Holiday shopping and a last chance...

OK, so I already pitched the Cafe Press stuff, (http://www.cafepress.com/lantoniou) that all remains the same. If you want timely delivery, order soon; I can't guarantee their shipping times.

But just a note for those of you who are big enough fans to follow this group and read what I write...

If *I* were *you* I would take advantage of the chance to buy any books I have in stock at my website. Because...well...it might be your last chance to get these editions.

Just saying.

Order now for Yule/Xmas/Solstice/New Year/etc. If the website is wonky, write to me directly at Laura@lantoniou.com and we'll work it out.

After "Passionate Bonds"

I have to say, it was an amazing weekend.

I have always wanted a chance to really sit down with people and work on what it means to have a personal protocol at home. It's something I have a passion about (see the workshop title) and it's something I think can actually be so useful for those people attempting a more encompassing D/s relationship, something they can feel as an ongoing, exciting, real, nurturing and yes, sometimes very difficult and complicated way of life.

To be able to set aside so much time in privacy, without the distractions of 100 other workshops and a contest and a formal dinner and a vending space and a fashion show, and, and...

To be able to have the ability to break into small groups, to chat casually, to sit on the floor with lunch and tell stories, and then get up and continue the discussion. Not just 90 minutes of the basics, hurriedly presented, with maybe ten minutes of questions, but lots of questions, lots of comments and stories and "what if?" scenarios. The freedom to return to something we talked about the day before. The chance to revisit the same questions and see what might have changed.

Not to mention the fun of teaching with fetish-diva, sex rockstar and close-personal-friend Midori. We found that hey, we still like each other just fine and I had a wonderful time working with her and the student/participants to make a good atmosphere to create, question and expand relationship magic.

I sincerely hope some of the people who couldn't attend this time around will be able to consider the next one we plan! We have already started reaching out to different cities, doing research on where and when it might make sense to schedule the next. Because we will do it again, having learned a bit from our virgin experience.

Laura

Holiday shopping

Just a reminder to get your orders in - for books, via my website, and assorted paraphernalia via my Cafe Press store. The books I have left include some limited first printings, and once they are gone, they are gone forever. And Cafe Press is offering free shipping on certain dates when you use their codes! There are also new *black* (and other colored) shirts with the "You Must Be This Tall..." logo on them. Oh...look, I have a pitch!

Hello, fans, friends and fellow holiday shoppers! This is a gentle reminder to get your orders in early for the best presents reflecting your style and preferences!


Get an "I (heart) to serve" doggie bowl for your favorite pet!


Sip your pumpkin spiced latte in an insulated travel mug with "Patience" on one side, reminding you not to kill the kids in the back seat as you battle your way through holiday traffic!


Confuse the relatives in your "I play Mandarin style" sweatshirt! They'll still be puzzling over it while you tackle them on the lawn and win the football game.


Attend your local SM club holiday party in your "Middle Aged Guard" t-shirt and let 'em know you were around before they were a tweet in their parent's eyes. Or a twitter. Or whatever those damn kids are doing now.


Shuck down to your "I (heart) service" undies to make that special someone giggle as they prepare to service you well and truly under the holiday candles.


From stocking stuffers to grab bag gifts to nice things to reward yourself for being extra naughty, this is a great time to support your local author and pick up a few goodies for Yule, Christmas, Hanukkah, the Solstice, Kwanzaa, Thanksgiving, the New Year, or just because you can't bother going to a mall.


The Official Laura Antoniou/Marketplace Store


Just FYI...there are shipping deals at Cafe Press.


November 30th (Cyber Monday) - Free economy shipping on orders of $60 or more with coupon code: MONDAYSHIP

December 7th - 9th - Free economy shipping on orders of $50 or more with coupon code: HOLIDAYSHIPS

Sex scenes and other thoughts

Health issues have been what I am sure I will think of as a minor challenge in years to come. But when you are in the middle of things, it does tend to feel overwhelming, don't it? Fortunately, things seem to be looking up.

In the mean time, instead of telling you what I have been reading, here's a glimpse of the writing side of my life.

I have started again to work on The Inheritor. It's been in fits and spurts (see the first paragraph) but it has been so much on my mind that it occasionally interrupts my sleep. I'm working on chapter 14 now. I passed two of the hardest chapters I ever worked on in my entire life, one because of research and a desire to recreate a life story in 15 pages, and one because...it was just hard. You'll see it when it's done.

Part of the shift in my brain that says "time to write!" is a desire to revisit what I have written before. Some of it I do to make sure I am not contradicting myself. (Where did Chris say he did this? What was that girl's name? What year is this supposed to be anyway?) Part of it is to see what I left out - can I add this piece into the history here, or have I written myself into a corner again? And part of it now, is to see where and how I worked in the sex scenes when I had just so much other STUFF going on.

Yes, I admit it - I write porn and have to remind myself to put in the sex.

It's not that I'm a prude, and it's sure not that I find sex beside the point. But I have found that I no longer structure a book to frame the sex. When you look at my earliest works, it's clear that the entire outline was created to showcase a series of erotic encounters, from little moments to full-blown set pieces. Some of it was obvious - The Catalyst was basically a "sex scene per story" anthology. Some was more organic - training and histories in The Marketplace and The Slave. But since then, I have become much more story driven, rather than inspired by the "if I don't have another sex scene, my publisher will complain and my readers who don't give a shit about story will get bored and they won't buy the books and I'll miss the car payment."

These days, I have to admit, I don't care about readers who don't give a shit about story. There's a ton of free or cheap porn out there which is one sex scene followed by another.

For The Academy, Reunion and now The Inheritor, even though I still call myself a pornographer, I have to admit explicit sex scenes are simply taking the same place in the story as the sex scenes in any modern novel - thrillers, adventure books, and the sort of Jeffrey Archer-esque romances where wealthy people romp. In other words, I write novels in which the major characters do have sex - *and* they are sadomasochists, therefore the sex they have tends to be kinky. But the sex occurs to aid the story, not the other way around.

In a way, this is reminding me of a shift in the whole queer novel world. In the beginning, queer lit was either dark, deep and depressing or it was porn. The deep and depressing stuff occasionally found real publishers - the porn was pulp. Gay people read both, just to see themselves in print.

So, too, did the kinksters. Whether the lead character of the tale died at the end or it was nothing but a series of one encounter after another (each one ramping up the stakes, of course) we read what we could find.

Now, look at the collection of gay books out there and there isn't a single genre not represented. Romances? Check. Paranormal? Oh, yeah. Mysteries? OMG, yes. Tons of them. Action/adventure, political thriller, fantasy and science fiction, even religious tales, the gays have something for everyone.

Now, some of them will still have sex scenes; some of them more explicit than others. But the writers do not feel like they have to include the two standard tropes of the early days - a depressing ending where people get punished for being queer, OR some mechanical sex scenes just for the sake of showing that we have sex too.

I no longer read books about gay characters for personal affirmation. (OK, maybe I never did.) I read them because I like the author, the story, the genre. I enjoy knowing that the gay characters have partners and have sex, even when I don't read explicit descriptions of it. After all, I know a bit about what sex looks (and reads) like. I enjoy a good sex scene when it's written well and especially when it has something to do with the plot. But I like the assumption, in the story, that it's simply THERE, whether I see it or not.

I don't think the SM readership is quite ready for the SM themed book with no sex scenes, at least not yet. Nor am I really interested in writing one quite yet. But it has become much more important for me for my sex scenes to not just be a part of the story, but to show something necessary to the tale. Some of them will show the growth of a relationship; some will show how someone's life has evolved and changed since the last time the reader saw that character. Things like that come out naturally; when I write them I don't feel forced or bored.

My issue today is...how long will my story-driven readers wait for the next such scene? This is a complex book with some heavy issues in it. To interrupt the flow of what is a major story in order to toss in a sex scene, even if it does suit the story overall, seems awkward at best, insulting at most. As the pages stack up, I will continue to write as the story drives me, but this is a nagging thought in the back of my mind.

Someone sent over a muse?

I wrote yesterday. Not the painful, one word at a time torture of - well, far too long - but simply paragraph after paragraph, until pages stacked up. The way I used to write.

Don't know what did it. Don't know why. But I am hoping to do the same today. If you have been out there thinking/praying/committing indescribable acts of sacrifice, saying "jeeze, whatever it takes, make her finish the damn next book!" thank you for the muse. I'll treat her well as long as she stays. I hope she likes Greek yogurt.

Reading by the bucket

When I say I like long sagas, I am not kidding. (That's also why I write them.) It's always disappointing to me when a series seems to peter out under the weight of its own vast universe or the exhaustion of an author who just needs to crank out another formula book to make the payments on...well, whatever.

Rarely, a series seems to just enthrall me so much that I can't bear to read the final book. I put off reading Colleen McCullough's The October Horsebecause I dreaded the murder of Caesar. Finishing Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallowswas painful, although I respected the vision of the author very much.

But as I am in a stage of recovery, I found reading the final two books in the Thomas Covenantseries *excruciating.* Just..wow. I could not take the relentless doom, gloom, confusion, frustration, impotence...the miasma of bad questions and bad answers and "hey, didn't we do this already?" scenes of artificial peril.

Now, a logical person would ask, why did I bother? Well, I first read the series as a teenager, and lemme tell you, the self-absorbed stubborn, rapist, anti-hero *leper* was about as aimed at a teenage audience as any other way to wail about how unfair the world is and how alone you are in a sea of pain. It was, in fact, the antidote to a spate of mild Tolkien rip-offs that filled the fantasy shelves at the time, lots of magic swords and dragons and unlikely teams of wiseass adventurers who were seeking the Golden McGuffin. Not that I minded those - but you know, candy is for snacking. And if you looked at my fantasy collection *now* you'd see very little from that time.

But I held onto the Covenant books, for two reasons. One was that I always felt I was not getting a complete picture of the story, I needed to know more, reason more, to be able to appreciate the full spectrum of the tale. After all, the first one was really good; the second and third not that bad, etc. What could I be missing? And two, his amazingly turgid language.

When I read Steven Donaldson, man, I need my dictionary handy. I like to think I have a pretty good working vocabulary and a better reading one, but whew, this guy wears me out. Reading a few days ago, I was amazed to find three words in ONE SENTENCE that I didn't know. In one sentence! Now sometimes, I look a word up and find it's a really cool word to know. Penumbra was one of those. (Lord Foul has one around his form as he becomes real.) I looked that up and thought, oh, that is a good word, I gotta use that somewhere. Things like that make me happy.

But there is a line between learning a new word, phrase or concept and feeling stupid. There's also a part of me that thinks, "couldn't you have just said the forest was dark and creepy? Just a thought."

So there I was, feeling ill and tired and slogging through this morass of cold, uncomfortable things - and I mean this, his main character is always cold, bathes in cold water, scrubs her wounded body with SAND, sleeps on slabs of rock...in 30,000 years, no one in the Land invented SOAP? Running water? The idea that maybe a bathtub closer to the fireplace might be warmer? I dunno, have they all been sitting around muttering cryptic, dire warnings to each other and forgetting to, maybe...write shit down?? Come up with a warmer outfit than a thin belted tunic? (Which everyone wears, regardless of weather.)

The Despiser doesn't have to ruin this world - it's stuck in a massive dysfunction already. (Hm. New thought. Maybe that's WHY he's so desperate to get out. The place IS a prison, of unimaginative, rigid, short-spoken people who wouldn't know a happy day if it came wrapped in rainbows and unicorns. People who never invent things, never grow, never question, and above all, never get freaking WARM. I'd be ready to destroy the Arch of Time myself after a few hundred thousand years like that.)

So...I couldn't do it. Couldn't finish the final book in the series. It has my place marked and I think I will put it on the shelf for a while, maybe hit it up one last time in the future. I still think there's something I am not getting. Or, maybe I am just not that teenager any more.

Blatant Commercial Message

In today's Blatant Commercial Message, I would like to announce...

(drumroll)

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And mug, sticker, post card, and assorted other sundries.
(Don't know what it means? Read my latest keynote speech.)

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*GASP! as you spot the very reasonable prices.
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And if you act NOW, you can see the ARRAY of STUNNING, AMUSING and did I mention RARE? shirts, sweatshirts, hoodies, mugs, greeting cards, posters and even teddy bears and pet bowls, available for YOU, the discerning consumer and knowledgeable insider.

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Gaze in AWE at new items with older designs - PLUS sizes! ORGANIC materials! MATERNITY sizes! Stylish drinking accessories!

Let people know who you are with your MIDDLE AGED GUARD hoodie; let them know who you crave as you announce you are LOOKING FOR CHRIS PARKER. Declare your love of service, or your exalted role as a true, lifestyle, etc. type. And most of all, SUPPORT your author, who needs some income occasionally.

This has been a commercial message from the Official Laura Antoniou Marketplace Cafe Press Store. Act now! The web is standing by.