Tag Archives: secret library

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Welcome, Primula Bond!

Today my guest at Naughty Corner Towers is the amazing Primula Bond, who was a regular fiction contributor back in my Forum days. Now part of the stellar line-up in Xcite’s Secret Library collection, she’s sharing her erotic writing secrets. Take it away, Primula!

I am a 50 year old Oxford-educated wife, and mother of three boys. I live in Winchester, and work part time as a secretary for criminal defence lawyers. I am a landlady to foreign students, a portrait photographer and a freelance features writer. And I write erotica.

I like to think I’m respectable, opinionated, intelligent and funny, and at the school gate you wouldn’t have me down as a kinky dominatrix who in her spare time writes about threesomes, lesbian sex and spanking. Some people wonder where, in a life full of boys, meals, commuting and deadlines, I find the time, but there is always time for fantasy. Idling at traffic lights, stirring a sauce, scrubbing a loo – as any writer knows, if you have a fertile enough imagination, you will find inspiration anywhere. Write about anything, real or imagined.

People always ask what triggers my stories, particularly the erotica. Well, it can be a conversation, an anecdote, a tableau glimpsed through a moving window. Personal memories. A random thought (while scrubbing aforesaid loo), an imagined scenario. Writing is a wonderful way of escaping the world but also of enhancing your observations of it.

But it wasn’t until I found myself a single mother at 27 and waiting for my knight in shining armour that I decided to try my hand firstly at Mills and Boon. Well, respect to romantic authors, because it isn’t as easy as they make it look. I was rejected despite setting my novels in every exotic place I’d ever been to: Venice, Cairo and, er, Devon.

Finally one helpful editor spelled out that, as well as other faults, my sex scenes were, well, too sexy. Too explicit. Hell, I reckoned that if I could do explicit, then I may as be paid for it.

My husband dines out on the fact that my first successful story, Man in a Cage, was written when I should have been typing his letters. He was my boss at the time, and about to marry someone else, but that’s another story. I bashed out this story about a heartbroken woman who finds, on her birthday, her naked ex lover delivered to her in a cage. It took me one lunch hour, and it was accepted by For Women magazine. I was offered £150 for what amounted to an hour’s pleasurable escapism, and that’s when it all began.

Since then I’ve published three erotic novels: Country Pleasures, Club Crème and Behind The Curtain and short stories for Virgin Books and the novella Sisters in Sin and short stories for Avon. Accent Press and Xcite published my first solo collection of stories Random Acts of Lust and my Secret Library novella Out of Focus is out in May.

Again, curious non-writers ask me, what are the stories about? Duh! Sex. Sex between consenting, passionate and adventurous adults, husbands and wives, stepmothers and stepsons, lesbian encounters, and my particular favourite, the cougar theme at its most forbidden. It’s graphic, but I write sensitively, building up characters, relationships and responses rather than constructing a one-dimensional set-up. I love creating colourful and exotic settings and situations between impossibly gorgeous people, using smell, touch, clothes and scenery to heighten the atmosphere. I enjoy finding erotic potential in the most mundane places – a suburban street, an office, a shop – or an unexpected moment, such as an awkward family gathering, a new wife meeting her stepson for the first time, or a PTA meeting.

The challenge is exploring it subtly; a comely landlady, for instance, inflaming her lodgers with her full English, or a convent girl falling for one of the nuns…

As for my own life, I’ve lived a little, sure, but I also mine my travels, my part-time work, my friends and neighbours, but mostly my over-fecund imagination. Have I been in a threesome, or been whipped by a mask-wearing dominatrix? Well, read my stories and tell me how convincing they are! Any erotic writer worth their bondage gear can, with rounded characters and real situations, take you right into the heart of a story and keep you there.

If that story happens to canter into a slick penthouse suite in Manhattan or a back-street convent in Venice, well, so much the better. The imagination is a great alternative to travelling.

The Secret Library is a new range from Xcite Books which will appeal to the female romance reader market. Each book contains three specially commissioned novellas guaranteeing a satisfying and varied selection.

The story content is relationship led with a strong alpha male hero, a level of conflict and a climactic, explicit ending.

The covers are deliberately designed without visual imagery to be discreet. These books could be comfortably read in public, given as gifts and left on a bedside table.

The Secret Library contains six books with three erotic romance novellas in each:

Traded Innocence – Toni Sands, Elizabeth Coldwell and K D Grace

Silk Stockings – Constance Munday, Jenna Bright and Lucy Felthouse

One Long Hot Summer – Elizabeth Coldwell, Penelope Friday and Shanna Germain

The Thousand and One Nights – Kitti Bernetti, Primula Bond and Sommer Marsden

The Game – Jeff Cott, Antonia Adams and Sommer Marsden

Hungarian Rhapsody – Justine Elyot, Charlotte Stein and Kay Jaybee

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Ooh, Strokeable…

That was pretty much the reaction of everyone who got their first look at – and feel of – the Secret Library collection at the London Book Fair this week. Those velvety covers are delicious to hold, and though they may look discreet, the stories within most certainly aren’t!

I spent time on the Xcite Books stall on Monday, bumping into a few familiar faces like Lucy Felthouse – who has a novella, Off The Shelf, in Silk Stockings, and who took a few pictures of the books in all their glory at the fair for the Secret Library blog - and Nicki from Total-e-bound, as well as meeting another Xcite author, the bubbly Jenna Bright for the first time.

The first two  Secret Library titles, Silk Stockings and Traded Innocence, which contains my own novella Cooking Up Trouble, are available now from Amazon (click on the book cover below) and the Xcite bookshop.

 And to whet your appetite, here’s an extract from Cooking Up Trouble. Morgan Jones has landed a plum TV job, presenting the Saturday morning TV show, Cook’s Treats. The only trouble is her co-host is celebrity chef Scott Harley, who has previously made unflattering comments about her figure and her cooking style in print. She’s all set to hate the man when she finally meets him for the first time, in the show’s production office – which, when she reaches it, is a scene of controlled chaos:

People were shouting into mobile phones, each one’s conversation seemingly more important and more vital to the smooth running of the show than the next. For the first time, Morgan realised the difference between working for a small TV company and one of the major players. Before, there’d never been more than three egos competing for attention in a room at any one time. Here, she counted four times that.

Scott Harley striding in brought the figure up to a baker’s dozen. Morgan had never met a man whose entrance could silence a room, until now. If he’d looked good in his magazine feature, he was something else again in the flesh. A good head taller than Morgan’s own five foot ten, he had the wide-shouldered build of a professional athlete and a taut, enticing arse outlined by tight-fitting black trousers. Pushing his thick mane of dirty-blond hair out of his face, he fixed Morgan with his piercing green eyes. Despite herself, she felt a sudden rush of lust, settling low in her belly and sending a faint, guilty flush to her cheeks. Of all the reactions she’d expected to have, she’d never thought she would find him as compellingly attractive as she did.

Of course, to find out whether they’re going to generate serious heat in the Cook’s Treats kitchens, you’ll have to read the rest of the story. But I promise you, it’s tasty…