Frosting On The Cake 2: Second Helpings Part 21

"I thought there was a low chance of getting caught, and a high chance of really, really enjoying ourselves." She helped Gail to her feet and found herself pulled into a fervent embrace.

"I know there's not enough time, but tonight I am going to..." The kiss that followed was a promise and Selena was more than ready to see what they could manage in the possible two minutes they had left, but Gail's saner head prevailed.

And that was a good thing because Christopher returned in nine minutes, not ten. Gail was back in her clothes and Selena had visited the rest room. Now that it was over, she dearly hoped they'd left no trace. Nevertheless, she was always going to agree to go shopping in the future.

The garments all wrapped and tied, Gail signed the bill and gave Christopher a parting hug.

"Have fun at the ceremony tonight. Do give that beast of a man a hug from me."

"I will," Gail said.

"When I was out I thought the winds were finally dying down. Enjoy the rest of your lazy day," he added. "It already looks like it's doing you both good."

They were in the car before they burst into mutual, guilty laughter.

With Frosting You Get Sprinkles.

h.e.l.lo readers. Thank you.

I could stop there. It's really the most important thing I have to say.

But those of you who have followed my history of blogging, listserv activity and Facebook postings know I'm unlikely to stop there, not when I've a blank page that needs filling.

The first Frosting on the Cake was published in 2001. At that time blogging, listserv and Facebook were not words in my lexicon. Friend was not a verb and complete sentences were a laudable goal. What's the world coming to? idk wtf cu bff Though the craft of writing hasn't changed much, the process of putting a book out into the world has. Nevertheless, every book represents a labor of love by a team of women. I'm very glad that remains the same.

One comment about this section of the book-I've been graced by my publishers with remarkable editors, especially the mentors.h.i.+p of Katherine V. Forrest. There are writers who believe that they don't need an editor, but this writer does as this unedited, from the heart but not Chicago Manual section will prove. All my bad habits are up for your scrutiny. Just me here. What's a dangling participle again?

Something else hasn't changed about my creative process and that's the way characters come alive for me. When I began working on this collection of stories, I made up a list of all the novels I'd written since the last volume. The last novel I'd published at that time was Unforgettable. In that first Frosting volume, my notes about each book stopped there. So...let's pick up where we left off.

Subst.i.tute for Love.

I was watching the Cheney-Lieberman vice presidential debate in 2000. In response to a question about marriage equality, Cheney managed to sound almost...liberal. Yet I knew where he stood on the issue. He was running for office so he was against it. (When he got out of office suddenly he wasn't. Thanks, d.i.c.k.) So I wondered, as I watched d.i.c.k talk, what it would feel like to be his daughter and listen to him sound like he thought you deserved equal civil rights and knowing he would sacrifice you in a heartbeat on the altar of his ambition. That was the birth of Reyna Putnam and her grim Darth Vader father. In "Reconciliation" she still lives with the double-edged gift-he is silent, but his reach is long.

As for Holly Markham, the inspiration was not nearly so topical. I wanted a character who had a gift, but one that hadn't been nurtured. I needed an exceptional woman who just didn't know it yet. I knew nothing about high-end mathematics, but I knew that one of Barbie's pull-on-the-string sayings was "Math is hard!" So why not a mathematician whose family devalued her skills because men don't go ballistic for girls who dig statistics. Last, and meant to be least, was the character of Clay, Holly's boyfriend, who busily squelched every impulse she had, disguising his overbearing selfishness as new age sensitivity. Let's just say that when I gritted my teeth and wrote the paper that professor wanted to read about his politics being superior and better thought out than anyone else's that I knew he'd show up in a book some day.

Maybe Next Time.

A word to the wise for other writers who work from inside a character's head. If you create a character who has only one way to communicate with the world, don't take that away until after you have what you need. Otherwise, you're going to be staring at a lot of blank pages for a long time. Sabrina Starling remains a difficult and uncooperative character to this day-you'll have noticed there is no short story inspired by this novel for you to read. I checked in with Sabrina, my one-time suicidal violinist, and this is all I got back: If the earth doesn't move, then there's no earthquake.

That's it. She refused to say another word. So I guess that all is well and nothing has happened in her life that she feels is worth mentioning. She does live in one of the most beautiful parts of the world, Hawaii's Kona coast. The sun goes up, the sun goes down and if there are Christmas lights it might be December. Otherwise, hang loose.

Thank goodness not all characters are like Bree. I put her through a wringer and she repaid me in full measure. But our intense synergy resulted in my first Lambda Literary Award, which was also the first award of any kind I'd ever won for my writing. It was also my first romance written for Bella Books-a promising start to what has become a beautiful relations.h.i.+p.

One Degree of Separation It won't be a newsflash to anyone if I say that my first crush on a real live woman was on a librarian. I was old enough to be checking out my own books. A man had come to the library to say that he was not going to pay for a book that he hadn't returned. It was a vulgar book, full of profanity, and he'd thrown it away. (The book? Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon.) The librarian explained that a library was a public trust. She said a lot more and truly, all I remember is thinking that she could be Barbara Gordon because she was wonderful and heroic and marvelous. She was wearing a sweater set, knit skirt, sensible shoes and gla.s.ses and she had pencils stuck through her tight bun. The cape must have been invisible, but I could still see it.

Flash forward a couple of decades and Marian the librarian from Iowa City was born. Though I gave her many human traits-hormones from h.e.l.l, migraines and a sarcastic wit that got her into trouble-she was still a superhero to me. I was so fond of Marian that I conjured up Liddy, just for her, added a case of instant attraction and a reservoir of untapped, mutual s.e.xual energy. For Marian, her ident.i.ty as a butch was one she chose and embraced, even if for some she just wasn't "mannish" enough. For Liddy, her dislike of being thought femme was rooted in the stereotype that she was supposed to be helpless. Swear to freakin' G.o.d, Liddy was anything but. They were the first explicitly butch/femme couple I'd written since Touchwood, and it won't be the last time I explore labels within the lesbian community. Labels can be fun and useful, they can honor-or they can hurt. They can illuminate our ident.i.ty-or limit it.

All the Wrong Places At the same time I was writing these last few books I was also writing erotica. During a vacation to a Club Med resort, I had a lot of fun imagining different hijinx behind the scenes and in one of those quick sketches of story ideas I found the character of my physical fitness instructor, Brandy Monsoon. Young, brash, s.e.xually open, frequent visitor to the Good Vibrations Web store and willing to experiment, she found s.e.x easy. Love, well, not so much. When easygoing encounters with her friend-with-benefits co-worker Tess turned emotionally terrifying she hadn't a clue what was happening to her. Even now, completely opposite from my relations.h.i.+p with Sabrina in Maybe Next Time, I ask Brandy what's up and she has a story to tell, usually about how things that seem simple, like saying "Let's be exclusive" to the woman you're madly in love with, really aren't simple at all. Both of the stories in this collection were originally published in erotica anthologies; they've both been altered and amplified because Brandy always has just a little bit more to say.

Sugar.

When I watch a cooking show I feel as if I could pluck any ingredient out of the ground, slap it around with some EVOO and I am an Iron Chef. Right.

My pa.s.sion for food and cooking shows up in many of my novels-I can safely say that my family wishes I had a fraction of the skill of my heroines. Enter Sugar Sorenson, who works with the one thing I have the sense not to try: fondant. Sweet Sugar was my ace of cakes before there was an Ace of Cakes. She was also my homage to the self-employed entrepreneur. Too busy to fall in love, her life refuses to stop for even a minute to let her catch her breath. She doesn't have time to meet women-so I arranged for women to meet her. A purely fun read, Sugar marked my first of five Golden Crown Literary Awards.

Just Like That.

Where would we be without Jane Austen? She wrote the first "literary" romance and was soundly trashed by (male) critics, writers and readers of her era for that hysterical nonsense about how women think and feel. Her heroines were bright with intelligence, modest in beauty and the embodiment-in one form or another-of the limitations of a gentlewoman's social standing and financial realities. In my favorite Austen work, Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth Bennet proudly spurns the arrogant Mr. Darcy and his ten thousand pounds a year even though she is on the brink of abject poverty. When he returns, fully appreciating the beautiful expression of her dark eyes, they have both changed and the course of true love is finally smoothed.

I had written about seventy-five percent of Just Like That before I realized I was basically retelling Pride and Prejudice, but in a very lesbian way. Syrah and Toni both allowed prejudice and pride to rule their emotions. I committed fully to the concept by paraphrasing one of the most famous first lines in all of literature: "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife."

18th & Castro.

A sharp-eyed reader will have already realized there is no short story based on 18th & Castro here. The explanation is simple: it's a collection of erotic short stories and it was impossible to decide if any of those 35-40 characters had another story to tell. I do count it as my eighteenth "novel" however, because the stories were tied together with two common threads, and when read together they created a mosaic of s.e.xual expression, primarily for couples.

I've been asked many times why I choose to write erotica. For some readers, it's the same thing as s.m.u.t-and definitely not their cup of tea. For me, when I looked around at the erotica being produced, I noticed a distinct lack of storytelling around long-term couples. 18th & Castro gave me a chance to explore how couples relate through s.e.x. I also wanted to decriminalize s.e.x for lesbians. Nice girls do, after all. They do all sorts of things, and they're still nice girls.

Finders Keepers.

If we all loved our bodies the way they were we wouldn't spend a minute trying to change them. But I don't know a woman who isn't trying to change something about herself. Having struggled all my life with image and weight, creating Marissa Chabot was easy. It was also easy to give her a moment of epiphany: change or die. As she struggled on her journey through the book to find fitness and better health, a lot of my own research into weight control and healthy fitness was put to good use. Anyone who has read my online doc.u.ment about the background research of the novel will recognize this sentiment: exercise sucks, mostly because it works and makes me feel better. A pox on it!

While it was relatively easy to create an overweight character who desperately wanted to change, it felt unbalanced to limit the story to one kind of body image issue. Everywhere we look there are beautiful, thin women. I don't think most are happy with their bodies either. And, regardless of her body image, if a woman hates a part of herself, how does she have the capacity to completely love someone else? These are not easy issues, and I tried my best not to create easy answers. It's a struggle, a journey, but in the case of Marissa and Linda, it became a journey that was easier together.

Finders Keepers is not the first novel where I dealt with child abuse and its lingering effect on a grown woman. There were readers, however, who "didn't buy it." One in particular felt strongly that the kind of abuse I detailed couldn't have been hidden from other family members, teachers or doctors. Sadly, it often is. My fictional story was unfortunately inspired by a very real one.

I think the most puzzling-and saddest-reaction was the protest that abuse didn't happen in homes like that, meaning the homes of wealthy people. Abuse knows no socioeconomic boundaries. It is everywhere, including partner abuse in our own community, which was a theme in One Degree of Separation. So as part of my writing about real life women I will continue to weave this other reality into stories, but I hope in ways that affirm and uplift as well as empower us to help ourselves or use our eyes to see women and children in bad situations.

The Kiss that Counted.

What if a thief fell in love with an elf? Thieves dwell in the dark, elves in the light, so where would they meet? That's the basic genesis of The Kiss that Counted. CJ believes that her very DNA is saturated with malice, greed and cruelty. Her childhood and adolescence taught her how to be a thief and a liar. Though she is trying to atone, she believes that she could fall back into that life at any moment, and she has no conviction that she can offer another woman anything of value, not even a real name.

As a comfort to a very lonely and odd-girl-out child, Karita's grandmother raised her believing that she had magic in her blood. Karita knows it's not true, but she wishes it were. Her world is golden, people are good and when bad things happen, all good need do is stand its ground. She finds CJ's darkness inexplicable, and CJ finds Karita's innocence baffling. The vast gulf between their way of looking at the world and understanding of what they can contribute to it was a grand story to write, and I loved the many layers of character development I was able to explore.

The Kiss that Counted won the second of my three Lambda Literary Awards.

Warming Trend.

What began as a writing exercise blossomed into one of my favorite romps across the page. The exercise was explaining why an expert in glaciers would live in Key West, Florida (nearest glacier at least 2,000 miles away). A love affair gone wrong seemed a good answer to me, but my heroine wasn't the type to fall in love with the wrong woman. Why would she run from the right woman then? Ah, enter the Femme Fatale with a Messiah Complex. Poor, poor Ani and Eve.

One of the joys of writing character-driven fiction is when an incidental character blossoms into much more. Ani's loyal new best friend forever, Lisa, started as a quick fling, but Lisa promptly informed me that she didn't go where she wasn't wanted, it was plain Ani was still hung up on Eve and besides, something was rotten in the state of Alaska. Who got Ani on a plane for home? Did Ani or Eve figure out exactly what had happened on that fateful glacier expedition and why Ani took the blame? No, of course not. Lisa had to do it all by herself, well, mostly. It was great fun to revisit Lisa when writing "Good Morning," once again through Ani's long-suffering point-of-view.

The novel also features a great dog. Tonk has no prototype in real life, though. I have teenagers to feed so a Newfoundland is right out.

Stepping Stone Some novels are about characters who are focused on a singular goal in life, and along the way their paths cross but the two paths refuse to become one. Wild Things comes to mind-Faith and Sydney are inseparable, but neither deviates from the path she's on. Instead, they shape the world so their paths overlap. Like Brandy Monsoon, Faith is another character who always has a story to tell, and the stress on their separate careers is the subject of "Losing Faith."

Stepping Stone is another example, set in the most relations.h.i.+p-perilous landscape of all: Hollywood. The joy of writing this story came from my love of film and the strong women in it, and the most satisfying aspect was skewering the nasty blogosphere that reaches lows of "journalism" (and atrocious grammar) that would have made Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper blanche. With a side industry invested in making a buck by exposing every private moment in a business where your business is already everybody else's business, how can two women hope to have a moment to themselves, and how do they develop the trust it takes to work on a future? The impediments are many, the chance of success small and yet, as so many of us believe, love will find a way.

The story is full of little nods to favorite films and strong women. As always, Barbara Stanwyck comes to mind, as she does whenever I think of Making Up for Lost Time and Val in her famous tool belt. You'll have to consult the first Frosting volume for that story.

Above Temptation.

Not being one of those writers with a lot of work in a drawer waiting to be mined, I finally reached into the small stack and pulled out Above Temptation. Originally written years ago in the hopes of publication for a straight audience, the story still worked. All the research behind it would have to be redone, and ma.s.sive changes in the world of banking, computers and even travel had taken place, forcing both big and small changes throughout the ma.n.u.script. By the time I was done there was little of the original left-except for Kip Barrett. Strong, principled and driven, Kip was still waiting for a challenge, so I gave her a crime to investigate from an unexpected client.

Contrary to any beliefs otherwise, lesbian romances aren't straight romances with one of the characters' gender changed. In the early days of my writing career, there were gay and straight critics who described our romances in those terms. (It always made me suspicious of their powers of observation.) Regardless, Tamara Sterling bears little resemblance to the hero I first paired Kip with. Exhausted and heartsick, her reaction to discovering an embezzler among her own staff moves her completely out of her comfort zone. Neither woman is looking for a relations.h.i.+p but both of them know that they are in deep trouble from almost the moment they meet.

Like Warming Trend, Car Pool and The Kiss that Counted, I liked the added element of a puzzle that the two women work together to solve. I have no desire to write a mystery but it's certainly fun to tie a Gordian knot and figure out how the characters will find and use their sword to set themselves free.

Frosting on the Cake 2: Second Helpings.

This project began almost the moment the first Frosting on the Cake was sent to typeset. I heard Louisa's voice from Touchwood and wrote "The Curve of Her" and otherwise filled in creative down time with sketches for other short stories. I partnered with other writers for anthologies and sometimes drew on previous characters, hence the a.s.sortment of stories based on a cruise and in Las Vegas. Sometimes events in real life would make me wonder how a character would react. I can't read about censors.h.i.+p of LGBT t.i.tles in public libraries without thinking of Marian my librarian and her horror at the very idea. A chance song on the radio reminds me of books and inspires new ones. It's not a bad life, being a walking sponge. Sooner or later it all gets squeezed out into a story of some kind, and thank goodness, else I would explode.

Where I remain most fortunate is that readers-that's you-are willing to check out the latest effort. You are there to offer praise and insight or to share a laugh. I'm happy to have met so many of you in person and hope to keep that up. Most of all, your support of lesbian writers keeps this wonderful wheel of creativity, affirmation and entertainment turning.

I only have one regret as a writer: I didn't keep a list of all the character names I'd used in a project. I recommend this to all first-time novelists. Make a list or you'll end up renaming characters halfway through a book-trust me, you won't find them all.

As I said at the beginning of this section, while much has changed in the last decade, some things have not. I ended the first volume with these sentiments, and they are still true: I am a lucky woman, and I have all of you to thank.

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ABOVE TEMPTATION by Karin Kallmaker. It's supposed to be like any other case, except this time they're chasing one of their own. As fraud investigators Tamara Sterling and Kip Barrett try to catch a thief, they realize they can have anything they want-except each other.

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