‘You taste of the desert sands,’ she whispered. ‘And incense. Sandalwood and smoke. Parchment. Dust.’
    Myrna’s eyes opened wide in shock.
    The Tiger Lady pulled back, her lips smeared. ‘I smell betrayal on you,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘Broken vows. And…’ Without finishing her sentence she reached down and clasped Myrna’s mons, and the slight woman gave a gasp. Her legs almost gave way and she sagged forward against the other woman’s arm. This wasn’t what she’d been trained for. This wasn’t pain. It was a wet heat low down in her belly and a tingling ache in her breasts. It was a scent of musk and a leaking moisture that even human senses would not have been able to miss. And weakness, not just in her limbs but a helplessness spreading like spilt wine through her every part, staining her red.
    ‘Oh Mouse,’ said the great lady.
    ‘What do you have there, Shinsawbu?’ said a lazy masculine voice, as deep and dark as the forest itself.
    Myrna managed to focus a wild glance upon the newcomer, and the remnant of strength left in her seemed to shrivel like leaves in hot oil. It was the man from the boat – if ‘man’ was an adequate term. Two average men together wouldn’t have matched him for bulk. He was taller even than an Irolian, broad with it, and yet he carried the weight lightly. There was a sinuosity to his muscle and a grace to his carriage that made the hairs on her neck stand up. His arms were folded across a torso clothed in a turmeric-yellow coat that hung open to the waist, where it was bound by a broad orange sash, and from there over tight trousers down to his knees. The bare chest framed by the satin gleamed with the sheen of polished bronze. His hair hung in black, oiled ringlets, matched by a dark moustache. His face was handsome, but brutally hard.
    He had the same amber eyes as his sister. And the same scent of cloves and hot leather.
    ‘I have a mouse, brother,’ Shinsawbu said, smiling. ‘A pretty little mouse.’ Rao Dhammazhedi lifted one corner of his mouth in a sneer, as if anything further were too much effort. ‘But she hasn’t the wit to fear the cat, it seems. Don’t you fear even him?’ the Tiger Lady wondered, stroking Myrna’s face and squeezing her sex, long and firm. 
    Myrna bit her lip. She knew from one glance at him that any woman would be a fool not to fear this man. She had seen that cold, dead look before; it was the gaze of a man in whom pity and imagination and compromise had long been eaten away by the gnawing acid of power. It was the look of a man who could not remember a time when there was any will but his own in play. She shook her head, wishing the roaring in her skull would still.
    ‘Go on, Mouse,’ said Shinsawbu; ‘say something clever.’ She rippled her fingers in the swollen swamp of her sex and Myrna felt her spine turn to mush. She bit back a moan.
    ‘I’m unimpressed,’ the great lord remarked.
    It took all her willpower to frame her words.    Her flesh had turned traitor, responding to a usurping power. Power was precisely what the two Tiger Lords embodied; not just the dry authority of rank but the visceral pump of physical energy, vital and untrammelled. They breathed it and they walked it; it oozed from their pores. They stank of it. They were not human. And it made her wet.
     ‘I am a goddess,’ she said thickly. ‘What do I have to fear from a little forest demon like you?’

The Plot:

A man awakes, injured and alone, in a tropical forest. He has no memory of how he got there, of who he is, or of any part of his past. 

A woman, Myrna, comes-to amidst bandits who have made her prisoner. She knows that she and her lover were attacked while travelling and that he, Veraine, was struck down and left for dead.  She is alone in a foreign land, for they've both fled from their own land over the great desert to the east. She once was a priestess in a great temple where she was worshipped as the living incarnation of the Goddess of the Cruel Earth: now she is a slave. Veraine once was an officer in the Imperial army: now, for all she knows, he is dead. 

Myrna is sold into the household of the Harimau, the rulers of this little forest kingdom, and becomes the personal slave of its most high-ranking queen, Shinsawbu.  The king (or Rao) is Shinsawbu's brother Dhammazhedi. The Harimau are tiger-demons, rumoured to shapeshift into animal form at will, and they have all the savage instincts of tigers, including the desire to hunt, kill and eat human prey. Dhammazhedi is particularly brutal and sadistic. Apart from the royal family the other inhabitants of the kingdom are human, but none dare rise up against their tyrannical overlords.

Veraine is rescued by a shaman and her daughter and nursed back to health. He regains a few tattered scraps of memory - that he was travelling with a woman with red hair, for example - and he sets out to find her. To his horror he finds that he is subject to supernatural visions; he can see spirits. He stumbles at first upon the ruined summer palace of the Rani Mirabai, empty now but for its insane queen and one servant after being sacked by an invading army. Mirabai wants Veraine to stay with her, and she tries to seduce him into an intensely sado-masochistic  relationship; Veraine is just able to resist. He flees, uncertain as to whether the Rani was alive at all.  He falls in with a couple of storytellers who take him under their wing, and the three travel on together toward the city of the Harimau where there is a great slave market and he hopes to find the companion he cannot remember.

Notes:

"Burning Bright is a swords ‘n’ sandals fantasy adventure crammed with malevolent were-tigers, rotting jungle palaces, snake-demons, insane ghosts, brutal fight scenes and lots of sweaty, sticky, scary sex. It’s a bit dark. It’s a bit Bollywood. It’s a bit Gladiator. If there was a Scarlet Award for ‘most deaths in an erotic novel’ I’d win hands-down." (Lustbites Blog promo)

This book was written as a sequel to Divine Torment and takes up the narrative almost a year after the other book ends. By this time the Malia Shai has been given a new name by her lover ("Myrna" means "Stolen treasure" - "loot" - in his language) and they have crossed the desert and entered the Twenty Kingdoms beyond, though they haven't yet found anywhere to settle. 

The starting point for writing, though, was a mental picture. It always is with me. This picture was of a lush and menacing jungle in which stands the ruins of an ancient palace. There's a woman living alone among the ruins.  Why is she there? She believes she is the Queen of this palace.Why does she refuse to leave despite the decay? Well, either she is mad, and made so by the destruction of her kingdom and the terrible suffering she has endured ... or she is dead, killed during the razing of her home, and she cannot leave because her spirit is tied to this place forever.  And there is no way to tell which of these it is.

And that's when I started writing.

The Cover:

The new style cover is just GREAT. It looks dark and paranormal in theme, and the model actually looks reasonably close to my description of Veraine. Hooray! After the ghastly 'Mabelline' cover of Divine Torment this was such a relief I got quite giddy and had to show it to everyone, willing or not.

I particularly like the font... 

The changes are due, apparently, to there being a marketing drive toward a US readership and into the Romance market. Apparently American romance readers really like the characters on the covers of their books to bear a close relationship to the contents. On this occasion I can only applaud.

Setting and Society:

As Divine Torment  was set in a pseudo-India, this book's setting is a pseudo-Burma. The landscape is hilly and covered in dense forest. The people are of a visibly different ethnicity to either Veraine (Irolian) or Myrna (Yamani) although for historical reasons they do (mostly) speak the Yamani language. On the whole they are a peaceful, parochial, village-dwelling people. The great port of Siya Ran Thu is an exception in being an urban centre, and  even that isn't big by the standards of Empire they've just left. 

The inhabitants of the Twenty Kingdoms are polytheists and share some of the same gods with the Yamani, although they might not use exactly the same names or descriptions. For example, back in the Empire, Malia is the supreme goddess of all cruel aspects of nature - famine, drought, disease etc. Here in the Twenty Kingdoms the word 'malia' very specifically means 'disease' or 'a disease spirit' and the goddess is known as Malia Mata: "Mother of Plague." However her pictorial depiction is identical to ones that Veraine and Myrna would be familiar with. 

There is no professional priest class in the rural areas, although different individuals in a village do have different spiritual roles. For example there are "spirit-talkers" or shamans (both male and female) who deal with everyday animist issues. Travelling storytellers ('bhopa' and 'bhopi' are words I took from Hindi) have a role in repeating the old religious stories, relaying news and bringing the divine gift of human fertility where it is lacking.  There are shrines in every village and local spirits (e.g. the Naga) are propitiated and invoked as well as the more usual gods.

The Harimau:

"Harimau" is a Burmese word meaning "tiger". I borrowed Burmese king-names for the Harimau royal family, who look like inhumanly bigger/stronger/sexier versions of the local people. 

The Harimau aren't, by either their own reckoning or that of their subject people's, human. They stand apart. They cannot interbreed with other people though they certainly can have sex with them. Rumour has it that they are capable of shapeshifting into tiger form, although readers of the book will note that direct evidence for this is ambiguous at best. Harimau women come into sexual season once a year, and will conceive twins. These babies may be born as tigers (in which case they will have a normal tiger lifespan and mental capacity) or much more rarely in human form. In the latter case they live for hundreds of years. There isn't any evidence that they worship the gods (there is conspicuously no shrine or temple in the Palace) and this is what makes them demons by local definition.

The Harimau were once a numerous and powerful nation but were defeated and nearly exterminated by the ancient Yamani hero Gidindhi, who went into battle against them with war-elephants. Since then they've remained hidden in the forest and only in the last century have they made a re-appearance, taking over the city of Siya Ran Thu. Their king, Dhammazhedi, is trying to rebuild his family's numerical strength and has ambitions for further territorial conquests. He's a bit hampered by the fact that Harimau, like tigers, are poor at group co-operation.

I'm not interested in defining the Harimau as 'evil', but the fact is that they have a predator-prey relationship with other peoples. They're extremely aggressive, addicted to hunting and bloodshed and believe in their own racial superiority. They might be no more evil than tigers, but they're also no more capable of living peaceably in close proximity to the rest of us.

Myna adopts a 'kill them all, even the children' policy to the Harimau that rather shocks Veraine. Remember, I never said she was nice either.

The Supernatural

Shu the shaman/witch describes a three-world model of reality: an upper, lower and middle world. We live in the latter and it is by far the most dangerous of the spiritual realms. This model is in fact  reasonably common in shamanic cultures worldwide. 

In Divine Torment the supernatural was low-key and ambiguous.  In Burning Bright the supernatural is completely in-your-face ... but still ambiguous. 

Veraine sees shamanic power-animals, a couple of gods (briefly), a Naga (or snake-spirit) and both Shinsawbu and Dhammazhedi in tiger form (note that Myrna never sees this). He also has a stay in a palace that appears to him decayed but intact (when in fact it is in ruins) , with a woman who appears deranged but may well, it turns out, have been dead all along.

But Veraine has taken a massive blow to the head and we already know this has messed with his mind. It is perfectly possible that all these 'supernatural' manifestations are figments of his damaged imagination; he's never had experiences of this kind before and he won't again after he's healed.

Am I going to stay sitting on the fence? Oh yes! I've got used to this fence. I sit on it for a lot of my supernatural fiction, erotic or otherwise. And the fence defines a very narrow strip of land that could be labelled "not either/or, but both".  I'm content to explore a version of the world in which reality is not objective but composed of multilayered subjective viewpoints. It works well for fictional purposes. 

                             (Louise Macneice, 1907-1963)

Cut It Out!

For various reasons, the version of Burning Bright that has seen publication is rather different to the one I originally wrote. This section is for those of you interested in the tribulations of writing. Before reading my tales of woe please realise that I am genuinely delighted with the novel as printed - every profession has its grumbles and I'll stand proudly by Burning Bright to my dying day. I loved writing it. I love the characters. And I love re-reading it.

Finally Veraine and the Malia Shai get their happy ending!

Cut: Reducing the Size

At first draft Burning Bright came in at 103,000 words. And I thought I was keeping it terse! Although far from excessive by mainstream fantasy standards, this was WAY over the 75,000 words contractually permitted by Black Lace.  Their limit is bound up with the technicalities and economics of the printing/shipping process, about which I know exactly zip. And though there was some leeway allowed (and the editor negotiated me as much space as possible) in the end I had to cut the length: by 20,000 words. That's a fifth of the novel. If you've not written under someone else's parameters you have no idea how painful that was. Here's how I did it:

• I completely excised 3 erotic scenes that didn't advance either plot or character
• I halved the length of the Shinsawbu Bath Scene, which was originally quite an elaborate lesbian group thing.
• I removed two entire scenes where Veraine and friends search the slave market and blag their way into the Palace, summarising in reported flashback at the start of Chapter 11 instead.
• I took a scene which presented important information (the box of shadow puppets) and reinserted it into an earlier chapter so that it wouldn't have to have its own context.
• Then - and this is where it really started to hurt - I went through the whole book chapter by chapter, setting the goal of removing 2000 words from each one. On the first pass I averaged about 50% of my target, so then I went back and did it again. I cut adverbs and adjectives. I slashed over-elaborate descriptions. I stripped the fulsome description of the storytellers' show in Chapter 7 down to the bare bones. I took out loads of background detail covering the mythology and history of the land. I cut all but one of Myrna's reminiscences about her past with Veraine, and all incidental detail harking back to the previous book. I dumped the names of the gods.  I waged war on "he said". I changed "was not" to "wasn't", "did not" to "didn't" and so on whenever I could do so without cringing at the results.
• I reached the absolute nadir when I deleted the word "Chapter" from the headings at the start of each chapter. Hey, it saved me 12 words! That could be a whole, telling sentence somewhere else.

The result is a sparer, leaner text than the original. It might well be the better for that; I do have a tendency to over-egg my descriptions. The only thing I really miss is the anthropological stuff, which is not what anyone buys the book for anyway, so ho hum.

Cut: Censored

The original version of Burning Bright was censored for publication. There are no two ways about this. I had to tone down the Veraine/Mirabai scenes very slightly because they had strayed too far into Horror territory - I've no grouse with that. But there were two huge changes that I was forced to accept very unhappily indeed.

1) I had to cut out all the man-on-man action. All of it.  Every mention. Never mind that previous Black Lace books (e.g. Menage by Emma Holly, Dark Designs by Madelynne Ellis) have included copious m/m sex. Never mind that it was clearly - nay, explicitly -  established in Divine Torment that Veraine comes from a culture where male bisexuality is the norm and that though he's basically straight he has no problem with the occasional bit of cock.

In the original manuscript of Burning Bright, it isn't a Naga that gives Veraine a blow-job after promising him knowledge of his past; it's his friend Rahul, and it is the very homosexuality of the act that triggers his memories of life in the Imperial Army.  Veraine gives in to Rahul's importuning out of a mixture of pity, curiosity and plain after-battle horniness. That had to go. Arguably this improved the novel by injecting more of the supernatural, but it did leave the whole Rahul/Veraine relationship  - which had been building over previous chapters - completely without resolution. Rahul has a massive crush on Veraine (it's one of the reasons he'll risk life and limb to help him) and in the published text this is just left hanging.

There were very good marketing reasons for all this. I listened to them at length. They boil down to the fact that the country we are now marketing most of our books to is a primitive homophobic theocracy which can't cope with an Alpha-male romantic hero getting it on, even casually, with another bloke (emphatically my words, NOT those of the Black Lace management. And they're the politest ones I can come up with. You should have heard what I said in the privacy of my own home at the time. Yes, I'm still angry: that sort of bigotry makes me angry.)

Now bear in mind that the USA is the nation that gave us Poppy Z Brite and Anne Rice, both mainstream best-selling authors who write (almost exclusively) male homoerotic action. But no, apparently Vampires Are Different.

As I write this the Lustbites blogsite is buzzing with talk of how m/m action is this year's thing, and that female readers on both sides of the Atlantic can't get enough of it. Go figure.

2)  I had to cut the scene where Veraine gets raped.

In the original Chapter 12, after a long and very frustrating talk with Myrna, Veraine is verbally tormented and then sodomised by Dhammazhedi.  He fights back unsuccessfully. He comes.

Right. I'm going to have to explain this one with some care. I don't do rape scenes normally. I think rape is a heinous and disgusting hate-crime. I'm not even terribly happy with reading masochistic rape fantasies written by women, although I do understand the arguments defending them. But here I am writing one. Why?

Well, I want to start by saying that I knew I was on dangerous ground even when I wrote it, so I wasn't totally surprised to lose it.  There have been male rape scenes in Black Lace books before - I'm thinking of Barbarian Prize by Deanna Ashford - but mine was explicit in its violence.  I was crossing out of sex-as-titillation-and-entertainment (Black Lace territory) and into sex-as-drama (mainstream territory). Think, for example, of Ed Norton's character getting raped in American History X. 

I wanted this scene because it does a number of things simultaneously:

• I wanted the readers to hate Dhammazhedi, and to be pleased when he gets killed. I'd written repeatedly about what a psychotic sexual predator he was but had never shown a graphic example on-stage, as it were.
• I wanted Veraine to have  a really personal reason for killing him. Having Dhammazhedi boast about fucking Veraine's woman is just lame. I hate that trope when it turns up in films and fiction; it denigrates female characters and turns them into mere plot levers.  In Mel Gibson's films, for example, women only seem to exist in order to be yummy mummys and to get raped so that the Hero will be Goaded into Action. It makes me spit. Veraine should not be taking vengeance on Myrna's behalf - and he sure as hell has no proprietoral rights to her that have been abused. He should be avenging himself.
• I wanted to punish Veraine. I'm an old-fashioned sort of moralist. I believe in repentance, punishment and then forgiveness and a clean start. Well, Veraine has done some fairly shitty things in in his time. I'm thinking of how he treated the Rani Mirabai in Chapter 3, and of what he did to the un-named Sajaal girl back in Divine Torment. He's certainly had the decency to regret and repent his actions, but he's never had a taste of his own medicine.  I wanted karma to finally catch up with him. 'Heroes' who get away with acting like bastards just because they're good-looking or strong really get on my wick.
• I wanted to demonstrate graphically that Veraine does not have an exclusively heterosexual past.
• I wanted to demonstrate that Veraine is emotionally strong enough to deal with that sort of thing. Being buggered, even against his will, does not destroy his sense of self-worth or of himself as a man. His masculinity is not predicated on him always being the sexual aggressor, nor upon him always winning a fight. He's angry and humiliated, but he's not destroyed. He wants bloody vengeance, not to crawl under a stone and die. 

Oh: Bear in mind, gentle reader, that Marketing did not remove this scene because it was violent or non-consensual.  They removed it because it was gay.

If you're interested, the original text of this scene is excerpted here:

Be warned, it's not particularly pleasant. It's not supposed to be.