Guest Blogger: Sacchi Green

Guest Blogger: Sacchi Green

It’s a thrill to be here amongst the vampire-lovers; paranormal/fantasy fiction, erotic or otherwise, is one of my first loves, and I started out writing in the fantasy genre (or at least my alter-ego Connie Wilkins did.) I haven’t been writing or editing as much of it lately as I’d like to, but I’m working on remedying that lapse. I do have a gargoyle/demon erotica piece, one of my rare straight stories, in Kristina Wright’s Dream Lover anthology, and a lesbian vampire tale (post-Civil War wild west setting) in Cecilia Tan’s Women of the Bite, but that’s about it, depending on how liberally you define paranormal. I have one in Kristina’s upcoming Steam Lust, too, but I suppose calling Steampunk paranormal is stretching things a bit.

How do you define paranormal? I’d really like some opinions. My alter-ego has an m/m (very rare for me!) fantasy piece in the Circlet Press anthology Best Fantastic Erotica, a WWI British setting with an iconic Green Man figure; does that count? And I have a lesbian one in their sequel, Best Erotic Fantasy and Science Fiction, where WWII intersects with an ancient legend in Brittany and an explosion ensues; does that count as paranormal? The latter is reprinted from an anthology edited by my alter-ego, Time Well Bent: Queer Alternate Histories (Lethe Press). Does alternate history count? Especially with fantasy elements? I’ll have a story out soon in Like a Treasure Found (Circlet Press) that may qualify as paranormal, a lesbian Asian pirate adventure that also plays with history, but the paranormal part is fairly minor.

I’ll try harder to get back to the realm of out-of-this-world love and sex, as soon as I finish up my current anthology for Cleis Press, Girl Fever: 69 Stories of Sudden Sex for Lesbians. (69 stories? What, in or out of the world, was I thinking?) Meanwhile, please do help me out in defining paranormal romance and erotica. Only the readers know for sure.

Sacchi Green is a Lambda award-winning writer and editor of erotica and other stimulating genres. Her stories have appeared in scores of publications, including seven volumes of Best Lesbian Erotica, four of Best Women’s Erotica, three of Best Lesbian Romance, Best Transgender Erotica, Best Fantasy Erotica, and Penthouse. In recent years she’s taken to wielding the editorial whip, editing or co-editing seven lesbian erotica anthologies: Rode Hard, Put Away Wet (Suspect Thoughts Press); Hard Road, Easy Riding (Lethe Press); Lipstick on Her Collar (Pretty Things Press), and Lesbian Cowboys, Girl Crazy, Lesbian Lust, and Lesbian Cops, all from Cleis Press. Three of them have been Lambda Literary Award Finalists, and Lesbian Cowboys, co-edited with Rakelle Valencia, won the Lambda Literary Award for lesbian erotica in 2010. A collection of her own work, A Ride to Remember, came out recently from Lethe Press.

She can be found online at sacchi-green.blogsot.com, FaceBook (Sacchi Green,) Live Journal, the Lesbian Fiction Forum and as a frequent columnist on writing lesbian fiction at Women and Words. Her next anthology will be Girl Fever: 69 stories of Sudden Sex for Lesbians from Cleis Press.

9 thoughts on “Guest Blogger: Sacchi Green”

  1. Hi Sacchi! Good to see you here at the Girls Who Bite blog. Love the covers and themes of the books you’ve edited! I can see Delilah is in good company at Cleis!

  2. For me, paranormal means the story is set in our world, with some kind of fantasy element added. This includes things that pretty much everyone believes are not-real, such as vampires and werewolves, and things that some people do believe are real, such as angels and ghosts and astral planes.

    Erotica is harder to define. It’s not just a story with sex scenes. It’s a story whose plot has to be dependent on the sex occurring when, how, and where it does, which makes it a requirement that the sex be shown explicitly. However, I think it’s also possible to write a story in which sex doesn’t explicitly occur, but in which the tone and language are so erotically evocative that the piece would rate as erotica.

    Erotica plus paranormal fantasy makes for a pretty powerful combination!

  3. Thanks, Fran. I’m wondering whether there’s some sort of style or tone parameter, too, so that, for instance, steampunk with suoernatural elements might qualify as paranormal, whereas steampunk with science fictional overtones wouldn’t. Demons in the machine, yes, but dirigibles not yet actually possible wouldn’t.

  5. Well, I’ve always adored vampire stories since Anne Rice and Linda Lael Miller did them…and I have to agree though that paranormal and erotica is somewhat more intense, and it holds a certain depth that even though it could be done, only a few writers could deliver the story successfully to the readers. As a reader, myself, I love it when I sense a bond with the author from the material I read. And admittedly, I don’t really get the whole Steampunk… *blink,smile* care to explain???

    1. For steampunk, think of the new Sherlock Holmes movies, where the camera dwells as lasciviously on the cog-wheeled machinery as on the heroes. It’s a blend of a Victorian ambiance and (sometimes) fantasy, with pre-internal-combustion technology like steam power and wind-up clockwork doing things it couldn’t really do. Corsets and top-hats and monocles, improbable round-the world dirigibles, seances and soul-capturing machines. D.L. King’s anthology Carnal Machines is a good example, and Kristina Wright’s Steamlust (out in October) will be another. I suspect that its current popularity has a lot to do with the costuming possibilities; quite a few steam-punk based mimi-conventions have sprung up around the country.

      1. I think steampunk is usually categorised as SF. But this has made me think (and before coffee, no less!). I guess the paranormals I’ve read have all been contemporary, so I never thought about historical stories being paranormal. D’oh! I suppose a Victorian ghost story would be paranormal, as long as it wasn’t too steampunky. My poor mind, it just got broadened a bit ;D

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