkness regretting wine not drunk and meals not eaten. Speaking of which, it must be about time for lunch. He’d go to his room, swap his swimmies that would probably never get wet for slacks and a casual shirt, and see what the restaurant had to offer.

He was almost at the door into the hotel when the man caught up with him. ‘Sir. You left your book behind.’

It made him so cross when he did something like that. And the book…a paperback ordered off the Web, a collection of stories about men enjoying with other men all those things he had so resolutely denied himself…no-one could look at that without understanding what kind of man would be reading it. He reached out to take it.

Had he imagined that? The fingers that touched his and the way they did it – not accidental and snatched away but a quite intentional contact? He looked up and found himself staring into a pair of brown eyes that were frankly appraising him. Asking the question other eyes had asked so many times before. He looked away quickly. ‘Thank you,’ he said, the words gabbled in his haste to be gone.

But the man did not immediately let go – of book or hand – and he was forced to look again, at a man in his middle years, maybe forty or a little over, in good physical shape with strong arms, a chest you wouldn’t be surprised to see on an athlete and a stomach as flat as a stomach can be without care that crosses the border into narcissism. Curly hair with the earliest touches of grey. Laughter lines around the eyes – and the man was laughing now, though it didn’t show on his face.

The man shrugged and tilted his head just a little to the side, still asking a question but this time the question was: are you sure?

And he wasn’t. So many invitations turned down, and now he was dying and he had refused the one thing he’d always wanted to know, wanted to do, and why? For a society that no longer existed and a set of rules that no one else now gave a toss for.

He was staring at the man and the man was staring at him and he had no idea who was watching or whether they understood what was going on and nor did he care. Something snapped. If you’d asked him, he couldn’t have said anything other than that – that something snapped. What use is a life that other people see as successful and fulfilled if at the end the person whose lived it feels only regret?

Keeping his eyes firmly fixed on the man’s, with one hand he took the book and with the other he gave the hand that yielded it the gentlest stroke. Then he turned and walked into the hotel. He knew without looking that the man followed him. His heart pounded. He felt more nervous than he had ever been in his life but he walked firmly to his bedroom door, opened it and went in. He turned to see the man hanging the Do Not Disturb sign on the door and turning the security lock. He waited, with only the faintest idea of what it was he waited for.

The man dropped his little leather handbag into a chair and then he was hugging him and he was hugging the man and then the man was kissing him and he was kissing the man. More than forty years of saying no when he had wanted to say yes and now he simply went with the flow. It felt wonderful. The hairs stood up on his arms and his neck. He felt nervous, the way a young athlete – the young athlete he had once been – feels nervous before he takes the field. He was on a path that took him to one place only and while he did not know the place exactly he knew he wanted to be there.

The man placed a last kiss on his throat and leaned back. ‘Is there anything you don’t do?’

‘I don’t know what I do and what I don’t do. This is my first time.’

The same smile in the man’s eyes as he had seen there before. ‘Oh. So that’s… I’m honoured. You’re sure you want this?’

‘I’m sure.’

‘Anything?’

‘I’m in your hands.’ Decades of sadness melted to nothing when he spoke those words. “I’m in your hands.” He was handing over responsibility for what he was and what he did. If it was a mistake, it was a mistake. He should have done what he was going to do a long time ago. What had held him back was fear. What possible point was there now to feeling afraid? What had someone in his position to be afraid of?

When the man said, ‘Shall we take our clothes off?’ he rolled the swimming trunks down his legs and stood naked. The man was wearing more and took longer. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Jimmy.’ He should have been embarrassed, standing waiting with his erect cock quivering, but he simply didn’t care.

‘I’m Carl,’ said the man and it was only then that Jimmy realised that the accent he had been listening to was not English. The man finished undressing, pulled back the sheet, took his hand and guided him onto the bed. He was ready to take charge and Jimmy let him. The man pressed him down, knelt between his thighs, put one hand around the base of his cock while cupping his balls with the fingers of the other and drew Jimmy’s cock into his mouth.

Bliss. The sense that, for the first time in his life, he was being true to who he was. So many years of deceiving himself and others were fading into nothingness. He put his hands on Carl’s head. His hips were moving, he knew that his cries of joy would be heard clearly by anyone passing the room and he’d simply didn’t care. Too soon, far too soon, he gasped, ‘I’m going to come,’ and Carl took his mouth away and stroked him to a climax better than anything he had ever known. Then Carl wrapped his arms around him and pulled him close. ‘How do you feel?’

‘Wonderful. As though, for the first time in my life, I’ve allowed myself to be me.’

‘No regrets?’

‘None. I don’t know what the form is. Is it all right to kiss?’

Carl’s reply was to press his lips firmly against his. Tongue slid against tongue; his hands were on Carl’s back and Carl’s had moved to his bottom.

After several minutes, Carl detached himself, reached out for his handbag and took out a bottle of oil. He held it up. ‘I’d like to fuck you?’

He gulped. ‘Okay.’

‘It’s bound to hurt a little. Maybe more than a little.’

‘Okay.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘I’ve got this far. If I don’t go all the way I won’t forgive myself.’

It did hurt. At the beginning, it hurt quite a lot. But there was not a moment when he felt regret or wanted to stop or wished he had never begun and when the climax came and he felt the hot flow of Carl’s seed enter him he felt completely fulfilled. This is me, he thought. This is who I am. This is who I should always have been.

He’d booked for two weeks but Carl was leaving three days after their first meeting. For three days and three nights they were inseparable and then he was alone once more. There were other male guests staying in the hotel alone but he looked at none of them and, if any of them gave him that particular questioning look, he chose not to notice. He’d had what he’d had and it was enough. He was complete.

Towards the end of the second week, he detected signs that the hospital specialist had warned him he would see sooner or later. The end was coming quicker than might have been. Entry to the hospice was probably only days away. He should have been sad. He wasn’t. On the day his freedom to go where he pleased was to end, he dropped to his knees and thanked God for His mercy in allowing him to be, if only for three days, the person he was born to be.

Author’s note

I hope you’ve enjoyed this story. If so, you might like to know that there’s another free story here. I put these on my blog so that you can know the kind of writer I am and judge whether you might like my more serious work, details of which you can find here  (and you can subscribe there to my newsletter, too).

Winging It – fact or fiction?

There are some books you write that everybody knows are fiction. You made them up, which is exactly what readers expect novelists to do. And then there are the others…Winging It is one of the others. The question of how real it is – to what extent it’s autobiography – has been around since the day it was published. One of the very first reviews it received on Goodreads includes this: “I am thinking this is a true story???” and others have asked the same question. That question being: how true is this? How much is fiction and how much autobiography? It’s time, I think, to set the record straight – or at least as straight as I’m prepared to make it.

Well, Winging It is an exercise in obfuscation. It was written in part by my brother Jimmy and in part by me, and some of those parts that seem to be by Jimmy are in fact mine. When Jimmy wrote the first draft, he called it Scenes From a Life, which may provide a clue – but may not. Names have been changed, starting at the very beginning – Jimmy’s name was not Carlton and neither is mine. But Jimmy had an unusual life and we knew from the very start that some people from our early years would know exactly who the protagonist was. Some name changes were to protect others. We went to great lengths to hide Barbara’s identity and we did that for what I consider to be good reasons which are set out in the book:

Barbara was appalled at the idea her past might be revealed. It broke her up. She talked about the disgrace it would bring on her husband’s children to have it known in a town like that that their stepmother had been a porn star. She said her husband would divorce her. She’d have to move on and she says she’s too old to move again. Whatever she has, she wants to keep.

I don’t believe that anyone who was not an intimate of C and Barbara will ever unravel the question of her identity and I’m confident she will never be tracked down and disgraced. But C herself must be fairly obvious and I don’t imagine that there is too much difficulty in working out who Marty Bone was – or A, or B. Margaret Holmes? One of those two names is not the one she really had, but anyone who was at school with Jimmy knows the identity of the girl he made pregnant. Nor will it be difficult to work out what school that was, because the book mentions Northumberland Street, which identifies the city Jimmy and I grew up in, and Doctor Comstock is so close to the name of the headmistress of a girl’s High School there that anyone from that time in that place will be able to name the schools that both Jimmy and Margaret (and I) attended.

The book does not tell you this, but I showed it to Margaret before publication and said I would remove all references to her if she asked me to. She was fascinated to learn things she had never known about Jimmy’s later life but she told me that she had no problem with the book appearing or with her part in it.

There are some things that Jimmy did not include in the original script and I have not added them. For example, when you read it you will know that our parents visited him in London but it will seem that he and I were only in contact by phone. That isn’t true – I saw him in London more often than our parents did. While we were growing up I had a friend who acted to the hilt the part of the attractive blonde flirt and when I saw some of Jimmy’s exuberantly gay conduct (which he always kept secret from the rest of the family) I said, ‘That’s Helen!’ and he said, yes, when he flirted with men he did it in exactly the way he had seen Helen behave. Helen appears in Winging It, but only by proxy – we took her name and gave it to the secretary who fell in love with Jimmy and whom he failed so disgracefully. And while we’re talking about Helen, this is a good time to say that Jimmy really did love wearing women’s clothes (but only among people he was confident would understand) and he was widely known at that stage of his life (once again, to those he knew well) as Lucy.

Reggie wasn’t called Reggie, Ben wasn’t called Ben, Guy wasn’t called Guy and Molly Brown was called something else entirely and did not work for the Toronto Dominion Bank – but all of them existed and, by and large, did the things they do in the book.

That, I think, is as far as I want to take this exercise in openness. And just to show how open I’m really being, let me make it clear that one question remains for anyone reading this post: is it really being written by Kat? Or by Jimmy?

I’m afraid you’ll have to form your own opinion on that, with no help from me.

Bookends

I think of Winging It and Pearl’s a Sinner as bookends in the sense that they are both erotic Christian romances but come from completely different places on the spectrum – opposite ends of it, one might almost say. What they have in common is that: both are available in paperback; both are available for Kindle; and – now – both are audiobooks that can be downloaded from Audible or iTunes.

One thing both audiobooks have in common is a narrator of the highest quality. Missy Cambridge did a fabulous job for me on Pearl’s a Sinner and Shannon Gunn is equally magnificent on Winging It. Each of them was right for the task – Shannon because Winging It is the story of Jimmy Carlton, who (like Shannon) was a man and Missy Cambridge because (obviously) Pearl is not just a sinner but also a woman. There’s more to it than that, though, because both narrators got to know and understand the books before they read them. The author’s dream when planning a transfer of one of their books to audio is that the narrator will “get” the book and they did. I was so delighted with their work that Shannon is now narrating my novella, A Perfect Solution and I recommended Missy Cambridge to my fellow Mandrill Press author, SF Hopkins for her erotic novel, Lovers In Their Fashion. She is at work on it now and I look forward to listening to the result.

If you’re not already familiar with these two books, you can get the flavour by listening to Chapter 8 of Winging It  and Chapter 1 of Pearl’s a Sinner.

When Shannon Gunn’s narration of A Perfect Solution is available on Audible and iTunes I’ll have the news in my newsletter, which you can subscribe to here. Whatever I say to her, Suzie Hopkins has so far not arranged a mailing list of her own (possibly because she lives in Abu Dhabi and is concerned about the reaction of the authorities there to the sort of book she writes) but you can find her blog page here and subscribe to it on the same page. If you prefer paperbacks or e-books to audiobooks, the two books are already available here:

A Perfect Solution

Lovers In Their Fashion 

 

My favourite chapter in Winging It

Mandrill Press was formed in 2012 by John Lynch and Suzie Hopkins. John writes contemporary fiction under his own name and historical fiction as R J Lynch; Suzie writes contemporary and Victorian erotica as S F Hopkins. Suzie introduced me to the firm last year – there are at present no other Mandrill Press writers. As well as writing his own stuff, which does not include erotica and is therefore completely unlike my work or Suzie’s, John handles all the Mandrill Press admin – in return for what he describes as a modest percentage of Suzie’s and my earnings, he briefs editors and proofreaders, commissions cover design and manages the production of paperbacks, e-books and audiobooks. I therefore tend to pay attention to what he says and when I saw this post about his favourite chapter in Zappa’s Mam’s a Slapper I got to thinking: what, in my books, are my favourite chapters?

My attention started with Winging It because Shannon Gunn has just finished narrating the audiobook version. I chose Shannon, and not Missy Cambridge who did such a fabulous job on Pearl’s a Sinner, because Winging It is written in the first person by a man whereas Pearl’s a Sinner is – obviously – a woman’s story. Shannon is also narrating my novella, A Perfect Solution, because that too is a male first person story. In the meantime, Suzie Hopkins has stolen Missy Cambridge to narrate her full-length contemporary erotic novel, Lovers In Their Fashion.

I mention A Perfect Solution because, when I thought about it, I realised my favourite chapter from Winging It was Chapter 26 and A Perfect Solution is central to that chapter. Rather than reproduce it here, I’m giving you this link so that you can listen to it. When you get there you will find that there are, in fact, two extracts. The second shows Jimmy at the point where, after a life that was dissolute by anyone’s standards, he is about to decide that he can no longer ignore the call from God of which he has been aware for some time. I call my work Christian erotica and Winging It an erotic Christian novel – this sort of thing (there’s more in Pearl’s a Sinner) is why.

I’m going to give some thought to choosing my favourite chapter in Pearl’s a Sinner – I’ll be back.

It’s #erotic, it’s #Christian and it’s a #romance. What more could you ask?

It’s erotic, it’s Christian and it’s a romance. What more could you ask? Well, you could ask if it’s available as an audiobook and — if it is, whether you can download a free copy. And the answers to those two questions are: Yes; and (if you hurry) Yes again. The first five people to email me at kc@mandrillpress.com will receive a code that allows them to download the Pearl’s a Sinner audiobook from Audible. (Remember to say whether you want it from the USA or UK Audible).

Listen to this to see whether it whets your appetite:

https://kccarlton.files.wordpress.com/2015/09/pearl-retail.mp3

Win a free #lgbt #erotic #audiobook

Everything you need to know about Winging It is here, here and here. Now it’s going live as an audiobook and we have some free copies to give away. The draw will close on 25th September 2015; to get your name into the hat, go to this page and sign up for KC Carlton’s mailing list. (Everyone who joined the mailing list since 1st September 2015 will be in the draw automatically).

Erotic Christian Romance

I referred here to erotic Christian romance and I offered here entry to a draw for free audiobooks of Pearl’s a Sinner (there’s still – just – time to enter) for which I used the same term. On Goodreads, Laura says, “Christian…erotica? Okay, that’s a new one for me.”

Well, good. It’s time we had a new genre on the block. But is it really so strange? I’m a Christian. Am I not supposed to have erotic thoughts? Because I do – as Pearl’s a Sinner will make very clear.

By the end of next week, the audiobook version of Winging It should also be available. I think you’d also have to call Winging It Christian erotica, though perhaps it deserves its own sub-genre: Christian bisexual erotica, since the protagonist, Jimmy, seems unable for much of his life to decide whether he’d rather be dressed as a boy or a girl and whether he’d rather be in bed with a man or a woman.

There’s a serious point here. Someone – it might have been Salvation Army General William Booth, might not – said, “Why should the Devil have all the good music?” To which I would add, “…or the rude thoughts?”

Chapter 5 of Winging It gives us the thoughts of Jimmy’s sister, recalling their youth in England as the 1950s became the 1960s. It begins like this:

Young people at that time were required to lead completely unnatural lives, and that was especially true of the ones clever enough to have passed the 11Plus. They were grammar school boy and high school girl; the world was their oyster. What was expected was that they would study hard, gain qualifications and—the boys at least, and some of the girls—get good jobs as a result. In their twenties, they would marry a suitable person and raise a family. Until then they must put all thoughts of the opposite sex out of their minds.

But at eighteen you are a sexual animal. Shakespeare knew that; he got Anne Hathaway pregnant when he was that age which suggests they were probably fucking when he was younger than Margaret and Jimmy when they got together. When Romeo and Juliet were their age, they were already dead. What was expected was not reasonable.

Margaret was very highly sexed, and she was one of those who had watched Jimmy on the cricket field, or when he passed by on his bike. Boys and girls from the two schools met outside at lunch time to chat about things that, looking back, would seem puerile. Jimmy was never one of them. He spent his lunchtimes throwing a ball around, running, or in the school library. I picture Margaret joining the others and wondering whether Jimmy would ever turn up to be flirted with. I imagine the lust growing inside her. Boys were supposed to feel horny and girls were not; I can tell you, speaking from the heart, that that is not real life.

The point I’m making here is: God made us the sexual beings we are and God made sex between people who love each other a joy so great that nothing exceeds it; it was humans and the society they created that told us that God didn’t really want us to be that way. That, really, sex was temptation and God wanted us to avoid it. See if you can find where in the Bible God expresses that wish – because I can’t.

Laura, your name will be in the hat when we draw the winners of Pearl’s a Sinner. If you’re one of them, I hope you enjoy the book. And the genre.