Inspired by Jeremy Edwards, I’m having a round up of recent acceptances.

The Last Dance will be appearing in Kristina Wright’s fairy tale erotica romance anthology, Lustfully Ever After, out in June this year.

I’ll have a short in Racy Page’s Stretched called All My Lovers in One Room. Not sure when.

And, much joy, I’ll have three pieces in Alison Tyler’s third anthology with Harlequin, out in July or August this year.

More on the stories nearer publication time. Isn’t that a lovely cover?

This is doubly delightful because a) I’m in it! And b), for the first time in the series we’ve got a guy included on the cover instead of the usual single, white, sexualised female. Awesome, no? Those of you with long memories may recall that Erotica Cover Watch, the blog I co-founded to campaign against sexism in erotica publishing, launched with a criticism of Mammoth’s covers. When we started ECW, we were concerned (and warned) that speaking out might damage our writing careers. So for me, personally, being in this book represents an artistic and political success. I’m thrilled!

It was also nice to find out about the couple-cover after hearing the sad news that Filament, a magazine that has done masses to challenge the notion that women aren’t interested in eyeing up men, are to close after a hugely successful run.

But to go back to a) I’m in it!, Mammoth is a series which, over the years, has featured fiction from Anne Rice, Kathy Acker, Leonard Cohen, Poppy Z Brite, Ramsey Campbell plus numerous well-respected names from the erotica genre. In his introduction to this new volume, Jakubowski recalls his struggle in the early 90s to persuade his publishers to take erotica on board, and makes a strong case for the validity of erotica as a genre with relevance and literary merit.

Sex was and always will be an integral part of the human make-up and I do strongly feel it is essentially dishonest to censor it out of our writings for the sake of propriety or social convenience. [...] Here are thirty wonderful tales of sex, life, hotness, passion, of erotica at its best. If you have not been converted to the sensual and intellectual pleasures of our genre already, this is your chance.

You hear that? This is your chance!

Your choices are: Amazon UK paperback, Amazon UK Kindle and coming soon, Amazon US paperback, Amazon US Kindle.

Best of the Best includes fiction from Marilyn Jaye-Lewis, Poppy Z Brite, Thomas S Roche, Matt Thorne, Carol Queen, Carole Anne Davis, Lucy Taylor, Michael Hemmingson, Lauren Henderson, M. Christian, Mike Kimera, Donna George Storey, Alison Tyler and more. I don’t think I’ve ever been in an anthology where so many of the contributors have wikipedia entries.

Anyways, Happy New Year to you all!

I’d like to wish you Happy New Rear too but, um, eyes right, our ass is currently being corrected! Alison privately confessed she’s always had difficulties with the word ‘annual’ … but anal? Alison Tyler?

I’m here to boast! I hope you don’t mind.

Asking for Trouble, my bestselling title, got a fabulous, intelligent review from Vanessa Wu. I want to quote the entire piece but I’m picking this part:

Don’t be fooled by the simplicity of [KL's] language. What she is doing is very difficult. For she doesn’t just focus on the physical. She manages to dig out and express the emotional roots of desire. I recommend this book to every writer. Kristina can be lyrical at times but she is never self-indulgent. And when she needs to be crude she is definitively crude.

Smart Ass, our brand new anthology of anal erotica, has also received a couple of great reviews on Amazon US. My story, My Ass Is Your Ass Is My Ass, wins some wonderfully high praise with our first reviewer describing it as ‘a pretty, dreamy surprise’ and ‘a love song to anal sex’ while our second says:

The stories mix in poetry and pornography, most notably the first story by Kristina Lloyd whose ability to go from something raunchy and graphic as the opening scene to something as poetic as “On the inside, I’m floating in a space nebula, and star clusters of silver are pulsing bright and dark” is just amazing. Breathtaking, even.

I’m thrilled with these reviews because they strike at what I’m trying to do in most of my writing: harmonise the base and filthy with a sort of imaginative lyricism. I want to get inside the sex, capture that evanescent magic, without shying away from the raw physicality of fucking, come and sweat.

No reviews yet for Bound by Lust, Shanna Germain’s debut anthology from Cleis Press, because it’s not out until April 2012. However, I’m delighted to say I have a story, No Sleep, in this collection. Check out the fab line up on Shanna’s blog.

If you fancy reviewing Smart Ass, drop me a line (comment or PM me via the form at the top of this blog) and we’ll send you a PDF, pronto. You’d make five authors supremely happy!

OK, boast over. Thanks for listening!

I  love writing for this series! My first story for our Ass ebooks was a M/M piece set in Istanbul, Strangers in the Bathhouse. I then went for anal sex with an astronaut and a couple whose marriage was on the (moon)rocks, and wrote Dark Side of the Moon. And this year I have My Ass is Your Ass is My Ass, a full-on, filthy, D/s threeway (MFM).

Here’s the official blurb:

Coral’s a barmaid with two lovers, at least. When her main squeeze, Tony, insists she keep one thing for him, anal or deep-throating, Coral hands him ownership of her ass. But Snowy, her other lover, unhappy at missing out, wants to challenge Tony’s dominance. In the ensuing battle for her butt, Coral figures the issue is best resolved by taking both guys to bed for a hot, hard threeway.

And I’m not even going to begin telling you what inspired this story!

Hurry, hurry! If you buy Smart Ass from Smashwords before the end of Saturday (17 Sept), you’ll get 25% discount. Here’s how:

Go here to purchase the ebook

Before you checkout, enter the coupon code DZ33X

This results in a promotional price of $3.37! Full price is $4.49. If, like me, you are a bewildered Brit, this is approx £2.85 down to £2.10. Brits, to get your piece of promo ass, simply act like a Yank (I believe they chew gum and say ‘Yee-ha! How awfully awesome!’), download from Smashwords, it does the math(s) and you get your goodies in a flash! (No e-reader required, just a computer.). I haven’t got a clue when Sat 17th Sept actually ends, so grab it while you can!

Smart Ass is also available at All Romance and on Kindle UK and Kindle US. (And you can get the Kindle app for PC for free: free Kindle UK and free Kindle US)

The latter (Amazon US) has flummoxed me because I wanted to add my story, My Ass is Your Ass is My Ass, to my listmania list of main publications. But it seems Amazon US regards  ’ass’ in listmanias as ‘inappropriate language’, even though it’s cool to have ‘ass’ in a title for sale (not to mention that ‘ass’ is totally appropriate for an anal-sex anthology!). So anyways, I had to rewrite my title as ‘My As* is Your A*s is My *ss’! Scroll down to see my as(s)terisks! Interestingly, I tried a BrE version of the title – My Arse is Your Arse is My Arse - and Amazon US accepts that. But that ain’t what my story’s called! These days, I generally go for ‘ass’ to make my smut more accessible/acceptable to a US audience (and don’t even get me started on the trouble I have with knickers, pants, suspenders and so on) but maybe ‘arse’ would slip past the ass-censors! Crazy.

Anyway, here’s the opening to my story:

My Ass is Your Ass is My Ass

So, there he is with his cock in my ass, and I’m biting the pillow, making all sorts of groans. At least, that’s how it looks on the outside. Not that anyone’s watching. We’re in my bedroom and very alone together, the way you are when someone’s fucking your ass. Very alone together.

So that’s the outside view: kinda porny and inadequate. On the inside, I’m floating in a space nebula, and star clusters of silver are pulsing bright and dark. I’m about to go supernova when Tony makes a breathless demand. “You’ve got to save one thing for me,” he says. “Your ass or your throat.”

He could be speaking a foreign language. Slow colorbursts spread across my mind like intergalactic ink stains: electric blue and peacock green with halos of neon pink and gold. My ass is so stretched and full of his big, beautiful dick.
“What is it, huh?” he says. “I’m giving you a choice here. You gotta make up your mind. Anal or deep-throating?”

I wail and whimper. The question’s too difficult. It’s like he asked me to explain string theory.

“Come on,” he urges. “I know you fuck other guys. No need to be shy. I know you’re a slut but you’re my slut, see?” His fingers grip below my hips. “So you got to put up a ‘reserved’ sign on one part of your body. ‘Only for Tony.’ What’s it to be? Ass or throat?”

I want to work through the question employing all my faculties of reason. I want to write a list of pros and cons and give due consideration to the implications of this decision, both for my myself, for my relationship with Tony and with the others. But I can’t. So I reach into deep space and pluck a word from a distant constellation, a single syllable burning bright and white.

“Ass. My ass.”

Tony groans and holds himself deep. “Good girl,” he murmurs. Whenever he says that, I go loose with lust. “What am I doing right now?” he asks.

My words are tangled up with stars. “Fucking me.”

“Where’s my cock?”

“In my ass.”

“Whose ass?” He slides away and in again, slow and controlled. “Whose ass is it really?”

I’m spiraling toward a whirlpool of blackness and I fight the pull, knowing gravity wants to steal my words.

“It’s your ass,” I say. “My ass is your ass.”

“That’s right,” he breathes.

“Is my ass,” I gasp. When I come, I fall through nights of liquid velvet, lights prickling as ageless galaxies die across the dark skies of my mind.

***

That was five months ago. I’ve been with half a dozen other guys since then and I’ve kept my word. Well, more or less …

You can read a whole lot more on Smashwords because mine’s the first story in the collection and the first 20% of the book is free to read!

Smart Ass also includes super-sexy buttfuck fic from Sommer Marsden, Thomas S. Roche, Alison Tyler and Sophia Valenti.

Something for the weekend? With 25% off?

Ah, go on! Treat yourself!