Sedonia Guillone

Just got the cover for this upcoming release today. Yay! I think it’s pretty hot, especially the guy in the background. I LUV his chest. I wanted the guy in the foreground to be showing more of his face but was told by the cover liaison, and I quote: “Between you and me, you really don’t want to see his face.” I laughed and approved the cover because really, it’s terrific. Les Byerley is the artist and I’m always thrilled with his work. I just hope no one ever says that about my face!

Anyway, I am excited about Barely Covered. As you can see, I’ve linked to the excerpt, that is if you don’t want to read on about my promotional woes.

Basically, it’s that no advertising I do seems to work. I’ve heard how difficult it is to get attention through advertising. Many people say word of mouth is the best and most effective method of advertising. Which is why I’m most appreciative of sites such as Library Thing, Goodreads, and those readers out there who write reviews on their blogs, helping authors get the word out their of a new release. I feel so grateful about that! I’ve cut back on advertising otherwise. I can just hope that more people will come to read this fascinating blog and want to take a look at the books too. I usually don’t talk about these kinds of things, but it’s something that’s been a frustrating and at times mystifying part of the the process of getting published. Now that my wallet is panting for me to leave it alone and stop emptying it out for advertising, I’ll see how it goes.

Throughout the recent years in which I’ve been writing M/M, my research has led me to discover that there really is an historical basis for the love of M/M romance, both with straight women and gay men. The manlove genre, yaoi, the m/m branch of graphic novels which originated in Japan has a deep and abiding origin in the history of the land and its people.

It’s pretty much common knowledge that there is a rich history of manlove within Greek culture, but many people don’t about the same tradition that existed among the samurai for centuries known as “nanshoku.” You’d never know because the classic samurai films don’t evermention it. But when I was working on my seminal M/M novels that led to the White Tigers series- His Beautiful Samurai and Beautiful Samurai, White Tiger, I needed to do research on samurai. Even though both novels are contemporary suspense, His Beautiful Samurai, with its paranormal element, needed to shift between a past era of feudal Japan and present-day Tokyo. In doing the necessary research to portray the historical portions of the novel, I found a wealth of information which showed me a whole new world of m/m lore!

Here’s an excerpt from a website, gay-art-history.org which explains nanshoku:

Not one of the many hundreds of samurai movies made in the past century even as much as hinted at it nanshoku, the “love of the samurai”*. From its pivotal position in the education, code of honor, and erotic life of the samurai class, the love of youths has sunk below the level of the untouchable to the level of the unmentionable, truly “the love that dare not speak its name”. But the indelible fact remains that one of the fundamental aspects of samurai life was the emotional and sexual bond cultivated between an older warrior and a younger apprentice, a love for which the Japanese have many names, as many perhaps as the Eskimo have for snow.

The samurai often called it bi-do, “the beautiful way”, and guarded the tradition jealously. Ijiri Chusuke, in 1482 argued:

“In our empire of Japan this way flourished from the time of the great master Kobo. In the abbeys of Kyoto and Kamakura, and in the world of the nobles and the warriors, lovers would swear perfect and eternal love relying on no more than their mutual good will. Whether their partners were noble or common, rich or poor, was absolutely of no importance… In all these case they were greatly moved by the spirit of this way. This way must be truly respected, and it must never be permitted to disappear.”(1)

Indeed, the only film I know of so far that exposes homosexuality in the samurai world is Taboo, a murder mystery set in fedual Japan with that beautiful young actor, Ryuhei Matsuda.

When I first saw it, I thought it was simply a unique plot twist for a murder mystery. However, as I said, my research showed the historical basis for this scenario.

For me personally, since I love writing about this period of time and this subject matter, the fact that there was this tradition of nanshoku has given me a rich supply of subject matter and I do hope to write more M/M stories in this vein!

That said, I’d like to share a snippet from my upcoming release, Flying Fish due out sometime in July 2009 at Loose Id. Yay!

Blurb:
In seventeenth century Japan, during the golden age of samurai and of the Kabuki theater, young actors known as “flying fish” travelled the countryside, performing for audiences by day and giving their bodies to their samurai patrons at night. Genji Sakura is one such flying fish, yet he dreams of the day he’ll find the man he can give his heart to and leave the loneliness of his itinerant life behind. Though he loves theater, he doesn’t love every part of his profession. So when a handsome ronin, or masterless samurai, comes upon him stealing some solitude for a bath in a hot spring, Genji doesn’t expect the afternoon of passionate eroticism he’s given.

For a moment, Genji believes he’s found the man he can surrender to, yet Daisuke Minamoto is a man with darkness haunting him, a past bitterness that grips his soul and makes him dangerous. Minamoto, too, is surprised by his own passion that takes him when he spies on the graceful young man bathing naked in a hot spring. His heart and soul are tormented and torn, for keeping this miraculous lover will require giving up the one thing that has kept him alive for years: his hatred for the lord who murdered his wife. Will he be able to make the sacrifice or will he destroy his own life and take Genji down with him?

Excerpt:

Genji nodded and remained respectfully quiet. The slant of the sun told him it was time to return to the village. His troupe had just arrived the previous day, and their stage would be near completion. Rehearsals would go on this evening, and then when the news of their arrival had spread, there would be the usual wandering in of samurai looking for an evening’s companion. Genji sighed. “I must return. I have a few moments to dry out on the bank, and then I will go back.”
The ronin started as if given a shock. He bowed to Genji. “I’ll accompany you,” he said. “It’s safer not to travel alone.”
Genji hovered on the verge of refusing the offer. After all, he had his tanto and wasn’t afraid to use it…he believed. However, he found Minamoto’s company oddly comforting, showing Genji how lonely he actually felt in spite of his busy life. His fellow tobiko could never really be true friends, even Aoki. Especially Aoki who coveted Genji’s position in the troupe. Aoki would not want to remain an understudy indefinitely, and so there was always an undercurrent of tension among the troupe members. With a sigh, Genji climbed from the pool, retrieved the pile of his things from the rock, and went to the grass where he sat dripping and worked his fingers through his wet hair. The long strands would comb out much more easily when dry if he worked any tangles out beforehand.
Peripherally, Genji saw Minamoto recline on the grass roughly an arm’s length away. He kept his back turned, so as not to steal glances at the samurai’s magnificent naked physique stretched out on the grass in the sun. Working his fingers down the fall of his hair, Genji turned slightly and caught a glance of Minamoto’s lower body. The man’s musuko was no longer soft between his muscular thighs, but stretched halfway erect, blooming with reddish color.
A jolt went through Genji’s body, sending in its wake a series of tingles that concentrated in his own member. He’d thought himself jaded after serving so many samurai with his body, but for some reason, life now infused his male parts, even his nipples, which began to tighten into small hard peaks. He looked back down, pretending to concentrate on his hair with all his will.
“Your hair is so beautiful.”
Minamoto’s deep voice behind him made a spike of heat through Genji’s middle.
Genji pulled in a small breath. With his fingers still engaged in untangling his hair, he turned. “Thank you,” he said softly.
The samurai had turned onto his side, propped on his elbow, watching Genji tend to his hair as if he were watching something of beauty unfold before him. “I didn’t know a man could move so gracefully…like a swan.”
Heat tingled mercilessly now in Genji’s cheeks. Such praise was a far cry from having his ass grabbed lustfully by a ribald admirer. The occasional riot that had broken out among audiences over Genji’s favors wasn’t nearly as flattering as this simple poetic admiration.
Unfortunately, it didn’t matter. There was no use in entertaining the attention. He had only his survival to think of and would only think of that…until he met the one man in the world he could surrender his heart to. As flattered as he felt, Genji accepted the praise with a mere gracious nod of his head and a smile then went back to the task of undoing the tangles in his long hair, still vividly aware of the samurai’s admiring gaze on his bare skin.
“Are you spoken for?”
Now, Genji’s heart lurched. He turned again. “Spoken…for?”
Minamoto nodded, his eyes shining toward Genji. The samurai’s musuko had stretched fully now and wept a glistening droplet from the tip.
Genji swallowed hard. Many emotions roiled within him at the question. Minamoto was naïve, a quality Genji found endearing. If Genji had wanted to, he could have fabricated a lover, or even perhaps a wife waiting in a far off province for his return. But he found he didn’t wish to lie to this samurai as he sometimes lied to others in order to keep them away. He cleared his throat again. “No. I’m not spoken for.” When the samurai didn’t answer, Genji looked down at the grass, pretending once again to concentrate deeply on combing his fingers through his hair. Sudden movement made his body tense. He froze, waiting.
“Genji.” Minamoto’s voice was closer now. The heat of the larger man’s body whispered over Genji’s skin. A large hand hovered above his shoulder, and the samurai’s breath, harsh and tight, pulsed close to Genji’s face. Genji dared to look up.
And met the samurai’s now-fevered gaze. “May I…touch you?”
Genji’s body began to tremble, not out of fear, but from something else deep inside him. No one had ever asked his permission before touching him. The newness, the sweetness of it, made shivers pass through him. “Yes,” he said before thought could intrude.
“Thank you.” The samurai’s voice was husky, tight. His fingers dropped lightly onto Genji’s bare shoulder.
Genji’s heartbeat sped wildly. His eyelids fluttered briefly, at the wonder, the need coiled in that small touch.
Minamoto explored Genji’s skin, as if testing it. “Softer than I’d imagined,” he said in that same heavy voice, hushed with wonder.
Genji heaved a breath with difficulty now that his heart pounded. His look dropped to the other man’s broad, heaving chest. Minamoto made him feel virginal, new, just by the look in his eyes.
Minamoto’s hand closed more firmly over Genji’s shoulder. Sheer need came through in the light grasp. “Genji, I…want you.”
The man’s other hand encased Genji’s other shoulder, and Genji could only tilt his face upward, imprisoned as he was in that firm yet impassioned grasp.
“Genji,” Minamoto repeated, his voice as tight as his breathing. His musky scent radiated in the warm summer air between their naked bodies. “I want you. Please.”

Yesterday I was doing something to work on my website and scrolled down each page. Suddenly it struck me (not that it’s never happened before) that I’m really lucky with the cover artists who’ve done a bunch of my covers. Les Byerley, a Philadelphia based photographer, does all my covers at Ellora’s Cave.

I feel he does an absolutely incredible job each time of capturing the feeling I want for each cover. He really is very talented! My favorite one of his is this one for A Man for Michael (even though the cover for Manwich is fabulous!).

The other covers I’m enamored of are my White Tiger covers. (But you probably would have already guessed that, lol), the MOST incredible one being the most recent, not only because the men on the cover are really good fits for the characters, but because Lyn Taylor, who did this one, worked her tush off getting the tattoos just right! Anne Cain did the other two.

Ann set the stage for the theme of the White Tiger covers. She too, did an awesome job with the tattoos for Ryu, who, by the way, is a young blond Russian man in real life!

Here, on the Sudden Bliss cover, Naoto in the background, is two men spliced together because although his face fit the character well enough, his body was skinny whereas Naoto is brawny. Who knew how much cutting and pasting goes into these covers to get them just right? Well, the results are worth it. Covers we love to look at and which give us a feeling for the story inside.

Lyn Taylor is the cover artist for my next White Tigers release, Men of Tokyo: Sudden Surrender. She did such a fabulous job on the cover and I marvelled at how she achieved the realistic effect of full body tatoos on a man who doesn’t have any tatoos. Well, a fellow author, Anika Hamilton (I’ll tell you more about her on a later post) read on Lyn Taylor’s blog the whole process of how she made my book cover. It’s really fascinating and almost did her in. lol. I’m glad she stuck with it because the effect is fabulous. I glommed her post about it so you could read the amazing process by which she made this cover.

This is the first cover I have done of this series and damn if it wasn’t a tricky one LOL! I honestly thought that body tattoo was going to be the end of me as a cover artist. Seriously!

Anyway, because I’m pretty chuffed with how it turned out, I thought I’d share with you how I managed to pull it together.

First things first. I needed to find the characters. In all honesty there’s not a lot of Asian/Oriental guys available out there. Well. I don’t think chubby business man is quite in the ‘Erotic Cover’ league, but someone might yet surprise me.

Anyway, so I managed to find some nice bods. The guy on the left worked perfectly for the Character he was to portray. The Guy in the middle though, looked like he’d sucked on a lemon so I decided to lop off his head and give him a new one. Oh, if only it were so easy in real life, eh?

The original head I chose was a bit too ‘cranky’ so we went for the guy on the right. Sweet!
Okay, so now with lots of cutting and pasting of heads we have our two characters ready to go. Now for the hard bit.

The character over on the right called for a full body Yakuza tattoo – white tigers and cherry blossoms. O.M.G.!

Now I’m pretty adept these days at adding a tattoo here and there and getting them to look relatively natural. BUT a whole body tattoo??So the search began. Firstly I trawled through the stock sites. There were a few things I could have thrown together but in all honesty the amount of stock required would have killed me. However, in my searches I managed to stumble across this image on the right.

It had the tiger AND the blossoms. Bingo!

Unfortunately the tiger was yellow, but thanks to the desaturate tool I was able to leach out the colour and produce a white tiger. Next, it was obvious that this image was not going to fit on the big guy’s body without looking a bit odd. Plus the larger I stretched the image, the poorer the quality became. So I was going to have to keep my images small.What I ended up doing was creating a new document and copying and pasting parts of the image around the tiger, gradually expanding outwards. I’d blend the edges of the image so there was no obvious seam by erasing with a large, soft brush.

This gave me a broader canvas to work with. Also ensuring that I would not notice the edges of the cut & pastes in amongst all that busy background.

So back to the big guy. Using the expanded tattoo design, I enlarged it enough to cover his chest. I had to dabble with the perspective so that the angles were correct. Then using a displacement map of his torso, I was able to distort the tattoo so it fit to his chest. I worked like this in sections all over his torso, upper & lower arms and shoulders. Cutting and pasting, blending and merging sections of the basic design until I was happy that his body was covered.As you can imagine there were quite a few layers. At least 20 just to cover his torso, arms and shoulders. Once I had him covered I copied those layers and then merged them into one. I changed the layer to Multiply and fiddled with the opacity until it looked more natural. Phew!

My next challenge, but obviously not so difficult was to try to find an image of the Kanji for Suzuki. I did manage to find one but it was of poor quality. So I had to recreate it in a new document. I hope to god it is correct LOL! This was just a ‘normal’ tattoo that needed to go on the background guy.

The hard bit out of the way all I needed to do now was bring the design over from the previous ones of the series. Pop the the guy’s together, blend them in, fiddle with contrasts, shadows, highlights, etc and then go and find myself a nice quite corner to huddle in. LOL!

Of course there was a lot more fiddling involved, but I don’t want to bore you all with the details. This is just to give people the gist of what goes on behind the scenes.

…but I managed to slog through dozens and dozens of photographs of adorable buff guys to find my White Tigers. This is because a new website for the White Tigers series is being created. Yay! I’m really excited about that. Coming in summer 2008 all the delicious guys of the White Tiger will be there, including more information on the White Tiger path and other fun things, as well as the books, of course.
So far, I have Yuzo and Kiku (Men of Tokyo: Sudden Surrender, but I’ve also found the others and they will be available for a sneak peek in the near future. They’re perfectly gorgeous, each and everyone. I will let you know when the site is ready!

Today I did edits for A Werewolf for Christmas. I’ve also picked up Fantasy Thief again after setting down well over a year now. I really got sidetracked by my White Tigers series which I adore! Even so, I managed to put in one link to the men at the White Tiger to the hero in Fantasy Thief even though the hero in this story, Takeshi, is straight. Takeshi’s grandfather back in Tokyo is the elderly man who frequents the White Tiger and who is waited on by Ryu all the time. Old Mr. Hamura is mentioned briefly in Men of Phuket: Tongue-Thai’d and in Men of Tokyo: Sudden Bliss, he appears briefly walking through the hotel with Ryu. Mr. Hamura, though we don’t really meet him, was a cool guy, really loving with his grandson and, we learn, ends up being a true friend to Ryu.

Perhaps looking at those pics of Gackt really did give me the inspiration I’ve been needing! Madelynne sent me another picture of Gackt, this one which had served as the inspiration for her character, Takeshi, in her Black Lace erotic romance Dark Designs which I love so much I’ve begun to read a third time! I can’t get enough of the character she created. Inspiration below…

In my White Tigers series, the men of the White Tiger are skilled in the erotic arts. Really, in my intention, it means they are trained to pay careful attention – to a man’s unique scent and flavour, the sounds he make, the part of him that are particularly sensitive and bring him pleasure. The background research of the White Tigers’ methods really come from The Sexual Teachings of the White Tigress by Hsi Lai, a Westerner who has spent years with the female sexual Taoists in China, learning their ways and understanding their history. I first heard about this book from Jade Lee, my favorite erotic romance author whose exotic historical Tigress series takes place in Shanghai and has been endlessly inspiring. She admires the Tigresses for their courage in finding sexual pleasure and enlightnement in a repressive culture. I agree and also found that this methodology adapted itself quite well to m/m. I don’t necessarily think that’s it’s necessary to make the body immortal, but it seems that learning healthy sexual attitudes and practices of the body and spirit certainly can enhance our lives, something that I try to convey through my stories. Hope it’s working! Hugs, Sedonia