Recently, the entire erotic genre celebrated a victory with the Fifty Shades of Grey movie opening weekend. Whether you love the trilogy or not, nothing beats knowing one of ours made the largest opening weekend ticket count of any R rated movie in a good decade. I don’t think there has been this kind of hype for a naughty movie since The Devil and Mrs. Jones came out in 1972. (I was born that year, so I can’t personally testify, but its reputation still lingers to this day.)
Trilogies are running amok and it seems like if you want your books published in today’s market, you need to be ready to write at least three of them. I have a love/hate relationship with stories that require three books. Every writer has that one set that rocked their one-handed-read literary world, but I never found mine. My first erotica teacher told me to try Anne Rice’s Beauty trilogy, the one she wrote as Anne Roquelaure. Many an erotic writer feels this one, but not me. Sigh! Another writing friend said, “Check out Molly Westerfield’s Carrie’s Story duo.” Them – Yay! Me – Nah! Last but not least, the Fifty Shades of Grey series by British author E.L. James. For me, it was equal parts Yay! and Nah! without anyone else’s say. Maybe there just wasn’t a trilogy that my erotic writer’s brain could feel.
You know what they say? — When you quit looking, that’s when you find it.
DARK SECRET LOVE.
The first book in the Alison Tyler series that blew my mind. It’s a memoir-that’s-not-a-memoir in the same tone I like to write. I love the “based on” feel where you have to guess how much of what happened really happened to the author and how much is completely imagination. Samantha is a young submissive, knowing what she wants and needs and not knowing at the same time. This first book charts her journey trying to find fulfillment.
THE DELICIOUS TORMENT.
Heroine Samantha is so vivid, you are with her every step of her erotic journey — you cry with her as you look with her eyes through the bars of her suspended cage and you crave more of it with her. This is the book that makes the story an emotion-filled BDSM reading requirement, even more so than all those books I listed above. The ending takes a reader’s breath away and makes you hunger for the final book. I hope I didn’t write the publisher and protest the slowness in that last book coming out. I don’t think I did. I hope… Oh, well. 😛
WRAPPED AROUND YOUR FINGER.
Jack, a powerful, controlled, bisexual dom with wit for every occasion, an iron will, and he knows you better than you know yourself. Alex, his equally delicious dom-in-training, and our favorite heroine Samantha. They make you sigh often and deeply. You can worry about uncurling your toes when you finish the last chapter and when you’re wish there were more. Why does a trilogy only have three books? Argh! The story is told. It made me laugh, it made me cry, and it aroused me over and over again. I hate it that this book is part three, but that only means I can start reading the first one all over again.
If you’d like to read these delicious books, Cleis Press has given me permission to give a set away to one reader of this blog. Just leave a comment below or email me at quixoticorchid@gmail.com with Dark, Secret, Love in the subject line, and I’ll throw your name in my rent paying job uniform baseball cap. I have a really hot boss who’ll reach in on March 12, 2015 and make some reader very lucky.