This is my latest creation from a block of orange alabaster stone from Colorado. I’ve taken longer on this piece than any previously, trying to get it to shine. The impressions (in case it’s not obvious) are supposed to be lily stems and petals. Here are some views and the spot in the house where it fits perfectly with the surrounding color.
Here is a short love story from the same publisher (Melange Books) who published my novel, The Last Conception. It’s called Zoe North and is written by Joanne Rawson. It is a categorized as contemporary, women’s, and mainstream romance. The heat level is rated “Steamy”.
This is a witty, spicy, story of love, friendship and never expecting the inevitable. A night dancing at a salsa club leads to more than Zoe bargained for – an ultimatum that could change her life forever and a honeymoon she will never forget!
Excerpt:
The church organist hit the first chord to the bridle march, whereupon the congregation instantly reared from their pews and turned around trying to catch their first glimpse of the leading person for todays’ show. That would be me by the way, Zoe North, and giving the finest performance of my life.
Walking down the aisle, aware that all eyes were on me, I knew I should be savouring this moment; the smiling faces of approval of my couture gown; tears of joy from my mother, who thought that this day would never arrive; laughing at my friends, acting like teenagers as they pulled silly faces and gave me the thumbs up sign, as if it were my first date. Yet all I could focus on was the man at the altar the man that, in a few minutes from now, would be promising to spend the rest of his life with me.
I turned to pass my bouquet to my matron of honour. Is this really happening? Am I really getting married today, or is it all just a dream? God knows I have dreamt of this moment for what seems like a zillion years.
The vicar smiled at me and then addressed the congregation. “God is love, and those who live in love live in God.”
This is it; this is usually the moment I wake up. Feeling a hand clasp mine, I turned just to be sure, he was real. Sure enough, standing next to me, smiling nervously was the man who had asked me to marry him.
Oblivious to the organist striking up the hymn, Love Divine, all I could think about was how it all started two years ago.
About the Author:
Joanne Rawson was born and raised in Derbyshire England. In 2005, Joanne and her husband gave up their hectic lifestyle, after ten years of managing branded restaurants around London’s M25, and now spends her time in England, Goa, and Malaysia, writing romantic novels and short stories.
Available at:
Satin Romance (Melange Books)
http://www.satinromance.com/authors/joannerawson/zoenorth.html
All Romance eBooks
https://www.allromanceebooks.com/product-zoenorth-1631543-177.html
A wonderful quote about The Last Conception from the extraordinary Bliss Mistress and author, Edie Weinstein.
“The Last Conception” is a bhakti-fest of love and loss, hope and courage that comes in unexpected packages. Take a peek into the lives of an Indian-American family faced with an unusual demand of their medical professional unmarried daughter whose job and personal life intersect in unanticipated ways. Although happy endings are never guaranteed, it seems that one is in the offing for this savory literary masala.
— Edie Weinstein, author of The Bliss Mistress Guide To Transforming the Ordinary Into the Extraordinary.
If you are unfamiliar with the story, here’s a brief description.
A successful embryologist (Savarna Sikand) must make difficult and life-changing choices. Should she continue devoting her soul to work and party with her girlfriend Magdalena or settle down with Charlemagne (Charley) and have children? If she decides to have children, how and when will they start the process and what will it take to convince her conservative East Indian mother to stop trying to marry her off to a “good man”? If that isn’t enough pressure, throw in the bomb her parents plant when they tell her she MUST have a baby because she is the last in line of a great spiritual teacher who reportedly never had children!
Available at: Melange Books and Amazon.
Will You Still Need Me When I’m Sixty-four?
Excerpt from The Penis Dialogues: Handle With Care by Gabriel Constans
“I was struck by this book’s humor, probing curiosity and genuine compassion.”
—Eve Ensler (Author of The Vagina Monologues, performer and women’s rights activist)
A team of researchers from the University of Southern California has determined that “men and women are remarkably similar in their mating preferences.” They found that college-age men and women prefer a long-term exclusive sexual relationship. Both sexes want a conscientious and compatible partner.
A cross-cultural questionnaire found that, contrary to popular misconceptions, over 80 percent of older women, and over 70 percent of older men, feel that sexual activity is important for health and well-being. Another survey found that 80 percent of married men over the age of 70, and 75 percent that were un-married, remained sexually active.
It turns out that grandparents and college students want the same thing – love, commitment and sex. People of all ages enjoy one another’s bodies and the pleasures, attachments and feelings that come with them.
Copies can be ordered from your local independent bookstore or online bookseller, including:
Some of my favorite sex scenes in literature.
The Pink Blanket
I have been entranced with the novel Ebba and the Green Dresses of Olivia Gomez in a Time of Conflict and War by Joan Tewkesbury since it was released. The story is a literary wonderland of love, hate, darkness and hope and is steeped in the spices and flavors of Latin American magic realism. This is Ms. Tewkesbury’s first novel, though she is well known for her screenwriting (Nashville, etc.), directing and acting.
Among the many delectable and delicious delights that are embedded in this story, are her loving sex scenes between husband and wife Bernardo and Hortence Grace. They flow seamlessly and beautifully into the narrative and are not only believable but palpable. Here are some savory examples.
“Hortense Grace stirred in her sleep and turned over, opened in her sleep for Bernardo who slid into her darkness, her well, her reservoir and they made love in semiconscious cascades. They were one over and over so many times before they drifted into sleep, deeply asleep, a sleep so deep they had no memory of how well they had known each other in the night.”
“Finally, when they were sure Rebecca and Tobia had fallen asleep, Hortense Grace and Bernardo pulled out the pink blanket, the one that Ariel had been conceived on, and unfurled it in the garden. Then they took off all their clothes and made love under the stars and the moon, accidentally rolling off the blanket onto the ground as they pounded into each other’s flesh over and over and fell asleep in a bed of wild sweet peas. Just before dawn they woke up covered in mud and started to laugh. Then they turned on the hose and wdashed each other off, let the water flood them as they slammed into each other one last time before running into the house to make coffee which they took outside and drank as the sun crept up over the morning glory covered wall.”
The beauty of these examples are the respect and intimacy that are shared between the characters. Though I enjoy explicit descriptions of sex (when they are in context), the scenes in this novel have much more impact, because of the development of the story and protagonists. It is raw, real and relative and resonates with experiences of loving consensual and joyous sexuality. That is why I’ve chosen sex scenes from this literary mistresspiece as some of my favorite of all time and encourage readers to pick up this novel and see for themselves.
Read more of Ebba and the Green Dresses of Olivia Gomez in a Time of Conflict and War at Amazon.
From The Treasured Writings of Kahlil Gibran. Translated by Anthony Rizcallah Ferris and edited by Martin L. Wolf (1951).
Song of Love by Kahlil Gibran.
I am the lover’s eyes, and the spirit’s
Wine, and the heart’s nourishment.
I am a rose. My heart opens at dawn and
The virgin kisses me and places me
Upon her breast.
I am the house of true fortune, and the
Origin of pleasure, and the beginning
Of peace and tranquility. I am the gentle
Smile upon the lips of beauty. When youth
Overtakes me he forgets his toil, and his
Whole life becomes reality of sweet dreams.
I am the poet’s elation,
And the artist’s revelation,
And the musician’s inspiration.
I am a sacred shrine in the heart of a
Child, adored by a merciful mother.
I appear to a heart’s cry; I shun a demand;
My fullness pursues the heart’s desire;
It shuns the empty claim of the voice.
I appeared to Adam through Eve
And exile was his lost;
Yet I revealed myself to Solomon, and
He drew wisdom from my presence.
I smiled at Helena and she destroyed Tarwada;
Yet I crowned Cleopatra and peace dominated
The Valley of the Nile.
I am like the ages – building today
And destroying tomorrow;
I am like a god, who creates and ruins;
I am sweeter than a violet’s sigh;
I am more violent than a raging tempest.
Gifts alone do not entice me;
Parting does not discourage me;
Poverty does not chase me;
Jealousy does not prove my awareness;
Madness does not evidence my presence.
Oh seekers, I am Truth, beseeching Truth;
And your Truth in seeking and receiving
And protecting me shall determine my
Behaviour.
Excerpt from The Penis Dialogues: Handle With Care by Gabriel Constans.
Recommended by Eve Ensler (The Vagina Monologues).
Men can have multiple orgasms without ejaculating. You heard me right – multiple orgasms without ejaculating. Though they seem to occur simultaneously, an orgasm takes place seconds before ejaculation. If you learn to stop, control and/or delay coming, you can have an orgasm, retain your erection and come again and again. It takes practice and concentrated awareness of your body, but you can’t go wrong because you end up having an orgasm either way, and you can practice alone or with your partner.
Without ejaculation, the semen is reabsorbed into the body and the orgasmic contractions massage the prostate, which actually enhances health and vitality. You get all the pleasure combined with the added benefit of knowing it’s good for your health too! Sort of like a tasty low-fat meal.
There are a number of books that talk about this Chinese Taoist technique and philosophy. I would highly recommend The Multi-Orgasmic Man: Sexual Secrets Every Man Should Know. Its authors are Mantak Chia and Douglas Abrams (a local Santa Cruz author and teacher).
Communion: The Female Search for Love by Bell Hooks.
One of my favorite passages from one of my favorite books.
Witness to Love
Women and men, girls and boys, must restructure how we spend our time if we want to be loving. We cannot be overachievers and perfectionist performers from kindergarten on in our public lives (the world of school and work) if we are to learn how to love, if we want to practice the art of loving. Genuine love requires time and commitment. And this is simply the case for love in the context of partnership. Self-love takes times and commitment, particularly on the part of those who are wounded in the space where we would know love in our childhoods. New women today, the late-twenties and thirty-something crew, are as reluctant as their patriarchal male counterparts to make time for love. Wise aging women know that one of the keenest regrets a large number of females experience in their lives is failure to understand early the power and meaning of love. Not only would that knowledge have afforded an understanding that would have prevented them from ending up emotionally abused and battered, it would have ushered true love in to their lives sooner rather than later.
My hope for younger generations of women is that they will examine the unfulfilled spaces of their lives soon and boldly, unabashedly choosing to do the work of love, placing it above everything. Again and again it must be stated that when I talk about doing the work of love, I am not talking simply about partnerships; I am talking about the work of self-love in conjunction with the work of relational love. Visionary feminist thinkers were among the first group of people to call attention to the disservice we women do to ourselves when we act as though it were important only to find the right partner, someone to love, rather than to choose a circle of love. When we place emphasis on building a beloved community, of which having a partner may be an essential part but not the whole, we free ourselves to lead joyous lives as single folks, (in or out of partnership with another).
Catching sight of it across the room,
pushing desks and chairs aside, I circled the stacks slowly, edging closer to the object of my literary desire.
Acting as if I didn’t care, my sleeve brushed invitingly against its spine.
Not succumbing to the obvious temptation I turned,
casually trailing my fingertips across the leather bindings on the shelf below.
Dizzy with discovery I slipped and fell against the stacks.
To my delight, the prized edition I longed for fell before me,
opening to reveal its fullest form.
“Prose! Prose!” my heart pounded with renewed anticipation.
Rushing to its side I knelt possessively.
“Too soon. Too soon.” I whispered into its creamy wanton pages.
Resisting the urge to devour its succulent stories,
tenderly closing its velvet covered hardness,
I held it tightly to my trembling body.
Spying a private corner behind the ferns I made my way to darker recesses.
Drawing the magic to my lips, breathing infinite possibilities,
I slowly lifted the cover and caressed the fly page.
The table of contents undressed its willful intentions
as I fingered through the waiting pages of blissful madness.
Wetness willed its way down my aching body.
I swallowed hard as my mind prepared for an invasion of ecstasy.
Subtle framing grabbed my soft tender throat,
as the turbulent dialogue licked me speechless.
The plot thickened with fully developed characters.
Metaphor wrapped its meaning around my memory,
and the rhythm rocked me head to toe, moving in three-four time.
I tangoed with luscious adjectives as the verbs drummed a gyrating beat.
Is this the middle or the end?
Did I miss the story in the first line, is it coming now, or is it all a fake?
“Don’t lead me on.” I cried.
“Take me to the edge, take me now!”
The words smiled cunningly.
I laughed at my seduction,
and made plans to come again.
Communion: The Female Search for Love by Bell Hooks (Harper Collins Publishers, 2002)
Excerpt from Chapter One – Aging to Love, Loving to Age.
Women are often more interested in being loved than in the act of loving. All too often the female search for love is epitomized by this desire, not by a desire to know how to love. Until we are able to acknowledge that women fail at loving because we are no more schooled in the art of loving than are our male counterparts, we will not find love. If the female obsession with love in patriarchal culture were linked from birth on to the practice of love, then women would be experts in the art of loving. And as a consequence, since women do most of the parenting in our nation, children would be more loving. If women excelled in the art of loving, these skills would be imparted to male and female children alike.
As long as our culture devalues love, women will remain no more able to love than our male counterparts are. In patriarchal culture, giving care continues to be seen as primarily a female task. The feminist movement did not change this perception. And while women more than men are often great caregivers, this does not translate into knowing how to be loving. Love is a combination of care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect, and trust. Socialized in the art of caring, it is easier for women who desire to love to learn the necessary skills to practice love. And yet women have not chosen to give themselves whole-heartedly over to the art of loving. As long as being loved is seen as a gesture of weakness, one that dis-empowers, women will remain afraid to love fully, deeply, completely. Women will continue to fail at love, because this failure places females on an equal footing with males who turn away from love. Women who fail at loving need not be disappointed that the men in their lives – fathers, siblings, friends, or lovers – do not give love. Women who learn to love represent the greatest threat to the patriarchal status quo. By failing to love, women make it clear that it is more vital to their existence to have the approval and support of men than it is to love.
Gabriel Constans 