Revelations

by Jean Roberta

The following scene in my story “The Feast of the Epiphany” is definitely stormy, but it includes glasses of wine and bowls of soup rather than cups of tea.



This story first appeared in Coming Together: Into the Light, a more-or-less erotic anthology of stories about surprises and discoveries. The "Coming Together" anthologies are sold to raise money for good causes.

Consider the context: I suspect that most people have taken part in a meal at which someone makes a unexpected announcement to a group of relatives or friends. The scene in which a young-adult son or daughter “comes out” to the rest of the family has almost become a movie cliché, but the revelation of a secret can be more complicated than it is usually shown.

In my story, Joanne (the narrator) is divorced from Peter, and she has a crush on Wendy, who seems like a more experienced dyke. Joanne has agreed to go out for supper with Wendy and her friends Mark and Roland, who seem to be a gay couple. All four friends, who would all say they are “not religious,” are ironically celebrating the Feast of the Epiphany, one of the oldest Christian holidays, when the wise men supposedly arrived at Bethlehem in January to see the baby Jesus. (This is also called Twelfth Night.) An epiphany is a revelation, and all sorts of secrets are revealed over supper, including the waiter’s interest in the proceedings, and his role as a referee.

This story is from my newest collection, Spring Fever and Other Sapphic Encounters (Renaissance Publishing, 2019).

We sit across from each other at a corner table while the waiter makes a show of lighting a candle which must then be covered by its little shade. He seems to be going out of his way to be gracious –- because he needs good tips to pay his post-holiday bills? Because he wants us to know that he is willing to serve two women who look like a couple? Because he knows we are waiting for two men who are entitled to good service?
The waiter offers to take our coats, and we hand them to him. He goes away, leaving us to enjoy the warmth and the dim light.

Wendy leans forward. “Joanne -–“

A gust of cool air brings Mark and Roland toward us, led by the waiter. Roland’s dark hair and sideburns are literally frosted, and Mark looks like a skinny homeless puppy, teeth chattering from the cold. “It’s damn cold,” says Mark as though we don’t know this. “We had to park halfway down the block.”

They settle into their seats, rubbing their hands. Roland looks around the restaurant, then lets his gaze caress my hair (medium-short, streaked-blonde) and linger on my necklace (a pearl pendant from before Peter) and the neckline of my dress. He smiles.

“So what are you lovely ladies drinking?” asks Mark. We all agree to share two bottles of wine, one red, one white.
The waiter returns. Wendy and Mark order the steak and seafood. I’m not sure I can eat all of it, but I am feeling greedy and decide that I can justify the cost to myself if one-third of my meal becomes tomorrow’s lunch. Roland orders a steak by itself.

The waiter is not yet out of earshot when Wendy announces her agenda. “Let’s tell each other what we all did for the holidays.”

Mark grins. “How we kept warm. Man, this is a great season for hooking up.” I look at Roland. I’ve never been told that they have an open relationship. Maybe they haven’t opened that can of worms yet.

Roland looks at Mark, and takes a contemptuous swig from his glass of ice water. “If you don’t care who you hook up with.” The ice clinks as the glass is placed firmly back on the table.

Mark fidgets. “Hey Ro, we agreed to have a good time tonight. No flaming at this table. Not that kind, anyway.”

Wendy leans over and pats Mark on the shoulder. “Don’t worry, baby, I have a thick skin. Roland, we’re all adults here.”

I hate this conversation. Everyone here seems to know something I don’t. I try to keep my face neutral and gaze at the wall beyond Wendy’s head.

She reaches across the table and grabs one of my hands, forcing me to look at her. “Joanne, Mark and I had a thing. It started out as a good friendship, and we didn’t think it would go any further. Well, I didn’t. One time he came over and it got so late that I just invited him to spend the night. My place is closer to his work anyway. It’s really no big deal. We talked about it after he met you” -– she nodded at Roland -– “and I said I would butt out to keep things simple. Obviously, we’re still friends. That’s not going to change.”

“So he can hop into bed with you and your girlfriend and get you pregnant, is that it?” Roland is openly showing his teeth. His hair is free of frost, and now he seems to be steaming. “That’s what all the dykes are doing these days, isn’t it?”

I am really afraid that in an instant, someone’s fist will plow someone else’s mouth. I don’t know who is more likely to strike first, Wendy or Roland. I feel unreasonably responsible for this mess.

“You need to apologize to Joanne,” says Wendy. “She has nothing to do with this.” But I have a stake in the outcome.
Mark is standing up, holding Roland by the shoulder. “What are you doing, man? You knew about her before.”

The waiter appears with the wine, and everyone freezes but me. “Who wants to taste this?” he asks, looking around with raised eyebrows.

“I will.” The resident connoisseur, that’s me. The waiter pours a small amount of wine into my glass with exaggerated concern. The look of it reminds me of fresh blood. I take a sip, nod and say, “Robust and fruity. Very good.” This means go away, and the waiter takes the hint.

“Okay, chill out.” It’s not clear to me if Roland is speaking to the other two or to himself. “I’m not an asshole. I just want to know what the hell is going on. If you’re both straight, you need to stop playing games.” He is looking at Mark.

“Dude, we talked about this.” Mark reaches across the table, and Roland pushes him away.

Wendy is staring hard into Roland’s eyes. “Hey. Roland. Get a grip. You can’t tell me what I am and what I’m not.”

“I think I should just go,” I say quietly, almost hoping no one will hear me or notice my absence.

“Don’t go, Joanne. Please stay. We need to talk.” The look in Wendy’s eyes could melt a stone.

As if to coax me further, the waiter approaches with bowls of soup. Its warm, rich smell reaches us first.

Mark’s expressive face can’t seem to hide anything he feels or thinks. Now he looks upset, and he can’t stop watching Roland. His shaggy hair hangs over his ears in an artless way.

Mark looks feminine to me. Why would Wendy be sexually attracted to him? Because he has the qualities that attract her. They play video games together, and they understand each other. As long as I can keep my own feelings out of the way, it’s not complicated.

Soup is a consolation. The earthy taste of spiced carrots is satisfying, but my stomach isn’t ready for it. I alternate between sips of soup and gulps of wine.

“Is this about sexual identity, Roland? Do you think we all need to be labelled?” Wendy is demanding a logical answer from a man who is choked with emotion. He seems as unable to admit his real fears as any of the heterosexual men I’ve known. Roland is vibrating with the effort not to jump up and lash out.

I feel a surge of compassion for the man who wants to know what the hell is what. Of course he wants a secure relationship, and he wants to avoid being humiliated or left behind. He wants a lifelong, unbreakable promise from his partner, as Peter did. Men like this can’t really get what they feel entitled to, but I can understand why they want it.
------------------------------------

For Equality

Like several other people at Oh Get a Grip, I’ve done a lot of writing for Coming Together, a publisher that produces erotic anthologies that raise money for various charities. Some of the work I’m proudest of has gone into those books, too.

I thought I’d take the opportunity to talk about one of my favorite Coming Together stories, which was in Beth Wylde’s Coming Together: For Equality, a book that benefits Planting Peace Equality House.

My story was called “Risk Rider and Dare Take the Con,” and it’s about cosplay at a geek convention. For those who don’t know, cosplay is the name for dressing up in (often astonishingly detailed) costume in honor of favorite characters from books, movies, comics, and video games.

A couple of years ago (and definitely around the time I wrote this story), there was a lot of vocal controversy around cosplayers. The people who cosplay (often women) began speaking publicly about the harassment they experience at conventions and the ways they are treated as sex objects by attendees. Other people claimed that cosplayers are “fake geek girls” (whatever that means) who are attending these conventions to somehow trick or manipulate “real geeks” (whatever that means).

Some good came out of this flurry of blogs, social media posts, and articles. Many conventions improved their policies around harassment and worked to make cosplayers safer. More people recognized the work and devotion that goes into creating these incredible costumes.

I don’t think it’s all solved, though. Despite much tooting of the horn about the accepting nature of geek culture, my experience as a lifelong geek is that it’s accepting in certain ways but quite intolerant in others. For people on the receiving end of sexual harassment, I think geek culture can be particularly dangerous and difficult. Geek culture is typically very accepting of people with poor social skills, a lack of ability to read social cues, and confusion around boundaries. I’m really happy for people with those traits who feel they are able to make friends in geeky places. However, having this set of traits be commonplace can put people in a bind when receiving sexual interest. Behavior that feels creepy can be excused as “person X is just not good at social cues.” Concerns about such behavior can be dismissed as intolerant. Many people fail to see how this shifts the burden onto certain subsets of the community and creates an unwelcoming and intolerant environment for certain people. I think geek culture needs to work out better ways to be accepting of people outside of the social skill mainstream while also being careful of the safety of all members of the community. People are working on this, but there’s still progress to be made.

I’d also point to things like the recent controversy over the movie Ghostbusters, in which a relentless negative campaign against the movie drove one of its stars away from interacting with the public for a while and has likely ensured there will be no sequel. Some people think they own geek culture, and they fail to recognize that lots of people are geeks, too, and have been all along. (I’m glossing over lots of details in this short description. If you’re interested in knowing more, ask me in the comments, or do a few Google searches. Be ready for hours of reading.)

Anyway, when I wrote “Risk Rider and Dare Take the Con,” I was really excited about that story. It’s fun and genuinely sexy, in my humble opinion, but the story also let me express my pent-up anger around the harassing experiences I’ve had at geeky events over the course of my life. As is often the case when I work on charity anthologies, I was the first beneficiary. It was great to get the chance to let out feelings I’d always struggled to express.

I don’t usually do snippets here, but I feel weird talking so much about the story and not giving you a hint of it. It’s one of my favorites ever, so it would be awesome if this inspired a couple more people to pick up For Equality:

They wound up pressed together in a crowded elevator, the smell of leather combined with Dare's clean, hot skin overwhelming any other person's scent. "Dare and Risk Rider, huh?" The guy next to them wore an assessing expression. "You guys realize you got it wrong, right? Dare is the girl." He spoke as if correcting a kindergartener.

"I prefer dressing as Risk Rider," Jamie-Lyn said. She wouldn't normally have engaged, but Dare's body had emboldened her.

Her interlocutor, however, shook his head dismissively. "That's backwards. It's unrealistic to see a girl as Risk Rider. He's got all the martial arts skills, and he's the one who fights people off while Dare works on hacking stuff. Since women's bodies aren't as strong, it just doesn't make sense for the woman to be the physical defender. Sorry." He turned his back.

"She's bigger than me," Dare pointed out, but the guy didn't respond. Jamie-Lyn wasn't sure if she felt irritated or relieved that he'd decided the conversation was over.

The elevator dinged at Jamie-Lyn's floor, and she tugged Dare behind her, doing her best to ignore the sly hands that brushed against the outsides of her breasts or the curves of her ass. She'd dealt with so much at the con already that people trying to cop a feel just felt unfortunately normal. She and Dare stayed silent until Jamie-Lyn let them into her room.

Dare stopped the door before it closed. "Would you feel more comfortable if we propped it open? I know we just met. You don't even know my real name."

Her cheeks heated. Lust and Risk Rider's reflected boldness had led her to take some uncharacteristically reckless actions. She didn't want to stop, though. Gently, she pulled Dare's hand away from the door, allowing it to close. "What's your real name?"

"Louis Rios."

Jamie-Lyn introduced herself, then cut to the chase. "Why did you ask to come to my room?"

"You know why. We both felt it."

"We did," she agreed. Gazing for a moment into his quick, mischievous eyes, Jamie-Lyn decided to take the plunge all the way. Today, with him, she didn't want to pretend to be anything she wasn't. Some of her friends back home might have thought it was ironic for her to feel this way while dressed as a comic book character, but the point had always been that when she dressed as Risk Rider, Jamie-Lyn was expressing her best and truest self. Her bravest self.

She took Dare's hand—Louis's hand—and guided it to her crotch, wrapping it around her soft pack. "I'm not exactly traditional," Jamie-Lyn said. "Do you mind?"

"I like it."

The smile that spread over her face made Jamie-Lyn feel fierce, victorious, and hungry for more. She wrapped an arm around Louis in a grip meant to claim him and kissed him just the same way. She kissed him as a man would kiss, guiding the pace, teasing his mouth open with her tongue, her lips outside his lips, her jaw pressing his open wider, her hands making him submit to her.

And if you’re interested in writing for charity, too, I’m currently taking submissions for my first editing project for Coming Together, Positively Sexy (deadline extended to October 1st). Full details are here. (And I need to work on propagating the deadline extension…)

Twenty-Twenty Hindsight

By Lisabet Sarai

In 2003 S.F. Mayfair and I published an anthology called Sacred Exchange: Stories of Spirituality and Transcendence in Dominance and Submission. I'm very proud of that book, from both a literary and a thematic perspective. Some of the stories still take my breath away. To a remarkable extent, it accomplished what we had intended: to reveal, through fiction, the affinities between D/s and enlightenment, however the individual might define that term – to illustrate how one could be changed, elevated, refined and perfected by the experience of dominance or submission.

Alas, the book was a commercial flop. It never earned out its advance (most of which went to pay the contributors in any case.) Although published by veteran erotica imprint Blue Moon, the collection was (I believe) insufficiently salacious to attract an enthusiastic readership (despite the fact that many of the tales are graphic and a few would qualify as extreme). It went out of print quickly, leaving me with a couple of dozen author copies and a slightly wounded sense of that all our work was not appreciated.

Now, seven years later, I'm thinking of resurrecting the book and reissuing it as a charitable anthology through Alessia Brio's Coming Together imprint. I'd really love to give the book a second lease on life. I'm far more familiar with the erotica market than I was back in 2003, when I was a lucky, wide-eyed amateur. I have a lot more connections. And I think that I can get at least some readers' attention, especially if the book benefits a worthy cause like Doctors Without Borders.

There's only one problem. I can't find the digital manuscript.

This is so embarrassing! I'm a software engineer and I live with a guy who's got years of experience as a system administrator and who is a fanatic about backups. It's true that I've moved to the other side of the world since I submitted the book, but we still have archives of material from our computers that are considerably older.

I do have a directory in my writing drive called “anthology” and sure enough it has material related to Sacred Exchange: form letters to authors, critiques, a spreadsheet that Seneca and I used to keep track of our evaluations of stories, and yes, a zip file of stories in plain text. However, as far as I can tell, these are not the final, edited versions, but rather, the stories more or less as submitted, including many that we didn't accept. Furthermore, we spent a great deal of time working with some of the authors to polish their contributions. All that work is, apparently, gone.

What must have happened is that I must have voluntarily deleted the full manuscript, thinking that I didn't need it. (In those days I was always tight on disk space.) Maybe I thought that the stories zip file included the finished versions. Maybe, innocent that I was, I figured that once the book was published, I didn't need the manuscript file any more. You'd think that I'd have a backup somewhere, and maybe one does exist, but I sure as heck can't find it. The book was published during the period when we were selling our house and preparing for our international move, so our backup infrastructure was probably far less sophisticated and complete than it is now.

So now, if I want to continue with this project, what are my options? I could start with the raw submitted tales and re-edit them with the finished book in hand. Or I could slice the binding off one of my author copies, and try to scan and OCR the pages, then edit carefully to fix the inevitable errors. Either way, it's going to be a major task. Do I want to undertake it just to soothe my pride and maybe make some money for charity?

I'm still pondering this question. And I'm kicking myself for having so little foresight. This isn't typical of me. There have been very few times in my life when I've had to start from scratch – even now, I'm not actually at ground zero, since I do have the printed book as a reference. I'm determined that from now on, I'm going to have good, accessible backups of every file I might need.

Of course, I thought that I already did!

One Drop Raises the Ocean

I'm always happy to guest blog when the subject is giving. Whether it's giving time, giving cash, or giving head. Doesn't matter. Giving is sexy. Generosity is sexy. Helping others is sexy. Selflessness is sexy.

Seriously soak-the-panties sexy to me.

And who doesn't want to be sexy? Feeling sexy is energizing. It puts a bounce in the step and a twinkle in the eyes. It boosts self-confidence and makes the imagination soar. Plus, there's some major good karma involved. Do unto others, and all that jazz.

I could tell you that I pump huge amounts of blood, sweat, and tears into the charity anthology series Coming Together because I want to be sexy and, really, that's not terribly far from the truth.
If we are totally honest with ourselves, we recognize that our actions are ultimately driven by self interest, even altruistic endeavors. I do what I do—give what I give—because it makes me feel good about myself. It mitigates my shortcomings, keeps my karmic account in the black, and alleviates my guilt when I spend more than I should on things made of leather or stainless steel. Making others happy, relieving pain & suffering, seeing a smile, hearing a groan of ecstasy all fuel my sense of self-worth.

That logic applies to charity as well as erotic fiction. Combine the two, and it's a double-sexy-whammy. Coming Together not only makes a difference in the lives of people who are suffering in the face of disease or natural disaster through its charity fundraising but also gives its readers a pleasant diversion and makes them feel good about supporting a cause.

The authors and poets who contribute to Coming Together are the sexiest people on the planet. Bar none.

And what better time to be sexy? Look at the world around us. There is never a shortage of illness, poverty, or natural disaster, but there is often a shortage of compassion and generosity.

We can tip that balance. We can be the change. No matter how small, or how seemingly insignificant, our sexy efforts matter.

One drop raises the ocean.

peace & passion,

~ Alessia Brio
www.eroticanthology.com

Bits and Spurts

I've been lying about all week, caught somewhere between being sick and just being tired after a long weekend. I've barely read anybody else's posts this week, and until this moment have had no idea what to say on today's topic. Charity, it's a great thing, right? And I should be able to say lots about it, only I'm the poor sucker who volunteered to be the last blogger of the week, and I'm not sure what I could add to what's already been discussed.

We do give to charity in la casa de Madden. The Hubster is a federal employee, and participates in an annual program that deducts a certain amount of money (pre-tax) from each paycheck to give to the charities he names. We decide together, each year, what those charities will be. In addition, the man is Catholic, and as such tithes to his church. But these are really the Hubster's charitable donations, not mine. Yes, his money is my money since I am the stay-at-home parent and have thus sacrificed a regular paycheck to take care of our family at home. But still, that old feeling of "I have no money of my own" rears its ugly head whenever I talk about charity and finances.

When I had a day job, I used to give regularly to a couple of charities - Amnesty International, ASPCA, Alley Cat Allies and my local PBS stations. These were things I believed were worth donating to, and my beliefs are strong enough that we still donate to these organizations thanks to the Hubster's paycheck donations. Then there was the volunteer work I used to do. Usually it was just small things. I'm not Catholic, so rather than sit through Mass I used to volunteer to work in the church nursery, until I decided my kids were too much of a handful to deal with in addition to someone else's offspring. My only other "big" stint at volunteer activity happened before we had kids, Hubster and I volunteered to train at the local Red Cross as Emergency Services reps. If someone's house burned down in the middle of the night, we were the folks who would help them find a place to stay and help replace some of their goods. We were never actually called upon to do this, thankfully, but we were willing and ready.

These days, my good deeds are pretty sporadic. Once or twice, I have volunteered to serve food at the homeless shelter my husband's church hosts once each year. I have bought clothes and toys for children in need and dropped them off at the local Y or Salvation Army whenever I chanced to see their signs for donations. But it's all few and far between. Again, I have no steady paycheck, so it's hard for me to donate my own money. As for volunteer work... well, with two small children and the demands of my writing and graphics work, it's hard to find time to breathe, let alone volunteer for one more thing to do.

Last weekend, that exhausting weekend I referred to at the beginning of this post, I was at Marscon, a local science fiction convention. I went as a writing guest, and brought with me a stack of books to sell, including Alessia Brio's "Coming Together: With Pride." I made sure to explain to anyone who stopped by my table what Coming Together was all about, and pointed out that there were other authors who were there as well with other volumes of the books and promo materials too. We pimped those books hard, and I think Sapphire Phelan may have sold the copies she had. All for a good cause!

In addition to the books I brought, there was also this collection of Star Trek plates I had. My mother had given them to me ages ago, a set of eight plates with various Star Trek characters painted on them, and matching mugs. I love Star Trek, but for the life of me I never understood why my mother bought me plates! What was I supposed to do with them? Hang them on my walls? Eh, no. So when I arrived at Marscon this year, I brought the plates with me, still in their original boxes with their original certificates from whatever mint they came from. I handed them over to the convention's charity auction for the Humane Society. "I have no need for these," I said. "Please sell them to a good home." I was told Sunday that the plates went for around $50. The convention was grateful, and I was please that I could do something, anything, charitable while reclaiming a bit of space in my china cabinet.

So my charity happens in bits and spurts; a short story given to Alessia here, some plates donated there, a little time helping out when I can. I am not Bill Gates, able to donate millions of dollars to helping the world. I give what I can, when I can. And maybe that's what counts. I hope so.

If anyone here would like to make a donation to a worthy cause, please consider taking a look at The Boom Effect, an auction in action dedicated to Sonic Boom, daughter of Tee Morris, author of "Morevi" and the Billibub Baddings mystery books, and his wife Natalie. Earlier this month, Natalie passed away unexpectedly. A group of friends have gotten together to create a trust fund for Sonic Boom. Many authors and artists have donated their works and other items for sale. Yours truly will be offering a signed copy of Future Perfect plus a crocheted ninja (that's right, I'm going to crochet a ninja; don't ask how, just believe). The auction will be held on line 27 February. That's in just a few weeks. Consider giving what you can to this cause. Even a small donation will make a huge difference in the life of one little girl.

That's it from me this week. Go out and do good, or at least as good as you can.

Beginning at Home

By Lisabet Sarai

Michelle added her topic of “Charity” to our Get A Grip calendar a couple of weeks ago. I had intended to write about my experiences writing and editing smut for good causes, through the Coming Together series and the I Do anthology, which benefits the fight for marriage equality. Then came the Haitian earthquake. Suddenly altruistic erotica seemed almost trivial, although Coming Together has organized collections for several disasters including the southern California wildfires and hurricane relief.

Like many people, I've been stunned by the images of devastation and death coming from Haiti. Nature's cruelty has never been so apparent. In the best of times, many Haitians barely survive. Poverty, disease, violence and fear are Haiti's legacies from decades of dictatorship and a century of environmental pillage. Now to suffer this, on top of everything else--it is almost too much for me to grasp.

It is a gorgeous day here where I live, bright, sunny, breezy and pleasantly cool. I'm sitting in my comfortable apartment, typing on my laptop and enjoying a cold drink. In an hour or so I'm off to a university party. Haiti seems like a bad dream--but like a nightmare, I find that it haunts me. Whenever I begin to relax, I remember the multitudes--wounded, homeless, robbed of their families and their livelihood--on the other side of globe. A cloud crosses the sun.

I live in Asia. I was here during the 2004 tsunami, and I remember feeling the same way. I recall that terrible New Years Eve when everyone wore black. I feel helpless. What, after all, can I do? I've made a donation to Doctors without Borders (Medecins sans Frontiers, or MSF), but what is money in the face of such trouble, especially the meager amount I can afford? A part of me wants to hop a plane and fly to the Caribbean, to help with the rebuilding. To hold the hand of some woman who has lost a child. To cook and serve food to the many who must be hungry.

Practically speaking, I can't do this. But money seems like such a pale substitute for the personal gift of comfort--human to human.

I was thinking about this and came to a heartening conclusion. If I can't help a Haitian personally, I should reach out a hand to someone closer to home. I believe that we are all connected, that we share a spark that makes every person worthy of love and respect. And though I'm not traditionally religious, I remember Jesus' comments that to assist the least of his creatures was equivalent to serving him personally. (If I were religious, I could find the Scripture quote, but I hope you know what I'm talking about.) In some mysterious but I think real way, showing compassion in one part of the world will ultimately have positive effects somewhere else.

So today I resolve to give what I can of my time and my capabilities to my neighbors who might be less fortunate than I am. I'm not as helpless as I thought. Every kindness, every gesture of love or support, anywhere, adds to the sum of goodness circulating in our world. We're bound into a chain of love that transcends distance.

Maybe that sounds hokey or ridiculously innocent. But that's what I believe.

Meanwhile, here's what you can do. Leave me a comment. Tell me your thoughts about how we can help Haiti recover or your feelings about my post. For every substantive comment other than those by other Grippers, I'll donate another dollar to MSF.

Thank you.

Selling My Soul

by Lisabet Sarai



It was great when it all began...

My first novel was a labor of love, a spontaneous externalization of my most cherished fantasies. I took my own experiences and desires and reshaped them into a fictional saga that had little in common with my objective history but was deeply revealing of my psychological reality. Of course, I was excited to be offered a publishing contract. Obviously I appreciated the advance. But the driving force behind Raw Silk was a feverish craving for self-expression. I wanted to get all those dirty scenarios out of my head and onto the page. I didn't think much about the potential readers, aside from the two men to whom I dedicated the book. Marketing? I hadn't a clue.

I look back on those early days with nostalgia. Now I'm a brand, albeit hardly a household word. I write for an audience. Sometimes I force myself to write, knowing that I've got to keep the titles coming or the world will forget me. Even more disturbing, sometimes I choose what to write based at least partially on what I think will excite my readers and “build my brand”. My inspiration, such as it is, is filtered though my notions of what will sell.

An example: I recently completed a M/M paranormal novel called Necessary Madness. One of the main characters is a young man devastated by violent, uncontrollable visions of future disasters. He's not actually psychotic, but he might as well be. His wild behavior terrifies everyone around him. He's homeless and alone, living on the street, trying to stay drunk in order to blunt the impact of his terrible power. (The other character is the older cop who picks up the young bum and ultimately falls in love with him.)

When the premise for this story first occurred to me, I saw the prescient, half-mad street person as a young woman. She was slender, dark-haired, raggedly dressed, apparently frail but with reserves of hidden strength. Her name was Keira. Having spent some time myself in psychiatric hospitals when I was in my late teens, I strongly identified with her.

Then Total-E-Bound released my first M/M romance, Tomorrow's Gifts. The Christmas short sold ten times as many copies in the month of its release than any of my other TEB titles. I was astonished, and sad to relate, excited by the larger than normal royalty check. I decided that just maybe, Keira could be recast as Kyle, and the story flipped into the homoerotic genre that appeared to be so popular.

I signed my contract with the Evil One and began to write Necessary Madness, shaping my picture of slender, dark-haired Kyle, a beautiful, tortured young man, dressed in rags, apparently frail but with reserves of hidden strength... and of course, seriously gay.

To be honest, once I got started, the book took on a life of its own. The M/M relationship gave me ideas and provided social nuances that wouldn't have fit in the hetero version of the tale. I'm really pleased with the way it turned out. I love Kyle and Rob and I'm even considering giving them a sequel.

But I still feel somewhat guilty. Instead of listening to my heart, I bent my ear to the fickle voice of fashion.

For money? Well, not exactly. Given the constraints on my time and on my ability to promote, I'm never going to make much from my writing. Sure, I love to see the royalties slipping into my PayPal account. But the real payoff is knowing that a dozen or a hundred or a thousand readers have enjoyed the products of my imagination. I'd rather get a stellar review than a hundred dollar check. (Though of course, the former may eventually lead to the latter.) I live for reader praise and those circulation figures.

I'm no longer writing primarily for self-expression. I'm writing “for the market”.

Now, there are tons of websites, blogs and books that will tell you this is exactly what you should do, if you want to be a successful author. Research what sells, then write to take advantage of the current trends. I don't buy it. I hate to see myself doing it. It feels dishonest and derivative. This is exactly the attitude that leads to the current glut of vampire and shape-shifter stories whose only virtue (with apologies to my fellow Grippers who write these themes) is that they are just like a hundred other stories in their genres. When I read, I crave something original, startling, unexpected. Yet here I am giving readers the same stuff as all the other authors who are out there clamoring for attention.

When someone asks me what advice I'd give beginning authors, I always say, “Write what you love; don't pay too much attention to what sells.” These days, I feel like something of a hypocrite. Sure, I do love writing about the erotic, in whatever guise. I'd written a few M/M stories before I realized how popular they were. I wrote F/F stories, too, but these days I tend to push my F/F ideas to the back burner if I'm targeting the romance market, because they (apparently) don't sell.

I do give some of my work away. As I said, I'm not really in it for the money. I've contributed stories to five of Alessia Brio's Coming Together anthologies, several of which I've written specifically for the theme of the collection and have not submitted elsewhere. I also offer many free stories on my website and my publishers' sites. I have to admit, though, that despite my sincere support for the causes Alessia has championed, I also see this as marketing.

Now I'm considering embarking on a new project, a sequel to Raw Silk. I worry, however, that I won't be able to create the same vibrant intensity I did in the original. Over the past ten years since that book was published, I've definitely learned a lot about writing. I have far more control over my craft. When I re-read Raw Silk, some of it comes across as clichéd and stilted. Still, the passion shines through—the thrill of sexual discovery, the breathless excitement of serious power exchange.

Can I duplicate that? Obviously not—I'm a different person than I was in 1999. Let me ask instead, can I suppress my craving for approval and popularity and once again write completely from the heart?

Only time will tell. I can only hope that document signed in my blood has an expiration clause.