Announcing Our New Imprint: Spasm & Honey

We've all heard about the wildly growing appeal of the romance and romantasy genre, but where is the erotica for readers with literary taste? For those of us who want to be titillated but are turned off by plot holes. For those of us that love a page-turning slow burn and masterful prose. For those of us that want sex scenes that don't just trigger culturally conditioned erotic response, but make us question who we are and the power structures that suppress our desire.
We deserve well written smut!

We are expanding that mission by starting a new imprint, Spasm & Honey. Send us your fiction, poetry, and hybrid works that center the visceral and sensual.

The ethos of the work we want to publish sits somewhere in the intersection and the contradictions of Audre Lorde's "Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” and Susan Sontag’s “The Pornographic Imagination,” and Melissa Febos's “Mind Fuck: Writing Better Sex.”

We are looking for compelling narrative and characters, for lyrical and dynamic prose, and new perspectives on the erotic. As Audre Lorde writes, "The erotic is the nurturer or nursemaid of all our deepest knowledge," and that knowledge challenges our "racist, patriarchal, and anti-erotic society." We are looking for work that takes risk, politically and sexually. That is shameless, honest, and vulnerable. And we are also looking for strong craft and intentional decisions. As Melissa Febos writes, 

To teach sex scenes is to talk about plot, dialogue, pacing, description, and characterization: all those elements that comprise a captivating scene. A sex scene should advance a story and occur in a chain of causality that springs from your characters’ choices. It should employ sensory detail that concretizes and also speaks symbolically to the deeper content of the story. Or if not, it should service your work of art in whatever ways you want your scenes to.

If you have a publication ready manuscript that you think would be a good fit for us, please review our submission guidelines and send us your work at submissions@sentientpublications.com. 

At first it was a fire, eclipses, short circuits, lightning and fireworks; the incense, hammocks, drugs, wines, perfumes; then spasm and honey, fever, fatigue, warmth, currents of liquid fire, feast and orgies; then dreams, visions, candlelight, flowers, pictures; then images out of the past, fairy tales, stories, then pages out of a book, a poem; then laughter, then chastity.

At what moment does the knife wound sink so deep that the flesh begins to weep with love?

 

From Fire: From A Journal of Love - The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin