Come Away With Me, a post by @GiselleRenarde

Thank you for reading my musings over the years. It has been a pleasure bringing my thoughts to you and I'm honoured you've taken time out of your days and nights to read my words.

Today's will be my final post here at The Grip.

Not because I'm done with writing.

Not because I'm done with blogging.

Not because I'm finished sharing my life with you.

I've been writing erotica professionally for nearly 14 years, and I'll continue to do so.  I hope you'll keep reading the words I put out into the world.

I've maintained my Donuts and Desires blog for well over a decade. I'll keep updating that site with new works as they emerge.

I celebrated 10 years on Twitter this September. You can still find me there most days.

In June, I started a daily music blog.  I've published over 200 posts there this year, and I plan to keep at it. Yes, that's right: I'm there every day. I hope you'll join me.

You can also support me on Patreon for access to weekly audio erotica: my stories, my voice.

I'm not going anywhere. I just won't be here. But you can still find me all over the internet.

Go to your local library's website and search the name Giselle Renarde.  See what pops up.

I tell you, I'm all over the map.

And if all else fails... subscribe to my newsletter?

#Writing as Impulse Control, a post about #taboo #erotica by @GiselleRenarde

Grief is weird.

It makes you want to do things you know you shouldn't. You KNOW you shouldn't. But you want to do them all the same.

You want to assert yourself as a living being. You want to LIVE because the person who is gone can't. Someone else's death is a reminder of your own mortality.

Or else you go numb and you just want to feel something. It takes more and more just to feel something.

Or else you don't care anymore. You don't care about yourself. You don't care about right and wrong. You don't care.

Or else you're just looking for some form of comfort while you heal.

You all know by now that I live with a sock puppet called Lexi Wood. She bashes her face against my keyboard to produce some of the most taboo smut I've ever seen.

Lexi has been my rock, of late. She's taken the wheel. Not only has she held my hand through all the losses I've lived through in the past 6 months, but she's helped me curb my impulses to go out into the world and do things I'll only regret when I get my shit together.

I'm sure I mentioned to you that writing helped me cope with my cousin's death this summer. Some of that writing was journaling about the situation specifically and about grief, both specifically and generally. But some of that writing was... well, it was Lexi, plain and simple.

It was strange, experiencing this extreme sadness and concern for my family, to be thinking about family all the time, and then turn around to find Lexi writing really raunchy smut about barely-legal teens begging their stepdaddies for a fuck.

Part of me was asking, like, is this really the appropriate time for taboo fiction? But apparently it was, and having something to focus on, something other than my family's state of mourning, helped me tremendously.

Then it happened again.

It was November when my grandmother died--National Novel Writing Month. I'd intended to work on a novel. But that didn't happen.

Following my grandmother's death, obsessive thoughts started creeping into my mind. Obsessive thoughts of inappropriate intimacies. Stuff I knew I couldn't do. Not in the real world. But I found myself thinking about these things all the time. Anyone who's ever wanted to do something they knew they shouldn't knows how excruciating it is to be haunted by those thoughts.

Luckily, Lexi stepped in once again. Lexi saved me from myself by routing all that strange sexual energy into a collection of taboo erotica I've recently published as Taboo Sex with an Ex.  Nice of Lexi to keep to a theme. She's got marketing in mind even when I'm grieving deeply.

Without Lexi, would I have done something I'd live to regret? That's one of those impossible to answer questions, I think. I would like to imagine I'm enough of an adult to say to myself "No, I'm not going to do that" and then... just not do it. But there's a rebel in all of us that hears a NO and automatically says YES. Not only does it say YES, but it digs its heels in a little deeper every time it hears a NO.

Writing smut helps in working through those impulses. I'm a living testament to the power of smut-writing.

We always hear about porn etc normalizing and even encouraging unsociable sex, but here's what I'm thinking: if writing taboo fantasies helps the writer cope with inappropriate sexual thoughts, isn't there a chance reading taboo erotica helps the reader in the same way?

Whether or not you're having impulse control issues, I invite you to read Lexi's latest collection, Taboo Sex with an Ex. It's currently in Kindle Unlimited because I'm doing an experiment which you can read about here.

Taboo Sex with an Ex
6 Explicit Erotica Stories
By Lexi Wood

These girls love their daddies so much they just keep coming back for more… even though they know they shouldn’t… even though they said they wouldn’t! In this mouth-watering collection of sinful smut, six young women return to their daddies to fill their needs as only a daddy can. They shouldn’t have done it in the first time. They shouldn’t come back for seconds. But here they are, pretty and purring and ready for more!

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07MLW8Z3F?tag=lexiwood-20
UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07MLW8Z3F
CAN: https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B07MLW8Z3F
AU: https://www.amazon.com.au/dp/B07MLW8Z3F

Negotiation, Anticipation, and Writing Erotica

Sacchi Green

They say “Getting there is half the fun.” I haven’t been able to track down who first said that, but I did discover that Henry J. Tillman claimed that the saying “became obsolete with the advent of commercial airlines.” Henry also said, “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the precipitate,” so I’m inclined to go along with whatever Henry says.

I very much doubt that Henry was taking into account “mile high club” action when he dissed the experience of traveling on commercial airlines, but I do suspect that thinking about and planning how to have sex on a commercial airplane, and anticipating how you think will be, can actually be more than half the fun of the undertaking, considering how hard the airlines work at making customers uncomfortable.

All of which has little or nothing to do with our topic of sexual negotiation, but I do have it on good authority that elaborate negotiation sometimes turns out to be more than half the fun. Not, by any means, often, but once in a while. It’s like when a writer has planned out a story in great detail, even outlining it scene by scene (not that I’d know anything about that,) and when the time comes to actually write the piece it feels like been-there-done-that. The anticipation factor has come and gone. Or so I’ve heard. Really.

I have, in fact, heard about some negotiations that go so far as to become lengthy written contracts, although my sources may be extreme outliers. I’ve read one long, detailed contract between a dom and a would-be submissive that could be a story in and of itself, and though I have no personal knowledge of whether the actual sex was even more fun than the anticipatory negotiations, I was told much later that after a while there wasn’t any more actual sex, for a reason that was too sensitive to have been included in the negotiations. It had to do with the young submissive making a comment about older bodies, without realizing how sensitive the dom was on that subject.

The necessity for negotiations was emphasized in the BDSM club for women that I belonged to on a largely nominal basis some years ago. I know about asking what areas of the body are off-limits, the relative preferences of pain or humiliation or dirty words, the necessity of safe words, the sharing of special fantasies. This was in the context of “play parties” rather than extended relationships, although I was close to some people who were trying to make long-term relationships work. The club had regular meetings with demos and lessons, and negotiation was one of the major themes. I got the impression that some folks there really got off on the negotiation part, especially as it represented a form of control of both self and partner. Looking back, I can see why the club eventually ceased to be when the non-sexual and never-ending “negotiations” over bylaws and mission statements made it impossible to get enough members to serve on the steering committee. Too bad, since the lessons on safe sex, required for all members, were quite valuable, and there were some great parties. But time moves along, and online groups like FetLife come along, and things change.

I know there’s much more to sexual negotiation than I can imagine. The closest I ever came was as a novice spanker, with a young spankee who knew exactly what she wanted, and what she didn’t. The main thing I remember was that she wanted me to be mean, so she could feel righteously angry at being unfairly mistreated. Okay. I don’t know what I would have done if she hadn’t already told me that her backpack contained, not sex toys, but library books, and YA books at that. I could play the mean librarian punishing her for bringing books for children to this den of iniquity (my hotel room connected to the play party suite.) I could also wield hand and belt and hairbrush harder, she said, that she’d thought possible. Ha. Don’t jump to conclusions about aging bodies. Although, several years later, I doubt that my joints could handle that much.

Getting back to my half-boiled theory about negotiation being somewhat like story-writing, I get quite a few submissions for my anthologies in which the negotiations makeup a major part of the story. In fact I was reading one today in which the negotiations and anticipations were the whole story, which, because of how intriguing the characters were, sort of worked, but may not end up being what I need for Best Lesbian Erotica of the Year. We’ll see. I have miles of text still to go, or at least it seems like it. Just eighty more submissions…

                 

 

Solo Sex--Solitary or Shared

Sacchi Green

Does one-handed reading (or film-watching, or eavesdropping) count as masturbation, or do the stories or films or orgasmic sounds coming through the walls get credit as supporting characters? For that matter, is it really masturbation if it’s consciously done while someone is watching? Does it matter?

No, probably not. Fantasizing is a handy tool for masturbation, and stories, films, etc are fuel for fantasies, whether for solo scenes or pairs play. Masturbation is whatever you mean when you talk about masturbation, or at least think about it, because who talks much about that? Except, of course, erotica writers. And even we don’t talk about it as much as we write about it, which raises another question: is writing particularly steamy scenes that push your own buttons a form of masturbation? Or at least a prelude to the physical act?

You don’t have to answer that. And neither do I. But I’m sure I’m not the only writer who fantasizes about writing sex scenes during sex, as well as fantasizing about sex while writing sex scenes. There’s an extra oomph when just the right and new and intense descriptive phrase surges through your fantasizing mind. My own mind, anyway.

And now having brought the subject around to my own mind, I’ll confess that although I personally think of masturbation as a profoundly private pastime, in my writing I’ve tended to include a voyeur who is very nearly a participant in such scenes, so that I’m not at all sure whether the protagonist can strictly be said to be masturbating.

It’s getting hard to remember which stories have already provided excerpts. I thought of sharing “On Wheels”, my first story in an edition of Best Lesbian Erotica, seventeen years ago in BLE 1999. It was badly in need of editing, which it got, but probably in need of more from my perspective now as editor of the upcoming twentieth anniversary edition of that series. It turns out, though, that my file for that story is so old that I can’t open it on my current computer, and I don’t have time to pursue the matter, so I’ll just mention the details in passing. The setting is a mountain cabin in the midst of a snowstorm. The characters are a young woman confined to a high-tech wheelchair after a criminal assault that traumatized her, and the tall, Nordic woman who is her companion/caretaker/bodyguard. The injured woman can’t stand to be touched, so her companion, the narrator, more or less seduces her with an intense masturbation scene interspersed with quotations from The Song of Songs, aka The Song of Solomon from the Old Testament. This is one case where I wonder whether sex clearly involving two people can really be called masturbation.

Another story in this category is one I’ve shared before, “Freeing the Demon”, from Kristina Wright’s Dream Lover (reprinted in The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica) in which a downtrodden call girl masturbates in view of a rooftop gargoyle in which a demon has been imprisoned. By the end of that scene the gargoyle has broken free enough to actively participate, if only briefly, but even before that he is definitely influencing the activities. Is this really masturbation?
__________

From "Freeing the Demon"

Sacchi Green

When Jayne finally climbed out onto the balcony she was wrapped in a deeply hooded raincoat. She knew the allure of mystery, and slow unveiling; she also knew all previous experience might be irrelevant. Could her demon be pleased like human men? Until she knew his pleasure, she would simply please herself.
The light from his depths glowed hotter than ever before. In anticipation of her coming? Or had he gained strength from devouring Leopold? A shiver of fear sharpened her excitement.
She pressed herself against the rain-slick stone and inched the raincoat open. Chill gave way to warmth wherever skin touched stone, and when she stretched upward from the balustrade a deep vibration pulsed through the rigid mass. She pressed closer, bruising her softness on his ridges, melding pain with pleasure, but when she sensed desperation in his trembling she loosened her grip and stepped down.
Jayne knew the art of pleasing watchers. They had been her only bearable customers. In any closer interaction it was she who would become the watcher, removed, unmoved, observing with vague repulsion what her other self must do.
She wondered whether he could see her, but when she raised the edges of the coat like dark wings the light beamed obliquely from his eyes to warm the pale flame of her body.
The coat, once released. did not fall but floated above and behind, supported by the light. She forgot the rain, forgot everything but herself and that burning presence, feeding on his hunger as it fed on hers.
Beginning with dance-like movements, slowly, sinuously, Jayne curved her hands from waist to hips, slimness to taut fullness. Her touch was the watcher's touch, but under her command.
Then she drew her fingers lightly upward, brushing them teasingly around the outer curves of her breasts, catching her breath at the sweet soreness. As she cupped them gently and then less gently the fullness, the firmness, grew; in her mind her outline transformed from slender to voluptuous.
The ripples of pleasure intensified. Urgency flowed down her body. She throbbed both with fullness and with an aching need to be filled.
Jayne thought fleetingly of pulling back. How could she bear it if this hot tide never flooded into release? But it was all she had to give. And besides, it was too late.
Hard nipples jutted from her round full breasts, yearning desperately for the stroke of hands that could not reach out, for the hot press and tug and bite of a mouth frozen in stillness. Her fingers teased their tips into greater, harder, unbearable tension, while her palms still cupped the swelling fullness. She thrust against her own hands and moaned, again and again, until a deeper echo sounded from the stone before her and she raised her eyes.
Red light pulsed from the depths. A low rumbling sound went on and on. How could she truly touch him, penetrate the shell of dark magic, bring his torment and hers to an ecstatic peak?
She had come to despise men's bodies, but now she cursed the spell, or sculptor, that had shaped the gargoyle, pressing the forelegs together to obscure the loins, leaving her without even a simulacrum of maleness to stroke, taste, press against.
Her hands slipped downward. Her breasts still yearned with fullness, but a hunger still more intense built in her depths, a pounding pressure that demanded a harder pressure in return, more, and more...
Detachment long gone, she could only open mind as well as flesh to him, projecting her own sensations, hoping for him to somehow tell her how to meet his need.
His vision of her flashed through her mind; eyes half-closed, lips full and parted, head twisting from side to side as damp, heavy hair coiled over her shoulders and slid across her thrusting nipples, rising and falling to the ragged rhythm of her breathing. It was his will that raised her hand to cradle and press one breast and then the other, gently at first, then harder, sending hot lances downward. She no longer knew which sobbing cries and moans were her own, and which reverberated from the stone.
Somewhere in the outer world there were sounds. Pounding on a door? Or her own blood pounding in her ears? The clamor of her body drowned any intrusion. Linked with this being who watched and shared and demanded, she moved in response to his will as well as her own, hips twisting, undulating, arching toward him, hands stroking and kneading and tantalizing but leaving the hot, pulsing void for him, for his filling, if only he would come to her, into her...
A sharp crack split the air. The balcony shook. A wave of force slammed her against the building, jarring her teeth into her lower lip until it bled. She force down pain-sparked anger; whatever she had incited she would willingly accept.
__________


Pretty close to not being, technically, masturbation, right? Except, possibly, for the author. I can’t say for sure that writing that turns its writer on will turn on readers better than writing that’s more detached, but really, wouldn’t researching that question be fun?


 

Lying for Fun and Profit

All authors are deceitful.  The whole idea behind writing a novel or short story is to tell stories that sound believable to your audience.  But I think with some genres, the deceitfulness runs a little deeper.

I’ve found with writing erotica, people assume that I’m writing about real life experiences.  (Honestly, if I fucked as much as my characters do, I wouldn’t have time to write about it.)  But with creating a pseudonym to write erotica, it certainly helps to give readers the impression that I’m a man-slut.  Would you rather read an erotica book from a party-loving man-slut or from a quiet, shy guy that likes to read Star Trek books?

It’s a little odd that this deceit seems to be required in erotica — if I were to write a sci-fi story, I wouldn’t have readers wondering if this was based on my lived experiences fighting off alien hordes on some distant planet.  If I were to write a thriller, I doubt anyone would wonder if I really had chased spies through Croatia.  Yet if I write about a hot sexual encounter — say, two guys in the back alley behind a gay club — I get readers wondering if it’s based on my sexual history.

Really, it would hurt my sales if I wrote dirty stories, but anywhere I was active online I kept saying, “Oh, I don’t do anything like what I write — I could never lower myself to such base desires.”  And it would also hurt my credibility as an erotic author.

Again, that’s a little odd since mystery authors don’t lose credibility for not actually being detectives, fantasy authors don’t lose credibility for not being wizards, and paranormal authors don’t lose credibility for not being vampires.  (That being said, there are some mystery authors who have a history in police, military, or forensic science, and I think it works in their favour — but it’s certainly not necessary for their success, since they are skilled writers to begin with.)

So is my whole persona a lie?  No, actually.  I present a slice of myself online, the slice that I believe appeals to readers of erotic fiction, and leave the rest of me offline.  I do twink-watch at Starbucks, like flirting with hot guys, and I really am a man in his thirties that looks rather twink-ish.  And while my stories are not based on lived experiences, I have had some experiences that parallel some of my stories.  Some, not all.  I confess I have not been involved in a bukkake… yet.  The rest is up to you to determine.



Cameron D. James is a writer of gay erotica and M/M erotic romance; his latest release is Go-Go Boys of Club 21: The Complete Series.  He lives in Canada, is always crushing on Starbucks baristas, and has two rescue cats.  To learn more about Cameron, visit http://www.camerondjames.com.

First Love: Do the Memories Linger On?

Write about first love? Sigh.

That would mean wallowing in memories, and I’ve been burned out lately on the memory front, spending so much time in the home where I grew up long ago and in doctors’ offices with my father—I should get the word on Tuesday or Wednesday whether lung cancer is the likely candidate to keep him from reaching 100, which he has no ambition to do—that I feel disoriented even when I manage to get to my own home for a while to tend to my garden, make jam from fruit that can’t wait, and edit erotica. You know, those kinds of things that root in you in who you are now.

Sooo, I’m going to punt this one, toss a question back at all of you, and then maybe post a brief fiction excerpt.

Do you ever have erotic dreams about your first love? Or at least a love from long ago? (“Long ago” being, of course, a very subjective concept, as, in fact, is “love.”) Let’s take that a step farther, and make it two questions. Do you ever think about past lovers during present sex? Envision them, see them as you imagined them to be, as you wanted them to be, even though you know now and maybe knew then that neither they nor you were exactly the way you imagined each other? In short, fantasize during sex about someone from long ago? It could be just for a few vital seconds for that last push over the edge, a vision flashing though your mind of something you did with them, or, even more powerful, something you wish you’d done with them but never dared to. It could be a total fantasy, just using a remembered figure as a silhouette to be fleshed out by your own creative muse. Just like writing erotica.

And now for a story excerpt. Apologies for the repetition; I posted some of this just a month or so ago, but this time I’ve left a bit out and included some passages more to the point.
__________

Alternate Lives
Sacchi Green
                                                       
In that wartime English summer Cleo had made me soar, even though I never left the ground.
Thirty-five years later, in 1978, her plane rose, and banked, leaving Anchorage dwindling in the distance. As the clouds lifted in the east, the towering glory of Denali blazed suddenly white in the sun.
"The mountain's out!" someone shouted behind me.
"Sure is," Cleo said, above the hum of the engine. "Takes your breath away, doesn't it?"
But it was Cleo Remington herself who took my breath away.
I watched her strong hands on the controls, remembering the way she had touched the Spitfire fighter plane that last night in England. Remembering, across the years, the way she had touched me.

(irrelevant snipped part)

My body was alert to Cleo's least movement. I wanted so intensely to lay my hand where a band of sunlight curving across her thigh that my own thighs quivered.
How had I thought I could carry this off? But I savored the anguish, every searing drop. In two weeks I would return to Jack, who truly loved and needed me, who had built a life with me. My love for him had never been diminished by the memories of Cleo kept tucked away like rare, glowing jewels I could never wear again.
     “Never," though, has a different ring to it when you're nearing sixty, and you know damned well that life is too short to waste on guilt. What you want is what you want, whether you can have it or not. I can't be the only woman to find that as the biological imperative wanes, other passions intensify. That hidden glow can flare into a heat too intense to deny.
Not that I would ever hurt Jack. He didn't know what aching dreams impelled me sometimes to rouse him early and urge him into my already-slippery cunt. He didn't need to know how I had discovered, late in life, the fine art of masturbation, or whose hands and body I felt when I touched myself, whose name I cried out. He only needed to know that I would always be with him.
When I told him I wanted to take this trip he understood, or thought he did. He'd heard all about how women these days need to "find themselves." Long ago I'd had to tell him just a little about Cleo, anyway; I couldn't very well hide the tiny wings tattooed above my left breast.
"I had a friend who was a pilot, ferrying fighter planes for the RAF," I'd said. "I was jealous of her silver wings, so we went to a tattoo parlor down by the docks in London and both got tattooed." He'd laughed, and teased me about my drunken debauchery days, and was relieved, I think, that no man was involved. But when we'd parted, Jack had held me close and murmured, "Wherever you go, please don't get lost." How much, after all, had he guessed?
__________

Getting back to my questions, above: You tell me yours, and I might tell you one or two of mine. Blurred to protect the obliviously innocent. This is all just between us, right? (Fortunately I never call out names during sex, having quite enough to do with my voice without resorting to words.)

Feeling too Comfortable?

Who would have thought my comfort zone would be writing hot, steamy erotica? I've been writing for as long as I can remember, but I never saw sex as my ticket to fame and fortune. Okay, so I'm neither famous nor rich, but all the money in my bank account is from sex writing. How did that happen?

I was voted the girl most likely to remain a virgin through high school (and I did). I adored Nancy Drew when I was 8 and went through puberty reading Stephen King. You'd think I'd be writing mysteries or horror novels. I did read romance fiction-- the Harlequin Presents books, with exotic settings and strong, domineering men-- and tons of gothics, but there was little to no sex in any of those. Sex happened behind closed doors, with waves crashing on the shore and curtains billowing in the windows.

I read the sweet romances and gothics at an age when I wasn't entirely sure what sex was all about. Oh sure, I understood the mechanics of the parts fitting together, but I didn't understand the point. I mean, masturbation accomplished the same goal, right? Right! So all of the drama and emotional turmoil and risk taking in those books seemed kind of silly when the end goal was orgasm and that could be achieved without a sheik or business mogul or brooding sheep farmer to boss me around.

And yet... here I am. Writing about sex in all its myriad forms. I guess I should've seen the writing on the wall when I chose to research women's sexual fantasies for my senior paper in AP Psychology. "Behind Closed Doors" was the title-- and I got an A. Thank you, Nancy Friday, for inspiring the topic, not to mention giving me a reason to buy all those smutty books and call it "research" when really it was just me figuring out what that sex stuff was really all about. I hadn't even had sex, but I finally knew what was going on behind those closed doors in the sweet romance novels-- and I wanted a piece of the action!

My writing comfort zone may be dirty words, erotic fantasies and kinky practices now, but I think I have probably written something in nearly every genre that exists. It's just that no one would buy my attempts at science fiction or horror or mystery. Sex became my comfort zone because it's the genre that pays me. The higher the number of erotica sales, the fewer stories I wrote in other genres.

This topic gave me pause because it asked about what happens when I step outside my comfort zone. I wasn't thinking in terms of my erotica comfort zone--there really isn't much in the category of sex that I haven't (or couldn't) write about-- I was thinking more generally about genres. And I will admit to a feeling of guilt-- I don't know what happens when I step outside my comfort zone because I honestly don't remember the last time I consciously decided to write fiction that wasn't erotic. I've written about ghosts and vampires, angels and demons, and they were all having sex. I have novels plotted, outlined, even half-written and they are a mashup of genres-- but they all include explicit erotic content. Does that mean I can't not write sex? Maybe. Or maybe I've just gotten lazy these last few years, too wrapped up in writing what I am reasonably certain will sell instead of venturing into the unknown.

I do think I'll be giving this idea more consideration. I love writing erotica (and erotic romance), but there is something to be said for breaking out of the comfort zone. Writing erotica has felt a little too comfortable the past couple of years. Maybe it's time to write something new, something that doesn't include sex. The mind boggles. A story (or novel) without sex? Do such things even exist? Not in my world, not in nearly a decade. But maybe it's time for celibacy-- at least in my writing. Maybe giving up sex will make me a better writer. Maybe sex is baaaaad for me.

Nah, I think that's taking it too far. I'll never stop writing erotica, but it wouldn't hurt to write something not erotic and see what happens.

I'll let you know how it turns out.