Following on with the theme of voyerism and exhibitionism, here’s a forray into a book about someone who spends a lot of time having sex in front of a camera.

The article below is by M. King

In Devil & the Deep Blue Sea, average—albeit slightly shy and geeky—guy Jacob meets and falls for the stunning, confident Laszlo. There’s only one problem: Laszlo works in adult films and, though he’s honest about it from the very first, Jacob finds the idea, and the reality, of dating a porn star deeply uncomfortable.

He tries to rationalize it; after all, he watches porn, and intellectually he knows there’s a thriving industry behind it, but he still struggles to overcome his prejudices…and his jealousy.

In contrast, Laszlo, both emotionally and sexually, is expansive and uninhibited. He’s a total exhibitionist, in the sense that he unreservedly enjoys both giving and receiving pleasure. Laszlo takes pride in the power his sexuality gives him, but he keeps his working persona, ‘Maxim Winter’, distinct from his personal life.

Though the book is written from Jacob’s point of view, we learn Laszlo is nervous about how revealing his line of work will affect things between them. Most of his past relationships have been ruined by the same pattern of jealousy and recrimination that now threaten his and Jacob’s romance, yet Laszlo refuses to feel a shred of guilt about what he does.

On one level, he treats it as any other career—he promotes himself on the internet, and shares anecdotes and gossip from the sets with Jacob, almost failing to realize that telling his boyfriend about something funny that happened while he was having sex on camera with another man is going to cause tension.

To Laszlo, personal and professional, or emotional and sexual, are totally different things. When Jacob challenges him, he is mocking and sarcastic, angered by hearing the same questions and complaints he has heard so often before.

Abruptly, Laszlo pushed away from the window, voice sharp and raw.

“Because the money’s good, it feels good, and I look fuckin’ awesome doing it! Okay? That what you want to hear?”[…] “Come on, next one.” He threw his hands up in spiteful encouragement. “Quick! Aw, come on. There’s always a next one. ‘Why aren’t I enough?’ How about that?”

For Laszlo, being Maxim Winter is about freedom. Exhibiting his body and sharing his most intimate physical moments with an unseen audience—potentially of several thousand people—is an empowering, liberating thing.

However Jacob, almost by default, finds himself cast as a voyeur, and he doesn’t enjoy it. For him, there is a clear and finite line “between fantasizing about a hot scene, and thinking about the reality of fucking for money in some anonymous hotel room or semi-public studio.”

Early in their relationship, Jacob forces himself to watch one of Maxim Winter’s movies. He’s turned on by what he sees, but at the same time hates the reality of watching Laszlo:

 Jacob couldn’t sit through any of those scenes to their completion. He hated seeing Lasz—Maxim—vulnerable in front of the camera, when his chest flushed and his breathing tautened and his body bucked against someone else’s. Stupid, Jacob told himself, because it was fucking hot and—in any other movie—he’d have loved it. Any other actor. But, knowing him, it just seemed wrong. 

 The problem for Jacob is that his voyeurism is automatically transformed into hypocrisy. He knows that, by being honest with him, Laszlo has nothing to be ashamed of, and no reason to apologize. But, next to his effortless, feral sexuality, Jacob feels inferior, and that enrages him.

As Jacob descends deeper into circuitous, self-absorbed jealousy, he is torn between his growing love for Laszlo, and the loss of control with which that emotion threatens him.

Ultimately, that—the question of how much we truly share ourselves with others, and how we deal with the act of doing so—is the central theme with which Devil & the Deep Blue Sea engages.

And there are no quick, easy answers.

There’s something about werewolf stories, isn’t there? The danger, the thrill that when the full moon arrives the man changes into the beast. In my series, The Unusual, my werewolf is just that. Unusual, because he can control his change times, becoming a werewolf at will. That’s handy for him, because he’s a killer out to take trophies from his victims and present them to Lee, the man he loves. In his warped way, he thinks the object of his desire will understand why he receives various body parts, left on his property or sent through the post. Obviously, Lee doesn’t understand, and the ‘gifts’ do nothing but make him uneasy and scared. Who wouldn’t be freaked at finding a severed hand in their back yard? Who wouldn’t be scared witless by getting an ear in the post?

In The Unusual, I explored the werewolf’s mind, how his obsession with Lee sent him off on killing sprees, when really, all he had to do was admit how he felt. I enjoyed the aspect of love making people do the oddest things—okay, killing is a little more than odd!—and showing how it affects some of us to the degree that we’re blinded. Parallel to that, Lee is also blinded by one man in his life, though wary of showing his true feelings due to licking his wounds over a broken relationship.

Lee is left wondering who the werewolf is. It could be anyone he knows; after all, he runs a bar. Customers come and go, but which one is fixated on him? As the series unfolds and people Lee is close to are killed, Lee leans more and more on his lover for support. Three key players are in his life…are any of them the wolf?

Due to my penchant for horror or weirdness, I enjoyed writing the werewolf’s point of view the most. He’s not all bad either, and I felt sorry for him, struggling to show his love plus coping with the fact he’s a werewolf. That’s got to be difficult, hasn’t it? Mind you, my werewolf always knew something was different, and when he first changed he felt at peace, despite the pain of morphing. I know he killed innocent people, but…yeah, I understood him, understood why he did so. He also didn’t belong to a pack so was Alpha without Betas to manage, without were-women to oversee. A lonely guy, for the most part, and only Lee makes him feel alive. The question is, if Lee knew who and what the werewolf really was, would he still accept him? Find out in The Unusual!

 Book One: The First Kill – Lee finds a severed hand in his yard. News of the murder rips through the town, and Lee’s friend, Alistair, the local policeman, finds himself embroiled in a startling case.

Book Two: The Reporter – Reporters descend on the town, eager for news, but one reporter gets more than he bargained for… The killer is out for blood, and jealousy spurs him into a frenzy.

Book Three: The Talisman – The body count mounts up, as does the pressure on Lee. He extinguishes the urge to up sticks and move on, hoping the killer will be caught so life can return to some semblance of normality.

Book Four: The Obsession – Lee’s love for Nathan grows. The Unusual strikes again, and Alistair is finding it increasingly difficult to cope.

Book Five: The Capture – Alistair and Lee go out for a meal, and on their way home find themselves on the scrubland—with a frightening guest who just won’t go away…

Pick up your cope of The First Kill here!

 M. King writes predominantly for the His and His Kisses line, although she also has a short story – Whistlebait with Femerotica, and another – Filth, coming out with the TransFix line.

Bryn: You came to lyd with the Immortal Fire project… how did you get involved with that?

M King: Well, I was first approached by Nix Winter and Jaime Samms, who had the idea for a fantasy m/m anthology. It sounded great to me, especially as there are some pretty strong similarities in our writing styles. Nix suggested pitching the idea to loveyoudivine, so we did, and the rest was, as they say, history! 

From the first moment, lyd has been a lovely working environment. I can’t stress that enough. It’s clichéd to say it’s like a family, but that really is true. As the Immortal Fire project picked up speed, of course Clare London, Adrianne Brennan and, um, you came on board (*grin*), and the anthology really developed a distinctive feel that, I think, has carried through to the finished volume.

My copy is sitting on my shelf now, complete with Nix’s beautiful artwork, and it has been an unqualified pleasure, and a privilege, to be part of it.

Bryn: I get the impression from your website that you write as a number of people. How does that work, and do you ever get confused about who you’re being?

M King: Those who know me might suggest I’m always confused, but it probably doesn’t have much to do with pseudonyms….

It’s a fairly new thing, as a matter of fact. I’ve written anonymously or under different names for a long while, and M. King is the first pen name I’ve treated as a cohesive identity. It’s just a short version of my real name, after all. The idea behind using a set of different names came about because I’ve found a lot of readers identify M. King as a writer of gay and m/m fiction and little else, which isn’t really true. 

The plan might have been to break everything up into well-organised chunks that could be clearly identified – one name for horror, one for gay fiction, one for straight erotica – but of course I don’t find it that simple. Too much of my work cuts across various genres at once, and then there’s the whole issue of social media and networking. It’s one thing to list a webpage for a pseudonym, but I’m not sure I could hold down half a dozen different profiles as well!

Plus, frankly, I don’t think readers really need to be that mollycoddled. Sure, it helps to know that such-and-such author writes a particular kind of fiction, but I’m not sure how far readers expect them to do that and nothing else. I certainly don’t read just one genre, and I don’t write that way either. 

That said, there are probably issues of style in the different names I use. I’ve written very explicit erotica as Chastity Vicks that isn’t necessarily much like M. King erotica, while as E. A. Gray, I’m writing a series of mainstream medieval historical thrillers. And so on. It’s really about me trying to make everything I write as accessible as possible for as many readers as I can. 

Bryn: How much writing do you do in a typical day?

M King: In terms of ideas, I’m never off the clock, and I have a selection of notepads, backs of envelopes (and occasionally household bills, beer mats, napkins etc…) that I scribble notes down on to work up later.

Usually, I find time to clear a minimum of 1500-2000 words a day, in between the dreaded housework, doggy things, and various other stuff. But, if I have a deadline or something’s going really well, then barring accidents I’ll attach myself to the computer by an umbilical cord and just write until it’s done. That can mean anything from 5000-10,000 words…but sleep isn’t important, right?

Bryn: And you do covers as well… (gorgeous ones in fact). Do they take a lot of work?

M King: Thank you! It’s probably no secret that I learned most of my cover art skills from Emmy Ellis (http://emmyscovers.wordpress.com). I’ve always been a keen fiddler-about-with of artistic things, but she taught me a lot about adapting nebulous ideas into cover graphics that actually work!

Of course, loveyoudivine also boasts two other fab cover artists in the form of Nix Winter, who uses her own art and photography in her designs, and Dawne Dominique, who just topped the Pre-Editors’ and Editors’ Poll as best cover artist of 2009. They both produce awesome work, but probably the most difficult thing for me is filtering the first idea that I have into the final design. I’ll go through various different drafts to achieve the look I’m after, but that’s not always a bad thing.

Bryn: You and Emmy do have a similar look to your covers, but I’d not put that together at all. Ok, off at a tangent… you’ve just done a whole series of Gypsy tales, soon to be in paperback. I wondered what drew you to that theme?

M King: Mwah-hah! Yes, Travellers’ Tales. The stories are all inspired by traditional Romany folklore which–as readers may or may not know–is a wonderful, rich, intense oral tradition going back centuries in England and Europe. They only started to be written down in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and survived through people like John Hampden and John Sampson, who collected the tales as they were told by fascinating figures such as Matthew Wood, the famous Welsh Gypsy story-teller. I’d wanted to use these stories in some way for a long while, because folklore in all its forms is a passion of mine, and I’m also a strong advocate of Romani rights.  

Back in the Fifties, my mother spent her summers with a Romani family in Kent (South East England), learning to ride, listening to stories (and yes, eating baked hedgehog!) and she recalls how the Caravans Acts of the 1960s curtailed the traditional way of life for travelling families, leading up to the situation we have in England today, where there is not only a great lack of available permanent sites for travellers, but also an appalling degree of prejudice. I lived for some time in East Anglia, probably one of the worst areas for that kind of attitude, and it was terrible to see people actually having to box their horses and transport their vardoes (caravans) in plain trailers to avoid being stoned on the road. 

Obviously, my fiction has some pretty crucial differences from the original stories, which is why I’ve said ‘inspired by’. The fact the tales all feature gay characters wouldn’t have gone down well at the time they’re set (the first years of the twentieth century) and probably wouldn’t go down too well with many Roma communities today! The way of life, both for travellers and gaje (non-travellers, also known as gorgios, or various other forms of the word) described in the stories has changed a great deal since the time I’m writing about, and that’s really the point of the tales. Yes, they’re very much folk tale-inspired fantasy, but they’re also about the way society isolates people–whether by race, gender, orientation or culture–and how that can, and must, change. 

Bryn: And… where can people find you online?

M King: You can find full details on all my published titles, along with excerpts, free reads and more, at http://thenakednib.com, where you can now sign up for my monthly newsletter (exclusive freebies and special offers for subscribers!) 

 I also loiter on Twitter (http://www.twitter.com/mkingauthor), Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/originalcinnamon) and MySpace (http://www.myspace.com/originalcinnamon), and I love hearing from readers and fellow writers.

Thanks for having me.

Jaime came to lyd as part of the Immortal Fire project. She contributed two very lovely stories – Windblown, and Black Roses to the collection. Since then she’s also released the erotic, seasonal story Muse’s Vacation.

Bryn: Jaime, you write m/m, pretty much exclusively. What made you decide to focus on this?

Jaime: When I first started writing, I naively set out to write a novel. (never did finish it). It had various familial relationships in it, a Prince, his cousin and best friend, and his sister, and their various love interests. In the beginning, the Prince’s love interest was a spy, who at first was mysterious enough to avoid being very gender specific. As the story progressed, it was revealed to me that he was a guy, and really, that relationship, rocky though it was, always rang the most true to me of the others on the story.

that was pre-Internet…

When I found Live journal, and the plethora of m/m slash and fan fiction, I found my home and my calling. It didn’t take long, less than a year, for me to branch away from fan fiction to writing about my own characters and their stories. They all, or mostly, seemed to be male. I suspect I have a strong affinity for the male mindset in some ways. I do find men easier to write than women, and I enjoy exploring relationships that explore power dynamics when those dynamics start out from equal, man to man, or, occasionally, woman to woman, and change because of influences other than gender.

Bryn: I find m/m relationships a lot more comfortable for power aggressive exchange. I know ‘Muse’s Vacation’ explores dominance and submission. Is that a theme we’re likely to see more of then?

Jaime: I would venture to say, yes, there will be more of that. While my men don’t tend to be very aggressive, in general, they do take on decidedly dominant or submissive roles lately. I tend to write blind, a pantser, some people call it. This lets stories and characters evolve very organically, and right now, the evolution of my writing seems to be leaning toward D/s relationships. I follow these trends in my writing, rather than lead them, taking things where the spirit moves me to go. that all sounds very esoteric and all, but really, it just means the characters write themselves and I listen. Right now, this dynamic intrigues me, and I’m willing to keep exploring it.

Bryn: Have you ever been really surprised by the direction a story has gone in?

Jaime: Usually, the surprise comes when I’m stuck, I get worked up and frustrated, and the surprise is how simple the solution turns out to be. I will say, though, that in the first novel I wrote, which I recently went back to re haul there was a great surprise in that one of the characters, who I blithely killed off near the end, turned out to be the love interest of the main character. I only figured this out after I decided he had to die, though. Now I’m troubled as to what to do. I could substitute in a red shirt for the death, and leave happy alone. Or I could reflect that in real life, sometimes, perfect couples are torn apart too soon. They are guards, and there is a war. Stands to reason…

In another story, the mc had sex with the wrong man. Out of spite. Not spite for his boyfriend, but spite for the man he fucked. Not pretty, but then broken characters rarely are. Fixing him is proving to be a challenge.

Come to think on it, a nice surprise would be fantastic… lol!

Bryn: I like dark and realistic, and the uncertainty as to what sort of an ending is likely. Do you have a clear sense of what your characters look like before you start?

Jaime: You’ll like the project I’m working on next for LYD, then. Dark, gritty, set in an alternate universe from our own, a very broken character, and uncertain love are all features of this next story. If the sun shines at the end, it will be through a crack in the overcast, I think. But it will shine. I require it to shine down on them, however uncertain it is to last.

Goodness. No. In some cases, I never get a really clear picture of what they look like. In one story on my website, Long Road Home (http://www.jaime-samms.net/), the characters don’t even have names. I don’t know what their names are, don’t really know what they look like. I just know they are meant to be together, however long it took them to get there.

Bryn: Ooh, this I very much like the sound of! Anywhere else online people can follow you?

Jaime: My Live Journal: http://dontkickmycane.livejournal.com/ has promo for fellow authors, book reviews, and sometimes, a personal rant or two. I also blog: http://jaimesamms.blogspot.com/?zx=767433e8e8796b26 though intermittently…

I’m a reviewer for Dark Diva Reviews, where we review romance nad erotica, and I tend to focus on gay romance, and at Kuriousity, where I review Yoai light novels.

http://ddrreviews.blogspot.com/

http://www.kuri-ousity.com/about/

I do love to spout my opinion about the books I read, which I read a lot of. I can’t get enough of the written word.

Bryn: Me too! I’m a total blog junky. Thanks for chatting Jaime.

While fiction writing is the thing I love to do most, I’ve spent a lot of this last year editing (mostly, but not exclusively) for the His and His Kisses line. It’s been the most fascinating process and has given me opportunity to get to know other LYD authors, and their work, a lot better.

I’ve edited before, and in other places. It can be a horrible job, wading through seas of typos, or dealing with stories you don’t much like. Not here. I can honestly say I’ve not had anything to edit that I didn’t love, and frequently have found myself with embarassingly little work to do. I really enjoy getting to see stories before anyone else does. This week I’ve had the pleasure of reading an awesome bdsm thing by Alex Morgan.

I’m going to make a point of blogging more often  (probably every Tuesday, maybe Fridays as well when the new releases come out) and talking about what’s in the pipeline as well as new releases and my own stuff. It may be a bit random, but hopefully interesting.

My next thing out is high fantasy, m/f with sex magic and much strangeness… more about that one nearer the time. Sarah Morton has done me a lovely cover, and I’m very much looking forward to unleashing this novella on the world!

Hey, everyone!

“Breathless”, the novella version of “Safe Word” is now available from Amazon.com!  Follow the link below and get your copy today!

http://www.amazon.com/Breathless-Alex-Morgan/dp/160054391X/ref=tmm_pap_title_0

Alex Morgan