Welcome!

Welcome to good sturdy jeans, the blog of Jean Roberta, a writer of a certain age who lives on the vast, windy Canadian prairie and tortures the young by teaching mandatory first-year English classes in the local university. Heh.

Whoever you are, please feel at home in my parlour. If it's cold where you live, pull a chair close to the fireplace.

This blog is intended to be relatively clean and respectable (most modifiers are relative) in contrast with my erotic fiction, which can be found elsewhere.

Approximately 60 (I no longer count every one) of my sexually-explicit stories have been published in print anthologies such as Best Fantastic Erotica 1, newly hatched (like a baby dragon) by Circlet Press, edited by publisher Cecilia Tan, the Best Lesbian Erotica series from Cleis Press (BLE 2000, 2001, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007), The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica 6 (one of Maxim Jakubowski's series of already-published material), two December-holiday anthos edited by Alison Tyler for Cleis (Merry Xxxmas, 2006, and Naughty or Nice, 2007), some fetish anthos edited by Rachel Kramer Bussel (Sexiest Soles: Erotic Stories About Feet and Shoes and the forthcoming Rubber Sex, both from Alyson Books), and many more.

If you want a complete list, just ask.

In January 2008, Eternal Press of Australia brought out my first single-author collection of erotic stories, Obsession, consisting of 14 stories in various sexual flavours and genres (fantasy, realistic contemporary, noir, historical). It is availabe only in e-form until summer 2008, when it is scheduled to go into print.

I also write reviews for a website, Erotica Revealed, run by Diane King of New York, where you can read about current erotic books before spending your hard-earned cash on them.
My reviews also appear fairly often on the sites Clean Sheets, girlphoria, TCM Reviews, Rainbow Reviews (for GLBT material), and in print journals The Gay and Lesbian Review (from Mass., formerly produced at Harvard), Batteries Not Included and Perceptions: The Gay/Lesbian Newsmagazine of the Prairies.

You can also find me in some other odd places in cyberspace - sometimes in other folks' blogs. I post to Live Journal as "Lizardlez." (And you might find a photo of me with my turquoise lizard tattoo.)

I like to jump across the gap between the world of academic lit-crit and the various worlds of sexually-explicit writing on the screen & the page. Academics, strangely enough, live in bodies like everyone else. Most human beings have minds, to use the term loosely. The perceived gulf between mind and body, a stale remnant of a kind of medieval Christian mindset, does not really exist.

Would you like to hear my spiel on the differences between the vebs "to lie" and "to lay"? Or my explanation of why "splitting an infinitive" has been traditionally described as a dangerous act of rebellion? (Incidentally, that's the name of a story about my alter ego, Dr. Athena Chalkdust.)
Or why the subjunctive voice in English is not simply a kind of outdated organ like the appendix? No? Well, maybe another day.

Feel free to check in again to read the rant, uh discussion du jour.