Wild Girls--Lambda Award Finalist!

I know my contributors to Wild Girls, Wild Nights are extraordinary writers, and now the Lambda Literary Award judges know it, too.  Our anthology is one of three finalists in the Lesbian Erotica category. All the credit is due to the fine writers, who wrote this time with their hearts as well as their skills; I was just the catalyst. (But I still get to add this to my list of finalists over the years, now seven, and my one winner, Lesbian Cowboys.) This year's winner won't be announced until the ceremony in NYC on June 2, but I know from experience that making the finalist list is the real challenge; there's usually very little to choose between them for the award itself.

Here, you can check out the whole list of finalists in every category:
http://www.lambdaliterary.org/features/news/03/06/26th-annual-lambda-literary-award-finalists-announced/

XOXO: Sweet and Sexy Romance—Review and Book Giveaway

This is my day on the blog tour for Kristina Wright’s XOXO: Sweet and Sexy Romance (Cleis Press), an anthology of thirty-eight extra-short stories that pack more erotic punch for their length than you’d think was possible. If you make it all the way to the end of this post you’ll see how to enter a giveaway for a copy, and, I hope, see why you really want to win.

First I get to pontificate on short-short stories in general. Every now and then I see reviewers of anthologies complaining that the stories should have been longer. When that happens with books I’ve edited myself, like Girl Fever: 69 Tales of Sudden Sex for Lesbians, my kneejerk reaction is, “No, these stories are just the length they need to be. You might well want to spend more time with these characters, but this particular chapter of their lives (or even mini-chapter) is so skillfully drawn that you don’t even notice how much intensity is gained with just enough of the just-right words.” Rather like maple sap cooked down into syrup. Or wine distilled into brandy. Or pan-juices reduced into a demiglace. Or…never mind. I’m using too many words here, too many metaphors. Not good in writing short-short stories.

Let’s stick with just one metaphor: dissolved sugar boiled until it makes candy. Candy, specifically those tiny candy hearts with Valentine messages written on them, the ones that inspired Kristina with the theme for this book.

XOXO: Sweet and Sexy Romance offers thirty-eight stories of searing sex and passionate love in just over two hundred pages. This means each story has only about fifteen hundred words, calling for writers who can make every word count. Fortunately Kristina has assembled writers who are more than up to the challenge.

I don’t want to tell too much about individual stories, because they’re worth discovering at just the right pace to savor them, but one factor I look for as an editor myself is a beginning that grabs the reader’s interest right way. I want to share just a few that do that particularly well, even though very good short stories can start out slowly instead and draw the reader in bit by bit, and many of those in this book do that to good effect.


“Midnight” by Emerald hooks you right away with sex and a hint of mystery.

Sometimes he’s inside me. Sometimes my mouth is on his cock. Sometimes his tongue is against my clit or my nipple or whatever square inch of skin he’s found that lights up that fire that’s somehow inside me and outside me and everywhere else all at once.
It’s different each time. But whatever form it’s taking, sex is what we’re doing. The timing is the important thing.

The scene then switches to a fondue restaurant, the tone becomes playful for a while, and you’re along for an irresistible ride.


“Ouch” by Lily K. Cho starts out with a bang, or rather a playful “Thwap!”

“Ouch!” Josh roared. “Dammit, Susie, that hurt!”
He heard Susie giggle, but he didn’t see her anywhere, so he turned back to the mirror and resumed his shaving.
Thwap!
“Susie, stop that!” he yelled, rubbing his rear and twisting to inspect the two pink spots blooming on his ass.”

Another ride you probably can’t resist.


“Night Moves” by Christine d’Abo begins with a nightmare.

No, no, no, no, no!
I couldn’t tell you what the nightmare had been about specifically. Images of too-tall walls and frantic running through black hallways were all that lingered as I blinked madly into the dark of our bedroom. The soft whooshing of the ceiling fan and the gentle rubbing of my husband’s hand against my back did little to slow my pounding heart. My stupid brain wouldn’t shut off.
“You ‘kay, babe?”

We know just what she needs, and by this point we need it too.

And another sleep-related excerpt with a distinctive flavor, from “The War at Home” by Giselle Renarde.

Flipping onto her stomach, Brenda buries her face in the bunched-up pillow. Too soft. How can she possibly get to sleep with her head sinking into the oblivion of a dark-blue pillowcase? Her mouth and nose are buried in feathers. She turns her head to the side, but that hurts her neck, so she flips again, landing with a bounce on her backside.
The sheets that match the pillowcase have wrapped themselves around her calves, and she kicks at them, but they don’t let go. Growling, she kicks harder, but the sheets have her bound like a mermaid—just what Kaz always wanted. Thank god he’s asleep.
Lucky bastard.

Want to bet somebody gets lucky?

My own story in this book doesn’t get you into the real action as soon as it should, or let you know quickly enough that the characters are on a honeymoon vacation in Paris, but I had a great time writing it, and I feel like sharing a bit, so here goes. (Warning, if you need it—“Gargoyle Lovers” is one of five lesbian stories included in the anthology.)

“I’m siingin’ in the rain…” But that song was from the wrong Gene Kelly movie, and it wasn’t quite raining, and I was only whistling. My speaking voice gets me by, but singing blows the whole presentation.
Hall glanced down, her face stern in that exaggerated way that makes me tingle in just the right places. I shoved my hands into my pockets, skipped a step or two, and knew she felt as good as I did. Hal’s hardly the type to dance through the Paris streets like Gene Kelly, especially across square cobblestones, but there was a certain lilt to her gait.
Or maybe a swagger. 


Of course for the really good parts of all the stories, the buildups, the peaks, the emotional resolutions, you need to read each piece all the way through. Bet you can’t read just one! But, like candy, you’re best off savoring them one by one, every single word.


Onward to the book giveaway part!

Just comment here, or on the Facebook status I posted about this (https://www.facebook.com/sacchi.green), or e-mail me at sacchigreen@gmail.com, and you’ll be entered in my drawing for a copy of XOXO.  I’ll choose a winner at random on February 28th, and announce a winner by March 2. Be sure to check back here or on Facebook to make sure I can contact you if you win.

The Delicious Torment, from Alison Tyler, the Mistress of Literary S/M

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,…

You’ve seen Shakespeare’s sonnet number 116. You’ve probably heard it read. In fact, I read aloud it at my brother’s wedding. But it isn’t about weddings, as such, but about two people who match each other’s needs so perfectly that nothing can destroy their love.

Alison Tyler’s The Delicious Torment, the sequel to her Dark, Secret Love, is about two people with such intense, specific, on-the-edge needs that it seems like a miracle that they found each other.

Samantha, the heroine based on Alison Tyler herself, is “ensconced in an S/M relationship that makes everything I’ve done before turn a whiter shade of pale.” Jack is older, a high-powered lawyer, whose need to dominate through “pain and shame and utter humiliation” could only be satisfied by a woman like Samantha, as strong in her way as she is submissive. Pain and humiliation are pleasure to her, even when she dreads them, and they bring her to orgasm even when they bring her to tears. Jack gives her what she needs, and she loves him without reserve, while he needs her love as much as her submission, even though he needs her to prove that love over and over.

There are plenty of S/M books out there now, but nobody does it with as much style and skill as Alison Tyler. Nobody makes it as real, as convincing, as appealing even to people whose tastes have never run that way. And the story here is more than a series of “scenes,” even though the traditional canes and belts and crops and chains play their part. The relationship has its twists and turns and unexpected deviations, especially when it comes to involve a third person. There are adjustments and alterations that might strain a love less strong. Jack’s difficulty in trusting Samantha’s love and the lengths he goes to in testing her could have destroyed the very thing he craved. But no impediment is great enough to tear these true minds (and bodies) apart.

And there’s never a dull moment. Here’s what happens after Sam counters Jack’s suspicious surveillance with tricks of her own, then waits at home for him:

I was on the bed, naked, and I’d cuffed my ankles and tossed the keys to the corner of the room, clicked the cuffs onto my wrists, and hung the chain from the hook on the wall. I was as exposed as I could possibly be. And deeply grateful that it was Jack in the room and not Alex. I didn’t know if I could have handled this reveal twice.

Then, when things are reconciled, at least for the time being, comes this scene:

Jack stroked me all over with his bare hands. Up and down. Not leaving any part of my body untouched. I’m trained as a masseuse, and yet I’m one of those strange creatures who don’t like to be massaged. In fact, if I don’t know someone well, I don’t like to be touched at all. I don’t hug people on greeting. I don’t spontaneously hold hands with my friends. I have a history of being stand- offish in this way.
And yet...
When Jack used his bare hands to stroke from the tops of my shoulders down to my feet, he made me purr like a relaxed panther. My body was humming, electrified. He didn’t tickle me. He didn’t touch me too gently. He used firm strokes, over and over, until I felt as if I were flying.
Only then, after he’d put me into an almost hypnotic trance of pleasure, did he bend close on the bed, press his face near the nape of my neck, and say, “You worried me.”
He’d lulled me, tricked me, created this false sense of
safeness in my surroundings, and now that was replaced by instant awareness. My skin prickled. My muscles tightened.
“On purpose,” Jack continued.
His breath warmed the back of my neck, but I would not turn my head to look at him. I was frightened of what I might see in his cold blue eyes.
“I told you before,” he continued in a menacing whisper. “I told you not to make me worry.”
Oh, I’d been so pleased with my plan. And it had worked exactly how I’d hoped. But should I have confronted Jack in a different way? Spoken to him like an adult rather than playing behind his back? No... He understood this. He understood dirty pool. Christ, he was a lawyer after all. But that didn’t mean I could get away free. Jack had to take back the power. And that meant I would endure the punishment he chose.
I could feel Jack’s body against mine, pressing hard. He was still dressed, which made me feel more naked than ever. He straddled my body from behind, so that I could feel how hard he was, and I knew that I’d turned him on. He was like steel. Even when I’d made him worry, I’d managed to turn him on. We had a powerful connection, a type that rarely exists. You can meet people who will spank you. You can meet people who will tie you up, who will fuck you six ways to Sunday. But this was different.


“A powerful connection, a type that rarely exists.” There you have it. Shakespeare’s “marriage of true minds.” Two people who have the incredible luck of finding each other, in a book readers have the incredible luck of being able to read, with no impediments.

Audible Sex

This must be my Audible week! (Can't you hear me?) My Lambda-finalist Lethe Press collection A Ride to Remember is now available as an Audible book, and I've just heard that my Cleis Press anthology Wild Girls, Wild Nights is available for preorder as an Audible book as well. Noisy (or at least audible) sex is the best kind! http://www.amazon.com/Wild-Girls-Nights-Lesbian-Stories/dp/B00I0F7ELA/ref=tmm_aud_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1391036429&sr=1-1

@Audible_com

Does "Bullwhip, Bull Rider" Ring Your Chimes?

I don't often remember to mention it, but I post a blog every other Monday on the Oh Get A Grip web site, home to enough erotica writers to fill two week of blogs on predetermined subjects. Today (Monday, Jan. 27) is my day, and the subject is supposed to be "Patience," but I cheated and posted a hefty snippet of a story that will be coming out later this year in She Who Must Be Obeyed, a lesbian femmedom anthology edited by DL King for Lethe Press. My story is "Bullwhip, Bull Rider," so if that strikes your fancy, go on over and check it out.

http://ohgetagrip.blogspot.com/?zx=a310aa93030f74e2

A Free Christmas Story

This one isn't erotica, even though there's a bit of sex in it. I wrote it last year for a Secret Santa project where folks specify three items that have to be included in the story, and then readers guess who requested what and who wrote the pieces. The requests I had to include were a cute little kid, dirty socks, and a clock that doesn't work. I deduced which member of that forum had made the request and just what cute little kid living in Europe she had in mind, so the story was extra fun to write.


A Little Bird Tells All

I used to be able to tell Saint Nicholas a thing or two about who is naughty and who is nice. “A little bird told me” is not just a saying, you know. The birds outdoors see many things you might wish were kept secret, and we indoor birds—even I, who might well be called an in-clock bird, only popping out to announce each hour—see more than you might realize, and tell it, too, if Santa asks.

My problem is that I have not caught up with modern times. It is so difficult to know what counts as naughty these days, and what is nice. For more than fifty years I saw nothing at all, hidden away behind old trunks in an attic.

When the little blonde girl found me I was overjoyed. So sweet, so sunny, so angelically innocent in appearance—and with such skill at using all these things to get whatever she wants! But I would never tell on her. Without mischief, childhood would lose much of its charm, and Santa knows this as well as anyone.

My concern is more with her aunt. Scarcely out of childhood herself, she seems to veer from niceness to some very strange activities indeed. It was certainly nice to bring the child to the old attic to search out toys from her own youth (toys so broken down from misuse as to be beyond repair, but interesting nonetheless.) And her astonishment and delight when her niece, festooned with dust and cobwebs, dragged my clock out from under heaps of rags in a far corner, was everything the finder could have wished.

“Look, Auntie! A bird clock, with leaves and flowers and little animals, like the ones we saw at the Christmas Market, but those cost far too much money!”

“You’re right!” She picked my clock up with care and handled it gently. “I never knew we had such a thing in the house! I wonder whether it still works.” So far, quite nice. But then, as they made their way down the narrow stairway, she muttered to herself, “I wonder how much we could sell this for.” Not so nice, and of course the little girl heard her.

“No Auntie! We can’t sell it! You must…you must have it in your bedroom, so the little bird can keep watch over you!” The angelic glow on her face lit up the dim hallway.

So of course she got her way, for a while at least. I was dusted and adjusted, and admired by the granny who had just returned from shopping and did remember that her own granny had had such a clock, though she hadn’t known it was still in the house. My song of “cuckoo…cuckoo…” counting out the hours was much admired as well, even by Auntie’s visiting friend, although I didn’t miss the way she nudged Auntie in the ribs and smothered a laugh. Still, this young woman was nearly as angelic in appearance as the child, so I held to my first opinion that she too was very nice.

But that evening, all my ideas of nice and naughty, good and bad, were thrown into a turmoil of doubt. The granny had gone to help decorate the church for the next night’s Christmas Eve Mass. The little girl, worn out from playing in the snow with cousins (and with Auntie and her friend, both as nice as is at all possible when snowballs are involved, or so the child recounted,) was sound asleep in her room downstairs. The two young women, quite likely also worn out from outdoor play, were sprawled on Auntie’s big bed.

I can only see a very little of a room while I am inside the wooden clock, but I can hear, and all seemed calm. They chatted in low voices that grew lower still, but as the hour of ten o’clock neared they seemed to be rested enough for some sort of indoor play. The bedsprings creaked. If they had been boys, I would have guessed they were wrestling; but perhaps, these days, girls play at wrestling, as well. Times do change.

On the hour, I sprang forth with my “cuckoos,” and only with the most strict control did I keep from stuttering before even five of my ten calls had sounded. They were wrestling indeed, and with no clothes on! Auntie glared up at me, snatched a dirty sock from beside the bed, and hurled it upward and over me so that I could see no more, though I could hear her friend laughing so hard the bedsprings creaked even more loudly. The worst part was that the sock wedged around me when it was time to retreat into the clock, which stopped the clockworks from working properly, and I was stuck half in and half out.

“Poor bird!” the friend said, still laughing.

“It was watching me with those beady little eyes!” Auntie said. “And mocking me with those silly noises!”

So she goes firmly onto the naughty list! I thought. “Silly noises,” indeed! And the noises the pair of them went on to make, after a short pause, went so far beyond silly as to sound downright frightening. Auntie in particular seemed to be doing something quite violent to her friend, who was gasping out sounds without words that I thought must be cries of pain. If only my woodcarver maker had thought to supply me with some sort of siren or other means to summon the constabulary! I could do nothing, wedged into my little doorway by a sock that had clearly been sweated into copiously during the day.

At last the sounds subsided into sighs and soft words. I could make out just enough, through the muffling of the dirty sock, to realize with amazement that the friend had found the whole encounter to be very nice indeed. When they began their wrestling again, this time with Auntie more on the receiving end, I rather wished, smothered as I was by the sock, that she really was in pain, but I was not surprised when she ultimately sounded most extremely satisfied with the proceedings.

Eleven o’clock came and went, and twelve, with no assistance from me or the stopped clock. I judged it to be about seven in the morning when the bedroom door creaked open. I heard the little girl gasp, and something grated across the floor, and then small fingers reached up to tug away the sock. I saw that she was standing on a chair she’d dragged over in order to reach high enough.

“Auntie, why is there an old smelly sock on the little bird?” Her voice echoed all the scolding tones she’d ever been subjected to.

Auntie, with the coverlet pulled up to her chin and her friend muffling laughter under the pillow, tried to sound soothing. “Sweetie, his sounds kept waking me up, every hour. A bedroom is really not the right place for a cuckoo clock. And besides, don’t you think he’d like to see the Christmas tree in the parlor, and all the candles, and the gifts when we open them on Christmas morning? Let’s move him out there. He can hang on the nail where that picture of a wild stag hangs now, and I’ll bring that one in here.”

The child agreed, but still cast an accusing look over her shoulder as she left the room, and could be heard tattling to her granny about the dirty sock Auntie had put on the cuckoo bird.

“Do you think,” the friend said, “that you’d rather have a big-eyed stag watching you than a little bird?” And her shoulders shook with laughter until the bed creaked again, but only a little.

So that is how I came to be waiting for Santa in the parlor while the red coals in the fireplace reflected off the sparkly ornaments on the tree, especially the colorful foil-wrapped Szaloncukor. “So, my little friend,” he said when at last he arrived. “Have you anything to tell me about the people in this house?”

I struggled to speak, but my tiny mouth, such as it is, was full. Santa peered closer. “What have they done to you? This doesn’t look good!” With a flick of a finger and a twist of his hand, he had me cleared of obstruction, and the clock running just as it ought to. “Now tell me, just how naughty have these folks been?”

“It is…well, it is so hard to say! The crumbs in my beak and inside the clock are explained innocently enough. The little girl didn’t know any better. She thought I deserved a treat, after the way her Auntie had treated me, so she crept in here after everyone was in bed, and tried to feed me a bit of poppyseed cookie. She had seen her Auntie feed seeds to the birds in the yard in cold weather, and thought that I would like them too.”

“So what did this Auntie who is kind to birds do so unkindly to you?”

I told him, in general, but added, “I did seem to be intruding on a most intimate occasion, so perhaps she could be excused. Not but what there was certainly a high degree of naughtiness going on, seen from one viewpoint, but for those involved it was clearly very nice indeed.” I twitched on my perch, which is as close to shaking the head as a wooden cuckoo bird can manage. “Santa, I try to do my best, but this world is so far from the one I remember! There is no telling now what is naughty or nice!”

“Just tell me this,” Santa said. “Are they kind to each other, more often than unkind?”

“Oh yes. I think they all truly love each other.”

“Well then,” he said, “that is all we know on earth, and all we need to know.” He spun around once, with amazing grace considering his portly bulk, and a stack of gifts appeared beneath the glittering tree.

It was midnight, as it is always midnight where Santa is delivering gifts. I rode my perch out into the room and began my song, while Santa departed for his next destination, but even over my aria of a dozen “cuckoos” I heard him exclaim, “Merry Christmas to all, and welcome to the twenty-first century!”

_________________
No on H8

Wild Girls Review, and Free Book Offer

Here’s an excerpt from a great review of Wild Girls, Wild Nights, and a link to the rest:

“Sacchi Green has gathered together stories that blow my mind. Peeking into a world that’s often thought of as taboo, I found myself longing for more. Each story is full of real life passion. Not something that’s thought up in the fantasies of another. The women who share are sharing their most intimate and devious encounters are strong, courageous and have a burning desire to tell the restrained details of their sex lives.”
http://kinketc.com/2013/11/real-life-lesbian-sex-stories-wild-girls-wild-nights/

And here’s a chance to win a copy for yourself from Cleis Press in return for your willingness to write your own honest review:
https://www.facebook.com/CleisPress?hc_location=timeline

Besides being true stories, these are truly well-written stories, and I've never felt more proud of the writers who honor me with their work.