"Abducted, Roped & Raped: Enemies to Lovers" Now Available on Smashwords

  

Click on the pic to be whisked to Smashwords and get the novella!

"Abducted, Roped and Raped: Enemies to Lovers" was originally going to be titled “The Modern Bodice Ripper” because that’s what it is, a modern take on the bodice ripper theme in a contemporary taboo erotica setting.

(For those who don’t know, a bodice ripper is a subgenre of old-time romances that were essentially rape fantasies. They passed muster because they were not at all explicit, in fact, you could read a bodice ripper and never even know that a rape had occurred. They way it worked is, say an 18^th century pirate captain captured a comely woman of good breeding after a sea battle. He drags her into his cabin and rips off her bodice (it’s some kind of undergarment they used to wear on the outside). She shrieks. Cut to some time later. They’re both fully dressed again. He’s all smirky and happy and she’s all shy and timid, as was the custom of the times. That’s how you knew a rape had occurred. That was about as explicit as it got in those days.)

Then I realized that the title would show up in alphabetical listings a lot better if it was just “Bodice Ripper.” So “Bodice Ripper” it was.

Then I did a little keyword research and discovered that “bodice ripper” isn’t exactly a popular keyword nowadays. I might be at the top of a pile of relatively rarely-searched-for titles, which means low sales because not many customers.

So I tried a different subgenre that fits the storyline along with some terms that describe what happens in the story. The title I came up with is “Abducted, Roped & Raped: Enemies To Lovers.”

That worked a lot better in the search engines. I’m on the second page of search results for “Enemies to Lovers” which is a term that gets over 10,000 hits on Smashwords. That’s MUCH improved.

Now as to the matter of updating the “Enemies to Lovers” trope, that has proven difficult for me. Since rapes were not only not explicit but could just barely be inferred in the old days, it was fairly easy for authors to sidestep the moral and ethical issues of rape just to slide a little fantasy fuel in there. (In fact, there’s a thread on Goodreads about 80s authors having to rewrite their books to eliminate even the INFERRED rape scenes in order to get published on Amazon, which has disappointed their fans who LIKED the original version.)

But I wrote an explicit bodice ripper: the male lead (Cal) repeatedly rapes the female lead (Melody) and it’s described in long, explicit detail, “rape for titillation” as the Smashwords form describes it.

Now I’m personally fine with writing “rape for titillation” fiction. Basically it’s because fiction isn’t real, and publishing rape fantasy fiction doesn’t make rape more commonplace (or “normalized”). I wrote a blog post explaining why with cites and everything. Click here to read it.

Clearly, my morality is not the basis on which censorship exists. Censorship exists on the basis of “I’m in power, I make the rules, f&&k you, writer.” In the case of Amazon I’m sure it’s a matter of balancing on the edge between profitability (they don’t care really about the morality of what they publish) and how much shit the prudes are shoveling over this and that. (“Prude” being my term for whoever advocates censoring sexuality in fiction, whatever their declared rationale might be.)

But the problem was, I had to figure out a way to write characters who might reasonably behave as bodice ripper characters do, in the modern day. And that was tough. Frankly, it was unreasonable behavior for the historical times it was supposed to be in.

So what I did was look for a character who was well outside traditional morality. And I feel I created one in Melody Chastain. Is she your average girl next door? Of course not, nor should she be. But I feel that a character like the one I created might conceivably have done what my character did under the same circumstances.

You’ll just have to read the novella to find out what she did and why and decide for yourself on that point. Bwahaha! as they say...

Rape Erotica Novelette “Your Body Or Your Life” Now Available on Smashwords

  

You can get the book on Smashwords by clicking on this link. No links to Amazon, they don't do taboo erotica.

Here’s the short blurb for you blurb fiends:

Penny Paxton’s peaceful life among the Free Foragers of the Forest is rudely interrupted when the Patriarchal Raiders raid her village and capture her. She winds up tied to a bed deep in the passion pits of the Maledom Dominion, a sex slave. What is the ultimate secret that will allow her to escape her life of endless forced sexual bondage and rape? Read this 15,000 word novelette and find out!

OK, here’s the straight skinny on this story. My previous short story, Butterfly went over a freaking cliff, that’s the story. It went over a cliff on Amazon. It went over a cliff on Smashwords. I’m not going to report the numbers, they’re embarrassing even to me. He’ll they’d be embarrassing to my goldfish if I had one.

Thing is, “Butterfly” was a pretty clean story. Clean, hell, it was WHOLESOME for being a kinky erotic romance. Tons of explicit maledom/femsub sex with lots of sexual bondage of course, but everybody in the story was totally onboard with what was going on and having a wonderful time. Dancing, eating out (the restaurant kind!) and tons of fun, exciting consensual sex.

And that’s how I marketed it, as a fun, clean, wholesome sexual bondage romance. And it went over a cliff on Amazon. And it went over a cliff on Smashwords. I mean, publishing that story was like dropping a penny down a well and never hearing the “splash.” If it weren’t for the fact that I have considerable backmatter built up, I might not have had any sales at all. Jeebus.

And that’s why “Your Body Or Your Life” is such a rapefest. It starts off with sex slave rape and proceeds to a mass capture and kidnapping with a public mass virgin gang rape. Consensuality? The characters in my story never experience it. Hell, they never HEARD OF it.

And me being me I added an ending that will Ruin… er, Change… Everything and force readers to re-evaluate the entire structure of modern society, something not normally found in hardcore nonconsensual rape erotica, but lemme tell ya… it works!

The rape erotica takes place in part of a mythical (because I just made it up) 1990s B movie that’s like most of those B-movies where the Peaceful Forest Dwellers’ village gets attacked by Grubby Raiders. We’ve all seen them, the Peaceful Forest Dwellers are all standing around in filmy togas grooving on how sweet they’ve got it hanging around in the forest, then the Grubby Raiders ride in, generally on horses, sometimes in SUVs or jeeps or motorcycles (curiously, almost never on bicycles) and they start beating, killing, robbing, kidnapping and raping everyone, as Grubby Raiders do.

I don’t have any brief for or against consensuality per se. Some stories consensuality works in, others it doesn’t. Some stories demand both nonconsensuality and consensuality (such as all the trad romances where the pirate rapes the main character and then falls in love with her, i.e., bodice rippers). I kind of hate that publishers push so hard to keep things consensual. What, do they think that the generally female readers who enjoy rape fantasies constitute some kind of danger to the public? It’s insane. Fantasy is fantasy, reality is reality. Readers can tell; most women who enjoy rape fantasy stories have NO interest in being raped in reality. Why can’t prudes and publishers tell?

Anway, we’ll see how this one does. It’s 15,000 words long and about 10,000 of those words is kidnapping and rape scenes with bondage throughout. Woo-hoo!

The only downside here is that trying to promote a story like this is like walking a minefield. On this blog I can write frankly about what the story is about, but on other media I have to tiptoe carefully lest prudes take offense and get whatever promotional effort I’m making censored. The social media providers are not at all concerned abut what’s fair or reasonable, what’s fantasy and what’s not. They just stomp reflexively if anyone complains, fair or not.

Still this is the sort of story that should attract readers all by its lonesome. We shall see.

(Note: in its first day of sales, "Your Body Or Your Life" has doubled the sales of "Butterfly" in the three weeks since its release. And the backmatter sales have been great. I think I have my answer as to which sort of story sells better.)

"I, The Glider Gun" Now Available on Smashwords

  

You can obtain "I, The Glider Gun" by clicking on this text.

Detective Lacy Throbb of the Century City Police Department was a loose cannon who wrote her own rules and broke them, too! Criminals in Century City had a love-hate relationship with her. They hated the way things always came out badly for them whenever they tried to maim or kill her. And they loved how easy it was to rape her, especially if she was tied up.

But there was a method to this madness and it would take the combined efforts of a numbers runner, Lacy's bestie informant Junie Jamieson, a genius hacker and Lacy herself to figure out what it was, and what it was might well challenge the nature of reality itself.

This is a genre-bending story that's part taboo erotica, part hard-boiled crime noir, part science fiction and a little bit gonzo. If you had to categorize it, you might say it's pulp detective sci fi parody erotica, but that doesn't really do the story justice. It doesn't just break the mold, it CRUSHES the mold!

“I, The Glider Gun” is in the same universe (in fact, the same city) as “Junie Jamieson, Snoopy Reporter: Captured by Gangsters” but you don't have to read “Captured by Gangsters” to enjoy “I, the Glider Gun,” it is a completely stand-alone story. “I, The Glider Gun” is over 30,000 words in length.

"The Also-Ran" Now On Smashwords

 

Get "The Also Ran" -- a full novel -- on Smashwords for just $2.99

“The Also-Ran” Is Now On Smashwords!

Here’s the pic that inspired the story. NSFW due to female nudity.

Can’t you almost see her sash and tiara as she poses in her cage?  When I saw this image I thought “Beauty pageant contestant in a cage … what can I do with that?” I thought what I’d do was write a short story or a novella. Instead I wrote a novel. Happens sometimes.

Basically this is a very familiar story from erotica: a billionaire falls for a beautiful woman and kidnaps her and rapes her and makes her his sex slave, then they fall in love and live happily ever after. Honestly, even in romance days before erotica they had “bodice rippers” that were basically about powerful men raping helpless women and then the two of them fall in love. It’s a very common theme in romances.

Generally the darker aspects of these stories are glossed over. There’s very little consideration given to the possibility that the woman will be killed. But my heroine has seen enough Lifetime movies to know that a possible outcome to being kidnapped, raped and held captive for more rape, is being found dead in a ditch or a pond later. In order to deal with her captor, she has to figure out what’s going on with him psychologically. Is he a whacko who might kill her at any moment or a normal man who can be reasoned with? 

At the same time, she has to deal with her own feelings, as she discovers she’s a natural submissive who likes being bound and fucked. She also kind of likes being raped. This is all new stuff to her, but being psychologically and socially grounded, Stephanie’s able to deal with that fairly easily.

I also give James’ psychology some attention. Billionaires have become a cliché in romances. To make James fresh I didn’t go with the tragic, brooding typecasting that’s normal for billionaire main characters in a romance. Instead, I made James brilliant and highly intelligent about math and money and sex, and almost completely clueless in other ways. I also got a chance to work a little socialist propaganda into the story, showing how being a financial speculator, working with amoral people and companies in an amoral capitalist system that sees all laws, rules, regulations and morals as just barriers to be worked around, worked through or simply broken in the quest to make more money, eventually corrupts the mind and soul of a financier.

And of course the whole point of this for many readers is going to be the rape and sexual bondage scenes, and I went full-bore on those, too. Setting up the conflict as strongly as I did, I was able to write some really strong rape scenes, with powerful emotions and some imaginative sex toys. James with his sexual expertise and mildly obsessive approach to sexual bondage, has all the toys and all the techniques, and Stephanie is brand new to them (though she’s not new to sex). I had the opportunity to write some powerful sex scenes, and I did. What’s more they fit right in with the psychological elements of my story. 

I think the whole novel came together very well, with the psychological, social and sexual themes intertwining nicely.  I hope you think so, too. That said, here’s da blurb:

When Stephanie Ann Steckler didn’t win anything at the Miss Grits Beauty Pageant, she broke down crying. This was of course very wrong. In beauty pageants, only the winners cry. Losers are expected to smile.

Texas billionaire James Pugh liked to have football games, cycling events and beauty pageants on in the background while he did the intense financial speculation that made him his billions. And when he saw Stephanie crying in the background as the winners were crowned, she stole his heart.

James, an oligarch and an alpha male, was accustomed to taking what he liked when he wanted it. When Stephanie stole his heart, he abducted Stephanie’s entire body and introduced her to the world of bondage and forced sex slavery. Her reaction surprised her. And James’ reaction to getting to know Stephanie surprised him. Then Stephanie surprised him in other ways, and James surprised her in other ways. Nothing went the way either of them thought it would or feared it might.

James thought he was a Master of the Universe, but in Stephanie, he might just have found his match. Stephanie, who thought she was average and normal, discovered she was neither of these things. Will their relationship survive its very rocky beginnings and sail into the sunset?

You’ll have to read the story to find out.

This 45,000 word novel is a contemporary erotic romance featuring an alpha male hero, a submissive heroine and a happily ever after.

A Love Beyond The Struggle: How A Billionaire Rape Story Became A Dark Romance

 

Get the book by clicking here! ($2.99 on Amazon or free on Kindle Unlimited)

When I first started writing “A Love Beyond the Struggle” I thought I was going to write a billionaire rape story for publication on Smashwords. In fact the working title for it was “billionaire rape story.” I was writing to market, hurrah!

Unfortunately, it didn't end up that way. Early on, it got changed, though I wasn't aware of how drastically it was going to change. 

After a bit of thought, I decided on Nero Wolfe as the model for my billionaire. Clearly, he'd make a GREAT billionaire, ruthless variety. But I couldn't do an exact Nero Wolfe map, even if I wanted to. Nero Wolfe had a finely developed moral sense, he was not a kidnapper or anything like it. Archie Goodwin, even more so.

So I came up with a darker Nero Wolfe,  the billionaire Colin Whitworth. He maintains a harem of kidnapped women on his private island to keep him entertained while he makes his billions from green energy.

The idea here is to make Whitworth a force of nature thanks to all his money and power. He's so powerful that his sexual whims, illegal or not, ethical or not, get enacted, and there's no accountability for him at all … his money ensure it.

So his assistant Garth Goodwin (an Archie Goodwin analog, of course) would be a counterpoint to Whitworth who sees his amorality clearly but still enables it. Garth wouldn't be involved in the harem at all, other than helping with acquisitions and disposals. He would be the romantic lead.

And at some point after I came up with that dynamic for the story, I realized that I could write it for Amazon by having all the harem sexual action occur offscreen, in essence. Garth might know all that goes on in the harem, but he wouldn't describe any of it in any detail, not being deeply interested in it. 

Which I realized makes for an EVEN BETTER story, because I can make the story chock full of fantasy fuel for harem bondage sexual fantasies, without having to describe any of them (hence complying with Amazon’s rule against nonconsensual erotica). All the nasty, dirty kinky sex stuff can occur in the reader’s nasty, dirty mind.

Sweet!

And that's when the story because a romance, specifically a dark romance. And of course, a very DIFFERENT kind of dark romance. I think it's an interesting and original story of a sort I've never written before. I've written other works that aren't erotica: “Slave Girls Of Outer Space,” “The Visitor From Incel World” and “The Love Invasion” but they were all basically science fiction adventures. This is a straight-up romance with no explicit sex whatsoever but SOOO much fantasy fuel. (Very Gorean, in fact, though Gor DOES have its sex scenes.) Will it work? Who knows?

You'll have to buy it and see what you think, if you like a dark romance. It’s $2.99 on Amazon or free if you have Kindle Unlimited.