Inside Mike Kimera: Silver Linings –good news in getting stories published

It’s been a quiet year with my writing so far. I have a lot of stories part way through so I’m hoping for a burst of posts in the autumn. The good news is that the stories I have written are finding their way on to websites and anthologies.

One of this years stories, “Toying with Lily” has made it into Alison Tyler’s “Hurts So Good”

I’m pleased to see this story in print. I’m also proud to be in the company of the other authors in this collection:

The Sound of One Hand Clapping Nikki Magennis

Sting Jessica Lennox

No Substitute for Experience James Walton Langolf

Panty Lines Sommer Marsden

Lucky N. T. Morley

Testing the Water Teresa Noelle Roberts

Never a Rookie Craig J. Sorensen

Provocation Jay Lawrence

I Promise to Do My Best Teresa Joseph

Party Manners Morgan Aine

Trophy Buckle Rakelle Valencia

Toying with Lily Mike Kimera

Turnaround A. D. R. Forte

Flick Chicks Allison Wonderland

Equilibrium Anna Black

First Time Since Xan West

Omega to Alpha Diana St. John

Crossed Rachel Kramer Bussel

My Mainstream Girlfriend Stephen Elliott

Rock Paper Scissors Shanna Germain

All in the Wrist Alison Tyler

I also have a story in another anthology edited by Alison Tyler this year, “Open for Business – Tales of Office Sex”. Here’s a link to Gwen Masters’ Cleansheets Review of the anthology which says nice things about my story “Have A Nice Day”.

I know this all sounds terribly self-congratulatory and narcissistic. There’s certainly an element of that, but the excuse I make to myself is that while writing is a solitary pursuit that is really a struggle in which the writer tries to land the story that his imagination has hooked but which may still get away, publishing is a social activity where the writer gets to find out if the outcome of the struggle is enjoyed by other people.

This is a long winded way of saying that reading reviews of stuff that I put forward for publication helps maintain my motivation to write.

One of the questions I had in my mind was what motivates an editor to go through all the hassle needed to produce an anthology that all the rest of us benefit from but in which they get a maximum of one story of their own.

I found a good answer on Alison’s website Alison must be one of the most prolific erotica editor's around and I've often wondered where she gets the energy.

Take a look at her post on her latest book - a guide for couples illustrated with autobiography and favourite pieces of erotica called “Never Have The Same Sex Twice” – and you'll be infected by her passion for keeping that first time heat in (at least) the sex you write about.

Read her post entitled “Riven with Need” and you'll see how her fascination with passion is linked to an ability to feel the power of words the way most of us feel that it-always-makes-me-cry song.

I came away from her site thinking that my writing needs a shake up – I first started writing hot scenes I thought were stories. I want to find a way to use the technique I now have available to me to express the hot, sticky, risky but worth it, oh my god who'd have thought this was possible excitement I used to be able to produce.

Here’s the excerpt from “Toying with Lily”

Toying with Lily

The jeans are a deliberate act of provocation. Lily, my allegedly submissive “You can do anything to me. Anything at all. I’ll even call you, Daddy while you do it” mistress, likes to test my limits by defying me. She wants to see what I will put up with and what I will do to keep her in her place. She likes to be kept in her place.

At the moment, her place is standing in front of my chair with her hands behind her back and her head held high, waiting for me to flog, pinch, spank and fuck her to orgasm. We both know that by now she should be naked. Instead, she has chosen to present herself wearing tight-fitting jeans and a sly smile.

True, Lily is impressively naked above the waist. She is a fully fleshed woman, short without being in any way small. Her breasts are large and heavy, and when, as now, she holds her hands behind her back, they push out almost aggressively. Her stomach is soft and flows over the cruelly tight fastening of her spray-on jeans. At any other time, I might have relaxed back into my chair and considered whether to start by using the soft calf-leather hand-lash on her belly or by suspending weighted clamps from her nipples.

But now my focus is on her jeans and the smile that accompanies them.

I could just tell her to take them off.

Or I could throw her onto the bed, wrestle them from her, maybe even cut them off her, and then raise welts on her substantial buttocks with the crop.

But then I would be doing the obvious, which means I would lose the initiative and, if that were to happen often enough, I would lose Lily.

I don’t want to lose Lily. She makes me feel alive in a way that no one else does.