Friskbiskit

Happy New Year!

We made it through another one.

 

Health, happiness and prosperity to you and yours in 2012!

Word Candy Wednesday

 

“It’s just like the nativity.”
 

“Does that make us the wise men?”
 

“No. The fools.”

 

What is this from?

Man Candy Monday Wishes You a Happy Holiday

On Donner, on Blitzen, on Cupid, on Vixen!

Ganked from Exterface's L'Ivresse Du Plaisir sequence.

Guest Post: Heidi Belleau and Violetta Vane

It's my pleasure to welcome authors Heidi Belleau and Violetta Vane to the blog today. They're here to share with us some of the prison slang they learned while researching The Saturnalia Effect, their new release from Storm Moon Press. It's an M/M seasonal contemporary with fantasy elements.

Heidi and Violetta are giving away a free ebook copy of The Saturnalia Effect to one lucky Friskbiskit commenter. Just leave a comment here with your email and your favourite slang word (prison or otherwise) to be entered! They’ll pick a winner on boxing day as a belated Christmas present!

Here's a blurb and a buy link:

Troy Khoury is serving a life sentence in Westgate prison for a robbery gone wrong. He just wants to keep his head down and do his time, but he runs afoul of an old-timer named Franchetti. Franchetti offers Troy a simple choice: kill fellow inmate Daniel Amato by Christmas in exchange for protection, or be tortured and raped to death by Franchetti's heavy, Pliers. Troy's no killer, though, and Daniel is as gentle and calm as can be. But a prison is a small place, and time is running out. Troy must decide how much he's willing to sacrifice before the choice is taken from him.

Buy link: http://stormmoonpress.com/books/The-Saturnalia-Effect.aspx.

Violetta and Heidi want you to know that purchasing directly from Storm Moon Press gets you the free erotic bonus short “Pretty Things,” starring Troy and Daniel, that you won’t find anywhere else. I'll add that buying direct from the publisher also means more of your money goes to the authors.

Oh, and don't miss the excerpt from The Saturnalia Effect at the bottom of the post.

So, Heidi and Violetta, what did you learn while researching prison life and how did you incorporate it into the book?

One of the most important aspects of capturing an individual character’s essence is giving them an authentic, distinct voice. Now I’m not referring to painstakingly writing out a person’s accent phonetically (although if your name’s Diana Gabaldon, you can get away with that sort of thing), but to issues of dialect and word usage. So many things influence the language we use: who raised us and where, our ethnicity, our country of origin, the people we spend time with, our level of education, whether we’re rural or urban, what time period or generation we come from, etc. A college-educated middle-aged WASP living in upstate New York is going to have a completely different voice compared to an immigrant from Hong Kong freshly arrived in Toronto, or a working class Londoner trying to make his way in the 1940s. If you don’t have distinct character voices, your writing can feel flat to your general audience and alienating or even insulting to the people you’re trying to represent. 

There is a rich wealth of dialects and vocabularies a writer can draw on to make their dialogue dynamic. And since we love to represent multicultural relationships in our stories, we’re constantly finding new ways to bring character voices to life, and learning new corners of language in the process. For The Saturnalia Effect, set in New York’s fictional Westgate Correctional Facility, we got to try our hands at prison slang. Here are a few words you might find useful to know as you’re following the story of Troy’s first maximum security Christmas:

Fish/New Fish: This one’s basic, but vital. A “fish” refers to an inmate who’s new to the prison system. It’s a term that doesn’t just mean newly arrived, but implies that the person in question doesn’t even understand the basics of prison life or culture. He or she doesn’t know the lingo, the unwritten rules, the hierarchies, where to sit, who to avoid, etc. Not surprisingly, a lack of knowledge makes for an easy target. Troy Khoury, the main character of “The Saturnalia Effect”, is a fish. Although he makes an earnest effort at staying out of trouble, his naivete means that trouble often finds him.

CO: Short for “Correctional Officer”, AKA a prison guard. Not surprisingly, more seasoned prisoners have a whole slew of unflattering terms: “screw” is one such commonly heard but out-of-fashion term. In “The Saturnalia Effect”, different COs are known by their reputations. Kowalsky seems to be the nicest of the bunch, for a guard at least, while Johnson is a well-known asshole who abuses his power. Winters is neither nice nor cruel, but he’s got a reputation for paying favors, so inmates try to stay on his good side.

Segregation/Solitary/The Hole: Segregation is a form of punishment where prisoners who’ve broken rules have further privileges removed to the point that they are put in “solitary confinement”: complete isolation without entertainment or human company for days on end. These cells are sometimes referred to by convicts as “the hole”. The hole can be used to penalize prisoners, but can also be used to protect the person segregated from other prisoners or themselves (in the case of suicide watches). In Federal prison, these cells are referred to as “Special Housing Units”. Troy and the man he’s supposed to kill, Daniel Amato, both do time in solitary. 

Lockdown: A term for when all prisoners are confined to their cells; all visits are cancelled and all communication is cut off. Prison officials will often declare a lockdown when gang violence seems about to explode, or if a riot looks imminent. It’s a major hardship for most prisoners, although some, like Troy, welcome being isolated and cut off from other, more violent inmates.

Cellie: A cellmate. One of the most important prison relationships, for obvious reasons. Most cells in US prisons are small and overcrowded, and sometimes cells designed for only one inmate end up housing two or even three. Daniel, who’s serving a life sentence and has a fair amount of prison clout, has a cell of his own, although he still has to share it with a cellie. Troy has no such luck. He sleeps in a dormitory. Prison overcrowding is often bad enough that even maximum-security inmates can be housed in dormitories.

Punk: In prison, as in the real-world, rape isn’t just about sex, but about power (to support a great organization dedicated to stopping prison rape in both male and female prisons, please visit Just Detention International; its initiatives are also transgender-inclusive). Especially in male prisons, rape serves to reinforce hierarchies among prisoners. In this context, the “punk” is at the bottom of the food chain: a physically weaker inmate, often but not always a fish, who is the victim of prison rape. The punk can end up belonging to a single man or to a whole gang. For a pretty-boy like Troy, with few resources, in a prison full of criminals much more violent than he is, becoming a punk is almost inevitable. 

Daddy: A stronger male inmate who becomes the dominant partner in a prison relationship, protecting the more submissive partner. But the word “protection” can mean a lot of things, including out and out abuse. There are a wide variety of relationships in prison, including totally consensual agreements typical of minimum-security prisons, but exploitative relationships are common among men who are used to violence. Troy is looking for protection; Daniel can provide protection. Can what they have together transcend that simple, brutal fact? 

And there you have it! Just a small taste of prison language and culture. Thanks for reading, and thanks to Jessica Freely for hosting us!

You're so welcome you two. That was fascinating.

Follow Heidi and Violetta on Twitter for more news and goodies: @HeidiBelleau and @ViolettaVane. 

And here's a steamy (literally) excerpt from The Saturnalia Effect: 

So maybe Daniel had a hunch about what he was up to. But if Troy pushed him hard enough, pushed him just right, it might not matter. Make him think with his dick instead of his head. Yeah. The time for slow, coy seduction had passed.

He looked down at the neat little pile he'd made of his boxers and jumpsuit, sneakers on top. Smoothed his hands down his thighs. He could hear the water from the showers hitting the tiles, and if he closed his eyes, he could pretend it was rain.

He hadn't had a single shower since coming to Westgate. He'd been washing himself at a laundry room sink instead, with a sliver of soap and a scratchy handtowel, braving the bitterly cold water just enough to keep from getting ripe. The reputation prison showers had on the outside was well earned—except that in the real world, you didn't actually need to drop the soap to end up... well. Doubly so for guys like him. He'd put a lot of effort into not getting himself into that situation.

Now he was going in with the exact opposite intention.

A smothering wall of steam hit him face-on. He pushed ahead, heading straight for the back of the room, far past the comfort of an easy escape route. He had to fight every instinct and habit he'd carefully built up since coming here. If he could have worn shoes in here, he would have. 

"Work it, girl!" came the first catcall. He barely flinched; he'd known that was coming. He'd seen the looks they all gave him in the TV room, the cafeteria, every shared space he dared to enter. It had always only been a matter of time.

Whoa. What a cliff hanger. I'm dying to know what happens next.

Word Candy Wednesday

 

"They say it began in a garden,"

said Lillith,

"but I know better. It began with a dream."

 

Where is this from?

Link Love: Sex is Not the Enemy

Stumbled across this on one of my favorite sites for ManCandy Monday fodder:

Putting the Glad in Gladiators

Check it out. You won't be sorry.

Man Candy Monday: Laugh Out Loud

I love how happy this guy looks.

Ganked from Sex Is Not the Enemy

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Guest Post: Allie Ritch

 

I'm so pleased to welcome the awesome Allie Ritch to Friskbiskit. Allie writes erotic paranormal and science fiction romance, which we just happen to have a soft spot for around here. Her most recent release, Love & Torment, came out from Cobblestone Press on Dec. 7 and has a hot premise:

In a dangerous world of secrets and corruption, Kira has a unique method for getting information from prisoners. She uses her psychic ability to torture them with sexual desire. But when she interrogates Dixon Hazard, she finds herself fighting her own arousal as he captures her heart.

Tortured with sexual desire! Yay!

Allie's got a great post for us about labels and their limits. Take it away, Allie!

Hi, everybody. I really enjoyed writing Love & Torment. This novella-length work is fully character driven and works much like a drama set in just one room. Or in this case, just one bed. 

When Jessica invited me to do this blog, I started thinking about what I have to say as a writer. Literary people love to throw around the word “theme.” I can’t say that I ever set out to give my stories any deep, serious themes. I’m more concerned with having a good time and making sure I entertain my readers, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t some common themes running through my work.  

  

Without getting too serious, I thought I’d talk about one of those themes. It’s this: labels don’t define people. No, I don’t mean those itchy tags in the back of your shirt. I’m talking about social labels.

 

Interestingly enough, the labels we use for people (real or fictional) tend to tell you what the person is not. For example, think about the label “gay male.” Okay, that doesn’t tell you who this guy is. Is he funny or serious, kind or cruel? We don’t know. Since it doesn’t mean he’s attracted to every man on the planet, it doesn’t even tell us what he is. But it does tell us what he is not. He’s not sexually attracted to women. That’s not much of a descriptor and certainly not something that should be used to pigeonhole a whole person or character.

 

Obviously labels for race, religion, and sexual orientation are the biggies. I would also add gender to that list—something I played with in my female-dominated society in Switching Positions. Other labels are subtler.

 

In Love & Torment, my characters defy labels at every turn. Dixon Hazard is labeled a prisoner, yet he’s not powerless. He uses his wits and the attraction between him and Kira to connect with her and turn the tables. Although he’s the one bound and naked, she’s the one who is vulnerable because he sees through her dominant, jaded façade. Kira is psychic, equipped with the ability to control arousal and orgasm, but that’s just a talent she has. Her personality is really revealed by how she uses that talent.

 

No label can tell us who we are. Only our actions and choices can do that. Why should fictional characters be any different?

 

Thanks, Jessica, for inviting me over to Friskbiskit. I’m delighted to be a part of your diverse and entertaining site.

Thank you, Allie!

 

Tomorrow: Allie Ritch Guest Blogs

In other news, author Allie Ritch will be a guest here tomorrow. I'm very excited! Allie hosted a cool promo a few weeks ago where we gave her some of our favorite lines from our books. Kind of a group Word Candy Wednesday. You should check it out, and you should come back here tomorrow to read what she has to say about labelling. It's a great post.

Sexy Nerd!

It's been a tough time lately and yesterday's fender bender didn't help, but in my hour of darkness comes this to remind me that life is worth living after all:

Possibly the most relevant link I've ever blogged. Big thanks to Marta for sending me this. You rock hon!

 

Word Candy Wednesday

“Are you…”

Legal? A dream? An illegal dream I should be shot for even having?

“…here with International Cultural Exchange?”

 

What's is this from?

Och, Aye, It's Man Candy Monday

I love the dynamism in this pic. This whole sequence from Exterface is awesome. Highly recommended.

 Ganked from Exterface's gang sequence.

My First Comic

From my afternoon of drawing the other day:

The villian swoops down upon an innocent victim:

 

But the villain has some disadvantages...

Things take an introspective turn...

And suddenly!

Upside down! Oh no!

 

:)

Drawing!

So I decided to take a long overdue mental health day today. And I wound up doing a bunch of sketches. It's fun!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Word Candy Wednesday

 

And from this distance, it didn’t take much

squinting

for Miss January to become Mr. January

...

 

What's is this from?