Just got the new cover for WHAT SUKI WANTS

WHAT SUKI WANTS is finished - in fact, it's at proof stage already - and I've been playing with a new idea for an erotic novel but I'm not quite sure how to progress with it. I think one of the problems is that I feel as though I broke new ground with WHAT SUKI WANTS and can't go back to the sort of erotica I was writing before. Yet to go much further forward might mean leaving the genre altogether. A thorny problem.

Well, let me tell you a little bit more about WHAT SUKI WANTS instead, because at least I'm on solid ground there.

I got the cover art recently for WHAT SUKI WANTS. It's a great shot of a slim scantily-clad blonde in white lace hipster knickers and bodice-style bra kneeling in front of another girl in lurid pink panties, which are half pulled down, the inference being that the blonde is about to taste the other girl's ... well, you get the idea! I'll get it scanned in soon and show you a sneak preview. Anyway, it's a provocative cover, with the photography attributed to Shackled Maidens.


WHAT SUKI WANTS
Suki is 21 years old and drifting; a waitress in a Midlands transport cafe, she lives alone in a motorhome and likes to sleep with women. Haunted by the memory of her dead girlfriend, a bisexual American called Magdalen with depraved SM tastes, she gives up waitressing and takes to the road again, heading north to Holy Island in Northumberland where they first met. Whilst in the wilds of that rugged countryside, Suki is drawn back into the seductive decadence of her old life, meeting an old flame of Magdalen's who likes to paint his girlfriends in the nude - preferably chained up - and soon begins to experience what she's been secretly missing for years.

WHAT SUKI WANTS will be published in April 2006. If you can't wait until then to get your hands on Cat Scarlett, you can find me quite easily on the UK amazon site or the US amazon site. Just type in Cat Scarlett and hit Search.

tune in, turn on

Working on an idea for a new novel this weekend, I've been listening to these tracks, in random order:

I Didn't Mean To Turn You On -- Robert Palmer
Strange Fruit -- Billie Holiday
Lay Lady Lay -- Bob Dylan
Black Coffee -- kd lang
Night Nurse -- Simply Red
Hounds of Winter -- Sting
Animal Nitrate -- Suede
Hotel California -- The Eagles
Roxanne -- George Michael version
Cool -- Gwen Stefani
Geisha Boys & Temple Girls -- Heaven 17
Nobody does it better -- Carly Simon
Pale Shelter -- Tears for Fears
Golden Brown -- The Stranglers

what suki wants

Nearly finished my latest novel, entitled What Suki Wants. It’s now down to the last few pages when you really don’t want to leave the characters and everything’s moving too rapidly for comfort. But like all good things, my story does have to end. After many erotic adventures and hard choices, Suki has finally discovered what it is she wants and is making sure she gets it. Repeatedly.

Luckily, the next novel is already here at the forefront of my mind, with new characters asking to be explored, new intriguing possibilities beginning to take shape. Onward and inward ...

scarlet vice

I haven't posted on this blog for a few days because I've been writing steadily in an attempt not to miss my delivery deadline at the end of the month. A forlorn hope, alas. I'm going to overshoot by at least a week. But it's a good novel and better not hurried. All the same, my free time is getting tighter and tighter as the days pass. I'm looking forward to posting this one off and staying in bed for a few days.



I see one of my favourite erotica writers, Aishling Morgan, had a new novel out in August called Scarlet Vice. I look forward to reading it when I've finally typed THE END on my own book.

I'm rather flattered that he wanted my name on the cover ...

under the whip

I'm under the whip these days, fast approaching the deadline for my latest novel. Things are becoming a little tense here. You always think it's going to work out okay, that even if you miss your word quota some days, you can catch up later when you're flying. But I haven't been flying for some days now, and I only have two weeks left. This weekend, then. That's when I'm going to get to grips with these last few chapters and really blow the dust off the keys. I tend to work better at weekends than during the week, for various reasons, even though I'm now a full-time writer. Perhaps I'm more relaxed at weekends and the words come easier to my mind.

One of the problems with the last stages of a novel is that you never want to finish it. Your practical brain wants to finish it, of course, and move on to your next novel, to the next fascinating character who's been creeping into your head for the past few months, trying to distract you from the task in hand. But there's also a part of you that fears completion, that doesn't want to type THE END and package it all off. Too late then for any changes of heart, for any last minute adjustments to the story or the text itself. It's finished and it has to stand alone from now on. At least until the copy-editor spots a glaring error - like the sexy brunette in chapter 3 who is suddenly a blonde in chapter 7!

So the last stage of a novel can be pretty fraught, not just because you have to prise your fingers off the baby you've nursed from page one to the end, but also because a writer needs to comb through the text as closely as possible to spot typos and grammatical mistakes and continuity errors. Luckily, thanks to a father who was a copy-editor, I rarely make spelling mistakes. But that doesn't make me immune to some of the other embarrassing errors that need to be corrected before a novel arrives on the editor's desk, spanking clean and ready to read.

When you begin a novel, you have an end in sight. And it's a tangible end, something you can point to, talk about, quantify in real terms. Most writers know from page one, deep down in their gut, what this novel is going to be like, who the characters are, how the book will feel for the reader. But of course that's what you're aiming at. It's not necessarily what you achieve. By the time you reach the last few chapters, you begin to have a fairly shrewd idea whether or not you have realised your initial vision for the book.

With my own last page on the horizon, I'll keep you posted on that ...

bluer than the ocean

It occurred to me today that I have never set any of my erotic novels near the sea, even though I've lived within sight of the sea for most of my adult life. Perhaps that's because I moved inland a few years ago and it's no longer part of my daily life. Though it must still be living inside me, I think, at some subliminal level. I just haven't connected my erotic writing to my own past yet, that's all. To the sea and the salt on the tongue and the bluish-grey light in the mornings and the way the body relaxes as it comes within sight of the water. Maybe it's time I did ...

how to hold a cue ...

'I've got a proposition to put to you. A very special deal ... and one you shouldn't turn down without thinking about it.'

'I only do deals when it's to do with pool,' Roz told him.

'Well, that's perfect. Because this is to do with pool. An all-female pool tour to be accurate, girls like yourself who play exhibition matches for wealthy private clients. I've only got seven players at the moment and I need eight for a full tournament. One of our best players dropped out last month and it's been hell trying to find a replacement in time for the new season. Most of the girls I've interviewed don't have the first idea how to hold a cue, let alone play a decent game of pool.' Carter smiled, still watching her face as he tried to gauge her reaction. 'But here you are ... and you're sexy too, which helps.'

Roz frowned, but she was curious. 'What's being sexy got to do with it?'

'Part of this particular deal is that you have sex after every match,' he said. 'With the men in the audience.'



The Player is published by Nexus, an imprint of Virgin Books. You can buy a copy by secure mail order here in the UK or here in the States.

separating the light from the darkness

From Plate 21 of William Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell

It’s never easy to start work in the mornings. For anyone, not just writers. But with most occupations, somebody is usually there, watching you, expecting you to keep to a schedule, to be seen to be actively doing something. Writing is a solitary occupation - unless you’re a script writer and have to suffer the indignity of working in a team where your ideas are picked over by a roomful of strangers and the creative impulse is constantly opened up to scrutiny. As a novelist, you work alone on a piece of fiction and the only motivation is either an ongoing fascination with the characters or a simple need to keep up the mortgage payments. Even then, it’s still a chore to drag yourself to the keyboard each day and start laying down words. One after the other, words and sentences and paragraphs and scenes and chapters, like proverbial pennies making up pounds.

The odd thing is, rather like forcing yourself to go jogging or do an aerobics class, you may loathe starting to write, yet still walk away after one or two thousand words glowing with satisfaction. Perhaps the discipline of writing, like physical exercise, releases endorphins that keep writers coming back for more punishment, day after day. Some writers become addicted to the process. Penny Birch writes her novels in the space of a few weeks - or less! - at a white-hot pace. Anthony Trollope wrote some forty-seven novels, at the rate of about 17 per year, as well as vast quantities of other fiction and prose. Personally, I’m more of a plodder than a flier. But I do try to write something every single day, however little that may be, to keep the characters humming in my head.

Of course, writing erotica brings other, more interesting complications. Like getting turned on while you’re writing. Though I used to get turned on by my writing before I began writing erotica - I’m not sure whether that’s just an individual response or common to all writers - so perhaps getting turned on is nothing to do with content, or language, or even the mind leaping ahead to what the reader may feel when he/she reads the published book, but something to do with the act of writing itself. Was God turned on when he created the world?

In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void, darkness covered the face of the deep and the spirit of God hovered over the face of the waters. Then God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light. And God saw that the light was good. Genesis 1, 1 - 4

At least God was able to see at once that what he'd created was good. There is something deeply satisfying about reading through what you have written each day and seeing that it is ‘good’. Assuming that it is good, of course. Some days are better than others; some scenes write themselves, others struggle to be born or die soon afterwards and require strenuous editing or, sadly, the last rites. As a novelist - especially as a novelist writing, like me, under a pseudonym - you have little or no contact with the reader. You can only imagine the effect your work may have on the public. Even sales figures don’t necessarily reflect that. After all, they buy your book before they read it. Not after.

So when you start work in the mornings, you need some sort of routine to get you going. Like untying a rope on a barge and shoving off. But when you find yourself intent on cleaning the keyboard or suddenly desperate to check your email - as I was this morning! - you know you need to re-focus your mind on the story, on the characters you've created. They are what keep the story afloat, after all. You use the characters to create order out of the chaos in your mind, to separate the light from the darkness.

what she wants

Some days I find it hard to get inside my main character's head. Not because I don't know what she's thinking or what she's planning to do next, but because she doesn't know.

If you write about someone who's suffering an identity crisis, perhaps you begin to suffer it with them. But I set out to write a novel where the characters rather than the words themselves do the hard work for you - i.e., drawing the reader into their world - and this sense of dislocation may be an effect of that. In any novel, words are a struggle. Finding the right ones, I mean. Not just good words, acceptable words, but the most accurate, the most apposite. In an erotic novel though, words begin to strain against the fabric of language. They can no longer hold their integrity, they become over-used, debased, tired. So in an attempt to combat that sense of fatigue I wanted to write a book where the actual characterisation is doing the work of the language.

Putting it another way, though not necessarily meaning exactly the same thing, I wanted the work to be inherently erotic rather than have the erotica layered over it afterwards by the language, the choice of words - hot, wet, panting, thick, rigid, slippery, erect - like a sheen, a glossy patina, distracting the reader from what's going on underneath the text. So the erotic element needs to come from somewhere other than the language. Which only leaves characterisation and the tension between characters, those gaps in the text where a reader's imagination leaps across like electricity, making connections between people. Physical connections, in this case.

I'm well into the last third of the novel now; the end is in sight. I wrote three and half thousand words yesterday. Today, none. That's the way it's been with this novel, all the way through. Either a feast-day or a famine. My usual method is to decide on a daily word count - say, one thousand - and stick to it regardless. But this novel is stubborn, it's recalcitrant, it's not sure that it wants to be finished. My bank account is sure but the novel isn't. Like the main character, it's not really sure what it wants at all.

the butcher & the pumpkins

A friend recently sent me a copy of Alina Reyes' erotic novella The Butcher. It is indeed beautifully written, on the whole, but there are moments when it seems to stray too far outside the erotic and into a territory all its own. Take this moment, for instance, just one of many in a sea of bizarre and apparently unconnected utterances:

Have you ever been struck by the mysterious presence of huge pumpkins in the middle of a kitchen garden? There they are, calm and luminous as Buddhas, as heavy as you are, and suddenly, before this strange creation of the earth, you are seized by doubt, you topple over outside of reality, you look at your own body in astonishment and you fumble around like a blind person. The garden remains impassive, it continues to hang its shiny tomatoes and peas in their pods, to cloak itself with sweet-smelling parsley and open-headed lettuce. And quietly, you go away, a stranger.

Well, yes. Her description of pumpkins is wonderfully precise. The rest of the passage, however, merits a place of honour in Pseud's Corner. And it seems curiously out of place in an erotic story. Personally, I can't recall ever fumbling about like a blind person after looking at a pumpkin. But that's the French for you.

Don't let me put you off reading it though; there's still much to be admired in The Butcher, and you can never go wrong with an erotic story where the words meat and flesh occur so often.

a warm dish of stewed bondage

The Book of Punishment came out last month and since then, I've been hard at work on my next novel.

I've noticed though, since being on a strict diet for the past few weeks, that I'm making my characters eat for me. I wonder if that's common with dieting writers, creating elaborate meals in their novels to psychologically fill the hole in their own stomach. Or writers on the wagon, putting drinks in their scenes. Or ... you fill in the blanks.

I suppose, as a writer of erotica, I should give up sex in that case.

Today's scene was a meal of leftover lamb, served cold in slices, with a simmering dish of dahl - curried lentils, in other words. For those who think that sounds tasty, here's a recipe for red lentil dahl.

Followed by a warm dish of stewed bondage and sex.

book of punishment

The Book of Punishment was published last month by Virgin Books. It's the story of Indigo, an antiquarian bookseller in search of a rare eighteenth century work of sadomasochism called The Book of Punishment. Her father first found the book in 1959 but lost his chance to acquire it; it became his livelong obsession, which he passed on to Indigo when he died. Indigo is thwarted in her search, however, by a dungeon-master on the London scene, Dervil Badon, who wants the book for his private collection of antiquarian erotica. The two clash in a violent and highly sensual series of confrontations as the trail of this elusive book crosses Western Europe.

Those interested can purchase the Book of Punishment online here in the UK or here in the States.

a dark & lightning afternoon

It's been a dark and lightning afternoon; the view from my window as I write has been all darkness creeping over the fields and a sense of storm closing in even as early as four o'clock. Autumn is already here, in spite of the sun we've had and the summer-feel to the light in the mornings. I managed seventeen hundred words today. A difficult scene to handle, dark and light, echoing the weather here. Maybe tomorrow will be easier.