From the Bone Yard: a BDSM Beauty and the Beast!

This week at the SFF Seven, we're digging in the bone yard and resurrecting... a backlist book!

Yeah, okay - not all that creepy.

But I did pick one of my very first publications that has significant creepitude, in that it's a BDSM Beauty and the Beast. Yes, PETALS AND THORNS is my exploration of what *really* went on in that dark and lonely castle after sundown. What happens when Beauty opens those doors on the Beast's truly wild and beastly nature?

This story has gotten a lot of lovely reviews over the years. I originally published the book under a pseudonym, "Jennifer Paris," so there can be some confusion. Still I love this review:

The BDSM elements work beautifully for this, and I was swept into the story, the characters, and the darkness of the work. Ms. Paris has a gift for drawing a reader into the center of her world and keeping them there, using sensuality, innocence, and desire as her lure. The Beast, while dominant and controlling, is equally soft and tender. The virginal Amarantha is more than a mere bride gained as a means to an end. The writing is fantastic, and I loved the twist at the end in which the Beast reveals the cause of his affliction to our courageous heroine. It added so much to the story and left me wanting more when I reached the final page.

Fans of fairy tales, erotic romance, and BDSM will love Petals and Thorns. This is one of the best novellas I’ve read so far this year, and I can’t wait to read more from Ms. Paris in the future. Definitely place this title on your coveted TBR list.

Interested in some twisty fairytale kink? Blurb and buy links below!

In exchange for her father’s life, Amarantha agrees to marry the dreadful Beast and be his wife for seven days. Though the Beast cannot take Amarantha’s virginity unless she begs him to, he can and does take her in every other way. From the moment they are alone together, the Beast relentlessly strips Amarantha of all her resistance.

If Amarantha can resist her cloaked and terrifying husband, she gains his entire fortune and will be allowed to return to her family and a normal life. But the Beast seduces her at every turn, exposing, binding, tormenting, and pleasuring Amarantha until she no longer knows her own deepest desires. Increasingly desperate to break the curse that chains his humanity, the Beast drives Amarantha past every boundary. But her desire for a normal life may jeopardize the love that will save them both.

       

Transformative Fairytelling

It's been a busy, messy week involving surgeries (one complicated and expensive, the other not so much), a drama queen, an all-nighter (which was last night - I'm running on two hours of sleep so no warranties expressed or implied as to the coherence of my post). Oh yeah. And a book re-release.

I wish I'd worded this little piece of pretty differently, but what the heck. 

I was also invited to step into a podcast to talk about the creative process, the excuses that derail it, and how to approach overcoming those. If you want a listen, check out Creativity Quest on Sound Cloud or on Anchor.fm. If you prefer video, the episode is also available from the Creativity Quest YouTube channel. Truth: The sole reason for vid was the opportunity for kitty photo bombing. Which happens. Now you can make an informed choice.

We're writing about fairytales - which ones inform our work and which ones we want to write. I come from a Jungian background, which translates into having followed the work of Joseph Campbell for more years than I want to admit. I love the fact that a folklorist made the psychology myth and fairytales so accessible that he and his work entered popular culture. Most of us are familiar with the hero's journey cycle. It's the basis for most TV, movies, and genre fiction in Western culture. But there's also a heroine's journey. It's very similar to the hero's journey in most respects. There's the call to adventure, the descent into the Underworld, mentors, gatekeepers, everything we're familiar with. It shifts near the very end. In the hero's cycle, the hero has to conquer the monster(s) facing him or her. (The great thing about these story cycles is that gender is meaningless - you could just as easily say 'protagonist' rather than hero if you don't want to get hung up on gender.) In the heroine's journey, rather than conquering or defeating the monster, the protagonist's challenge is to transform the monster(s). It's a subtle shift, but the implications can be really profound both from a character standpoint and from a plot standpoint. How do you overcome someone or something you can't kill (because to kill or destroy would also wreck your character arc and you would fail your quest). I feel like the romance genre spends a lot of time and page space exploring the differences between hero's and heroine's journeys and I love when I run across a book that unabashedly gives all that transformational power to its protagonist.

If I get to play around with fairytales and myths in my stories, I want it to be from within the confines of the heroine's journey. I'll admit that Enemy Within didn't make that benchmark. It is solidly a hero's journey rather than a heroine's, but that's my aspiration.

As to which fairytale I prefer? I'm an author trying really hard to grab my own glass slipper. I'm comfortably certain you can work that one out. :)

Retelling the Fairy Tale

Our topic at the SFF Seven this week is which fairy tale would you pick to rewrite and why?

It's kind of a funny question for me, because it's starting to be more accurate to ask me which fairy tale I *haven't* rewritten yet.

So far I've done retellings of Beauty & the Beast (PETALS AND THORNS) and The Goose Girl (HEART'S BLOOD).

Then there are all the books that incorporate fairy tale themes without being direct retellings. For example, the original Twelve Kingdoms trilogy began with the idea of the three princesses, daughters of the High King, each more beautiful than the last. All of the books in that trilogy and the Uncharted Realms and Chronicles of Dasnaria spinoff series play with various fairy tale themes. My first fantasy romance series, A Covenant of Thorns, also plays on fairy tale themes, that time about a person being transported to Faerie.

 As for the ones I still want to do... two have been on my list for a long time: Rapunzel and Cinderella. I have ideas for Rapunzel, but nothing yet that really gets to the feel I want. Cinderella poses its own challenges, but... I think I may have it now. :D

Ding Dong the Dude Is Dead

Weeeeeell. Could last week's meme post have segued any more smoothly into this week's? I don't think it could.

I think I've provide graphic proof that I have no issue with killing of whoever needs killing. Bad guys. Innocents. Not so innocents. Folks who were in the wrong place at the wrong time - few are safe from me. And it's probably a character flaw of mine, but since those deaths happen solely to serve the story, I may be guilty of using death as plot device.

Remember fairytales? Not the ones Disney fed you - the dark and creepy tales the Brothers Grimm actually wrote - where Cinderella's step mother maimed her own daughters to get the glass slipper to fit? The penalty in those old, dark stories is almost always death. There's something ancient and bloodthirsty in the human psyche - something that whispers for the deaths of those who transgress, who keep the hero or heroine from what is rightfully theirs. No wonder genre fiction likes to off the bad guys. On some primitive level, it just feels right.

That's the bad guys sorted, but what about when it's a good guy or gal who bites it? I'll be straight with you here. It's emotional manipulation. Yep. Truth. You are being twisted into giving a crap about a character, you're being led to invest emotionally, and then you're being hauled nose first right into your own fear of death. Have I killed off good guys? Of course. SPOILER ALERT: There are likely to be more who take a dirt nap. Why? Not because I intend for you to work through your existential dread over what happens when you die - though, according the ancient Greeks, that's exactly what you're doing - that's the premise for all those tragedies they wrote. Catharsis - purging emotion. I'm not Greek. I kill off good guys because in every battle, in every crisis, in every situation with high stakes, some people learn the lessons that allow them to survive and some don't. Every action a hero or heroine takes has consequences. Sometimes, those consequences include the deaths of allies. Characters who could have been the heroes of their own stories. These are the deaths I try to be most careful with. I roll my eyes at every movie that murders some dude's family/girlfriend/partner in the first ten minutes (y'know, to motivate him) so I am very careful to not use character death as some kind of goad. That's just my particular peeve. If a character is to die, it needs to be the culmination of that character's arc - NOT a blip on someone else's arc, if you see the difference.

The one thing I can say is that I ended a book on a character's death. The series was later canceled by the publisher (not because of the death!) I'd intended to answer the question of whether that character had actually lived or died in the third book - only I didn't get to do a third book. This was not a happy thing for anyone. So. Killing characters is often necessary. Both from a story standpoint and from a character standpoint. But if there's any ambiguity about the demise, don't leave yourself and your readers hanging unless you're already contracted for the next book.