Voodoo Fetish free until 28 July

Voodoo Fetish, the second book in my Vodou Trilogy, is free on Amazon until 28 July: it’s available on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk. The first book, Ridden, details Eloise’s brush with the lwa and Baron Cimitiėre in which she’s used as an instrument of supernatural healing. Her powers are only released, though, when she has bdsm sex in which she can use her pain to channel away another person’s illness. This novella isn’t free, so to read the backstory you’ll need to pay a nominal two dollars and some cents. Voodoo Fetish details her life back in London. You’d think London is a long way from vodou – but the vodou diaspora is present these days in many large cities. She’s called upon by the lwa to carry out a healing ceremony for the daughter of a work colleague. Among other things this involves supernatural sex, discussions with crows and a dead witch, sex with a pagan couple she meets who are recruited to her healing project, a relationship with a houngan (male priest) who comes from the slightly different New Orleans tradition of vodou, a bass guitar with interesting properties, and discussion of the Navier-Stokes equations of fluid dynamics. There will be a third novella in due course, which explains how the various people she’s healed are connected together and what the longer-term project of the lwa was. And, yes, bdsm and sex will be involved. However, for now you can read the second novella, Voodoo Fetish, for free. Go to it. Enjoy.

Shiny new covers

Because I’ve been busy on other projects recently I missed the news that Xcite won a prize: ETO Best Erotic Book Brand 2013.

ETO is Erotic Trade Only, an annual convention in the UK for all erotic trades that also puts out a magazine, has a blog, and so forth. They award prizes at their annual event and the complete list of winners is here.

Some of the sex toys that won prizes, incidentally, were things I had to Google in order to work out what they were and what they do. Some days I just feel like a dinosaur who doesn’t know anything any more. Maybe a session with a Revo 2 would pep me up… Yes, it won a prize. As did Lovehoney, which is where that link leads. And when I searched the internet for it, I was initially puzzled because there’s also a car tyre of the same name. But I digress.

 The reason I knew Xcite had won the prize was because they’ve been redesigning the covers of their books to include a spiffy little thing that on a real book cover would be a sticker announcing the prize.

But they’ve also redesigned some of the covers completely, and I think they’ve done an excellent job on them. I’m guessing here but I think other titles of mine (and of Velvet Tripp’s) will probably be getting the same treatment in the near future. As and when I spot new covers I’ll announce them.

So my First Day at Work and Vampire’s New Plaything short stories, and the Tricks For Kicks collection that has my story ‘Filthy White Dress’ in it, all now look like the pics in this post (the other links to these stories that are around this blog that show the old covers also still work, of course).

And if you go over to the ‘Our Publications’ page, you’ll find links to Amazon Uk and a bunch of other places where you can also find these titles.

Just thought you might like to know all that. And… Buy our books!

A couple of news items

A couple of things that are worth reporting.

Xcite are open for voting in their annual Xcite Awards. They cover best internet retail site (for sex toys), best erotic author blog, bets reviewers, best sexperts and best erotic publication. And no, we’re not in the running for any category so you can’t vote for us. But if you want to review the nominations and vote, here’s the link to the nominations list.

Oysters and Chocolate has been a premier erotica website for a decade or so. But the two principal people who ran it, Samantha and Jordan, decided they wanted to get involved in other projects. They closed it down at the end of January. They also ran OC Press, and most of the titles there have now been taken on by other publishers. Fulani had precisely one story published on the Oysters and Chocolate blog, and in due course we’ll post it here so it’s still available.

Also, for those of you in the UK who use the fetish social networking site Informed Consent – it’s closing down in a couple of weeks. Its administrator, Tanos, has run it for something like 15 years, which in internet terms is an eternity. He has other irons in the fire so if you want to keep abreast of what he’s up to you can become a member of Fetlife, where he’s set up an Informed Consent discussion group, or follow him on Twitter – search for @UKTanos.

Things change, and while some sites have closed down others have opened. In particular you might be interested in Erotica Ebooks and DangerLust, both newish blogs featuring erotic publications and more. As other new stuff comes to our attention we’ll post updates.

Ridden – for free, 14-18 November 2012

It’s true, you can get Ridden for free, for a limited time. Xcite have it on free promo on Amazon for four days. Erotic novella, bondage and BDSM, voodoo and paranormal, more details in previous blog posts.

Get it from Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk. And please leave a review on Amazon when you’ve read it!

Bearing in mind it’s Part 1 of a trilogy (though each volume is self-standing and complete in itself) and Part 2 is mostly written while Part 3 is already plotted, I’m still open to suggestions about particular scenes you might like to see in the later volumes…

Ridden – now out

Okay, I’ve been slow to promote this novella, especially since my novel came out a week or so ago (see the posts about Corporate Slave, below). It’s been out since Monday but I’ve been writing other stuff, nonfiction, about topics such as cultural imperialism.

And that’s relevant, actually. Because the novella is based in a culture that isn’t mine. But then again, for various random reasons, it’s a part of a diaspora of beliefs I happen to know at least a little about, and that you can now find embedded in almost any world city.

Currently Ridden is available as an ebook only on Amazon in the US and Amazon in the UK, and it will be a while before it’s available elsewhere. But I’ll have another announcement to make about it next week…

The core of the plot is based on voodoo, if you like the ordinary Westernised spelling; or vodou, which is how its practitioners and followers usually refer to it (there are other spellings as well but they mostly relate to its practice in West Africa, and other names used within the range of vodou beliefs). The title of the story comes from the common description of someone who is possessed by a lwa, or spirit, as being ‘ridden’. And of course, in more everyday English, someone who is completely obsessed with some idea or emotion is sometimes said to be ridden by it.

I’d like to think, though I may be deluding myself, that alongside the erotic content readers may pick up something more ‘educational’ about the nature of vodou in reading the novella. I haven’t tried to be absolutely faithful to its practices and beliefs, but I have tried to convey something about its worldview.

So: rather than try to offer a short description (which is on Amazon anyway) or an extract (which is on our Tumblr, and you can use the Amazon ‘look inside’ function to read the beginning as well) I’ve come up with something that I hope is a more evocative summary:

The hospital doctors said Eloise had concussion. It wasn’t concussion.
Tom nodded slowly. “I know what you’re thinking,” Eloise whispered. She felt a myriad of sensations. Later, she felt herself accelerating, plunging towards sweaty carnal seizure.
Confused and dream-filled sleep.
Huge, rusted cemetery gates. Nakedness, erection, the smell of sex.
There had been a travail, a working.
Tom. Romero. Philippe. The sudden flare of the candle. Romero’s old bullet wound. Instinct. Possibilities multiplied. Complicated palette of emotions. Ropes, hanging from the rafters. Fuck.
Healing people, through sex. Sex as a moral and sacred act.

This is Part 1 of a 3-part trilogy. It’s a complete story in itself but there will, in a couple of months or so, be more to read about Eloise and her developing relationship with vodou.

I hope you like it. If you like paranormal, I hope you find it to your taste. If you don’t normally like paranormal, I hope you find the slightly out-of-the-ordinary paranormality of the novella intriguing. If you don’t normally read bdsm erotica, I hope it helps you understand why people might become motivated to try bdsm, and leaves you hot and sweaty. If you do normally read bdsm erotica I hope it leaves you hot and sweaty anyway. If you don’t know much about vodou I hope it gives you at least a sense of how and why others are attracted to it – though if you are, in fact, a vodouist you’ll probably think it’s overly simplistic, not to say overly imaginative. But whoever you are, I hope it makes you rampantly excited.

-F

Sex, Art, Aromatherapy, Androids and iPhones

Every so often we check the stats for the blog, which among other things tell us where people are clicking out to. And occasionally, we find they’ve clicked on a link way back in the blog somewhere that’s been updated at some point over the past couple of years.

A case in point is Fulani’s novella Sex, Art and Aromatherapy. We can’t even find the broken link that someone clicked on (update – we have now, and fixed it) but for the avoidance of doubt, here’s the link for it at Xcite Books. It is of course also available in a bunch of other places including Amazon.com (picture also links there), Amazon.co.uk, and Kobobooks.

It’s a standalone short story, i.e. around 6000 words: Ruby is already experienced in BDSM and fetish, and she’s surprised to meet an older man in an art gallery, of all places, who also seems experienced in that world. He tells her stories about how, in his youth, BDSM was simply one part of a wider and more spiritual quest. Ruby sets off on a journey to discover some enlightenment of her own…

Meanwhile, in the process of checking the old links we discovered something we didn’t even know about. It’s also available now from Waterstones as an ebook – and you can also find it as as Android app and an iPhone app, and on iTunes (though quite why the top iTunes search result on Google shows it in the Kazakhstan iTunes store is something of a mystery).

[Edited to add: here’s a link to buy Sex, Art and Aromatherapy on Android, and here’s a link for the iPhone version. Plus, depending on where you’re buying from and what format you’re buying in, you might find it has the cover shown below, which was created for the iTunes version when they were being snippy about ‘sexual’ cover images. Actually it’s quite suggestive…]

Xciting times on Ebay

Sex at Work cover – Xcite publication

Just had word from Xcite Books that in addition to their various other outlets, their books are also now on Ebay. If you go to ebay.co.uk, and search for ‘xcite’ in ‘books, comics and magazines’ you’ll get (as of a couple of minutes ago) 222 listings, around half in ‘buy it now’ format and half on auction.

Currently none of Fulani’s books or the collections he’s contributed to are there, but collections Velvet has contributed to, like Sex at Work, are listed (her story involved two zookeeps in a tropical house – hot and steamy in a literal sense as well metaphorical). And as best we can tell, Xcite is offering exceptional deals through their Ebay shop at the moment.

A pagan camp

It’s been a bit quiet on this blog recently because we’ve been away. To a small pagan camp, with people we’ve mostly known for several years and to a place Velvet’s known for well over a decade.

For the uninitiated, ‘pagan’ doesn’t mean ‘wiccan’. Sure, a few of the people there were and are wiccans, but others have a range of beliefs that essentially revolve around the idea of ‘do as you will and harm none’, a respect for the earth and the environment, and a sense that imagination is a useful tool.

Also for the uninitiated, if you want to be initiated we can probably sort you out with an appropriate fetish themed initiation ceremony. Alternatively you could read Raven Kaldera’s book Dark Moon Rising: Pagan BDSM and the Ordeal Path (also on Amazon.co.uk), which sets out ideas for how such things could be done and is still the best source for such material we’ve come across.

That’s ‘come across’ as in ‘discovered’. If you didn’t get the double entrendre, you don’t have a filthy enough mind.

So what happened on the ‘pagan’ camp included the following: discussions of runes, drinking, making flutes, drinking, standing around bonfires drinking, and playing the odd drum or two. Oh yeah, and some drinking. Apart from that there was the naked orgy on the last night in the middle of the stone circle that’s on the site. Oh, wait, that was just in my imagination…

So seeing as this was a camp and most people were in tents (we have a campervan, though), this is what the camp looked like. In microcosm, and taken on Fulani’s mobile.

Pagan camp, decorations outside a tent

And here’s a shot of something that really did happen on the last night of the camp: Fulani playing with fire.

Fulani playing with fire: cracking a fire whip

The pic may over-dramatise the amount of flame: the shot was a 2-second exposure at f4, ISO400. It was still pretty hot though.

So now we’re back, Fulani’s hammering away at a paranormal novella and Velvet’s doing some practical magic (aka planting vegetables in the back garden). We’ll give you updates on both in due course.

Meanwhile: pagan/supernatural stuff we’ve written and that you might like to look at includes:

– Fulani’s story ‘The Incubus Candle’, in the Xcite Spirit Lovers collection (the first Spirit Lovers volume, not the second; also at Amazon.co.uk and direct from Xcite).

– Velvet Tripp’s story ‘Go Find Yourself’ (with a lesbian theme) in two Xcite collections, Wanton Women and Submission in Silk (also available via Amazon).

Something to read and somewhere to go

Making her pay – front cover

A quick roundup of stuff here.

Firstly, Fulani’s short story ‘Filthy White Dress’ is just out in the Xcite collection Making Her Pay, a five-story ebook with works by (in order of appearance)  Veronica Wilde (her story title is also the collection title), Mary Borsellino, Fulani, Victoria Blisse and Maxim Jakubowski.

You may find it interesting because it’s the first time outside of this blog and Fulani’s other blog that he’s had any of his Nu Fetish-inspired work commercially published. If you want to know more about Nu Fetish, just check back a couple of posts on this blog and you’ll find more description and discussion of it.

Here’s how ‘Filthy White Dress’ begins:

Chloe sits in the Aztec Bar, sipping a mocha coffee. The bar is nowhere near Mexico – it’s on the third floor of a city centre hotel – and the name was probably chosen to reflect the gaudy décor in maroon and gold.

The men in suits who populate this bar, most of them networking, negotiating, buying or selling, look in Chloe’s direction occasionally. Their eyes register curiosity or, sometimes, lust. She knows what they’re thinking. They’re trying to work out if she’s someone’s mistress or lover, a professional escort waiting for a client, or a prostitute. They’re thinking this because she’s half their age, has out-of-the-bottle chestnut hair almost long enough to sit on, and wears a little black dress that shows a lot of leg and ankle boots with four-inch heels.

The fact is, she’s reading a book called Drama/Theatre/Performance and getting her head around the theories of action, alienation, catharsis, character and representation. She’s reading it on her Kindle, though, so for all anyone else in the room knows she could be reading some hot erotica.

She’s reading the book because she’s waiting for someone to come down from the fifth floor. 

And the blurb: Chloe doesn’t get the job. What she does get, by way of compensation, is dinner with the mysterious but attractive Dr. Vogel. He’s insistent she should wear a white dress, but it’s what he wants her to do while wearing it that’s kinky and slightly surreal. Their unlikely relationship flowers, though, and Chloe finds herself drawn into his colour-coded world.

The five-story collection is abstracted from a longer 20-story collection, Tricks for Kicks, which will be out in May – so look out for that as well.

Secondly: there’s a Festival of Erotic Arts in Edinburgh, Scotland, 22-24 June 2012: it’s ‘dedicated to the multi-disciplinary art forms which make up the Erotic Arts’. So there’s art, performance, cabaret, seminars, workshops, readings, short films, a workshop and a club night or two. Not sure yet if we’re going to be there ourselves (and we’re not involved in any of the events) but it’s a possibility because we’ve been planning a break in Scotland sometime in the summer anyway…

Nominated!

I was going to write another blog post today but then I had an email:

The following book has been nominated by The Romance Reviews reviewers for Best Book of 2011 in the following categories:

• Title – The Vampire Skye
• Author – Fulani
• Category – GLBT
• Sub Category – Paranormal Romance

Voting takes place here! http://www.theromancereviews.com/bookvote.php (Voters have to be logged in to The Romance Reviews).

Voting is from March 16 to March 31. Results would be announced on April 2.

It’s up against a strong field, so I’ll be grateful for every vote!

Meanwhile, the novella is available in the Amazon.co.uk Kindle shop, the Amazon.com Kindle shop, the Barnes & Noble Nook website  and direct from the publishers, Xcite Books.

Velvet Tripp’s reaction?  ‘The Romance Reviews? You mean Fulani, vampires and romance? That’s sick!’

Well, there is a bit of romance there in between lesbian BDSM vampire sex scenes, and the somewhat dystopian setting that involves the last throes of the sovereign debt crisis…

The email made my day, anyway. Hope yours is at least as good!

– F