image credit: White Room, via Tamsin Flowers

My name is now in print in a book you can actually buy! Or, well, download to your Kindle, because the book is free. Now before you get too excited about that comment, no, I do not mean that I have finally published something to Amazon. Soon, I hope! Some day…

However, my dear friend Tamsin Flowers, whom I have talked about before in these pages and with whom many of you are already familiar, has done something I did not expect, something that took my breath away when I saw it.

Tamsin, of course, has published quite a few books. She is a prolific and fabulous author, and her works are both kinky and quirky. There is usually a lighthearted tone to her erotica, and a lot of fun and whimsy, though occasionally she goes to something a little darker, and that’s pretty exciting, too.

Now she is embarking on something a little different, a little retro you might say, hearkening back to the days of the penny dreadfuls and when many novels were published in serial form in the pages of magazines and newspapers. She is writing a great omnibus of a book, Alchemy xii, and publishing it one month at a time, in thirteen installments. The first installment, the prologue to the series, is titled New Year’s Eve, and although it was intended to become available on December 31st, it is in fact available on Amazon now. For free.

image credit: White Room, via Tamsin Flowers

Which means you really have no excuse not to download this book to your Kindle immediately. If you do so, and you go to the back of the book, there is an acknowledgments page. Four people are acknowledged there for their assistance helping Tamsin make this book the best it could be. Three of those names are probably no surprise to anyone following along: Malin James, Jade A Waters, and Eva Gantz. Malin and Jade are published authors, Eva is a standout in the publishing industry, and all three are popular bloggers or podcasters who have worked with Tamsin for some time.

The fourth name is Lace Winter.

Me. Alongside these greats. Included in Tamsin Flowers’ new book.

All I can say is that I feel incredibly honored that Tamsin asked me to help, and humbled to be included.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. The acknowledgments are at the back of the book. You really should get there by reading the book. You will want to read this book, the prologue and every installment. My name is in there because I believe in this book, because it truly is excellent.

In fact, my first ever Amazon review on any book is for New Year’s Eve. There will be more (I have a small backlog of books I loved that I want to go review), but there can be only one first.

So what is it all about? Well, it’s a ‘club BDSM’ story, and of course there have been many of those (I love reading them myself), but Alchemy xii goes a bit beyond that. The Alchemy of the title is the club itself, a near-mythical place occupying several floors atop a tall skyscraper in downtown Chicago. ‘Alchemy xii,’ or Alchemy 12, is the name of the club’s submissive training program, a year-long program in which a small handful of very lucky subs participate, at the end of which a number of opportunities may open up for them. Not all of them will complete the program. The head of the program, and Chicago’s ‘Prince of Kink,’ is Harry Lomax, a Dom a bit unlike most you will have encountered in fiction before (and probably outside of fiction, too). Harry is a very compelling character, not a cookie-cutter at all, complex and with his own little quirks. He’s not perfect, in the sense that he’s a human being, too, and this just makes him all the sweeter in my view. He’s also not pure Dom; he has a switchy side to him, in the right circumstances, and New Year’s Eve gives us a hint of that in his interactions with his boss and friend, Belladonna Grim. However, when he’s with his subs, there is never any doubt about who’s in charge, and whatever doubts and anxieties Harry may have, he won’t let them show here.

New Year’s Eve is told from Harry’s point of view and is the story of how, with a matter of only a few days and then just hours to go before the start of the new training program, he still has one trainee slot to fill. Enter Olivia Roux. Harry spots her while canvassing other clubs and immediately knows she’ll be perfect. He also knows he has to approach her just right, or she’ll run, because she’s new to this scene. In this installment, Harry courts Olivia for his program, although he doesn’t tell her until just a few hours before the deadline — Midnight, New Year’s Eve — what is really going on. Then the question is whether she will accept on such short notice, or will she turn him down?

Olivia herself is not pure sub, and this is something Harry sees in her early on, though she doesn’t know it yet about herself. Olivia is also a bit switchy. She definitely thinks for herself; no pushover, our Olivia.

image credit: White Room, via Tamsin Flowers

The suspense, of course, is whether Olivia will accept, but it’s probably not much of a spoiler, because the rest of the series will be Olivia’s journal entries as she recounts and reflects upon her experiences. Oh, and yes, I’ve had a sneak peek into January, which will become available on January 1st, and I am not going to give anything away except to say that you will absolutely fall in love with Olivia when she finds her voice, just as you will fall in love with Harry in New Year’s Eve. You will want to be Olivia when she first experiences Alchemy.

Alchemy: (n) A power or process of transforming something common into something special. (source: Merriam-Webster)

Tamsin Flowers has worked her process and the result really is something special.

image credit: White Room, via Tamsin Flowers