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Certain Things Guys Do

Some things just turn me on no matter how hard I try to ignore them.  I noticed it right after I got married when--for the first time--I saw my new husband standing at the chest of drawers in nothing but a pair of unzipped worn, faded blue jeans with his belt dangling to either side of the opened fly. With his broad shoulders, adorable feet and a killer ass no woman could overlook, he literally took my breath away. When he turned to look over his shoulder at me I thought my knees would buckle.  At the time I was eighteen years old and he was the only man I'd ever seen sans clothing so I thought all men were...well...as well-endowed and well-proportioned. Boy was I in for a rude awakening!

Over the years I begin to realize there were certain things guys do, the way they look, what they wear that do really funny things to my libido. Case in point: I have a type.

Black or very dark brown hair, cobalt blue eyes with really long, thick lashes; full lips that are just as ready with a smile as with a sexy smirk; broad shoulders, narrow hips, good-sized thighs and calves; an athletic neck and a chest full of curly, swirling hair that tapers down a distinct tiger line to a flat belly.

Yeppers, that's my type and there are a lot of guys out there I see on TV who fit the bill. Well, maybe not all of them have ALL of the traits, but many do. The guy in the shot above is Newfoundlander Allan Hawco and he is some mighty fine eye candy despite the fact he has only a teeny-tiny tuft of hair between his pecs. Others who fit the mold: Colin Donnell, David Giantoli, Jamie Lee Soffer, Collin O'Donahue, Antony Starr, Wes Bentley and Ryan Peavey to name a few.  I can stare at them all day long. I've also noticed they all tend to look at a woman from under their lashes: another tell that simply turns me on.

Scruff?  Yes. Full beard? No.  Goatee only? Hell to the no!  Funky mustaches such as Pablo Schrieber wears on Orange is the New Black? I'm shuddering just thinking about. They aren't called pornstaches for nothing. Muttonchops? Get the hell out of my sight, dude!

Nice asses that stick up so delightfully from a pair of torn, faded blue jeans. (Are you seeing a pattern here with the jeans? So sue me.)  I prefer no belt but if they are wearing one, it had better be black and have a silver buckle. Ever seen the old poster called Buns and Roses? Guy is standing with his bare back to the camera in a pair of tight blue jeans. His arm is behind his back, crooked across his waist and clutched in his hand is a bouquet of red roses. A nicely-rounded behind adding to the mix makes that poster drool-worthy. Wish I still had my copy of it.

In going through stock photos to use on my webpage, I found numerous shots of men standing with their fingers stuffed into the pockets of their torn jeans with just their cute little thumbs sticking out. That is a MAJOR turn on for me. I will pause a scene on TV when I see a good looking guy standing like that. I have absolutely no idea why it turns me on but it does. If...by some glorious chance...they are bare chested and barefoot at the same time and I get a glimpse of their cute little toes?  Oh,  babybabybaby! Lemme at him!

Men standing with their hands on their slender hips. Yes. That is a turn-on, too. Especially if he's standing there all authoritative and sexy, one eyebrow arched as if to ask: Whatcha gonna do now, girl?

Men wearing sunglasses. <SIGH>  The darker the lens, the better. No blue or amber though. I prefer silver aviator sunglasses and I'll tell you why.  My husband was an Air Force weatherman and it was his job to brief pilots before they took off.  Sometimes I'd visit him at the weather office and I'd watch him talking to the hotshot B-52 pilots. Most of these guys were absolutely mouthwatering gorgeous and they had ATTITUDE. They didn't walk, ladies. They strutted. They swaggered in their jumpsuits and Air Force blue garrison caps with the metallic braid. (Funny thing about these hats. Servicemen called them cunt caps.)  I remember one guy in particular who turned when he saw me. He flashed this 3000 watt stark white smile, hooked his index finger on the nose piece of the sunglasses, tugged them down, looked over them then winked at me. Right there in front of my husband. Man, I lived off that sensual flirt for several days. 

BTW: in the photo showing pilots wearing their garrison caps is the first female Thunderbirds pilot Maj. Nicole Malachowski. 

In the photo above there are three great little Certain Things I Like: hands on hips, man wearing aviator sunglasses who has a killer little tush.  He may be short, but I'll bet he's in proportion to his size. Even if he isn't, he's a pilot and he's hot stuff to most women.

Handsome men wearing scuffed caramel-colored cowboy boots with their jeans will get my attention in a heartbeat. Slap a black Stetson and a blue gingham shirt rolled up to the elbows on him and I could really hurt that boy.

Wait a minute while I fan myself here and wipe the drool from my keyboard.

I like a nice ripped body on a male. Chiseled pecs, washboard abs, killer asses and hairy chests get a lot of play in each and every one of my books. Gotta have those nice big thighs, too. No spindly legs and thin calves for me. No twisted toes with yellowed nails attached, either. A man with a pretty pair of feet just makes me melt. The only thing that would turn me off is if he had a forest of hair growing atop that foot.

Men with an Australian or New Zealand accent. Alex O'Loughlin and Antony Starr come readily to mind. Although they have very believable American accents for Hawaii Five-0 and Banshee, they are from Down Under. Irish accents?  Oh, yeah. Talk to me Jamie Dornan. Mrs. Boyett-Compo will see you now. Scots? Not so much but usually when Gerard Butler is speaking I'm not listening to what he's saying. I'm too busy looking at his face.

So, ladies. What turns you on? What Certain Things do the men you find irresistible do or wear or say that makes you get all ooey, gooey? Let's hear what you have to say.

To read about some of my heroes who fit the bill for my dark fantasies of Certain Things I Like, please visit my webpage at www.windlegends.org .  Like me on Facebook at www.facebook.com/windlegends . Drop me a line at windworldwriter@gmail.com .

#ShirtlessSunday

Herding Cats: The Joy and Challenge of Organizing a Boxed Set by Suz deMello

Some of you may remember this Super Bowl commercial—it’s one of my favorites.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pk7yqlTMvp8

At the end of the commercial, here’s how the company, EDS, promotes itself:

                                                      

In a sense, it’s what we do. We bring together information, ideas and technologies and make them go where you want. EDS—managing the complexities of the digital economy.

A few months ago, my primary publisher underwent a corporate contraction which, unfortunately, garnered an outsize amount of adverse publicity. Authors were concerned about a variety of events which might take place. On the yahoogroup I set up so we could privately exchange information, I read fear, worry, anger...but candidly, little action.

I don’t consider myself a leader. In fact, more than one group I’ve been in has lost steam and foundered, so often I wondered if I was some sort of Jonah, a bad-luck jinx. But I do prefer action, so after a while I proposed that we take the energy we’d been expending on negative speculation and focus it on something positive. To mangle Paul McCartney, I wanted to “take a sad song and make it better.”

I proposed creating a holiday boxed set. Thus was born the Naughty Literati, a group of twelve authors who have, as our website says, “come together to show off their epic talents in short stories filled with powerful eroticism and satisfying romance.”

Why short stories? The timeline was short, so I suggested short stories. That may change. And because some were leery of too much structure, I kept it loose. Although the conventional wisdom is that readers don’t like subgenre mixing—M/M mixed in with F/M, for example—I didn’t care. I’m not interested in telling anyone how to do her art. If someone wanted to write M/M, cool. If someone wanted to contribute a ménage story, equally cool. Although the Naughty Literati all came from a publisher of erotic romance, I pushed for no set heat level. I felt sure that there would be plenty of hot sex, but I wasn’t going to decree XXX or BDSM.

Because every writer in the NL is a professional, I felt comfortable with few rules and I think others are also.

It’s been sort of a “seat of the pants” undertaking—the organizational equivalent of being a pantser as opposed to a plotter. But because I have a legal background, and used to run a law practice, I tend to be highly organized. I tried to think ahead, to anticipate issues before they arose.

We benefited by being a group of highly motivated, talented, smart and

responsible individuals. Each of us brings gifts others may lack. Nic Austin is a wizard with Photoshop and has created beautiful covers and logos, plus the blog and the website. Marianne Stephens is my right-hand gal, my co-organizer, my sounding board. I can’t begin to say how glad I am she’s there for me. Regina Kammer “concatenates” like nobody’s business. Everyone stepped up to edit, copyedit, promote...there’s a myriad of tasks to complete.

There were challenges, of course. Primary among them, for me, is my naturally strong personality. I’m dominating and have the paddle and floggers to prove it. I had to rein myself in, occasionally reminding the others, “Hey, I’m not the Queen. I don’t have a tiara or Corgis.” (Damn. I like Corgis.) And I had to keep people on task without, quite frankly, being an asshole about it.

Whenever there was a potential point of disagreement, I took the easy way out. I put issues up for a vote. I have to say that while many diss Yahoo, their polling feature has been invaluable, as well as files, photo storage and databases. Communication was relatively easy.

Initial challenges: creating a loose but meaningful contract. Getting everyone to sign it without being a jerk about it. I felt that the arithmetic associated with divvying up the royalties could lead to serious issues, so I persuaded everyone to hire an outside company for that very purpose. The same company has handled publishing and distribution as well, for a portion of the royalties.  

What can I say right now? Naughty List, the first boxed set, released during the winter holidays, is still selling nicely. We then released another in February, Naughty Hearts. I especially love the art on this one--it's got a clean, elegant look even though the stories are unabashedly dirty. We're in the midst of creating our third bozed set, Naughty Flings, a springtime set.  

Even better, the mere existence of the group, with its intense focus, has energized us.  For me, I had been strangled in the grip of writers’ block so long and tight that I often contemplated giving up.

Not any more. My story for the summertime boxed set is coming along well, which is excellent since, again, we’re working with a very short timeline.

Lesson learned. Next year will be easier, and there will, I think, be more boxed sets from the Naughty Literati for years to come. At this point we’re planning about four anthologies annually, each corresponding to a season.

It’s hard to pinpoint what’s been best about this experience. Falling in love again with writing has been a big deal for me.

But surpassing everything has been the joy of working with a group of such fantastic colleagues. “Heart-warming” is a word that’s overused, but the caring and commitment I see from the Naughty Literati truly does warm my heart.

What's in a Pen Name?

I’m going to let you in on a little secret: I’m new to romance writing. I started selling fiction around the turn of the century. Fantasy and science fiction mostly, with a bit of non-fiction tossed in for seasoning. The question of pennames is one most writers I know have at least thought about.

There are more reasons for pennames than there are writers who use them. Some day jobs might object. Sometimes families might have a problem with what a son or daughter or mother or father writes. Knowing my family as I do I know it would be less that they’d be horrified by what I write and more than everyone would decide they know best and I’d never have a moment’s peace. Sometimes a writer just wants the privacy of keeping her real name separate from her writing life.

The biggest reason for pen names is marketing. The first is very simple: how does your name look on a book cover? Some names are too long to fit in a readable font. Some feel jarring for a particular genre. For years, women have written under male names to get published in science fiction (James Tiptree anyone?). And yes, men have written under women’s names to get published in romance. Dean Knootz wrote gothic romance as Deanna Dwyer. Marketing can be to the reader…or to the publisher. For such a seemingly small thing, a pen name can make a huge difference.

For those of us who write in different genres, a pen name, or names, let readers know what they’re getting. The late Barbara Mertz wrote non-fiction books on Ancient Egypt under her real name, but most of us knew her best as either Elizabeth Peters or Barbara Michaels. Or both. In her case, her publisher made the decision for her to use pen names to keep her fiction and non-fiction separate. But in these Wild West days of indie writing, more and more authors are making that decision themselves.

Terry Rissen is my latest pen name and one I hope to be using for a long time. The story I have coming out in the upcoming Naughty Flings anthology (May 15, 2015) is more than just an urban fantasy story of a young man and young woman finding each other on a night in 1969, but it’s the debut of a universe I’ve been living with for close to a year now. Blue Plate Special introduces characters I created for my novel Phoenix. It still has a rewrite or two in its future, and I can’t guarantee the title won’t change (again) before I send it out into the world. While Phoenix is light on romance, it’s heavy on character with a little end of the world action tossed in for good measure.

I’m doing something very different with this pen name. I’m not limiting my genres. In addition to Blue Plate Special’s urban fantasy, I’ve got Lodestone, a male/male science fiction paranormal romance adventure story in space coming out in June from Dreamspinner. I keep thinking I should have had horses so I could add western to the mix. Rainmaker is currently being written in the Lodestone universe, but with completely different characters. I have no idea how long it’ll be, I just hope Dreamspinner likes it as much as I do. Then there’s The Glass Spinner’s Tale, which is in rewrites. It’s a male/male steampunkesque fantasy with an almost Regency sensibility which doesn’t have a home yet and might end up going out as an Indie title.

I always swore I’d never juggle universes like this, but it’s turning out to be more fun than I ever imagined. I hope you all enjoy reading my work as much as I enjoy writing it.

Keep calm and read!

For now, you can connect with me on Twitter @terryrissen. I hope to have my own blog up and running before too long. When it is, the link will be posted on Twitter and appended here to future posts.

Where's My Birthday Gift? by Marianne Stephens

Yes...it's my birthday...and I'm looking for gifts! At my (ahem) old age, I want a man...no, two men. Is that so hard to get? I bet my husband would help with this. (I'll take the teddy bear if the guy comes with it!)

No? You don't think so?

But...I want a man to cook and another to clean. You know, do the stuff  I've been doing for SO long that I want to take an extended break from the household stuff! While my husband will barbecue, that's about it for him. I need a 7-day, 3 meals a day cook. Who'll also do the food shopping.

Wouldn't that be heavenly?

And, the cleaning. If I never scrub another toilet bowl I'll be blissful! Again, my husband can run the vacuum (never does a great job), but he'll leave the rest for me to do. And, I'm tired of it! I need a 7-day a week house cleaner...willing to move furniture and scrub those floors. As well as do laundry.

My husband can handle my other needs just fine. Don't want another man (even if he is younger) for personal stuff. Let's face it...it would take SO LONG to train another man and I don't want to spend time doing that again!

So, for my birthday:
one man to cook and whatever goes along with food
one man to clean everywhere in the house...and one who does windows.

In the Naughty Literati's first anthology, Naughty List, the heroine want a MAN for Christmas...but she orders a man doll to use for sexual pleasure. Her interest in her doll shifts to the real man who delivers the doll...and you can read our anthology - and my story - to find out who she picks as her Christmas gift!

Visit:
http://naughtyliterati.com for details about all our short story anthologies: buy links, author information, blurbs, excerpts.
http://www.mariannestephens.net

Leave a comment for a chance to win a $15 GC for Amazon. Put your email address in with your comment....even if you just say "Happy Birthday!"


photos:flickr: rockshots.com, flickr:willclayton's photostream.

Naughty Hearts - Buy Me a Rose Playlist

Welcome to my playlist for my short story, Buy Me a Rose. I’ve been writing erotic romance for a number of years now and I’ve found that one of the most important parts of my writing is music. Music inspires titles, scenes, love scenes and even my characters.

I think this is true for most writers but it’s especially true for me. I know many writers who can’t abide lyrics when they’re writing because it distracts them. For me, songs with lyrics help me to reinforce my own words and the feelings behind them. I love to listen to great songs and genre doesn’t matter. Love songs grab your heart whether they twang, strum or anything else.

Let me give you an example, I’ve been writing about shapeshifters since I started out and most of my stories have featured couples who are new to each other. But I wondered what would happen with a couple who’d shared a long relationship. Would things stay happy or could True Mates, my version of fated soulmates among my shapeshifters, drift apart.

After considering for a while, I realized that yes, a True Mate relationship could get strained and just like any other relationship if a couple didn’t nurture it, the relationship could falter. But with True Mates, there’s no divorce option because once you’re together, you’re mated for life. Unlike a human couple, the danger of cheating or splitting up isn’t in the cards.

To make this story work, my couple, Nathaniel (Nat) and Jessica (Jess) Whitewolf have allowed their relationship to grow stale, but with help from their kids and some work together, they get the opportunity to rediscover each other.

Nat is a dedicated doctor and Jess is involved in her landscaping business and active in the community. They’d lost touch with one another. My shapeshifters can communicate mind to mind and Nat and Jess have almost forgotten how.

So here are a few tunes on my playlist for Buy Me a Rose.

Of course the biggest influence was Buy Me a Rose by Kenny Rogers. I remember watching an episode of Touched by an Angel that featured Kenny Rogers and roughly followed the storyline of his song. That episode and that song stayed with me. When I started writing this story, I knew that this song had to be featured so I could explore that distance between my hero and heroine. It ended up being an important turning point for my hero.



Another important song for my hero and heroine is “their song.” All I Need sung by Jack Wagner was a big hit in the mid-1980s when Nat and Jess met. In fact, it was the very first song they ever danced to and it expressed feelings they both had at that time in their life.



Another song that I used when I was writing and I also mention within the story is a song that long time lovers would respond to is Remember When by Alan Jackson. It’s sweet and it can make me cry and I know Jess would feel the same way.



Something That We Do by Clint Black is also one of those songs that helped me while I wrote. It’s super romantic but it kept me aware of the importance of the little things – the things we do – that show our love to one another. That was definitely something that Nat and Jess needed to be reminded of. Live in each day. Love in each day. Share each day.



Buy Me A Rose  by Francesca Hawley
Jessica and Nathaniel Whitewolf celebrate their thirtieth anniversary as True Mates but they’ve lost their bond. Now a hot couples’ retreat will get it back.

Excerpt from Buy Me a Rose by Francesca Hawley

Copyright © Francesca Hawley, 2015

Chapter One

She heard his step on the stairs and dished his bacon and eggs onto the plate. Right on schedule. Just like every morning. He walked into the kitchen and absently kissed her cheek as he sat down at the table. He ate neatly, as he always did.

Jessica Whitewolf watched her True Mate as he read the paper, his forehead knotted in thought. He’d been so focused on a case lately. One of his patients was late in a high risk pregnancy and he had been seeing her often so that she’d have a healthy pup.

Jess knew she shouldn’t feel jealous, the wolf bitch needed Nat’s attention. Sadly though, Jess couldn’t remember the last time her Mate focused so keenly on her. She fought the envy down and choked it off, wishing the best for the expectant mother.

“What are your plans today?” she asked.

Jess could almost predict what he’d say even though they rarely used their True Mate telepathic bond anymore. He’d talk about spending the day at the clinic and checking on his special case. Then he’d get up, give her a quick kiss and tell her he’d see her tonight.

“It’s a clinic day. I’ll be slammed all day with office visits.”

“Any interesting cases? How is Missy Goldwolf doing?”

“Missy?”

Jess smiled. Nat was a stickler about confidentiality. “She’s pregnant. She’s had a difficult pregnancy and everyone in the entire valley is holding their breaths hoping she’ll carry to term. It isn’t hard to figure out, honey.”

He rose and crossed the room. “I suppose not. She’s holding her own. I’m just glad that Yohana approved the upgrade to the obstetrics and neonatal units at the hospital.”

“Well, considering she’ll need it soon herself, it was a no-brainer for the council.”

“She didn’t know that at the time it was approved, but my thanks to the council,” Nat smiled and gave her a wink since Jess was part of that civic body. “I better go. See you tonight, right?” He kissed her cheek, picked up his briefcase and headed for the front door. Jess followed.

“The kids sent cards.”

“Hmm?” he asked absently as she followed him.

“Anniversary cards,” she hinted. “For us.”

“That’s nice.”

He opened the door and left without turning around once. She watched him walk to the car and waved as he drove away. He didn’t wave back. She wasn’t even sure he’d seen her.
Jess sighed. When had this happened? When had they become so comfortable and…boring. She turned around and went inside to wash up in the kitchen before she headed over to her landscaping business.