Vampires, strippers and a thousand tiny stab wounds

Lust at First Bite, the latest anthology from Black Lace, is out now. It features my story, The Funhouse is Closed Mondays, which centres on two characters from my vampire novella, The Vampire’s Heart. In The Vampire’s Heart, Simeon and Suzanne were living in Arctic exile with their other lover, Billy. They’ve since de-camped to New York where they’ve made their home in a derelict ghost train in Coney Island. Here’s an excerpt, set in the funhouse, where they meet Christophe, the leader of NY’s vampire pack.

A thud on the floorboards made them turn and there was Christophe on the far side of the room, knees bent as if he’d just jumped from a height. Grinning, he swaggered towards them, looking oddly like a thuggish black Cossack, bare chested with fur-lined boots below calf-length combats. His hair was close-cropped, a shadow of wool over a menacingly strong head, and a neat goatee framed his plump lips. His skin was the colour of stale chocolate, muscular slabs of brown tinged with a bloodless beige-grey bloom, and tattooed inky flames licked up one big brawny arm. Whorls of dark hair clustered around his pecs and his stomach was a washboard. Around his neck he wore, like a symbol of defiance, a large silver cross.

Simeon’s cock was rigid.

‘Nice to see you, friends,’ said Christophe and he clasped Simeon’s hand, giving it a single shake. Around them, the light was low and purplish, and a stormy lilac glow shone on Christophe’s body.

Before Simeon could reply, Christophe grabbed hold of his hair and plunged a fat, insistent tongue into his mouth. He kissed deeply, his thick lips pulsing, his beard scouring, and all the while, he kept Simeon’s hair bunched, making his scalp prickle as if with a thousand tiny stab wounds.

When they broke away, Christophe smirking and Simeon stunned, Suzanne was gawping. ‘Oh god,’ she said weakly. ‘I love watching men fuck. Keep going, please.’

Watching men fuck seems to have been a theme with me this year. Ah, what a life! The Lion Tamer’s Scars, my story in the recently released Ultimate Burlesque, includes some hot m/m seen through the eyes of Roxy Roxoff, a jaded female stripper working in Psycho Daddy’s Circus of Sin. Ultimate Burlesque is raising money for Macmillan Cancer Support, and last week I did a reading at my local Waterstones along with the founder of the Burlesque Against Breast Cancer campaign, Emily Dubberley, and anthology author, Carmel Lockyer (aka Kay Sexton who’s blogged about the event here). It was a great night, and apparently the book is doing fantastically, chart-toppingly well. Left to right in the pic is Kay, Emily and yours truly, clutching a cup of wine.

For more hot excerpts from Lust at First Bite, check out today’s post on Lust Bites. And don’t forget to take a moment to admire the cover of the book which not only features a sexy guy, but also matches my burlesque socks! It would be wonderful to see more sexy guys on the covers of erotica (as opposed to on erotic romance) but erotica, sadly, is still stuck in its sexist past, publishing thousands of books which act as if men are its only consumers. And the wildly offensive result is covers like this. If you think this is bang out of order, please add your voice to our campaign on Erotica Cover Watch. And thank you!

Vampires Part II

Wet man! Wet man! At last, the Gods have heard me!

Here’s the wonderfully sexy new cover for Lust at First Bite, the forthcoming collection of vampire shorts from Black Lace (UK November; US Jan 09). It’s particularly thrilling to see today because I’ve just been ranting chez Jeremy Edwards about all those erotica covers featuring half-naked women. Really, it’s time erotica publishers woke up to the fact that women read smut too and there’s this thing called ‘gender equality’ some of us are into (not to mention porning over men, which *cough* some of us are into as well).

Anyway, vampires! This collection includes my story, The Funhouse is Closed Mondays. It’s a spin-off from my snow-vampire novella, The Vampire’s Heart, and features two of the characters, Simeon and Suzanne, now living in a derelict ghost train on Coney Island. It’s the first short story anthology for a while from BL and looks to be a goody.

And, just to offset the jolly happy news on the cover-art front, here’s the new German translation of Asking for Trouble, one of the ugliest, most objectifying and misogynistic cover images I’ve seen in a long time. I’ve made the pic super-duper tiny because I don’t want to cause eye-bleed in anyone. But yes, they really do seem to have erased the woman’s head with a badly photoshopped hood, all the better to highlight her tits. If you want to see the image in its full horror, go here. And if anyone can translate Gib’s Mir, I’d be most grateful. I think it’s one of those tricksy idiomatic ones and I’m told, worryingly, it means something like ‘sock it’. *Weeps!*

Your Essential Orgasm Kit

So anyway, I decided to put my porn in alphabetical order (not really – there was an earthquake) and discovered among the cobwebs, The Cosmopolitan Bedside Book of Orgasms. It’s a freebie from 1998 and includes a section entitled ‘Your Essential Orgasm Kit’.

So whaddya think it is? What’s number one on Cosmo’s list of orgasm essentials? Go on, guess! Try! What have you got? A pair of cuffs? Some filthy porn? A ten-inch vibe?

Nope. It’s …

an ostrich feather.

For real! An ostrich feather! This is how women climaxed ten years ago. There are eight items in the kit-list, plus an additional eight for ‘If you’re feeling particularly sexy …’ One of these additional items is ‘bright red lipstick (go glam)’.

So, yeah, it’s Cosmo, it’s mainstream, it’s a decade old. But really, if you’ve ever had an ostrich-assisted orgasm while wearing red lippy, please tell me about it. Other than that, I’ll give a prize of something hot from my top shelf to anyone who can guess two more items from Cosmo’s list of 16 – excluding a vibrator (which is no. 5 on their list! Five!) and massage oil (no. 3). I’ll even throw in the booklet. (‘You’ll come and come and come again!’)

What’s that you say? Scented candles? Nope, they forgot that. An electro stim starter pack? Umm, let me check.

In other news, I got word that a story of mine, Boot Camp, has been selected for Maxim Jakubowksi’s Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica 8 (published Jan 2009). Hurrah! Boot Camp, recently described by Forum magazine as ‘wonderfully original’, first appeared in Alison Tyler’s F is for Fetish. The story’s about a woman who gets off on polishing dirty army boots. Interestingly, among my earthquake cobwebs, I also found the very first Wicked Words anthology from Black Lace which includes my story, The Western Whore. It’s about a woman being subjected to an army-boy gang rape. (It’s consensual! Don’t fret!) So, hmmm, maybe I kink for army boys. And maybe those decades can be quite small after all.

Also in the joy department, I had a short accepted for Black Lace’s forthcoming vampire anthology, Lust at First Bite. The story’s called The Funhouse is Closed Mondays and centres on Simeon and Suzanne, two characters from my Lust Bites vamp novella, The Vampire’s Heart. Simeon and Suzanne, last seen in the Arctic, are now living in a derelict ghost train on Coney Island. This will be published in about 10 million years time. OK, November 2008 in the UK.

And, because I’m not here very often, let me also tell you I sold a story to Alison Tyler for her Sex and Coffee anthology from Pretty Things Press. This is my first PTP publication so I’m super-thrilled. This is actually 10 gazillion years away from being published but that’s fine. I’m being premature today.

So go on, take a guess. We’ve got vibe, oil, lipstick, feather. What else?

Split Hits the States

Split, my dark, haunting tale of submission, bondage and puppetry got its official US release yesterday, January 1st. Also hitting the shelves was Lust Bites, three hot and sexy vampire novellas, one of which is mine. Actually my story, The Vampire’s Heart, is set in the Arctic so it’s pretty damn chilly.

Personally, I can’t think of a better way to welcome in the new year than with a simultaneous release and some strange, wondrous smut, so I’m giving away some goodies. Add a comment before 10th January and you could win one of two copies of my ‘Gothic tour-de-force’, Split. I’m afraid I don’t have many spare copies of Lust Bites so if you wanted a vampire, you’d have to beg especially hard. But it might be worth begging because look, we got a great review from Ashley Lister!

Check out Lust Bites (the blog!) this Saturday, 5th Jan, where I’ll be offering some sexiness from Split and having a little farewell tea party. It’ll be my last post over there for some time because, alas, I’m hanging up my LB hat for 2008. I’ll miss being part of the gang but my decision, though it hasn’t been easy to make, is a positive one for me. I’ll still be dropping in to make lewd jokes etc, but I will be erratic.

Eyes right for the new cover of the German translation of my deeply dirty Victorian romance, Darker Than Love. It’s heaps nicer than the UK cover but, as ever, why oh why must they insist on sexualising women on books supposedly aimed at women? I am a woman. I like looking at men’s bodies. They’re very beautiful indeed. I would have been so happy with, say, a nicely-muscled, sepia-toned back but what do I get instead? Tits! I wake up with tits every day. Why would I want them on my bookshelf?

Sorry. Is that giving you weird mental images? Me too.

Please comment to win some smut!

Another wonderful review of Split!

I got another wonderful review of Split!

Kristina Lloyd writes incredible sex scenes. Her prose is beautiful – even when the scene being described is positively grimy – and she uses novel, original language. [...] This book is clever, beautiful, dreamy and gritty.

I’m so happy! Check out Tumperkin‘s review over at Dionne Galace’s rather smart and witty site. I think it’s a very considered and insightful response to Split, and I’m always especially grateful when people perceive my work as romantic, despite the fact that it doesn’t tick many of the genre-romance boxes. Jeremy Edward‘s once wrote a very brilliant article on offbeat romance for Lust Bites. And he cited my filth which is obviously marvellous.

Asking for Trouble – not exactly trad romance – was November’s featured book on Love Honey’s newly-launched Erotic Book Club – and I do feel it got a bit of a roasting.

‘That girl needs to see a therapist big time.’

‘A story that is well-written and hot early on quickly turned into one that you just wanted to finish so you could see the ending before you showered.’

‘Prepare yourself for domination and submission, group sex, an attempted rape and a scenario which I struggled to read as in my view it is the ultimate in humiliation.’

‘I think ultimately the book serves as a potent illustration of why in the majority, fantasy should stay exactly that, and never actually see the light of day.’

Get thee to a nunnery, Lloyd!

The comments were positive in many ways – well-written, couldn’t put it down, really horny etc etc – and I got lots of pretty stars. However, as usual, what bothers me is the oft-held view that certain types of kinky sex must be centred around histories of abuse, lack of self-worth, mental health issues and all that jazz. And that Beth, my central character, did all that dirty-dirty submissive sex stuff because she was too stubborn to back down, or because she was hoping for his commitment and love, or because she was deluded, or because she was doing it to please him. No! It’s just a hot thing to do! She liked it! She had no ulterior motive.

And, gosh, I don’t know how I could have made it any more obvious in the book that Beth really likes the sex. And that she is very in tune with her somewhat dark sexuality and is determined to explore it, even when it’s uncomfortable.

Oh, and it’s frustrating that many of the kinks and themes I explore seem perfectly acceptable in erotica based on trad romance with a naive heroine and a Sir Dystic D’Arcy. But create a sexually enlightened and self aware female character and people start saying ‘disturbing’, ‘disgusting’ and ‘how could she possibly want that?’

Maybe this is inevitable when you’re a woman writing erotic fiction because it’s so heavily marketed at the Romance readership. Feathers are bound to get ruffled if you try and do something different. I wrote Asking for Trouble in 1998. Progress is so-oooo slow.

Anyway, I’m going to hibernate for a while – unless I get another review to crow about. I have a Top Secret project to work on. Ssshhh!

Merry Christmas everybody! And US readers: look out for the release of both Split and The Vampire’s Heart (in Lust Bites) on January 1st. Yes, my smut will be bringing in the new year!

As I write this tonight, Split is at number 16 in Amazon UK’s Bestselling Erotica Chart and Asking For Trouble is at number 11. Hurrah!