Isabelle Drake's Blog, page 59

How hot is hot? Cara Sutra Feature

Writing erotic romance and erotica is the best but it’s not what I’ve always written. I got my start writing confession stories for magazines like True Confessions and True Love. While my stories gradually got hotter and edgier, I still do tend to write stories about everyday people in extraordinary situations. Pushing my characters out of their usual lives is one of my absolute favorite things to do.

But I’m not writing all the time. When I’m away from my keyboard, I like watching classic horror films, especially Hammer films such as the Karnstein Trilogy, reading (of course) and traveling.
Sex toy features, naughty diaries, sincere Q&A, fetish event coverage and everything else having to do with sex — Cara Sutra is awesome and I was thrilled to be featured on the site.
What's better than a basic feature? I was welcome to send my hottest of hot excerpts for the page. Hit this to read how hot is hot, but don't open this link at the office. 

Seven things a city girl should know before she dates a guy from the country.

1. He's not a hipster (...yet).
The first time you met him he was drinking a Pabst Blue Ribbon and wearing a flannel shirt, a Carhartt beanie, and a pair of Red Wing boots. It was only until you got close enough to hear what he was saying that you realized he was talking about how he was all-conference middle line-backer his senior year, and not discussing how Paul Thomas Anderson is America's "most important" filmmaker.

2. He won't get your Mean Girls quotes.
The cable company didn't have service all the way out where he lived. In fact he barely got enough reception with the comically-sized rabbit ears bolted to the side of his house to watch the State game on Saturdays. The closest cinema was thirty miles from his house so he's only ever seen three movies: The Notebook, Forest Gump, and Remember the Titans.
3. His Confederate Flag belt buckle doesn't make him a racist (probably).
That's not actually even the confederate flag. That's the battle flag of the army of north Virginia and the only reason he's wearing it is because of that show Dukes of Hazzard. To him the red, white and blue reminds of home cooked meals and good ol' boys. That being said, if he tells you that the south will rise again, you might want to move on. Maybe not. Just ‘sayin.
4. No, he doesn't like to dance.
Or any kind of Dance. His eyes still tear up when he remembers his middle school wrestling coaching telling him he was "lead footed". He would be much happier lying on a picnic blanket in the bed of his truck than being bumped into by sweaty twenty-year-olds years in a sketchy club with the latest Diplo/Tiesto collab track blaring in his ears.
5. Only having 80 Facebook friends doesn’t mean he's a serial killer.
His high school graduating class was only 30 people and his principal was his best friend's grandpa. And his history teacher. And the football coach. His social circle is tiny and he probably likes it that way.
6. Don't visit his hometown.
To you it sounds quaint and cute. You imagine big bright red barns and sprawling pastures filled with galloping horses and grazing cows. The reality is a run-down gas station and a diner whose only patron is a ninety-year-old man who only stops wheezing long enough to leer at what you and mutter to himself about "girls these days".
7. Your romantic past is longer than his.
You might’ve had thirty new matches on Tinder every day for the last few years, but he only ever had one girlfriend before you and it was the town scandal when the two of them didn't get married the summer after they graduated high school.

This last one applies to guys who date girls from the country too. 
Read more on My Fiction Nook.

Cuckold Beach #2: Wicked Pink out now from Ellora's Cave

Cuckold Beach, Book Two
Matthew is a desperate man. Married to a gorgeous raven-haired beauty but unable to satisfy her demanding sexual needs, he thinks it’s only a matter of time before she strays. If he knew how intensely Tara loves him, he might not have delivered her into the arms of his best friend, Dan.
Tara quickly learns that some deDan has done a good job keeping his wild past a secret. Dungeons, whips and exotic tools, those are things he thinks he’s left behind. But when given a chance to put his talents to use, he realizes that knowing how to unleash a woman’s wicked side has some important advantages.

An Excerpt From: WICKED PINK

“I’d like to see you hit the bag.”
Her request hung in the air, a challenge. But damn if he understood what it was about.
“Now.” She took a step forward and looked him up and down, this time more slowly, with more weight in her stare. “If you don’t mind.”
Striding toward the darkest corner of the barn, Dan unbuttoned his shirt and tugged out the tails. She followed him again, the sound of her feet louder this time. Or was it that he was more aware of her? 
Judging by the thud in his chest and that he could smell her, it was the later. Every nerve in his body was firing, snapping with an awareness of her and what he’d been tasked to do. He reached the corner and shed his dress shirt and then the white undershirt.
Tara picked the gloves up off the bale of hay where they’d been resting and held them out. He took them, slipped them on and smacked his fists together. She sat. He moved to the bag.
The first swing of his right hit the edge and the chain whined as the bag swung to the side. He hooked with the left, sending it twirling in the opposite direction. Several punches in, he found his rhythm and the thump of the bag and the moan of the chain soothed him as much as the physical release. He circled the bag, working his way around to the backside so that he could watch Tara watch him.
After he’d gone through the initial burst, he slowed his pace but continued slamming the bag. Punch after punch, step after step, he kept at it long enough for his skin to become coated with a sheen of sweat and to feel pressure in his lungs.
He only paused when Tara got up and came to him. “You know I love him,” she said, placing the fingertips of one hand on his chest and then running her hand down across his abdomen.
Dan dropped his hands, the gloves suddenly feeling tight and heavy as he watched her caress him. “I know.”
She took a step closer and reached up to touch his shoulder. “I’ve never seen him like this.” She put her other palm on his other shoulder and then ran both hands down his arms. A few drops of sweat hit the dirt when she wrapped her fingers around his wrists. Strands of hair fell across her face when she looked down. “I don’t know what to do. I tried…”
Dan let out a long breath. “He wants you to stop trying.”
“He asked me to come here, tonight with you. So here I am. This is trying, isn’t it? Trying something else?”
It was. But what exactly were they trying to do? Was Dan a placeholder for Matthew? A distraction for Tara? “He told me the rules,” he said. “You come to me but he doesn’t get to ask you any questions about what we do.”
She shrugged and lifted her face, the movement a combination of noncommittal and come-hither. 
“That’s right. What happens with Dan stays with Dan.”
He grabbed her waist, held her as well as he could with the gloves still on and lightly kissed her neck, making a trail down to her shoulder. Her entire body seemed to vibrate with sexual energy. The muscles beneath her skin quivered each time his lips touched her. “You think he’ll be able to stick to that?”
“His rules. His decision.”
Dan reeled from the reality of it all.
What the hell was wrong with Matthew? He spent night after night with this gorgeous, fuckable woman—and nothing? If he could see Tara and him now, Dan was pretty sure Matthew, a man he’d risked his life for, would try to tear off his head.
Tara swayed toward him, the tips of her breasts brushing his chest.
He tightened his grip on her. “I’m going to kiss you now, unless you stop me.”

Want to Write Sexy?

Week long online sex scene writing seminar
Taught by erotic romance author/college writing professor Isabelle Drake
May 25-May 29
$35.00 via paypal
Would you like to:

Create satisfying sex scenes?Examine how  the best sex scenes are structured?Be sure to infuse your sex scenes with emotion?Make sure your sex scenes move the story forward?
Are you:
Totally new to writing sex scenes?Have some experience but looking for ways to punch your sexy writing up?Searching for an opportunity to brush up your skills?
If you’re nodding yes to some or all of these questions, this online course may be for you. Taught by an erotic romance author and college writing professor, this course will be a combination of daily challenges, lessons, scene work-shopping, and instructor feedback.
Of course, all correspondence and submissions can remain anonymous.

Request to join Write Sexy or questions to: isabelle@isabelledrake.com

So you decide to be the “cool” girlfriend...

...and hang out with your boyfriend and all of his friends. You can be one of the guys too, right? You show up with pizzas and a 12-pack. Most of the food gets devoured seconds after it’s placed on the living room table. Your guy says, “Play Mario Kart with us” and thrusts a wii-mote at you. All the guys look at you with anticipation and for that split second you are the center of attention. It’s fabulous.
Ready to seize that moment, you take a seat on the Doritos-dust covered couch and try not to think about the fact that the hideous plaid thing was probably garbage picked from a frat house that got condemned by the CDC. You’re given a hasty tutorial on what the buttons do. The guys deliver it with such enthusiasm and look super cute but the info only confuses. Still, you’re committed so you choose Princess Peach and before you know it the race starts. Your previously slug-like, couch-potato guy friends are suddenly filled with life. They spring off the couch, onto their feet, screaming. They yell at each other, at you, at the pictures flashing across the screen. You think you might be in last place but nobody seems to notice. Someone gets a “blue shell” and your boyfriend starts swearing like a twelve-year-old who finally got to sit in the back of the bus. Four minutes later, it’s all over. You finished 6th out of 12. Not last! Everyone crashes onto the couch. You flop down next to your guy. Someone spills beer on you reaching for a pepperoni that fell to the floor from earlier but you don’t say anything because right now you’re the cool girlfriend, one of the guys. The ritual from before is repeated, and repeated, and repeated.
Two hours of bumping into walls, getting taken out by bananas, and driving off cliffs. You want to be done, but you’re in it for the long haul. Surely they’ll get bored of it soon. Before you know it, it’s 3 a.m. and your thumbs are starting to cramp up. You realize you’ve been sitting in that same spot for eight hours and you smell like Bud-Light and Doritos and cheap pizza.
You open up Snapchat and look at all the fun your friends are having at the club. But quality time with the boys is more fun than that, right? You turn to your boyfriend. He’s snoring away, using the towel someone used to clean up the beer spill from earlier as a blanket. Everyone else lumbers off to bed and you guiltily send an SOS then steal a few Cheetos from a bag left open on the floor. The friend you called arrives so you give your sleeping angel a kiss goodbye then leave.
Read more at Bitches Be Writin'.

Terrible bosses, bad jobs and happy endings.

The worst job ever? A terrible boss? We’ve all had one or the other. Lucky me, I’ve had both and at the same time. It sure didn’t feel lucky at the time. It was darn awful. The luck came later.
A while ago, I had a temporary job at a call center. The work was okay, just making calls and reading a script. The problem was that whenever I had a question I was told to look in the training manual. So I did that and I did whatever the training manual told me to do or say.Here’s where I have to tell you something you might not know about call centers. The management folks listen in on calls. This makes sense. They have to check up on the employees to make sure everyone is doing the right thing. Apparently, I wasn’t doing the right things. I found that out on a couple occasions when my supervisor would stop by for a chat. She’d tell me I was “off script” or “following the wrong process.” Then she’d ask me why I was doing whatever it was that I was doing. And, for some crazy reason, she didn’t like it when I referenced the page number of the training manual.
Even after all these years, I can see the curl of her lip and the blank look in her eyes when she spoke with me. It was as though she couldn’t believe someone so inferior had been parked in her cubicle row. “It doesn’t matter that the manual says that,” she’d say. “Just do what I said.” I would’ve been totally fine with that approach if it hadn’t been for her dreadful attitude. Having her lurking nearby, listening in on calls, waiting to zero in and expose my every inept response made most every minute of every day terrible.
When does the luck come in, you want to know?
It came years later, while working on a story. I needed an inspiration for a bad boss. Viola! There she was. My dislike for her was so strong, my memories were--and still are--crisp and vivid. Having her there in my memory made creating the nasty boss I needed for my new novel, Unfinished Business, almost instantaneous.

Read more on Female First. 

If I were snooping around your kitchen...

If I were snooping around your kitchen and looked in your refrigerator right now, what would I find?

•Three containers of leftovers: eight hot wings, chicken stir-fry and half a turkey sandwich. I always order too much food when I go out then feel guilty if I leave it behind.
•Four bottles of Founders Red’s Rye IPA - one of my favorites.
•Whole milk, for my lattes. 
•Lettuce that is too old to eat.

If you could be a superhero, what would you want your superpowers to be?

I’m tempted to say invisibility but I think that might get me into trouble. How about the ability to imagine something and have it transcribed into words while I sleep….is that a superpower?

If you could sequester yourself for a week somewhere and just focus on your writing, where would you go and what would the environment be like?

I’d go to Tween Waters Inn on Captiva Island, Florida and stay in cottage 101. The screened-in porch has a view of the Gulf of Mexico and the beach is about twenty steps away, just across the street. Breakfast at the hotel restaurant is fabulous. The afternoon is quiet, perfect for writing. Then, after a day at the keyboard, there are great bars and restaurant within walking distance but it’s quiet during the day. 

What's the one thing, you can't live without?

Exercise. I like weight training, distance cycling and dance classes best. 

I often have a hard time settling down and a good work out wears me out enough to sit down and focus. Also, I get a lot of answers to my plot tangles and character concerns while riding my bike or walking. Sometimes I even carry a small notebook with me, in case something pops into my head. 

Find me on Goodreads and read more.

Free range eggs! Organic, fresh chicken for dinners! How great does that sound?

I grew up in the suburbs outside Detroit but have lived in the country for a while. At the start of my country life, I made the mistakes city people make when they move to the country. Most of these errors were pointed out to me by experienced country folks but I did what most city people do when they’re given advice by country people—I ignored it. The errors were most obvious when I started raising chickens. The up side to these blunders is that they make for good stories at parties and added a lot of humor to my latest novel, Unfinished Business.
Free range eggs! Organic, fresh chicken for dinners! How great does that sound? To someone who’d moved from the city and has no idea what’s involved in raising chickens that sounds fantastic and like a whole lot of fun. After deciding I wanted to raise chickens, I bought some books, went online, and talked to people. Things I learned: how much space each chicken needs, what type of heat lamps are best to keep chicks warm, and the best atmosphere for nesting boxes. One piece of advice I ignored: put the nesting boxes in a cozy, dim corner because hens prefer darkness. That simply didn’t sound right. Surely the hens would appreciate my thinking of their happiness and providing them with a cheerful coop.
After weeks of preparations, I brought the chicks home from the feed store and every morning, afternoon, and evening I checked on the adorable baby birds. I fussed over them and let myself be charmed by the silly peeping and the ridiculous way they fall asleep standing up.It wasn’t until the chicks’ sweet yellow fluff had been replaced by brightly-colored feathers and the birds were old enough to venture out into the yard that my errors became apparent and I learned a few things that are, in retrospect, painfully obvious.
Chickens can and will fly. Right over the fence. My perfectly measured yard? Abandoned. The birds’ favorite place to spend the day was my herb garden, scratching and digging up all the tiny tender seedlings I’d carefully planted earlier that spring.
Something else I learned is that hens really do prefer dim lighting for egg laying. My cute tin nesting boxes, bolted to the wall of the coop in the pretty morning sun–empty. Instead of filling the boxes with eggs, the hens flew off, far away from the coop in search of cozy corners. Where did they find them? In my garage. On top of the trash bins. Or in the barn. Way in the back by the lawn furniture I’d bought at a garage sale years earlier and kept meaning to refinish.

The harshest lesson? Roosters really are mean. They look cute in cartoons and are pretty perched on fences, crowing at sunrise. But they’re mean. They don’t appreciate the hard work of taking care of them and they don’t want to be friends. Given the chance, they probably will hop up and scratch you with their spurs. It was this lesson that found its way into Hayley’s story.
Read more: http://www.bookreviewsandmorebykathy.com/2015/01/25/5423/ 

Guys can be confusing. So true, right?

As a writer, I want to be sure my male characters talk and act like real men so I often do research--talk to men, watch men, think about men. You know, the basic stuff. Sometimes even that isn’t enough. Sometimes I have to be direct, like a guy. For me that means asking questions. I was talking to a guy friend of mine about how to make sure my male characters sound like real men and our conversation turned to the stuff guys says to girls when they want to say something nice but don’t want to come across as a rude jerk who’s only interested in her body.
Here’s what he told me.
If a guy says:that’s a pretty sweater
He means: you have pretty breasts
If he says:those are awesome boots/shoes
He means:you have awesome legs
If he says:those are great jeans
He means:you have a great ass
Ok. That’s not the whole list. There were others including potential compliments including her jacket, blouse, skirt, turtleneck, tank top, khakis, gloves, hat, scarf—and others I’ve already forgotten.


I do remember though, when I asked him if there were any coded compliments about other things—other things being anything other than the woman’s body—and him drawing a complete blank. I prompted him with, you know, like maybe if they want to say something about her personality.
Again another blank.
Hmmm. I guess that coded speech does serve its purpose.
Decoding some guys can be a challenge but most of the time its worth the effort. Right?
Read More:http://foxylutely.blogspot.co.uk/2015... 

Like most writers, my writing process varies somewhat but there are some patterns.

I start writing to get a sense of the characters and setting. I might write the opening of the story, a scene or two from the middle or the end. In the beginning, I write whatever comes to mind, whatever makes the story and characters come alive for me. I keep writing until I get stuck.

When I get stuck I ask myself a couple questions. What does she want? What’s her goal? What does he want? His goal? The best stories have complex characters who desire several things, often these things are conflicted. Like the woman who wants excitement in her sex life but is afraid to trust. Or a guy who wants to commit to the woman he’s in love with but has a job that always puts him in danger.  Once I know what the characters want I can use those goals to give the story shape.
The next ingredient is motivation. Why does she want crave excitement in her sex life? Sure, everyone wants excitement. But each character is unique and much of that individuality is expressed in motivation. Does she want excitement because she’s just left a dull but secure romance and wants to know what she’s missing? Or does she want to experience some wild sex because she’s just finished law school and has done nothing but read, write and study for the past couple years? What about him? Does he long to provide for his woman because while growing up he never had a home of his own? Or maybe appreciated his childhood and wants to provide a stable home for future children. The characters’ motivation propels the story forward by causing them to move toward their goals.Next up, conflict. What’s in the way? There has to be something in the way ‘cause if there isn’t a problem there isn’t really a story. Readers are wonderful people, but, well, they do like to see the characters work hard for that happy ending.

The best conflicts are ones custom designed for the character. That woman who wants hot sex but is afraid to trust? Create a to-die-for hero who gives her a taste of what he has to offer but makes it clear that to get more she has to trust him. Even better, add in an external element that requires her to trust him, to do something she can’t, maybe help her achieve a goal that’s important to her. 

Read more: multitaskingmomma : Blog Tour, eARC Review & Guest Post: Unfinished Bu...