The World and Writing of Rosie D. Ruthers from Erotica to Paranormal Romance to Pulp fiction and Essays on Writing and More.
Without another word Xavier plunged the blade into Connor’s chest, ignoring the tears streaming down both their cheeks, and he knew that no matter why he did this Xavier would never be able to forget how all of this horror could have been avoided.
#prompt #writelife #fantasy
Prompt: Words
I will follow you I didn’t want to at the start When you kept shining that spot light on me Blinking Blinding I didn’t like what you said What you were finding As you walked around Tut Tut Tutting Then muttering All That Muttering Nearly drove me mad But now I see it was me […]
via Pillaging Poetry — A Thousand Bits of Paper
Followers if you can’t tell this is one of my favorite blogs and truthfully favorite poets. This poem is…well, for me, it is just incredibly evocative.
Wedding Cake We eat the top of your wedding cake, Stale sugar pieces cracking our teeth, Promising each mouthful To be the last, Buttercream drooling from Sticky fingers, Pregnant with cream, Pink pearls to be kissed. Plump lips wait, Shivering from loneliness. We listen to the screaming downstairs […]
Between broaching the busy season at my day job and the mounds of grief, I’ve been crawling out of my skin. There was no writing. There wasn’t even reading. I even considered deleting my author page and quitting my blogs. (Stop panicking, I didn’t give into the crazy.) Determined to break out of my funk, […]
via In Case of Writer’s Block, Break Glass by Heather Novak — Nights of Passion
kissing tenderly, as our husbands watch,
their passions temporarily placid, bodies weary,
cocks shiny and flaccid, our mouths tasting of their cum, and of scotch, fingers tenderly explore moistened crotch, head moving down, as yours hands gently urge, till my delving tongue, makes arousal surge, finding your hard clit, jutting from its notch, once limp […]
A nice read. For my sf/f loving readers! I can’t wait to read more by this author.
I’ve been working on this damn thing for longer than I really should, and I’ve never really been happy with it.
This patchwork of chapters has benefited from the various stages of my writing ability as I’ve revisited it time and again over the past twelve years, and in January I decided enough is enough, am I ever going to use it? No.
So rather than give up on the characters and world that I created – I’ve grown quite attached to them – I decided to rewrite the whole novel from scratch…as a science fiction novel. So that’s what i’m doing.
I’m roughly halfway through the first draft of the novel and making steady progress, but as this is my first full length novel I thought i’d see if I could enlist my friends and supporters to take a look and feed back any inconsistencies, cracks and/or spelling mistakes…
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One thing everyone assumes about self-publishing is that all you have to do is throw some cheap romantic cliches on a sheet of paper and make a cool $10k. But here in the real world we all have to decide whether we’ll try and get rich quick, which isn’t possible unless you scam, or whether you’ll take the time, dedication, and appreciation for you craft to create a product that not only will people want, but will keep them coming back for more. The most common difference between a successful author and a failed author is one gives up too soon. People write romance, not out of love but out of thinking the market is easy, and the result isn’t a labor of love or a desire to give readers what they want because their tastes are respected, but a book that will make a few sales then fade with the author’s name.
I respect myself and my readers, especially you loyal followers, too much to do that. This blog isn’t dead, but it is quiet as I focus on building a back catalog and pulling double shifts in order to afford editors and others to make my works more than good, but great because my readers deserve the best I can do. As I shift from pure erotica to romance I find myself falling in love with writing again.
some of the first stories I loved in my formative years were Lifetime Network’s romances and the intense made-for-TV dramas that were peppering the airwaves. Intense stories became cliches, but those cliches have roots in genuine human emotions. They’ve been belittled, but The Burning Bed touched on genuine fears in a society where regardless of race, class, or age women have a specific place in their relationships and how that can spiral into a nightmare Where the Heart Is touches on the harsh realities of being a young mother in rural America and the fear that you having been on “the wrong” path means you can’t love someone on the “right” without hurting them. Outlander is massively popular because it is genuine in its fantasy and romantic elements. A heroine is torn between one constraint in one time and another in another time; one love in the past and one in the present. What all of these stories have in common is sincerity.
They aren’t money grabs though their creators wanted to make money. They aren’t snubbing their noses up at their cliches. They’re using what we recognize and building very human stories in ways that leave you unable to look away. Sincerity makes the author successful. Sincerity gets you an audience that will always be in your corner even if it is only to debate you. Before I publish my next work I want to take time to make sure it is everything I know it needs to be so that you all can enjoy it, and see that it isn’t a money grab. Self-publishing isn’t just a scheme to me, but a dream and a love. Authenticity is how you write from tone to creating characters that are more people than props, more than simple projections for readers but vibrant heroes we root for and cry for. Authenticity is in short, everything.
I believe I captured that in a fun way in my first erotica Dirty Honey and Suffer Too Good. They’re stories about the erotic worlds of submission and domination, but they’re stories about relationships…about quirks that make our sexual lives special. The unique perspective an author brings to their work can and should enrich a genre. If you don’t bring that then you won’t succeed. If you don’t bring that then you’re insulting your audience. By god I get messages from people who dislike my stories, but one thing I’ve never been told is that my work feels fake. My editing? Self-editing. Sloppy? No, but some have rightfully said they need work. I’m now able to give money and time to my works
I’ll give you the number one tip to success in self-publishing that will mean something…be sincere. Don’t talk down to your audience, don’t just spout cliches, and don’t think you can just put out one book and make money.
Emptier than before
He finds my shy spaces
Devoid of even suffering
Leaving simply aching
And a gasping
He seals his lips to mine,
Lipstick swallowed,
Sounds unhinged
Filled with being
As I drift into him, sating a hungry heart.
Source: Review of The Clothing of Books by Jhumpa Lahiri
This is an interesting review of The Clothing of Books, which makes a compelling argument for how we design books and consume visual media. I can’t wait to give it a look. One of the most underappreciated arts is designing good, concise, covers that are reflective of what the writer knows the story to be. This may seem trivial but can have disastrous and embarrassing consequences.
Here is an example….
Back in 2009, the young adult book Liar by Justine Larbalestier was a center of controversy due to the covers of the book. Larbalestier’s preference was the cover have no face at all, a preference met by the Australian cover, which featured the word Liar written over and over on a white background, creating a unique and visually striking image. The U.S cover however was another issue. The U.S branch simply, as most companies due, believed Americans were not going to buy something so artistic or intriguing. To the world we’re simple and commercial is best. You can guess my feelings on that. But that’s common…what isn’t common is the cover choice. The U.S cover of Liar originally featured a white girl, cast in black and white, her mouth covered, as she looks at the reader.
The problem? The main character, Micah, is described as a black teenager, and her physical appearance the author has described as resembling a WNBA player she’s a fan of with dark skin and short natural hair. Emails began appearing in Larbalestier’s inbox asking whether Micah lied about being black, or if the cover represents a lie. The author has said this:
“I never wanted a girl’s face on the cover. Micah’s identity is unstable. She spends the book telling different version of herself. I wanted readers to be free to imagine her as they wanted. I have always imagined her looking quite a bit like Alana Beard,2 which is why I was a bit offended by the reviewer, who in an otherwise lovely review, described Micah as ugly. She’s not!3”
In the planning stages she objected to a number of potential models to be used on the cover, and in her own words “none […] looked remorely like Micah.” But her words went unheeded. She remained silent, letting those unfamiliar with the text praise the over, while awaiting readers who’d push back, allowing her to comment without hurting her reputation as a writer who was easy to work with. As she watched she even began to realize how important it is to have a girl who looks like Micah, or Alana Beard, on the cover. Between people automatically calling her an ugly girl for having “nappy” short hair or being dark when reading the text, to observing the lack of diversity among models used for book covers…she began to see the underbelly of race, beauty and marketing. She began to see without ever being conscious of it how people assigned “marketability” to certain bodies or simply didn’t care.
But in a book about a pathological liar and in a world where a cover shapes how we read the publisher accidentally hurt the content of the book. The publisher, seeing the backlash and confusion, published a new cover with a light skinned curly coiled model. Better, but still problematic. Covers don’t have to be exact reflections of the character, but the choices publishers make about covers says a lot about them as a company marketing a product and a producer(the author).
I tell you this story because covers matter and they say a lot about the industry. Authors don’t always know whats best, but authors do know what’s honest and what works. The decision to ignore the content of the book, a story about a black young woman, and present an image completely seperate from that does damage to authors. And in this case makes the publisher’s U.S branch seem racist. There’s no way around that. The author gives them so much benefit of the doubt, but I cannot. It’s an embarrassing, event that didn’t have to happen, and could have been avoided if the author was actually listened to.
Hopefully ,The Art of Clothing books will open some eyes and begin to give the industry something to really think about when it comes to how writers can and should impact the cover process. Designing our books shouldn’t just be a formality, but a mindful process.
Prompt: Self Destruction in love.
Loving her left me with a journal, xanax, and whiskey.
Drugs and rock n’ roll were kids stuff or stupid, but not Sex
Best friends ate together, laughed together, and fought over cocaine.
Bound By Rosie 