Archive for July 30, 2007

July 30th, 2007

Both on the Same Day!

Today I picked up my author copies of Erotika: Bedtime Stories at the office (they actually arrived Saturday, but I didn’t pick up my mail in time to know that before the party — fortunately for those there, as otherwise I would have brought them along and been flaunting them around all night like a total dork ;)), and after I got them I went to get my mail and discovered that my author copies of G is for Games were also in the mailbox! Holy amazing mail day!

In both books I am alongside celebrity authors within the world of literary erotica, such as Gwen Masters in Erotika: Bedtime Stories and Rachel Kramer Bussel and Alison Tyler herself in G is for Games. My story “Who’s on Top?” in G is for Games was edited a bit, which doesn’t surprise me because its word count was pretty high for the Erotic Alphabet series (I’d originally submitted it for something else, not knowing about the series at the time), but nonetheless it is right there on page 51, exactly in the middle of the 13 stories! :)

In Erotika: Bedtime Stories, I don’t know that there were any edits to “Let It Snow”; and I must preface what I say next about this book with something I remembered reading several months ago in a book review online (who knows how I happened to stumble upon it, but that’s not the point at the moment):

“Traditional anthology wisdom is to start with your strongest story, and end with your second strongest.”*

I will admit this was vaguely in the back of my mind as I checked out the tables of contents in both books. Thus, I almost fell over when I opened Erotika: Bedtime Stories to see that my story leads off this anthology. That’s right, it is FIRST. It is the first story in the book (humor me while I ramble about this just a little more, because I am a little bit ridiculously excited about it), which means that if someone picks up this book and actually reads it from the beginning, the first thing s/he will read is MY STORY.

!!!!!

Okay, enough of that little bout of giddiness. :) I will stop now before I start describing what a dork I look like reading over my stories in both volumes and periodically stopping with a look of amazement on my face because I am sitting here reading a real live book, and my words are in it (yes, I still do that with Best Women’s Erotica 2006 too, a year and a half after its release). Wow…

All right, that’s a wrap (really now). Hope everyone is having a magnificent day!

Love,
Emerald

“I first had the idea more than ten years ago. A slew of sexy little anthologies you could slide into your purse or backpack, whipping one out when you wanted to lose yourself in a brief burst of primal pleasure . . . . What publisher would sign on to 26 books at once? Cleis would.”
Alison Tyler, on the Erotic Alphabet series

*(from a book review at the New England Science Fiction Association, Inc.)