Do you have an aural fixation? If so, you might want to check out my story The Sex of Therapy on the Nobilis Reed Erotic Stories podcast. The story, which originally appeared in the Circlet Press anthology Up for Grabs 2, is one of my favorites. I swear that the main character just showed up in my head while I was killing time at a Boston Starbucks, started talking, and wouldn’t shut up. This is what she said:

On Wednesdays, I enjoy being a girl.

It’s not just a job to me. I think of it more as an art form.

I go to sleep on Tuesday nights planning my presentation. Will I have slides? Or will I slip on the high heeled pumps with the ribbons that wrap around my calves? I think about the menu of blouses and skirts, dresses and suits that will be available for me when it’s time to prepare myself, and I imagine what kind of girl I will be when I wake up.

I’m always a girl on Wednesdays.

Listen to the rest on the podcast, or pick up a copy for your e-reader at Circlet Press or on Amazon.com

The Gingerbread Dungeon will be available from Lazy Day Publishing in a few weeks!

Something has changed within me, something is not the same

Reading writing blogs, it often seems like most writers have trouble being concise and keeping their novels down to size. I’ve always had the opposite problem. Short is easy for me. I used to work as a storyteller at various Renaissance Faires, and telling a small self-contained tale is my comfort zone. When writing for anthologies, I used to have a great deal of difficulty bringing things up to length, but I never worried about exceeding the specified limit. At least I didn’t until recently.

I blame my stalled !romance novel*. I had never written thirty-five thousand words of fiction before, and I loved doing all that character development. I wouldn’t say that I enjoyed it more than writing shorts – I still love how quickly shorts get done – but it was incredibly satisfying.

Unfortunately, the desire for exposition, character development, and plot lines that are too complex to be resolved in 20 pages is starting to affect work that is supposed to be short. Right now I’m about 3600 words into a story for an upcoming erotica anthology, where I am not allowed to exceed 10,000 words, and my characters aren’t even close to getting into each other’s pants. In addition, my story has gone so far away from my initial outline that there is no hope of ever making it back.

It’s frustrating, but if I were to be honest, I’d have to say that I love this story. I love these characters. I love their journey, and the outline can go sit in a corner and pout if that’s what it wants to do. This is why I’ve always been a pantser instead of a plotter. I may need some sort of literary scaffold when building novel length work, but for the short stuff I prefer to just let my characters tell me what they want to do**… even when they are being a pain in the neck.

_{*It’s not a romance novel. I know it’s not a romance novel, but it started out as a romance novel and that’s how my brain persists in thinking about it. ! is the mathematical notation for “not.” It is also a punctuation mark that can be referred to as a “bang,” which is oddly appropriate, because once I gave up on it being a romance novel it started to contain a lot more banging.}

_{**Yes, I am totally my characters’ bitch. I have acknowledged this and now we can move on.}

I’m very excited to be able to announce that my e-book The Gingerbread Dungeon is going to be released by Lazy Day Publishing in early summer 2011. I could describe it here, anew, or I could simply be a lazy muffin and use the teaser text that I spent most of the other afternoon slaving over with the help of my friends. Rose Fox, in particular, gets major credit for the final product, and anyone looking for a fabulous editor should start gazing in her direction right now. (Any mistakes, however, are my own.)

Not all storybook romances begin with once upon a time, and some people want to be kinky ever after…

The Gingerbread Dungeon collects the stories of three fairy tale princesses who don’t want to be rescued from the dungeon, they want to be ravished there.

In “Sensitive,” a prince would do anything to avoid marriage until he meets a princess with tender skin and dark desires.

In “Upbraided,” Rapunzel’s uptight parents lock her away but her magical hair draws the woman of her dreams through the tower window.

In “Discipline,” Goldilocks falls in with three bears and learns that love can take very unexpected forms.

Just because you’re all grown up, doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy a good bedtime story…

I love that my editor at Lazy Day encouraged me to explore a wide range of sexualities in these erotic stories. Although all of the characters are kinky, there is a heterosexual story, a lesbian story, and a story that contains both heterosexual and gay elements. It was so much fun getting to play with such a diverse cast of fairy-tale characters.

Next Post: Picking The Fairy Tales