Sensing Your Way to Sexy Alien Ghost Sex That Smells Like Roses, or Using Five Senses When Writing Paranormal

by Sapphire Phelan

When a writer writes a short story, novella, or novel, a writer always uses the five senses in telling the tale. This pulls the reader into the story, brings them closer to the hero/heroine and yes, even the villain, plus many other characters involved with the storyline. Stories and novels are words on paper, not celluloid. And since authors are artists, you are painting a picture for them. Bringing it to life like a movie on the big screen.  

We all know what the five senses are, but here they are anyway: sight, smell, taste, touch and hearing. When the hero in a paranormal romance makes love with the heroine for the first time (or all the other times too), the reader wants to feel the moment, taste it, know what sounds lovemaking makes, see the what the lovers see, and even the scents of sex. All this will aroused the reader and make them fall in love with the characters as the writer has when she/he written it.  

And with romance being important in a paranormal romance, then the five senses are what are needed to blossom it in vibrant color. 

Example from a short story of mine no longer in print:

Sarah closed her eyes, enjoying the sensation of his lips on her skin. His fingers under her chin and drew her chin forward. Shocked, she popped her eyes open when his hard, sensuous lips captured hers, gentle at first, then growing more demanding and taking what she had to give. What she wanted to give. Her tongue slipped in and found a fresh, minty flavor.

 

She circled her arms around his neck and he enfolded her closer. Her nipples hardened as her breasts pressed against his chest. His hardness poked at her stomach and she gasped against his lips. Taking a deep breath, she breathed in a sexy aftershave that reminded her of limes.

“Love your aftershave.”

“I don’t use an aftershave, not while I am the super hero.”

Oh my, it’s him.. 

The reader learns that the hero’s (um, super hero) skin has a great odor that entices the woman, his mouth shows he must gargle, and both are becoming aroused. You learn a little bit more about the two characters in this love scene. This is done, whether a sweet scene of romance or hot and heavy sexual intercourse with the gloves off erotic sex scene. Whichever you write, you want the reader to feel, smell, taste, touch and see it all, exposé the intimate details. Without the five senses the sex scene or even a simple kiss becomes boring, even bad writing. 

And since this is paranormal, another type of sense would be the sixth sense, appropriate to the story you are telling, whether a psychic, shifter, vampire, sorcerer, witch, alien, fairy,  or any other being connected to the supernatural, fantasy, or science fiction worlds. Unscientific senses can be just as powerful, if not more so, than the conventional ones. And they also happen to be a great way of foreshadowing dramatic events to come.

Sapphire Phelan  

Blurb from The Witch and The Familiar:

Mortal woman Tina discovers she is part of a prophesy that says she and Charun, her demon Familiar, must make love so she can become the witch she is fated to be. If she doesn't do it and stop the demon army bringing Armageddon to the Mortal Realm on Halloween, she won't stand a chance in Hell.

 

A year later, just when Tina and Charun thought it was all over and that their life would be normal—another prophesy pops up. If Lucifer snatches Tina and mates with her before the last chime before midnight of the new year and gets her pregnant with his son, that the real Armageddon would begin, spelling the end of life as they knew it. This time they get help from an archangel, Jacokb, but with demons, Lucifer, and a cute demon bunny with fangs out of a Monty Python nightmare, out to stop them and Heaven not lending a hand, will Tina this time lose the battle and become the mother of the Antichrist and the start of a new Hell on Earth?

About Sapphire Phelan:

Sapphire Phelan has published erotic and sweet paranormal/fantasy/science fiction romance along with a couple of erotic horror stories. Her erotic urban fantasy, Being Familiar With a Witch is a Prism 2010 Awards winner and a Epic Awards 2010 finalist. The sequel to it is A Familiar Tangle With Hell, released June 2011 from Phaze Books, Both eBooks were combined into one print book, The Witch and the Familiar, and released April 24, 2012.

She admits she can always be found at her desk and on her computer, writing. And yes, the house, husband, and even the cats sometimes suffer for it!Dark heroes and heroines with bite...sink your teeth into a romance by Sapphire Phelan today. Contact her at:

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How to make readers fall in love with your paranormal characters

by Tina Gerow 

Everyone who reads paranormal loves all the non human characters.  After all, vamps, shifters and all the rest are characters who draw us in and keep us there.  But they aren’t just humans with fangs or fur.  If their ‘species’ isn’t an integral part of their character, your reader will not suspend disbelief long enough to fall in love with them. 

 

One of the best ways to do this is to use all five senses in “building” the rules of your characters etc.  

 

Let’s start with using the five senses.  I can see the puzzled expressions now.  But Tina, how the heck do I use the five senses to build paranormal characters??  Well, it’s not as hard as you think, and it’s a lot more fun than it sounds!

 

Do things taste different to them because of what they are? How does blood taste to a vamp or flesh to a werewolf?  Does your succubus not eat chocolate because since she was “turned” it now tastes like rotten fish?  Does your Elvin character have a weakness for Orange Crush but now that he’s passed puberty, the only thing that tastes like his favorite drink is anti-freeze, but that gives him heartburn?  This fun, quirky stuff will make for interesting scenes and interactions with other characters as well as make these characters more distinctive and fun for readers to remember! 

Describe how it feels for fur to sprout all over your body when you shift – maybe it tuckles?  Or makes them itch?.  Or how it feels for Gargoyles to change from stone to flesh and back again – a cold rush over the skin like in my Maiden series?  Or just a heavy heat or even a ripping, burning pain?  When a ghost appears or disappears does it make a sound?  Leave a certain smell in the air?  What do a dragon’s scales feel like?  How about an Incubus’ hair – maybe it looks really soft and smells like vanilla but feels slimy when you touch it?

 

Describe all of these vividly so the reader can imagine BEING THERE!  What senses you use and how you use them are up to you, but let the reader in on it so they can experience everything with your characters!  Readers love to be IN on stuff!!  I know I do when I’m reading!

 

That’s really the secret!  If your reader feels like THEY are getting to actually live the story along with your characters or even live your story AS your characters they will be so sucked into the your world you created that they will want to visit time and time again!

 

Now get out there and write some amazing FF&P books because I’m running low and want to read them all!!

 

More About Tina Gerow

Tina Gerow is a multi published, award winning author under two pen names who is basically a slacker ex band director with an outgoing personality and an overactive imagination that she’s put to work as a writer for the safety of herself and others :)

You can visit me at www.tinagerow.com (OR www.cassieryan.com for some extra steam)  and on Facebook as Tina Gerow   and on Twitter with user name @tinagerow.

I hope you will join my class titled
SETTING IN PARANORMAL

Hosted by

Fantasy-Futuristic & Paranormal Romance Writers This One Week class starts August 19, 2013 
For more information click HERE 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Rulz by Taryn Kincaid

You know the clichés: Rules are made to be broken. Or, The exception proves the rule.

Well, yeah. They’re clichés. They’re truisms because there’s truth in them.

When we start out as fiction writers, we tend to adhere slavishly to the rules (particularly if we are judging contests or budding members of a critique group) because we haven’t read enough, we haven’t written enough, someone once told us something, or we don’t know any better. 

Your first sentence can be a one-word expletive if that’s what it takes. (Personally, I love that kind of sentence!) What it can’t be is something that slithers down the page like boa constrictor, festooned with inappropriate commas (or no commas) and questions marks where periods should go, until the  life of your story is choked dead as a ferret (or whatever boa constrictors eat) in the jungle (or wherever they all live, including The Third Ring of Outer Gyyzapius).

Reading should not be a life or death struggle. Nor should writing, despite whatever the late, great Red Smith may have opined about sitting down at the typewriter and opening a vein.

I’m a great fan of rule-breaking and rule-breaking with impugnity, as you may have gathered from the number of broken rules and sentence fragments above. (That may have been a sentence ending in a preposition right there.)

It’s one of the reasons I love reading and writing paranormals so much: You get to break rules and makes stuff up.  Create worlds. (As long as you stay logical and abide by the rules you’ve created for that world.)

For years, we thought of vampires strictly in terms of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, which is where we got the vampire rulz of garlic, no images in the mirror, wooden stakes and silver bullets. Then along came sparkly Edward of the Twilight saga, who could go out in daylight but glittered like diamonds. And J.R. Ward’s beefcakey boys in the Black Dagger Brotherhood series,who were not undead, and not turned humans, but a whole different HOT species.

Just because one writer once made something up, doesn’t mean you must adhere to that writer’s world. Especially if we are dealing with otherworldly beings.

In my recent series of 1Night Stand stories for Decadent Publishing, I write about a trio of succubus sisters. The first, Lily Night, put her high school prom date into a coma the first time they were together, because she didn’t yet know how to cope with the electricity and the lightning she generated during sex. One reviewer, who loved the story, nevertheless wondered if lightning wasn’t supposed to be a Valkyrie thing.

Well, yes. If you’re in Kelsey Cole’s Immortals After Dark world.

But now you’re in mine.

Here’s the blurb from FROST, my February erotic paranormal release from Decadent Publishing. The heroine is Dagney Night, Lily’s younger sister:

Dagney Night, a sought-after succubus, is no stranger to blazing hot sex. But as Valentine’s Day approaches, she longs for something more. When oddly erotic paintings arrive for display at her art gallery, arousing everyone who views them, she wonders about the mysterious artist who created the works.

Maxwell Raines, a fire-sex demon, lives a life of solitude and seclusion behind the walls of his compound at Sleepy Hollow, channeling his lustful impulses into his art—until his muse deserts him and his temperature rises past the danger point. He needs sex. Now. 

When Madame Evangeline arranges a torrid Valentine’s 1Night Stand for them, will the flames of their encounter be too hot to handle? 

More about the Author:

Taryn Kincaid lives in scenic Serendipity-By-the-Sea. (Go ahead. Try to find it on a map. If you do, Taryn will send you a smooch. Also a Nutter Butter.) She is an Olympic caliber athlete in egg rolling contests and spends a great deal of her time petitioning the U.S.O.C. to introduce fantail shrimp competition. When she's not bungee jumping off the Palisades or parasailing up and down the Hudson River, she devotes her time to caring for her aging pet walrus, arranging her voodoo doll-pin collection and practicing rhythmic chants. At this moment, she is busy picking up loose wholewheat spaghetti sticks that spilled out of the cupboard and onto her kitchen floor. Wait. Is that something…shiny? 

Taryn hangs around a lot on Facebook and Twitter with her trillions of fans and pops in at Goodreads from time to time. You can catch her on her website, http://tarynkincaid.com, and her blog, http://dreamvoyagers.blogspot.com where she lives for comments! She implores you to buy her books so she can retire. 

Website | Twitter | Facebook | Goodreads | Amazon

PRO News at FF&P

Do you find yourself at a chapter meeting, conference or checking your email and recognizing names faces etc of people who were your peers but have made the jump to PAN? Do you feel envious, sad, depressed because that should be you?

Well, you are not alone. What can you do about it? Well, the short answer is get your butt on that seat, hands on that keyboard and write, write, write. Do you feel even more depressed now that obvious piece of advice is in front of you?

Well -you are still not alone. Reach out to your chapter, online group. Put yourself out there at a conference. Writing is a lonely business - we've all heard that. Writers can be introverted (well most are) Reach out - there are so many things that your chapter, other writers can, want and do provide.

And here’s one you can do right now--

Join the

Fantasy-Futuristic & Paranormal PRO group!

(Or become more active if you're already in!)

What is the PRO group, you may ask? It’s an online group for folks who have taken that first step to tell the world they are damn serious about their writing. They’ve shaken their fist in the air and said, “I am HERE!” They’ve completed a manuscript and have sent it forth to an agent or editor.

The PRO group is a place to join with like minded souls to support each other, share information, prod each other on. Hold each other accountable to continue being the best writers we can be.

Part of being successful is to put yourself out there - network, make friends with your colleagues. Set yourself a goal of sending one email a day to your online chapter group about something writing related, join in discussions, share information. Make suggestions like WIP tracking groups or chats.

The more you put in the more you get out. The PRO’s group, like all groups, is only as strong as it’s members.

Joining PRO, and more importantly, being ACTIVE in your FF&P PRO group will lead to:

Becoming more PRO-active

in your writing career.

You'll find your daily output of writing increasing as you do timed sprints and having the accountability of a goal group.

You'll find your writing improving doing critiques for your fellow FF&Pers in the Mudpuddle or PRO goal groups.

You'll find publishing contacts and opportunities by sharing information with your fellow PROsters and chapter mates.

You'll find you will be published that much quicker from joining in and then you won't have to stand up at a chapter meeting and feel the need to stand up and say - 'hi I'm ....... (insert name here) and I'm a PRO ho.'

Let us help!

Contact Sandra and Marie- FF& P Co_PRO's

through RWA at: pro@romance-ffp.com

 

pro@romance-ffp.com