Please welcome David Russell!

I'm excited to introduce another author to my blog! I want to welcome David Russell! First I’d love you to introduce yourself.

Tell us about your latest release: My latest release (pending) is a collection of four short stories, Seductive Semaphore, The Heroine and the Author, Dancing with Danger, and Dreamtime Sensuality.

Now I have a few questions for you – I have found readers do like to know fun things about us writers.

1.) Who is your favorite villain – it can be from a book (even one of yours), movie or TV show. And why? Henry Morgan the Pirate

2.) Who is your favorite character out of your books? Why? Selene, the heroine of my novella Self’s Blossom. I guess I have a fantasy obsession about her.

3.) What do genre do you write? What made you pick that one? I do journalism, poetry, speculative fiction and romantic fiction. I was long ago inspired by the works of Anais Nin, and the novel The Girl Beneath the Lion (Le Lys de Mer) by André Pieyre de Mandiargues. A close friend tried writing in this mode, which prompted me to attempt it.

4.)What are you working on now? I’m approaching the final editing stage of my four stories.

5.) What got you to start writing? A struggle for self-expression: I am very shy, and a poor conversationalist.

6.) Where do you get your ideas from? Books, movies, videos, acquaintances’ accounts of their experiences.

7.) What would people who read your work be surprised to find out about you? That I am really very shy.

8.) Do you have any special talents? Hopefully as a writer, musician and visual artist.

9.) What was the one piece of advice you received when you were an aspiring author that has stuck with you? Why? “I should scrap your present methods if I were you, and try approaching things on a new tack.” I did; it worked.

10.) If you could talk to any famous figure (present, past or fictional) who would it be and what would you talk about? Ben Okri, the poet and the novelist, about the imagination.

11.) What song would you say describes your life? There are so many, but perhaps Bob Dylan’s Idiot Wind should have priority.

12.) If you could come back as any animal – what would it be? An armadillo; I’d like to protect myself.

Thanks for joining me David and answering my crazy questions.

Excerpt

Six-thirty p.m. in the lounge - the prearranged rendezvous time if things had been normal. Selene was first to arrive. Would Hudson now feel inclined to turn up? Would he be in any state to turn up? She noticed on her way that his key had not been returned to reception. In fact, he arrived at seven, looking incredibly coy, bashful and apologetic - just like Selene felt. He was carrying a gold lacquered gift box. She gave him a nod and a smile, beckoning him to sit down beside her. They kissed tentatively - reticently. 

"Oh Selene, I really am sorry I got carried away like that. It was dreadful of me." 

Selene patted him on the knee. "Darling, I should be apologizing for getting all hysterical like that." 

He put the box in front of her. "I went diving, wanted to come to my end in the depths; felt I couldn't live with myself, but I was obviously called to find something. I guess I realized one of my ambitions." He opened the box. In it was an oyster containing a huge pearl. Selene gave him a hug, tearful in her appreciation of his courage. "I've had to reflect an awful lot on my past experiences, you know. I've had to study feminism, and I really feel that if both sides - both sexes open up more, accepting more of each other, then life will be so full and enriching. I know that an awful lot happened between us . . ." he hesitated. 

"And?" 

A dreamy glow came over Hudson. "We've got so close, taken plunges together; you were so magnetic in that costume." A lump came to his throat. Selene was now aquiver with suspense. They were at the point of that final something for which she had yearned so desperately for so long. Selene took the words out of his mouth. 

"Let's make everything perfect - the absolute right time, the absolute right place, and in the perfect way. Let's take the bridal suite together for our last night here!" The final overt proposition synchronised absolutely with Selene's memory tensions. A split second before her utterance, she had a vision of being at a ceremonial hair shearing before becoming a nun, and then of a mythical white wedding (the reality of which had never come near her). She thought of the flying buttresses of a cathedral, stained glass tinted in the morning sun, angled to the light of daring love, lifting to heaven. 

Hudson had at last uttered the key word to the elusive combination of the ideal seduction! This just had to have one fragment of impulse and spontaneity in the context of everything else being utterly premeditated. The peak of experience had been rehearsed to the finest detail. True seduction was total theatre. To hell with all those 'ideals' of 'naturalness'! She had seen through them in that turgid forest. The true ideal lay in laced artifice! Here was the final trigger. Ages ago, they had talked away all thought of marriage and domesticity. But Hudson's superb artistry in taking hold of the last remnant of conventionality for the final act of defiance against it. The flouting, the inversion of all the oppressive concomitants of a straight wedding night, was genius. They went into a torrid clinch nearly upsetting one of the tables in the process. 

"Oh darling," said Selene in a half-whisper, "you've done everything right; let's go!"