Lust Bites T-Shirt Tour

A holiday, a holiday:
The first one of the year.
Young Matty Groves went to the Fest
For folk music and beer.

And when the singing it was done,
He cast his eyes about;
And there he spied a Lust Bites shirt
A-passing through the crowd...

(That's enough Folk.)

Highballs, Cocktails, Cones and Hoses: A Hard Look at Hot Jobs

by Shanna Germain

I’ve had a lot of jobs over the years. I started milking cows for the farmers down the road (it seemed way better, in my fourteen-year-old mind than my other option: watching said farmers’ kids), and then moved on to stacking hay. I served up soft-serve cones for one summer, and watered plants for another. After that, it was grocery store clerk and waitress. Waiting tables soon led to slinging drinks at a bar (not to show my age, but you were allowed to do that at eighteen back then). I was a paramedic, a firefighter and part of a grounds crew. A newspaper reporter. A photographer. The list, surprisingly, continues for a while before you get to my current “smut writer” status. But you get the picture (and you get this bonus picture from FX Networks' show Rescue Me as well!).

Over the years, I learned one thing from all those jobs: how to cash a paycheck.

No, not really. I learned that work—no matter what you’re doing—can be sexy. It’s all in how you look at it (and who you’re looking at). Throwing hay in 102-degree heat was hot as hell, but so were the older college boys who drove the tractor. The older-man botanist who worked at the greenhouse had the kind of profile that made me accidentally drown more than a few poor seedlings. And as the only girl on an otherwise all-male firefighting crew…well, you can imagine the kind of trouble one could get into when you throw in hot flames, long hoses and big, shiny trucks (the trucks were never my thing, really, but the guys sure got off on them).

And bartending—that might have been the sexiest job I’ve ever had (other than smut-writing, that is). Sexy drinks. Sexy customers. Dim lights. The ba-ba-boom of the music...It was this inherent sensuality that convinced me to put together a collection of erotica based on drink names. (Shameless plug: Screaming Orgasms and Sex on the Beach will be available from Pretty Things Press in early 2008, and includes a number of our amazing Lust Biters writers).

As I wrote in my introduction: Before I became a sex writer, I was a bartender. The money was great, but that wasn’t why I stayed. I stayed for the chance to pour two fingers of Jack over ice and slide it to the sexy businessman on the other side of the bar. I stayed for the shy blonde who came in on Friday nights and blushed every time she asked for a Muff Diver. I stayed because I liked to lean in when I lit a customer’s smoke and I liked to whisper, “Here’s the Wet Dream you ordered. Let me know when you’re ready for another.”

I know I'm not the only one who thinks that jobs of all sorts are sexy. Recently, I picked up an erotic collection about hot cops and another about men in uniform. But it's not just doctors and lawyers and firemen that we're lusting after. One of my favorite stories ever (sexy or otherwise) is Maggie Gray's deliciously hot and sad, "Fuck Dying," in which the narrator has a most unusual job. And who can forget that other Maggie (Gyllenhaal) and her fantastic turn as a paper pusher in Secretary? For those of us who've always imagined that librarians really are the most seductive creatures on Earth, it turns out to be true--check out this sexy, funny and haunting video about librarians from musical group, Haunted Love.

When you're done with that, step up to Bar Lust Bites and have a seat. Here's your After Work Special. Sure, I can light that cigarette for you. But only if you're willing to talk. One thing about bartenders (and writers), we're good listeners...

So, what's sexy about your job right now? Or, if you're a writer, what sexy bits have you stolen from past or current jobs to give to your characters? And, yes, we can even talk about the unsexy bits if we must (like the time I got splattered with an entire blender of strawberry margaritas--I was picking strawberries out of my hair for weeks!).

Here, have another shot. Settle in. It's going to be a long, steamy night...

Coming Attractions

Mathilde Madden
Whilst compiling that 200 post last week Kristina Lloyd and I agreed that we had the sexiest job in the world. Shanna Germain will be getting her hands dirty on Monday to find out if that's true.

Jolie du Pre is an erotica writer and editor with a vast back catalogue. She'll be here on Wednesday to discuss her latest collection, Iridescence, with Dayle A Dermatis. I hope Dayle's made a sexy job of it!

On Friday, our Lust Bites boy is here. Jeremy Edwards claims to be talking about offbeat romance. That just means filth.

ETA: Competition Winners. A huge sack of Love on the Dark Side booty goes to Triste, and runner up Petricke wins the Quickies. Carnal Knowledge competition winner is friend of LB Erastes. Please send your details to lustbitesladies (at) yahoo (dot) com

Mathilde Madden
Just off for a bath

What Witches Want

Mathilde Madden
Kristina gave you a run down of all the stories in Love on the Dark Side on Wednesday. If you haven't seen that post, do pop back because there's a huge competition too, which might make up for the lack of giveaways here.

My story in Love on the Dark Side - What Witches Want - is especially exciting because it is the first ever outing for characters from my werewolf series out in October (the first book - The Silver Collar - is dirt cheap on Amazon if you order right now) . And Americans can get their hands on it in December.

Because I am excited - and because I can - I am giving you a little snip of What Witches Want here. It is the first time you will get to meet powerful witch Lilith and werewolf hunter Blake. Characters who I hope will become very familiar as key figures in the world of The Silver Werewolves .

*

Lilith sighed. 'The whole point of the operation tonight was to find a guy who didn’t know I was a witch, but not so I could trap him – just so I could have a good time.'

Blake frowned at her. 'Don't witches always have a good time?'

'No! Why does no one get this? Look, when did you know I was a witch?'

'About ten seconds after you started talking to me.'

'And if I hadn’t been a witch would you have still come home with me?'

Blake looked a little puzzled by the question. 'Of course.'

'Are you sure? As soon as you knew I was a witch you knew you had to come home with me if I wanted you too, right?'

'Um, well, I guess?'

'Well, that's the thing. I don't want you to be here because you know I'm a witch. I want you to be here because you want to be.'

'What? I swear I want to be here. I'm not trying to leave, am I?'

'Yeah, in case I eviscerate you.'

'I don’t think you’re going to… Uh, you're not going to eviscerate me, are you?'

Lilith shrugged. Blake looked pale. Lilith said, 'See, that's the problem too. I can’t go two minutes without making you afraid of me and if you’re afraid of me you're hardly going to put me over your knee and spank me, are you?'

Blake's throat moved as he swallowed hard. 'You want me to spank you? You're a witch!'

Lilith sighed. There was something so appealing about this taut conundrum of a guy, who was wearing a suit that flowed over his body like it was in love with him and yet appeared not to have brushed his over-exuberant hair for a fortnight. 'What do you do with the werewolves?' she said. 'Do you always kill them or do you ever capture them and keep them?'

'Rarely. Well do sometimes I capture and keep them, but I'm not meant to. It's not policy.'

'What do you do with the ones you capture?'

Blake's face went cold, like the shutters had come down. 'Extract information.'

'How do you do that?'

'Various methods. And I know where you're going with this, but they're werewolves. Outside full moon they're no more powerful that the average pissed off human. But it's different with you, Miss Witch. One false move you'll flay me.'

'Oh, please try not to think like that,' Lilith said. 'So, do you tie them up?'

'Who?'

'The werewolves.'

Blake narrowed his eyes. 'Are you serious? You want me to tie you up?'

Lilith nodded vigorously.

'But, what'd be the point? You're a witch. It's not like I could make you actually helpless. If that was what I wanted. If that wasn't a ridiculously stupid thing to try and do. Even,' he added with heavy emphasis, 'if the witch claims she wants you to.'

Lilith wetted her lips. She'd seem a little chink then. A little bit of something that said he was warming to the idea. But it was only the tiniest thing. She knew she still had a long way to go. She sighed. 'Well that's just it, isn’t it? I want a man to be all, I don’t know, mannish with me and the minute he finds out I'm a witch…'

'Well, okay, I rumbled you, but you won’t get so unlucky next time. Try again. Find someone else who doesn't know how powerful really you are.'

Lilith stamped her foot. 'I don’t want to try again. I chose you. I want you. I want you to overpower me and fuck me hard. Right now.'

'Overpower…? What? Bend you over the table and rip your knickers down?'

'Yes! Damnit, yes. Forget about my powers. We'll pretend I don’t have them.'

Blake was breathing a little more heavily now. He was still standing in the middle of the room, squarely facing the sofa where Lilith sat. Lilith's eyes flickered to his crotch.

'But what if I get it wrong?' Blake said, with every part of his voice sounding like resignation. 'What if I bend you over and rip your knickers off and spank you and pull you hair and fuck you hard and one of those things is the wrong thing and you turn around and go all black-eyes and uber-powered and give me sodding small pox or something? Witches aren’t exactly known for their restraint…'

*

Amusing trivia: I wanted to call What Witches Want 'Spellbound', but the rest of the world prefered my alternate title.

And if you want a little more there's another (even dirtier) excerpt on my new (and almost ready) Silver Werewolves blog.

And look out for the first book of the trilogy in October/December (I might put, uh, *something* on the blog to remind you)

Mathilde Madden
All About Werewolves (and witches and werewolf hunters and one or two other things)

Navel Gazing with Charles Hodgson

by Alison Tyler


I think my all-time favorite discussion of "naughty bits" was by our own Kristina Lloyd. (And, yes, I know, I should just marry her and get it over with.) But in her excellent post "Cunt or: how I learned to stop worrying and love the C-word" she said, "When I was a little girl, I didn’t have genitalia. I had a nebulous zone referred to as ‘between your legs’. I can’t blame my parents. They were simply part of a certain generation. But really. Between your legs? It’s like describing your face as ‘above your shoulders’."

If only her parents had access to this lovely new book by Charles Hodgson—CARNAL KNOWLEDGE: A NAVEL GAZER’S DICTIONARY OF ANATOMY, ETYMOLOGY, AND TRIVIA. Carnal Knowledge is a book about the words we use for all of our body parts. Although not specifically erotica, we did say “all of our body parts” and the imagination begins to click into gear. (At least, mine does!) Charles is here as our guest blogger so let’s see what little secrets the English language holds for us today.

****

Hi there. In addition to writing my book CARNAL KNOWLEDGE, I host a blog and podcast called podictionary where every day I talk about the surprising history of a word you thought you already knew. I bill it as “the podcast for word lovers” and I sometimes wonder if that key-word “lovers” attracts an audience that perhaps I hadn’t intended.

The book has an intentionally provocative title and although you can’t judge a book by its cover, I think it looks pretty good, too. It’s a pretty attractive looking couple wouldn’t you say, especially when you consider that she’s 100 years old, and he’s 400. She is the Awakening of Psyche by Seignac, he’s Bacchus by Caravaggio.

Although the subtitle is supposed to tell you that this really isn’t about sex—do the words “dictionary” and “etymology” turn you on?—because I talk about every area of the body in the book, I necessarily cover the naughty bits. Or should that say “uncover”? Here are a few examples.

There are said to be as many as 650 euphemisms for a woman’s genitalia. While I don’t go that far, I do have quite a few examples. I point out that the word “cunt” has been in English since pretty well as long as there’s been English. These days you likely wouldn’t use the word in polite company but there was a time when the word was acceptable enough to fit naturally into the names of streets and people. One imagines that part of London called Gropecuntelane might have been the red light district of its day. At the time of Geoffrey Chaucer the word “cunt” was being used by physicians in medical descriptions. By about 200 years ago the word had descended into the realm of the taboo and people were being arrested for using it.

Another word most people don’t shout out in the library is “twat” but it turns out that Robert Browning, husband of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, writer of those famous lines “how do I love thee? let me count the ways” would have had no such qualms. He was under the mistaken impression that a twat was something that nuns wore on their heads. It kind of makes me rethink the counting of those ways.

A penis hasn’t always been the male flaccid or engorged counterpart to twats and cunts. The famous ancient Roman orator Cicero complained that the word he had always used to mean “tail” has suddenly become rude. So what was a euphemism back in classical Latin has become an anatomically correct term in our lexicon. “Penis” isn’t the only word this has happened to. There’s more to say on that score under the entry for “vagina.”

The reason we call a man’s cock a “cock” is a little unclear from the etymological record. Evidently, there is no written record of this use of the word in the years before the death of Shakespeare, although it was used to describe male birds from the time of King Alfred the Great more than 1100 years ago. Suspiciously, to “cock” something, meaning to make it “stick up” is documented as having taken on that meaning less than twenty years before cock the “penis” is documented. Still, that great authority the Oxford English Dictionary suggests a human cock is called a cock due to its role in dispensing fluids, since an old name for a faucet is a stop-cock.

The book CARNAL KNOWLEDGE also introduces you to words you might not know. Hundreds of years ago early archeologists were digging up ancient Greek statues. One of the more famous of these is the Venus de Milo whose bare breasts identify her as the goddess of love, despite her lack of arms. Her lesser known incarnation Aphrodite kallipygos was dug up around the same time. You know that Venus was the Roman counterpart to the Greek Aphrodite so that the goddesses are one and the same. Aphrodite kallipygos however does not have her breasts bared, but instead displays a tush so exquisite that the archeologists who named her used the Greek words for “beautiful” and “buttocks”; hence when you call someone “callipygian” you’re saying they have a great butt.

****

Learn more about names for all parts of the body in CARNAL KNOWLEDGE, and ask Charles a question or two if you'd like. He'll be giving away a signed copy of his brand-new book to one of our commenters.

XXX,
Alison "callipygian" Tyler (first t-shirt slogan of the day!)

COMPETITION: Love on the Dark Side!

by Kristina LloydIt’s here at last! The one we’ve all been waiting for: Black Lace does paranormal erotica. Tomorrow sees the UK release of Love on the Dark Side (known affectionately as Man Tits), and we’re sizzling hot and spookier than you’ve ever known us. In this anthology, our imaginations have been let off the leash (huh, like they were ever on one) and we slide into the sinister to bring you sexy tales of vampires, werewolves, timeslips and witches, of shapeshifters, sorcery, spirit lovers and semen.

Well, that’s not an exact quote from the back cover blurb but that’s the gist. Love on the Dark Side features fifteen stories, over half of which were penned by Lusties. This is our biggest haul yet and that’s because we rock! To celebrate, we’ve got two super hot prizes on offer: a bundle of Black Lace novels from Lust Bites authors in Dark Side and a runner-up prize of a fistful of Quickies, mini volumes of shorts from BL collections. Both winners get a copy of Dark Side and the biggest stash of smut also comes with a special bonus prize of my friend, Bam Bam (right)!

Oh, okay. You don’t win Bam Bam. Sorry. Slave auctions are down the corridor, second door on the left. You do, however, win this amazing Lust Bites Monster Woman bag as modelled by the divine Bam Bam, looking sexy and sultry on Brighton beach.

To be in the draw, add a comment to this post and we’ll announce the winner in a week or so. But first of all, gather round, my lovelies. Pretend it’s a dark and stormy night, and check out these other-worldly openings from Love on the Dark Side.

What Witches Want by Mathilde Madden
‘You know the worst thing about being a witch?’ Lilith said, world-weariness chiming in her voice.
‘The clothes? The religious intolerance? The cackling?’ Cate didn’t really want to be drawn into one of Lilith’s circular conversations, but she didn’t dare completely bail out either. Not after what had happened during the coven meeting. Lilith was clearly not in any mood to be trifled with. As usual.
‘Men,’ Lilith said.

The Black Knight by Olivia Knight
Once upon a time, there was a hero of most unusual qualities, known as the Black Knight. He was as beautiful as the night, with long silky hair like the sky spangled with stars. His long limbs were as lithe and swift as a deer’s. On the battlefields, his bravery was famous, and every knight would rather fight at his side than anyone else’s. His quick eye, fast reflexes and dexterity with both sword and bow had saved many of his countrymen’s lives – and ended many of their enemies.

An Earthquake in Leamington Spa by Kristina Lloyd
I am having an affair.
There, I’ve said it.
Even the words make me feel giddy and alive.
I am having an affair!
Oh God, how he touches me: his big hand in the small of my back, his big arms carrying me to bed, his big cock moving inside me. Everything about Harry is big, even his heart. Especially his heart.

Stranger to My Shores by Sophie Mouette
He was behind me, hands on my breasts. I was braced against one of the benches as the hot tub bubbled around us and steam rose up to meet cold stars. It was spring on Cape Cod, and the parts of me that ended up out of the water must have been cold, but I wasn’t paying attention to anything except him, his thick cock in me, our bodies rippling together.

Lust for Blood by Madelynne Ellis
That night … The night my world screwed up, started with the same ghastly routine as every Friday night: work, pub, restaurant, club, trying to blot out the numbing emptiness of my life. The invasive greyness of Messers Cox, Cooks and Evans, accountants and soul-suckers, is what pushes me to these shallow pools of warmth and comfort. I knock back alcohol, gyrate with strangers on the dance floor, anything to rub away the feel of old paper and tweed.

Sun Seeking by Janine Ashbless
He had the most beautiful arse.
I’d seen a lot of naked backsides that morning, male and female, big and small, but one glimpse down the length of that hall took my breath away. It was … just awesome. Not a bum; bums are soft and round and a bit silly. There’s no muscles in a bum. Kids have bums. Women have bums, particularly when they’re worrying about whether their pants are too tight. Even builders have bums. This was emphatically not a bum. It wasn't a nearly non-existent student slacker rear either, or a slightly hairy squared-off male backside.
No, this was an arse.

The Shadow of Matthew by Gwen Masters
Alison opened the bedroom door.
It was a simple thing, opening a door that she had opened a million times before. So why did the knob seem to burn in her hand and why did the door open so slowly, like it was just as afraid of her as she was of it?

To Stand between the Wild and the Human by Teresa Noelle Roberts
I stood on the narrow beach and watched as the fishing boat motored away from Torishima, shrinking and finally turning into a speck on the blue-tossed horizon.
The boat had answered my distress call, and was now ferrying Akiko, my Project Albatross partner, off to the nearest hospital, some eighteen hours away.

* * *
Love on the Dark Side is special for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it looks like being the last anthology for a while as Black Lace launches a series of novella volumes, kicking off in November with vampire erotica from Kristina Lloyd (me!), Mathilde Madden and Portia Da Costa. Secondly, Dark Side brings us a sneak preview of characters from Tilly’s Silver werewolf trilogy, arriving in October with The Silver Collar. Tilly’s story in Dark Side not only has me hungry for the wolves, it also contains the line, ‘Come on, witch, suck my dick.’ Personally, I think that alone is worth the cover price.

Good luck everyone! Comment away.

Amazon UK | All the latest from Black Lace Books | Amazon US

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The fab Monster Woman bags are available to buy from our Shameless Lust Bites' Merchandise Shop for a mere $17.99! And if you want more Bam Bam, go be her friend on MySpace where you can listen to her gorgeously haunting, sexy song.

You're a Winner!

The winner of a copy of Velvet Heat, edited by Scott McMorrow, is Ally.

The winner of Mandy Roth's PDF download of 'Red Light Specialists' is lover of books.

The winner of Marilyn Jaye Lewis' Engtangled Lives is eile.

And the winners of the A - H books are femmegyrl and Kiki. Please send your mailing address to msalisontyler at yahoo dot com. Also, if you want to be my friend, check out my new MySpace page for the ABC books.

XXX,
Alison

everybody we're moving on up
moving on up
you're a winner
you gotta keep pushing
—Coolio

P.S. Check out the pin above and other delightful accesories at Locher's.
P.P.S. Winners are chosen by the Random Number Generator.
P.P.P.S. Shameless Plug alert! Scott McMorrow is a finalist in the IVEY Awards One-Minute Play Contest. Check him out!