Guest Post and Giveaway: Solace Ames on Asian Sex Symbols and BDSM

Image credit: Jain Basil Aliyas

Our friend and awesome author, Solace Ames (who also writes under the Violetta Vane pen name), is here today to tell us about her new book (co-written with Heloise Belleau aka Heidi Belleau) and to talk about sex symbols, sex stereotypes and race. As you can see, we’re kick-starting the year with a bang. Also, stick around because there’s a giveaway at the end of the post.

Let’s give it up for Solace!

Asian Sex Symbols and BDSM by Solace Ames

I like to think there’s a big difference between a sex symbol and a sex stereotype. Symbols are unique, and potentially infinite, like stars in the night sky. Stereotypes are the same, flat, and dehumanizing. As an Asian-American woman, I’m sadly familiar with sexual stereotypes. My race is a porn category, after all. But while it’s important to criticize stereotypes, I think it’s equally important to celebrate the positive. And today, there are an increasing number of Asian sex symbols.

Guest Post: Anatomy of a Co-written Scene by Heidi Belleau

I'm pleased to welcome author Heidi Belleau to the blog. Heidi, along with her partner in crime, Violetta Vane, writes M/M Romance stories that are often gritty an very real. Since they work as a team, I asked them to tell me a bit about how they work and their experience as co-writers. The result is this interesting and insightful post that gives us a glimpse into the creation of a co-written scene. Enjoy!

Anatomy of a Co-written Scene 

by Heidi Belleau 

Violetta and I are often asked about how we co-write. Do we trade-off scenes, do we roleplay, do we email back and forth, do we each take a chapter? Our reply is always the same: we write simultaneously in google docs, even down to working on the same sentence at the same time. It's a hard thing to visualize, I imagine, so we've come up with a little exercise to try and show you what we mean. The following is a short scene fromHawaiian Gothic. The green areas are Violetta's writing, the purple are mine. This is also an edited version, so there's input from our Loose Id editor, Venessa Giunta, here as well, but we haven't colour-coded what she influenced. Hopefully this gives you a sense of our process!