Rainbow Award Win!

What is this madness, people!?!

December is apparently a winning month for me. This is karma paying me in advance for the trials and tribulations that are coming next week, I'm sure. But still, wow!

Caitlin Ricci and I took first place in the Rainbow Awards' Best Lesbian Contemporary/Erotic Romance category for our novel Camellia. We also tied for third in Best Lesbian Novel overall. This is especially amazing to me because I don't write a lot of lesbian romance--hardly any--and most of you read me for my M/M, my science fiction, my...anything but lesbian romance. Especially contemporary, BDSM lesbian romance. And yet! People had really lovely things to say, which I'm going to share because darn it, I'm proud.

Camellia is a beautiful, delicate story that unfolds with the same languid, graceful pacing of a Japanese tea ceremony...and like the ancient art of the ceremony, will engage every one of your senses by the time it concludes. The memory will linger as well, with surprising, subtle strength. And lest you think this story is a snoozefest, I’d best mention the sex was hot enough to leave me wishing for a fan. No fooling.

I normally do not read lesbian novels or BDSM. The genres are not my usual preference. However, after reading this book (first in a series), I was genuinely pleased with the dynamic, tight writing style, the beautiful explaination and demonstration of the BDSM lifestyle, and the introduction into the beauty of tea service. Lucy & Danny are two characters I am willing to visit again & delve deeper into their story.

A book about tea but this romance is so much more than that. Lust swirled between these two characters that exploded off the page and kept me spellbound. With a promising ending, I wanted to read more about these characters and I dreaded getting closer to the end.

I know a book is good when it makes me a fan of a lifestyle that I usually don't find attractive or interesting. BDSM is usually not my scene at all and also if it's a setting so explored and exploited nowadays in literature, a really few reads have been able to engage me during their reading, but this book is one of the winners!

As a member of the BDSM community and a Dom I often cringe when I read books that contain BDSM/Kink elements. I especially cringe when these stories attempt to delve into the mindset of a Dom because they so often get them wrong. However, this story did such a gloriously, magnificent job on both of these jobs that I found myself hard-pressed to put the book down even when I had to go to sleep.


So, there you go! If anyone is interested in reading Camellia, you can find it at Less Than Three Press: Camellia. It's on sale right now, so good timing.

Well. So. Yeah, that happened.

**On a side note, I'd like to say that I've fulfilled a personal goal of mine by both winning a Rainbow Award and being featured in a personal defense magazine article on wielding a knife against a left-handed attacker. Yes, that's right, I've got layers!

Various Cool Things!

Well, damn.

So, last year Caitlin Ricci and I wrote Camellia, a contemporary BDSM novella with Japanese tea ceremonies and spankings. It did...okay, but didn't make a big splash and I was ready to fire off a quick sequel and move on to other things when, just recently, I learned that it earned an Honorable Mention in this year's Rainbow Awards. That doesn't make it a winner, exactly, but it does mean that whoever read it (two different people, I think, since we got two comments) liked it well enough to score it at least 36/40 on the judging scale, and left some lovely observations on it for us:

"Camellia is a beautiful, delicate story that unfolds with the same languid, graceful pacing of a Japanese tea ceremony...and like the ancient art of the ceremony, will engage every one of your senses by the time it concludes. The memory will linger as well, with surprising, subtle strength. And lest you think this story is a snoozefest, I’d best mention the sex was hot enough to leave me wishing for a fan. No fooling."

"I normally do not read lesbian novels or BDSM.  The genres are not my usual preference. However, after reading this book (first in a series), I was genuinely pleased with the dynamic, tight writing style, the beautiful explaination and demonstration of the BDSM lifestyle, and the introduction into the beauty of tea service.  Lucy & Danny are two characters I am willing to visit again & delve deeper into their story."

So wow. Apparently, those who went after this one have really liked it. I'm humbled and pleased, this is my first lesbian story in years, as well as one of my first forays into BDSM, and it seems to resonate. That's awesome, and I'm very happy about it. It's also been nominated for a Golden Crown Literary Society Award, which are awards given solely to lesbian fiction, so...gosh. Guys. Who knew? If you want to give it a try, you can find it on Amazon here: Camellia.

The other cool thing: another co-authored story now has a cover, and it's beautiful. I've got to hand it to LT3 Press, they listen to you when you describe what you want out of a cover and do their best to give it to you. Caitlin and I have a story coming out in an upcoming collection called Hunting A Lady, and here's it's pretty cover:

Oooh, shiny!

Yeah, believe it or not, I do have some new releases coming out in the near future. This story and my Riptide short will be released in the new year, and an M/M science fiction story of mine called Evergreen (which naturally is about the colonization of Mars) will be out in LT3's Missed Connections anthology in November. I've got the serial story, obviously, and several other novels picking at my brain, and a list of calls for submission that I'm set to wrangle. Basically, I'm getting my groove back. I lost it for a while in the crazy rapids of my life, but things are calming down a little bit and so am I.

Camellia Release Day and a Contest!

Hi guys!

My contemporary  f/f BDSM novella Camellia, written with Caitlin Ricci and published by Less Than Three Press, is available today.  You can find it here: Camellia.

Some of you may be thinking, what the hell, Cari?  Since when have you written contemporary, or BDSM, or lesbian fic?  Well, since this book, basically.  None of these are subjects I had a lot of experience with before this, but all of them are intriguing, and rolled together into one volume, I think it packs quite a smack to the ass.

Our main characters are Lucy, tea shop proprietor and domme extraordinaire:

And Danny, aspiring model and trained car mechanic:

It's 43k of kinky fun.  If you're interested in knowing more, author and reviewer Anastasia Vitsky had this to say about it: Camellia book review: A Sensuous Tale of F/F Spanking.

Now for the contest part.  I wrote a guest post for Prism Book Alliance today.  Leave a comment there, and whoever gets randomly picked at the end wins any ebook they want from my backlist.  You can find the post here: Cari Z stops by to discuss Camellia.

Okay, I think that's it.  Whew.  Now I have to go write more.

RainbowCon and other stuff!

Finally, a post about RainbowCon!

This was the inaugural year of RainbowCon, put on primarily by the owners of Storm Moon Press and taking place in Tampa, Florida.  For those of you who don't know, I live in Colorado, which meant flying out Wednesday, my man in tow, and getting into volunteer mode.

RainbowCon was meant to be a con that focused on more than just M/M fiction, and in that way it certainly delivered.  There were panels on writing YA, on F/F fiction, on writing trans characters, on self-publishing, on contracts, on...just about everything.  There was a trip to Ybor, the nightclub hotspot in Tampa, which I didn't participate in.  There were also male strippers as part of the welcome event,which...I did participate in.  What can I say, my man handed me some money and said go for it.  Then the awesome Lori Toland bought me a dance, and I was done.  Let's just say there's video of me out there on Facebook (which I'm cautiously approaching thanks to Anastasia Vitsky and my beloved readerwife) and leave it at that.

I got to meet a lot of great people, and some of my favorite authors!  It's pic time, so if you don't want to know what I look like, avert thine eyes.

First off, my absolute favorite author of M/M right now, if you haven't checked out her series I mourn for you: Jordan L. Hawk.  Read the Whyborne and Griffin series, guys, start with Widdershins and go from there.  It's so good.

I also got to see K-lee Klein again, who was out in Denver last year visiting for Pride--she is fun and awesome and has gorgeous tattoos, not to mention a step-and-fetch-it boy.  Lucky woman.

The LT3 Press people were also there, which was great because I got to meet Megan and Samantha Derr and their entourage, and also I'm publishing with them in, oh, a week or two, so--nice to know them.

I also went out to dinner at a very authentic Korean restaurant with Ana Vitsky and David Berger, and was introduced to barley tea and the feeling of being a small child.  Seriously, they had to get scissors from the back to cut some of the noodles because David and I couldn't handle them at their normal length.  Ana didn't laugh too hard, bless her.

Honestly, the best place to get pictures and see what was going on is the RainbowCon facebook page, here: https://www.facebook.com/rain.con.3  Needless to say at this point, it was a lot of fun and a good way for me to get used to new aspects of attending a con, like being a moderator, so if I can go next year I certainly will.

Other stuff, real quick:  I should be able to weather any disruptions to The Academy's posting schedule for the next month, hopefully.  Lots is happening--my readerwife and her husband are coming to visit this weekend, in fact--but I can handle it now, I think.  So, happy news for Tuesdays.

I've gotten an extension on my goodreads's group Love's Landscapes story, so it's now due on the 10th.  I just got too busy to adhere to my writing schedule, and the reprieve will help me make it a story worth reading.

My f/f novella Camellia, co-written with Caitlin Ricci, is available for preorder now.  It comes out on May 6th, and I'm really excited to be doing something different and challenging.  It's lesbian/BDSM (mild, all things considered)/based on a Japanese tea ceremony, so very different.  If you're moved to read it, I love you.  If not, well, you're reading my blog, so I still love you:)  I'm a bad disciplinarian, I'm afraid.

That's it for now...happy Thursday, darlins.

Lesbian Romance and the Issue of Readership

I know that most of the people who read this blog do so because of my m/m romance stuff and my weekly serial story.  I respect that, believe me, I'm grateful you're here, but I do write other things as well and sometimes that spills over.  So if lesbian romance is of no interest to you, I'll see you tomorrow when I post the next part of The Academy (it will be so fun!).

For the people who've stuck it out, first things first: my co-author and I got the cover for the first novella in our f/f BDSM series.  Jeez, that's a lot of letters.  The only other lesbian romance I've ever published was a short story in a Cleis anthology years ago, and it's not the kind of fiction I'm often inspired to write, but Caitlin Ricci was interested in collaborating and I've never gone all the way with another author before, so I agreed.  Interestingly, I've written very, very little BDSM before as well (the only other story I can think of is my Shadows and Light series on Literotica) so this ended up being quite the stretch for me.

Let's get the cover reveal out there first:

I think LT3 did a great job with this cover.  It's got the elements we were looking for without being overwhelming in any particular way, and there are no partially naked torsos.  Not that I don't like a nice naked torso, but that wasn't really the feel I wanted, and it's not LT3's style either.

Onto the issue of readership.  E.E. Ottoman recently did a very cogent blog post on the subject of why lesbian romance doesn't sell as well as gay or straight romance.  She makes a lot of very good points, and I'm going to highlight one here:

I think for a lot of women it's triggering to see women portrayed as confident and sexual without having men involved. It brings up, all of their own insecurities about their bodies and their sexualities. It highlights all of the ways they've been told that they are bodies aren't good enough and their sexual desires are wrong without the 'safe space' of a male body or male sexuality to retreat to. 

I know this can be an issue for me when I read lesbian romance.  I  primarily seek the company of men, in part because they tend to be the majority participating in my very physically inclined hobbies, and in part because I just feel like I can be more comfortable with men.  Other women tend to intimidate me.  There's an unspoken layer of competition there, whether it revolves around looks or material success or just sheer poise, and I generally label myself as lacking.  Part of the joy of reading a book is losing yourself in the characters, but there has to be something to draw you in and make you identify with them, and sometimes I just can't quite manage that with lesbian romance.  True, I'm not a lesbian, but I'm not a gay man either and I get down with that all the time.  Perhaps the problem is a lack of personal verisimilitude.  Maybe I need to write a lesbian romance about an introverted, jiu-jitsu loving, knife-wielding writer. :)

I strongly suggest you read the rest of the post, not just for it's primary content but for the comments too, some of which are incredibly well thought out: http://thisjourneywithoutamap.blogspot.com/2014/02/why-is-lesbian-romance-so-unpopular.html

When it comes to the issue of readership, though...here's where it gets interesting to me.  Since I've not published a lot of f/f fic, I can't speak to sales, but plenty of authors (see the above article) said that their lesbian fiction didn't sell as well as their gay fiction.  The only experience I've had with selling both types of books came at last year's Denver Pride Fest, and here's what's interesting: the only author in the group selling lesbian fiction sold out in an hour.  Really.  She brought like forty books, and they were snapped up instantly.  All of the rest of us with our piles of m/m?  We did okay, but not great.  Certainly no one else sold out.

Why would this happen?  Is it because a large part of the readership of m/m romance is straight women, who weren't as present at Pride?  Is it that the women who were at Pride were more interested in reading than the men?  I'm not entirely sure, but it definitely inspired me to have something ready for this year's Pride Fest that would meet the need of more of the people there.  This new series (only one book will be ready for Pride this year, but it's a start) might not sell fabulously online (really, I can't say that anything of mine has sold fabulously yet) but it will be there for the people who are interested, and that makes me happy.

At some point I'll write another blog post on the trial by fire that is co-authoring, but not today.  This is long enough.  Happy Monday, darlins.  Be strong!