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Stella Fosse

Care and Feeding of Your Sexy Novel – Negotiating with a Publisher

Care and Feeding of Your Sexy Novel Negotiating with a Publisher (without an Agent) Part One of Care and Feeding of Your Sexy Novel is here. First you wrote a great erotic novel (perhaps with inspiration from Aphrodite’s Pen).  Then you found a publisher without paying an agent (see Part 1). Now it’s time for the next phase:  negotiating your advance and your contract (which you’ll have reviewed by a literary attorney). Take a deep breath

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Stella Fosse

Care and Feeding of Your Sexy Novel – Do You Need an Agent?

Care and Feeding of Your Sexy Novel Part One:  Do You Need an Agent?  Let’s say you’ve played your way through a sexy first draft.  Then you sailed through your edits, adding great material as needed, then carving away the nonessentials like a sculptor chiseling marble.  You’ve sent your prize manuscript to beta readers, taken the best of their comments and passed on the ones that don’t serve your purpose.  You have made a final

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Stella Fosse

Publish Sexy Stories after Midlife

Publish Sexy Stories after Midlife Some of us who are writers don’t quite know what we think until we write it down.  So writing our erotic stories is liberating, even if we never show them to another living soul.  If you would like a boost to keep the pen moving, you’ll find two FREE self-taught courses on my website:  One for writing our erotic histories and the other for creating sexy stories. Each course encourages

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Stella Fosse

Everyday Life Is A Revolutionary Act

A woman in a longstanding lesbian marriage once told me, “I love it that my everyday life is a revolutionary act.”  I remembered that while reading the new novel, Fishwives, whose main characters go about their daily lives exemplifying for their friends and neighbors the lasting and perfectly imperfect love of two women. In the process, they model that love for us readers too. Sally Bellerose writes powerfully about sex and about growing old. She

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Too Many Images Too Little Touch
Stella Fosse

Too Many Images Too Little Touch

Too Many Images Too Little Touch   April 2020 exists as a haze in my mind.  One of my few clear memories is looking out the window at two squirrels running and playing in the newly green yard.  Even then I knew it was absurd to envy wild squirrels with as little as a one-year lifespan. Yet I felt enormous envy that, while humanity locked down, life in the wild roared back with the season.

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Stella Fosse

The Challenge of Male Violence

The Challenge of Male Violence March 8 was International Women’s Day. As they say on their website, the theme this year is #ChooseToChallenge. Spoken word poet Anisa Mandaula celebrated our power to change the future in a video for the day, saying, “Choose to create history, not to be created by it.” Her poem calls on us to change the lives of all women, not only our mothers, daughters, and sisters. The body of 33-year-old Sarah Everard

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