Early release excitement: Best Women’s Erotica 2009

Get your copy here.

It’s not supposed to be on shelves until December 11, but it’s shipping *now* (and I got my hands on a red-hot copy). Best Women’s Erotica 2009 is my newest anthology — explicit lit by women, written by astoundingly talented women from all over the world. It’s so fucking hot that when I read the first story in the collection to my lover, I was instantly jumped and deliciously molested. True story. I’ll do a podcast of Valerie Alexander’s “Fly” later. For now, see why I’m so freaking out excited to see the fruits of a year spent editing this book made into reality — read the intense introduction I wrote (describing the book’s contents and my feelings behind my choices) after the jump.

Make no mistake, it’s a dirty, naughty book. One filled with joy, and stories that stay with you for a long time. And names you will recognize such as Trixie Fontaine (AKA Tasty Trixie), Donna George Storey, Elizabeth Coldwell, Ms. Naughty, Scarlett French, Sommer Marsden, Jaqueline Applebee, Janine Ashbless and more — plus, several newcomers being published for the first time who will be names to look out for.

It’s on Amazon right now in paper version and Kindle version.

Now, read my very personal intro — and enjoy.

When you’re ready, really ready for sex, desire becomes an ache. A throb that pulses with the rhythm of your blood beating in your head and between your legs. You want to peel away the layers obscuring your object of desire until you get to the juicy, sweet fruit within. And when you finally sink your teeth in — the initiation begins.

The only problem, of course, with using a ripening fruit analogy for sexual initiation and Eros’ coming of age — when he sits on your chest and plucks at the strings between pussy and heart until you sing with desperate want — is that fruit only ripens once. Yet as desire burns through us for the thing we’ve never had, consumes us, then somehow magically with sex as with nothing else, the cycle begins again. We do not rot, we swell and juice and pick the flower that pulls us into the underworld and we beg Hades for another deflowering. We demand it.

The clocks and calendars conspired against Persephone. She had never intended to spend her afternoons with her virginity clamped furtively between her legs, with her mind driving her insane playing blue movies of hardcore decadence on the screen behind her eyes. A girl sentenced to clawing at attempts to scratch all her forbidden itches, stuck frolicking in fields of flowers with a bunch of boring maidens who had no fucking idea how good it felt to rub yourself to wet explosion thinking of huge-cocked Satyrs, nubile and voluptuous and wet Nymphs, costume parties where only masks and eager mouths were required for entry. Idiots staring at flowers all day.

I’m sure Persephone hated being a virgin. But, as it was to be her sentence, she was forced to navigate her lust with hot and prickly skin, perfecting quiet masturbation, and wandering those damn flower fields with legs rubbery and fingertip skins shriveled from seeking relief when everyone else was distracted. Imagine the glow she must have had from her third, her fourth clandestine orgasm when she saw the single narcissus, which, according to legend, was glowing as much as she.

The myths like to portray Persephone as an innocent moth to the flame: that god of the underworld Hades (or Pluto) performed a particularly evil bait and switch to lure the naïve young goddess into plucking the flower that would seal her fate and open the world for her to fall into hell, into Hades’ arms.

But I think we all know what it’s like. To feel need for fucking and being fucked, to remember needing it more than air, for the very first time. Persephone floated awkwardly toward the narcissus, I’m sure, all girlish knobby knees and elbows at angles and ears sticking out and pussy burning as hot as Helios, who as everyone knows, watched her that day, watched her every day. The flower glowed like the sharp hard-on of her clit, and made of the same stuff, it pulled her like a magnet. And when she crushed the flower to her mouth, squeezing the juice down her chin, destroying the flower between her breasts as her eyes rolled back in her head in ecstasy and sweet pain and all things sex, the earth opened up, and she slid home. I know it. I just know it.

When her mother Demeter panicked, she sent Hermes to find the lost little girl. But when Hermes wove his way deep down into the underworld, he did not find a fearful and frail Persephone: he encountered the radiant, striking, powerful, and sexually rapacious Queen of the Underworld. She was just fine, thanks.

Still, she had to see her mom. Red footsteps on cool dark earth in circles, brow furrowed from the absurdity, she fretted her duty to Hades, worried that a trip to her chaste past may never end. The girls of the underworld wept crimson tears that they may never taste Persephone’s sweet pussy again. Hades felt stretched by steel hooks inside. Taking his heart and his cock and his love in his hands, he cracked open a pomegranate and crushed the berries on Persephone’s pillowy lips, staining them red forever. Then, she left.

She burned inside in the hollow spaces her lovers occupied, but her mother’s name was still sweet on her tongue. Demeter, however, knew that the austere life she had fought to keep with her child was gone. The mother remembered a declaration that Zeus, king of the gods had made from the heavens: that for Persephone to return, she must be as pure as the day she left her mother’s side. The garnet stain on Persephone’s lips clearly showed that the girl had tasted the Fruit of Life. It could not be erased. And she liked it. Those tender lips curved into a soft, playfully hungry Mona Lisa smile, sweet with the surrender of innocence.

There’s a lot of that between these pages.

In the stunning, unbelievably arousing “Fly” by Valerie Alexander, it’s night in Neverland and Tigerlily is finally the sexually fierce young woman we always knew she’d become — much to the surprise of Peter and Wendy. “On Loan” by Lauren Wright describes a different sort of coming of age, where a woman is “lent out” by her husband to fulfill her number one fantasy of hotel room fuck doll bliss, only to be surprised by a confrontation with a taboo that stems from her adolescent desires.

Trixie Fontaine takes us for a spin in the well-crafted “Fast Car, Not For Sale” where long roads and a girl’s souped-up hot rod lead to one of the sweetest deflowerings a young man can dream up. “Waiting For The River” by Kris Adams brings us another flower aching to be plucked; here, a video camera gives a deeply shy young woman an excuse to open herself to another girl in a surprisingly exhibitionistic turn. The talented Xan West makes us feel “Lucky” in her tale of a submissive queer boi who surrenders to her mistress in every way, losing the virginity of complete sexual submission at a BDSM play party to a group of dominant strangers.

D. L. King’s “Snug Designs” might just make you want to slip into something skintight to read the rest of the book, as the protagonist’s heated sexual adventures coming out as a dressing fetishist at the hands of a handsome rubber couture designer. “Courting Him” by Deborah Castellano is a decadent and delirious visit to the Victorian era where a fainting flower gets the upper hand of desire on her older male guardian and sinks into her first sexual takedown. In Janne Lewis’ “The Bitch In His Head” we see a takedown of magnitude when a vicious germaphobic executive has the tables turned on him by his young sex worker, and bringing us yet another sexual first for both characters.

When a woman meets a stern, bookish yet handsome antique store owner in Donna George Storey’s “The Secret History of Lust”, her desire to gain access to his member’s only back room collection has her opening herself up in ways she’d only imagined in order to pass his tests. In “Live Bed Show” by Elizabeth Coldwell, a young woman shocks herself by staging her own public sex deflowering in an Amsterdam store window. As often with anal sex, the first time is often the worst time, as with the woman in Ms. Naughty’s “Pasta With Blue Cheese and Anal” who finds that if at first you don’t succeed, you can just have another “first” and enjoy ongoing success of the most blissful kind.

The myth of the first man and the fist woman and the first penetration gets a biting turn in Alana Noel Voth’s intense, powerful and lyrical “Eve”. Jealousy turns quickly into curiosity — and then to overpowering sexual desire — in “What If?” by Cheyenne Blue, where a femme follows through with a scary-yet-hot first-time voyeur fantasy watching her butch lover perform a lesbian de-virginizing on a nervous, wanton straight girl. Scarlett French delivers a perfect tale of an experienced sex toy shop girl who anxiously tries out her first mix of pain and pleasure with some very inspiring results in “Good Pony”. And for those who have ever wanted to cross the line for the first time between teacher and student, don’t miss the unconventional and very explicit upending of this iconic fantasy in Elisa Garcia’s “cardio”.

Some things you try once and just hit a sweet spot so good you have to make it a tradition, just like the creative gender-bending couple in Vanessa Vaughn’s aptly titled “Switch”. Lux Zakari’s female protagonist wants to know just what’s so hot about sex with girls, and when she asks her lover to “Describe It” she gets her first real view from between her own legs. Women who like sex with strangers love the endless line of first times stretching into their future: the eloquent and unerringly dirty “Decorations” by Sommer Marsden capitalizes on that notion and twists it into playtime for a couple whose female submissive public adventures describe a realm of fantasy I hadn’t yet seen.

In Jacqueline Applebee’s superb “Hush” silence is more than golden, it’s a relentless aphrodisiac for one woman who initiates a man into her intricate world of silent pleasures. The supremely talented Janine Ashbless brings two archaeologists together in a tight squeeze and a first encounter of the desperately lusty kind — perhaps mimicking a sacred initiation — in “Ritual Space”. And upon deciding that enough is enough with her attraction to the boy next door, Kay Jaybee’s “The Girl Next Door” surprises herself (and the boy) by taking the upper hand to create an unforgettably intense first for both of them, with at least one scene with a boy bent over a bathtub and a girl who fully comes into her own — and to sexual fruition — when she takes what she wants, rather than waiting around for it.

This collection is a ruby red pomegranate, sacred to Persephone. This anthology is a fragrant narcissus that opens the earth when picked. These stories are packed with first times, sexual initiations, women and men and genderqueers who try their number one desires on for the very first time — and like it, thank you very much. Virginity of all kinds — except the typical — is lost to the strains of shaking, thundering orgasmic bliss. There are furtive blowjobs, tense cunnilingus encounters, shockingly pleasurable spankings, desperate trystings, devious bindings, romantic couplings and many, many taboos broken wide open like the path to the underworld itself. And the strong women between these pages delight themselves ultimately knowing that there’s always another first time.

Of the Best Women’s Erotica Series, this is the most unforgettable collection yet. A collection of delicious firsts, to be visited as often as Persephone beckons you. I hope you like it as much as I do.

Violet Blue
San Francisco