Happy Birthday Riptide Publishing! Blog hop stop/Prizes

Thanks for joining us on the Riptide Publishing First Anniversary Blog Hop Bash! All month long, we’re bringing you guest posts and interviews from your favorite authors, artists, and Riptide staff. As a thank you for helping us celebrate, we’re also giving away $10 in Riptide store credit to one lucky commenter at every stop! Simply leave a comment below by 11:59pm on Sunday, October 21^st to enter. Be sure to check out our complete tour schedule to find out where else you can enter to win—one Grand Prize winner drawn from commenters at all the stops will also win a Kindle that we’ll load with every book we publish in 2013!

Plus, check out our anniversary sale—All October long, backlist titles are 15%-50% off!

Today we have an interview with Elyan Smith, author of Portside, and contributing author to the upcoming kinky holiday anthology O Come All Ye Kinky. 20% of the proceeds from O Come All Ye Kinky go to the NLA’s domestic violence charity!

Hi Elyan! To get started, tell us: what draws you to LGBT fiction?

It's a broad enough genre that I can do most of the things I do within it without being constrained by genre expectations. I'm publishing on the fringes of M/M romance at the moment and it's important to keep in mind that most readers who'll stumble across my stories will come at them with those genre expectations but I don't, ultimately, write M/M romance. I'm not the biggest fan of romance as a genre with the framework and cornerstones that are a necessity in genre fiction (HEA for one, the romance plot line for another). I like love stories, I like people, and if they end up together that's great, but I think that I just don't have the skills to write good genre fiction so sticking to a broader umbrella without the same tight expectations suits me fine.

What do you think is sexy?

Messy sex. Humiliation. An edge of control. Gagging on cock. In other words, fairly explicit sex things. I'm not the type to go for lingerie or candles and music – that said, in the right mood for the right people it can be incredibly sexy, but I like my sex explicit and pushing the boundaries a little.

Do you write under a pen name? Why or why not? Will you tell us your real name?

Given I write sexually explicit stories, it seemed a bad idea to link my real name and my pen name given that folks from my work environment would have reason to google my name for work-related reasons. It still seems a good idea to keep the two entirely separate.

Speaking of online hangouts, where are yours? Where can your readers find you?

The easiest place to get a hold of me would be on twitter at @ElyanSmith or on my website at http://www.elyansmith.com

What’s your current book list and where can we buy them?

My fairly short list of publications is on my website, and the stories are available via Riptide's website, through amazon and all other major sellers.

Do you tend to base your characters on real people or are they totally from your imagination?

They're completely from my imagination. I don't think I've ever sat down and taken anyone I knew. There are probably slivers of people I know in there, inevitably, but I tend to rely much more on my imagination when creating a character.

 Can you tell us a little about your latest release?

Portside, which came out with Riptide July 2012, is a story about Iwan, a Welsh guy who ends up paying a bloke for sex to get his first experience out of the way with. More than that though it is, I suppose, about living in poor run-down towns, the kind of stuff you spend your time with, and what you do with your life if you see all the glorious, pretty things on the TV, knowing that what you have isn't that glorious or pretty but it's still your life.

What does your family think of you writing erotica?

They, ah, don't know. My parents are quite eager to know what I'm writing and publishing but so far I've managed to keep my pseudonym (and with it the messy blowjobs etc) secret. They keep nagging and say they'd even buy a copy but all they know is that I write LGBT fiction – the erotic component is the dirty little secret still.

What made you publish with Riptide?

A friend pointed them out to me just before they launched and at the time they were the only ones openly seeking and advertising for fiction with trans* characters

What have you liked best about working with Riptide?

We've been on the same wavelength regarding trans* in LGBTQ fiction, so that's helped a great deal in making Portside work (and will hopefully hold true for the future as well).

Do you get a lot of fan mail?

I think I'm not prolific or known enough to be at that point yet (I have gotten a few really nice tweets though :) ), so if anyone want to get in there and be the first person ever to send me any? Feel free ;)

Where should readers send mail if they want to contact you?

elyan.smith@gmail.com

Author Bio: Elyan Smith lives in the southwest of England. Friends regularly accuse him of being an antisocial sod who spends too much of his free time looking at porn on the internet, when in truth he spends most of it writing—but the porn's the easier excuse. He works as a researcher in psychology by day, and when he's not writing, he's probably in the theater, watching other people create magic.
You can find Elyan at his website (http://elyansmith.com/) and on twitter (http://twitter.com/elyansmith).