Giveaway ends August 01, 2012.
See the giveaway details
at Goodreads.
A fair few people have read Sinful Submissions now and I’ve had positive feedback on it. I wrote the rough version of the followup late last year and I’ve been editing it since. It’s called Succumbing and will be stylistically very similar to Sinful Submissions, a collection of short stories about a diverse group of people with myriad desires and yearnings including a lot of graphic sexual content and nude drawings. So far I’ve finished a selection of the stories. I’m planning on making some of them available in advance to people that are interested in them. These are the titles of the finished stories:
Which of these titles intrigues you most? Tell me which one you like and you might get to read it.
I’m working on the follow-up to Sinful Submissions at the moment. I wrote the roughest of conceivable versions of it over the course of NaNoWriMo 2011, also known as November. It includes further tales of Antoine the artist and what led him to abandon brushes in favour of sculpting the dead plus a panoply of other experiences to suit many a fetish and peccadillo. While working on it I’ve also drawn a lot of pictures, which leads me to a thought. The pictures that appeared in the first volume were included as a last minute decision. They are rough and ready and drawn by me. An actual artist has offered to illustrate the second book. Is that a good thing? For anyone that likes the current pictures, if you buy a print copy of Sinful Submissions from this site you’ll receive an original drawing in the style of the ones in the book with it.
Monday is the May Day bank holiday, even if it is a far from actual May Day as you can get. Sinful Submissions will be available for free from Amazon as a kindle ebook over the weekend. It was quietly free on actual May Day and caught some attention, and it’ll be free for this surrogate May Day that is the one that is a day off for at least some of us. The exact timing seems complicated because they always do things their own way but it should be from about 8am Saturday in British money. It’ll be available from different national flavours of Amazon, such as:
Amazon.com
Amazon.co.uk
Please, download it, take a look. It would also be a bonus if you paid for it, whether for an ebook or one of the limited first edition of the print books that can be bought here. Tney’ll all be signed and numbered and the next few copies will also include an original sketch in the style of the ones in the book. Read the book and it’ll all make sense.
As it says in the book, its starting point was Nos Calan Gaeaf in 2010, also known as Halloween. It’s opposite counterpart in the year is Nos Galan Mai, the night of April 30th. Due to the vicissitudes of British bank holidays the day we’re officially allowed to notice this is a week late this year. The night before May Day and Halloween are days known as Ysbrydnos in Welsh. This means “spirit’s night” and they are times in the year when the spirits of the dead are said to walk. The book will tell you more.
After more time than I care to think about has been spent figuring out the intricacies of their weird-flavour of html, the Kindle edition of my short story collection Sinful Submissions is now available. It’s about a dollar or 77p for it and using either a Kindle or the Kindle reader app you can read it on a very wide range of different smartphones, tablets, PCs and ebook readers. Check it out here: Sinful Submissions Kindle Edition
A large box arrived today that seems to have travelled an interesting journey to the UK from somewhere in the US with a brief detour to Germany. Presumably there is an underlying logic to the meandering. The net result is that the first, limited, collectible and remotely possible to one day be extremely valuable first print edition of Sinful Submissions is available from me now. The easiest way to get it is to head for the buy page of this website. All copies will be signed by me and numbered. For anyone that hasn’t heard it from before, this is my second published book and it contains a sequence of interconnected short stories on the nature of sin and passion and includes a diverse selection of graphic lewd behaviour and naughtiness. The book also contains more than twenty of my charcoal sketches. For those people that don’t read much, there’s an awful lot of sex in it so just open it somewhere random when you feel like it. There’ll probably be sex and nudity on the page somewhere.
The first run of print copies of Sinful Submissions are now on their way to me. It’s already available on Amazon.com where you can take a look at a chunk of it through the wonders of modern technology. It’s also be available on Kindles as soon as I can make sense of their scripting for tables of contents. The pictures will be in both ebook and bookbook editions just in case there are people that use Kindles who get tired at looking at all the pesky words without pictures of breasts to keep themselves occupied with. Rest assured, there will be graphic sex saturating all editions. I am also making headway on the follow-up. There’s going to be a trilogy of this stuff and it’s only set to get stranger as time goes on. You can access a story from it here. The easiest way to get a copy of the book will be here if you’ve got PayPal. If PayPal doesn’t work for you, drop me a line at ed@edbemand.co.uk I’ll post a link to the ebook when it’s available.
The first print proof of Sinful Submissions was completed a couple of months ago, but I wasn’t happy with it so the time since has been spent improving it. The text itself is the same, but I’ve changed the formatting and moved the pictures around a bit. The revised version should be available within a couple of weeks and it’ll be available as a paper book from this website and from Amazon. I’ll post links when it’s up. There will also be an ebook version of Sinful Submissions coming soon, for Kindle and other platforms.
In the mean-time, for NaNoWriMo 2011 I wrote the first draft of the follow-up, Succumbing. This is another collection of short stories about sex and death featuring a range of returning characters from Sinful Submissions along with a load of new faces with their own tales to tell. Find out why Antoine stopped using paint and how he learned to use corpses as the basis for his great works and how distance helped to bring Richard and Laura together.
I’ve added a Page to this site where Beheld and Sinful Submissions can be bought directly from me. Email me at ed@edbemand.co.uk if you need.
Apparently it’s been a little while since I’ve updated anything. Let’s just pass it off by pretending I’ve been doing something useful in the intervening time that has precluded internet access, like working with starving children somewhere in Africa. Not feeding them of course, making sure they dig enough to keep me supplied with diamonds.
That aside, the book that I wrote over the course of NaNoWriMo last year is perilously close to being unleashed upon the world. To save me from having to read back over what I’ve written about it I’ll proceed on a basis of assumed ignorance, which is generally one of the safer assumptions that can be made. National Novel Writing Month is an annual project that encourages people to write a novel (they call it 50k+ words) in a month, specifically November of each year. The rough text of Sinful Submissions was completed within it last year. Other than some light editing the text is as it was written.
Sinful Submissions is a collection of interlinked stories about sex and passion. Mostly sex. Stories include the life affirming story of how Svetlana became a mail-order bride, how Antoine’s love of the dead helped him become great, why isn’t always the priest’s fault when there’s sinning in church and how John and Beatrice found out what really made them happy. Needless to say, it includes explicit sexual content.
It’ll be available via Amazon and other online shops, as well as directly from me. It’ll also be available from Amazon as an ebook for Kindle. In addition to the text, the physical book includes more than twenty of my drawings. I’ve also designed the covers of both version, using my drawings. The costs haven’t been fixed yet but I’ll be posting details shortly. I’ve got a sample story from it that is available to anyone that would like to read it for no charge. You can find it here. It’s also available as a .pdf for those that prefer them. Drop me a line at ed@edbemand.co.uk if you’re interested.
I’ve foolishly got out of the habit of writing things to add here, so I suspect that I ought to try and fill the gaps of the last couple of months. Two main projects have absorbed the brunt of my creative time since the end of November. The one is getting Sinful Submissions sorted for publication, which I hoping to have completed within the next couple of months.
The other project, is well… somewhat more ephermeral.
The above picture will be easily immediately understood as being a sign of a minor Minecraft habit or lead to heavy confusion, depending upon the individual’s familiarity with that most successful of indie games from the last year.
Compared to some of the projects that I have seen posted online by fellow addicts of this latest digital narcotic mine is very simple, but it still involved the wasting of a significant amount of quality time. As with most people, I had been deposited by the game onto a patch of sand surrounded by an elaborate and rugged landscape of brightly coloured cubes and had immediately set to work punching trees and sheep to see what would happen. Clutching fistfuls of wool and wood with bloodied knuckles I was able to start interacting with the world in earnest and seeing what it might hold for me.
My first night in game was spent cowering in the dark in a small cave that I had hacked into the side of a hill, listening to the sinister noises as zombies and the like prowled around outside, much too close for comfort.
In time I developed the rudiments of a material culture in this new land, focussed on an excess of dirt and stone and just enough coal and iron to scrape by. My alien society of one, surrounded by day by the placid crowds of cows, sheep and pigs and the dangerously aggressive zombies, skeletons and creepers that come out at night was forced to focus heavily on its defence. The green hills that I was so free to wander in daylight became hostile to me when the moon rose and I was forced to spend my nights safe within the solid stone walls of the increasingly elaborate fort that I had built for myself, which can be glimpsed in the top left corner of the screen shot.
Over time I felt like there was something missing from the society that I was developing. I had architecture, agriculture, industry, mining, but what we were lacking was ritual. Where better to start than with that oldest of ritual forms… the stone circle?