connecting the dots by editing & writing erotica
More Sinful Sunday here:
Eliza shifted under the covers, and covered her face as if she wanted to drown in the sheets. She began a silent countdown in her head, as to how this situation would resolve itself. How they would acknowledge what had happened and move on. She could not leave her own hotel room, maybe if she stayed on the terrace, the new guy would do what he should do. Leave.
Terrence.
The new guy’s name was Terrence. Terrence she hoped, would leave and be gracious.
She got out of the bed, wrapped in the sheets like Venus de Milo, but gracelessly almost tripping on the train. She walked out onto the terrace, and looked at Paris. Her favorite city in the world, with the scent of fresh-baked bread rising and life on parade below her.
Eliza was startled by the warmth of flesh on the small of her back. She had not really covered her back, and now the new guy–Terrence–caressed her back.
Before she could turn around to protest, Terrence caressed her arms and she dropped the sheet. Naked before him, she was perfectly still as he kissed the nape of her neck and down her spine. It felt so good, even though she wished it did not. She did not stop him, as his hands trailed down her arms, pinning her wrists to her sides.
“Sweet butterfly…” he murmured, as he let her hands go.
Eliza turned around to face him, and pressed her breasts to his chest. Terrence pulled her close to him,
“I did not plan any of this Eliza, I did not plan for this to happen but I am happy it did. Something would have burst in me if I did not touch you…”
She pressed her cheek to his, and looked up at him.
“Of course you did not plan to seduce me, to seduce your boss…” she laughed.
Terrence looked in her eyes, and something in his eyes made her still. He caressed her cheek, and she closed her eyes. He kissed her, and lured her back to the bed.
They made love on the semi-sheetless bed, in the sunlight and it was illuminating…
More Wicked Wednesday here:
venus de milo via wikipedia
Nichy looked out onto the street through the leaf-shaped holes, that decorated the small shopping bag where she got her macarons from. She saw Tyler’s thigh through them, and then looked up over the bag at him. He stared at everything with the wonder that she did, when she was first in Paris and she squeezed his hand.“This is my favorite cafe here,” she smiled.
Tyler turned, and studied her with the same wonder she thought was reserved for Paris.
“You have been here before a lot of times. Because of Sonia?” Nichy tensed, she had never told Tyler a lot about her prior life. And at this moment, caressing a chocolate on the corner of the dish her coffee was on, and remembering making love with him in front of Sonia…she felt like telling him things she never told him before.
“I was with my boyfriend at the time too.”
The serious one? The one you told me you did not want to talk about?”
Nichy nodded, as she opened the tiny chocolate.
“Yes, him,” she answered. She paused, knowing she did not want to tell him about what had recently been going on with Graham.
But the past was safe.
“I had a threesome in Paris with him, his name was Graham…” Nichy felt her clitoris twitch, just from mentioning his name. “…and Sonia.”
“You had sex with Sonia?”
Nichy nodded.
“It was something that Graham wanted, and at the time we were together? I wanted everything that he wanted. I did so many things with him I had never done before or since.”
“Was the relationship between you too so serious emotionally or just sexually?” Nichy looked at Tyler, and tilted her head to the side ironically.
“I never thought about it that way, you know? I just knew that sexually it was very intense, and he was someone that I really wanted to please.”
“I feel like that with you, I always want to please you. Even when I saw you were with Renee. I was actually a little jealous because I always really liked you, and I always wanted to be with you. That was why I really pushed for the threesome…”
“I never sensed that with you!”
Tyler looked away from her, and picked up his cup of coffee.
“I think that you thought I was a clown, and I cannot really blame you. I was a clown around you, but it was because I liked you so much and I did not know how else to act.”
“And now, I want to please you. I want you to be happy because I care about you…”
They kissed at the table to please each other, Nichy did not care about the clatter of coffee cups and water glasses, or the melted chocolate on her hand as she pressed it on Tyler’s thigh. She spread her fingers over the hardness of his thigh, and pressed her own to his without abandon.
She once watched a couple make love in an apartment building lobby nearby. They were so eager they could not wait, and left the door jarred…
More Masturbation Monday here:
paris cafe photo by f dot leonora
Social media is often criticized, but it is through it that I met my guest and friend, Adrea Kore. Adrea is luminous, and the first person I have known to do a right on American accent! She is a brilliant, brilliant writer of all forms–and today she is going to flash us! I mean prep us all to enjoy the art of flash fiction. Get comfortable, and savor every word of hers…
I’m delighted to be here with F. Leonora, as her guest blogger. As a regular contributor to her Friday Flash monthly meme, I want to share some thoughts on the short-short story or “flash.” Sometimes also referred to as micro-fiction, flash fiction is the quickie of erotica.
I started writing seriously, and getting published, in the erotica genre in late 2012 – so I still feel like a relative newcomer. My very first story accepted for paid publication was actually flash fiction – on a femme-porn and erotica site called For the Girls. Then Go Deeper Press accepted Dangerous Curves for their flash fiction anthology, Dirty Little Numbers. 
Of the twenty or so paid story publications in anthologies and online since then, about a quarter of them have been for my flash fiction. A fan of both short stories and poetry from way back when I was in pigtails, it’s no surprise that I succumbed to the allure of “flashing” as soon as I discovered that such a thing existed.
Although length definitions differ for flash fiction, most publications seem to opt for 500 words as the maximum word-count. Some insist on even leaner stories, cinching in the word limit at 200 or even 100 words.
The practice of writing flash fiction, with the restraints of that svelte word-limit, can hone your powers of description and storytelling in wonderful ways. Each word has to work harder to convey meaning and emotion – which inevitably makes us better writers when we return to longer fiction. Whether on the page or in the boudoir, it seems I’m definitely into restraint.
The more flash fiction I read, the more incredible variations I see in style, expression and tone. A lot can happen in five hundred words. The form seems to deftly distill a writer’s style and voice, so that the reader may experience it more vividly.
Flash fiction is a tablet and mobile-friendly fiction, a way to showcase your style to your readers, which is also why I’d recommend giving flashing a go and getting some on your blog or website. It’s fiction for the nomadic, distracted population with truncated attention spans that we have supposedly become. That said, as a reader, I approach them more like poems, preferring focused time to contemplate them. Writer Vanessa Gebbie describes them as “a flash of narrative lit up, then extinguished,” but also stresses that a good flash is “never incomplete.”
I’ve observed that a compelling flash embodies elements of both poetry and film.
Like a film, it may show the reader crucial narrative “beats,” as quick cuts from one image to the next in order to tell its story. These could be close-ups or wide shots, but not lingering or panning shots – you simply don’t have the luxury of wordiness and leisurely pacing for too much of the latter. The reader sees these images via a few crafted words and sentences before moving onto the next element, but the information lingers in the retina, the memory, gathering detail, momentum and meaning. Like a film, it may also utilize dialogue as a narrative device to progress the plot with fewer words than descriptive narrative.
Like a poem, flash fiction may harness imagery, word play and metaphor to convey narrative, subtext, and atmosphere in compressed form. Additionally, the use of poetic language allows for multiple layers of meaning, using the same cluster of words. This approach allows you to say and suggest far more than you may initially think is possible within that leaner number of words. Like a poem, pared-back language is desirable; part of revising drafts may be to eliminate excess words such as “the,” “and” and “now.”
I’m comfortable writing flash in the zone of 400 – 500 words. It’s amazing how much scope five-hundred words allows to create a story arc and some steamy erotic detail. A 200-word limit for me is like trying to make a luscious cake with only flour and water. Given a 100-word limit, I may as well (and more happily) be writing poetry. I’ll leave those shorter versions for more hardcore flashers. Give different word limits a try, and see what works for you.
I once read somewhere that the Chinese term for flash fiction translates as “the cigarette-long” story – something you can mull over on a cigarette break, taking about as long to read as it does to finish your smoke. As a non-smoker, and a lover of coffee, perhaps I’d rename it the espresso-long story.
Here are my tips for crafting compelling flash fiction. Like any “tips” list, they are not prescriptive, but rather intended to provoke thought; whether they work for you may depend on your style.
Work your verbs hard
Lazy, vague verbs such as “went” tend to immediately require adverbs to prop them up. Why write “He went quickly towards her,” when you can write “He careened into her?” Why write that your character “said” anything, when instead they can leer, whisper, insinuate, proposition? A specific verb can convey so much about a character – how they walk, talk and kiss. Sweat the verbs, and you’ll need less adverbs, and less words generally.
Choose adjectives like they’re gourmet chocolates
They’re expensive, so you want to choose the perfect ones with just the right flavors for your story. To choose too many will weigh your story down and make it too fat to fit the flash format.
Build atmosphere with quick shots of imagery and word-play
This is one of my favorite ways to write flash fiction – take your central themes and refract your imagery through the story, like different facets on a cut diamond. They’ll all sparkle in a slightly different way, but make the whole more dazzling. My latest flash, Hurdy-Gurdy Love, takes the carnival theme as a metaphor for a relationship and riffs on that in several layers.
Start near the middle of your story, not the beginning.
I borrowed this one from flash fiction maestro David Gaffney. You don’t have space for preamble. Crash land the reader closer to the middle of the story in terms of action. You can make nimble references to backstory when necessary. See here for how that can be achieved.
Use dialogue to convey character and give narrative momentum
Some writers excel at using dialogue in this way. You could try writing a flash that is ninety-percent dialogue, if you’ve ever fancied yourself the screenwriting type. Or you can see how I use fragments of dialogue here, in Celluloid Dreams to convey character, backstory and theme.
Maximise the function of your Title
Your title is a bonus few extra words for free, so make them count. Like a well-made poem, a flash title (the title of any work of art, really) can be employed to reveal another element of your story, or create the lure of a double meaning. I love a flash that, once read, has me returning to the title to ponder, and find something new.
The sentence fragment is your friend
One, two, three-word sentences seem right at home in micro-fiction. Micro-sentences. They can work well scattered through “proper sentences.” To convey fragmented perspective. Suspense. Movement, fast or slow. Futility. Finality. See, I’m doing it here, and it’s so much fun.
Pay special attention to the last line
David Gaffney beat me to it, but this tip probably shows up on all flash fiction craft articles. After readers devour your flash fiction, give them a final line that will linger in their senses; an aftertaste, an aroma that doesn’t make this a read they can easily forget.
Gaffney is firmly against flash fiction that deploys a punch line or last-minute gag ending, saying that a “story that gives itself up in the last line is no story at all, and after reading a piece of good micro-fiction we should be struggling to understand it, and, in this way, will grow to love it as a beautiful enigma.”
I agree, although I may have been guilty of writing at least one punch-line flash along the way. Sometimes, they are just fun, especially when the topic is playfully sexual.
Create some Negative Space
Just as if it were an abstract sculpture or a charcoal sketch, give your flash some negative space as part of its overall effect. One way you do this is to eliminate and pare back excess words, as I’ve mentioned. Another way is to play with ambiguity, or place some spaces in the narrative for the reader to enter. This is particularly effective, I believe, in erotic flash fiction. Let the reader catch a glimpse of themselves in a hotel room mirror. Let them recall that exquisite orgasm through your erotic detail of a mouth, a hand, a sensation. Vanessa Gebbie aptly surmises:
“A great piece of flash fiction creates a complete world in very few words, draws you in, and makes you complicit. You become the creator too, in partnership, filling in the gaps the writer leaves behind … And because it is, to some extent, ‘yours’, it has a lasting effect.”
There’s lots of great flash fiction available online to read, and I’ve provided a few links below. I love Leonora’s meme here , because as a writer I often respond well to an intriguing image as a prompt. If you’ve not done this before, give it a try. Writing a flash story can also be a good warm-up exercise after a writing dry spell, or to begin exploring an idea for a (longer) story.
So, take that spark of an idea, set that pen on fire and light up a little narrative with your own writerly brilliance.
Adrea Kore is a writer, poet, and developmental editor, focusing her lens on female sexuality and creative expression. Her erotic flash fiction, short stories and poetry have been published online and in numerous anthologies. Most recently, her poem “Made in Darkness” landed in Lustily Ever After, erotic re-tellings of myth and fairytale.
Adrea enjoys being distracted from her long-term writing projects by short term pleasures such as this article. She collects corsets and antique tea-cups. Find her wearing one and sipping from the other here, and browse her flash fiction gallery from the menu.
Look out for her sexy story “Dance for Me,” featured in the newly-released erotic anthology For the Men: And the Women who Love Them (edited by Rose Caraway). Available on Amazon, Smashwords, iBooks and coming soon in audio-book format.
Read Adrea’s latest post about her story in the anthology here.
Craft Articles
Online Sites / Journals for Flash Fiction
Eliza pressed her hand to her head.
Life was wilder than fiction…she could not have made any of this up. She rolled from side to side on the bed, at first not sure literally where she was–
–in bed.
–or where she was…
…in Paris.
She loved Paris, but she had not been excited about this trip. Aside from all of the things that were going on in her personal life with Rafe and Oscar, she was less than thrilled about her traveling companion.
The new guy in her department had rubbed her the wrong way as soon as she met him. He was far too cocky, and did not mesh with anyone in her department. He was abrupt with her, and she was his boss. She had not wanted to go with him, but he was hired because he had contacts in France, and they wanted to expand outside of Paris. Plus his French was impeccable.
On the plane there, they sat side by side. Eliza pressed her head to the window, and felt the new guy fall asleep on her shoulder. She wanted to push him off of her, but she figured he was asleep. She reread texts that she and Oscar had exchanged. Oscar mentioned Polly, and that was almost too much for her to bear.
As work colleagues, the new guy was spectacular. In and out of meetings, he was spectacular. And then there were the awkward interactions between them, when they were not in meetings. Eliza would stare at her phone, and the new guy would sit across from her.
“You should dump that guy…”
Eliza looked up at him.
“What?”
“You keep staring at your phone frowning. I know that look, you should dump the guy.”
She picked up her phone, and walked out onto the terrace. The new guy followed her.
“Don’t jump!”
Eliza rolled around on her bed, and felt as if she was burned when she rolled into his body.
It was the new guy, and he was still asleep. She swallowed as she watched him. This truth was far stranger than fiction…
More Wicked Wednesday here:
the new guy via wicked wednesday
“What are you doing Nichy?” Sonia said, caressing her e-cigarette.
Nichy stared at Sonia. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Tyler asleep on the couch. He had barely gotten undressed the night before. His arm covered his face, and she could see the edge of his boxer shorts. She remembered lying beside him on the couch.
Sonia had offered them her spare bedroom, but they had fallen asleep on the couch. She woke up with her hand just inside the band of his boxers. The lettering on the waistband felt like braille on her fingertips telling her, her hand should go further. Her hand rested on his hipbone, and then she let her thumb turn down toward his crotch like an adventurous hitchhiker.
“Why did you bring Tyler here? Does he know…” Sonia continued.
Nichy raised her eyes wide at Sonia, who took a deep inhale from her e-cigarette.
Their cups clicked, as she got up and returned to Tyler’s side. He was sexy as hell to her when he just woke up, disoriented for a moment but then completely aware. Even in Sonia’s apartment, he had his bearings.
“You,” he said softly, and she touched him. He was semi-hard. He often woke up with some type of erection. The skin of his penis was as familiar to her as her own skin, even though he felt different than she did.
“You…” she started. “are beautiful.”
Tyler pulled her on top of him, and Nichy did not care that they were in the middle of the living room. She felt as much inhibition as Sonia’s friends had felt when they arrived to the apartment. With his hands inside of her panties, Nichy did not care. Tyler touched her like she was as familiar to him, as she was to her.
What she was doing was intimacy.
With Tyler.
She had never imagined that she would be with him, like this. Never imagined that she would have feelings for him like this after all the time that they had been friends in the office. But here she was on top of him like a crown. He pulled the crotch of her panties to the side and they fucked like they were animals in the wild. They were shameless in their cries and exposure. Nichy almost fell off of him from their rough thrusting, but righted herself atop him and knew that Sonia could see why she brought Tyler there…
More Masturbation Monday here:
paris via wikipedia
Photo courtesy of Modesty Ablaze
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Female Orgasms – Addressing Women’s Sexuality
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BUTTER FOR LUBE… Salted or Unsalted?
KOTW:Static on the line
Control Queen
Well, That Didn’t Go According to Plan
A BDSM Vignette from Two Viewpoints
CORPORAL PUNISHMENT – with a twist
Iris
A Polyquad Squad Orgasm
Beautiful Birthday Fuck
Purpose of Tasks
Do You Trust Me
The meanings of “good girl”
How Long Is Enough
The Virgin. Unlocking Feminine Power.
The Other Day
Communicate! Communicate! Communicate!
addressing doubts one step at a time
How D/s has taught me to stick up for myself
More Sinful Sunday here:
At first when Carla told Margaux what she knew about Rafe, and how she would never be more than a sideshow to Eliza…Margaux was not sure that they were going to be able to be friends much longer. She was not sure if Carla was going to have certain ideas about her because she was involved with him, or because she did not want Carla to speak badly about the man that she loved……and who was the father of her child that would never be born.
Margaux knew her eyes were damp, and she knew that Carla was going to say something about it.
Carla looked at her with soft eyes, and put her hand on her thigh. Margaux closed her eyes tight, and felt a tear pull from the tightness. When she opened her eyes, she saw the tear splashed on the top of Carla’s hand. Carla continued to rub her thigh.
She had told Carla about the baby, about the baby that she never let have a chance to breathe in this world. She had ended her pregnancy for so many reasons, and she did not doubt them…but she wondered at the miracle she had let go. What would Rafe had done? What kind of father would he have been?
“He surprised me,” Carla said, not looking at her. “I did not think that he would be a stand-up dude like that for you. I did not think he would be this cool about it…”
Margaux nodded, knowing it was a lot for Carla to say that to her and that was why they were friends. Carla knew she was in love, she knew that she was in love with Rafe way before she did. Carla knew she was interested in him before she did, Carla knew all of her secrets as if she was a part of her. Being friends with Carla was like holding a mirror to herself.
Margaux looked at her friend, and in her eyes, she saw her own mirrored. She put her hands on her now empty stomach, and imagined there was still something inside of her…
More Wicked Wednesday here :
hands via f dot leonora
Nichy placed her hand on Tyler’s thigh, as the plane landed. She had not been on a trip like this with a lover for a long time. She rubbed his thigh, and was proud to present him to Sonia.Sonia waited for them outside, and Nichy used her peripheral vision to watch Tyler look at her. Sonia was the type of woman who always looked effortlessly sensual. In a kimono, over skinny jeans and her hair pulled up in a messy bun, she looked like Parisian chic. Nichy squeezed Tyler’s backside, as they settled into Sonia’s car.
The car was redolent with Sonia’s perfume, and Sonia’s basic scent which was of a sweet but steady musk. Nichy had memorized every variation of her friend’s scent, because she was so used to being with her either with or without Graham.
It made Nichy sad that Sonia did not approve of the revival of her relationship with Graham, but to some degree, she should not have been surprised.
“Thank you for picking us up,” Nichy said, too lazy to retrieve her lost French.
Sonia’s apartment was the same decadent disarray that Nichy remembered. It was not surprising to her, but even before they had walked in completely, there was a couple on the couch making love. As of they knew that their time was limited, they intended to make love as fast and furious as they could. The woman who Nichy remembered her face but not her name, faced her partner and rode him for all he was worth. The force of her body undid the dress that she had wrapped about her waist, as her hair fell loose. But even with her broad backside covered, the movement of her body made it obvious what they were doing.
“Bienvenue chez moi…” Sonia said softly, as the couple continued making love oblivious to them.
Welcome indeed, Nichy thought to herself and squeezed Tyler’s hand.
More Masturbation Monday here:
paris via f dot leonora