As Long as the Topic isn't "Other Talents"

by Giselle Renarde

My grandmother is terribly proud of the new kitchen light my uncle installed for her. "He's such a perfectionist," she told me. "But he takes his time. He enjoys the work."

"He could make some extra money as a handyman now that he's retired," my mother said.

"No, no. He'd never do that. If this was a real job with pay and clients, then it would feel like work and he wouldn't want to do it anymore."

Same thing with me and graphic design.

I've mentioned before that cover art was, in my mind, a barrier to entry to the world of self-publishing. I knew I couldn't afford to commission quality cover art, but I also didn't know how to create it myself.

That was a big hurdle, but the less I earned in royalties from small presses, the more I realized I needed to make a change--and self-publishing was the best change for me.

I'm a self-taught cover designer. It's a skill I've acquired by trial and error. I won't say it's a "talent" necessarily, because I know some spectacular graphic designers and my covers really don't stack up.

From time to time, I do commission covers from people I consider "real" graphic designers, but the truth is that I've grown to love playing with my design program. Even after four years using it, I learn something new with every cover I create.

I was an artist, as a kid. Teachers told me I'd grow up to be a writer but I never believed them. I only wrote stories so I could draw pictures to go along with them. Maybe cover art is my adult version of book illustrations.

But there's a reason I don't offer up my skills for cash. There's a reason I gave premade covers away for free in December. And it's the same reason my uncle will only do handiwork around my grandmother's house and his own: once you're working for pay, working for clients, it's a job rather than a pleasure.

I want to retain graphic design as my pleasure. I want to keep learning and keep enjoying.

And I'll tell you one thing: when my lesbian novel The Other Side of Ruth came out in the fall, readers (and writers) came out of the woodwork to tell me how much they loved the cover--a cover I'd designed myself. It made me almost as proud of the cover art as I was of the book itself.

Of Liars and Cover Artists

Forgive me if somebody's already covered this particular subject this week, but I'm actually writing a week in advance, and as you're reading this, I'm in Chicago on a not-quite vacation.

A few weeks ago, I read an article on a book called Liar by Justine Larbalestier. The main character of the story is a young African American girl, but the cover prominently displayed a Caucasian girl. Though the book has not yet been released, previews of the cover raised the ire of many people online, and even drew criticism from the author. As a result of the hullabaloo, the publisher, Bloomsbury, is creating a new cover, both for the paper back versions and the hardback versions. The fact that new covers are being printed for the hardback book is particularly impressivve, since the original cover was already printed, and the printing of new covers will probably cost at least an extra $7000 for the publisher. (You can read an article on Liar and its new cover here.)

As someone who's both a writer and a cover artist, I found this to be particularly interesting, and not just because of the issues on race and publishing that have been raised. A lot of thought goes into the creation of books covers, or at least it should. I don't know how they do it in the big publishing houses, but in small press and e-press, authors are frequently asked for their input on the cover. They're handed a form to fill out, asking them to detail one to two ideas for the cover that will grace their work. A smart author will fill this form out with as much detail as possible, including things like eye and skin color for the characters. An even smarter author will realize that no matter how detailed they get, the cover they imagine is not likely going to be what ends up on the final book, as Justine Larbalestier found out with Liar.

As a cover artist, each job I get comes with a brief -- that is, a description of what the cover should look like. This brief comes from the publisher. Except in one instance, I've never had direct contact with the author. All information comes from the publisher, and all my questions go to the publisher. The one exception was when I designed a cover for the publisher's wife's book. She had something very particular in mind, and being married to the publisher does have it's advantages. In that case, working with the author turned out great, but for any other book cover I've worked on, I wouldn't want to have contact with the author. I only get a couple weeks at most to create a cover. I have to come up with the initial idea based on the brief, then do a rough draft, and if the publisher okay's that, a final. That's a lot of work to accomplish in a short amount of time, and a lot of e-mail going back and forth between me and the publisher. Adding a third person, the author, into the process would slow things down dramatically. This is, after all, the author's baby that I'm working on. As artist, I'm trying to bring to life his or her book in visual form. Since I don't get to read the book (there's no time with this schedule), chances are I'm not going to get things exactly right.

But I am going to get things right enough, and the publisher knows that. The publisher has a feel for the book, and a feel for my work. He knows what I'm capable of producing, and when he's not sure, he asks. The author doesn't know squat about me, usually. They don't know what programs I use, what resources I have. They don't know if I have a painterly art style, where I draw each detail from scratch in Photoshop, or if I prefer to create covers using stock photography (I prefer a 3D collage approach, actually). All they know is that they have this perfect image in their head of the hero and/or heroine on the cover, hair blowing in the wind, or brilliant blue eyes staring out the porthole of a space station. They know the back story, the reason why the characters smile just so, and how high a hand must be raised in hello or farewell. They know the plot, the setting, the theme of their master piece.

Authors are supposed to know that kind of detail... and put it into their books. Artists are supposed to create attractive, engaging, exciting book covers to lure people into buying the book and then discovering the magical details inside. Because while a picture might paint a thousand words, it's no substitute for the actual story itself. I'm good at what I do as an artist, but I can't recreate someone else's book on a cover, certainly not in two weeks time. What I can do is help sell it, and that's what I strive for every time I get a commission for a cover.

Bloomsbury put a Caucasian girl on the cover of a book about an African American girl. They were trying to "symbolically reflect the narrator's complex psychological makeup," they said. They wanted to get across the nuances and details inside the book. Bad idea, in my opinion. Their marketing department should have focused instead on selling the book, and let the author do her work. If Justine Larbalestier is any good at writing, she'll have a reader hooked within the first few paragraphs. All the cover has to do is get people to pick up that book and read those first few paragraphs. Oh, and it also has to not piss off a lot of people over issues of race and truth in advertising along the way.

Take it from someone working in the trenches of publishing. Keep it simple, Bloomsbury. Keep it simple.

*****

As an aside, I did not even try to completely capture my own writing in the cover art of my own book, Future Perfect, though elements of various short stories are in there.

Future Perfect by Helen E. H. Madden, available from Logical-Lust.com

Sometimes Scary is Good!

Series are scary – lot’s of commitment, time and memory required.

Stand alones are also scary – if all the stories are stand alones, how do you tell which one you should work on next.

My solution is a bit of a middle ground – collections of stories around a theme.

You’ll find these with a lot of publishers – but you’ll usually find that they are multi-author collections – like Total-e-bounds Anthologies and Seasonal releases. (The Gift on the left was the first one of those I tried my hand at.)

In my wisdom I’ve taken this idea and written a series of collections around different themes. Since I have a grand total of one story released in each series, the jury is still out on if these are a good idea or not.

Here’s a bit about them anyway.

The Collared Collection is the first one. I case you haven’t heard me mention the fact before – I love collars. Really, really love collars. I love writing about how collars change and represent different relationships in different ways.

Collars turn up in a lot of my other books as well. But this is a collection of those stories in which the collars themselves really get to take the centre stage a bit more. Since it’s a collection and not a series, each one stands alone – which also makes it easier to put in M/m and M/f stories without worrying that people who only like to read one or the other will be put off.

Here's the blurb for the series, which explains what it's all about a little bit more logically, lol.

Leather. Latex. Silver. Gold. Ink. Velvet.

There are as many different shapes and styles of collar as there are people who wear them. Protection.

Possession. Dominance. Submission. Loyalty. Love.

Some collars mean it's time to play, others signify a life time commitment. A fun bit of bondage to one person can easily look like the kinky equivalent of a wedding ring to another. A gold necklace might look vanilla enough until you know what it means to the person wearing it.

But no matter what they are made of, or what they represent, collars are important. A collar can make or break the submissive wearing it - and the dominant who put it around their neck.

It doesn't matter if you are dominant or submissive. Everything changes once one person is Collared.

The Perfect Timing Collection runs the same way. It’s a set of twelve stories that stand entirely alone. They just all happen to revolve around the theme of time. Again there’s a mixture of M/m and M/f stories in there, and again they’re all BDSM.

Deadlines. Relationships that are intended to end when the proverbial clock strikes midnight. Existing relationships that change with the click of the equally proverbial fingers.

I had a huge flurry of stories where the relationship thrives or fails based on the Perfection of the Timing. So I went with it. I don’t even know if anyone reading them will see the way they are related to each other. I just know that they felt connected when I wrote them.

Or, to put it a little more logically:

Sometimes you meet the right person at the wrong time. Sometimes it takes an exceptional circumstance to make you realise the time has come. And sometimes you just have to wait to get for what you want.

But when the timing is perfect, anything could happen…

The third collection I’m working on at the moment actually came about because someone mentioned the fact that those guys in my books who like other guys tend to be quite comfortable with the fact they are gay (or in some cases bi).

They tend to be out, and happy about that. For want of a better term I didn’t write about “gay issues”. And so the G-A-Y series was born. I’m not going to say they represent a deep and angst ridden troll through the difficulties of being gay in a sometimes still very homophobic world. But they all revolve around different things that are probably more an issue for a gay man than they would be for a straight one.

Here's the thinking behind the series:

Being gay isn’t always easy. Between families and closets and psychotic ex-boyfriends, finding a happy ending can be difficult to say the least.

At the same time, other guys seem to fly a rainbow flag and breeze through homosexuality as if it’s the easiest thing in the world.

Maybe it’s about time the guys who’ve got it all worked out shared some of the fun with those having a rougher time of it.

Maybe that could lead to happy endings all around.

When I started thinking about my response to this topic, I was going to say that I’m going to write a proper series, but I haven’t done it yet. I actually said that on another blog I contribute to several months ago - I also made a commitment that I would get my act together and try to work on a series as well as the collections I enjoy writing so much.

Well, as of a few days ago, that information is out of date. I now have a contract for a series – one in which the characters, location, theme and what-not all follow through from book to book!

Pack Discipline is a M/m werewolf, BDSM series. It will run for four books. And I’m completely in love with it. The first book isn't going to be released until next year, but I’m excited already, lol.

I think I’m going to become very quickly addicted to writing series. Sometime scary is fun!

Kim Dare.
Kink, love and a happy ending. Do you Dare?

Writing from the soul

by Kim Dare

For anyone who doesn't know exactly how this blog works, we all take it in turns to pick a topic to talk about each week. This week was my turn. It seems to me, you have two options when picking a blog topic.

Either you can pick a topic that you believe you have something interest to say about, or you can pick something you'd like to hear what other people have to say about. I'll confess that I picked this topic mostly because I was curious what everyone else would say.

You see, although I write BDSM every day, it's not actually a subject I find it easy to say a lot about. It's a bit like someone asking - why do you like the colour red? Um... because I do. Or why do you like a certain song? Um... because it just feels right when I listen to it.

However, since I obviously need to say something more than that, I decided to look through my old stories and see exactly when I started writing con-kink, or BDSM or D/s or whatever you want to call it.

After a lot of reading, I found out when I started to write about sex, and I discovered when I started to write about romance, I even discovered the point at which I started to write something that looked like a vaguely competent story. But as for when I started to write BDSM? As far as I can work out I've always written it.

There was, however, a point at which I didn't know the right words for all the things I was writing about. I wrote a lot of submissives before I knew that was the right word for what they were. I wrote negotiations and scenes and whole D/s plots without knowing any of the right words for the sort of relationship I was describing.

I found excuses for the relationships to be based on dominance and submission for a long time before I realised that excuses weren't needed. Fantasy, sci-fi, historical, paranormal. Looking back, I tapped every vein I could think of because I think, deep down, I was aware that most people in the real world around me didn't see things in quite the same way - so I went out and invented societies that did.

Now, I'm not talking about societies that were about a dominant gender or class or race suppressing another. I think I knew right from the start that my own ideas of dominance and submission weren't about that. I invented characters and situations which made the dominance and submission about love - about giving each character the chance to be happy with their lover, and inside their own skin too.

Earlier in the week Jamie mentioned doing research on various websites. I'm familiar with quite a few of them, but when I went on them, it was less like discovering a new world or a new way of doing things, as much as someone suddenly providing a dictionary of proper words for ideas that existed inside my head, but which I didn't have the right vocabulary to express.

There are quite a few words in the kinky vocabulary I'm not fond of. For example, I don't call my submissives slaves, no matter how complete their submission or no matter how thoroughly they are owned by their masters. I just don't like the word. The real world connotations are too strong for me to find it erotic. It's a term that will always be non-consensual in my mind. But still, by and large I'm happy to say the vocabulary of BDSM is now my vocabulary.

And I happy to admit, the psychology of dominance and submission is and always has been very much my psychology. I've never researched it. It came built in, lol. My understanding of vanilla, though, that's a different story. I find it as hard to understand the appeal of that as others find it to understand the appeal of BDSM.

That's why, all in all, I'm left without anything very interesting to say on my own choice of topic.

I write BDSM because the stories inside my head and the characters who live inside those stories are intrinsically tied to ideas of dominance and submission. Take that out of the stories and you take part of the soul out of them.

I write BDSM because I think BDSM, and maybe because it's part of my soul too.

************************************

On a similar topic :)

I'm one of the authors in Total-e-bound's Night of the Senses anthology. It's a BDSM anthology and each story in the collection focuses on a different sense - sight, smell, taste, touch, hearing, and extra-sensory!

My story - Whispers - is the extra-sensory one. As an M/f, vampire story about a 24/7, D/s relationship.

Here's the blurb:

Charlotte is more than happy to offer her master her body, her blood and her submission. But her mind is her own, if he really is listening in on her thoughts, he has to stop – Right now!

As soon as Zachariah feeds from Charlotte’s blood, he begins to hear her thoughts whispering into his mind. A rare blood bond forms between them and Zachariah is thrilled. He’s sure the bond and his new insights into Charlotte’s mind will solve all their problems.

Charlotte was ready for her master’s bite to hurt – she was looking forward it. She thought she was ready for anything else too, but she wasn’t ready to let her master into her mind. The bond isn’t the solution to anything. The bond is the problem.

Zachariah has to solve a whole new set of problems if he’s going to prove he’s the master Charlotte’s always wanted, and Charlotte has to learn to do something she’s never done before – trust a master with her mind.

And an extract:

(At this point Zachariah has taken his first feeding and has just started to hear Charlotte's thoughts whisper to him over their mental bond. She is still unaware of the bond's existence.)

With gentle kisses, and teasing caresses, his hands and lips roamed over her body. He felt tension build very slowly in her muscles. He sensed the pleasure building, oh so slowly in her body. He forced himself to be patient. Human women could not be expected to have the same speed of reactions as a vampire man.

He ran his hands up her arms, intending to wind his fingers through hers. With his hands around her wrists, Zachariah leaned forward a little bit too far. His erection brushed against the soft skin on the inside of Charlotte’s thigh and slid higher. He felt the slick moisture gathering along her slit ready to welcome him.

With the extra sensitivity of the recent feeding, it was almost impossible to not to plunge forward, to bury his shaft inside her with one smooth stroke. His grip tightened around her wrists as he fought his body for control.

She caught her breath.

With a silent curse, Zachariah immediately softened his touch.

He looked to her wrists, but it was too soon to know if his grip had been too harsh, if he would leave a mark on her skin.

Charlotte shifted underneath him. He desperately tried to concentrate on her thoughts—on his only chance of discovering if he really hurt her—because he was damn sure she wouldn’t tell him.

Harder!

Obviously the bond wasn’t reliable right from the start. He would have to practise reading his pet before he could rely on the bond to report accurately to him. He had no choice but to resort to more traditional means of communication.

“Did I hurt you, pet?”

“No, master.”

Yes.

He stared into her eyes, trying to read her expression. How could a woman hide pain from him so easily? Not even the tiniest flash of fear showed in her eyes. Before he could retreat, before he could explain to her such carelessness would never happen again, another thought came through to him.

Want more.

More? He frowned down at Charlotte. He was so sure the bond would be the solution to every problem between him and his pet. He’d been so eager for it to be a magic pill.

Want more!

The thought rammed into his mind, hard and certain.

Zachariah stopped trying to think about anything logically. He stopped trying to think at all. It was impossible to argue with the bond when every single part of his brain told him to trust it.

Aware he might be about to make the biggest mistake of his life, he replaced his hands around Charlotte’s wrists and slowly tightened his grip.

Yes!

She liked it. Even if he’d mistaken the words, the bond whispered into his mind, unequivocal hot pleasure flowed in a steaming torrent across the bond.

Zachariah tested his theory. He cautiously tightened his grip again.

Like.

He pinned her wrists firmly to the mattress. “Do you like this, pet?”

“I like whatever my master wishes to do with me.”

He hated those words so much.

Suddenly he had to get truth from her lips. He kissed her—not the usual gentle brush of mouths he was so used to employing with human women. It was a harsh demanding kiss, all about making her show a response—any response.

A soft whimper escaped from the back of Charlotte’s throat.

Zachariah felt the pleasure course through her and pushed her harder, letting more of his weight rest on top of her so he pinned her firmly against the bed at every point of contact. He made the kiss even rougher. Keeping his teeth to himself be dammed. Nipping at her lips, he thrust his tongue into her mouth.

The kiss became a simple statement of dominance. She was his. He could touch her however he wanted, kiss her however he wanted.

Yes! Want! Master! Please!