Jade's Erotic Awards 2009 - Best Cover

Jade Magazine has voted SARAH'S EDUCATION Best Erotic Book Jacket of the Year for 2009. I'm chuffed!

Here's what Jade has to say:

Book Jacket of the Year: SARAH'S EDUCATION (Black Lace).

The great debate over what constitutes an ‘erotic’ image still rages today and is largely subjective. However, of all the books we received for review over the last year the image for the cover of ‘Sarah’s Education’ by Madeline Moore and published by Black Lace was, for us here at JADE, easily the most sensual and erotic image we had seen adorn a book jacket. Without any bare flesh or body parts the simple image spoke seductive, sensual volumes of what was to come - the essence, we believe, of the perfect erotic image.

Let's have a look at that cover, shall we?



My my, this looks like my favourite kind of erotic book:

Purty on the Outside,
Dirty on the Inside!

Okay, so I didn't take the picture or pose for it or even get to choose it, but I like it! No, scratch that. I love it!

My dear 'friend I've never met', Janine Ashbless, received Jade's Award for writer of the year, 2009.

A;though Black Lace, Virgin Books, gets the credit on Jade's site, we all know it's the parent company that makes or breaks a little imprint.

So congratulations, Random House! From the inside out, you really know how to produce award winning erotica!

Thank You. Thank You very much!

Hello Stranger, Hello Neighbour

Not so long ago, we lived in communities where everybody knew each other.
When a person fell ill, she could depend on her neighbours for food and comfort.
If a fire razed one man’s farmhouse, he could be sure that soon a man, and another, and another, would arrive with wood and nails to help him erect a new one. We lived in communities.

These days we strive to live in isolation. How many people, even those living in apartments, know the people who live across the hall, never mind on another floor of the same building. When our neighbours, people who live near us but are strangers, experience misfortune, we don’t know about it or, if we do, we turn a blind eye and a deaf ear. “I have my own problems,” we mutter defensively. “Life is hard.”

Maybe we’re the ones making life hard.

One day my daughter came to visit me for the first time in my apartment. Her father and I had split up and she’d chosen to live with him. I was understandably nervous when she decided to go for a walk downtown. Although I live in a small town she was only nine at the time and I worried for her safety.

When she returned I immediately asked, “Did anyone talk to you?” And she replied, “Only one man. He lives in that house with the stone fence that is on the corner opposite this apartment building.”

“Oh.” I knew the house, of course, how could I not? I walked by it every day, at least twice. But I hadn’t bothered to wonder who lived in it, though the occupants were my “neighbours.”

No, I’d been too preoccupied with my troubles. Why had my marriage failed? Not so long ago I’d been the wife of a wealthy man with a big house full of things, my own car, and many supposed good friends. Where had everything and everybody gone?

Now I asked my daughter, “What did he say.”

“Well,” she replied, “he said, ‘Everybody’s a fucking asshole.’”

There it was, the answer to all my questions, out of the mouth of a babe as related to her by a complete stranger.
The moral of this little tale is simple.

Everybody is a fucking asshole.