I invited Jennifer to chat with me about her latest sex demon book, which I enjoyed a great deal. She wrote an amazing guest post -- see below!
Dancing With Cupid: How mango sex saved my bacon and restored a defrocked Hindu love god’s wicked reputation
by Jennifer Stevenson
Confession time: I’ve written a lot of sex demon books, and with every new sex demon, I have to figure out what his kinks are. Yes, those kinks. What did you think, they pay me for my exquisite flower arrangements? I’m saying it’s not always easy to find something new to do with a sex demon.
Thank goodness, most of ‘em are tortured heroes. If they weren’t tortured, they wouldn’t be demons, would they? Figure out what makes ‘em tick, and you can figure out what kind of magical torque they put on sex.
Examples: Randy, a.k.a. Randolph Llew Carstairs Athelbury Darner, third Earl Pontarsais, is a control freak. Any fantasy you want, you get, as long as he’s in charge. One of these days he and Jewel will realize how much fun it would be to let her make him happy, but hoo boy, first the drama. Archie is terrified that Aphrodite will wreak vengeance on any woman he gets close to, so he’s trapped in one-night-stand-land. That’s right, a man who is forced to have awesome sex with an infinite parade of women he’ll never see again, and he hates it. (I said it was a fantasy, didn’t I? Women’s fantasy, that is.) Lido is great with women but he’d rather be with men, a fact he thinks nobody else knows. Mutmumtazarek is possibly the least gifted sex-demon-in-training in history. Baz can’t get over loving a goddess he can never have. Veek tries to look badass on the outside because he’s hideously uptight inside, so sex demoning is about his only fun-loving outlet, and even that’s all screwed up with rules.
The only sex demon I’ve done who’s a nontortured hero is Kamadeva. Kama’s also the oldest, probably no coincidence. You don’t make it to six thousand years without a positive attitude. His story by rights ought to be the kinkiest of them all. Oddly, it’s the most vanilla of the bunch so far, and the sweetest.
Westerners feel this huge mystique about the Kama Sutra (“Love Book,” named after Kama of course) and most of them haven’t read it. You have to be careful about that. There are two Kama Sutras out there—the original, which is a compilation of sex manuals dating back to [oh shit look it up], and the Ananga Ranga, a rewrite perpetrated in the 1550s by a court poet in Islamic Delhi. The second one scaled way back on women’s pleasure and focused instead on advising men how to control their wives and restrict their civil, economic, and orgasmic rights. Boo, hiss! Read the first one.
What made the Kama Sutra so controversial was its emphasis on equal pleasuring—frank teachings advising men how to pleasure women, as well as the other way around. Europe and India filled up with woman-hating laws around the same time. Women’s rights shrank to nothing, starting with women’s right to pleasure. The original Kama Sutra shocked Europe as much as it had shocked the Lodi court at Delhi. Hence the rewrite.
So here’s Kama wooing his long-lost runaway bride, a woman he was married to for 5500 years. Trouble is, she’s been reincarnating the whole time, and she has completely forgotten that she ever was a goddess of sensual love. When they meet again, she’s a virgin, thinks she’d like to try sex with a competent partner, but hasn’t a clue. Can’t find her love button with both hands.
And Kamadeva chokes. After more than five hundred years searching for her, marking time on hell’s payroll for having inappropriate sex, he realizes that this time he’s not seducing a virgin just for the score. It’s got to be perfect. Moreover, if she walked out on him once, she could walk out again. Sex will revive the goddess in her, and all of her memories—including those last fights before their breakup. He daren’t risk it.
You see the problem. My own hero, a sex demon, was refusing to get into the heroine’s panties. The author of the Kama Sutra. Original of a thousand erotic temple sculptures. His reputation is shot if I can’t figure this out. How am I gonna get these two into bed?
The author had painted herself into a corner. It took writing about two thirds of the book for me to realize this. I was pulling my hair out. How freaking hard can it be? Randy had Jewel’s undies off in chapter three, for pete’s sake.
And because Kama isn’t a tortured hero, I was stuck. What price all those raunchy sculptures on temples all over India? Doesn’t the Kama Sutra count for anything? Oh, I was raving.
Eventually I let his virgin amnesiac runaway bride drive, and she got us there.
It’s not too much of a spoiler if I reveal that mangos make the world go round.
I’m a terrible tease. You’ll just have to read it.
-----------------
Jennifer Stevenson has repaired real and artificial sunflowers, run a cafeteria dishwasher, laid paint-shop flooring, coaxed crows, dug drain-tile ditches, bathed horses, demolished walls, Je painted houses, and once was allowed to help upholster a ten-foot-diameter pink satin pouffe. She has taught fiction and erotica writing, slo-mo barrel-racing, and how to fall down wearing roller skates. She skates with the Fleetwood Speed Team and racks her brain daily, thinking up new uses for old sex demons.
My website: http://jenniferstevenson.com
My Facebook page (much more frequently updated--I prefer that you use this, not my website page: http://www.facebook.com/JenniferStevensonAuthor
Dancing With Cupid: How mango sex saved my bacon and restored a defrocked Hindu love god’s wicked reputationby Jennifer Stevenson
Confession time: I’ve written a lot of sex demon books, and with every new sex demon, I have to figure out what his kinks are. Yes, those kinks. What did you think, they pay me for my exquisite flower arrangements? I’m saying it’s not always easy to find something new to do with a sex demon.
Thank goodness, most of ‘em are tortured heroes. If they weren’t tortured, they wouldn’t be demons, would they? Figure out what makes ‘em tick, and you can figure out what kind of magical torque they put on sex.
Examples: Randy, a.k.a. Randolph Llew Carstairs Athelbury Darner, third Earl Pontarsais, is a control freak. Any fantasy you want, you get, as long as he’s in charge. One of these days he and Jewel will realize how much fun it would be to let her make him happy, but hoo boy, first the drama. Archie is terrified that Aphrodite will wreak vengeance on any woman he gets close to, so he’s trapped in one-night-stand-land. That’s right, a man who is forced to have awesome sex with an infinite parade of women he’ll never see again, and he hates it. (I said it was a fantasy, didn’t I? Women’s fantasy, that is.) Lido is great with women but he’d rather be with men, a fact he thinks nobody else knows. Mutmumtazarek is possibly the least gifted sex-demon-in-training in history. Baz can’t get over loving a goddess he can never have. Veek tries to look badass on the outside because he’s hideously uptight inside, so sex demoning is about his only fun-loving outlet, and even that’s all screwed up with rules.
The only sex demon I’ve done who’s a nontortured hero is Kamadeva. Kama’s also the oldest, probably no coincidence. You don’t make it to six thousand years without a positive attitude. His story by rights ought to be the kinkiest of them all. Oddly, it’s the most vanilla of the bunch so far, and the sweetest.
Westerners feel this huge mystique about the Kama Sutra (“Love Book,” named after Kama of course) and most of them haven’t read it. You have to be careful about that. There are two Kama Sutras out there—the original, which is a compilation of sex manuals dating back to [oh shit look it up], and the Ananga Ranga, a rewrite perpetrated in the 1550s by a court poet in Islamic Delhi. The second one scaled way back on women’s pleasure and focused instead on advising men how to control their wives and restrict their civil, economic, and orgasmic rights. Boo, hiss! Read the first one.
What made the Kama Sutra so controversial was its emphasis on equal pleasuring—frank teachings advising men how to pleasure women, as well as the other way around. Europe and India filled up with woman-hating laws around the same time. Women’s rights shrank to nothing, starting with women’s right to pleasure. The original Kama Sutra shocked Europe as much as it had shocked the Lodi court at Delhi. Hence the rewrite.
So here’s Kama wooing his long-lost runaway bride, a woman he was married to for 5500 years. Trouble is, she’s been reincarnating the whole time, and she has completely forgotten that she ever was a goddess of sensual love. When they meet again, she’s a virgin, thinks she’d like to try sex with a competent partner, but hasn’t a clue. Can’t find her love button with both hands.
And Kamadeva chokes. After more than five hundred years searching for her, marking time on hell’s payroll for having inappropriate sex, he realizes that this time he’s not seducing a virgin just for the score. It’s got to be perfect. Moreover, if she walked out on him once, she could walk out again. Sex will revive the goddess in her, and all of her memories—including those last fights before their breakup. He daren’t risk it.
You see the problem. My own hero, a sex demon, was refusing to get into the heroine’s panties. The author of the Kama Sutra. Original of a thousand erotic temple sculptures. His reputation is shot if I can’t figure this out. How am I gonna get these two into bed?
The author had painted herself into a corner. It took writing about two thirds of the book for me to realize this. I was pulling my hair out. How freaking hard can it be? Randy had Jewel’s undies off in chapter three, for pete’s sake.
And because Kama isn’t a tortured hero, I was stuck. What price all those raunchy sculptures on temples all over India? Doesn’t the Kama Sutra count for anything? Oh, I was raving.
Eventually I let his virgin amnesiac runaway bride drive, and she got us there.
It’s not too much of a spoiler if I reveal that mangos make the world go round.
I’m a terrible tease. You’ll just have to read it.
-----------------
Jennifer Stevenson has repaired real and artificial sunflowers, run a cafeteria dishwasher, laid paint-shop flooring, coaxed crows, dug drain-tile ditches, bathed horses, demolished walls, Je painted houses, and once was allowed to help upholster a ten-foot-diameter pink satin pouffe. She has taught fiction and erotica writing, slo-mo barrel-racing, and how to fall down wearing roller skates. She skates with the Fleetwood Speed Team and racks her brain daily, thinking up new uses for old sex demons.
My website: http://jenniferstevenson.com
My Facebook page (much more frequently updated--I prefer that you use this, not my website page: http://www.facebook.com/JenniferStevensonAuthor
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