After honing my craft working as a journalist for several decades, upon retirement the moment finally came for me to do something completely different: write for pleasure. Of course, I always enjoyed writing for a living, but it’s a very different thing to actually have the opportunity to choose your own subject matter and explore it in precisely the manner you wish.

So a couple of years ago I decided not only to create a work of complete fiction, but also to explore one of the most frequently maligned genres: erotica. I’ve never thought that sex and good literature were mutually exclusive—though a lot of erotica out there seems to suggest that they are. I set out to write a thoughtful, humorous, and character-driven story that treats its readers as the intelligent consumers they are! The result is my first novel, Spank:

When George Aloysius Brown, a retired civil servant, accepts a challenge from his creative writing teacher to ‘step outside his comfort zone’ and write erotica, his research leads him into a bizarre world of strange and fascinating characters.

He visits a S&M club where he befriends a trainee dominatrix who wants to be a ballet dancer. He auditions for an adult movie directed by a titled lady. He visits a librarian who entertains “assertive older gentlemen.” George enjoys his new life as a researcher until he buys telephone sex from a B grade movie actress and it all goes horribly wrong.

The plot thickens when he forms a literary alliance with Catherine Mallory Jones, a beautiful Cambridge University graduate and aspiring romance writer, who has a dark sexual past. When her past catches up with her and she fears for her life, she turns to George for help. Their friendship deepens and until there is one final improbable adventure. 

Please enjoy an excerpt from Spank that includes a little meta glimpse into the world of writing erotica:

George and his friend Dolly discuss his new book research and project

“In the cold light of Tuesday George had some misgivings about show and tell with Dolly, but Wednesday followed on its weekly rotation and George felt he had nothing to lose. He knew Dolly Bloom to be a very proper person so he put on collar and tie and reminded himself of the social etiquette. He would have to remember to crook his little finger around the handle of his teacup at precisely the correct angle. As things turned out, Dolly’s mind was on more than teatime.

“Alright George, spill it,” she told him after he had hung up his hat and coat.  “Let’s hear the juicy details.”

They were sitting on her antique Chippendale chairs across from each other at the dining room table of her cozy little flat near the Ebury Street Bridge. As he had expected it was heady with the fragrance of flowers.   Dolly Bloom, looking her usual ample self in a floral frock trimmed with several yards of Belgian lace nudged a plate of chocolate digestives in his direction with a plump elbow and poured him a cup of her finest Sri Lankan tea.

“Out with it,” she demanded. “What sort of a novel are you writing, romance, suspense, crime, comedy, a whodunit – I love whodunits – what’s it all about, Georgie?”

George took a deep breath, making a quick check on the crook in his little finger.

“The genre is erotica,” he said. “Erotic discipline, spanking really, there’s quite a bit of that, but there’s lots of other sex in it too.” George thought it best if he came right out with it.

Dolly put down her chocolate biscuit and slowly raised an empty hand to her mouth. She was blushing like a prize-winning petunia.

“Oh, my, is it now? Spanking, you say.” She said the word carefully as if she might break it.  It was not something she herself was accustomed to saying. She shifted uneasily on her Chippendale chair.”

Award winning journalist Alan Daniels was a daily newspaper reporter and editor in London, Sydney, Hong Kong and Vancouver. Married with children, he is currently working on his second novel.

Spank : The Improbable Adventures of George Aloysius Brown

When George Aloysius Brown, a retired civil servant, accepts a challenge from his creative writing teacher to ‘step outside his comfort zone’ and write erotica, his research leads him into a bizarre world of strange and fascinating characters.

He visits a S&M club where he befriends a trainee dominatrix who wants to be a ballet dancer. He auditions for an adult movie directed by a titled lady. He visits a librarian who entertains “assertive older gentlemen.” George enjoys his new life as a researcher until he buys telephone sex from a B grade movie actress and it all goes horribly wrong.

The plot thickens when he forms a literary alliance with Catherine Mallory Jones, a beautiful Cambridge University graduate and aspiring romance writer, who has a dark sexual past. When her past catches up with her and she fears for her life, she turns to George for help. Their friendship deepens and there is one final improbable adventure.  Purchase on Amazon

Follow Alan Daniels Website / Facebook / Twitter

*About the Author* Award-winning journalist Alan Daniels was a daily newspaper reporter and editor in London, Sydney, Hong Kong and Vancouver. Married with children, he is currently working on his second novel.

He rides in like a phoenix from the fire, black coat fanned out behind him. He’s a good
man with a dark past, perhaps a penchant for violence, but it stems from passion not
cruelty. He’s a lover standing in the rain, bleeding and victorious, come to find the one
who makes him whole.

A Hero.

The archetypical lover of women and role-model of men. We all know who he is, the
outline of his shape branded on our psyche. From Achilles to Clark Kent, from James
Bond to John McClane, he is a flawed and deeply driven man.

What is it about the larger than life icon of “Hero” that draws readers in? The
psychological need to believe in someone who can do exceptional things. I think maybe
it has something to do with the idea that one person can make a real and concrete change
in the world. Heroes are often imbued with supernatural abilities or extraordinary
qualities, but it’s not necessary for the hero to be from Krypton to pull us in to their
plight. In fact, it’s not the supernatural of Superman that makes him a hero, but the
goodness of Clark Kent.

It’s so easy in the sea of chaos we find ourselves in as individuals to feel that nothing
we do has any real impact. Apathy reigns supreme and in our busy lives the important
things like life, liberty and justice have to wait until after our taxes are done. But a hero,
someone with a single-minded focus, acting for good, can make a real difference.

The hero character inspires us, makes us want to take up jujitsu and hunt down our
nemesis thereby freeing the city. Real life isn’t so easy, not so black and white, which
makes these iconic stories stand out.

In Shadow on the Wall Recai Osman is a man adrift. He is removed from his culture, his
religion, and his legacy. But when faced with the existence of real evil he is called to act.

In Book One of The SandStorm Chronicles Recai must grapple with his own insecurities
and complicated past before he can head Allah’s call to become The SandStorm.

Shadow on the Wall: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0983876908

My blog is all ages: http://www,fightingmonkeypress.com

My tumblr is 18+ only: http://pavartidevi.tumblr.com/

My Fan Page needs your likes: https://www.facebook.com/#!/FMPress

My Twitter likes friends: http://twitter.com/#!/PavartiKTyler

My Google+ is random: https://plus.google.com/?gpinv=JFSVnKSj7Uk:FdjR-3NCJW8#me/posts

The Lust Garden

With her perfectly tousled blonde hair and pink, pouty lips, Gianna Salvani is the girl everyone loves to hate. She has it all – fame, fortuneand unrivaled beauty. But behind the seductive smile is an insecure girl who still grieves for the father she lost years ago. With a controversial new film in the can, and the release of her debut album looming, Gianna ispoised to take center stage. But when a shocking secret leaves her exposed, her fame will bring her face-to-face with a nightmare she never saw coming. Because lurking in the shadow of her spotlight is an obsessed killer with plans of his own for Gianna.

Ignited by his first conquest, Gianna’s greatest admirer begins a brutal hunt to claim her as the ultimate trophy in a string of look-alike murders. Motivated by envy, he forces himself into her seemingly untainted world and threatens to ruin everything she’s built by revealing a hidden tie that binds them. And if you knew his secret, you’d want to kill her too

Kindle / Paperback

Billy Jolie graduated from the University of South Florida with a degree in Mass Communications. He lives in the Tampa Bay area.

Follow him on Facebook / Twitter / Blog / Goodreads

Read an excerpt

Victoria, a nosy news reporter, is grilling Gianna hard during an interview when she asks her personal questions about her family, which sets the superstar off…

Caution: Language

“I hate to backtrack here, but I’m definitely intrigued with the relationship between you and your mother. Publicly, you’ve been estranged for years… ever since the death of your father. Have you reconciled? Or would you agree that his passing is the single cause for the strife between the two of you?”

Gianna stared blankly. She was in shock.

Are you kidding me? You’re reading from scribbles on a notepad and asking me questions about my father… Like it’s not an issue, like he was nothing at all to me. Shit! Don’t do this… Keep it together, G. Get up… Walk away and end this charade.

“Do you need me to repeat the question?”

Gianna gritted her teeth. “You’re way out of fucking line! Do you actually think I’m going discuss the problems I have with my mother with someone like you. And how dare you bring up my father in a shitty, ridiculous interview like this.”

Gianna was furious. She felt a huge knot tightening in her stomach. Her father was off-limits. No one had the right to go there. He was never spoken of. His death had been shattering. And he was buried deep in her heart now.

Victoria recoiled. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to–”

“You did!”

Gianna quickly texted 9-1-1 to Blair. Seconds later he was at her side with a worried expression coloring his usually jovial face. He recognized her look immediately and knew he had to get her out. Get her away from this woman.

He took her cue and said, “It’s that time.”

“That’s right. We have that thing, don’t we?” Gianna replied, faking it.

“Leaving so soon?” Victoria replied, knowing she’d struck a chord with Gianna. She was squirming. It was almost comical to watch. There was more to the story and she’d be damned if she was going to let her get away unscathed.

By Brooke Moss

Hi! And thanks for having me on the blog today.

You know, as I was getting ready to write this guest post, my four year old son walked

past me, and touched the keyboard on my laptop, as well as the stack of papers resting next to it.

Now, normally this wouldn’t phase me, except for the fact that his little fingers were covered in

peanut butter—and the stack of papers in question happened to be a manuscript I am editing.

*Thud. Head on desk.

Now would be a good time to tell all of your readers that I love my son. Really, I do. But

I’d been working on those edits for weeks, and this was the final copy. Once I read through it, I

was going to send it off to my editor and then twirl around in my backyard like Maria in The

Sound of Music. Yup, I really was.

And now….peanut butter everywhere.

I guess this is just how it goes when you are an author who has four children. This is

something that just happens to a woman who works from home in he pajamas. Hey, it beats

wearing a polyester uniform and asking, “Would you like fries with that?” Does it? Doesn’t it?

*Crickets.

The best news about my sticky, peanut buttered home office, is that I am cranking out

books like my latest release, The Carny, for all of my readers to enjoy! In this story, Charlotte

Davenport wants desperately to have a family, and often covets her best friend’s lovely, infant

son. I wonder sometimes if Charlotte was at all aware of peanut butter fingerprints when she

craved children?

I’ll bet she did.

I am so excited to share The Carny with you all. Here is what it is about: At a town fair

on the coast of Oregon, handsome Native American carny, Vincent Youngblood, bestows an

unforgettable kiss on shy, awkward teenager, Charlotte Davenport. Then he disappears without

another word, leaving her baffled and enamored.

Ten years later, Charlotte is still living in the small fishing town of Astoria, while being

trained to–reluctantly–take over for her philandering hotelier father when he retires. After all,

who else will do it? Her two perfect sisters are busy being married to their flawless husbands and

having cookie cutter children, while Charlotte remains single, childless, and every bit as mousy

as she was a decade ago.

As Charlotte struggles to climb out from underneath her judgmental parents thumb, the

carnival rolls back into town, and Charlotte finds herself face to face with Vin again. He’s back

to run his father’s carnival, walking away from a promising career in medicine he started in

Chicago. Will her biased and judgmental family accept her relationship with a man who is not

only a Native American, but works as a carny for a living? And what unsavory secrets bind the

well-educated and seemingly superlative Vin to that ramshackle carnival?

After all, you can’t judge a carny by its cover.”

My name is Brooke Moss, and I write complex, character-driven stories about kismet,

reunited lovers, first love, and the kind of romance that we should all have the chance at

finding. She prefers her stories laced with some humor just for fun, and enough drama to keep

her readers flipping the pages, and begging for more! Find me elsewhere on the web here:

www.brookemoss.com.

Thanks for having me today…I hope you all enjoy The Carny. And I hope each of you

find some peanut butter fingerprints on your pages from time to time, and think of me.

Gossip
By Beth Gutcheon
Published by William Morrow
Hardcover: 288 pages
March 20, 2012; $25.99 US/ $28.99 CAN; 978-0061931420

Where a Novel Comes From
By Beth Gutcheon,

In my experience, a novel accrues, over time and from many sources, with ideas and aspects seeming to light up until enough of them form a cluster that can become a story. I read a lot of biographies and I love volumes of letters because they give you authentic voices, the diction and vocabulary of a period. A major plot line in my novel Leeway Cottage came from one sentence in a book of letters by Sylvia Townsend Warner. Her fiction doesn’t speak to me at all, but her letters are brilliant and wonderfully frank and full of the daily details of a life. At one point the love of Sylvia’s life left her for a younger woman who was more beautiful and far richer than Sylvia. She bore it quietly, in spite of being devastated, because she wanted her lover’s happiness even more than she wanted her own. Eventually, Valentine came back, and Sylvia wrote to a friend this incredibly simple explanation: her rival had all the advantages, except that “I was better at loving, and being loved.”

What a thing to say, what a thing to understand.

I think Gossip started with a biography of Emily Post. I’m a longtime fan of Mrs. Post, a very witty writer and brave, self-reliant and deeply considerate woman. Etiquette books in general paint a vivid picture of changing manners and mores, but Post’s are the most fun. From her 1928 edition one learns that is shocking to allow your butler or footmen to sport facial hair of any kind. Who knows, in this Downton Abby world, when that might come in handy? (As you can infer, I find a lot of research material in second hand bookstores.) Mrs. Post is brisk and confident, but a crusader against snobbery and fussiness, and I thought I might do a character based on her, but instead turned out to use Tuxedo Park, the very grand, very early gated community where she spent much of her childhood and where she is buried. It was the perfect symbol for one of the questions the book raises: what does it mean to be an insider in society? What does it mean to choose to be an outsider? A maverick, if you will? By society, I mean any group that sets the tone for a community, be it the local grange in a farming village, or Mrs. Astor’s Four Hundred.

This is real life, but it is also Edith Wharton territory, of course; so many of her New York plots are turned by the terrible power of social judgments and gossip. But in Wharton’s world, and in Mrs. Post’s, there is a recognized social standard and body of opinion. Our world is very different. The true purpose of manners, according to Emily — I think of her as Emily, since she feels to me like a friend — is to treat others with consideration and kindness and avoid making people uncomfortable. In my mother’s youth, good manners required addressing people formally unless you were truly familiars. When she insisted, though, on calling my friends “Mrs. Todd” or “Mr. West” although she was 35 years older than we and we were wearing blue jeans with our hair down to here, it didn’t seem polite, it just seemed weird, really a protest or rebuke, if not actually to us, then to the world for changing and shifting the ground beneath her feet.

So the deal with manners is not propriety, but kindness. Which reminded me of the “Iago question,” which you hear a lot about if you’re an English major. What is his motive, why is he evil? Does he even know? He does seem to be one of the few characters in literature or life who actually knows that he’s mean. So I re-read Othello, and Othello led me again to the subject of gossip, or rather to the fact that knowledge is power, and words are weapons. I began to think of a modern character who winds up doing something like what Iago does, but in such a way that we understand what she thinks she’s doing when she does it. You almost never meet with pure malice outside of a mental ward, but you certainly all the time meet with people who do casual harm to others while feeling swell about themselves, and that seemed like a proper subject for a novel.

But is that really where this particular novel came from? I think we all wonder why some things lodge in memory when we forget so much else; someone once told me we remember moments when we learned things. Here’s a moment from when I was about seven. The subject of rumor had come up, maybe in life, maybe in a book. My mother told us about the girl who went to confession because she’d said something untrue about somebody else. The priest said that as a penance, she was to go outside, cut open a feather pillow, and empty it on the breeze. Then she was to retrieve all the feathers. I remember my childhood bedroom, blue wallpaper, my sister’s horseshow ribbons on a string above the mantel, the clock on the wall in the shape of a black and white cat with eyes and tail that went back and forth as it ticked, and that story.

© 2012 Beth Gutcheon, author of Gossip