Suddenly, there are three!

I’m not gonna lie to you: The fact that I have three short-short stories in Sudden Sex just tickles the hell out of my fancy. Whatever that means.

Doesn’t look like it’s up for pre-order yet, but I’ll let you know when it is!

Booked by Alison Tyler
Frank by Donna George Storey
Riding the 5:15 by Sophia Valenti
Peach-Colored Panties by Thomas S. Roche
Reserved by Jax Baynard
Night Visitor by Cheyenne Blue 
Tripartite by Georgia E. Jones 
Lift a Finger by Jeremy Edwards
Stopover by ADR Forte
The Point of Least Resistance by Saskia Walker 
Misdirection by Victoria Janssen 
Sweet and Spicy by Kat Watson 
Working Up a Sweat by Heidi Champa
Come As You Are by Andrea Dale
Possessive Tense by Raziel Moore
Necessities for a Perfect Marriage by Ashley Lister
One Sleep by Maria See
Crawling Through Temptation by Elise Hepner 
Tick-Tock by Rita Winchester
Throwing Sugar by Jeremy Edwards
Bound to Serve by Mina Murray 
Naugahyde by Sommer Marsden
The Perfect Pair by Sophia Valenti
Taming His Wild Cat by Andrea Dale
At the Car Wash by Lucy Felthouse
The Exorcism by Veronica Wilde 
My Army Buddy’s Girlfriend by N.T. Morley 
Two Man Job by A. M. Hartnett
Sex in the Shower by Thomas S. Roche 
Deep Throat, Deep Love by Kristina Lloyd
Hoarder by Bella Dean
TV Repairs by Sophia Valenti
Triptych by Kat Watson
Seasonal Affected Disorder by Gina Marie
The Scribe by Tabitha Rayne 
Come to the Light by Maria See
Night Heat by Vida Bailey
For the Moment by Kiki DeLovely
Obey All Signs by Andrea Dale
Girls Sleep with Girls by Giselle Renarde
The Dealmakers by A.M. Hartnett
Among the Trees by Heidi Champa
Last Call by Sophia Valenti 
I’d Rather Go Blind by Tenille Brown
Rubber Chicken by Thomas S. Roche
Sugar Upsets My Vagina by Kristina Lloyd
Clement by Sommer Marsden
Heart on the Dance Floor by Stella Harris
The Not-So-Blushing Bride by Lucy Felthouse
Homecoming by Sophia Valenti
Dress Me Up Pretty by K. Lynn
Committee Work by Jeremy Edwards
Queen of Parking Lot Blowjobs by Giselle Renarde
Helluva Thing by A.M. Hartnett
Mad Ghosts of Lust by Kristina Lloyd
Bookmarked by Alison Tyler
Cuckhold’s Nest by D. L. King 
Cookie by Sharon Wachsler
Eye of the Beholder by Stella Harris
Stress Relief by K. Lynn
If You Know Where To Look by Giselle Renarde
Thrill the Competition by Allison Wonderland
Cosmic Fate by Angell Brooks
Let Me Tie You Up? By Devin Phillips
Nice Dream by J.Sinclaire
Eva by Donna George Storey
Dress Code by N.T. Morley
Consequences by Cheyenne Blue
Bookended by Alison Tyler

Warning: Explicit

"The Twelve Fucking Princesses"

Once upon a time there were twelve princesses, and every night… What? Did I ask you to stop me if you’d heard this before? Because you might think you’ve heard it, but you don’t know the real story. You know the watered-down, sanitized, safe-for-children version. The truth really isn’t appropriate for children, trust me. You really think it’s about twelve princesses dancing their shoes to tatters? Have you never heard of euphemisms? C’mere. Let me tell you what really happened….

This short story by a legendary erotica heavy-hitter is a kinky-hot twist on a familiar fairy tale. Warning: Contains explicit group sex, BDSM, female domination, male submission, and lesbian and gay sexual situations.

Contains BONUS story “How the Little Mermaid Got Her Tail Back.”

“The Twelve Fucking Princesses” originally appeared in The Mammoth Book of Threesomes and Moresomes (Running Press, 2010), under the author name Kendra Wayne.

Cover art by SerrNovik / iStockPhoto.

Available in a variety of electronic formats
Amazon |  Barnes & Noble |  Smashwords

Once in a glorious blue moon

In celebration of the Blue Moon, I give you my Moon playlist.

Once again, I wonder why the hell we don't have Ozzy's "Bark at the Moon." What else am I missing? Suggestions?

Beneath the Moon, Dennis De Young

Desert Moon, Dennis De Young

Drawing Down the Moon, Gaia Consort

Electric Moon, Shakespear’s Sister

Falling From the Moon, Marillion

Full Moonlight Dance, Libana

The Light of the Moon, Emily Mitchell

Moon Cradle, Loreena McKennitt

Moon Dance, Enaid and Einalem

Moon Over Bourbon Street, Sting

Moon, Sister Moon, Moving Breath

Moonchild, Shakespear's Sister

Moonchild's Psychedelic Holiday, Gowan

Moonlight Desires, Gowan

Moonlight in Samosa, Robert Plant

Morgana Moon, Woodland

New Moon on Monday, Duran Duran

Poet's Moon, Fish

Rocket to the Moon, Runrig

Shadow of the Moon, Blackmore's Night

Shadows in the Moonlight, Tommy Shaw

Shepherd Moons, Enya

Sister Moon, Sting

Sisters of the Moon, Fleetwood Mac

Tea-House Moon, Enya

Under a Violet Moon, Blackmore's Night

Exciting news! New collection!

So…that exciting news I alluded to a few days ago….

Behold my latest collection, Written on the Coast: Thirteen Stories of Magic & Mayhem Written on the Oregon Coast!

This collection has been 9 years in the making: The first two stories were written at the first-ever Denise Little Anthology Workshop (an Oregon Writers Network workshop) in 2003. The last two were written last year. I’m saving this year’s stories for the next collection.  :-)

So, two stories per anthology workshop, six workshops since 2003—plus I added a story I wrote at the Short Story Workshop last year to bring it to 13 total, because I like the number 13. They range from high fantasy to contemporary fantasy to science fiction to one I’m calling “indefinably absurd.”

I was floored when award-winning author Dean Wesley Smith, whom I can call both mentor and friend, offered to write the introduction. And then he wrote this:

   But nothing about Dayle blurs for me. She and her wonderful husband are amazing people and I feel lucky to even know them.

   And for me, getting to write this foreword to this wonderful collection is a real honor.

   So why does Dayle have so many great stories written here on the Oregon Coast? Even more than the thirteen included here?

   First off, I don’t think she is capable of writing a bad story. There sure isn’t one in this collection. And a few in here are my personal favorites of her work. (I’m not going to say which ones because I know you all will find your own favorites. Just trust me when I say all thirteen stories are great.)

Once I stopped sniffling, I finished up the collection and put it up for sale. You can get it at the usual venues:

Amazon  |  Barnes & Noble  |  Smashwords

And before the end of the year, it should be available in print as well.

I hope you enjoy it.

Fancy a romp in the great outdoors?

"Outside, in the Rain"

When a wife forgets her raincoat on a trip to Scotland and her husband buys her a rubber Mackintosh, they discover a mutual fetish they never dreamed they shared. “Outside, in the Rain” is a sexy story of rubber passion in the Highlands by a legendary erotica heavy-hitter. Includes BONUS story “Storming the Castle.” Note: Contains explicit outdoor sex.

“Outside in the Rain” originally appeared in Coming Together: Al Fresco (All Romance E-Books, 2009).

Cover art by Stanislav Perov  / BigStockPhoto.

Available in a variety of electronic formats
Amazon |  Barnes & Noble |  Smashwords

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

"Storming the Castle"

Will a night of passion in a Welsh castle ruin reignite Cassidy and Joe’s crumbling relationship, or will their marriage be demolished along with the historic site? Deemed “exceptional” by Erotica Revealed, “Storming the Castle” is a sexy and romantic short story from a legendary erotica heavy-hitter. Note: Contains explicit sex in the outdoors. Includes BONUS story "Outside, in the Rain."

“Storming the Castle” originally appeared in Sweet Love: Erotic Fantasies for Couples (Cleis Press, 2010), a 2010 Independent Publisher Book Awards winner.

“Exceptional.” Jean Roberta, Erotica Revealed

Cover art by Oleg Komilov / BigStockPhoto.

Available in a variety of electronic formats
Amazon |  Barnes & Noble |  Smashwords

NOTE: Both of these stories are "two-packs"—buy one, and you get both stories for a single price!

The invitation I almost didn't get...

I sold a story…and everybody knew about it but me!

I’ve been working on the publishing side of my business today, and took a break to check GoogleReader, where I have all my blog feeds. I saw that my friend, frequent coauthor, and stellar author in her own right, Teresa Noelle Roberts, had updated, so I popped over to her blog.

She’d just announced a sale to Cheeky Spanking Stories, edited by Rachel Kramer Bussel.

That’s odd, thought I. I sent Rachel a spanking story… ::checks spreadsheet:: almost a year ago. But Rachel often has calls for submissions before the anthology has a title, so I thought maybe my story was still under consideration for another anthology.

But partway down the TOC that Teresa posted, there was my story title, my name, and a shoutout from Teresa.

Say what??

I went through all my files—spreadsheet, work email account, story folders—and found no contract, no correspondence (other than my initial submission), nothing.

So I pinged Rachel, and sure enough, she’d included my story in the book! Somehow my contract slipped through the cracks. She attached it, I reviewed it and signed it and fired it back to her.

::laughs and laughs::

Without further delay, I’d like to announce that “Invitation to a Spanking” will appear in Cheeky Spanking Stories!

Here’s the TOC, courtesy of Teresa’s blog. Oh, and it’ll be out next month!  *\o/*

The Perfect Dom Lucy Felthouse
Birthday Boy Cecilia Duvalle
Unwrapping Craig J. Sorensen
The Assignment Donna George Storey
A Game of Numbers Kiki DeLovely
Mermaid Teresa Noelle Roberts
Butch Girls Don’t Cry Giselle Renarde
Echo J. Sinclaire
Bitch Elizabeth Silver
The Price of Experience Kate Dominic
The Spanking Salon Elizabeth Coldwell
The Impact of Change Maggie Morton
Writer’s Block Evan Mora
Lessons Learned Jade Melisande
Invitation to a Spanking Andrea Dale
A Timely Correction Dorothy Freed
Spanking the Monkey Cynthia Rayne
Shine Shanna Germain
Papers to Grade Thomas S. Roche
Lean on Me Adele Haze
Proxy Lucy Hughes
Bad Boy Isabelle Gray
Marks Rachel Kramer Bussel

Best Lesbian Erotica 2013!

Squee! My story "Winner Take All," which originally appeared in The Harder She Comes: Butch/Femme Erotica, has been selected to be reprinted in Best Lesbian Erotica 2013!

Here's the full TOC—check out all those nummy authors!

The Invitation  by Maggie Veness

Nothing If It Fades  by Nikki Adams

Cucumbers and Cream  by Helen Sandler

Anonymous  by BD Swain

Woman-Time  by Rebecca Lynne Fullan

Kitty and the Cat  by Amelia Thornton

She Never Wears Perfume  Sid March

Amateur Night  by Maggie Morton

Crave  by Fiona Zedde

Stella Loves Bella  by V.C.

Homecoming  by Anamika

Pool Party  by Zoe Amos

Daffodils  by Sally Bellerose

Winner Take All  by Andrea Dale  ← hey, that's me!

Lessons for Leona  by Tenille Brown

Morning Commute  by Penny Gyokeres

Aftermath  by Valerie Alexander

I Have a Thing for Butches  by Sonya Herzog

La Caída  by Anna Meadows

The Horse and Hounds  by Rachel Charman

Underskirts  by Kirsty Logan

Recommended Reading: The Demon Lover, the Newsflesh trilogy, and Tamsin

The DemonLover, Juliet Dark. Juliet Dark is a pseudonym for literary mystery author Carol Goodman, whose books I’ve raved about here before. By “literary mystery” I really mean rich gothics: stories that involve the heroine’s physical and sometimes emotional isolation, evocatively described settings, a sense of dread or foreboding, and often a past mystery that needs to be solved. Yum. The Dark pseudonym is for her new trilogy (and who knows, maybe more?), which are billed as paranormal romance, but they aren’t, not really. Demon Lover is paranormal, absolutely, but not really a “romance” in the genre sense, in part because it’s a trilogy.

Anyway, I still loved it. It’s got an incubus and a witch and a Victorian house and a slightly creepy college in “upstate New York” (which is in quotes because it’s not really upstate upstate), and a heroine whose “lifelong passion is the intersection of lurid fairy tales and Gothic literature” (back cover copy). Oddly, the book I’ve just started writing has some of those elements. Or maybe not so oddly, because I love those elements, and gothics, and paranormals, and romances. If you do, too, you might very well like this book.

Blackout, Mira Grant. I’ve been remiss in keeping up with these posts, so I don’t think I’ve actually recommended Feed and Deadline, the first two books in this trilogy. Let’s just make this about all of them, shall we?

Mira Grant is the pseudonym for Seanan McGuire, whose urban fantasies I’ve rave about there before. (Apparently it’s been my month for pseudonymous author I rave about.) She went with a pseudonym because these are more science fiction/horror. They’re about biologically created zombies.

If you’d told me I’d willingly read a zombie book, much less enjoy it, I’d’ve laughed. I really don’t get the whole zombie phenomenon. (Which is not to say there’s anything wrong with it—I’m simply more partial to ghosts, witches, and fairies than I am zombies, vampires, and werecreatures. If it’s a good book about any of those things, I’ll give it a try.)

These are good books. Give them a try. Grant/McGuire’s magical power is the ability to create characters that really feel like real people. She also creates believable situations—she researched the epidemiology of how the zombie virus works—and talk about page-turning cliffhangers, hoo boy. If you’re up all night reading these books, don’t blame me. But read them.

Tamsin, Peter S. Beagle. I first read Tamsin when we lived in Wales, and I reread it earlier this year in preparation for Phoenix Comicon, where Beagle was a guest. I’d intended to have him autograph it, but instead I caved and bought the deluxe DVD/Blu-Ray edition of The Last Unicorn. (What can I say? I’m weak when I get all fangirly.)

I’d forgotten how good Tamsin is, which was in some ways nice because it felt like I was experiencing all the wonder for the first time. Although the protagonist, Jenny, starts the book at age fourteen, it’s not a YA book (although it could certainly be read by YA readers). Jenny’s perfectly content with her life in NYC with her mother, her cat Mister Cat, her friends, etc. Then her mother has to go and fall in love with a British guy who hauls them off to a farm in Dorset, along with his two sons. When I was growing up, this would have sounded like pure freaking heaven (and it still does, in many ways!), but not so much to Jenny. Jenny’s miserable but not bitchy; she’s unhappy but not unhelpful. She has a fantastic voice, too, and as she teeters on the brink of womanhood, she finds both the wondrous magic and terrible evil the world contains.

Beagle is a master storyteller, and Tamsin is just about perfect. If it weren’t for the tottering piles of books in my To Read bookcase, I’d be likely to pick this back up and reread it right now….

RWA Nationals 2012, Day 1

I’m at the annual Romance Writers of America national conference (aka RWA Nationals or just Nationals), surrounded by smart, creative, savvy, engaging, vibrant, funny, wonderful women. I was hit with some negativity in my life recently, and this is like a refreshing, energizing dive into a woodland pool that’s almost shockingly cold—bringing me back to center, sluicing away the bad stuff, and waking me up to the good.

Over the past couple of days, I found myself resisting coming here. (It was never a question, since I’d already paid for it, committed to sharing a room, etc.) It wasn’t logical; it was emotional. Ken’s going to be gone for most of August, and I just don’t want to be away from him right now. Plus I’ve been in a bit of a writing slump, thanks to the above-mentioned negativity but also, I’m coming to realize, that I really haven’t completely recovered from the emotional battering of the past couple years (the trifecta of my father’s death, my sister’s aneurysm, and Ken’s accident and my attendant primary-caregiver status, along with the added pain and stress of my own hand injury last December). I always think I’m better before I really am, and I’m surprised to discover I’m wrong. I’m much, much better, don’t get me wrong—I just forget that it’s a process, and there are always slides backwards, even if they’re small and the forward motion is bigger.

Anyway. I rode down here with the utterly wonderful Kim—which is, in fact, one of the things I really was looking forward to, because she’s funny and a bundle of positive energy, and I never get the time to just sit and talk with her. We had a blast. Then I hit my room and hugged my awesome friend Christine and met our roomies Sarah and Roz, both of whom I adored within minutes, and Kim and Tanya stopped by, and there was wine and conversation until far too late.

I’ve been to two workshops today, but the third was so crowded that I opted to take a break and do a little work in the room. Next is a luncheon, followed by another workshop, and then I’m taking the rest of the afternoon off. Sarah and I are going to work out, and then a bunch of us will grab dinner, and then who knows what mischief we’ll get into.

One of the workshops this morning made the conference worth the price of admission. It was about how productivity isn’t a matter of time management, but of energy management. So much of it resonated with me, like this simple exercise: Close your eyes, focus on your body, and think five times, “I have to write.” Did you tense up? Now do the same thing, except think “I get to write!” You’ll have an entirely different physical, emotional, and spiritual reaction. Duh. (I’m saying “duh” to me, because, well, that should’ve been obvious…)

[Hm…it’s now after the conference and I don’t remember what else I was going to write here, so I think I’ll just post this and move on!  :-)  ]

Euphoric

I’ve signed the contract, so now I can announce the very, very exciting news!

I’ve had a short story accepted for a Mercedes Lackey-edited anthology of stories based in her awesome Elemental Masters universe!

::runs around in small circles, hands flapping::

I’ve been reading Misty’s work since…well, let’s just say math would be involved in figuring it out. A long time. And I love the Elemental Masters series. It’s mostly set in Britain (although our stories didn’t have to be), pre-WWII, and the premise is that there are people who have elemental magic, the ability to work magic based on the four elements and to interact with the attendant elemental creatures (water magicians commune with sylphs and naiads, etc.). Additionally, each book is based loosely on a fairy tale or legend.

I set my story in and around Castle Coch in south Wales, a place I’ve been to several times. It’s truly a fairy tale/fantasy castle, with conical-roofed towers and incredible decorations. Unsurprisingly, my underlying fairy tale is Rapunzel. (See also below.)

I love writing romance and erotica (obviously), but fantasy was my first love, and any opportunity I get to write fantasy makes me happy. To be a part of this project makes me insanely joyous.

I have to thank a few people for helping me on this journey:

• Ken, for putting up with me every time I thought I couldn’t do it, thought the idea was stupid. I haven’t had much faith in my writing ability lately, and he’s done nothing but prop me up and say all the right things I needed to hear.
• Kris & Dean and the Oregon Writers Network, for not only holding so many workshops that have helped me grow as a writer, but for making it possible for me to be in the right place at the right time for this opportunity.
• Lee Rebennack, for immediately saying “Rapunzel” when I asked those in our hotel room at Phoenix Comicon what their favorite fairy tale was. That smashed into the idea of using Castle Coch and my brain did that wonderful writerly “OoooOOOoooh!” that happens when the right ideas come together.

I’m probably overreacting to this—I mean, hell, I’ve sold more than a hundred short stories—but given how hard it’s been to even finish a short story lately, much less how I’ve questioned whether I should be even doing this, I’m going to go with the euphoria.