Please give the lovely Liv Honeywell your warmest welcome – she is nervous about having to follow Kristina Lloyd, and I know the feeling, since I’m in the same position in the Black Lace release schedule. Eek! But I know you’ll agree that she’s done it brilliantly.

Thank you, Justine, for allowing me to guest post on your blog. I’ve really enjoyed reading the other posts in the series and I’m thrilled to be here .

2012 was a very good year to be British, with the Olympics, the Golden Jubilee and the Queen meeting James Bond for her (as far as we know ) first parachute jump. It’s hard to top all that.

But I really think we can.

The Jubilee is over, the Olympic Games have gone to Rio, but we still have one amazing thing that we will always have. Tamsin Flowers mentioned it in her Briterotica post, but I think it’s well worth talking about it again.

From the sublime to the ridiculous, from Shakespeare’s Sonnets (57 and 116 in particular), to Anais Nin to Fifty Sheds of Grey, the English language, wherever it is written in the world, has given us so much and so many ways to talk about love, sex and BDSM (which is what I write about) with humour, passion, joy and all shades in between.

Here is the most wonderful quote from Miria Hunter:

“If you are meant to be in the lifestyle, you will find that, where you were once only walked through life, you will be gliding on air. Parts of you that never were complete will then become whole. In relinquishing control, I have found freedom: freedom to find and be the person I am inside.”

Damn, I wish I’d written that! It’s exactly how the lifestyle makes me feel.

I love language – how it enables us to express our emotions, the different ways it can make us feel; how we, as writers, can (hope to) move readers to tears or laughter, to arouse them, excite them and leave them itching to turn the next page, to read just one more chapter. As a reader, I love to be swept up in the story, to laugh and cry and love with the characters; to enjoy the descriptions of the scenery and imagine myself there too. What a fabulous thing language is to give us all that.

I love the humour in the English language, the accents and dialects, and the differences in meaning just between one town and another here in the UK. In Accrington, for example, you can buy a teacake and have your savoury fillings put on it for lunch. In Bolton (only 12 miles away) if you ask for a teacake it has currants and sweet spices in it! In Coventry it’s a batch and depending on where else you go it’s a barm, a bap, a roll, a sub… Not quite the 100 words the Inuit apparently have for snow but getting there, and we’re only talking about bread. What amazing possibilities for writing, once you include sounds, smells, taste, touch and sight in descriptions.

Speaking of differences in language from place to place, I’m really quite new at this writing thing, however, one thing I can help with. Gemma Parkes, in her Briterotica post on 22nd March, mentioned that she’s always wary of what to call her character’s ‘rear parts’, given that in the UK we use ‘bottom’ or ‘arse’ and in the US, they tend to use ‘ass’.

Dearest friends in the US and Canada, I give you conclusive proof that you do not want to call your derriere an ass!

Picture the scene. Things are getting hot and heavy:

He pulled down her hose and slipped the silk of her panties down her legs, then cupped her buns firmly, squeezing and kneading her flesh. He slipped a finger inside her ass and she moaned, pushing back against him.  He replaced his finger with his cock, slowly pushing himself deep inside and then all the way out of her ass.

Okay, so far so good. Needs some work but it gets the point across.

Now, here’s how it reads to a British person:

He pulled down her hose (Her what?? Is she suddenly a he?) and slipped the silk of her panties down her legs, cupping her sticky cakes (huh?) firmly, squeezing and kneading her flesh. He slipped a finger inside her small donkey (ewww! And where did the donkey come from?) and she moaned, pushing back against him. He replaced his finger with his cock, slowly pushing himself deep inside and then all the way out of her small donkey. (Nooo. Just… nooooo!)

I rest my case .

Thanks very much for having me, Justine. Here’s a short excerpt from my latest WIP which will be out soon. It’s the last of three stories exploring tease and denial in a long term relationship:

You sit next to me and take my hand, stroking my palm gently with the tip of your thumb.

“Do you know what I’m going to do to you?”

I look up at you and open my mouth to speak but no sound comes out. You smile, watching me.

“Well?” Your fingers drift across the curve of my hip and I move under your hand, already aroused, so sensitive to your touch.

I moisten my lips and manage… “No, Sir.”

“Would you like me to tell you?”

I don’t know what to say. Not knowing is bad enough but knowing what is coming, waiting for every last thing… I don’t know which is worse.

“Too late,” you say, your smile deepening. “So. This is what’s going to happen to you… I’m going to  tie your hands  above your head then spread your legs and tie them in place, leaving you all exposed. And then I’m going to tease you. My fingers can wander anywhere and there will be nothing, nothing at all, that you can do about it.”

My eyes widen and I can’t stop a rush of excitement. I know I won’t be able to close my legs or protect myself and I only just manage to stop myself from squirming at the thought.

“It turns you on, doesn’t it?” you say. “The idea of being defenceless and exposed.” Your hand cups my breast and I moan softly as your fingers lightly brush my skin.

“Yes,” I whisper.

“Doesn’t it?” You grab my nipple and twist it, hard.

I yelp. “Yes. Yes it does.”

My Bio:

When not writing about delicious, hot male dominants and the female subs who love them, I’m usually doing something craft-like, reading, baking, eating the results of said baking, and attempting to satisfy the demands of His High and Mighty Dominance (the cat!). My first story, Imagine, was published with Silver Moon Books last year and the new anthology will be self-published May/June this year.
You can follow me on my blog – www.liv-honeywell.com, Twitter http://www.twitter.com/LivHoneywell or Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/LivHoneywellErotica

My Kinky Wife has been free on Amazon UK Kindle since yesterday and, ever since, she’s been flirting with the top 100 titles quite shamelessly. I’m checking every so often to see if the flirtation has paid off and she’s gone all the way but…not yet.

There’s still plenty of time for that, though. She’s a free and easy download for the next couple of weeks, so if you haven’t made her acquaintance yet, now’s the time to hit her up.

She’s not the only tempting offer on UK Kindle right now, though. There’s a lovely variety of Mischief titles up for grabs. Check them out!

For Her Pleasure by Kyoko Church

Confessions of a Naughty Night Nurse by Lily Harlem

Look At Me by Felix Baron

Two anthologies too – one is Forever Bound and I’m afraid I’ve forgotten the title of the other, but it’s sure to be good!

Since I’m celebrating signing the papers on my forthcoming Xcite novel, Princess In Chains, I thought I’d jump on Victoria Blisse’s Sunday Snog train and give you a sample. I’ve only written 20K words so far, but there’s plenty of lip on lip already. Here’s a taster (for purposes of clarification, I should explain that the eponymous heroine, Princess Leonore, is posing as her servingmaid, Asta):

Taran took her by the waist and manhandled her into an alcove at the side of the building, hidden from the main square.

“Unhand me.” Leonore tried to squirm out of Taran’s hold, but he stood no less than six foot four and could not be eluded.

“Why?” he laughed. “Look, I don’t want a drink either. We will go and seek your mistress, although I am sure she has found a congenial dancing partner of her own.”

“Good. Thank you.”

She made another escape attempt, but Taran held firm, pinning her to the wattle and daub wall of the inn.

“Then what…?” she faltered.

“When the dance is done,” he said. “There is no use looking for her while it continues, is there?”

“I suppose not.”

“And while we wait…” He leant closer, and Leonore cursed the pulse of desire that started up within her again, overcoming her sense and her reasonable doubts about this amiable but over-forceful stranger.

“You have no right,” she whispered, but without conviction, and before she could tell him what it was he had no right to, he had taken it.

Leonore experienced the kiss of a man’s lips, for the second time that night, but Taran was no lumbering guardsman. He pressed his mouth to hers, hot and eager, as if swooping to devour a favourite dish. His face was so big, so prickly about the chin too, and he pushed her up against the wall until her neck cricked, but she was powerless to dislodge him. Powerlessness. This was it. It felt…not unpleasant, if only one could know what Taran had in mind next.

He let go her wrist and slipped his hands around her waist, clasping them in the small of her back so that his belt buckle pressed into her pelvis. It might be painful, if only she didn’t wear a quantity of Asta’s petticoats beneath her dirndl skirt.

“You look so surprised,” he said, laughing softly as he broke off. “Have you never been kissed before?”

“Not in such a manner,” said Leonore, truthfully enough.

“You should accustom yourself to it, Asta,” he said, touching his lips to cheeks and the tip of her nose. “You will be kissed a great deal. Perhaps I might follow you home to Veron.”

“Don’t be absurd. You only want a quick tumble while the town is in high spirits. Tomorrow you will have forgotten me and you’ll go about your business as if this had never been.”

“Oh, so beautiful and so cynical,” he sighed, raising his eyes skyward. “Did you learn this from your mistress?”

“I don’t want to think about what I’ve learned from my mistress. Just at this moment, I prefer the lessons you have to teach me.”

Taran’s face lit up in a wicked smile.

“Let us not think of tomorrow,” whispered Leonore, “when today is so very interesting.”

 

It’s a rough cut, folks – first draft and all that. Still, I hope it meets with your approval.

For more luscious kissing, take a look at Victoria’s site.

Sigh. Amazon again.

I sometimes think I should stop writing about pleasurable sex and write about torture and murder and nasty ways to end up in A&E instead. At least that might be acceptable to Amazon.

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/technology/willardfoxton2/100009064/amazon-looks-pathetic-by-excluding-porn-from-its-search-engine-but-still-selling-it/

Tonight I have my thousandth follower on Twitter, which is rather lovely.

Are you a tweeter or a facebooker or a determined refusenik? I tend to prefer Twitter’s fast-paced concision to the (arguably necessary) evil facebook. As a reluctant self-promoter, it allows me to send out the odd blast of ‘buy me’ whilst interacting with all kinds of interesting people. And it’s by far the quickest way to find out what’s going on in the news.

Facebook has pictures, but I can do without them (especially since such a massive proportion are just pictures of some writing).

So, yes, Twitter for me. Long live the blue bird.

I’m all in a tizz today because my Briterotica guest is the marvellous Kristina Lloyd, whose forthcoming Black Lace novel, Thrill Seeker, is one of my most eagerly awaited reads of 2013. And she’s writing about the seaside! Welcome, Kristina – have a stick of Justine rock!

I was brought up in the industrial north of England, in a small, rainy mill town spiked with factory chimneys and overlooked by lumpy, grumpy hills. Summer holidays were at the coast: Tenby, Newquay or, when we were very young, at places closer to home such as Morecambe and Knott End. Every October, we’d visit the Blackpool Illuminations, a full-on display of bling in a seaside resort  often described, somewhat hopefully, as the Las Vegas of the North.

Twenty years ago, I moved to Brighton, a seaside town south of London, not realising I’d end up making my life here. I love reading fiction with a strong sense of place, and I love writing it too. My second novel, Asking for Trouble, is set in Brighton, and my forthcoming novel, Thrill Seeker (May 2013), is set in Saltbourne, a fictional town based on Hastings, another resort on the south east coast.

These seaside towns, with their gaudy piers, faded elegance and echoes of holidaymakers from long ago, are more than simply a location for my stories. They have an atmosphere that, for me, harmonises with the erotic. Living in a holiday town is a peculiar experience. British seaside resorts were developed to create a sense of magic, excitement and escapism before workers could easily obtain that by jetting off abroad. You can see the influences of Moorish and Oriental architecture in the ornate bandstands, pavilions, and in the onion domes dotted across the towns’ skylines. Now, this exotic splendour rubs shoulders with funfair rides, candy floss, postcard racks and the toe-tingling thrill of the sea.

I tried to capture this mix of the everyday and the extraordinary in Asking for Trouble.

We ambled down Queens Road which was thronging with a freshly-disgorged train load who were, like us, beach-bound. They were all babbling away, towels and mats poking from their bags, eager to reach that brilliant blue sea under that brilliant blue sky which lies, so enticingly, at the foot of the road.

To us hardened Brightonians, Queens Road is an everyday road [...] but to visitors on hot sunny days that road must scream: ‘go directly to the beach, do not pass go, do not stop to collect £200.’ It’s got those street lamps you only ever see in holiday towns – the tallest street lamps in the world, with white glass balls on ornate black brackets; and the road, full of traffic, slopes down to the sea in a series of slumps and bumps, like a gentle Big Dipper; and at the bottom, squashed between buildings, is a slice of the English Channel, shimmering blue and hazy with heat: Mum! I can see the sea!

Seaside resorts, with their layered histories and ghosts of visitors eager for fun, seem full of stories, secrets and sexiness. Here, you’re encouraged to be not quite your usual self, to don a Kiss-Me-Quick hat, shake off the prosaic and explore the magic. You might think living in a holiday town would turn the glitter to dust but it doesn’t. Instead, it destabilises in odd, subtle ways, offering regular reminders that life can be strange, surprising and enchanting. I walk past this building almost every day. A structure so camp and preposterous has got to disrupt your sense of reality! Or as journalist Julie Burchill says, ‘Brighton looks like a town recovering from a multiple orgasm’.

The flipside of magic charms me too, the tawdry moment when the lights go up or you spot the wires and weariness underpinning the illusion. Living in a holiday town means you see plenty of this. I like the flipside perhaps because it draws attention to the creation. As kids, we believe in the magic wholeheartedly. As adults, we can relish both the magic and the making of it, romance and cynicism jostling for first place. In Thrill Seeker, my central character, Natalie Lovell, gets caught up in a game of kidnap after sharing her abduction fantasy with an online stranger. She’s held captive in the auditorium of a derelict theatre in Saltbourne, surrounded by the fallen glory of a space made for the make-believe of dramatic plays. I’m exploring edgeplay and issues of consent in Thrill Seeker, of the erotic charge which, for me, inhabits the uncertain borders between roleplay and reality. As I was writing the book, I began to see how this theme was echoed in the setting. The abandoned theatre, with its torn velvet seats and dusty chandelier, calls attention to concepts of performance and the creation of unreality, while in itself being a marginal space, a theatre without people, a building without use.  Similarly, seaside towns exist on the border between land and sea.

I didn’t decide to employ this symbolism. But that’s what’s wonderful about the subconscious: it hands you stuff then  later, you go ‘Ah ha! Now I get it!’ To give another example of the subconscious being smart, Natalie is exploring a new kink-based relationship while still healing from the heartache of a previous, loving relationship. Saltbourne, like its inspiration, Hastings, is a town structured around old and new, and around the frivolity of the funfair versus the rootedness of the declining fishing industry. Again, it’s only as I was writing the book that I spotted the thematic resonance of my setting.

Living in a British seaside town undoubtedly impacts on my writing but the influence runs, I think, deeper than Brighton and nearby towns featuring in my fiction. Esther Perel, in her wonderful TED talk earlier this year, defined sex as not something we do but a place to which we go. This feels very true to me. The space of the erotic is one of adventure, pleasure, imagination, danger and risk; a space where, as Perel says, we can stop being the responsible citizen.

Something about a coastal resort’s fluctuating magic and endorsement of the fantastic connects with, and enhances, my own erotic sensibility. Additionally, I’m fascinated by the darker implications of how the flipside both tarnishes and enhances that magic by exposing  its makers and manipulators. I’m drawn too, to exploring feelings of secrecy and shame associated with losing oneself to seductive charms, be those charms a holiday escapade or wanting to fuck someone who or how you shouldn’t.

In many ways, as an author of erotic fiction, I feel I’m always writing about the British seaside, even when I’m not.

For an excerpt from Thrill Seeker (the internet’s first glimpse!), head over to my blog where Natalie and Baxter Logan, the man who later betrays her, are having sex in an old, broken boat on the beach at Saltbourne.

***

Kristina Lloyd writes erotic fiction about sexually submissive women who like it on the dark, dirty and dangerous side. Her novels are published by Black Lace and her short stories appear in a range of anthologies, including several ‘best of’ collections, in both the UK and US.  Visit her at http://kristinalloyd.co.uk

Please do pop over to Kristina’s blog and read her excerpt – that’s where I’ll be!

Of course you are – you’re here, aren’t you? That makes you a VIP in my book.

But if you’re a member of Total E-Bound’s VIP members’ club, you can get your hands on Close Harmony, book 3 in my Food of Love series right now – ahead of next month’s general release.

How do you choose between two perfect men? It’s like choosing your favourite music—certain pieces suit certain moods. Which mood is Lydia feeling the most?

The autumn season of the Westminster Symphony Orchestra finds Lydia unable to choose between passionate Milan and dominant Karl-Heinz—so she decides to give them both a chance. She hops from one bed to the other, trying to weigh up her options. Milan has a hold on her heart, but has never been reliable. Karl-Heinz is a good man, but what is the secret behind his strange repression? Old rivalries and new jealousies are kindled while Lydia works hard at having the time of her sex life.

No trio has ever practised quite as hard as this…But there is trouble in paradise for Ben and Vanessa, too, as a face from Vanessa’s past makes an unwelcome appearance and all seems impossible to resolve.

Amid turbulent emotions and orchestra rehearsals, the musicians work hard to negotiate a path to happiness. Will music prove to be the food of love, or a poison, infecting the future?

Reader Advisory: This book contains BDSM, MMF ménage and MM, as well as references to rape and sexual assault.

There are other advantages to joining the TEB club too – discounts and early releases of all their books for you.

Have a look at the site if you want to sign up: http://www.total-e-bound.com/about.asp