Author: Exhibit A

As some of you may have noticed, I really enjoyed putting together last year’s Christmas Erotica prompts, and reading all of your submissions. Like, really enjoyed it. Picking the prompt each day, from the long list of festive songs that I love, writing it up, waiting to see how people used it – the whole thing made me smile so much over the course of the month, and not just because it combined two of my very favourite things, Christmas and sex. It felt like getting an exciting, mysterious present every few hours, and really, what’s not to love about that?

I did strongly consider doing something similar this year, only with Christmas movies instead of songs. Think of the possibilities! Home Alone, Love Actually, Bad Santa, Die Hard, Trading Places…so many film titles, so many filthy directions in which to take them. I may still do a truncated version of this, in fact, but I’m not sure how much appetite there is for another set of daily prompts. Nor whether movies have quite the same appeal as songs and carols.

For that reason – and because I had so much fun with it at the time – I am re-opening the submissions page for last year’s prompts. Maybe you really wanted to write something for one of the song titles, but ran out of time to do it. Maybe you have a half-finished story sitting in your Drafts folder, or an idea that only hit you in February. Maybe you weren’t reading my blog last December.

Either way, if you want to write something for any of the 19 prompts I put together in 2015, here’s your chance. You have from now until the 25^th to send me a link to your story, and I’ll add it to this page on my blog. There’s already a whole bunch of great stories there, so you’ll be in excellent company – seriously, go check some of them out!

Even if no-one has any Christmas Erotica left inside them, the memory of that whole project will still make me smile whenever I think of it. I guess I’m just feeling greedy today…and I have been a very good boy this year…

I woke up from a particularly filthy dream this morning, still smelling of oil after last night’s photo/massage session, and with an erection that barely subsided in the 45 minutes it took me to get out of bed, dress for work, and take the Tube two stops up the Victoria Line to Vauxhall.

After I’d settled down on the train, I started typing out what I could remember of the dream, and it quickly became a short, filthy series of tweets, which I thought I’d share here too. The format/style probably works better in 140-character format than as a big block of prose, but if you do enjoy it, let me know here or on Twitter, and I’ll aim to post more in future…

Ok, the results are in! It’s customary with this kind of contest to begin by emphasising how difficult it was to elevate one entry above the rest, but on this particular occasion that’s almost painfully true. I managed to get it down from 11 to five on the second reading, from five to three on the fourth, and since then…well, that was six hours ago and since then I’ve been pretty much stuck!

It’s a lovely problem to have, of course – testament to the high quality of the writing on show – and I’m happy to say I genuinely enjoyed re-reading all 11 entries, which rarely happens; there was something to admire in each of them, from small, deliciously sexy moments through to their wider, tangible sense of storytelling and eroticism.

The three finalists had both of those qualities in spades, and took them to the next level with creative, exciting interpretations of the prompt – as well as a real freshness and originality. It’s all subjective, I realise, but in each of them I saw something different; something I kept coming back to as I read through them.