Vicarious Vampire Lust

In my own fiction, one of my very favorite characters was created almost by accident. He was my first vampire. I was very intimidated by the thought of writing vampires at the time. Not sure if he whispered the fact in my ear or grabbed me by the throat and bared his fangs. But I wrote him a vampire, and a pretty damn scary one he is. Alonso Darlington’s story was the first proper M/M romance I ever wrote. Calling it proper, however, might not be the best choice of words. Some M/M fans were a little put off by his early vicarious use of his succubus familiar to help him find out details about Reese Chambers and satiate his lust for the man while at the same time keeping him safe. Alonso doesn’t normally play well with humans. 

I never imagined when Alonso Darlington shoved his way into my imagination that he would become one of the main characters in my Medusa Consortium novels, and that he would also become one of the characters my readers most lust after. Since his creation, there have been multiple sexy vampires, and his role as one of Magda Gardener’s most valued allies has made him an endless source of writing pleasure for me. Below is an excerpt of Alonso’s first encounter with Reese Chambers from my novella, Landscapes.Enjoy!

Landscapes Blurb:

Vampire, Alonso Darlington has a disturbing method of keeping landscaper, Reese Chambers, both safe from and oblivious to his dangerous lust for the man. But Reese isn’t easy to keep secrets from, and Alonso wants way more than to admire the man from afar. Can he risk a real relationship without risking Reese’s life? And if Reese finds out the truth, will there be any relationship left to risk? 

Find Out Who He Is - Landscapes Excerpt:

It wasn’t that Reese Chambers made my cock hard – though he did. It wasn’t that he was beautiful in a rugged, leather and stone sort of way – though he was. It was that Reese Chambers moved me in ways I had not been moved in a very long time, in ways that I, who never lacked just the right words to express myself, found my vocabulary inadequate to the task. Talia would call it an obsession, and maybe it was; from my first sight of him mantling his sketchpad like a bird of prey over a fresh kill, alone in the midst of the crowded pub, I could think of nothing else. It was my first night back on British soil. It is said that you can never go back home, and it had been a very long time for me. But the need to come home was in my blood like fever these past years, as were so many needs that never left me, but only sharpened with the passing of time. 

Next to me, Talia droned on about suitable residences in Cumbria, about the leasing of a car and the making of necessary renovations. The Twa Dogs was busy for a Monday night with tourist season past, but being invisible was always easier in a crowd.

*****

‘Find out who he is.’ I nodded in Reese’s direction. Before Talia could protest, I continued. ‘I have a roof over my head, and I’ve fed. There’s nothing that can’t wait until tomorrow.’

Talia’s cheekbones flushed with the rush of blood, and heaven knew how beautiful she was in such a state, porcelain pale skin, midnight blue eyes and hair, which was so close to black that no one but I would have noticed all of the other colours in her silken tresses. She knew what it was I asked of her, and she knew the delicate line she tread on the rare occasion when I did ask. A tremor passed up her long, straight spine, and a bloom of tiny goose bumps textured her bare arms. It would not be painless, what I asked, and I knew she feared it as much as she longed for it. I could hear the thud thud of her pulse in the thin, silken skin of her throat as she swallowed the sudden dryness of fear. ‘What do you want to know?’

I leaned forward to rake the tip of my thumb against the pulse point in her temple. ‘Everything, Talia. I want to know all of it. And when you know, come directly to me. I don’t care what time it is when you return.’

*****

It was nearing dawn when Talia returned to our accommodations smelling of sex, as I knew she would if she were to obtain for me what I wanted. By then my blood burned in my veins, and my body felt too close to me, as though the flesh that I dwelt in suddenly conspired to crush me with its demands. And though I knew that Reese Chambers could not have refused her even if she had come to him as a toothless, foul-smelling hag, I hated her that he had poured himself into her body while I had been left with only my fantasies kindling my lust to an inferno. 

Though my need was such that my flesh was fevered and my cock an insistent throb, until she returned, I held myself contained within skin that felt too thin. When she saw the state that I was in, she pulled the heavy drapes with an efficient tug, then with a nod of her head, motioned me to follow her down into the basement room that had been prepared for me. When she turned to me at the foot of the bed, before she could opened her kiss-bruised lips to speak, I took her mouth, starving for the first taste of him, the taste of his saliva, the taste of his blood, mixed with hers. She’d bitten him; he’d bitten her back. He was rough, and he liked to be treated rough, but he kept that to himself. He was embarrassed by it. His lips were slightly chapped from so much time in the sun and wind, and they’d slid against hers, suckling and stroking and pressing until her mouth opened to his. With ravenous laps of my tongue, I tasted him in her mouth, and she held back the moan of response, so I could hear the echoes of his groans, heavy with need he’d not satisfied in awhile, and I felt kinship in my own unsatisfied needs. Images of him flashed through my head. Christ, his eyes were green, dark green like the evergreen forests of the north, and he kept them open when he kissed her, taking her in with his gaze. 

I shoved aside the silk of her low bodice exposing her breasts, breasts that his hands had cupped. My nipples peeked to sharp aching points at the feel of his calloused thumbs raking, pressing and releasing. I breathed in his scent on her breasts, burying my face in her cleavage, licking the taste of salty, slightly picante maleness, sniffing and tasting until I could stand it no more. In one violent jerk, I tore the dress all the way down and shoved it off her shoulders, away from the flesh he had licked and kissed and mounted. I cried out at the feel of him, weight on one elbow, knee spreading her thighs, fingers opening her heaviness, anxious to penetrate, anxious to relieve his need. And then, with Talia free of clothing, Reese Chambers’ essence filled the room. Talia’s panties were still wet with his semen mixed with her humid desire, and I tore them from her and forced her onto her stomach, onto her hands and knees, so that it was not her face I saw, but his that I imagined. With hands on her hips, I raised her bottom in the air and spread her still swollen, still slippery folds with fingers made awkward by my arousal, letting the scent of his hot bread and honey release intoxicate me. Then I buried my face in her snatch and, as I ate his lust from her, I knew him. 

He was Cumbrian born and bred, and his accent was the soft lilting sound of the fells. He was a landscaper and a gardener by trade. His hands held the magic of the earth and his mind conceived ideas for beautiful outdoor spaces; those he liked best were patterned after Renaissance and medieval gardens. He was homesick and heartsick. He’d gone to Surrey to work with his father because the money was good. But his father had died recently and he had returned home to Cumbria. He didn’t care if he had to work in a pub or muck stables. He wanted to be home. He missed the people and he missed the fells. He missed the simpler, more honest rhythms of life. He was shy, even a bit reclusive. He read voraciously and widely, he liked astronomy and he was afraid of snakes, though it embarrassed him to admit it. He hadn’t had sex in a long time, and found it better to have a wank than a meaningless encounter. The facts of him, the details of his life raced at me in a flood I consumed ravenously with each lap of my tongue.

As I ate Talia I felt the shape of his face, the curve of his chin, the rise and fall of his chest as he had done the same. I felt the soft tuft of bronze curls nestled between the hard rise of his pecs and the courser, deeper curls that caressed his testicles and his cock when it was at rest, but it hadn’t been at rest. How many times had he taken her? He was thick enough to fill her and the friction of him inside was delicious and maddening. The shape of him – I wanted to caress the shape of him, with my hands, with my mouth, and the taking of his essence from Talia was an act of ripping away something that should have been mine. As I bruised her arse with kneading fingers and, as I licked the last of his release from her, she managed a breathless moan. ‘Take the rest. God, Alonso, take the rest, and release me.’

Buy Landscapes Here: 

Amazon UK

Amazon US

Amazon AU

Amazon CA

Sauce for the Goose, Sauce for the Gander

by Jean Roberta





“Aren’t you curious?”

Paul shifts and twitches and gazes beyond my ear before looking down at his feet. “Uh, no. I know what guys are like. I’m a guy. I don’t have to – I mean, you know, touch some other guy’s junk to know how it works.”

“You have to if you want to watch me with my girlfriend.”

“That’s different! Every guy wants to see two chicks get it on. Show me a guy who wouldn’t!”

“Okay, well, then, you can’t blame me for wanting to watch two guys. You’d be helping me with my research. I can’t be sure my M/M scenes are true to life unless I take a close look.”

“Then watch some of your gay friends!”

“I hope to watch one of them, anyway. I hear someone coming up the front walk. Dustin always makes a point of being punctual.”

The sound of the doorbell changes Paul’s expression to one of anxiety mixed with doubt.

I move swiftly from the front room to the hallway, and peep through the peephole in the door. Sure enough.

“Dustin!” I sing out as I swing the door open. He really is one of my favourite people, but I exaggerate my welcome for Paul. “We were just talking about you. I’m so glad you could make it.”

Dustin has glossy dark hair, a chiselled face, and well-defined chest and arm muscles. He worked as a male model and held some shadier jobs in his youth, but he has reached a certain plateau of respectability, and is now known as a Hunk. This is not why I chose him for Paul. Dustin is also known as a Cherry-Buster. He flirts constantly with women, including me, but he prefers men.

I hope Dustin won’t refer to himself as the Black Widow. It’s his way of coping with the grief of losing his boyfriend to a cruel disease, but it makes all his friends wince. It might make Paul jump through a window.

“Paul, Dustin has been looking forward to meeting you.”

Paul is now pasty-faced, but he extends a clammy hand to shake with Dustin. “No offense,” babbles Paul, “but I’m not—I’m sure you’re a good guy, Dustin, but Cheryl doesn’t understand, I mean, not everyone can just, you know.”

The winning smile never leaves Dustin’s face. Without warning, he wraps his arms around Paul’s chest and raises him up on tiptoes as he presses his lips to Paul’s.

Incoherent sounds leak out of Paul’s trapped mouth.

I know my ex-husband. Paul wants this, and I want him to stop fighting himself. He is still breathing hard as Dustin holds him at arm’s length to study him better.

“I don’t want it to hurt,” mumbles Paul, looking up into Dustin’s eyes.

“I’ll stop whenever you want me to, honey,” assures the Cherry-Buster.

Paul has a misty gaze. “Not yet,” he tells us both, almost whispering. Then he kisses Dustin the way he used to kiss me.

Two Confessions from the Ivory Tower

Like Amanda (and others here, no doubt), I have been intrigued by Catholic sexual guilt from my first friendships with Catholics (in my teens), although my agnostic upbringing was harder in some ways: no ritual of confession and no chance to expiate sin or wrongdoing except by apologizing and making amends to anyone I might have harmed.

Instead of being raised religious, I was raised academic. The earliest home I remember clearly was an actual college dormitory where my family had an apartment. (My mother was official "dorm mother" to a large building full of young men.) My father was an instructor, who was then promoted to professor.

I've always known that colleges/universities are places where young adult students and older adult teachers meet for the purpose of teaching/learning, and that sexual attraction on either side can not only mess up the process but ruin lives and careers.

The earliest universities were associated with churches, and in many ways they are still parallel to religious institutions. I can imagine being consecrated as a child to Athene, goddess of knowledge, by ancient Greek parents, and then choosing to make my own vow as an adult.

Of course, universities are hotbeds of student/student attraction, and that seems much less harmful than student/teacher exploitation. Frat-boy antics and sexual initiation on campus are the stuff of low comedy. However, it's not all good, dirty fun. In real life, no one can earn the kind of grades that are needed to get into grad school and/or launch a career if they are drinking, drugging and fucking every weekend. In fantasy, yes. In real life, no. Students who think of post-secondary education as an escape from the responsibilities of adult life are likely to get a hard awakening.

Sexual tension is ever-present in universities, and it is always threatening to wreck the concentration of those who need the clearest minds.

So my guilty-pleasure erotica tends to take place in the Ivory Tower. Here are two samples.


Confession #1 is a little piece I wrote several years ago, a cougar's confession.

English Lit

You sit in the front row, and your eyes study me while I try to seduce you into the world of literature. I can smell your cologne or aftershave – is it for me? I notice the clean chestnut hair that falls across your forehead and the unexpected grin that lifts the corners of your sullen mouth when I touch your sense of humor. Do you know how much you resemble a young Byronic hero?

If we had been born in the same generation, I would gladly have gone for a ride with you, beyond the lights of town and beyond my usual limits. I would have freed my breasts into the custody of your sweaty hands and your hot, demanding mouth. I would have spread myself out like a book and dared you to dive into the juiciest part to find the climax. What a story we could have created, student of mine. But now, we only have a semester together, and I am honour-bound to follow the rules. As long as my words can kindle the light in your eyes, it will keep me warm enough.

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

The following is a shortened version of a story of mine that appeared in two anthologies in different forms: in I Kissed a Boy from Ravenous Romance, about seemingly heterosexual males in their first sexual encounters with other males, and in Bottoms Up, a spanking anthology from Cleis Press. Needless to say, this is not strictly autobiographical. :)

Flaming

The first thing you need to know about me is that I always thought of myself as a normal guy before the day it happened. Well, relatively normal--maybe a little queer but not exactly kinky. I wasn’t the only one in our art class who had noticed that Lorne was blessed with talent as well as good looks.

I don’t know why I sound like I’m apologizing to you. I don’t really worry about the opinions of straight-laced, philistine types. You’re not one of the Muggles, are you? I didn’t think so. I might as well just tell you the story from the beginning.

That day, Lorne was studying his canvas the way any other man would study a drunk who had just insulted him in a bar. Even from a distance, anyone could see that he had a problem. He had tried to sketch a raging goddess, but the pencil outline on the white background didn't match the vision in his head.

He worked in front of his front-room window, as usual, so that he could add colours to the canvas by natural light. He didn’t know that I was studying his long nose, his intense dark eyes, his messy brown hair and his sculpted body from the short distance between our two apartments in University Row.

He stood up to stretch, and I admired the way his loose cotton yoga pants skimmed over his tight ass and hinted at the shape of his legs. "Beautiful, man," I muttered.

He paced the floor. His vision of the goddess probably laughed at him in his mind's-eye, billowing out of the mouth of a volcano in bursts of flame and clouds of smoke, flaunting her shape-shifting, unsubstantial nature, then posing as a voluptuous tawny-skinned woman.

He knew what he needed: a human model. He could see the beauty in male and female bodies equally, and the goddess in his mind had a masculine aspect. Lorne wanted someone, anyone, to pose for him.

I ran over to his building and pressed his buzzer.

"Who is it?" he asked suspiciously.

“Matthew," I answered. "I'm returning your book."

“Come in.” He pressed the button to let me into the building.

I scampered down the hallway to his apartment door. “Hi,” I said. “I hope I’m not bothering you.”

“I’m working on a piece for the spring prize.” He enjoyed inspiring guilt in others. “You could help.” He accepted the art book I had borrowed.

“Sure! What can I do for you?” I couldn’t keep the grin off my face.

“Have you ever done drag?”

I remembered my father’s reaction to my interest in my mom’s clothes when I was a curious little kid. “Well, sort of, I mean in drama class, but not, you know –“ I took a deep breath. “What do you have in mind?”

“I want to paint the Hawaiian goddess of volcanoes. In oils. She’s a passionate bitch with a lot of power and charisma. When she’s pissed off, she bursts into flame. I need to get her facial expression and body language.”

I swallowed hard. “D-do you want me to sit or stand?”

He studied my pale, thin, flexible body under my faded T-shirt and ripped jeans. “Try crouching behind the big plant there as if you’re in a tropical rain forest. I’ll get something to wrap around you.” He went into his bedroom, and emerged holding a sheer orange curtain with pleats at one end.

I had already kicked off my shoes. I pulled a potted plant with huge leaves to the middle of the room and knelt behind it as though I were trying to hide from a predator.

He groaned. “You’re supposed to be a force of nature, Matt.” He stood behind me, and the smell of his cologne went straight to my crotch. He didn’t help the situation at all when he wrapped the curtain around my arms and shoulders.

He stood back to study the effect. “This won’t work. You have to take off all your clothes, guy. I need to see your bone structure.”

I was mortified by my growing boner. “Okay,” I mumbled, pulling my T-shirt over my head. I unzipped my jeans and stretched out one leg. I hoped that clever maneuvering would serve as camouflage.

“Oh for Christ sake, man, stand up and take your clothes off. Nobody’s here but us.” I thought that Lorne could easily see the face of a wrathful goddess by looking in a mirror.
He grabbed me by the elbow, looked down and saw what I was trying to hide. I thought I would faint.

He grinned. “Kinda sensitive, aren’t you, Matt?” To my surprise, he stroked my cock, making it jump. “This could work. Tension and desire, that’s what we need here.”

He pulled me to my feet and helped me out of my jeans and jockey shorts. My hardon was rock-hard and tomato-red, sticking straight out from my body.

He licked his lips. “You still have to model for me.” He picked up the curtain, and casually rubbed it over my bare chest, my ticklish belly, my hard cock and my red balls.

I glanced at Lorne’s crotch, and saw that he was sensitive too. I tried to wrap my arms around him, and he reached behind me. Smack!

I knew that his hand had left a lasting impression on one of my lower cheeks. “Show me the look of a fire-goddess, baby,” he said. “You promised.”

My cock seemed to be reaching for the heavens. “Lorne, I want --.”

“I know, baby, and you’ll get it, but I want something too.” Lorne rhythmically jerked my cock through its covering of orange rayon. “Come in here.”

He led the way into his bedroom, and I followed, still feeling the electric zing that ran from my ass to my painfully-bouncing cock. He pushed me toward the red velvet bedspread on his inviting bed, and I fell gratefully backwards on it.

Lorne rummaged in his closet and came out with a long black wig from the drugstore, part of a Vampirella costume. He pulled it onto my head and inserted four hairpins to hold it in place. “There.”

I looked up at him.

“My beauty,” he sneered. “You came here to seduce me, but I am the master of my domain. I decide what happens here.”

Holding me in place with one hand, Lorne used the other to slap my ass. “How do you like this?”

I yelled. I heard “Uh! Oh! Ow!” coming from my own mouth.

“How does this make you feel?” he demanded, watching my face. I tried to slide out of his merciless grip.

He suddenly ran a slow, gentle hand over my hot buttcheeks. Then he wrapped a fist around my cock. “What a big clit, lady,” he snickered. “Do you want to be fucked?”

I’m not even sure why he asked. He had already coated his longest finger in vaseline, and he slid it effortlessly into my back passage. I heard my own smothered scream as my dick erupted in ecstasy, shooting jism all over the orange fabric that covered it. Like a pulsing firehose, my burning cock shot load after load through the soaked curtain and onto the bedspread.

He watched me, grinning like a maniac. “Now that’s the look, Matt. That’s just the look I want. Do you think you could do that again?”

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

A Stealthy Cad

by Kathleen Bradean

Have you ever written about your lovers?

Hmm. Yes, and no. Next question?

Oh. You want me to expand on that answer. Well, hmm. I've never turned on the literary hidden camera and preserved a... what does one call it? Sexual encounter? An episode? A tryst? Anyway, I've never written about one of mine from start to finish with any attempt at historical accuracy. Mostly because when it's good, I roll over and fall asleep. I'm such a romantic. But really, try to cuddle with me after an intense orgasm and we will have words. Mine will be, "Go away." Yours better be, "Sorry," or better yet, silence as you get on your own damn side of the bed.

I would never write that in a story.


I haven't written about most of my lovers since-- let's be honest here-- the average person makes for a terrible character. They aren't extreme enough to be interesting to read about, and extreme people in real life are too high maintenance to have an affair with. As an example, my latest passion, the TV show Sherlock. In real life, if you lived with someone like Sherlock, chances are that you'd (okay, I'd) take a baseball bat to him one evening as he plucked that damned violin for three hours straight. Not to mention that he'd probably be terrible in bed. But I'm sure there's already scads of erotic fan fic about him, and probably quite a bit of it is slash* with Sherlock and Watson. But without looking to verify this guess, I doubt there's as much erotic fan fic about Watson sans Sherlock, even though in real life Watson would be the far better lover of the two. Since I haven't done jail time for assault with a deadly weapon, you can assume that in real life, I haven't had a Sherlock lover. But I know that readers don't want a Watson; they want the Sherlocks. That's my best writer's reason for not using my real lovers as characters.

However, I have written about one truly terrible real life sexual encounter that reflects so poorly on my skills in bed that it comes off as a comedic piece. And I wrote it with enough true details that it's possible that she'd recognize herself. I have mixed feelings about telling that story. Not because I'm embarrassed about my part (well, yes I am, but if you can't cringe at your past, you don't have one) but because I feel like a cad sharing what she had every right to expect was a private moment. Thankfully, she's the only one who could point to a story and say, "That bitch wrote about me!"

I've grown stealthier about sharing things. Now I start off with characters and plots that are emphatically not me or past lovers until I reach the point in the story that must ring true. That's when I tap into those affairs that left deep impressions. I dredge up the emotions and physical responses and for a paragraph or two bare my past to readers. Old lovers won't know, because no one ever knows what's going on in your head or what sensations you're feeling. Old lovers won't see themselves in the characters. Readers won't know because it's hidden within a story-- or if you prefer, a morsel of truth wrapped in pretty lies and indistinguishable from the rest. But what I write in those paragraphs is the real thing. Like orgasms, that's something I don't fake.


* Slash. If you read erotica or fan fic you're probably aware of it, but if this is a new term for you, slash is m/m (male slash male) fiction. There's also f/f and other variations, but when someone says slash, they usually mean male, although not necessarily gay even if it includes male on male sex. Slash is a complicated topic. I'm not even going to try to address all the nuances here. Just take it to mean here that the fan fic with Sherlock and Watson probably portrays them as lovers. 







 

Exactly what are bejeebers, and why are they so easily scared?

By Jenna Byrnes

A woman named Mrs. Andrews was visiting the grave of her daughter in a cemetery in Queensland, Australia in 1946 or 1947. Her daughter Joyce had died about a year earlier, in 1945, at the age of 17. Mrs. Andrews saw nothing unusual when she took this photo of Joyce's gravemarker.

When the film was developed, Mrs. Andrews was astonished to see the image of a small child sitting happily at her daughter's grave. The ghost child seem to be aware of Mrs. Andrews since he or she is looking directly into the camera.

Is is possibly a double exposure? Mrs. Andrews said there were no such children nearby when she took the photograph and, moreover, did not recognize the child at all – it was no one she would have taken a picture of. She remarked that she did not believe it was the ghost of her daughter as a child.

Investigating this case, Australian paranormal researcher Tony Healy visited the cemetery in the late 1990s. Near Joyce's grave he found the graves of two infant girls. ~ About.com on paranormal

----------

I love ghost stories. Some of them scare the bejeebers outta me, but I think they're fun. I like writing about ghosts for the same reasons Lisabet mentioned yesterday. There aren't as many pre-existing rules about ghosts. I'll never forget the first time I discussed writing vampires with a group of authors. They were quite serious about what a vamp can or cannot do. I had always figured if I was writing fantasy, I could have the characters do whatever I wanted. Apparently, that is not the case.

I've done one book about vamps and one about werewolves (also a loose interpretation!) and they were fun, but I love ghosts. In several of my first short stories I used the old "person has sex with someone and finds out later he or she is a ghost" routine. I used to think that was a blast. I still like the twist at the end, but I believe I've evolved from that particular plot line.

In the Kindred Spirits series Jude Mason and I are writing, there is no sex with ghosts. Each of the ghosts/spirits has a story, and part of each book is spent uncovering one of the tales. Ethan's Choice dealt with Angry Annie, and exactly what made the chick so angry. One of my favorite lines (which Jude created and I use liberally) is when Cade told Ethan that Annie "has a scream that will shrivel your nuts". LMAO!

Part of what I'm enjoying about writing this series is giving an interesting history and delicious description to the ghosts. Even now as I'm writing about her, I can picture Angry Annie in my mind. It's my hope that after you read the book, you can, too.

*door slam*

Annie? What are you up to?

*Jenna stomps off to find out*

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?