Guest Blog - Author/Editor Cheyenne Blue "Same Same But Different"

“Same Same But Different”

Thank you, Emily, for once again hosting me on your blog.  I’m happy to be back here.

There’s a singer-songwriter much beloved in Australia, but little known of in the rest of the world.  Paul Kelly has been around since the 1980s, and has an enormous body of work spanning musical genres and styles.  Many of Paul’s tunes are some of my all-time favourite songs, so a couple of years back, when he released his memoir How to Make Gravy, I snapped it up.

The memoir was a fantastic read, but one thing leaped out at me.  Paul freely admits to borrowing ideas, patterns of notes, the occasional riff, even words from other songs.  He cites a long tradition of this in songwriters and authors.  However, Paul takes these words or notes and makes them uniquely his own, changes them subtly, moves the order around. 

Now very few authors would ever admit to stealing other people’s lines.  With good reason—plagiarism is a nasty thing, copyright infringement even nastier.  But here we all are, writing stories of love, of romance, of sex, of break ups and getting together, of long term lovers, and one-night stands. Sex and more sex.  The plots, when distilled to their elements, are all so very similar.  And of course, most people can tell you that there are only seven basic story plots and every book ever written slots into one of these metaplots.

But what keeps us writing, what keeps readers reading, is the slant we put on our stories of girl meets girl.  Our own words, our own style, different settings, different adversity, attraction, angst, conflict and resolution.  Oh yes, different resolutions.

I could read lesbian romance and erotica every day and still be amazed at the diversity and skill of writers in our genre.  Like Paul Kelly, writers of lesbian stories put their own individuality on a basic common theme and most stories come out new and fresh and arousing.

I have a new mini-anthology out, which I hope highlights some of my own diversity of writing.  Blue Woman Stories Volume III: collected lesbian erotica of Cheyenne Blue, like Volumes I and II, contains five of my previously published stories spanning the decade and a half that I’ve been published.  They are all lesbian, they are all erotic, they all have an element of romance, some more than others, but although they all fall into the simple girl-meets-girl category of storytelling, I think they are all very different from each other.

In A Story About Sarah, Melly tells the reader about her lover, the only other girl in a remote mining camp in outback Australia.  She tells the story of their life and their love. Two of the other four stories are more transient encounters. In Carrowkeel, a tourist meets a New Age hippie in a prehistoric tomb in Ireland, in the second, Irish Abroad, an Irish tourist alone in Las Vegas has the chance to reinvent herself to a tough biker dyke.  The remaining two stories catalog the start of relationships: an experienced nurse takes a student under her wing in Nurse Joan, and in Run, Jo, Run two women fall in love through their mutual passion of fell running.

I hope you enjoy this collection.

Leave a comment on this post (with your email address) and one random commenter will win their choice of Blue Woman Stories Volume I or Volume 2.  The winner will be drawn on 30 April 2015.

Finally, if you have your own lesbian story to tell, my latest Call For Submissions is open until 24 April 2015.  http://www.cheyenneblue.com/#/archives/894

Blue Woman Stories Volume III: collected lesbian erotica of Cheyenne Blue is available from the following places:

Direct from Ladylit  http://www.ladylit.com/books/blue-woman-stories-volume-three-by-cheyenne-blue/

Amazon US http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00VMZOA7Q/

Amazon UK http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00VMZOA7Q/

Amazon CA http://www.amazon.ca/dp/B00VMZOA7Q/

Amazon DE http://www.amazon.de/dp/B00VMZOA7Q/

Amazon AUS http://www.amazon.com.au/dp/B00VMZOA7Q/

All Romance https://www.allromanceebooks.com/product-bluewomanstoriesvolume3collectedlesbianeroticaofcheyenneblue-1773357-362.html

Smashwords https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/532069

Kobo https://store.kobobooks.com/en-US/ebook/blue-woman-stories-volume-3

ITunes US  https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/blue-woman-stories-volume-3/id982228203?mt=11&ign-mpt=uo%3D4

ITunes UK https://itunes.apple.com/gb/book/blue-woman-stories-volume-3/id982228203?mt=11&ign-mpt=uo%3D4

Cheyenne Blue’s erotic fiction has been included in over 90 erotic anthologies since 2000, including Best Lesbian Erotica, Best Women’s Erotica, Sweat, Bossy, and Wild Girls, Wild Nights. She is the editor of Forbidden Fruit: stories of unwise lesbian desire (Ladylit). Under her own name she has written travel books and articles, and edited anthologies of local writing in Ireland. She has lived in the U.K., Ireland, Colorado, and Switzerland, but now writes, runs, makes bread and cheese and drinks wine by the beach in Queensland, Australia. Check out her blog at www.cheyenneblue.com, on Twitter at IamCheyenneBlue and on Goodreads at https://www.goodreads.com/CheyenneBlue