Today we’re excited to talk with another fellow author from the Sapphic Planet anthology, available in print and EBook. Welcome, Jean Roberta!

I’m Jean Roberta, and I teach English in a university on the Canadian prairies. Thanks to the law that made same-sex marriage legal throughout Canada in 2005, my long-term sweetie and I got married on October 30 (Halloween weekend) 2010.  We’re currently going through Renovation Hell, upgrading our vintage house which was built in 1914. We plan to invite more guests to our home when it’s ft for company.

I write in several genres. Over eighty of my erotic stories have appeared in print anthologies such as the annual Best Lesbian Erotica series (2000, ’01, ’04, ’05, ’06, ’07, ’09). A few of my non-erotic (sensual or suggestive) lesbian stories have appeared in such places as Kissed by Venus (www.kissedbyvenus.ca), where I also review books with lesbian content and write a regular column, “Stranger Than Fiction.”

My older publications are listed on my own site, www.JeanRoberta.com. I write monthly reviews for the in-depth review site for erotic literature, Erotica Revealed (www.eroticarevealed.com). I blog every Thursday on the six-writer blog, Oh Get a Grip (www.ohgetagrip.blogspot.com).

A collection of my rants, um, articles on the politics of sex is available as an e-book, Sex Is All Metaphors, from the Coming Together enterprise (www.eroticanthology.com) which publishes erotica to raise funds for good causes. These 25 pieces originally appeared in my column on the site of the Erotic Readers and Writers Association (www.erotica-readers.com) from 2008 to 2010. The title, “Sex Is All Metaphors,” is based on a line in a poem by Dylan Thomas.

My story in the Sapphic Planet anthology is named “Fame.” It’s about the kind of misunderstanding that often occurs in fairly small lesbian communities, where everyone “knows” everyone else, but where gossip and impressions can be misleading.

Is fame in the eyes of the beholder?

“Emerald Green,” locally-famous lesbian writer of Victorian mystery novels and visual artist, lives in the same artsy neighborhood as Jen, university professor and specialist in linguistics. Jen is fascinated by “Emerald,” but she doesn’t want to seem like a stalker. “Emerald” thinks Jen is an intellectual snob until she works up the nerve to speak to her about rising property taxes in the neighborhood.

Jen offers “Emerald” a glass of wine and an explanation. The two women discover that they have much more in common than they knew.

Here is a passage about “Emerald,” told from Jen’s viewpoint:

“Her pen name was Emerald Green, but her real name was Emily Carr. Really.

Emily was short, curvy, and charismatic. If you were in the same room with her, you couldn’t ignore her. It didn’t matter whether her body type, her strong features or her hair color of the week were currently fashionable. Emily didn’t need to follow trends. She was the kind of person who sets them.

I surfed to the website of “Emerald Green” regularly to read the latest news about her Victorian mystery series, and I checked her blog every day to read her thoughts. I bought one of her whimsical pen-and-ink drawings on-line. It was named Submission, and it showed a busty dark-haired woman on all fours, licking the high-heeled boots of a slim blonde who would have looked unnaturally tall even in bare feet. The Mistress was smiling as she peered sideways at her maid’s bare, pink bottom, exposed beneath her little black skirt and the long white sash of her frilly apron, which was tied in a large, poofy bow at her waist. The picture looked like an erotic portrait of Lady Gwendolyn and her maid Mary, the crime-solving team in the mystery novels.

“Emerald Green,” a self-professed submissive, was as much a creation as anything else she produced.”

Little does Jen know that Emily finds her cool, aloof, intellectually intimidating and very sexy. Jen is still feeling unlovable since her live-in girlfriend moved out, but Emily’s admiration seems like a miracle cure.

Most of my lesbian stories could be classified as erotica rather than Happy-Ever-After romances, but lesbian erotic romance is growing in popularity, and it is fun to write.

In “Madame Blanche,” I retell a French fairy tale of the 1600s about a shapeshifting cat and the prince who discovers her secret. In my version, the “prince” is every bit as bold but not as male as he is in the original. This story appears in a collection of lesbian fairy tales, Rumpled Silk Sheets:  www.ravenousromance.com/lesbian/rumpled-silk-sheets-lesbian-fairy-tales.com

My story about a singing ghost, “Authentic,” appears in an award-winning anthology, Haunted Hearths and Sapphic Shades: Lesbian Ghost Stories, from Lethe Press (www.lethepressbooks.com).

Watch for my very short story, “Signature,” in a new anthology, Girl Fever: 69 Stories of Sudden Sex for Lesbians: www.cleispress.com/book_page.php?book_id=455.