How To Wonderfully WriteSex (13)

Check it out: my new post at the fantastic WriteSex site just went up. Here's a tease (for the rest you'll have to go to the site):

“The assassin readied himself, beginning first by picking up his trusty revolver and carefully threading a silencer onto the barrel.”

That reads right enough, doesn’t it? You look at it and it sings true. But it’s not. Not because the assassin is a product of my imagination but because, except for one very rare instance, silencers cannot be fitted onto revolvers. So every time you see Mannix or Barnaby Jones facing off against some crook with a little tube on the end of their revolver, keep in mind that it has no bearing on reality.

What does this have to go with smut writing? Well, sometimes erotica writers—both old hands and new blood—make the same kind of mistakes: not so much a revolver with a silencer, but definitely the anatomical or psychological equivalent.

People ask me sometimes what kind of research I do to write erotica. The broad answer is that I seriously don’t do that much true research, but I do observe and try and understand human behavior— no matter the interest or orientation—and add that to what I write. But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t some (ahem) fieldwork involved.

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I Am The 99%

I just wish I could be there to add by body, as well as my voice, to this movement!

Excerpt: Better Than the Real Thing

Now here's a treat: the great folks at 4-Letter Words not just feature a lot of my books but also just posted a sweet excerpt from my new collection, Better Than the Real Thing.  Check out the story, "A Light Minute" over there ... but in the meantime here's a tease:

How are you today?  was all the message said.  It was their ritual, a tight tradition between them.  Sasha was an night timer, a sunset-to-dawn kind of girl.  Before she crawled into her “warm flannel cave and drew sleep up over her eyes” (she’d written) she always left that message for Alyx to find in her own preferred morning.

Happy, Alyx sent back with a flutter of keystrokes, love you.  Another ritual, much more recent.  Alyx felt it, though, with a tug of hesitation, a grip in her chest of uncertainty.  It might well have been totally true, that Sasha was the love of her life – but they’d never met.

So much was known – despite all that was unknown (the sound of her voice, the way she smiled) – that Alyx was very certain about the feelings she had for the tiny, dark-haired girl with the sweet little bulb of a nose, deeply tanned cheeks and vibrant brown eyes (I’m a Mediterranean princess who likes the night): a color print of her framed neat over her machine’s monitor.  Even without hearing her voice or really seeing her face (beyond the picture she’d transmitted) she knew that Sasha somehow fitted perfectly into her life.  Their conversations, though time-delayed, hummed and clicked with a familiarity that belied their three month relationship.

At first Alyx was hesitant about venturing into the electronic unknown.  The world was still much too loud, hard, and brilliant for her back then to learn the unfathomable language of baud, server, gateway, and the like.  Jo had left her – taken her pictures, blankets, clothes, books, and herself and left Alyx nothing but her little Santa Cruz bungalow.  That, and a series of pains when Alyx did anything – anything at all.  Till, that is, her brother smashed open her front door, emitting a torrent of painful light and crashing street noise and slammed down a small box next to her antique computer.  In a sympathetic whisper that sounded like a torrent of dishware pouring down a tin-shod mountainside, he had said, “If you won’t go out, maybe at least you’ll meet someone else.”

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Out Now: Finger's Breadth By M.Christian

Zumaya Books and M.Christian are pleased to announce the publication of a brand new gay erotic horror/thriller by M.Christian:

Look at your hand: four fingers and a thumb, right?  But what if you woke one morning and rather than four fingers and a thumb you are ... short?  How would you feel?  What would you do?  What would you become?

The city is terrified: a mysterious figure is haunting the streets of near-future San Francisco, drugging and amputating the fingertips of queer men.  But what's worse … this terror or that it can, so easily, turn any of us into something even more horrific?

Erotic.  Nightmarish.  Fascinating.  Disturbing.  Intriguing.  Haunting.  You have never read a book like Finger's Breadth.  

You will never look your fingers - or the people all around you - the same way again.

Here’s what some people are saying about Finger's Breadth:

Finger's Breadth may well rank as one of the most psychologically astute erotic novels since Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs, and it deserves to be just as widely read.

- JKB, from the Circlet Press site

Finger's Breadth is a real wild ride, the sort of novel you turn to when the apocalyptic mayhem out your window gets dull, and you lust for something to remind you of what it's like to live life at full-throttle. M.Christian sends the reader hurtling like a hockey puck through a world of crime, out-of-control passions, mutilation, and madness. Terms like noir and hardboiled don't quite fit - this is more like ultraviolet, the invisible light that makes the scorpions glow in the dark.

- Ernest Hogan, author of Cortez On Jupiter and High Aztech

It is not that hard to come up with an idea that can be turned into a horror story and that is why horror has been part of the folklore of America and why these stories are so popular on camp-outs as we sit around a campfire. To successfully do this, we need a combination of characters and plot but more important than all else is a novel way to relate the story. For me that is the definition of M.Christian. This book is unlike anything I have read before and I suspect that it will stay with me for quite a while.

- Amos Lassen, reviewer

Finger's Breadth creates a vivid portrait of a community torn apart by suspicion, where the thrills of hot, anonymous sex go hand in mutilated hand with the chill of fear, and no one is entirely what they seem. M.Christian skilfully mixes a dark, potent cocktail of lust, longing, paranoia and an overwhelming need for acceptance...

- Liz Coldwell, author of Take Your Slave To Work

To be effective, the act of literary intercourse between horror and erotica should be deeply unsettling. It should leave the reader feeling uncomfortable, overwhelmed by equal parts dread and anticipation. M.Christian understands this better than most, weaving a tale that permits the reader but a finger’s breadth of space between fear and arousal. His deft control of the story makes us feel the blade, but it's his subtle manipulation of our emotions that makes us want the cut.

- Sally Sapphire, Bellasbookslut

M.Christian has seen the future -- and it is hardboiled! If you love crime stories -- gay or otherwise -- and you love science fiction, you will love Finger's Breadth. No other storyteller nails it quite like M.Christian does. This is a real page turner.

-- Marilyn Jaye Lewis, author of Freak Parade

M.Christian is a force to be reckoned with. Just when you think you understand the path that his narrative and characters are taking, Christian throws a monkey wrench, or a limb, or a head into the works and you have to get your bearings and start all over again. No matter which book of his you pick up, prepare for an intoxicatedly weird ride.

-Ily Goyanes, author and filmmaker

Strange and sexy, Finger's Breadth is a seductively suspenseful read.

- Paula Guran, Darkecho

Finger's Breadth is as dark and rich and well-blended as good bourbon. Sexy, suspenseful, and believable in the details and elements of its world. Great stuff!

- Angela Caperton, author of Darkness And Delight

Finger's Breadth is mesmeric storytelling, riveting in execution and appalling in implication.  M.Christian’s tale of erotic terror in a near-future San Francisco is imagined so skillfully that it grabs the reader with its easy familiarity, then refuses to let go as it careens to its shocking yet completely believable conclusion.  Evoking such Grand Masters as Armistead Maupin, Thomas Harris and Rod Serling while remaining strikingly original, Finger's Breadth is Christian at the height of his considerable powers.  Like Charon the ferryman, the author takes the reader down the dark rivers of human sexuality and shows us things that would normally never see the light of day.  Ultimately the most compelling aspect of this fiction is how fascinatingly and terrifyingly plausible it is. Finger's Breadth should come with a warning label: Read this before clubbing.

- Christopher Pierce, author of Rogue Slave, Rogue Hunted, and Kidnapped By A Sex Maniac

Zumaya Books

Paperback: $15.99

ebook: $6.99

ISBN-10: 1934841463

ISBN-13: 978-1934841464

About M.Christian:

M.Christian is - among many things - an acknowledged master of erotica with more than 400 stories in such anthologies as Best American Erotica, Best Gay Erotica, Best Lesbian Erotica, Best Bisexual Erotica, Best Fetish Erotica, and many, many other anthologies, magazines, and Web sites.

He is the editor of 25 anthologies including the Best S/M Erotica series, The Burning Pen, Guilty Pleasures, The Mammoth Book of Future Cops and The Mammoth Book of Tales of the Road (with Maxim Jakubowksi) and Confessions, Garden of Perverse, and Amazons (with Sage Vivant) as well as many others.

He is the author of the collections Dirty Words, Speaking Parts, The Bachelor Machine, Licks & Promises, Filthy, Love Without Gun Control, Rude Mechanicals, Coming Together Presents M.Christian, Pornotopia, and How To Write And Sell Erotica; and the novels Running Dry, The Very Bloody Marys, Me2, Brushes, and Painted Doll.  His Web site is www.mchristian.com.

Interested in reviewing Finger's Breadth?  Write M.Christian at zobop@aol.com for a copy

How Right!

Great time!

Just wanted to toss out a happy, hearty thanks to all the people I met at the very-fun Sex In Sin City: The Erotic Authors Association’s Inaugural Conference in Vegas last month.  I'll probably be posting more about it but in the meantime hope everyone I met had a good time as well!