Dirrrrrty

I have the privilege of being part of a delicious anthology called Dirty Girls, edited by Rachel Kramer Bussel. The anthology guidelines called for “HOT HOT stories, as in, the hottest one you've ever written. … I want stories that blow my mind and take me to new places…”

I cracked my knuckles and dove in. Now there was a challenge.

What I ended up writing was “Party Favor,” one of the kinkiest things I’ve ever written. It’s a loose sequel to “On Tour,” which appeared in Sex on the Move. In “On Tour,” my unnamed narrator is offered a chance to be with the rock god of her dreams…only under his—and his wife’s—kinky terms.

I was already pushing some personal boundaries when I wrote “On Tour.” I’ve made no attempt to hide my fascination and lust for rockers, including one in particular.

And there’s the slippery slope. Erotica writers are the ones who constantly get the question, “Have you done everything you’ve written about?” The unspoken but obvious question is “Have you fantasized about everything you write about?” The belief is that if you write about it, you must want it (if you’re not writing from experience, that is).

I’m pretty sure Stephen King doesn’t want to experience everything he’s written, but I bet he doesn’t get asked the same questions, either.

So even though the rocker in the stories is a guitarist fronting his own band and his wife is an amalgamation of women, writing “On Tour” was hard for me, because I wondered with every word whether I’d be judged. Whether assumptions would be made about my personal desires, my personal fantasies.

Still, I wrote it, I had Ken review it for typos, and I mailed it, and I sold it. And somewhere between that and publication, I stopped caring what people thought. I write fiction; it’s my job to make things up. I make things up. Writing “Party Favor” was easy after that.

The premise of “Party Favor” was one I’d had in my head for years, but I’d never written it as a story until the Dirty Girls guidelines hit my desk. It was a natural progression from “On Tour,” and there’s a part of me that wants to put those story together with others and write a whole novel about the unnamed narrator and her adventures with the kinky rock star of her dreams and his even kinkier wife. (But that’s a subject for another post.)

The question is, do you think “Party Favor” fits the guidelines of “HOT HOT stories, as in, the hottest one you've ever written”? Rachel, the editor, did, but it’s reader response I really crave…

For more about Dirty Girls, check out the book’s blog, and if you go down to the April 8 entry, you’ll be able to follow links to the rest of the Blog Tour.

And hey, can I just say? I only just got my comp copy and haven’t had time to do more than skim the stories, but I think my hair caught on fire at least once. These stories sizzle, baybee!