When it comes to writing, I’m influenced by trends, but usually only in a negative way. If everyone is writing Mafia romance, or reverse harem, or billionaire’s babies, or hotwife/cuckold kink, my immediate reaction is to write something that twists the genre so thoroughly that it’s unrecognizable. This doesn’t do much for my sales, of ..read more

“Get your facts first, then you can distort them as much as you please.” – Mark Twain I’m not sure how closely Mark Twain followed his own advice, but that quote can apply just as well to news writing as it does to fiction in this age of distorted truth. It’s getting to the point ..read more

by Ashley Lister It’s that time of year when my students are graduating and receiving their degrees. It’s a time of mixed emotions for me as I’ve known some of these folk for more than three years and, as they move onto bigger and better things, it might be the last time I see them ..read more

Our bodies are strange things. They can be wondrous, pleasurable, even astonishing. But they can also be downright weird. And it often takes us time to understand what our bodies are trying to tell us. Consider, for a moment, a pencil. Just a plain, ordinary Ticonderoga. Now, if I were to jab you with said ..read more

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay To what extent are we authors responsible for protecting our readers from negative emotional experiences? Any fiction runs the risk that it will make readers uncomfortable. Indeed, some books do so intentionally. (Have you ever read anything by Chuck Palahniuk?) Can we assume that readers are mature enough to ..read more

On the third of June I was sat in front of my PC, wrestling with edits from a recently completed chapter. The document itself was roughly 23,000 words of a developing idea: a WIP I’m currently calling Seagulls from Hell. The seagulls in my story had just been getting frisky. They’d done something that only ..read more

For the past few years, I’ve been privileged to teach several creative writing classes in the university where I have taught literature-and-composition since the twentieth century. I’m currently teaching an intense class in a six-week semester, and the students have to try their hands at various genres: fiction, drama, poetry, non-fiction. I’m not sure if ..read more

Does size really matter? The answer is...It depends on the person ..read more

Image by Stefan Keller from Pixabay When I published my first novel, I didn’t realize how profoundly it would change my existence. After all, I’d submitted to Black Lace on a whim, intrigued by the fact that someone might be interested in reading stories inspired by my forbidden fantasies and my real-world sexual adventures. Since ..read more

Every year at this time, we’re bombarded by holiday-themed romance flicks on TV. Christmas and love affairs go together like cookies and hot chocolate, but some cable networks take it to the extreme. The most recent count is 116 new TV movies this year. With that many on deck, I question the originality factor. The Hallmark Channel began airing their lineup before Thanksgiving, followed by Lifetime, Ion and Netflix. I try to catch a few, but some of them threaten to push my blood sugar level into the diabetic danger zone. To that end, I submit my own list of favorite holiday movies, the ones ..read more