Ran out of keywords...

So, my latest title was a personal challenge. When I write the short stories I've been selling so far, the idea is to offer between about 4000 to 7000 words. It should be like tearing your favorite dirty pages out of a much longer book, keeping the hottest action and just enough of the plot to make sense of it all.


Yesterday, my goal was to see how many rules I could break in that short, sweet little space.

Amazon allows me a limit of 7 keywords to describe anything you publish on it, to help readers find your work for the first time.

In the case of Billionaire Bloodsucker's Slave: Good Breeding, I actually ran out of tags before I was done. It's one of the most taboo stories that I've ever put down, featuring the tale of a girl whose family has been bred by a vampire for generations as his 'private vintage' of blood. She's fed upon, woken up with a hard fuck, bred with a stepbrother, mind controlled to participate in an orgy and generally has the time of her life.

As always, I hope you all like it. :)

My first sequel...

Conditioned to Serve: Bought & Sold did very well for me. I started to pick up another story, but it didn't quite gel, so I went ahead and wrote a sequel for it. (I have several more ideas for this universe. Really resonated with me.)

Conditioned to Serve 2: Billionaire's Sexy Spy uses the same setting and most of the same characters, but is a self-contained story. For the time being, I don't want to engage in too much serialization. Spoils the whole point of this short story experiment.

I hope you all like it.

Here's a sneak peek:

I padded down the ladder of the Unforgettable, wearing nothing but a glossy blue micro bikini, a tasteful silver choker and my ear piece. 

Hugh was sitting in the dining area, watching a ninety inch flat screen TV, a bottle of Cristal in his hand. It seemed like an odd choice for the evening news, but he could afford it. He glanced up at me and asked, “Finished sunning yourself, babe?”

All he was wearing was a pair of loose fitting green shorts, and I appreciated that. Hugh spent plenty of time with a personal trainer, and it was nice to get a view of his washboard abs.

I shook my head at him and said, “Got some lousy weather rolling in, Sir. Conrad told me to get below.”

“Good man,” Hugh smiled at tapped the deck in front of him with his foot.

I slid gracefully to a kneeling position at his feet, sideways so that I could easily look at either him or the television.

Hugh Creighton Elliston was somewhere between the 680th and 690th richest man in the world, depending on how the market was doing on any given day. Besides the yacht we were riding in, his assets included a majority holding in an Alaskan oil company, concerns in several investment banks, private planes, fancy cars, several mansions… 

And, of course, me. 

I’m told I came with a sticker price of something like half a million dollars. I wanted to get a tattoo of the exact figure on my ass, but Hugh liked my skin unmarked, and he’d gone to great lengths to remove my ability to refuse him anything.

Another brainwashing story

So, here's the latest story. It's the simple tale of an unemployed girl who receives a mysterious phone call that ultimately leads to her being bought by a billionaire, as his personal sex toy.

Here's a brief excerpt:

I looked into my fridge and frowned. There wasn’t much in there: a carton of milk of questionable age, a couple boxes of cold Chinese food and a half full jar of sliced pickles I didn’t remember buying. There were chocolate diet shakes in the cupboard, but I was tired of them.

Things had been tight, lately.

Seventy five seconds later, I sat down to breakfast: a cold glass of water and a piping hot bowl of chow mein. Two bites after that, my cell phone rang.

For a brief moment, I considered letting it go to voice mail. I didn’t have friends in town. On the other hand, it was possible that one of my resumes or head shots had panned out. With a soft sigh, I got up and fished my bright red phone out of my purse. I answered, “Rachel Cipriani. How can I help you?”

A series of tones played on the line. They were naggingly familiar. I straightened up, trying to remember where I’d heard them before.

“Override 4F:42:45:59,” a mechanically synthesized voice said, “Acknowledge.”

I stared forward, watching motes of dust dance in the narrow shafts of light slipping through the slats in my venetian blinds. I heard myself reply, in a flat monotone, “I obey.”

“You received a call from your agent,” the voice explained, “He sent a car for you. It will arrive in half an hour. You will shower. You will dress in red. You will wait at the curb. You will perform all tasks directed by the occupants. Acknowledge.”

The word ‘perform’ sent a little thrill down my spine. I heard myself parrot again, “I obey.”

The call disconnected and I smiled: my agent Todd had come through. I’d have a job today.

Things would be okay.

I stepped past my breakfast with a pang of regret, peeling off my shirt on the way to the shower.

I'm fond of this particular setting and feel, so if it turns out to be popular, I'll want to revisit it. (I was going for a sort of Dollhouse vibe, here.)

About me

So, it occurs to me that I just sort of started publishing short stories without talking about myself. No information about who I am or what I'm into to give you an idea if you should want to check my work out.

I'm sort of in between stories this morning. I've got three half-finished ones sitting in a pile in Scrivener, and I thought I would take a break from picking at them to talk a little bit about myself here, to help anyone who finds this place with that.

The short version is that I come from a family that's included published authors. You probably haven't heard of them, even though some bills got paid that way. As a result, I've always held a pretty unromantic view of the life of an author. To me, it was always about rejection letters and uncertainty, not empowerment.

I decided to go a different route. My degree's not in literature or anything, and my prior work experience has very little to do with creative writing.

The thing is, storytelling is in the blood. I've done a lot of RP, much of it sexy. Lots of stories for small audiences or single partners. I still remember when Yahoo was shiny and new. They had groups for fetishes I hadn't even considered.

It's weird to think about a time when I was innocent, but I've got the logs safely tucked away.

I probably never would've tossed anything out into the wild, except for e-books. Self publishing sort of turned the whole idea of writing on its head for me: suddenly, selling a story wasn't about waiting six months to hear back from one of the big publishing houses. I discovered that all I had to do was write stuff and it could be live the same day. I did a little research about covers, roped a couple people into proofreading my work for typos, and the rest is pretty much documented here.

My first blog post was a hurried afterthought because I was trying to make sure I did everything right when I submitted my first story for publication.

I picked erotica because the two things I enjoy most as a writer are full length novels and short, steamy scenarios. I can't really afford to take months to polish a novel and offer it up in the hopes people will buy it... at least, not with my budget the way it is now. So I settled on short stories. The way I figure it, if I spend today making something unpopular, I can always try again tomorrow with something fresh and new.

As for what I like, my own tastes are pretty broad. There are two big themes I like to explore:

1) Sci-fi and fantasy.
I spend all day on Earth, so when I'm fantasizing, I like to go someplace else. I'm a fan of stories both mainstream and obscure. I love Lovecraft and Star Trek and Harry Potter, but I also remember War Against the Chtorr and Riverworld and a thousand other places.

I like my vampires, but I like them to break the usual molds: BBC's Ultraviolet and Brian Lumley's Necroscope really stand out, when I imagine them. I'm hoping to do something neat with those soon.

2) Control.
It's hot to think about people controlling other people, either through crude means, (coercion, blackmail), or subtler and more fantastical stuff, (hypnosis, magic). What can I say? Power imbalances are hot.

That said, not everything I do will feature bizarre creatures or weird gadgets. I want to write more mainstream stuff too, just to get a better grounding in it. I don't want to get boxed into any one thing - part of the fun of writing is getting to see where it takes me. I'm often surprised by the time I'm done with something.

I really hope you all like what I have to offer. My goal with this whole project is to try and tell stories that you enjoy and remember.

So... that's who I am. I guess I'd better get back to it.

Daydreamed about dragons

This past weekend, I was thinking about the mechanics of a human being having sex with a full scale fantasy dragon, and how that might even work. So I wrote down a short story based on the premise.

It's available for purchase here. Hopefully you guys will like it: :)

(I mostly just felt like doing something a little different. The story I was working on before that didn't want to gel, so I decided to do something as different as possible, to clear my head.)

New title out

So, here's my newest title:

As I mentioned last time, no tentacles in this one. Instead, it's a first person POV story about a girl who's being brainwashed. I tried to keep it subtle and interesting, mix stuff up a bit. I feel like it was a learning experience: I almost always write in a 3rd person limited POV, but this seemed to flow pretty well.

Hope everybody likes it. :)

After edit: 

It occurs to me that I never showed off the title for the last one:

I was pleasantly surprised to find that stock photo to use.