Split and Lust Bites out today!

Kristina Lloyd

'My story starts last autumn. I want to set it down because I understand now that I’ll never be able to leave this place. And I want you to remember me as a good person.'

So begins Split, my neo-Gothic tale of bondage and submission set in a puppet museum on the Yorkshire moors. And today it’s out in the UK along with Lust Bites, the hot volume of vampire erotica from me, Portia Da Costa and Mathilde Madden. (Sorry Yanks, you have to wait till January.)

Split tells the story of Kate, a woman who flees London and her boyfriend to take a job in a weird little village called Heddlestone. She doesn’t tell her boyfriend she’s leaving. Drawn by a strange compulsion, she simply vanishes. I am Kate Carter, five foot nothing, freckled and fair, pear-shaped but sprightly, a librarian on the run.

Kate lodges in the attic of Jake, the strange, beautiful puppeteer whose surreal, doll-filled house adjoins the museum. When Kate first meets Jake, she’s smitten.

He was too tall for his suit so he was all wrists and ankles, a man almost as gangly as his puppets. I know I’m a romantic fool, but my stomach really did flip. His hat was of battered brown leather, dark curls peeping beneath the brim, and his pale skin was dotted with a couple of moles. His nose was narrow, a little misshapen, and his cheekbones enviable, his face having a refined feminine bone structure, although his neck was strong. He reminded me of a deer, full of wild nervous grace, his stone-grey eyes at once timid and serene.

Jake’s social awkwardness is belied by a dark, sexual confidence and when he and Kate get together it seems as if, surrounded by puppets and isolated from the world, they’re in a realm where anything might happen. But Kate also desires Eddie, Jake’s brother, a thickly-muscled bruiser who’s smug, arrogant, contemptuous and crude. Although she dislikes him, Kate recognises some warped part of her finds him horribly thrilling. Soon she’s involved in a second dark relationship, and all the while she's haunted by a gathering sense that there's something very wrong about Heddlestone.

There’s a cold intimacy to this place and the brothers have drawn me closer to its dark, disturbed heart. They had me from the start, Jake with his beauty and that clever careful mind, Eddie with his arrogance that gets me right in the groin. Even now, I don’t know who I prefer. I’m split between them, relishing both but trusting neither. Lust has taken me to some strange places but none stranger than this.

Split is released today along with Lust Bites. This makes me very happy!

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Something else which makes me very happy is being the first author in Love Honey’s newly-launched erotic online book club. Love Honey are running a huge promotion on my second, ever-so-slightly-controversial book, Asking for Trouble, and you can buy it over there for a ridiculous 99p. Yes, I'm dirt cheap! The book club looks fantastic. You can read an interview with me, join an Asking for Trouble discussion forum, and there are even questions for you to ponder. I confess, I’m nervous. Some people love Asking for Trouble, some people hate it. If you don’t already own it, now’s your chance. I doubt I will ever be 99p again. That’s so cheap, you may as well buy a vibrator while you’re there.

To celebrate all this happiness, I’m giving away a copy of Split and Lust Bites on my blog. Come on over to my place and add a comment. I am very friendly, so friendly that I'll say Lusties can play too.

The Pleasure of Unpleasure

by Kristina Lloyd
All writers get bad reviews. If you write erotica, your sexuality gets reviewed as well. Trust me, you sometimes need a thick skin to deal with this. We are all, as individuals, never more vulnerable than when we reveal our desiring selves to others, and smut writers do this on a grand scale. Sure, it’s framed within a fiction and no one can see us blush. But with that distance comes a space which allows strangers to pass judgement.

Here are a few things that have been said about me. I mean, about my books:

Most of the sex scenes are degrading - not arousing.

Great if you like the idea of being humiliated and called slut etc., not so great if you don't.

Ilya is a man who truly doesn't respect Beth in the least, doesn't even like her.

You would think that an erotic fiction book would be at least a little bit sensual

I pitied Beth more than I wanted to be in her place.

One of the worst Black Lace books I have ever read.

I found some of the BDSM disgusting.

Nothing against a kinky read but I don’t like mental abuse in erotic books.

Ouch!

My grumble isn’t really with negative comments; I think it’s par for the course when you’re a writer. And I’m pleased to report, they’re vastly outnumbered by the very many positive, insightful, considered reviews my work has received over the years.

No, my problem is with the way erotic humiliation is so frequently misunderstood, reviled and marginalised. I write a lot about women who get off on being used, degraded and verbally dominated; about rape fantasy; about discomfort, conflict, fear. Pain isn’t my kink. Spanking is off my radar. Rough stuff and psychological humiliation is more my theme although, of course, the physical and the mental don’t form neat parcels for anyone. When I write about this and someone says 'Ew! Gross!', they're saying that what turns me on is wrong.

An editor once reminded me that erotic fiction needs to focus on pleasure rather than be a vehicle for dysfunction. I was so stunned by this I didn’t eat worms for the rest of the week and almost quit my basket-weaving. I am not dysfunctional. I am not damaged. And what on earth is ‘pleasure’ anyway? It sounds suspiciously like scented candles to me. The notion that female erotica should be softer and more romantic is wildly offensive. Ditto the implication that a women who wants to be dominated by a man must be lacking her own mind. She doesn’t want it. She’s merely a victim and it’s her damaged, self-loathing psyche talking. Oh, purlease.

I get a lot of pleasure from unpleasure, from being made to squirm, from hating it and loving it all at once. All those who are with me, say ‘Ay!’ One of the most moving erotic scenes I’ve ever read is in Stephen Elliott’s My Girlfriend Comes to the City and Beats Me Up. The narrator, a male submissive new to the BDSM scene, after hours of being tied, gagged, hurt and demeaned is fucked with a strap-on. Elliott writes:

I had never been entered before. She leaned across my back, wrapping one arm around my chest and gripping my neck with her other hand, occasionally squeezing my windpipe so I couldn’t breathe for a second. I cried again, but it was a different crying. I was very comfortable. I don’t think I had ever been comfortable before.

'Comfortable' might seem an odd word to use in this context but I think it’s perfect. For me, it’s that sense of dreamy, egoless relief that arises in the tension between pleasure and unpleasure. Subspace, to use the jargon. A lot of my characters (jeez, I can’t think who they’re based on) get off on being treated badly, on being distressed, reduced, shamed and scared. They’re not screwballs, nihilists, emotional masochists or lacking in self-worth. It’s a sex thang. They can still function.

Beth, my central character in Asking for Trouble, is a woman exploring her taste for sleaze, danger, submission and humiliation. Ilya is the enigmatic stranger she’s newly involved with. She confesses her fantasies to him: ‘I just like picturing things where I’m being used, objectified, degraded, that kind of stuff. It’s liberating. I’m in someone else’s hands. I’m not being me.’

Once upon a time, academics wrote about Black Lace books and the new phenomenon of women writing porn. One academic, analysing Asking for Trouble, quoted the above dialogue and said, ‘So once again then, we see in the woman who liberates her sexuality and embraces eroticism the simultaneous flight from selfhood.’

Guh? Flight from selfhood? Isn’t half the point of sex the way in which we can transcend ourselves? (What’s the other half? Someone remind me? Oh yes: cock.) In Split, my spooky puppets and bondage novel out early next month (US, January), I explore what submission and degradation mean a little bit more. Kate is falling in love with Jake, the strange and beautiful curator of an isolated puppet museum in the Yorkshire Moors. She’s gradually coming to understand how the power imbalance of their sexual relationship fulfils her:

He breaks me down, strips me of inhibitions and when I’ve sobbed and climaxed until I don’t know who I am, he wraps me in his arms, so soft and tender.

Do I sound like a masochist? I don’t feel like one. The point isn’t the pain and I don’t suffer. Or rather, I go beyond suffering and into a new space. If I could get there without it hurting, I would. I think that’s why I like it when Jake calls me ‘slut’ and makes me feel bad. It takes me there, helps me lose myself […] and it’s as if I’m in a nothing space, floating. I am so free there.

It’s such a feeling to be free of yourself. I didn’t understand it at first. I think it scared me but I’m getting to know and understand it. I’m coming to realise that I want this not because I’m worthless and I must suffer. It’s because I’m human and life’s tough. Letting go is so powerful. Surrender transforms me. I adore oblivion.

Kate, like Beth, is a woman conflicted about her sexuality. I think this is true of a lot of people whose kinks are on the dark side, and I think this is OK. We hear a lot about ‘sex positivity’ and having a ‘healthy’ attitude; and while I applaud the sentiment it leaves me feeling a tad uncomfortable. It seems so neat, clean and tidy, and leaves little space for angst or doubt. Where we want to go and what we want to do or be done to us can be disturbing, terrifying, upsetting and exciting. It’s pleasure but not as they know it. Accepting conflict and contradiction is a significant part of accepting our messy sexual selves. I’m sure ‘sex positive’ was originally meant to encompass this but it’s easily miscast to imply unproblematic happy-jolly-fucky sex. It can make me feel dirty, and not in a good way.

I like brutes and bullies with a nice line in contempt. I like back alleys, seediness and squalor. I like scary scenarios that make my heart beat faster. All these things break down the ego and strip away the veneer of the civilised self. And when you’re without that constructed identity, when your dignity and self-respect have been put on hold, then boundaries shift, inhibitions are lost. If anything, those who like to indulge in being broken down need to have a very secure sense of self. They must be continually piecing themselves back together again afterwards.

I imagine a scene. To some eyes, it may look like a woman on her knees in a crack den, sobbing in shame with her hair full of piss, being mocked by a couple of thugs. But for plenty of people, suffering and degradation is intensely erotic. It’s the pleasure of unpleasure, of being split between yes and no. I like it there. I’m comfortable. The scented candles can go hang!

ASKING FOR TROUBLE: read it and win

It’s the last Friday of the month, time for our second Hot Slot of 2007, a regular feature in which we bring you a snippet of pure unadulterated filth, also known as an excerpt from one of our novels or stories. Today, I’m taking the floor with my award-winning, dark and sleazy, psychological thriller and all round dirty book, Asking for Trouble.

I’m also giving away one signed copy. Usual rules apply ie. we don’t really have any. Just add a name and a comment to this post some time before the end of February. Any old comment will do. A simple 'mmmm' is fine by me. Very fine, actually. I'm a big fan of 'mmmm's. The winner will be announced early March when we do the draw for our Valentine’s competition. And if you haven’t yet entered our Valentine’s comp, why the devil not?

ASKING FOR TROUBLE by Kristina Lloyd

Back cover (more or less)

‘I wasn’t too keen on baring my innermost fantasies. They weren’t exactly clean and sweet and besides, I didn’t know if I wanted them fulfilled. Ilya wanted me to confess all so he could make my bad dreams come true. If I’d realised how well-suited he was to do that – to drag my dangerous dirty fantasy down into his dangerous dirty reality – I might have kept my mouth shut. But I didn’t. I told him everything.’

When Beth Bradshaw – the manager of an arts bar in the seaside town of Brighton – starts flirting with the mysterious Ilya, she becomes a player in a game based purely on sexual brinkmanship. The boundaries between fantasy and reality start to blur as their relationship takes on an increasingly reckless, addictive element. When Ilya’s murky past catches up with him, he’s determined to involve Beth and she finds herself being drawn deeper into the seedy underbelly of Brighton where things, including Ilya, are far more dangerous than she bargained for.

Background

In this excerpt, Beth and Ilya haven’t even met. They are neighbours and have flirted in a slightly scary way from across the street. Ilya has somehow got Beth’s home phone number. Here, he’s encouraging her to tell him about the time she had sex on a rural train station platform. It’s starting to get a little heated.

The entire chapter, by the way, is written as a phone conversation. Yup, that’s around 20 pages of phone sex.

ASKING FOR TROUBLE: excerpt

'Go on, Beth,' he challenged gently. 'Just unzip. That's all. You're on the platform at Ford, pressed up against a wall, at the back of this waiting room. You're so horny, so hot. The sun's beating down, probably making the concrete white, hurting your eyes. Behind Ben – his body's up close to yours – you can see trees and bits of fields. The sky's blue, blue, blue. No one's around, so Ben unzips you. How did he do it, Beth? Was it slow and teasing? Or was he hungry for you? Was he desperate to slide his fingers inside your knickers?'

I swallowed hard. 'No,' I said. 'It was like this. Listen.'

I moved the receiver into position, holding it across my belly. Making sure the mouthpiece was close enough, I fumbled for the zip-tag with my left hand. The metal gave a light, tinny clink. Then I unzipped. As my fingers eased downwards, the teeth unlocked with a low, steady purr.

Congratulating myself, I released a gentle sigh. Then I cradled the receiver into my neck, hunching one shoulder to keep it wedged there.

Eager for his response, I let my fingers stroked mindlessly along the grinning lips of my fly.

'That was nice,' he said. 'Not too fast, not too slow. What happened next? Did he slip his hand into the gap? Did his fingers slide into your knickers? Did he touch you?'

'Yes,' I whispered.

There was silence. Then he said: 'How? What sort of knickers were you wearing?'

'I ... I don't know. Can't remember. I just remember – oh God, I was so horny – I remember his fingers running along the leg of my knickers, just a fraction inside. Then he kind of moved the gusset and he began ... he began touching me, fingering me. "God, you're wet," he said. His voice was all whispery and groggy, and his body was still close to mine, shielding me. I had to hold onto his shoulders. I felt weak. I was about to come.'

'Did you come then? Did you come with his fingers? Or was it later, when you fucked? Or both? Twice?'

'No, when we fucked,' I said. 'I came when we fucked. I really, really came. I was so – '

'So horny.'

'Yes.'

'And now? Are you horny now?'

'Yes.' I could scarcely hear my own words. My voice was like a breath catching in my throat.

'Where are your hands?'

'One's kind of here, readjusting the phone every now and then. And the other ... It's near my fly.'

'Are you masturbating?'

Oh, his voice. It was hypnotist-soft.

'No,' I said throatily. As I spoke one of my fingers stole past my open zip and into my knickers. I skimmed across my swollen vulva then withdrew. I felt as if he were watching me.

'Do you want to?' he asked. 'Are you ready to?'

'I don't know,' I said weakly. 'But I need to – '

'Touch yourself, Beth.'

It was what I craved. I ached to caress myself, and I don't know why, but I wanted his permission. Feeling freer, I edged into my knickers once again, via the zip of my skirt. With my index finger, I sawed along my cleft – it was so slippery and open – and my moist flesh pulsed in gratitude.

'Is it good?' he asked.

I dipped my fingertip into my entrance and stirred a lingering circle there, resisting the urge to penetrate myself fully. 'Yes,' I murmured. 'It's very good.'

'Keep doing whatever you're doing, Beth,' he said, 'and tell me about you and Ben. The train station, behind the red brick thing, and his hand is in your skirt, past your knickers. His fingers are all over you, inside you. Is that right?'

'Yes, yes. His fingers were so good. I was ... my cunt ... it was just melting into his fingers. I could hardly stand. He kept me pushed against the wall, holding me upright with his body. And his fingers worked. There was no one around. I was ready to come. I was groaning, trying to be quiet, just in case.'

'Did you tell him you were ready to come?'

'Yes.'

'What did Ben do?'

'He unzipped. He checked over his shoulders and he unzipped.'

'Sound effects?'

'What?'

'Listen.'

I held my breath, my fingers teasing. My clit was fat and tender, like a fruit about to burst with ripeness. I heard the sound of flies being unzipped. His flies. I could picture a crotch, bulging, and the zip unteething over it, gaping to expose underwear. I imagined an erect cock springing out: the erect cock of my faceless man whose name was Ilya. Ilya Travis.

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If you want to find out what happens when Beth and Ilya meet, there's another excerpt here - which may make you think I'm obsessed with thoughts of sex and seduction up against a wall. And you're right. I am. Madly. If you want to find out even more, then head for Amazon UK or Amazon US and buy my lovely book. Or try one of those old-fashioned bookshop places. Thank you.

Kristina X

Female fantasies of female submission

by Kristina Lloyd

I know it’s all tinselly and the lights are so pretty but I’d like to talk about sex with dogs. Or, more specifically, about Nancy Friday whose collection of female fantasies, My Secret Garden, caused such a fuss when it was published in the 70s. Why? Because it was so dirty. For the first time, ordinary women were voicing their lusts, and society was appalled. Many scenarios centred on female submission and rape fantasy, and women, they complained, surely didn’t think like that. In Women on Top, published in the 90s, the submissive fantasies had largely disappeared to be replaced by those of dominatrices, closet lesbians, and a rather high incidence of gals who dreamed of getting it on with the family pet.

I don’t know where Nancy was getting her data from but the implication was that, thanks to feminism, women’s fantasies had suddenly got healthier. OK, so doing it with Fido might not sound that healthy but it does neatly evade the gender politics inherent in your more average hetero, human shag.

Today, there’s plenty of evidence to show that fantasies of female submission are still immensely popular. A fem sub fantasy can be anything from a good, hard kiss against a wall, to a mild spanking, to a hardcore gangbang in a fully-equipped dungeon. What all the scenarios have in common is that he, our object of lust, is the boss. We can flip this notion on its head and declare it’s actually the woman calling the shots: as the fantasist, she’s in control of events; as a role-player in BDSM games, she probably has a safeword to mean ‘stop’. This might be true but, for me, it misses the point. And the point is: many women get off on thoughts of being dominated by a man. Or by a couple of them. Or by a whole, badly-tattooed football team in a massive hot tub. (Oops, there goes another of my secrets.)

Not surprisingly, in our postfeminist age, this can make us uneasy. Our fantasies seem to be in direct conflict with our real-life hopes and expectations. But consider the inequalities of the society we’ve been brought up in, and it’s easy to see why these fantasies are so common. In our culture, nice girls don’t, and dreams of being overpowered absolve us of responsibility and guilt. The fantasy dom is also extremely useful because he knows exactly what we want and he’s staying in control – of us and himself. We don’t have to ask for a thing. We don’t have to try and please. Take a look at him. See? He’s already pleased. Very. And all you’ve done is show up. Heck, what a relief.

The desire to be desired is, I believe, at the heart of erotic fantasy. We can imagine ourselves to be so goddamn gorgeous that our man, Mr Slightly-Twisted Alpha (back off sister, he’s mine), can’t control his base, animal instincts. He wants it, and he wants it now, and our cries of ‘No, stop!’ don’t mean jack shit to him. My imagined man is seldom someone I’d want to have dinner with. But then it’s not his mind I’m after. It’s his smouldering masculinity, his arrogance, his charisma, his cracking pair of thighs. The dominant male archetype is something we’ve all been brought up with, inside the home and out. He’s there in film, books and TV. He’s Tarzan, he’s daddy, he’s the bogeyman in the dark. He’s the bank manager, he’s Shakespeare, he’s Heathcliff, he’s God. He is, in short, the product of centuries of male social superiority. Small wonder he’s so hard to knock off the top spot.

The fem sub scenarios I like to read and write about are fairly dark, grubby acts tinged with danger. I’m not into elaborate, ritualised behaviour or heavy equipment. I struggle to read fiction where the bloke is referred to, without irony, as 'master', 'sir' or, heavens above, 'He'. This stuff leaves me cold. I can’t see the characters for the role-play. Its world is artificial. I prefer my fem subs to be ordinary, believable women who are perhaps uneasy about what butters their muffins. I want conflict, internal and external. I’ve written about rape fantasy. Sometimes it’s called ravishment, being taken, forced submission or consensual non-consent. It sounds better phrased that way but it amounts to the same thing: he made me do it, and it was raw, scary, debasing, sweaty and hot. (And here I'm obliged to add, for the hard of thinking (Wow, you made it this far? Here, have a biscuit.): no woman wants to be genuinely raped. As a concept, it's really not that tricky to comprehend.)

In Asking for Trouble, my second novel, Beth agrees to play a game with Ilya, a virtual stranger, in which they explore fantasy. Reluctantly, Beth admits to having rape fantasies, making it clear it’s fantasy. They agree to a safeword but the stakes are high: not only does the safeword stop a particular sex act, it also ends the relationship, no questions asked. In one scene, Beth and Ilya are angry. Ilya wants to fuck. Beth doesn’t. ‘Well then,' says Ilya. 'This is shaping up to be a pretty decent rape fantasy, isn’t it?’ He squashes her against a wall, his hand clamped to her mouth. Beth, whether she wants to or not, is unable to utter the safeword.

This is a key moment. Ilya has denied Beth the right to speak. He has taken her out of the game and his power has become purely physical. Language is political. Language makes us. Language separates us from animals. When Ilya silences Beth, they are no longer equals in the game - or in the world - and fantasy has become too realistic.

In the book, I really wanted to make this point. I wanted to highlight the importance of distinguishing fantasy from reality. Sure, there are overlaps for us all but in this instance, the line has to be clear. Ilya, in using his muscle against Beth, is effectively stealing her fantasy by twisting it in something else.

In our culture, female sexuality has been silenced for too long. Feminism has finally given women a voice, allowing us to articulate our desire (even if sometimes that amounts to little more than ‘uh, uh, yeah’). It’s crucial we speak and allow ourselves to explore and enjoy our fantasies, even – perhaps especially – the dark, troubling stuff. Our desire has been denied and distorted for centuries. The last thing we need to do is silence ourselves.

I’m an enlightened, independent woman with a filthy, overactive imagination. I consider myself a feminist. Why wouldn’t I? And I’m happy to say (and I’ll say if for you if you’re shy): I love a forced submission. I love those arrogant bastards.

Anyone else agree? Anyone else say ‘uh, uh, yeah’?

Kristina Lloyd

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• Asking for Trouble has just been reissued in the US alongside Black Lace releases, Dark Designs by Madelynne Ellis and Sex and Shopping. Scroll down a couple of posts to enter our amazing giveaway competition, featuring these 3 books and many, many more!


• To read more about Asking for Trouble, click here. To read an extract, click here.


• The image at the top of this post is copyright Kristian Purcell and is used here with kind permission of the artist. Take a look at Kristian's website. His work is lovely.

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