Have you been watching the Cover Café 2007 contest?

Kensington’s Aphrodisia line has become famous for its cover art. When I heard about the contest, I linked over there to see which Aphrodisia covers made it into the various categories.

I didn’t find any Aphrodisia covers in the Alternate Reality category, which was the first one I looked at. I wasn’t too surprised because the Aphro covers specialize in capturing that “falling in lust” moment or even the washboard abs and almost bare hips moment—but they don’t have dragons or wizards or other otherworldly accouterments on their covers. (I have to admit I voted for Magic Study, although Belladonna was hard to resist.) Sharon Page’s covers would have looked good here, though. They’re very sexy, and you definitely know you’re getting a vampire book when you see the cover art.

I wasn’t expecting to find any Aphrodisia titles in the Romantic Suspense category–even though some of us write erotic romances with suspense elements, they’re just elements. (I voted for Abandon, just barely resisting Hide.)

The Two-cover category has books with 2-part covers (a front with a second image set right inside), and I don’t think Kensington makes these for any Aphrodisia books, not even Kate Douglas, who gets raised letters and gold foil. (I am NOT green with envy—okay, I am, but it’s a pretty green, not unlike that found on the cover of Magic Study. And I’m still happy for Kate.) So, I looked at the covers and couldn’t decide. I didn’t vote in this category.

When I came to the Historical category, I thought I might find one of Noelle Mack’s covers. Not only is her cover art beautiful, but she’s garnered at least one 4 and a half star review from RT. (Again, I’m Magic-Study green with envy, but congrats to you, Noelle!) But no, nothing from Aphrodisia here. Drat.

I clicked to Contemporary, knowing we must have some great art on this page. Thigh High? Gorgeous cover. Sexy Beast? Oh, yeah. Lush? Dear God, Yes. Bound to Ecstasy? Should definitely be there. But none of them were. Damn. What’s wrong with these people? Lush and Thigh High are two of the most breathtaking covers of all time?

And then I got to the Worst Cover category, and I thought I’d fallen into the next dimension. Look at the covers they thought sucked. Lacy Danes, What She Craves? It’s beautiful and raw and edgy. Maybe not to everyone’s taste, but definitely not It Happened One Wedding, which doesn’t just border on goofy—it defines it. When Cassie Ryan got her cover for Ceremony of Seduction, I was green with envy and there wasn’t anything pretty about it. The cover is romantic and lush. The couple exuded not only lust, but romantic love. I want to be that woman. What was the nominating committee thinking? They were on crack. Big Spankable Asses? Well, the girl on the cover has a spankable ass, but it sure as hell ain’t big. So maybe it got nominated for lack of logic. But look at Kink. The cover art oozes edge. Fishnet, handcuffs, and a suggestively placed title. But the book is about kink, for god’s sake. Please.

But okay, I’m biased. I write for Aphrodisia. I love the cover art (with the exception of a certain pair of boots and a particular cover that is the exact color of a Good N Plenty box). So maybe I’m in denial about the quality of the cover art. So I start looking on the web for what other people are saying about it.

Robin at DearAuthor said: Well, I thought some of the “best” nominees belonged in the “worst” category (and vice versa for a couple of the worst noms), but it was still fun.

Jennifer McKenzie said: Wow!!! Some of these covers were great. The “worst” category wasn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be. I’ve seen some stinkers compared to those.

Evie Byrne said: Also, I protest Kink’s inclusion in the Worst. I think that design is very fresh, very strong–and edgy, yes, but heck, the novel is called “Kink.” What’s it supposed to look like?

And Robin added: I’m still trying to figure out, though, whether I like or hate the Big Spankable Asses title and cover.

So, I’m not the only one who thinks the cover committee is smoking crack. Still, looking at the covers was fun. Next year, I want to be part of that nominating committee—not tat they’ll let me because I’ll be nominating all Aphrodisia books.

So what covers would you like to see in the 2008 contest?

She’s on Top would be among my nominees for Contemporary. Sins of the Night gets my vote for Alternate Worlds. (Of course, I have to nominate my own—She and Running Wild). Dark Master and Nailed are also pretty damned hot, too. Let me know your thoughts.

*You can find a lot of the Aphro covers on our blog.

What they don’t tell you when you start writing…

One of the most common questions people ask me during an interview situation is about my advice for aspiring writers. What tips would I give to anyone starting out writing?

Aside from the advice to read, read and read some more and to sit down and write, my best tip is to exercise on a regular basis, because writing and all the sitting involved during the writing of a book, leads to bottom spread.

Yes, sadly true….take it from one who knows. It even bears repeating. Beware the dratted bottom spread.

“Exercise?” you cry. “I don’t have time to exercise.”

Yes, I can hear your words of disbelief echoing around the globe now.

The thing is, bottom spread is insidious. It creeps up on a writer and suddenly…wham! Shaking head. It’s not a pretty sight.

Luckily I have a solution to halt bottom spread. One word, and no, it’s not a dirty one.

Exercise.

I’m all about multi-tasking whenever possible so here are some ways to add exercise to your routine without too many radical changes.

1. Take the stairs instead of the elevator.
2. Park your vehicle in one central place and walk to different shops/destinations to complete your chores.
3. Walk your children to school instead of driving them.
4. Go for a walk after dinner. Take your children and husband wi th you and make it into family time.
5. Explore some of the National and State parks during weekends and holidays.
6. Walk barefoot on the beach.
7. Take the dog for a walk.
8. Do the housework – not my personal favorite, but I’m just laying out all the options!
9. Go dancing or put on some music at home and shake your groove thing.
10. Use that gym membership.
11. Drag the old bike out of storage.
12. Take up a new sport.
13. Try gardening – grow your own flowers and vegetables.
14. Fancy a swim? My local pool has water aerobics, which actually tur ned out to be a lot of fun. Swim or walk up and down the pool.

As well as a great way to combat weight gain, regular exercise helps with concentration. It gives you time to think about your characters and plot. Yes, it’s that multi-tasking thing again. Exercising is me-time and although you mightn’t think so at first, it’s also fun. So get to it! Sweat those toxins out and you’ll find you’ll feel better. You might even live longer and gain in self-confidence. And above all, you’ll stop that nasty bottom

spread!

What do you think about exercise? Do you like it or hate it? Do you exercise? Pssst – do you suffer from the dreaded bottom spread?

Shelley Munro lives in New Zealand and loves to write. She was horrified to discover the truth about bottom spread and has worked hard to combat said problem ever since. Shelley likes walking the dog and cycling but hates housework. Her most recent release is Wanderlust, a contemporary tale of travel through India. It combines all of Shelley’s favorite things: ex1otic location, love, and lashings of intrigue and murder. Wanderlust is available from Cerridwen Press as of yesterday! You can visit Shelley’s website at http://www.shelleymunro.com

I’m delighted to be today’s guest blogger. I write sexy romances for Kensington Aphrodisia – and I owe it all to two women.

Let’s start with Grace Metalious who, back in 1956, wrote a book called Peyton Place. Is anyone old enough to remember that book? Or the movie (1957, starring Lana Turner, nominated for a ton of Academy Awards) or TV show (1964-69, with Ryan O’Neal and Mia Farrow – the first primetime soap opera)?

My book club just read Peyton Place and I learned all sorts of interesting things. It sold over 10 million copies and is the 4th biggest selling novel of all time. But, more relevant to my blog today, is the fact that when it was published it was considered to be utterly scandalous. It created a whole new – and shocking – image of small-town life, rife with sex and secrets. The women of Peyton Place were the original desperate housewives, and the town harboured illegitimacy, adultery, rape, abortion and murder.

Peyton Place was a “dirty book,” but it was also an exposé of the secrets small-town America had kept buried. Grace Metalious was America’s “naughty girl” but her book had a huge popular appeal. It opened the door for commercial fiction that wasn’t “nice” and “proper.” It said, basically, that sex is an intrinsic part of normal life, and that women as well as men are sexual beings.

And remember, this was the 1950s. The days of white picket fences and Leave it to Beaver, Father Knows Best and The Donna Reed Show. The days when, if a bedroom scene was shown at all, the man and woman were husband and wife, buttoned up to the neck in PJs, and sleeping in separate twin beds. All I can say is, hurray for Grace!

Now, fast forward to the mid 1990s when a woman named Candace Bushnell wrote a column called Sex And The City, which became a book and an amazingly successful TV show. As with Grace, Candace wrote about a community – this time not a small town (or is it, in its own way?) but Manhattan. And within that community she focused on four female friends who did what young women had never done quite so openly before: experimented with sex and love, and got together to laugh, cry and dish explicitly about it. Again, a writer shattered the conventions and notched up another triumph for the liberation of women – and of female characters in fiction.

Okay, I’m no groundbreaker like either of them, but I love writing about my own Awesome Foursome, four 20-somethings who live in my own wonderful community – Vancouver, BC. These girls are at that magical but stressful age when you try to figure out who you are as a woman. They’re discovering their sexuality, figuring out whether they want sex or long-term love, learning how to separate from their parents without completely disrespecting them, working out how to balance career with personal live. And they’re doing it all as best friends, the same way Carrie Bradshaw and her friends did in Sex And The City. The fourth and final book in my series was released last week. “She’s on Top” is the story of Rina Goldberg, a woman with body-image issues who reconnects with her first love and discovers he’s turned out to be a true hottie. I’m thrilled to bits that it’s an RT Top Pick and has garnered a lot of other fabulous reviews.

I’d love it if you checked out my books (complete with trailers, excerpts, review quotes, and notes on how each originated) at my website: http://www.susanlyons.ca. If you hop on over and enter my monthly contest and say you came from Naughty & Spice, you’ll be entered in a contest to win a copy of “She’s on Top”. I’ll pick the winner on Saturday, April 5.

What I’d like to chat about with you today is: what books, movies, TV shows really rocked your world when you were young? Which were the ones that were scandalous in some fashion – that opened your eyes and made you see the world around you in a different way?

You know how we go through life waiting for the next day, or Friday, or next month? We wish time away as if it were a renewable resource instead of treating it as a precious commodity.

I’m here to tell y’all, it’s precious, beyond the value of any precious gems or minerals. Treat it well, savor it, celebrate it.

What brought about this blog post? Well, a friend of mine and her dad. He’s had cancer for seven years and he just took a terrible turn for the worse. As I write this post, she’s at the hospice care ward and he’s breathing his last breaths in the company of his family. This friend had lived in Germany for five years until about a year and a half ago when she moved back to North Carolina. If she hadn’t, then all the time she’s spent with her dad over those 18 months would’ve never happened.

She seized the day, kept those incredibly important hours with him. It made me think about my dad (he’s 65) and how much I’d miss him if the same thing happened. Gads, it makes my throat close up to even think about it.

Life is so short, it’s a blink in the eye of the universe. Let’s take a moment to truly realize just how much we have and be thankful for every second and make it Celebrate Life day. I’m sending you all cyber hugs and saying “Hey there, it’s wonderful to see you!!”

Here’s my challenge for y’all. Tell me one thing about your life that you love/celebrate/are thankful for. Everyone who comments gets entered to win a download of choice from my backlist.

I’ll start. I’m thankful to have my family, my friends and to wake up each morning able to write stories that I love. I also love the fact that I can blog and touch people around the world (well, not really touch, that’d be weird). So what about you? Lay it on me, y’all, and let’s celebrate life!

Thanks to Amie for inviting me to guest blog! It’s my normal day to blog on my critique group blog - www.butterscotchmartinigirls.com, but I’ll be funneling everyone here today!

Anyway, let’s start this off right. My name is Cassie Ryan and I write hot books.

Yup, that’s me. Call it what you will–sex with a plot, panty-igniting, snarky and seditious, soft porn, or any of a hundred other labels, and uh huh–you’re on the right track. Hell, my books even have a warning label!
(And damn, if I don’t sell more books because of that cute little label “Warning! This is a Really hot book. Sexually Explicit.”

So what does this have to do with every day life and why do you care?

Well, the above (or reading my books) will let you know that clearly, I’m not a prude by anyone’s stretch of the imagination. I love sex, love doing it (sorry for the TMI moment!), love reading about it, and love dreaming up some fun scenarios so my characters can have it–usually LOTS of it. But call me picky–I do have to have some plot with my sex.

The erotic and erotic romance markets are still booming, although I think they will start to slow a bit pretty soon and the ranks of books will thin and the quality will skyrocket. It’s inevitable in any market or genre that has had the huge surge in popularity and sales that this one has. But I digress…

I try to read broadly, not only in this genre, but in many others. (I was and still am a very avid and eclectic reader before I started writing for publication.) Anyway, that means I’ve read tons of erotic books and erotic romances. The first one I ever read was one of Cheyenne McCray’s earlier works–and especially since she’s a great lady and a good friend and not to mention a phenomenal writer–I will always hold her as one of my favorites.

When I discovered her books, I was in heaven. They had a great story with lots of plot twists, real emotions and yes, some steamy, melt the clasp on your bra sex scenes! So when I dipped my toe into writing within that genre, I wanted those same things in my books.
However, I also tend to have a much more sarcastic and scathing sense of humor that Chey, so my books definitely reflect that. For example, the Cunts.

Yup, you read that right. The Cunts.

They betrayed the crown on their homeworld and were banished to Earth, where the name of their race became synonymous with traitor and betrayer.

Now, let me say for the record that when I queried, pitched and even got edits, I fully expected someone–my agent, my editor, anyone, to say, NO WAY! You can’t do that! But other than a few bloggers who were cracking up throughout the book (and no, I wasn’t offended, it was written to be sarcastic, after all…lol) no one has even questioned my use of the dreaded “C” word. But, and here’s a big but–there is a ton of plot along with my sex!

So now that you think I’m on something and have jumped around to several subjects, I’ll try to pull it all together for you. As I said, I’ve read tons of erotic and erotic romance books, judged contests in those categories and even read online fan fiction in those genres, and the number one thing, even behind passive writing and backstory dumps that will make me put down a book is the total and complete absence of plot. If it resembles a loose plot like you see on a porno with a string of sex scenes in the middle–bingo! I’m not going to spend my precious and carefully guarded reading time on a story that doesn’t fully engage me. Because to me, sex (even with pretzel-type positions and twenty hot men in a room) isn’t worth reading about without the plot and the emotions behind it to tie it all together.

Does that mean I’m telling you that you have absolutely no taste if you don’t feel the same way. Nope. Obviously there are books like that on the market and they are selling well. It just means they don’t keep me engaged long enough to get to the group orgy on page three.

So, which do you prefer? Do you like your sex with some plot? Or do you like your sex with a side of sex and a sex chaser? Leave a comment and I’ll draw one of the commenters to win a free copy of Ceremony of Seduction–yup, the one with the Cunts!! :) If you’re not sure if you’re brave enough for it, there is an excerpt up on my MySpace page -

Tee Hee!

Cassie Ryan
Www.cassieryan.com
(aka, writer of lascivious porn with a plot)

I like to write Regency heroes who aren’t quite what you’d expect, in fact, I like to write heroes who appeal to the type of reader who is slightly intrigued by the tantalizing thought of gay men making out, but still likes a good romance along the way. My heroes will give you that. Not quite gay, but willing to experiment with anyone or anything if the opportunity arises, (and somehow it always does in my books and also just Alpha enough to keep you interested and hot and, well, you know…

How did I end up writing them? I don’t know. I just got fed up with the whole Alpha, Beta, Metro thing. I mean, sexuality is much more complicated than that isn’t it? Aren’t there a hell of a lot of grays in between? I love the grays, the men and women who can appreciate that sex is far more interesting if you can be open and up for anything.

What does amuse me is seeing my books in the romance section. Yay, I’m a subversive! ‘Georgette Heyer on crack’ as one of my fellow Black Lace authors called me. I’m expecting my readers to want to know whether a sexually ambiguous pair of Regency gentleman like Lord Valentin Sokorvsky and Peter Howard who star in Simply Sexual and Simply Sinful, can find their happy ever after’s. And I want my readers to be happy for them and care about what happens to them. I want them to care even though these men aren’t remotely conventional and never will be.

I don’t have an agenda. I truly believe love is where you find it and that we all have a right to be happy and sexually satisfied. Is that going to become the norm? Will my kids wonder what all the fuss was about back in the day? I sure hope so

So tell me, does ‘just gay enough’ turn you on or off and how do you feel about it being in the romance aisle?

Sexy…With Your Clothes on

Ever since I was a kid I used to daydream…picture fantastic scenes unfolding in my mind. So as an author I tend to “see” scenes play out in my head like I’m watching a movie.

Some of the sexiest scenes in books or movies, in my opinion, involve intense emotions, friction, conflict, and surrender.

The other night I was channel surfing and I happened upon the famous Burt Landcaster/Deborah Kerr scene in From Here to Eternity. You know the one, the two of them rolling around on the beach, kissing and holding each other. (I tried not to think about where sand was ending up <G>). They were in bathing suits, sure, but it wasn’t just Burt’s handsome chest that made this scene sexy. These were two characters who risked their lives to be together and finally succumbed to their attraction.

Another favorite of mine (don’t laugh) is the scene in “It’s a Wonderful Life” when Donna Reed and James Stewart are standing in her mother’s entryway taking on the phone to Donna’s boyfriend. Remember the scene? Donna’s playing coy, trying to get close to James and, well, he loses it, telling her he’s not interested, doesn’t want to settle down and – WHAMMO – they’re kissing. And I mean really kissing! They’ve fought the attraction long enough and are just to weak to keep up the battle.

I’ll let you guess this third favorite. The heroine is a nanny to his many kids (I lost count) and the hero is set to marry another woman. Again, they are both fully clothed. (Sorry.) This scene is skillfully designed as hero and heroine stroll across the property, the moonlight outlining their silhouettes as they profess their forbidden love for one another. ::: sigh ::: I guess my point is, some of the best scenes I’ve read or seen on the big screen are exceptional because of the highly charged emotions, not necessarily because everyone’s naked. Although that’s fun too. <G> (If you have examples to share, bring ‘em on.)

In my January release, Soldier Surrender, Katie Anderson has to keep a hallucinating Gray Turner from exposing their location to the enemy. How does she do that? By kissing him, of course! But not because she wants to, oh no. LOL

What are some of your favorite sexy scenes? Do tell. It’s what we live for!

Cheers!

Pat White

www.patwhitebooks.com

Soldier Surrender, Intrigue 1/08, 4 Stars Review, RT Magazine

Saving Destiny, Nocturne, 11/07, Top Pick, RT Magazine