Hello Katherine!
Thank you so
much for visiting Written Butterfly with me today!
It’s such a pleasure to chat with you.
So tell me…
Q) How did you dream
up the dynamics of your characters?
Ah! In this book, it came about in a complicated way! To
begin with, I thought I’d write a prequel to my previous release, Woman as a
Foreign Language. In that book one of the main characters had a back story
where they had been rejected by a lover due to their complicated gender
identity. But then I decided to move this storyline on a different character,
Raphael. And then a dear friend of mine, talking about himself, said “I am an
angel with a bit of a devil inside”. And that sparked the idea that Raphael
could be a really complex character with a double nature in everything, not
just his gender identity… The other two characters in the story, Hugh and Di, were
originally just accessory to Raphael’s complexity, but the more I wrote about
them the more they gained a life and a will of their own…
Q) Is this book part
of a series? If so, can you tell us
about it?
Yes and no. It can be read as a complete standalone, and
it’s not really a sequel to Woman as a Foreign Language. But the two books are
still linked together by their main topic (unusual gender-identity) and the
characters from WaaFL both appear briefly in the new novel so that we get a
small glimpse of their story after the end of the first volume.
Q) Can you give a
fun or interesting fact about your book?
I was not
sure, for a long time how to bring about Raphael/Lucie’s and Di first meeting…
in the end, I thought, oh well, write what you know, right? And I used pretty
much my husband’s and mine first meeting. He was busking on a really cold day,
and I was so struck by this beautiful music that I brought him a mug of hot
chocolate from a nearby cafè… also in
that occasion there was an element of gender confusion, since to begin with he
was not sure if I was a boy or a girl!
Q) What gave you the inspiration for your book?
It’s been a
mixture of personal life experiences and many interesting, beautiful, often
heartbreaking stories of transgender people coming out to their beloved
(sometimes in unwise ways) and being sometimes lovingly accepted and sometimes rejected
in a very painful manner. I wanted to write a story about secrecy, disclosure,
rejection and gradual acceptance, as perceived from both parties. I wanted to
send a plea for empathy and tolerance to *both* transgender and cisgender
readers.
Oh and there
was this outrageously hot crossdresser I came across on Instagram… talk about
inspiration! J
Q) Do you plan all
your characters out before you start a story or do they develop as you write?
Oh, they definitely develop as I write. In this story in
particular Hugh changed from a secondary character (and a bit of a dickhead) to
a fantastically layered, deep, moving person, and my true voice in the story.
It was completely unexpected and I became tremendously attached to him because
he acquired so much a life of his own, and absolutely refused to be set aside
for Raphael’s new love interest. It became clear that this book was not going
to end without him being part of the picture and he broke my heart with his
desperate and unexpected plea not to be left out.
Q) How much real life do you put
into or influences your books?
A lot. In fact all of my books are to a degree autobiographical. In this
particular story it is more diffused than in my last, but there are still many
bits and pieces of me scattered here and there: how I met my husband, some of
my cats, an interest in art and the Pre-Raphaelite painters, a life outdoors
(and the fear that it might come to an end one day), a certain
gender-queerness, a deep, heartbreaking, longing reverence for a certain kind
of beauty that I can never, ever possess but just admire.
And believe me, I have been up to a lot of weird stuff in my life, so I
still have many “slightly autobiographical” stories to tell J
Q) What are your
upcoming projects?
There is the third book in this sort of loose series, a
spin-off from Spice & Vanilla that is set in Victorian London (did I
mention the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood? Wink wink). It is a story about an
artist who has had a “painter block” for years and the mystery woman who
unleashes his creativity again… It’s supposed to be a short story, but then, so
was Spice & Vanilla J
Blurb:
Time was, when Di could dance all night. Time was, when she
could ride any horse in the stable. Time was when she had a fiancée, a future
and a home she loved. Until a silver SUV came out of nowhere and broke her life
in half.
Well concealed under a sarcastic, spiny hide, Hugh has a
darkly romantic, passionate soul. Torn between love and terror, he’s held the
talented, elegant, magnetic Raphael carefully at arm’s length since the day
they met.
Male or female, men or women, kinky or sweet, top or bottom?
Angel or devil? Raphael’s life is a string of unanswered questions. And Lucie,
his long-hidden female self, may bring it all together or destroy everything he
has.
Be warned: cross-dressing, gender-queer, explicit M/M and M/F
sex, anal sex, spanking, flogging, bondage, forced orgasm, sex toys
Excerpt:
Hugh watched him stroking away with great contentment. He
was totally worn out after a crazy day at work, and it was not always easy to
find the energy to satisfy such an enthusiastic masochist. There were days when
he wished Raphael were a bit less fond of being spanked and whipped, but he
always did his best to oblige him. The thought of his Raphael going out there looking for release from
God-only-knows-whom, and getting hurt for real by some less scrupulous or
talented Dom was just unbearable. Still, tonight he would lie back and relax.
Mostly. I will have to help him
eventually, he thought with a slightly evil grin, but I can take a breather first.
Raphael stroked in perfect tempo. He was one of the most
technically exact musicians Hugh had ever played with, after all. Too exact, in
fact.
It would do him so
much good to let go a bit, to just go with the flow, be wild and imprecise and
purely passionate. Then he would not need so much of this.
Tick—tock—tick—tock—tick—tock, went the metronome, and
Raphael stroked and stroked. It was a good while before Hugh could tell, from a
small furrow between those blond eyebrows, that the unchanging, slow rhythm was
beginning to frustrate him. He smiled a bit wider and said nothing, devouring
his beautiful quarry with his eyes. He watched, entranced the fluid play of
flesh and skin as Raphael’s long pale cock, a nice ruddy purple by now, sank
and reemerged into and from his fist, the velvet-like foreskin lapping
beautifully over the shinier, silky glans, the testicles bouncing softly to the
rhythm as the scrotum was pulled up and released. It was hard to resist the
temptation to throw the whole scene to the devil and just take that cock in his
mouth and suck it empty.
This is without exception
the best use a metronome was ever put to.
Raphael’s body was developing a number of small, charming
tics and twitches. He briefly lifted his left knee from the mattress then
relaxed again. His right wrist was pulling on the strap from time to time, and
his breath was coming in slightly ragged bursts.
Still it took a long time. Too much control, thought Hugh, smiling. Tsk-tsk.
Tick—tock—tick—tock.
He slowly unfolded his hands and moved to sit between
Raphael’s legs. He spit on his middle finger and watched Raphael’s face, half
hopeful, half anxious, as he slowly approached his anus. He didn’t hurry. He
let Raphael wait for it. He would beg, in time, Hugh knew, but there was no
need for that, not yet. He finally pressed his fingertip to the twitching,
tight, live rose of flesh and felt it jolt and spasm. He massaged it in
circles, with relish, and didn’t even try to penetrate it. Raphael was shaking
all over, trying to press down on his finger, but there was just so far he
could stretch, tied as he was. His belly muscles went taut. They were
contracting in random, jerky convulsions. Hugh had never seen anything so
beautiful.
Then Raphael missed a beat. His hand had picked up pace,
ignoring all orders. Raphael whimpered, trying to compensate to get back in the
right tempo. The double change of pace made him squirm all over. He swallowed
twice and missed the beat again. This time Hugh slapped the inside of his
thigh, very hard. Raphael could take a long regular series of well-spaced blows
with relative ease, but a single hard slap coming down out of the blue like
that drew a ragged cry from him.
“You do know what tempo means, I asked?” Hugh said, in a
plain chatty voice. He had never had any taste whatsoever for histrionics. He
was not, he had never been, a theatrical Dom. He wasn’t in it for setting up a
show. He just got the job done.
“Yes. Yes!” said Raphael, a bit frantic. He managed to stick
to the rhythm for a minute longer, until Hugh gently stuck his finger just
within the ring of his anus. All of Raphael’s body twisted, and he lost all
track of the cold, mechanical rhythm of the metronome.
And that is exactly
what you need, my love . Too much playing by the rules, too much fucking
control. You need to find your own tempo, and just let go.
Five or six fast hard strokes followed. Hugh slapped him
twice, on his thigh, and, when he turned suddenly, on his butt. And then
Raphael came, on the third slap, as he flopped flat on his back again, crying
out in pleasure or pain, or both. It was hard to tell. Semen spurted out in
beautiful, long, arched white streamers, splattering over Raphael’s belly,
chest, and even his face.
It is difficult to aim while being spanked hard.
Hugh watched him coming, avidly.
He was so naked. So vulnerable, so unguarded. Hugh, who
felt, every day, that he might shatter like glass, on Raphael’s unearthly,
impossibly graceful, self-possessed beauty, lived for these moments, to watch
him released of all self-consciousness and all bonds. Strange, how it took a
bunch of leather straps to get him to do that.
“Ah, oh, shit. That hurt,” Raphael whispered after a minute.
“Not complaining, mind,” he added, with a small edgy laugh, wiping some drops
of sperm from his lips and eyebrow.
“Good,” said Hugh, quite composed, despite the erection
straining in his pants. Watching Raphael twitching and jolting while covered in
glistening semen was not a sight to leave him unmoved. He reached out for the
metronome, stopped it and lowered the weight a tad, then started it again.
This was a faster, business-like tempo.
“There you go, hot lips,” he said to Raphael, who was still
breathing hard from his orgasm.
“What? Wh—but…”
Hugh gave him a small devilish smile. Raphael was perfectly
capable of coming two or three times in one night, but, like most men, he
needed a while to recuperate in between. Well, tonight, he wasn’t getting it.
“You didn’t think it would be that easy, did you?”
You can also find an exclusive
excerpt on my website, here:
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