Short Hot Nights: a mini collection of flash fic and short shorts

Short Hot Nights, my new e-collection of flash fic and short shorts, features nineteen tales of quick and kinky erotica and is available on Kindle now!

This collection includes a handful of new pieces alongside stories previously published in anthologies from Cleis, Mammoth and more; and on the fabulous women and couples porn sites run by Ms Naughty: For the Girls and Bright Desire. Some of the pieces are just 500 words in length while the longest, ‘Last Christmas’, is a dark, ghostly story set, appropriately enough, when the nights are long and dark. (You can read ‘Last Christmas’ for free on Tamsin Flowers’ blog.) The tales in Short Hot Nights centre on submission, bondage, humiliation and obsession, themes that run through most of my work. Titles include ‘Mind Games’, ‘Sugar Upsets my Vagina’, ‘Betsy’s Blushes’, ‘Memo for the Boss’ and ‘Mad Ghosts of Lust’.

Fun Fact: a couple of years ago, I ran a flash fiction workshop at Eroticon and circulated colour charts of nail polish and wallpaper paint to spark story ideas for participants. ‘Betsy’s Blushes’ is a spanking story inspired by the Farrow and Ball paint, Nancy’s Blushes. Wanting to ensure I stayed on the right side of copyright law and not get sued, I changed my main character’s name. (A less fun fact: ‘Betsy’s Blushes’ was slated to appear in a Cleis anthology until the company was bought out and numerous scheduled titles got cancelled. Such is publishing!)

I’m not writing much erotica these days, nor (as you can probably tell!), am I blogging much. However, I’m thrilled that I’ve been able to gather together the bulk of my flash and short shorts into a single volume, and to pair this with last year’s collection of my longer-length short stories, On My Knees. If you do decide to buy, I hope you enjoy the read, and particular thanks to anyone and everyone who leaves reviews. They really do help sales, even if they’re only a sentence or two long.

Here’s a very neat link that will take you to the Amazon site where you live: Short Hot Nights

Meet sadists, submissives, spanking fans and seducers as their sexual adventures are captured in these snapshots. Whether it’s back alley or boardroom, heartbreak or happiness, every twisted encounter offers an invitation to more.

 

On My Knees is everywhere!

My book of short stories is now wherever you want it to be!

The rather beautiful paperback version is available from the Amazons (snazzy global link here) and the ebook is sold via all the big retailers – so you can purchase for your Kindle, your fancy iPhone, your tablet, your Nook, your cranny and more!

You can also buy in various formats (.mobi, PDF, ePub etc) from Smashwords.

This is a full-length collection, featuring fifteen of my stories published in UK and US anthologies between 2007 and 2014. I’m so pleased I’ve been able to bring these kinky pieces together in a single volume. There were a handful of additional stories I would have liked to include but, since I sold all rights to the publishers at the time, I unfortunately had to leave them out.

For nosy parkers such as myself, I’ve offered an ‘About the Stories’ section where I reveal a few behind-the-scenes details – the inspiration behind the pieces, their route to publication and so on.

I’m toying with the idea of doing a volume of my flash fiction next year but I’ll see how this book fares first!

Shake your stuff at Brighton Fetish Weekend!

Or maybe read your stuff! Or hey, why not both?

If you’ve ever wondered what it might be like to devote an entire weekend in Brighton to kink, drinks, shopping, spanking and dancing, then April 10 – 12th is your chance to find out. If you’ve previously experienced such delights, chances are you’ll already have bought your tickets for Brighton Fetish Weekend.

In April, I’ll be appearing at BFW’s Fetish Expo for the third time, and this year I’ll be joined by writers Zak Jane Keir and Molly Moore. Excitingly, we’re hosting an erotica reading slam! This means you – yes, you! – can read your smut on stage.

The Fetish Expo takes place on Saturday afternoon (11th April). All readers will be given a maximum of five minutes for their reading. Anyone who goes over time, will be publicly humiliated with a spanking! And there’ll be prizes too!

Anyone can join in. You might be a secretive, newbie erotica writer or an old pro. It’s all good. We’ll be asking hopeful readers to put their names into a hat on the day (I very much doubt it will be a hat…) and we’ll then select at random.

If you fancy reading, we’d love you to contact us in advance, just so we can get an idea of numbers. Comment here or drop us a line via the Contact form on this site (top right).

Brighton Fetish Weekend is heaps of kinky fun, incredibly welcoming, diverse and relaxed. The theme this year is Kaleidoscope Circus and you can join the Facebook event here. The Saturday afternoon Fetish Expo is always truly fab, and features performances, demos, exhibitions, traders and, erm, that thing which happened last year where people wore fencing masks and whipped balloons off each other’s heads. That. Name escapes me, But that! And this year, I’m pleased to say, there’ll be a guy on the roster of burlesque acts. Huzzah! Some flesh for the cock lovers among us.

You can buy tickets for the whole weekend or for individual events. Check out the tickets page for details.

Drop us a line if you’re interested in reading. And hope to see you there!

As Kinky As You Wanna Be

The release of a certain film (no, I haven’t seen it yet) seems like a good time to mention this recent guide to safe, sane and smart BDSM from author and editor, Shanna Germain.

As Kinky As You Wanna Be serves up a mix of advice, anecdote, interviews, info and fiction. I’m a huge fan of sex guides which champion the imaginative, and don’t simply focus and the nuts and bolts of fucking. Being playful and free in your thinking is the best route to having a great time in the sack (even if it’s just you on your own!).

AKAYWB features stories from a bunch of top writers including Remittance Girl, Janine Ashbless, Kristina Wright, Nikki Magennis and Donna George Storey. I have a piece included, The Wrong Woman, which Shanna describes in her introduction as breaking “all the taboos […] to remind us just how hot a dirty, naughty fantasy can be.”

This story first appeared in Maxim Jakubowski‘s Quick and Dirty Erotica anthology, and centres on non-con, sort of. You can read a sexy excerpt here.

And if you’re in the South East of England this weekend, why not check out Dirty Sexy Words, an erotica reading evening in Croydon this Sunday? Last week, Time Out magazine listed the event in its feature on The 20 Sexiest Things to do in London. They also included a photo of me (below) from one of the times I read there which was nice of them! This was two days before the release of Undone, and the first time I’d read from the book in public. It’s less than six months ago but it seems like an age.

Hope to see some of you there on Sunday!

Interview with Janine Ashbless

Last month, I was lucky enough to share a book launch with Janine Ashbless, one of my favourite erotica writers, at Sh! Womenstore in London.

We read from our new books, chatted to readers, drank lots of bubbly, kindly provided by my publisher, Black Lace, and generally had a wonderful time. (You can read more about the event on Janine’s blog.) Afterwards (and this is where it starts to go wrong), I went to the pub with Zak Jane Kier and later, left behind my own, heavily-annotated reading copy of Undone and Janine’s brand new book.

The very kind barstaff found my books and kept them safe. However, when I returned to collect them a couple of weeks later, I managed to almost lose the damn things twice again in the same evening. Fortunately, I now have both books under lock and key, and Janine is here so we can have a more coherent conversation than any we might have had at our book launch!

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Janine, you very kindly signed my newly-bought copy of Cover Him With Darkness at our joint book launch the other week. Since then, over the space of a fortnight, I managed to almost lose the book three times at pubs and takeaways in London and Brighton. Is your book haunted? Does it not want me to read it?

LMAO! More likely it wants to get out there and mug a stranger!

Ha, I do like dangerous books! Cover Him With Darkness is the launch title of Tempted Romance, a new imprint from awesome indy publishers, Cleis Press. Tempted describe themselves as publishing “only the smartest, sweetest romance”. You’re smart, I know that, but – no offence! – I’ve never thought of you or your work as “sweet”. Have you joined the other side?

Good grief no! It’s not sweet. Lots of emotion, yes, but much of it dark and fearful and torn-up, the protagonists battered by betrayal and guilt. Love is the light in the darkness.
You know. Marketing puff is just that.

I know Cleis commissioned you to write this novel because they loved a short story you’d submitted to one of their anthologies, and they wanted you to develop the piece to full-length. When you wrote the short, did it feel like a story with a lot more mileage?

I wrote the short with a totally open ending – about as open as it could possibly be. I didn’t even know who the male protagonist was. So it always felt like the start of … something. But at the time I got a lot of pleasure out of the not-knowing!

To which of your other books is Cover Him With Darkness most similar?

Probably The King’s Viper, at least in tone. Both have got a dark hero, the central relationship is morally problematic, and everyone is having a really rough time except for the moments they’re having sex.

You’re a very visual, descriptive writer. I love the opening to Cover Him With Darkness which you read at Sh! with its emphasis on Azazel’s bound, muscular body and the corresponding grime and physicality of the hard, ancient rock of the cave where he’s imprisoned. Do you have a clear sense of how characters and places look before you start writing? Or are they nebulous? And if so, does the process of writing bring them into being, or maybe concretise them for you? Basically, show me your writer-brain. I’m fascinated.

My writer-brain is completely visual. I picture places, lighting, weather. I run through all dialogue scenes like a director – every tilt of a head or tip of a hand – often mumbling everything to myself and acting it out. Like it’s my own private movie.

The exception is faces. Did you notice my descriptive writing rarely extends to faces? I’m actually pretty face-blind in real life, which can be a real problem. I deal with this in several ways: I might “borrow” real faces from movie stars and paste them on my imagined protags. I might give them strong “hook” features (particularly facial hair, or strange coloured eyes) which I can recognize. Or I might not describe them at all. I actually had little idea what my heroine Milja looked like (except that she had dark hair and eyes) until I found this picture. But that was long after the book was written!

You’ve received some wonderful reviews for Cover Him With Darkness so far. Which one has made you glow the most?

Oh … I’m torn between: “Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, only much better written and with much more sexiness involved.” – Clitical

And: “Janine Ashbless is one hell of a writer. I got so caught up in the story that I couldn’t put the book down. It’s dark and ugly and absolutely beautiful. Really captivating. The kind of book that leaves you feeling exhausted when you finish, and anxious to go back to the beginning and read it all over again. Which I did.“ – Kate Douglas

Which scene in the book is your favourite?

I love the sequence where “nice guy” Egan first meets the fallen angel Azazel, not just because it’s hot ‘n’ dirty, but because it’s full of hidden plot (like the lipstick writing) that will only become visible later in the book and make readers go “Oh!”, and because it completely shreds the nascent relationship between Egan and Milja, forcing them to re-evaluate each other. It’s a pivotal moment.

Cover Him With Darkness is the first book in a potential trilogy – potential because Cleis are waiting to see how sales are before committing to parts two and three. How nerve-wracking is that? Have you started writing part two yet?

The uncertainty is … difficult.

And of course I’ve started writing it!

Thanks Janine. I can’t wait to read, and here’s hoping it’s a trilogy!

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Janine Ashbless is a writer of fantasy erotica and steamy romantic adventure – and that’s “fantasy” in the sense of swords ‘n’ sandals, contemporary paranormal, fairytale, and stories based on mythology and folklore. She likes to write about magic and mystery, dangerous power dynamics, borderline terror, and the not-quite-human.

Janine has been seeing her books in print ever since 2000, and her novels and single-author collections now run into double figures. She’s also had numerous short stories published by Black Lace, Nexus, Cleis Press, Ravenous Romance, Harlequin Spice, Storm Moon, Xcite, Mischief Books, and Ellora’s Cave among others. She is co-editor of the nerd erotica anthology Geek Love.

Her work has been described as: “hardcore and literate” (Madeline Moore) and “vivid and tempestuous and dangerous, and bursting with sacrifice, death and love.” (Portia Da Costa)

www.janineashbless.blogspot.com :: Goodreads :: Janine Ashbless Facebook

Amazon UK Author Page :: Amazon US Author Page

If You Loved an Angel… How Far Would You Fall with Him?

What happens when the daughter of the village priest falls in love with an archangel banished from heaven? Milja’s heart is struck when she catches a glimpse of the preternaturally beautiful prisoner her father keeps captive beneath his church’s altar. Torn between tradition, loyalty and her growing obsession with the fallen angel, will Milja risk losing her family, and her eternal soul, for the love of this divine being? Janine Ashbless will transport you to a world where good and evil battle for true love.

Amazon UK :: Amazon US