Everybody likes pirates, right? I mean, come on. Pirates!

This is kind of a long story. But it has pirates in it, so I hope you’ll bear with me.

I’ve been emailing back and forth with this guy--another writer--and he makes a suggestion, and it’s not a bad one, though I have mixed feelings about it. He says something along the lines of: "Terra, you read and critique a lot of unpublished stuff for people. (True!) And some of this stuff goes on to sell. (Also true! And it makes me happy.) And you blog. (Ayup. Intermittently. Kind of unreliably. But it is still true.) You could talk about some of this stuff on your blog, and it might even help out your writer friends."

And... maybe. Maybe it could help. I mean, I don’t think I have a huge audience, but he’s right. Word of mouth is a powerful thing. It’s just that I don’t really like the idea of regularly leveraging my blog for promotional purposes because I find it kind of a turn off when I see other people doing very much of that.

But all the same, he’s not wrong, and I totally should pimp my friends from time to time, especially times like now, when there’s an interesting story attached.

Pirates!

I’ve mentioned allichaton before. She’s my bestest writing buddy, who lives in California and gets up at 4am to write with me. (Everyone needs a great writing buddy. The buddy system totally rocks. I’ve been meaning to make a post about that for months, and I still will. It’s partially written, even, but my fiction comes first.) Anyway, allichaton has a not-so-sooper-sekrit identity, and writes smutty erotic romance novels, which are published under her not-so-sekrit pseudonym Aislinn Kerry.

So, a couple years back, I was at Dragon*Con (and if you’ve never been, you just really don’t know what you’re missing) with yet another writer. It was her first Dragon*Con and I had shown her the sights and we’d gone to a bunch of panels and eaten lunch and so on, and then returned to her room at the hotel, and along the way we had a vigorous discussion about the inherent entertainment value (or lack thereof) in Bodice-Rippers. For those unfamiliar with the term Bodice Ripper: A Bodice Ripper is a romance novel in which the heroine is usually (not always!) abducted by the hero, and forcibly seduced. Often the heroine’s clothing is ripped away, and rape or things uncomfortably close to rape happen. But at some point, despite all this unpleasantness, the heroine falls in luuuurve with the hero. Can you seduce someone by force? I don’t know! And we were debating this very topic in the halls and elevators of Dragon*Con. Surrounded by Jack Sparrows. And the occasional Dread Pirate Roberts. And then... the topic shifted, as topics at conventions often do, to slash. We somehow moved seamlessly from the debate about bodice rippers to a debate about whether the term slash was only appropriately applied when discussing male/male romantic relationships in fanfiction, or whether those discussing original fiction containing male/male romantic relationships could use the term for that, too.

We get back to her room, and flop on her bed. She drags out her laptop to chat with the husband she’d left behind in Kansas, and I drag out my laptop to catch up with allichaton, and make sure she’s still meeting her daily writing goals even though Dragon*Con has interrupted our regular routine.

It turns out she’s completely stuck. Or something like that. The details have faded in my memory. But for whatever reason, she wasn’t at all in the mood to work on her main project, whatever it was at the time. (Maybe she was just feeling left-out of all the Dragon*Con fun, I don’t know.) But I am a ruthless taskmaster of a writing buddy, and I demanded that she must make her goals and write something. Even if it was just some random thing for fun.

“But, my bestest writing buddy,” she says, “what else could I write? Woe, I do not have any ideas!”

Well. I am a font of ideas. I think if I wrote from dawn to dusk without stopping every day of the rest of my life, I would still never catch up and write all the things I want to write. Thank goodness I have allichaton! I can give her all the ideas I’d love to read, but don’t really want to take time out of my life to write.

Usually, the way I do this with anyone who asks me for an idea of something to write is I first ask them what kind of a thing they are in the mood to write. Because if I give a person an idea for, let's just say for example: a smutty, slashy bodice-ripper (with pirates! And actual ripping of bodices!) and the individual in question is in the mood to write something much more serious, then I’m not really being very helpful.

But it so happens, I was at Dragon*Con, and having a good time, and too distracted to be a very useful idea generation machine, and so I said to her, “Hey, you know what you should write? A bodice ripper! With pirates! But make it slashy. And somehow you have to incorporate an actual bodice ripping. It’ll be fun!” “Um...okaaay. How am I supposed to write a bodice-ripper with an actual bodice ripping if the romance is between two guys?” “I don’t know? Maybe one of them cross dresses?”

I didn’t think she’d actually write it.

Yet there it is. She wrote it, and did some amazing and fun things with it. The sex scenes are many. Many. And extremely explicit. If that’s not the kind of thing you like, then steer clear.

But the book’s funny and sexy. It is superficially a bodice-ripper, but the seduction is really not what I’d call forced (there is nothing remotely akin to rape). There is a cross dressing prince and a bodice ripping and swash-buckling pirates. Stormy seas and betrayals. Romance and kissing and lots lots more than kissing. And the two heroes fall in luuuurve and bring gay marriage to the prince’s kingdom, where it had previously been forbidden. Happily Ever After!

It’s a crazy kind of thing, really, but I also love that she wrote it, more or less on a dare, and then went on to find a publisher for it and dedicate it to me.

If you like that kind of thing, check it out. I believe the publisher has an excerpt of it up on their site so you can test drive it if you’re not sure whether it’s the kind of thing you’re into. It’s available in ebook format as of yesterday, and I’m told the trade paperback will be available in mid-July.