New Release Sample: Bred by the Alien Tentacles 2: Alien Brood

Here's the second part of the Alien Breeding trilogy: Bred by the Alien Tentacles 2! Read an excerpt here:

The thing turned to look at her with round, dark eyes. Its stare had a depth to it that made her uncomfortable. It began to undulate up to her, and Jasmine tried to crawl away.

Already it seemed fuller, stronger: one thin tentacle coiled around her ankle in an iron grip and the newborn alien pulled itself up, creeping up along her body.

“No,” Jasmine whimpered, too exhausted to fight back. “Oh no, not again...”

Its tentacles were hot and slippery against her bare skin, tiny suckers gripping lightly and releasing. It made its way up to her chest, where a pair of questing tentacles found her milk-swollen breasts. Even their light touch made a drop of milk leak from her tender nipples.

Jasmine tried to push it away, and the alien thing reacted quickly: one of its deceptively strong tentacles lashed out and gripped her wrists, bringing them together and binding them tight, pressed against her now-empty stomach. With no way left to interfere, exhausted from the creature's birth and her many orgasms, Jasmine could only lie there as the thing latched a pair of sucker-tipped tentacles onto her nipples...

New Release Sample: Bred by the Alien Tentacles

Hey there, folks. It's been a while, but I'm finally back in action! Here's a sample from my latest story, Bred by the Alien Tentacles:

  

Jasmine felt her mouth drop open. A multitude of tentacles had emerged from the depressions in the wall. There were various shapes and sizes: some were only as thick around as a few of her fingers held together, while others were as thick as her forearm.

Some were smooth and tapered, some were ridged and had tips like spades, some were covered in suction cups - and everywhere she turned there were new and different kinds.

They all had one thing in common, however: they were all converging on her. She turned and tried to run but she was met by more and more tentacles no matter where she looked.

Jasmine held up her bedsheets like a shield, but they were snatched away and in an instant she was being held down by some of the stronger tentacles. They coiled around her wrists and ankles, pinning her to the smooth rounded floor and laying her bare for their brethren....

You Are Good Enough

"I'm not good enough."

Those four little words are like a personal plague, something that chews me up from the inside out. I know I'm not the only one: I've been in any number of creative hobbies over the years, and that sentiment twisted through them like poison vapor. It's always there. Once you learn enough about something to realize how much there is to learn, how much you don't know, it can be crushing. If your self-confidence is weak to begin with, it could be too much, you might just give up - after all, you'll never be good enough.

I'm not a very confident person, truth be told. If I don't correct myself I'm shy, I'm quiet, and I have a tendency to wait so long for everyone else to have their say that I end up saying nothing. (I suppose I'm living proof of every warning you've ever had about how it's always the quiet ones that are... well, in my case, secretly a filthy pervert. But I digress.)
In short, I don't believe that I'm good enough, and maybe I never will. I deal with it. Self-doubt doesn't mean that I should give up, it means that I should try to prove myself wrong. The worst I can do is to meet my expectations, after all. Maybe some people are just naturally self-confident; I know that I'm not, but that doesn't mean the rest of the world has to know. You're the only one who knows what you think of yourself.

My point here is that even if you feel like a hack, a dunce, like all you've made belongs at the bottom of the Marianas Trench and that even there the eyeless bottom-feeders will bump into it, in the true blackness, and recoil in disgust... don't believe yourself. Keep going. Keep trying! You can only improve if you don't quit, and simple perseverance can keep you a step ahead.

You're not the best yet, but everyone starts somewhere. Give yourself a chance.

On Research...

Erotica - at least as I write it - actually involves a surprising amount of research.

No, not just "research" (although that's my favorite kind, really), I mean more traditional research that could be expected for any book or story. What is this environment like? What kinds of plants do you find here? Is it reasonable to assume there would be an excess of coffee shops in a given setting?

To be fair, this is erotica, and you get your fair share of less conventional subjects. Let me use my most recent story as an example.

The story is about an ecologist who encounters a herd of wild horse-shifter men while she's out doing field work. She makes the decision to join the herd and become a shifter herself - and of course, in order to do this, she needs to take the herd as her mates. As one does.

I was able to pull some of the material for the story from personal experience, but other topics required further research. Some of these may or may not show up until later in the series, but I wouldn't want to give away everything at once!

Off the top of my head, I had to research:

• Horse coat colors and name
• Wild horse breeds: did you know that the breeds we think of as wild horses are actually considered feral horses? Before I wrote Taming Her Herd, I didn't! It turns out that the only surviving horse species that has never been domesticated is Przewalski's Horse, native to central Asia. All the others - mustangs and whatnot - are actually descended from domesticated horses, and are considered feral rather than wild.
• Prairie ecosystems (because accuracy matters!)
• From the above, prairie predators: while they're not likely to feature in the series, black-footed ferrets are adorable, and I had never heard of them before. On second thought, maybe I'll work them in. Ferret shifters, anyone?
• The exact mechanics behind double vaginal penetration. Because this is still erotica, after all.

That's just for a single 6,000 word story - I have some longer pieces in the works that are taking much more effort.

This is really one of the things I love about writing. It always gets me thinking about new things, and I end up learning because of it!

Self-Publishing Sales Spreadsheet Download

When you're self-employed in any respect, it's very important to keep clear, accurate records. Knowing how to work with spreadsheets can streamline that, particularly when it comes to your earnings and expenses.

If you're just starting out and you haven't gotten the hang of spreadsheets yet, here's something to help!

I've made a spreadsheet template for anyone who's self-publishing e-books. It's not perfect, and it's designed for erotica authors specifically, but you could easily change the titles and numbers if you're publishing on different sites.

This spreadsheet assumes that your e-books are priced at $2.99. The royalty estimates for Amazon and Smashwords will give you a slightly high estimate - there are fields to fill in actual royalties for the month. It will highlight the highest sellers/earners, per-site and overall. It includes a sheet for each month, plus a yearly total sheet that will sum up the other 12.

Download it here!

It's an .ods file, which will work with OpenOffice. It's free - if you don't have a certain other office software suite, you should go download it!

Again, this spreadsheet is certainly not perfect, but it could be a good starting point. Off the top of my head it contains examples of (fairly simple) functions and conditional formatting.

Good luck! :)

New Release: My Best Friend's Heart

Something to end the month on a sweet note! A bit more romantic than some of my other titles so far. :)

In My Best Friend's Heart, Chloe's best friend, Alice, is visiting for the night. Just like normal, except Chloe's finally admitted it to herself: she's in love with her friend. Will her confession shatter the best friendship she's ever had - or will it lead to the two friends discovering more about each other than they have before?

My Best Friend's Heart

Alice kisses you and her mouth is gentle and warm and sweet against your own, and wholly unexpected. You never considered it could go like this but you don't care, you're pressing your lips back against hers and she's not like any of the men you've ever dated, all precise and so yielding.

She pulls away and she's still looking at you like she's never seen you before, clasping your hands gently in her own. Have they always been so warm, so gentle?

"We've both been fooling ourselves for a long time, haven't we?" she asks, and there's relief in her voice. Oh my god, you think, I was an idiot.

"We have," you agree and now you're kissing her again, and her mouth opens for you and she's still nothing like a man, so careful and tidy and soft, and you could just kiss her forever. She puts her arms around you and you can feel her fingertips press ever-so-lightly against your shoulder blades as you map her mouth, learning it like you've learnt so much else of her. How did you never realize that you wanted this?

Safe Sex in Erotica

Do you prefer the sex in your erotica to be safe or not? Safe as in everyone is verified STD-free, and (where applicable) condoms, dams, etc. are used?

It came up again today, and it's something I've thought about before. A bit of research into the subject has turned up mostly two views:

• Unsafe sex is icky and unpleasant, and it's a turn-off if the scene doesn't either include a condom or a mention of being clean and on birth control of some sort
• Condom use detracts from the scene and is unpleasant/unarousing

I can understand both the pro-condom and anti-condom sides here. There's nothing sexy about infections or unplanned pregnancies (unless you're into that, but if that's the intent of the story this doesn't really apply), but at the same time, stopping the action to get your contraceptives sorted out can be decidedly unsexy and potentially ruin the flow of the scene.

So if you're writing erotica, which approach should you take?

Well, first off I'd say you should go with whichever one you're more comfortable with. As with many topics in erotica, if you're really, genuinely uncomfortable writing something - don't! I'm not saying that you shouldn't push your boundaries, but if you know something squicks you, your writing is likely to suffer from it.

That said, if you'd like to compromise between the two options, there's plenty of room to do so. Writing about a bunch of vampire fellas taking turns barebacking a werewolf? It's all good: as the undead and shapeshifters, they obviously aren't susceptible to mere venereal diseases, and you can slip in a line to that effect. Condomless sex between an established heterosexual couple? It's all good, she's on the pill. Same couple, but with a condom? You could slip in a mention after the scene or gloss over the prep a bit - or you could work it into the sex by having the woman help out. There's plenty of options!

I personally fall under the "unsafe sex is kind of icky" camp: it's not an all-or-nothing thing and I can understand the frustration with condoms in sex scenes, but all the same I appreciate a little note that no one is going to wake up the next morning and have it burn when they pee, you know

And a caveat: much of this obviously won't apply to historical settings, and some fantasy settings.