E is for Anal

Dark Side of the Moon is my latest story and it’s in the just-released Bad Ass, the second in our series of annual anal-erotica eBook anthologies. (Try saying that with your mouth full – ahem!) I’ll follow up soon with more about the anthology as a whole but for now, I wanted to tell you a little about my story.

Sometimes when you write erotica, as with any kind of writing, you professionally produce a story that fits the bill. Some stories sing to you, some are like pulling teeth, a lot are somewhere in the middle. Dark Side of the Moon sang to me! When the awesome Alison Tyler asked for an assfuck story (I love it when she does that), I started writing a teeth-puller. Initially, I thought my story was a winner. But the more I wrote, the worse it got. I ended up in one of those writerly dilemmas: do I keep going with this story (so professional!) or scrap it (you useless fucking failure!)?

You can read thoughts from all five of us on our individual stories here. I scrapped my teeth-puller and ran away with Dark Side of the Moon. Or as I say in the official blurb:

I started off writing a fairly regular story set in a map library, but several pages in, the piece wasn’t working for me. I don’t know where the idea to write about anal sex with an astronaut came from. An image popped into my head and the title, Dark Side of the Moon, quickly followed. Immediately, I knew this was the story I wanted to write instead. It’s a surreal, strange tale, but it’s also an exploration of something quite ordinary: a struggling marriage and a breakdown in communication. Oh, and of ass-fucking and bondage which is never ordinary, no matter how many times you go there!

Here’s the opener from Dark Side of the Moon:

DARK SIDE OF THE MOON

When Jackson came back from the moon, he was a little changed. They warned us this might happen but they couldn’t say how. On returning, his first words were, “I’ve touched the night.” I could see in his eyes that he had, and that he liked it. I’d touched no such thing and knew I’d never be able to fathom where he’d been and what he’d seen. Over time, a distance grew between us until Jackson, sitting next to me on the sofa, watching TV in his replica spacesuit, seemed further off from me than he had been when he was many thousands of miles away, hopping around on that big disc of cheese.

Locally, he was a hero. When he wore his spacesuit to the supermarket, kids followed him, asking how you go to the bathroom in space and whether he had any moon rock at home. But after a while, even they saw my spacesick Jackson as just an ordinary weirdo, the sort of washed-up dreamer you get in any small town. He must have looked the loneliest of souls, wandering around the freezer section with his empty wire basket, fish sticks and ice cream reflecting in his vizor.

He rarely bought proper food unless I reminded him it was good to eat. Our garage was full of astronaut food, bulk-bought online, and with the help of Mike Herman from number 10, Jackson installed a roll-off-roof shed in our back yard and called it his observatory. While I slept, he shut himself away in there, gazing at the cosmos through an enormous telescope he’d nicknamed “Bettina”.

I wasn’t happy about this, obviously. Jackson might have touched the night, but he hadn’t touched me in months.

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Bad Ass is available right now as a download!

You don’t need an e-reader to read it, just a computer:

E-junkie $4.49

All Romance $4.04

Or if you’re in the States and want to kink up your Kindle, Amazon is waiting for you!

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For more about the gorgeous astronaut pic above, go here. It’s a picture drawn from memories of photographs, then photographed to look like, well, a photograph. And it was done by Brazilian artist, Vik Muniz, who emigrated to the States in the early 80s with very little English. Pictures obviously mattered. Muniz says of his work: ‘People thought they were seeing bad reproductions of photographs of famous events, but in fact they were only looking at pictures of thoughts.’

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I hope you like Bad Ass and my Dark Side of the Moon.