Free Telepaths Don't Need Safewords, by Cecilia Tan by Circlet Press

Telepaths Don’t Need
Safewords
    “ Age of Majority”
Ebook Edition
    by Cecilia Tan

    Circlet Press, Inc.
    Cambridge, MA
    Copyright Information:
    Telepaths
Don’t Need Safewords and other stories
    Copyright
© 1991, 1992, 2009 by Cecilia Tan
    Original
Cover Art © 1992 by D. Cameron Calkins

    All
Rights Reserved

    Originally
printed in chapbook form, March 1992. Released in ebook form in
November 2009.

    This
ebook edition does not replicate the original printed book. It
contains the same stories but does not have the same introduction or
other matter. It was prepped for upload in-house at Circlet Press and
then converted to multiple ebook formats by the Smashwords
"Meatgrinder."

    Published
by
    Circlet
Press, Inc.
    39
Hurlbut Street
    Cambridge,
MA 02138

    www.circlet.com

    Please
do not support online piracy of copyrighted works. Copies of this
ebook may be purchased through the Amazon Kindle Store, Fictionwise,
Barnes & Noble.com, Scribd, Smashwords, All Romance eBooks, and
many other online sites, as well as from the publisher s own site at
circlet.com.
    Selected Other Titles also by Cecilia Tan

    Edge Plays
    Royal Treatment
    The Siren and the Sword (Magic University, Book One)
    The Hot Streak
    Mind Games
    White Flames
    Black Feathers
    The Velderet
    Contents

    Introduction
    Telepaths Don’t Need Safewords
    Cat Scratch Fever
    Heart’s Desire
    About the Author
    Introduction

    I
know it is hard to believe, but Telepaths Don’t Need
Safewords is now 18 years old. Yes, that’s right, people
who were born when the story was are now old enough to read it.
Scary.
    The story had its
initial release into the wild in 1991, onto an Internet newsgroup
called alt.sex.bondage. The reaction to the story, which was posted
in four separate parts, because in those days of the early text-based
Internet a thousand words was considered a long post, was
overwhelmingly positive. I decided perhaps a printed version was in
order.
    But
once I had decided on a printed version, I decided to go all the way
with it, and start a whole publishing house. I went out and got a PO
Box, an ISBN prefix, and a Very Big Stapler.
    Yes,
I hand-stapled those first 100 printed copies of Telepaths, on the
floor of my Boston apartment. Why the floor? Because the apartment
was too small to have a table, and my desk was taken up with my
computer.
    The
rest, as they say, is history. I sold out of copies at the first
convention I brought them to, Lunacon in Rye, New York, in March
1992. The second printing was done at a commercial printer, 500
copies. Then a thousand. Then two thousand.
    In
the meantime, Circlet Press had begun to take off, too. What was then
a ground-breaking idea, to combine the erotic with sf/fantasy,
excited many readers and writers besides me, and the press grew to a
peak of at one point doing 10-12 trade paperbacks per year.
    Then
came the “returns crisis,” the bankruptcy of our
distributor, 4500 independent bookstores went out of business over a
span of just a few years, leaving us with only 500, then our next
distributor went belly up, and so on. Circlet’s output trickled
to near zero. We had to beg for donations to print Best Fantastic
Erotica in 2006.
    But
a funny thing happened. Although the book retail and book printing
world has gone through massive upheaval and decline over the past 18
years, writers and readers didn’t change all that much, and the
changes that did come were for the better. Readers opened their minds
to more combinations of the erotic with the fantastic. The genre of
paranormal romance was born and has become the dominant category in
romance right now, spilling over into other genres like young adult
(Twilight) and traditional fantasy and science fiction (The Last
Hawk, Sebastian, and many more). But with the bookstores dwindling
and the big chain bookstores clueless about what readers actually
want, the readers turned to the place they originally found stories
like “Telepaths Don’t Need Safewords.”