Baby Love

Please welcome guest blogger Jeffe Kennedy/Jennifer Paris

I’ve just started a new novel. And I’m totally in love.

You know how it is, right? I’m just 7,000 words in and they’re just *so* cute at this age! All we do is cuddle and play. She sleeps through the night and never gives me any trouble. She is all potential right now – she could grow up to be anyone at all. Everything about her is lovely, fresh and new.

I know this will change. She’s my third novel, so I’ve been around the block. She’ll start to put up resistance after the first 20,000 words or so. There will be arguing. She’ll refuse to speak to me and I’ll sit in the silence and wonder where I went wrong. The only way for me to get through that phase is to set firm boundaries. I write 1,000 words a day on her, no matter what. If we have to backtrack because she throws a tantrum, then fine. But we work every day, no matter what her attitude is.

Then comes her moody adolescent period. Some days she’s over the top, bursting with energy, ready to take on the world in all her overconfidence. Other days she sulks, seeming lost. I try to help her along, promising the happy days will return.

It’s the late teenage years when I really start to doubt if she’ll ever make it in the world. I know this is really my expectations coming into play. When she was young, I didn’t have to worry about what kind of living she’d earn. We were happy just being together. But now that she’s nearly a legal adult, I fret about which agents she should apply to and if a reputable publisher will *ever* hire her. I love her, but I also know she can be lazy some days and there might be a couple of profound character flaws that will hold her back.

After all, I have two novels out in the world already. They don’t call or write often. I know they’re consumed with the job search, so I try to leave them alone and not fret or nag. Some days there’s news – a potential job offer, an interview that goes great. One of them, though, I haven’t heard from in quite some time. I’m hoping he isn’t languishing in a crack house in the city somewhere.

So, I’m trying to just enjoy my time with this new baby. I know she’ll grown up and life will get more difficult for her. But for right now, it’s just the two of us.

And anything is possible.

Jeffe Kennedy, is an essayist and fiction-writer. Her work has appeared in diverse magazines such as Redbook, Puerto del Sol, Wyoming Wildlife, Under the Sun and Aeon. She has been a Ucross Foundation Fellow, a Wyoming Arts Council roster artist and winner of their Poetry Fellowship. Her essay collection, Wyoming Trucks, True Love and the Weather Channel was published by University of New Mexico Press in 2004. Jeffe has written two novels, received numerous full manuscript requests, but is not yet represented by an agent. An erotic novella, Petals and Thorns, came out under her pen name of Jennifer Paris in 2010. Jeffe lives in Santa Fe, with two Maine coon cats, a border collie, plentiful free-range lizards and frequently serves as a guinea pig for an acupuncturist-in-training.


Petals and Thorns

In exchange for her father’s life, Amarantha agrees to marry the dreadful Beast and be his wife for seven days. Though the Beast cannot take Amarantha’s virginity unless she begs him to, he can and does take her in every other way. From the moment they are alone together, the Beast relentlessly strips Amarantha of all her resistance.

If Amarantha can resist her cloaked and terrifying husband, she gains his entire fortune and will be allowed to return to her family and a normal life. But the Beast seduces her at every turn, exposing, binding, tormenting, and pleasuring Amarantha until she no longer knows her own deepest desires.

Increasingly desperate to break the curse that chains his humanity, the Beast drives Amarantha past every boundary. But her desire for a normal life may jeopardize the love that will save them both.

Publisher's Note: This book contains explicit sexual content, graphic language, and situations that some readers may find objectionable: Anal play, BDSM theme and elements, dubious consent.