Happy Endings

Today I'm thinking about endings, because I'm less than a thousand words from the maximum length I'll allow myself for my current work in progress.  The story, Cassandra, is Book Four of the Fair Warrior Chronicles.  The situations of the characters have gotten more dire as the story line moves along. A powerful, sinister corporation is bearing down on them for reasons they don't understand. Their lives are in danger. Their strange paranormal abilities seem far too weak to survive an onslaught by the paramilitary forces of their enemy. But Cassandra has to end happily.

If an author wants eXasty Books to call her story a romance, it must have a happy ending.  That's a no-exceptions house rule. The ending has to be either HEA (happy ever after) or HFN (happy for now).  That suits me.  I seldom know how one of my stories will end until I get there. I try to put the emphasis on starting the story in an interesting, immediately erotic way, and maintaining a fast pace of sex and action. I figure there's no point worrying about the ending unless people are willing to read that far. But knowing the story needs to end happily colors everything that comes before.

No matter how much desperation or heartache my characters endure, the necessity of a happy ending requires me to keep hope alive in their hearts. Fortunately for an erotic writer, people tend to feel pretty hopeful after they've been well laid. A piece of writing advice attributed to American detective fiction writer Raymond Chandler is, "If in doubt, have three guys come through the door with guns."  In writing erotic romances, I change this to, "If in doubt, have three three people come through the door naked." It's fairly easy to make encounters of this kind end with happiness all round.

A Book by its Cover

The talented cover designers are another example of the high standards of eXtasy Books. It is so nice to be working with a publisher who values quality work.

Martine Jardin designed the cover for my first eXtasy Books release, Mandi. Carmen Waters designed the covers for Clytie, Minotaur, and Huntress. All of the covers do a great job of catching the eye and expressing the atmosphere of the book.

 The cover designers are working from brief descriptions of the setting and key characters that the publisher requires the author to submit along with the final manuscript.  The cover information I submitted for Huntress (scheduled for June 15 publication) was:

Setting : English forest preserve; old stone cottage with thatched roof and big fireplace.

 

Description of Hero:  Andrew. Short hair, pale, boyishly handsome, rugged. An English gentleman and scholar, at his restless leisure in his mid-thirties after making a fortune in international finance.

Description of Heroine:  Camilla.  ASIAN-AMERICAN, long BLACK hair, lean body, muscular shoulders. Over-achieving and self-loathing daughter of a tiger mom. Likes to paint herself with tiger stripes. Hunts deer and men with bow and arrow.

               I read once that if there is a physical characteristic you don't want the cover designer to overlook, you'd better emphasize it.  That's why I put Camilla's ethnicity and hair color in all caps.  There she is on the cover, an Asaian-American amazon, complete with bow and tiger stripes.  Thanks, Carmen!

Here's an interview with me, posted today on Erotica for All, the lively and entertaining site of Lucy Felthouse.

Interview: Valerie Herme

Posted on May 29, 2012 by Lucy Felthouse

Here’s an author interview from Valerie Herme.
Take it away, Valerie…

• How did you start writing erotica?

By joining in the lap dance position and reaching around my lover to type Start at the Top, Mandi dear, which are the first words of my erotic novel, Mandi. Or so I wish. Actually, everything I write ends up having a lot of erotic content, so I decided it would be fun to dispense with the rest of the stuff and write as erotically as possible. The result was Mandi and a nice string of contracts with eXtasy Books.

• What’s your favourite published work of yours and why?

I have a hard time playing favorites, but I’m really high on my new eXtasy release, a novella called Clytie. The story has to do with the desire of lovers to live with free hearts. The plot let me invent a randy island resort and write some fun scenes about Minoan bull leaping. It seemed to come together in a very entertaining way.
Also I love the cover done for Clytie by eXtasy Books designer Carmen Waters. She did a great job of conveying the sensual atmosphere of the book, though I must share with readers that the story is quite away along before Clytie gets to wear as much as a ribbon, let alone a bikini top.

• What erotic authors do you enjoy reading?

I see all fiction as erotic. What else is there to write about, really? I have an old collection of short stories printed by Grove Press. Some of those stay in my mind. I love Lolita. The writing is so amazingly good.

• Where do you draw your inspiration from?

I like to draw loosely from Greek myths, but mostly I just start writing. Whatever is on my mind seems to find a way into the story.

• Do you have any unusual writing rituals?

I mentioned the lap dance position. Actually, I hit the keyboard at 5:30 in the morning, 6:30 on weekends. Those are my holy hours.

• Where’s your favourite place to write?

In bed.

• Who is your favourite character from one of your stories and why?

The title character from Clytie is more engaging to me than any of my other characters who have seen the light of publication.

• Do your nearest and dearest know what you do, and if so, what was their reaction when they found out?

Only my very nearest and dearest, who is has the biggest heart and the best writing sensibility of anyone I know. The reaction was hardly surprise, since my lover has read almost everything I’ve ever written.

• What was your ideal career when you were a child?

I still am a child. That’s why I write. I wanted to be a marine biologist, though I was growing up a thousand miles from the sea.

• How do you get yourself in the mood to write?

I am always in the mood to write.

• What’s the best writing tip you’ve ever been given?

Believe in yourself, and keep writing. I’ve participated in a lot of workshops and writing groups. I know many people who are better at it than I am, but they don’t quite finish their novels, or they make a halfhearted effort at publication of one manuscript and then give up. I think that’s because they don’t truly believe in their abilities. Writing is very largely a craft that can be learned, practiced, and refined. Hang in there!

Hot, Hot, Hot

Extasy Books is hot in more ways than one.  After being featured on Canadian television and written up in Vancouver's leading newspaper, publisher Tina Haveman has received a cascade of interview requests and speaking invitations. She earned it all with her years of dedicated work. With ebooks on the rise and with ereaders making it possible for people to maintain the privacy of their reading material, eXtasy Books is becoming a leader in publishing trends. Electronic publishing greatly reduces the price paid by the reader, the overhead of the publisher, and the constraints on the author. Hard working independent publishers like Tina put a human face on these changes.

 eXtasy Books and other quality on-line ebook publishers are the antidote to corporate publishers whose goal is to make works of fiction as predictably profitable as cans of soup. Ebooks are the answer to chain "bookstores" whose shelves are filled with book-like objects and videos. Goodbye, boring Borders. Hello, eXtasy!  

Settings

A writer wants the setting of a story to open the imagination of the reader. That's why so many classic English romances are set on the desolate, windswept moorlands, where anything can happen. Or think Manderley in Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca. Erotic literature might rely more on setting than another genre. Nobody fucks in a vacuum. If the only real sex organ is the brain, then the feel, scent, and texture of the surroundings are as important to an erotic experience, real or imagined, as the bodies and voices of the lovers.

               Isolated settings are erotic. So are settings of wealth and luxury. I try to combine luxury and isolation in my settings, such as the anything-goes private resort island in my novel Clytie, the  boudoir in the private jet in my novel Mandi, and the penthouse where Mandi labors to please her master under the libido slavery of the Master Genie drug. My story Minotaur begins in a high-roller casino penthouse in Las Vegas. My story Huntress, set in a stone cottage deep in an English forest preserve, has the rugged luxury of roaring fireplaces and a feather bed with animal skins for blankets, plus and endless supply of solar-powered hot water.

               So it was with pleasure that I finished last night's writing with an idea for a scene involving an f/f/f/ ménage in the shower of a super-luxurious motor coach.  I woke an hour early this morning, in order to have time to write it in full before I went to work.
      
         The shower is a glass tube sized to fit one person. What three limber, hungry, soapy bodies can do when squeezed within the slick tube is a real imagination-opener. One of the ladies winds up in the splits, with a foot on the floor and the other foot touching the shower head.  Her two companions….well, you'll have to read the story. It's titled Cassandra, and it's scheduled for July 15 publication by eXtasy Books.

Into the Cave

One of the classic stages in the telling of a story is The Cave, an episode where the heroine enters some dark, secluded space, and faces the deepest fear they carry inside themselves.  If you start watching for it, you'll find Cave scenes in many books and films. Classic examples include the Malabar Caves in E.M. Forster's A Passage to India, and the scene in The Empire Strikes Back when Luke Skywalker ignores Yoda's warning and enters a cave where he encounters an apparition of Darth Vader that turns out to have Luke's face. 

Entering a cave is the central event in my eXtasy Books series, The Fair Warrior Chronicles. Six students hike up a mountainside, party, get horny, pair up, and use the cave as a dark place to have sex. A mysterious, chilling power ravages their minds. They leave the cave changed forever, and take years to discover the odd powers it has given them and the threat it has equipped them to face.

Entering the cave is so much a part of fiction that sometimes I write myself into one before I realize it.  That happened with Minotaur, the first of the Fair Warrior stories.  I wrote my characters into a dark space where they could fool around.  Then I realized where I was in terms of story structure, and made the cave a place where they encountered dark truths.

Announcing Minotaur

On May 15 eXtasy Books released Minotaur, the second story in my Fair Warrior Chronicles series.  Here's the book jacket copy:

Men who enter Camilla's forest pay a price. Touch her, and she'll turn you into a living statue. Anger her, and she'll make you believe you're a hunted stag. Threaten her, and you'll feel the bite of her arrow. Try to love her, and see what you get. Contemporary romance, paranormal adventure, ménage, m/f, f/f, m/f/f, m/f/f/f/f, violence, series.

I started to write this post under the heading Announcing Huntress.  Oop, wrong story. Huntress is the title of my next eXtasy release, scheduled for June 15.  My writer's mind is always on the next project.