Go! Check it out! And vote.

If your favourites aren’t on the list (two of mine weren’t), you can vote via email – bung your picks in an email to bookclub@abc.net.au.

My picks? “Cloud Street” and “Breath”, both by the incomparable, magical, lyrical Tim Winton and an old one – “My Crowded Solitude” by Jack McLaren.

Ebooks are a new one for me — all of my previous acceptances have been in print anthologies, websites, or newsletters (promotions and the like). I’ve never had an ebook, with my name on it out there.

Anyway, the point of this post is to ask, shamelessly but nicely, if my trusted friends group (that would be you) would be so awfully kind as to click on the below link, poke around a bit, like it on Facebook, Twitter or whatever else those funny buttons are on the top, and maybe recommend the story to anyone they think would be interested.

Take a look at it here, read the excerpt, poke around the site. There’s a lot of great reading on JMS Books.

Cheers and Beers xox

In the last couple of weeks, I discovered a story of mine was copied without my knowledge and posted on a site, “credited” to me (“I’m just posting this for my friend, Cheyenne Blue”). I’m still working on getting that removed.

However, this isn’t the first time it’s happened. Another original story of mine was posted on a bulletin board “to share” (I got that removed by emailing the site owner). Another story was stolen, the names of the characters were changed and it was posted on a fanfiction site with no acknowledgement to me whatsoever. That’s gone too.

Paul Kelly writes in his memoir that he has borrowed things in his songwriting. Titles. Phrases. Chord sequences and riffs. A phrase a friend once said about Anastasia always changing her mind. The song title “Don’t start me talking” was taken from a song by the same name of Sonny Boy Williamson (1955), which also inspired Elvis Costello to use it as the first line in “Oliver’s Army”.

I have reused snippets. Sometimes consciously, sometimes I’ve only realized it after the event. Very occasionally sentences, more often just a pairing of words or a fragment. Most often from my own writing (there’s one particularly sentence, I realize to my shame, I’ve used three times in three different stories).

I’ve seen it in other writers too. Other stories, that I’ve thought “That reminds me of so-n-so’s story”. Once I came across a story where the sex scene was a word for word copy of the sex scene in another story – by the same writer, so it was her own writing she was reusing, but it was a couple of pages long, not a couple of paragraphs. Curiouser and curiouser!

There are some quotes that are so instantly famous that the reader recognizes them as being from something else, even if they are unaware of the source. They have become like a cliché – a sequence of words the writer didn’t invent, but uses anyway. Did you recognize “Curiouser and curiouser” as being from “Alice in Wonderland:? Chances are you realized I didn’t come up with the expression, even if you didn’t remember its source.

There are legal definitions for acceptable use of others’ works, which govern quoting from, critiquing of, parody, public domain and a myriad of other reproductions. Clearly, in my examples above, the reposting of my stories without permission is a clear breach of copyright. As titles cannot be copyrighted, Paul Kelly’s and Elvis Costello’s reuse of the title “Don’t Start Me Talking” is obviously fine. But what about those conscious or unconscious borrowings of fragments, sentences, twinned words?

To me, much of this comes under the heading “lazy writing”. It’s bloody lazy of me to use the same sentence to describe a beating heart in three separate stories. We all have our comfort language we like to use (ask my betas how often I use sticky/stickiness, for example); that’s a well-worn groove that it’s too easy to fall into. Lazy. However, is it lazy of me when I read a book and a pair of words jump out at me – maybe a perfect description, maybe I just like the sound of them together- but for whatever reason the words get stored away in my head to reappear later, almost certainly in a different context from the original use.

I don’t think I’m being lazy, when I remember a phrase someone has said and I file it away for later use. A friend once was recounting a story which included the phrase “My ex was up a ladder in Lekemba” and I immediately thought, what a fantastic title for a story that would make. It’s jotted down in a file I have for such snippets – potential titles, opening lines, phrases, concepts, ideas. If you ever stumble across a story with that title, there’s a good chance I’ll have written it! Lekemba, btw, is a suburb of Sydney.

Writers (and songwriters, and other creative beings) are largely filters. They take something they’ve seen, heard, experienced, imagined, read, watched, dreamed, fantasized, and they process it through their head until it comes out in their own words. Even though I’ve never murdered someone, been pregnant, traveled in space or done many of the things I’ve written about in my erotica, I’ve experienced those things via other mediums (or simply in my head) sufficiently that I’m able to filter those experiences and come up with something of my own. It depends on how wide the mesh of the filter is as to what gets through.

So, dear friends, what is acceptable? Reusing pairs of words, sentences, paragraphs? From your own or other people’s work? Pinching a title? What about plots? Dialog? A sex scene? What is acceptable, in your view? And if it’s acceptable in the public eye, do you consider it acceptable from the point of view of your own integrity?

Don’t start me talking, I could talk all night.

So why, when there’s so much vampire erotic out there, should you buy this ebook?

Good stories, almost free (it’s a 99c download for Kindle). Great stories. Great authors.

My story, “The Taste of B Negative” is a story I’ve had sitting around for a while. It was hard to place — not erotic enough for some markets, not romantic enough for others. An edgy feel, a twist in the tail. I like it. It’s a story I’m proud of (well, I’m proud of all of them). One I look back at and think, “Yeah. I dun good”.

Check it out!

In some ways this is a first for me — it’s my first “erotic romance” story as opposed to “erotica” (or smut or porn or literary erotica, or whatever label you care to slap on my stories). It was tons of fun to write this story, so much so, that when I finished I found it had ballooned to a whopping 3,000 words over the limit. Brutal editing ensued, and luckily Delilah liked the result enough to include it.

Here’s the droolworthy cover:

And here’s the Table of Contents and introduction from Delilah. “Veteran erotica writer”? Moi? Well my first published erotica story was in 2001, so I guess that makes me a veteran in this game!

I’m a bit late on this — the results were out in December 2011, but I’ve just stumbled across it as I was googling to see if the latest novel by the amazing, incomparable Haruki Murakami is available in paperback. Yes, it is. Yay! And it’s a bad sex finalist. Not so yay, but having read a few of them, I have to say it’s a good pick.

“served no purpose, and had no effect, other than to lessen the status and human dignity of gays and lesbians in California, and to officially reclassify their relationship and families as inferior to those of opposite-sex couples.”

Well, duh.

Congratulations California.

Australia isn’t forgotten here. You can sign the petition for marriage equality here or you can petition the ex-priest with big ears and budgie smugglers to allow the opposition a conscience vote on the issue here

Go for it!

It’s only 4km return (that link lies) but it’s a volcanic plug that stands 485 metres. Most of the “walk” is a scramble up rocks, the odd bit of concrete step, 3 flights of metal stairs, and some extremely slippery shale. There’s a chain to hang on to for the worst bits, but it still breaks your balls.

They have a King of the Mountain Race every July. Participants start and finish in the township of Pomoma and so add on an extra 2 or 3 kms to the distance. The record is 22 minutes. 22 freaking minutes for a near vertical race. I am beyond impressed. It took us about 1 hour 45 minutes return.

Of course, then we came home and ate hash browns, fried eggs, mushrooms, tomatoes and a huge plate of tropical fruit, so any virtue in mountain climbing before breakfast is overruled.

And then I made Tomato Kasundi.

INGREDIENTS

50g fresh ginger, peeled
50g garlic cloves, peeled
2 green chillies, split and seeded
1 large onion, peeled and roughly chopped
1 tablespoon black mustard seeds
2 sprigs curry leaves
1 tablespoon turmeric
2 tablespoons ground cumin
1 tablespoon paprika or chilli powder (or a combination)
1 tablespoon dry mustard
½ cup vegetable oil
½ cup brown malt vinegar
1½ kg roma tomatoes wash and roughly chopped
1 cup sugar
1½ tablespoon salt
METHOD

Blend ginger, garlic, chillies and onion to a paste in a blender.

Heat a large pot and add half of the oil and mustard seeds and fry until they ‘pop’. Add curry leaves and stir as you add them as they will splutter. Add the remaining spices and garlic and chilli paste and cook another minute or until fragrant.

Add the remaining ingredients and bring to a boil. Reduce heat; simmer, stirring occasionally, for about 1 hour or until thick and ‘jammy’.

Spoon into sterilised jars with a layer of remaining oil on top. Cap and store — improves with age.

Now, if I could write something my day would be complete!

The anthology is a lesbian one with a sporty theme. I love sporty! And although my story is one about running, I don’t need an excuse to post this pic again:

I play tennis (badly), and I run (slowly), and swim (flounderingly). Then there’s boxercise, step aerobics, weights, bushwalking. I guess you could say I’m the sporty type. So yeah, I’m looking forward to seeing this anthology hit the shelves.

I’m not sure yet who else is in there. Anyone want to pipe up and share?