Monday 4 August 2008

The premise for The Three Riddles, the erotic fairytale novella in Enchanted, emerged from a flash of fruitless intuition and the tale of a button. Sometimes the smallest things can change the course of the world, as the elves well know. Unfortunately, they communicate in riddles - so how well would you do at deciphering them?

Read Enchanted ~ The Three Riddles

Friday 1 August 2008

When fairy tales were still sexist misogynist Barbie-Cinderalla bollocks, a host of feminist writers opened the floodgates for us to create the intense, mythic, and very sexy fairy tales of contempory Black Lace. A quick skip through the history of fairytales paves the way for the erotic fairytale collection, Enchanted.

Read Fairytale Feminists

Wednesday 25 June 2008

With the beautiful new Black Lace covers, came three new lines: paranormals, contemporaries, and historicals. The Bluffer's Guide to Historicals addresses the nature of the reticule, how not to make Shakespeare's mistakes, and the contrariness of historical heroes - all set in Place Comma Date.

Read A Bluffer's Guide to... Historicals

Wednesday 11 June 2008

With the beautiful new Black Lace covers, came three new lines: paranormals, contemporaries, and historicals. Featuring ghoulies and ghosties and things to go bumpity-bumpity-bumpity-bump in the night, the Bluffer's Guide to Paranormals explains - among other things - why all lovers must have a human head.

Read A Bluffer's Guide to... Paranormals

Friday 9 May 2008

Fantasy creates worlds - and chews up the word count to do it. Great fat tomes, six-volume epics... so how do you craft a compelling, convincing, complex world in something as small as a novella? Find out the art of building a world on a postage stamp.

Read Building The Dragon Lord's world

Monday 21 April 2008

Somewhere between 'one or two Latin terms' and 'his throbbing member', Black Lace writers find the words they need for a thingie. A quick hurtle through descriptions of dicks shows that action, and context, is everything: there might even be a place for 'fish'. Includes an excerpt from Olivia's Thesaurus of Filth.

Read "His throbbing member"

Wednesday 16 April 2008

"This garden is the only place where ignorance of the law is an excuse." - "These things do happen" by Megan Kerr in Open
A groundbreaking new anthology: Open: South Africa's first erotic anthology by women writers, from a country whose history of censorship is gobsmacking but whose constitution is now one of the world's most liberal... the writers embrace their freedom and the characters embrace each other, all with gleeful explicitness.

Read OPENing a new Eden

Friday 21 March 2008

Do you want to shake the hand that wrote the words that put your own hand firmly between your legs? Or is reading a strictly private pleasure in which the author, like a good waiter, maintains a discreet absence? Olivia discusses the pleasures and pitfalls of meeting the author.

Read Meet the author

Monday 19 November 2007

Porn, eh? Plumbers, firemen, nymphomaniacs, 'special institutions' and an encyclopedia of postures - right? Wrong. Writing stories with the sex left in means putting story and characters first, and including the sex because - frankly - it matters. And it's okay to be frank.

Read Stories with the sex left in

Tuesday 30 October 2007

As Samhain (or Halloween) draws closer, pick up The Ten Visions and the pagan wheel of the year to explore the rhythms of nature. Which are mostly about counting, and not just the ol' one-two type of counting. The one pagan festival that parades its occult origins is the one that's not about sex: it's the beginning of the time which is no time...

Read Samhain: the time which is no time

Monday 22 October 2007

Without the nice literal definiteness of spurting jizm, how do female erotica writers create their "cum-shots"? With fireworks, that's how. Fireworks - explosions - tidal waves - earthquakes - erupting galaxies - and a soupçon of death. After a long and silly history of denial, our orgasms burst onto the scene all guns blazing.

Read Orgasmic metaphors

Wednesday 18 July 2007

Stickiness: secretions, juices, fluids, mucuses, jets, spurts and drops: what would sex be without it? And what, for that matter, would erotica writing be with it?

Read Sticky

Monday 4 June 2007

Our fondest notion of writing seems to come from the sixties, which in turn nabbed it from the Romantics: writing is something that springs forth from one's soul... Our artist-myths range from useful excuses to debilitating lifestyle choices, with a lingering grain of truth in all of them.

Read The mythe of the artiste

Wednesday 16 May 2007

For those who would rather have lithe, slender, lean, elegant, graceful, and smooth instead of rugged, manly, bulging, muscular, beefy, well-built, and hairy.

Read Skinny boys

Monday 14 May 2007

Divulging more intimate details than anyone was probably ready for, this explores how we put our erotica to use. How do you prefer to read? Where? With someone, alone, or both? And where, in your home, do these inflammatory books live?

Read One-handed reading habits

Friday 20 April 2007

With erotica sliding increasingly towards erotic romance, the Happily Ever After question raises its dewy-eyed head with some peculiarly specific problems.

Read And so they lived happily ever after

Tuesday 10 April 2007

The really epic romances – Romeo and Juliet, Tristan and Isolde, Lancelot and Guinevere – are all about sex. Almost everyone puts a love interest and its consummation in their stories, but most authors would rather describe shoe leather than their own character’s gleefully satisfied lust. Where do those missing scenes really grate?

Read The best sex I never read