Morgan James's Blog

Man of the Shadows, my erotic romance historical time travel novel featuring a muscular, handsome Revolutionary War offier and a witty, adventurous, frustrated contemporary young woman, is the Ravenous Romance featured novel of the day. For those who have not gotten a copy yet, I thought I'd offer a few sample snippets of conversation from the novel to pique your interest. [image error]

SAMPLE ONE:

Alexander gazed at his wife, now wearing only her white linen petticoat and shift. "My beautiful lady. If I were an artist, I would paint you as you are right now, blushing, beautiful, and willing."

Hannah's cheeks flushed pink. "Should you paint me as I am right now then we should have to hide the portrait well away from prying eyes! I'm practically naked!"

"Not naked enough."

SAMPLE TWO:

"You're sweet, Alan."

"I know."

"And I might even find a story worth writing for the newspaper while I'm gone."

"I won't hold you to it. I know you're trying to write a novel. That'll take your time."

"True. Hey, how about if I name a character after you as a thanks for you being so understanding?"

"What kind of novel is it?"

"Ah, well. It's historical…and erotic."

"Really? Wow, well. Do with my name as you will!" He chuckled. "And have fun while you're gone. You deserve it."

SAMPLE THREE:

The man grunted. Then he managed, "A ball wound is most often fatal, dear lady. Some right away. Some…in due time."

"I said don't talk like that!"

"But…"

"But?"

"But should you meet with Captain Skinner, tell him that Peter was disoriented. He didn't know…he didn't…" The man stopped, his breathing heavy, as if he could say no more.

Holly jumped to her feet. "Don't you dare die on me! Not now! I'm out of here. I'll make the call and get the help. Just hold tight! Don't move. Don't make it worse!"

The man went silent. Was he in shock? Had he passed out?

Was he dead?

SAMPLE FOUR:

The woman continued to weep, her body wracked with increasingly greater sobs.

"Madam?"

She did not answer.

He reached out to touch her shoulder but could not reach. Carefully, he drew the blanket down from his legs and, on his hands and knees, moved close to her. "Madam, I apologize from the deepest corner of my heart."

"It's….it's not you," she managed, her face still buried in her hands.

"Ah, dear lady. Have you lost someone to the war? A husband, perhaps? Or brother?" Maybe she had so generously cared for him because she had been unable to care for her own loved one, and hoped that in doing so it might ease her heart and soul.

"No, no one," she said.

Alexander could feel the heat of grief rolling off her in waves. He touched her arm gently. "Then what has you so sad?"

SAMPLE FIVE:

"Should I explore you, Madam? Should I let my fingers go where they will?"

Holly nodded so hard she thought her head might fall off. Holding her breath, she waited with agonizing, glorious anticipation as Alexander's hand hovered a mere inch from the wet, desperate place between her legs. Touch me, oh, please, please touch me there!

SAMPLE SIX:

"Lieutenant Wyeth," said Skinner, "I am here to take you back to our encampment where you are to face court marshalling for desertion!"

"Sir," said Alexander. "I request the opportunity to speak on my behalf, in my defense."

"No," said Skinner. "Save your words for the court. We have captured Peter Edwards as well, and are holding him so that we can try you together. Clearly, your plans to abandon your duties and your country were a scheme hatched together, but you must have known, Wyeth, that we would not be still until you were both arrested and returned."

"Wait!" cried Holly. "Please wait. Let me explain to you what happened to us!"

The soldiers turned and stared at her, their faces twitching with a mixture of intrigue and distrust.

There is a great deal of hot, graphic love making, passion, hope, despair, fear, and ecstasy in the book, just waiting for new readers!

Love,

Morgan

Music is one of the most powerful forces in the universe. It can bring us up and bring us down. It can inspire us, depress us, move us to tears, bring us out of a depression. It can turn us off or turn us on.

I love listening to music when I write. Nothing with words; that would just start me singing along and then I'd get nothing written! I love instrumental pieces. Movie scores (Gettysburg, Gladiator, Master and Commander, The Color Purple, The Stand, Sophie's Choice, to name a few.) I also love the music of Secret Garden, David Lanz, Jim Brickman, and lots others. Depending on what kind of story or scene I'm working on, I can select music to help enhance my emotional reactions to what is going on and therefore make what I write more intense or touching or sexy or sad.

What kind of music do you listen to? And why? To relax? As a background to a glorious love-making session? To help you create?

Love,
Morgan

"Write every day." That's something many writers tell others who want to write. "It doesn't matter if what you put down sucks," they say, "put it down anyway. It's the only way to become a writer! Write. Write. Write!" That's good advice. So is this: "Don't write."

I quit my day job to become a full time writer in 1994. Jumping into the full time writing fray was thrilling, liberating, and scary. Writing full time continues to be thrilling, liberating, and scary.

All this time later I'm still writing full time. Erotica. Horror. Historicals. Most days I spend hours upon hour at the computer, creating fictional adventures. Some steamy and graphically sexual. Some scary. Some set in the past. Some set in contemporary times.
Good fun, hard work. I write – a lot. I want to. I have to.

"Yep," other writers might say, "That's what she has to do. That's what she's gotta do. Don't let a day go by. Write something everyday!"

But you know what I've discovered in all this time? Sometimes that old well runs low. And you have to fill it back up or you start scraping the bottom. What you come up with is thick mud and worm poop. You have to turn off the computer or lay aside the pen.

I took a vacation a couple weeks ago. Went to the beach with Mitch for five days. Stayed in an inexpensive motel on the oceanfront, one that was all the more inexpensive because it was off season. Ninth floor. Nonsmoking room. Balcony overlooking a pier and the great gray sea. I didn't take a laptop. I didn't take a legal pad, though I was going to. I was tempted, Lord don'cha know it. Instead, I just sucked up the vacation. I stood on the balcony to breathe in the frosty, salt-laced February air. I watched the people below on the boardwalk, pier, and sand, braving the chill in their coats and gloves, throwing sticks to dogs who leapt into the foamy waves to retrieve them. At daybreak I watched the orange slice of sun on the horizon, followed by several old men on the sand, waving their "treasure hunters" back and forth, looking for quarters and other valuable finds. One afternoon I watched a group of retarded people on a day's trip with their counselor, sitting on boardwalk benches in matching wool caps, dutifully eating the sandwiches that had been brought in a wheeled cooler. I saw lovers buried deep against each other and against the wind, wandering past, unaware of the beauty around them, absorbed in the beauty that was their intimate connection. I observed the waves at high tide. The waves at low tide. The "Sand-Boni" leveling the sand soon after sunrise. Laughing gulls diving for leftovers. Herring gulls looking pissed and bored. Little sand pipers running around and just being cute. Pelicans in the sky. Dolphins embroidering the surface of the water.

Mitch and I also did our share of wandering. I took off my shoes and socks and rolled up my jeans to test the winter waves. We meandered through the closed-for-the-season amusement park, studying the graffiti, the old newspapers blown against wire fences, the boarded up concession stands. I stared up in horrified fascination (I have a major fear of heights)) at the "Skyscraper," a 165-feet high, 65-mile an hour Ferris Wheel-type thing that seemed content to be left alone for the time being. Bought cool, kitchy souvenirs made of shells and glue at one of the few gift shops open. Then, I challenged one of my fears and climbed the wrought-iron spiral staircase to the top of the 200-year-old Old Cape Henry Lighthouse. For five days I watched, I touched, I smelled (yeah, okay, shut up), I tasted, and I listened. I took it all in. And I didn't write a damned thing.

Now I'm home. My mind's well is full again. I'm ready to get back to work. Not writing for those five days was inspiring and enjoyable. And I'll attack my writing once again with inspiration and enjoyment.

If you are a writer or aspire to be one, write, write, write! But also, don't forget to shut down the computer some times. Spend a day in a park or an afternoon in a bookstore. Do some gardening, go wandering, sit in a coffee shop and experience the world beyond the screen. Don't tell yourself, "Okay, I'm here to get inspired for a story, a novel and I better come back with some ideas." Remove yourself from urgency. Just be there. Just suck it in. Relax. Don't fear a little time to let the well refill, for it will. And when it does, drink deeply. (But spit out any residual worm poop.)

Love,

Morgan

I want to thank Nixy Valentine for the excellent review of my Ravenous Romance novel, Haunted Seduction. To me, the most important element of a story or novel is the characters. You can have an intricate plot, an exotic setting, but unless you can care about or be genuinely curious about the folks who people the story, then it is going to be hard to force yourself through 50 or 200 pages of their lives. I appreciate Nixy's comments about my flawed yet realistic character, and the fact that the sex - which is critical to an erotic story - is intricate to the story, not just something folks do.

Here's a link to the review: http://www.nixyvalentine.com/index.php/2009/02/review-haunted-seduction/comment-page-1/

Thanks again, Nixy. I'll continue to do my best to offer steamy, sexy stories with characters that ring true, and situations that test them to their limits.

I was interviewed a few days ago by fellow author Jesse Blair, and the question came up: Why do I write erotica?

It's a good question. Especially for someone who has been writing and publishing in other genres - historical fiction, horror/suspense, media tie-ins, nonfiction, mainstream - for quite some time. But it basically comes down to one thing. I write realistic characters and their experiences. Their lives. What the encounter, what scares them, excites them, makes them angry or sad or overjoyed. Yes, the stories often get pretty wild or scary and sometimes surreal, but the characters themselves are rooted firmly in reality. They love, they hurt, they bleed, they cry, they laugh, they tremble, they desire. We read about them because we want to experience what they are experiencing. We want to learn what they learn, go where they go, discover what they discover. So when the opportunity came to write about sexuality, it seemed to fit right into what I was already doing.

Granted, I've never been as explicit with my sex scenes as I have been with my Ravenous Romance novels and short stories. But real sex is pretty graphic, right? And so it didn't take much to open the bedroom doors just a bit wider so the reader could see more clearly what was going on. And what's wrong with a little literary voyeurism? I mean, isn't all fiction a bit voyeuristic by nature?

Love,

Morgan

How does an author write erotic fiction? Or more specifically, how does a writer create effective sex scenes in erotic fiction?

The key is to tune in to what turns you on. Granted, our inner desires are intimate and personal and often quite private. Some even startle ourselves! But if a writer wants to create steamy scenes that will ignite the fires in his or her readers, then the writer has to be willing to explore and then put on paper those intimate, personal, private passions. The writer has to be willing to lay it on all the line, to allow his/her imagination to experience all these things and then share them. I've heard tell writers should never write as if their mothers are watching over their shoulders. Excellent advice, especially for writers of erotica. Let it all hang out! If this isn't the case, then the scenes will read flat, uninspired, and unrealisic.

Years ago, the book My Secret Garden made a big splash. It as a nonfiction collection of women's private sexual fantasies. Talk about steamy! Those interviewed held nothing back, and it made it very clear that there is a huge variety in what gets our minds and bodies a-throbbin'! There are some fantasties that do nothing for me. Others get me hot immediately. The ones that get me hot are the ones I'll include in my fiction. I'll be the first to admit that I enjoy watching others make love (there's a lot of that in my Ravenous Romance novel Haunted Seduction). I especially am turned on by two men enjoying each other's bodies (see my short story in Merry Sex-mas). I love the idea of powerful, brooding men who have in some way become vulnerable and need to be tended...until they're strong enough to rise up and turn the tables in a very big way (such as what happens in my Ravenous Romance novel Man of the Shadows). I love the idea of sex outdoors (soon to come in my next RR novel, Mad Mistress of the Mountain). Hey, humans are all part of nature, aren't we? And there are other hot situations that get me going.

And you can trust me to be honest enough to share them with you in my fiction.

Love,
Morgan

So it's been excrutiatingly cold the last 24 hours. Brutally cold. Below zero overnight. Time for warm socks and sweaters and leopard-print fuzzy slippers. Time for fires in fireplaces, kitties curled on a pillow, soft blankets and softer music.

And I've found another way to keep warm. And that's reading Ravenous Romance novels and short stories by some of the other grand authors on this site. Jesse Blair. Lisa Lane. Inara Lavey. Sephera Giron. Ryan Field. Hot stuff, all! Just right to help thaw out a frozen winer's night.

I'm also warming by writing scenes for my upcoming novel, Mad Mistress of the Mountain. Witchcraft, superstition, clan mentality, a beautiful misunderstood young widow, a handsome, brooding official who has come to the mountains to investigate dreadful mining disaster. The sparks fly, in more ways than one!

But until that is finished, check out my newest offering, Man of the Shadows, or my first Ravenous Romance novel, Haunted Seduction. Both involve frightening, supernatural events that sweep up ordinary people and thrust them into terrifying worlds where they must find a way to survive. And in doing so, they reach out to those trapped with them. The results are passionate, fiery, sensual, and emotionally satisfying.

And check out the works by the other authors here. Quite a variety of approaches and voices, but each offers some damn sexy stuff!

Love,

Morgan

What it is about a man in a tri-cornered or cocked hat that stirs such passion for me? What makes that so freakin' hot? I don't think I could really put my finger on it. But when I'm in Colonial Williamsburg and a young man with dark hair and broad shoulders…or even an older man with steely gray hair and a square jaw…goes galloping down Duke of Gloucester Street on his horse, cape flying, black leather boots secure in the stirrups, eyes blazing, I feel absolutely faint in the knees. Is it the sense of power the man projects? The self-confidence? The aura of duty and determination and strength? The idea that a man who exudes such command would command me in all the best ways? Maybe it's none of those or all of those. I just know that a tri-corn hat is a first step to getting me hot and bothered and willing to meet the man in stable loft or behind the oak tree in the lily garden. Every Revolutionary hero needs a willing woman to help ease his mind and his soul and his body.

My novel Man of the Shadows (debut Jan. 16) throws a frustrated contemporary woman into a terrifying time fold with a handsome, dedicated, yet troubled Revolutionary War officer. Together, in the wilderness, they must find a way to survive. Is this my fantasy? Well, of course it is! And I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed imagining and writing it. 

And I'd love to hear what you think. Thanks! And thanks, also, to those who have helped make my first Ravenous Romance novel, Haunted Seduction, a best seller. If you haven't read that one yet, check it out!

Love,
Morgan