Tag: Cherise Sinclair

27

Edges, Limits and Boundaries

Edges, Limits and Boundaries

Soft limits, hard limits, personal boundaries, personal fears. It doesn’t matter if we’re kinky or vanilla, every single one of us has things that we’re comfortable and not comfortable doing sexually; lines that we don’t want crossed, things that we adore doing. And it’s most certainly the case that one person’s ‘hell no!’ is another person’s ‘hell yes!’ That’s a good thing. If we were all the same, life and sex would be terribly boring. What intrigues me, however, is how our comfort levels and perceptions of what we do and don’t like, can and can’t tolerate, can – and often do – change over time.

Now, before I go any further with this train of thought, I’d just like to make it really, really clear that hard limits should always, ALWAYS be respected. No exceptions. They are not there to be pushed. They are not there to be ‘broken though’. A hard limit is a prohibition, a definite no-no. End of story. And a hard limit remains so until such time as the person whose limit it is chooses of their own volition and without coercion for it not to be.

Public service announcement out of the way, let’s continue.

One of things that I am coming to realise the longer I explore my sexuality is that the devil is very much in the detail. And the gulf between the aforementioned ‘hell yes!’ and my safeword is actually much wider than I originally thought. Not because I’ve been sloppy in articulating what I’m okay with and what I’m not or because I’m getting kinkier (I don’t think I am) but because identifying the things that arouse is a bit like going off to explore the jungle. You take your map with you and it defines the terrain you’re going to cover, but the route you follow to your destination often ends up revealing a multitude of alternate trails and tracks that you just have to go back and explore. And on occasion, those offshoots lead you to places you originally sought to avoid. Continue reading →

09

Take us and Break us: we’re on Cari’s cover!

Remember the write up that Michael and I did for Cari Silverwood’s Take Me, Break Me back in March? Of course you do! Who could forget deliciously sadistic Klaus and Jodie of the capture fantasy? Well, Cari, God bless her, stopped by Chintz to read our review after we’d posted it and was sweet enough to pay us both some lovely compliments on our respective ramblings. She even said nice things about my questionable ‘art’ skills. (I can’t help but have serious love for anyone who gets my stick figures.)

Anyway the other day, Michael and I received a fantastic surprise: Take Me, Break Me will soon be released in paperback and guess whose words will be appearing on the cover? Yup. Mr M’s. Continue reading →

04

This Is Who I Am – Cherise Sinclair

This Is Who I Am - Cherise SinclairTitle: This Is Who I Am (Shadowlands Book 7)
Author: Cherise Sinclair
Publisher: Loose Id LLC (27 May 2013)
ISBN: 978-1-62300-148-3
Reviewer(s): Michael & Jane

 

This joint review was a no-brainer for us. Michael and I are both big fans of Cherise Sinclair and it’s fair to say that we were both gagging to read this latest instalment in her Shadowlands series. When I suggested to him that This Is Who I Am should be our next project?

 

@Jane: I have been looking forward to that book for over a year:

‘”I won’t scar you. I won’t go past when you can take. If you can trust me that far, this will be much easier for you.” He met her eyes straight on, letting her read his body, hear the truth, and see it in his face. “But, Linda, I’m going to hurt you. You’ll hate me when I make you take it, and you’ll hate even more that you need it. That it fills that hole inside you and cleans away the clutter.”‘

(To Command and Collar (Shadowlands Book 6))

 

@Michael: CANNOT WAIT for Sam. And DeVries from Dark Haven. They both scare and tempt at the same time … *sigh*

 

Yep, we were pushing the download button on release day.

Did it live up to our expectations? Continue reading →

29

Silence

Yep, I know it’s been nearly a week since the last Chintz post. Sorry ’bout that. I’m currently at the mercy of Half-term and a rather interesting writing project that kicked off a few weeks ago. In other words, updates over the next few days are going to continue to be sporadic. Lest you think that I’m swanning about in my underpants in front of the T.V. and eating chocolate, however, let me assure you that there is stuff going on behind the florals: Michael and I have just finished another joint-read (Cherise Sinclair’s This is Who I Am), I’m currently drafting another My Life in Books entry as well as some additional reviews, and there are two toys of the vibrating variety currently being put through their paces for the Toy Box.

So it’s busy silence. Honestly!

Jane
xxx

 

15

My Life in Books (Part Two)

My Reading Life (Part Two)

On Monday, we covered the books that, for various reasons, had some sort of influence on the first two decades of my life. In this post, I’m going to be looking at titles that have managed to stick a literary stake in me post-twenty through to the present day. (For those who’re curious I’m thirty-five, so this particular batch spans a fifteen-year period.)

Again, a really mixed bag, although my penchant for grit and darkness is, I think, far more evident in this group. Surprisingly, there are a number of YA books in the line-up; not sure whether that’s because I’m completely ambivalent when it comes to ‘recommended age group’ ratings or a sign that I’m desperately trying to have a second childhood. I’ll let you decide. Continue reading →

27

Talk dirty to me

Words have a lot of power. They can move us to tears, make us laugh, shock the hell out of us, make us happy. They can also turn us on.

Lately, I’ve noticed that increasing numbers of female erotica and erotic romance writers are using flowery euphemisms less and what we would traditionally have considered ‘baser’, masculine terms more. We all have different tastes, obviously, but I’m curious to know whether our comfort levels as female readers are changing. In text, are we now more able to embrace words that, say, five or ten years ago had the power to shock us? And do they invoke feelings of arousal or have we simply become desensitised by the rise in their use?

The feminist Germain Greer said in the BBC’s Balderdash and Piffle series, which originally aired back in 2006, that the word ‘cunt’ was ‘one of the few remaining words in the English language with a genuine power to shock.’ Is this still true six years down the line? (I did consider titling this post ‘Cunt: when is it appropriate?’ but decided that the word, when used blatantly and without context, would likely be a barrier to people reading any further into this piece. Which tells me straight away that I, personally, have attached some degree of stigma to it even though I consider myself fairly comfortable with ‘cunt’ in the context of erotic writing.) I also have to wonder if the success of E.L. James’ Fifty Shades of Grey is due to its rather chaste language. Sure, we get some non-vanilla toys and some alternative sex practices, but how many times do we get to hear about Anastasia’s ‘down there’ during the course of the story? I’m not saying that you have to use crude words to write good sexual content – look at John Cleland’s Fanny Hill – but do we, as women, have a fear of using certain words in the bedroom? Continue reading →

04

My Liege of Dark Haven – Cherise Sinclair

Title: My Liege of Dark Haven
Author: Cherise Sinclair
Publisher: Loose Id LLC (August 26, 2012)
ISBN: 978-1-61118-978-0

Cherise Sinclair, how much do I love My Liege? Let me count the ways.

I love the depth and breadth of His character.
I love His outward poise and inner grace.
I love His calm, His confidence.
I love His humility.
I love His stoicism.
I love the way He expresses himself.
I love that He questions himself.
I love His naturalness.
But most of all, I love His dominance.

Oh, my goodness. If I had the ability to will a fictional character into existence, I would be doing my utmost to bring Xavier Leduc (a.k.a ‘My Leige’) to life. He strides about the pages of My Liege of Dark Haven, dominating the characters in the story – the heroine, Abigail Bern, in particular – and the reader like the most wonderfully dark maestro. He is absolutely – wonderfully – consuming.

I realise that I’ve only recently posted a review for one of Cherise Sinclair’s other books (Breaking Free from the Club Shadowlands/Masters of the Shadowlands series) but I’ve been waiting for My Leige’s story for the past few months and it – He – is just too good not to talk about immediately. Master Xavier waits for no one.

So what’s My Liege of Dark Haven about, then? Let me tell you, dear reader, let me tell you … Continue reading →

02

Breaking Free – Cherise Sinclair

Title: Breaking Free (Masters of the Shadowlands)
Author: Cherise Sinclair
Publisher: Loose Id LLC (30 Mar 2010)
ISBN: 978-1-59632-965-2

How’s this for an opening line:

‘Music, beer, tie up a willing woman, maybe use a flogger lightly … should be a no-stress evening.’

Breaking Free was the first book that I read of Cherise Sinclair’s and it made me an absolutely devoted fan of her Masters of the Shadowlands series. It’s well written, has excellent characterisation, a wonderful sense of tension and is hot with a capital ‘H’. (Did I mention it’s hot?)

Where to start? Well, I’m actually going to kick off with the message that Cherise Sinclair includes at the beginning of the book (and indeed all her others that involve BDSM):

‘This book is fiction, not reality … Good Doms don’t grow on trees and there’s some strange people out there. So while you’re looking for that special Dom, please, be careful.
.
.
.
When you find him, realize he can’t read your mind.’
You will have a safeword, am I clear? Use protection. Have a back-up person. Communicate.
Remember: safe, sane and consensual.’

For this alone, I applaud Ms Sinclair. Before the book has even begun, she’s taken a socially responsible approach to the reader and made it clear that, while Breaking Free is a contemporary erotic romance, it is fiction and you shouldn’t be running out to your nearest fetish club and asking the first person you encounter to tie you up and take a cane to your behind. This may sound like a no-brainer but a lot of people use books as inspiration – just look at the rise in sex toy sales since Fifty Shades of Grey hit the mainstream – and Cherise’s message is an important one. That’s not to say that other books don’t include disclaimers (many do) but the personal approach to the reader from the author, I think, is commendable. Continue reading →

05

Fifty Shades of Grey – E.L. James

Title: Fifty Shades of Grey
Author: E.L. James
ISBN: 978-0099579939
Publisher: Arrow (26 April 2012)

I’ve procrastinated over whether to do a review for Fifty Shades of Grey because, frankly, there’s not a lot that I can say about it that hasn’t already been said. The coverage of – and the furore around – this book has been absolutely massive and you can’t seem to walk five paces without bumping into someone who’s reading it or having a conversation about it. It’s broken sales records set by J.K. Rowling’s boy wizard, Harry Potter, and is the first book ever to reach the one million sales mark on Amazon Kindle. If you’ve been living in a parallel universe and haven’t a clue what I’m going on about, here’s a brief run-down …

Fifty Shades of Grey is an erotic romance written by British author E.L. James (a pseudonym for London T.V. executive Erika Leonard). It started life as fanfiction based on the characters and stories from Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series, which James later reworked to create Fifty Shades of Grey and the two subsequent books in the series, Fifty Shades Darker and Fifty Shades Freed. To boil it right down to basics:

- Edward Cullen (wealthy blood-sucking vampire) becomes Christian Grey (wealthy flogger-wielding sadist);

- Bella Swan (virginal high school student) becomes Anastasia Steele (virginal college graduate);

- Forks (small Pacific North West town) becomes Seattle (large Pacific North West city). Continue reading →