This week, I have a big anniversary to celebrate: Ten years ago today, I published my first book with Ylva Publishing!
I’m celebrating with a big book giveaway (plus romance trope candles!) and a book sale.
Enter the drawing by filling out the giveaway form that I linked to in the post!
This week’s Sapphic Book Bingo features books about characters with a sexual orientation or gender identity that differs from your own. I’m recommending 15 books with lesbian, bisexual, pansexual, asexual, trans, nonbinary, and intersex characters.
For this week’s Sapphic Book Bingo category, read a sapphic book that mentions the main character having their period.
Especially in romance novels, menstruation is hardly ever mentioned. No one ever seems to have their period or PMS, so this is definitely a true Book Unicorn category.
Since temperatures are turning cooler in the northern hemisphere, let’s read a steamy sapphic book for this week’s Sapphic Book Bingo!
It can be a sapphic erotic romance–where the focus is on the romantic but with several steamy love scenes that are critical to the development of the love story–or sapphic erotica, which focuses on sexual journey of the main character.
For this category, you could read a novel or a shorter steamy story.
If you have read my newest novel, Just a Touch Away, you know that Hannah, the professional cuddler, has aphantasia, and so have I.
Like most people, you’ve probably never heard of aphantasia before reading Just a Touch Away. Aphantasia is the inability to voluntarily form mental images.
Up until a few years ago, I had never heard of it either, even though I’ve had it all my life! We all tend to assume that other people think and experience the world the same way we do. I assumed the same, so it came as a surprise when I discovered that other people can visualize things in their mind’s eye—they really do “see” sheep jumping over a fence when they are counting sheep, and apparently, picturing people naked to help with public speaking isn’t just a joke! Who knew?
As I found out, human minds are actually very diverse.
Read more about what aphantasia is and how it affects being a writer in this blog post. I also interviewed 6 fellow authors of sapphic books who have aphantasia too.
For this week’s Sapphic Book Bingo category, read a sapphic book with a meet-cute. A “meet-cute” is a first meeting between the two main characters that is cute, hilarious, or unusual in some way. Often, it’s a misunderstanding or an awkward situation, e.g., one character spills coffee on the other.
As a surprise for you, I put together an anthology full of “meet-cute” scenes from 45 popular authors of sapphic fiction. You can download “Meet-Cute” as a free ebook.
For this week’s Sapphic Book Bingo, read a sapphic book that mentions another sapphic book or a sapphic book that is mentioned in another sapphic book. For example, Hannah, the main character of my new romance Just a Touch Away, is an avid reader and is seen reading Write for Her by Kim Hartfield. You could read either Just a Touch Away or Write for Her for this category. The book needs to be either mentioned by title or described so clearly that it’s easy to guess which one it is. 15 recommended sapphic books that mention another sapphic …
This week’s category of the Sapphic Book Bingo features sapphic books with main characters who have unusual jobs. You could approach this category in two ways: Either pick a main character with a job that is unusual (or unusual for a woman) in “real life” or choose a main character with a job that you rarely see in sapphic fiction. Some jobs are rare in real life but common in sapphic fiction and the other way around, e.g., cashiers are common in real life but rare in sapphic fiction; famous actresses or pop stars are rare in real life but …
Most sapphic books, like most books in general, are set in the United States, and there are also a lot of sapphic books that take place in the United Kingdom. For this category of the Sapphic Book Bingo, I’d like you to read a book that is set in a country other than the US or the UK.
I’ll share 15 book recommendations below. For more books set all over the world, check out the “country you don’t live in” post of last year’s Sapphic Reading Challenge.
For Book Unicorn category #8 of the Sapphic Book Bingo, read a sapphic book that contains elements of BDSM (bondage and discipline, dominance and submission, sadism and masochism).
BDSM encompasses an entire spectrum of activities, from blindfolds and light restraint to flogging and more restrictive bondage, etc., so pick whatever you prefer.