Thursday 24 August 2017

Special Guest - Tony Flyer


Please welcome Tony Flyer to my blog today to chat about poetry and his story LAZY SUNDAY which features in the new SINFUL PLEASURES anthology. I also have a story in this new collectiong titled FIREWORKS.


Magic Words
By Tony Fyler

Never underestimate the power of love poetry.
It’s the best tool in the would-be lover’s romantic arsenal, and it always has been. Better than money, better than power, better than even a hot body, poetry has been building bridges between hearts, between minds, and crucially between bodies, for thousands of years. Money is cold. Fun, but cold. Power is harsh. Seductive, but harsh. Hot bodies grow colder over time, and you need to be invested in the change to still find sparks.
But poetry is magic, because poetry is woven out of words, and words…
Words are extraordinary. Words are emotions given flesh and bones, set free in the world, with the power to change it forever. Words are teardrops with spikes on, and smiles made of sound. Words are I have a dream, and One small step, but they’re also I do, and Yes, and Forever. Words are promises and kisses, hopes and dreams and all we know when we look in our lover’s eyes. They are the hands that intertwine, the breath we take so close it could be theirs, the kiss we dare to say we hope for, and all that follows on.
Words are the hopes of actions on which love is built.
Which of course is why love poetry has been building bridges between bodies, and laying the foundations of lives lived together, for thousands of years. The Ancient Greeks did it. The Romans did it. So did the Persians. Even the Bible, often castigated for its generally sexually censorious tone, gets its poetical swaying sashay on from time to time – check out The Song of Solomon and the bride’s confession of her love. World class ancient erotica, right there.
That, I suppose, is that point. We live in a sex-drenched glorious exhausting world, but the erotica we have today is the evolution of all the ancient love poems ever scribbled by suitors in the desperate hope of melting the hearts of those they loved or wanted.
None of which, I have to say, was in my mind when I sat down to write Lazy Sunday. None of that had the time to be in my mind – I only discovered the submission call for the anthology the night before the deadline closed, and I’d never written erotica for public consumption before in my life.
‘Good,’ said my wife. ‘You’ll get out of your own way then.’
She’s forever telling me to get out of my own way – to stop writing with my brain, and just write with my heart. To be fair, she’s got reasons for telling me that.
We first ‘met’ in an online writing group run by a mutual friend. She lived in rural New York State, I was a Welshman newly arrived in London, a seeming world away. We chatted by email in and out of the group, and then she wrote a short story, a peek behind the veil of her everyday life.
I read it, and sent her feedback, and told our mutual friend ‘I want to be in this woman’s life somehow, however she’ll have me.’
She read my feedback, and turned to her colleague in work, announcing ‘Oh god…I want to marry this man.’
But New York, London, family, careers, how was that ever going to work? She decided that, powerful as our attraction was – an attraction mostly based in words pinged back and forth across the Atlantic – she shouldn’t, couldn’t let herself take me seriously.
So I got out of my own way, and I wrote her a love poem.
And then, a couple of years later, I read it to a wider world at an intimate ceremony, when the impossible became possible, because we’d decided it had to be.
Love poetry. Magic. Words that change the world, from hopes to realities, from maybes and daydreams to waking up next to the one you love.   
I am a Welshman, my wife’s an American.
Lazy Sunday is written from the viewpoint of a Welshman, married to an American. But that of course is where the similarity ends – when you love, you do not give away your lover’s real secrets; that would be monstrous. But with a deadline ticking, and never having written this kind of story before in my life, I got out of my own way and wrote what to me feels like a love song to a long-married couple, their banter, their shared life – and the magic power of poetry to bring them in and focus them, and make all the world go away.

Tony Fyler is Editor-in-Chief at Jefferson Franklin Editing, and spends his days telling writers what they need to know, rather than what they necessarily want to hear. To get a free sample chapter edit, email enquiries@jefferson-franklin.co.uk. 
Follow him @JFEditing on Twitter 
Meanwhile, the writing for which he has far too little time can be found at
@FylerWrites



Excerpt from “Lazy Sunday”
Sinful Pleasures
 The time I first discovered her poetry weakness, outside, in the park, with my back against a tree. Reading French poetry, being desperately pretentious. She was doing the sun dress thing that Summer, and she looked like something from a watercolour in the yellow dress with strawberries on, and a broad straw hat. As I read, she closed her eyes, her breathing getting heavier.
Seul, inconnu, le dos courbé, les mains croisées,
Triste, et le jour pour moi sera comme la nuit.
Je ne regarderai ni l’or du soir qui tombe,” I read.
She reached over, letting her hand lie, as if testing a theory, in my lap.
I looked down, surprised but thrilled, and flared a welcome to her. She took off the sun hat, then unzipped me, pulling out my cock and covering her hand with the hat. “Keep reading,” she said, the Summer thick in her voice.
I did, the words, the intonations rising and falling along with her fist on me. I’d just started “La vie est une fleur dont l’amour est le miel” when she squeezed the base of my cock, I thought to make me stop.
Le miel,” she repeated, seeming content and yet frowning.
Life is the flower, and love is the honey,” I translated. She nodded, as if to say she wasn’t an imbecile.
Oui,” she said, releasing me from her grip and letting the hat cover my modesty. It’s no good,” she decided, her voice quavering. “Was gonna wait till I got you home, but that can’t happen now.” She reached quickly up both sides of the sun dress and drew her panties down, letting the dress fall quickly back into place and handing me the sodden scrap of fabric. That was it, that was the word, it was absolutely sodden, like you read about in stories and don’t believe until you experience it for yourself and realise you underestimate a woman at your peril.
One day, my darling,” she said, her voice raw and thick as she pulled the hat away, exposing me to the breeze and any wandering eyes, “I’m going to sink down your body while you read me this stuff, and I am going to suck your cock and blow your tiny mind to the sound of the French poets.”

Blurb
Sinful Press welcomes you to lose yourself in Sinful Pleasures.  
Join us as we weave our way from mainstream erotic romance to surreal sex-filled dreamscapes and everything in between, created by some of the best new and established voices in the erotica genre. 
Janine Ashbless, Ella Scandal, Sonni de Soto, Jo Henny Wolf, Lily Harlem, Lady Divine, Gail Williams, Samantha MacLeod, Tony Fyler, Ellie Barker, Lisa McCarthy




Support your small publisher and buy the paperback direct



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