Amira Press Release

Woohoo! Forty-six Days in the Caribbean: A Girl's Guide to Sun, Sand, and Sex is out now from Amira Press! This is my latest release and I'm very excited!!! Basically, it's a sexy take on your regular travel guide so if you've been thinking of a trip to the Caribbean - this is the book for you!

Here's the blurb -

Secret blogger, SexGirl is young, hot and sexy! When she’s assigned to do an in-depth magazine article about a special promotion organized by a Caribbean airline in conjunction with several hotels around the region, SexGirl sees an opportunity to combine two of the top blog genres on the Internet – sex and travel. For forty-six days, she blogs about sex with the men she meets on islands as diverse as Jamaica and St. us while dishing information about the hotels she stays in, the historical and other sites she sees, Caribbean recipes, island aphrodisiacs, and much more.

And here's an excerpt -

"What’s playing on my iPod? “It’s a Punky Reggae Party” by Bob Marley.

My jackrabbit. Check. Sun block lotion. Check. A hundred Elexa ribbed condoms. Check. Three swimsuits. Check. Two dozen warming condoms. Check. That’s right, y’all, I’ve got my first assignment, and it’s a doozy. Forty-six days in the sunny Caribbean! All thanks to the Caribbean Tourism Association and one of the regional airlines, Caribbean Airways. They’ve teamed up with hotels from Jamaica to Barbados to offer a really great island-hopping package. And they want travel mags, like my own dear place of employment, to come on down and check it out! The other writers here are already up to their necks in assignments, so I’m the lucky one who gets to go. Yay! It’ll almost be like going home since my mother is from the beautiful island of Antigua. I spent a couple summers there when I was knee-high to a grasshopper, as Gran used to say, but I haven’t been back in ages. Thank goodness I did like the boss said and got my new passport ready. The old one would have expired next week. Eeek!

More than ten islands in forty-six days! It’s gonna be hectic. B., my coworker, says the local tourist boards will frog-march me from one attraction to the other, but I definitely aim to keep up with this blog.

I mean we’ve got our travel blogs, and we’ve got our sex blogs, big shout-out to my pal, Bacchus over there at Eros, but SexGirl is gonna be the first to combine two of the hottest blog genres on the Net. How cool is that? I’m getting wet just thinking about it. You guys know how much I like a little bit of public sex, a little bit of sex with strangers, okay, a lot of that! A little bit of the train thing, a little bit of this, and a little bit of that, and now, ta-da!— I’ll get to do all those things on a different island every week and blog about it. Don’t hate me, please. I can’t help being lucky! Anyway, I promise I’ll share everything with you."

To condomize or not to condomize!

A few days after World AIDS Day and at a time when health experts are reporting that there are a whole lot more new HIV infections than previously thought, it's probably a good time to bring up the topic of condoms.

A lot of writers worry about introducing rubbers into their stories but there’s no hard and fast rule.

Some publishing houses take the view that their books are fantasies and who would fantasize about condoms? So they don’t require it. Who wants to think about sexually transmitted infections when they're getting their groove on?

Other houses, concerned about any messages they may be sending about unsafe sex, require writers to, at least, mention that their characters are using condoms. How the writer chooses to introduce the topic is up to them. It could be a one liner where a character mentions using it or discarding it after sex or it could be something lengthier where putting it on becomes part of the sex play.

So whether you choose to condomize or not really depends on the writer and their particular publishing house. I don’t mention condoms in The Gladiator’s Woman, not because they didn’t have condoms in ancient Rome, they did, but because it being a historical I didn’t feel the pressure to do so. People just weren't as worried about those diseases back then and there was a lot more ignorance about signs and symptoms. In a contemporary, I probably would bring up condoms. In another life, I was an HIV educator and I'd feel I owed it to my readers.

What you do depends on you and on whether the publishing house you're targeting would allow it. If you're unsure, look up the guidelines, read other books they've published, or, just ask the editor.