Aphrodisia Authors :: Blog

For me, it wouldn’t be Christmas without the cookies. And we’re talking thousands of cookies! I start in late September, baking batches in the evenings and on weekends, and I make at least 150 dozen cookies to give to friends, family and my church. I’m mailing and delivering this season’s goodies now, so—HO HO HO!–how ‘bout we do a recipe exchange?

I’ll share my sugar cookie and buttercream frosting recipes, with a colorful variation, AND I’ll give a signed copy of UNWRAP ME to the person who submits the recipe I can’t wait to try (“Naughty Noelle” has a mom who bakes hundreds of cookies in that story…in case you’re wondering how this is “writing related!” We write what we know, right?)

Some baking hints before the recipes:

***I’ve discovered parchment paper, and it’s the BEST way to produce wonderful nonstick cookies with a minimum of pan cleanup. You can use the same paper batch after batch.
***If your cookies turn out dry and hard, set a timer for a few minutes less than the recipe calls for and focus on those cookies! Overbaking is quickest way to ruin a beautiful cookie (unless you like them dry and hard! Me, I’m the soft-and-chewy type.)
***Sugar cookies, bar cookies, you name it—they all freeze very well in boxes/bins with wax paper between the layers. And they’re still great after months of being in the freezer.
***Use real butter for cut-outs. No substitutes! Cookies hold their shape better as they bake, and they just taste better.
***And those cookies you see in magazines with shapes cut out of the centers?? The recipe might SAY to cut that shape before you bake but it doesn’t work! For a nice clean
opening, cool the cookies on the pan for about 30 seconds and then cut/lift the shape out with a metal cutter. You can use the cut-out parts on other cookies, AS cookies…or they pop into your mouth, too! It’s called quality control, before you serve these to your friends!

Merry Christmas, everyone! Have a wonderful holiday season!

SUGAR CUT-OUTS
(about 3 doz.)

½ C. butter, softened
1 C. sugar
1 egg
1 T. lemon juice
1 tsp. vanilla extract
2 C. flour
½ tsp. each salt and baking soda

Cream the butter and sugar, add the egg, lemon juice and vanilla until well mixed. Add the dry ingredients until moist and blended. Roll dough in wax paper and chill at least 2 hours (I leave these in the fridge overnight, or for whenever I have the time to bake).

Preheat oven to 350. Roll out the dough about ¼” thick, cut out shapes, and bake on
sprayed or parchment papered pans for 7-9 minutes. Cookies firm up as they cool.

A PRETTY VARIATION: Add a box of sugar-free gelatin, along with coordinating paste food color to intensify the tint. Green/lime makes awesome trees, holly, etc., red/cherry looks festive as Santa boots, poinsettias, etc. and for yellow, use peach or orange gelatin. If you use regular sugared gelatin, decrease the recipe sugar by 1/8 cup.

BUTTERCREAM FROSTING

1 stick butter, softened
½ C. Crisco
½ C. milk
1 tsp. vanilla
1 tsp. lemon flavoring
A 2 lb. bag of powdered sugar

Put the butter, Crisco and liquids in the mixing bowl and add sugar a cup at time
until frosting peaks hold their shape as you mix. Best to tint this with paste color,
as liquid makes it too soft. Pipe or spread this on cookies. You can freeze leftover
frosting.

After twenty years of writing books that range from racy to extremely explicit, I can tell you it’s sometimes a challenge to be up for the sex scenes (sort of like real life, after 30+ years of marriage… Here are some tips for keeping those scenes fresh for your readers–and for you as a writer, too.

**Try different H/H combinations: While, yes, you can explore same-sex and multiple partner scenes, you can also vary the heroes and heroines you write. In “Naughty Noelle” from UNWRAP ME, I created an older woman/younger man, and Noelle and Andy’s romance plays against her mom and his uncle falling in lust, too (at their age! Imagine!)To keep myself fresh story after story, I vary the personality matches a lot, and I vary the secondary characters. In “The Captain’s Courtesan” from THE PLEASURE OF HIS BED, privateer Damon is a friend of Blackbeard–who then kidnaps Sofia, the love slave heroine, for his own nefarious uses. I also like to mix ethnicity, because describing a Latino or an Asian or a Native American offers varieties in accent, skin color, and cultural expectations about sex.

**Use the conflict to your sexual advantage: When Noelle’s duffel rips and her faded old panties fall out, Andy quips that while many women have dropped their panties for him, none were as hot as she is. And what better excuse for him to buy her a sparkly red thong as a Christmas gift? Noelle is ordinarily a very capable competent woman but this first Christmas without her dad, her husband, or a job makes her vulnerable. The last thing she needs is a too-cheerful, too-cute Santa who’s determined to lift her spirits as he lowers her jeans. In my WIP, identical twin heroines are so dissatisfied by their husbands’ sexual performance, they swap mates–which creates more conflict!

**Draw upon the H/H’s occupations: Andy’s rehabbing bungalows (which offers plenty of places for nooky, where only he has the key…) and Noelle ran an interior design biz with her ex (whom she caught in bed with a client and her college-age daughter. Talk about conflicted!) I’ve also written a female loan officer who turned the hero down for a mortgage on his mama’s ranch, not just because he ruined her small-town rep at Prom fifteen years ago, but because she has the clout over a high-dollar male model with a cash flow problem. Some occupations, like rodeo rider or striptease artist, are sexier by nature, but the real fun comes from creating a computer geek or a librarian who sets your pages and his/her partner on fire.

**Play up the setting: Andy lives in large beach home with his uncle, and the two bachelors have a doorknob code for “don’t come in now.” Noelle’s mom has a broken leg, which will confine her to the upstairs of their rental house (and Andy appears as the White Knight who carries Mom up all those steps when they arrive, which incites Mom’s matchmaking tendencies. I’ve written stories set in snowed-in cabins and isolated ranches, but the large desk in a banker’s office, a cocktail lounge on a cruise ship…places that seem too public–or too dangerous–created heat that was fun to write, too.

**Got a holiday or a theme? Christmas, Halloween, office parties…even cemeteries, offer unusual times and places to do it. When invited to write a novella, let the theme direct your naughty mind to wherever it’ll go before you write the proposal, so you can milk every opp for setting, language, season, and life circumstances to play a part in the hanky-panky.

**Write to a different kind of music: I have a CD of Yo Yo Ma playing Argentinean tangos that is just hot and passionate. I like the soundtrack from “Chocolat” (now there’s a fantasy, with Johnny Depp as a wandering gypsy-trash hero… ) for playful moods. And when I was writing “Naughty Noelle,” I was surprised at how much sexy dialog lines of Christmas carols provided. The lyrics to “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” inspired a lot of this story, because Noelle was pouting and crying and all of those things “ya better not” do when Andy Hathaway happened along in his Santa hat.

**Toss in some personal experience: I always smile furtively when asked if I’ve tried every sexual thing I write about! My husband, while a devoted fan and supporter, is not the model for my erotic heroes. I’m writing fantasy, after all! So the faces in my collages tend to be rugged, hot, provocative models from ads who inspire my imagination. And yes, when I close my eyes in a tub of hot bubbly bath water and let my mind wander, they always come through with fascinating flashes of do-it-to-me scenes. My cruise vacations gave me great stuff for ALL NIGHT LONG and HOT FOR IT. “Naughty Noelle” is set in the Outer Banks, NC, where I’ve spent many a wonderful week enjoying those huge, fully furnished dream homes.

**Dirty movies: Yes, I do watch the occasional porn flick to pick up on some costuming or positions or situations (certainly not for the plot or dialog! “Oh, God…oh, yeah baby…yeah, baby…(insert moan).” But it’s a lot more fun to create characters with believable personalities and conflicts!

And gee, seeings as we all do this for our books…why not share YOUR most outrageous/daring/unusual encounter now? We could all use a little fresh fantasy…and I’ll send a signed copy of UNWRAP ME to the two who share the best stories! How’s that for some early Christmas spirit?!

Thanks for coming out to play today! I’ve enjoyed it!
Melissa Mac

OK, so I got called last weekend when my stepmom died after a long, nasty bout with Alzheimer’s. Just back from the funeral trip to PA (14 hours in the car each direction. Woof.) and I confess I have NO inspiring ideas on what to blog about today.

I have pages to catch up on! I’m behinder than I like to be on my WIP.

I missed out on the big all-block garage sale I spearheaded, and can only hope the other 12 families did a gangbuster business while I was gone.

But the family visit had some very special moments I’m glad I didn’t miss…like taking the collegiate Queen Niece shopping (she didn’t get to visit us this summer–had to work) and outfitting her with a cute red pea coat, gloves/scarves, and furred snow boots so she’s ready for the snowy hikes across campus! And taking her to lunch. And seeing my four half-sibs for a few days, all of us together…and, because this was their mom in that casket, I had the rare and beautiful privilege of comforting them. Of being counted as ONE OF THEM in a family I didn’t even know about until I was 40 (long story).

And at visitation, when so many longtime family friends told me I looked just like MY mother…I had to smile. After all, these people haven’t seen my mom since she was in her 20’s because she moved away from PA when she married my dad, and she died 10 years ago. And in her 20’s, my mom was HOT in a sloe-eyed smokey sort of way…and we can’t ignore the fact that I’m (cough) somewhat older than that.

So I’m smiling. My whole week got disrupted but yeah, I got a new perspective on who I am and how much I’m loved–and yeah, all my sibs were SOOOOO happy to get their freebie copies of
THE PLEASURE OF HIS BED and UNWRAP ME!

So I guess it was a pretty good extended weekend after all!
And now I’ll get back to cranking those pages….

My bad-boy hero, privateer Damon Delacroix, encouraged me to rethink a lot of things as I was writing “The Captain’s Courtesan” for the September antho, THE PLEASURE OF HIS BED. Seems the perfect thing to discuss on the Aphrodisia blog, so while I’m in real-time church today, you can be pondering these things in your hearts!

1) Bad Boys don’t live by other peoples’ rules. They make up their own as they go along. Think how many apologies that saves them! How many expectations they don’t spend their lives aspiring to! Sounds terribly liberating, not?

2) Bad Boys don’t ask permission. It never occurs to a BB that he needs anyone else’s permission or approval. He knows what he wants and he goes after it. Sounds way simpler than the life path most of us follow.

3) Bad Boys have the same philosophy as dogs: if you can’t eat it or hump it, piss on it and walk away! None of this “fixing” stuff, or that “pleasing” that so many of us Good Girls were taught from our bassinets onward. It’s not that BB’s don’t care about other people. They simply know that some situations (and people) are beyond hope or are way too high-maintenance, and they choose not to get entangled. They do not choose, however, to get humped and eaten and then pissed on…which is how some of us Good Girls spent a lot of our younger years.

4) Bad Boys don’t live by the clock or the calendar. Instead, they live and work by gut instinct, usually at things they excel at. They can be extreme workaholics if a cause/career merits their time, or they can appear to be doing nothing at all–and look damn good doing it! This is because they aren’t stressed about time. It’s all theirs to spend as they please…kinda like their money. The older I get, the more I admire this philosophy!

5) Bad Boys don’t apologize, nor do they agonize over the broken hearts they leave in their wake. More than likely, the ladies in question lived by those expectations, rules, clocks and other stuff, above, which was what made them think they could domesticate a BB in the first place. It was their wishful thinking, not the BB’s, that told him it was time to go to the c-store for smokes and never come back. If more women acted that way, they wouldn’t become one of those broken hearts in a guy’s wake.

Given a choice–and we ALL have the choice–I want to come back for my next life as a Bad Boy. Better yet…I intend to adopt more of their attitude RIGHT NOW! What have I got to lose??

Ok, I saw that line–”penetrates and transforms”–on a bottle of hand lotion! But of course my naughty mind raced to that other sort of penetration we erotica authors tend to think of first.

And you know, it’s true! Some of us believe we can do without men, but think about it: does this mean, if we were never “penetrated” we’d be virgins all our lives? THINK BACK TO YOUR FIRST TIME–no snickering or eye-rolling, now! Once you’d been there and done that, you were indeed transformed, yes?

I can assure you that my first guy looked NOTHING like the fellow in this fine cover of my upcoming antho! I don’t even recall his last name–and it’s truly, truly best that Phil’s one-afternoon slam-bam stand was the only time I ever saw him, as he LAUGHED afterwards, when I told him it was my first time.

Was I transformed? Damn straight–the “good girl” who’d held out on a longtime college boyfriend was wishing I’d let him show me that rite of passage before he got tired of being patient and broke up with me. Instead, a biker boy caught me at a weak moment on his friend’s bet, and I was left with that classic, “I saved it for THIS?” reaction. I was 19, and I spent the rest of college catching up on the sex education I’d been denying myself. Quantity rather than quality at times. I am SO glad to be beyond that point!

Maybe that’s why I write really feisty, satisfying sex scenes now! And maybe that’s why I’d lots rather write them about women who’ve been around the block a time or three and know what they’re getting into! Penetration transforms our heroines, too, and I hope to show them a much nicer primrose path than I followed myself!

So what do YOU think? Did your own sexual history affect the way you write erotica now?
We’re all eager to find out, so spill it!

Melissa MacNeal

By the time you read this, I will have been caffeine-free for 10 days.

I’ve spent the past couple of days (well, OK–weeks!) working on a new proposal/synopsis, and once again my agent has been saying “the romance is overshadowed by the other stuff” and “not enough CONFLICT between the hero and heroine.”

(Hey, Bonnie–blog any time you want, babe! Me, I’m running a tad late today because I’ve got too damn much to do before I go to yet another conference this spring!)

This morning I spent a fun hour and a half on BlogTalk Radio giving live Tarot readings and talking about my upcoming books…here I am blogging online…last Tuesday I emailed a proposal for my next Aphrodisia book to my agent, stepped outside with my dog, and when I got back to my Mac, my agent had already read the synopsis and sent it on to my editor, John! In less than 10 minutes, a proposal went from my desk to my agent to my editor!!!

It’s been a case of Girl Gone Wild the past couple weeks (and wouldn’t THAT statement reflect totally different things, had I said it, oh, 30 years ago!) because I’ve stayed away from the Mac and writing ON PURPOSE. After meeting 3 deadlines in the previous 5 months, it was time to get away! The galleys for my May “Charlotte” book got done, and a number of other commitments got met…and then I said “adios” to all this WORK stuff.