Category Archives: Fantasy

Rumpled Silk Sheets offers everything you expect in a fairy tale and in an erotic romance. These talented authors have taken some familiar tales-and a few not so familiar-in new and incredible directions.

Ride the desert sands with a girl who encounters a sexy incarnation of the Egyptian cat goddess Bastet and a Japanese maid who helps free her mistress from the human body trapping her heavenly spirit. We haven’t forgotten the witches and wolves, but you’ll also meet a Snow Bear whose gruff exterior hides a secret only a scared girl can unlock. Like a little pain with your pleasure? Then meet a delicate princess who longs for a lost lover’s firm touch instead of a traditional marriage that leaves her unmarked and unsatisfied.

Princess of Silk and Pain by Shanna Germain
Handsome and Gretel by Kilt Kilpatrick
The Art of Storm-Riding by Sunny Moraine
Red in the Hood by Vivica Lace
Hannah and the Witch by Michael Jones
Snow by Kenzie Mathews
The White Bride by G.G. Royale
Madame Blanche by Jean Roberta

They got my story slightly wrong–the woman Badra meets at the heart of the storm is cursed by Bastet, not an incarnation of her–but regardless, that is a stellar lineup right there. Pick up your copy here.

“The Art of Storm-Riding” started life as a very different story; it is actually my third attempt at a retelling of the German folktale “The White Cat”, which was a favorite of mine as a child. Both my previous attempts were decent but also much too conventional for me, and it wasn’t until I decided to radically shift the setting and the premise that it started to feel right. As it currently stands, it bears only the roughest resemblance to the original folktale, but I think what’s there is a neat twist on a classic form. I also like the idea of a fairy tale that ends in liberation for all the characters in a way that isn’t just another form of being boxed in, to marriage, to tradition, to family convention. Badra never would have stood for that and I wouldn’t have tried to force it on her.

The title comes from a poem by the Egyptian-Lebanese poet Yahia Lababidi, whose first couple of verses feel, to me, to be full of the same kind of unhinged power that sits at the heart of the story.

I could not decipher the living riddle of my body
put it to sleep when it hungered, and overfed it
when time came to dream

I nearly choked on the forked tongue of my spirit
between the real and the ideal, rejecting the one
and rejected by the other

I still have not mastered that art of storm-riding
without ears to apprehend howling winds
or eyes for rolling waves

Excerpt under the cut.

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