anonymous asked:
Hi! 🙂 Is it too early to ask you about your new book, Best Women’s Erotica of the Year Vol. 4? Could you tell us a bit about your story?
Hi! Not too early at all! BWE 4 is coming out December 11 – that’s in four weeks! AAAaaaah I’m so excited!!!!
For a number of reasons, my story “Aftershock” is a very personal story, even though Tessa, the heroine, is quite different from myself (apart from the fact that we’re both German). Tessa is in a long distance relationship with Hector, a Mexican doctor, and arrives in Mexico for a visit just as the earthquake hits Mexico City in September 2017. Her flight is redirected, leaving her stranded far away from her lover in a country she doesn’t know and of which she doesn’t speak the language, and with no possibility to reach him. So what is she going to do? Take a flight home, like the airline offers, or embark on a risky journey to find Hector?
I’ve never been in a long distance relationship, and I don’t know what I would have done in Tessa’s situation. I’m too scared to board an airplane to begin with. So, why is this story so personal if pretty much everything is so different from my own life?
While I was writing Tessa’s story, my sister was living with me. She’s the most important person in my life, my person, to put it in Christina Yang’s words. She’s also a German woman married to a Mexican man, who just had her first baby in a long distance relationship. She lived with my family for three months, waiting to return to Mexico City with my baby niece. Tessa’s story was born one morning when we sat in the kitchen, remembering the fear and impotence we (both, but she more than I, of course) felt when the 2017 earthquake hit while she was an ocean away from her husband. And we laughed when she told me that he had slept through it, because his apartment building is built on different substrate and barely shook at all.
It’s weird to have personal stakes in a catastrophe happening on the other side of the world, and being unable to do ANYTHING – besides feeling guilty for also being glad you (and your person) weren’t there when it happened. But we wondered: what would my sister have done, had she arrived for the first time just as it happened? Mexico City Airport was closed and evacuated, flights were redirected. And when my sister visited her then boyfriend for the first time, she had nothing but a mobile number – and there was no cellular network directly after the earthquake, so how would she have reached him? And how would I reach my sister if another strong earthquake were to happen now, while she’s there? I hope I would be like Tessa, who finds the strength to go on a quest in search of her lover.
Tessa’s story is one of romantic love, but it’s not that different from the deep, absolute love I have for my sister. In the end, it’s love that offers us the strength to cross into the unknown, to take risks and get out to help the people who need us, and save the ones we can. “Aftershock” is such a personal story because I, too, would move heaven and earth to find my sister.
You can preorder Best Women’s Erotica of the Year Vol. 4 here:
Kindle: http://mybook.to/bwe4ebook
Print: http://mybook.to/bwe4print
https://www.bweoftheyear.com/bwe-of-the-year-4 (Universal buy links)
Now that Salt is finally out, it’s time for me to get on with the next twisted fairytale — after all, I want this to be a series. I have a short list of fairytales I want to write, but as all of them are rather dark and in the realms of erotic horror, none of them seems a good fit for a continuation of what I started with Salt. Especially not since I want the next story to revolve around Durwin, Aiden’s gruff and rough man in Salt. He’s a difficult character to begin with, so I don’t want to put him into a story that makes him fully irredeemable and unlikeable — only a little. After all, I’m all here for complex and complicated characters.
Since there is no story on my list that is a good fit for Durwin, I spent the last days searching a home for him in another fairytale, and I think I found the right one. Apart from being not too dark, the story had to fulfill other conditions as well: I don’t want to lose any momentum I may be able to build up by writing in a completely different niche, so apart from having kinky bdsm elements, it also has to be hetero (I’m so sorry, I promised my dear friend Ann to finish the lesbian fairytale I started forever ago… I will do that next!) and predominantly mdom. I hate to limit myself too much in terms of what to write, but I also have to eat, so there is that. Additionally, I don’t want to tell the ever same stories that are repeated over and over again, so Little Red Riding Hood, Snow White, Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty are out. Continue Reading
Tomorrow starts my favorite month of the year, November. The beautiful, terrifying month of novel-writing-frenzy. I’ve failed every single one of my last three attempts at nanowrimo and camp nanowrimo, and yet I am here to try it again. I have too many WIPs as that I should start yet another one, and too little motivation and ideas on top of it. All I have is my basic premise and a cover (because instead of creating an outline or brainstorming plot, I created the second most important thing you need to write a novel: a cover).
I also have the firm resolution to keep this story as free of smut as possible (which means I will allow myself between one and three sex scenes but not a single one more). I haven’t written nearly as much this year as in the years before, and every single story I wrote was erotica and bursting with smut. And there’s nothing wrong with that. I love writing sex, and I’m pretty good at it. But I need to make sure I haven’t unlearned to write anything else. So my nano story is going to be my practice-piece. A story to reconnect with storytelling beyond carnal desire. Continue Reading
Writing is hard. Writing in a second language is some next level of hard. And I don’t say this to complain, after all, I chose to do this. And I love doing it. By now I probably forgot how to write in my native language. Still, sometimes, I miss the effortless elegance and ease of writing in a language where I definitely know how this [thing of the day giving me trouble] is called.
At long last. I should learn not to give myself deadlines, for they seem to be a surefire way to give myself writer’s block. After some struggling, cursing, lying on the floor and crying, I finally managed to finish this chapter. You can find the book mentioned in the text here (in French). An English translation can be found in Robert Darnton’s The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre Revolutionary France (a very entertaining read that I enjoyed immensely; I will surely come back to this). The translations in this chapters are my own, and I take responsibility for every mistake I made. My French is… rusty, to say the least. Continue Reading
Three years ago, I wrote this post about taking a detour around my haunted head. I was writing a story I have long since scrapped (or, let’s say, I saved it for later). Instead of concentrating on the main plot, I wrote a 30K piece about the villain and the heroine getting down and dirty with each other. And all of a sudden, writing happened almost magically and on its own. Before, I struggled to get my daily word count goal of 300 words down. When I finally gave in and wrote what was basically a wild AU fanfic for my own, unfinished story, I wrote 3000 words a day.
This was before I started writing actual fan fiction. Now my little detour has turned into a rather extensive trip. But that’s not a bad thing, really, and here is why. Continue Reading
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