Sunday, March 25, 2012

How To Wonderfully WriteSex (16)


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):
Like bestiality—and unlike underage sexuality—incest is a tough nut: it’s not something you might accidentally insert into an erotic story. Also like bestiality, it’s something that can definitely push—if not slam—the buttons of an editor or publisher. Yet, as with all of these “sins,” the rules are not as set in stone as you’d think. Hell, I even managed to not only write and sell an incest story (“Spike,” which is the lead story in Dirty Words) but it also ended up in Best Gay Erotica. The trick, and with any of these erotic button-pushers, is context. In the case of “Spike” I took a humorous, surreal take on brother/brother sexuality, depicting a pair of twin punks who share and share alike sexually, until their world is shattered (and expanded) by some rough S/M play. 
As with any of the “sins,” a story that deals with incest in a thought- provoking or sideways humorous manner might not scream at an editor or publisher I’M AN INCEST STORY. Instead, it will come across as humorous or thought-provoking first, and as a tale dealing with incest second. Still, once it comes to light, there’s always a chance the story might still scream a bit, but if you’re a skilled writer telling an interesting story, there’s still a chance quality could win over the theme. 
Unlike bestiality, incest has very, very few stretches (like aliens and myths with bestiality). It’s very hard to stumble into incest. In short, you’re related or you’re not. As far as degree of relationship, that depends on the story and the intent: immediate family relations are damned tough to deal with, but first cousins fooling around behind the barn are quite another. 
[MORE]

Thursday, March 22, 2012

Fingers And Gothic.net

And the crazy publicity spreads: the cool folks at Gothic.net just posted this cool thing about my (ahem) 'unique' approach to getting the word out about Finger's Breadth:


Author M. Christian, upon seeking publicity for his newest novel, “Finger’s Breadth”, has threatened to cut off the tip of his little finger. This idea goes in line with the books character that does a similar fashion of chopping in a futuristic noir San Francisco world. Acknowledging how tough it is to spread the word about new books, Christian readily admits that this is a public relations stunt. His theory is that it takes someone to think outside of the box in order to garner the attention it requires for the novel to reach a wider audience. Christian has an impressive list of accomplishments, including six novels, over four hundred short stories, nine author collections, editing twenty-five anthologies, and being a contributor to Gothic.net. “Finger’s Breadth”, published by Zumaya Publications, is a gay erotic science fiction horror thriller. More of an intense psychological ride, the novel serves to dissect human nature rather than to deliver surface scares. So far he still has all of his digits, but who knows what will happen in time.
[MORE

Wednesday, March 14, 2012

M.Christian Teaches!


If you live in the San Francisco Bay Area, here's not one, not two, but THREE chances to attend one of my celebrated classes!

Magic Words: Using Erotic Writing To Explore Your Hidden Sexuality And Spirituality

Tuesday, March 27, 2012, 07:30pm
$15-30 sliding scale
Center For Sex And Culture
1349 Mission Street (at Grace Street between 9th and 10th streets) in San Francisco

There are many ways to reach your inner sexual and spiritual self -- but one of the most surprisingly powerful paths is through the written word. In this lecture/workshop, participants will hear how erotic writing (fiction as well non-fiction) can reach hidden places that often lay unexposed, help make personal discoveries and to assist in a personal journey of self and sensuality. Participants will learn how to free their erotic writing voices, how to develop their writing towards discovering their erotic spirits within, and when to silence -- and when to listen -- to the inner critic.

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Sex Sells: How To Write & Sell Erotica

Tuesday, April 24, 2012, 07:30pm
$15-30 sliding scale
Center For Sex And Culture
1349 Mission Street (at Grace Street between 9th and 10th streets) in San Francisco

The market for erotic fiction and nonfiction is booming! There actually is a secret to writing great erotica - and you'll discover just what that is in this fun, hands-on workshop with well-known erotica writer and teacher M. Christian.

For the beginning writer, erotica can be the ideal place to begin writing, getting published, and -- best of all -- earning money. And for the experienced writer, erotica can be an excellent way to beef up your resume and hone your writing skills. M. Christian will review the varieties of personal and literary expression possible in this exciting and expanding field. He'll also teach you techniques for creating love and sex scenes that sizzle.

Plus: current pay rates, how to write for a wide variety of erotic genres, where and how to submit your erotic writing, and more.

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Sex Magic: Manifesting Positive Life Energy Through Erotic Play


Thursday, April 26, 2012 · 7:00 PM – 9:00 PM
$20 Non-Members, $15 Members (smOdyssey, Inc.)
Private Location in San Jose

Sex, without a doubt, is a powerful personal force: it has the ability to not only give tremendous pleasure but also lift us up beyond our normal selves, and sometimes even to higher states of consciousness. Whether through sex with a partner or via masturbation, this class will explore how sex can be used to explore sometimes hidden spiritual and sensual dimensions, grow as a sexual being, manifest positive life-changing energy, or simply have a lot of wonderfully erotic fun!

But sex also has its emotional risks as well, and participants will also learn how to protect themselves as they explore sex magic and deal with sometimes shocking revelations about who they are as a sexual being.

Tuesday, March 13, 2012

Future Fire Likes Finger's Breadth

(Happy dance) Here's something very cool: a nice review for my gay sexual thriller Finger's Breadth by the fantastic folks at Future's Fire.  Here's a tease:


M. Christian is well-known for his erotic stories, as well as editing several erotic anthologies, so I wasn’t surprised to find that his newest novel, Finger’s Breadth, was pretty explicit. This is not a book to read if you are easily offended. Published by Zumaya Boundless, the gay, lesbian, bisexual or transsexual-themed imprint of Zumaya Publications, which has been putting out both e-books and print since 2001. 
Finger’s Breadth takes place in San Francisco in the near future—someone is drugging random gay men and cutting off the tip of their little finger. The gay bars in the area are almost empty; men are staying home, scared it might happen to them. The police are baffled; there are no suspects. The first victim, Varney, works for the newspaper and becomes a celebrity of sorts. But his celebrity isn’t exactly earned, and this is eating Varney up inside. He debates with himself whether to confess his sin while still using his infamy to reach out to the public. 
Then a gradual change comes over the gay population—those who have been cut are looked at as desirable, exciting. Those who have not been cut now begin to feel left out, even ashamed—aren’t they good enough to be approached by the cutter? Are they unattractive? The bars fill up again; the patrons divided between victims and wanna-bes. It’s rarely said aloud, but those men who are whole are hoping to be the next victim. The internet burns with men in chatrooms, looking for the cutter or a reasonable facsimile. Although the story is seen through the eyes of several characters, quite a bit of the book is written in chatroom format, with the cutter—or supposed cutter—looking for victims. 
[MORE]

Monday, March 12, 2012

Sunday, March 11, 2012

Confessions Of A Literary Streetwalker: "Hey There, Big Boy--"

Check this out: I just wrote a neat little "Confessions Of A Literary Streetwalker" for the great Erotica Readers & Writers site about publicity and the lengths that (ahem) 'certain' writers may go for it - and not just me.  Here's a tease - for the rest just check here.


Oh, dear, I've done it again.  
You'd think would have learned my lesson – what with the fallout over the whole Me2 "plagiarism" thing – but I guess not.  
Just in case you may have missed it, I have a new book out, called Finger's Breadth.  As the book is a "sexy gay science fiction thriller" about queer men losing bits of their digits – though, of course, there's a lot more to the novel than that.  
Anyhow, I thought it would be fun to create another bout ofcrazy publicity by claiming that I would be lopping off one of my own fingersto get the word out about it.  
Naturally, this has caused a bit of a fuss – which got me to thinking, and this thinking got me here: to a brand new Streetwalker about publicity ... and pushing the envelope. 
The world of writing has completely, totally, changed – and what's worse it seems to keep changing, day-by-day if not hour-by-hour.  It seems like just this morning that publishing a book was the hard part of the writing life, with publicity being a necessary but secondary evil.  But not any more: ebooks and the fall of the empire of publishing have flipped the apple cart over: it's now publishing is easy and publicity is the hard part ... the very hard part. 
What's made it even worse is that everyone has a solution:  you should be on Facebook, you should be on Twitter, you should be on Goodreads, you should be on Red Room, you should be on Google+, you should be doing blog tours, you should be ... well, you get the point.  
The problem with a lot of these so-called solutions is that they are far too often like financial advice ... and the old joke about financial advice is still true: the only successful people are the ones telling you how to be successful. 
That's not to say that you should put your fingers in your ears and hum real loudly: while you shouldn't try everything in regards to marketing doing absolutely nothing is a lot worse.
[MORE] 

Thursday, March 08, 2012

Who Is This Guy?

This is wonderfully, glorious, WEIRD: I just stumbled across this Tumblr post of a picture from Flickr.  But guess who mchristianzobop is?  Oh, and the picture is STILL my iPhone wallpaper ;-)




patronsaintofgelflings:
nomad002 (by mchristianzobop)

Saturday, March 03, 2012

Timothy Leary's NOT Dead

“Admit it. You aren’t like them. You’re not even close. You may occasionally dress yourself up as one of them, watch the same mindless television shows as they do, maybe even eat the same fast food sometimes. But it seems that the more you try to fit in, the more you feel like an outsider, watching the “normal people” as they go about their automatic existences. For every time you say club passwords like “Have a nice day” and “Weather’s awful today, eh?”, you yearn inside to say forbidden things like “Tell me something that makes you cry” or “What do you think deja vu is for?””

- Timothy Leary


Thursday, March 01, 2012

Tease Of "Speaking Parts" From Rude Mechanicals

Just 'cause, here's the teasing opening from my cybersex tale, "Speaking Parts" that's featured in my mechanically themed collection, Rude Mechanicals.  Enjoy!



Pell remembered seeing Arc’s eye—it was the first thing she’d noticed.

Tourmaline and onyx. Silver and gold. A masterpiece watch set in a crystal sphere, the iris a mandala of glowing gold. Her blinks were a camera shutter’s, as imagined by the archetypal Victorian engineer but built by surgical perfection not found anywhere in Pell’s knowledge. The woman’s left eye was jeweled and precise, clicking softly as the woman looked around the gallery, as if the engineers who’d removed her original wet, gray-lensed ball had orchestrated a kind of music to go with their marvelous creation: a background tempo of perfect watch movements to accompany whatever she saw through their marvelous and finely crafted sight. Click, click, click.

An eye like that should have been in a museum, not mounted in a socket of simple human skin and bone, Pell had thought. It should have been in some other gallery, some better gallery, allowed only to look out at, to see other magnificent creations of skilled hands. Jare’s splashes of reds and blues, his shallow paintings were an insult to the real artistry of the woman’s eye.

That’s what Pell thought, at first, seeing Arc – but only seeing Arc’s perfect, mechanical eye.

Pell didn’t like to remember first seeing her that way – through the technology in her face. But it felt, to her, like it had its own kind of ironic perfection to deny it. So Pell lived with the biting truth that she didn’t, at first, see Arc – for her eye.

But later, right after she got momentarily lost in the beauty of Arc’s implant, the woman looked at Pell with her real eye, the gray, penetrating right one – and Pell forgot about the tourmaline, onyx, silver and gold machine.

She had finally seen Arc, herself – the woman, and not the simple, mechanical part. Next to her, the eye was cheap junk: a collection of metal, old rocks, and wires.

* * * *

She wasn’t Arc at first. She began as just the woman with the perfectly created eye. Then she was the beautiful woman. Then she was the woman where she didn’t belong. Seeing her eye, then seeing her, Pell lastly saw her as oil, the kind of oil you’d see pooling in the street, that had somehow managed to make its way into a glass of wine. Agreed, it was cheap red wine – something out of a box and not even a bottle, but, still – she was oil. She didn’t belong and that was obvious, despite the cheapness of the gallery. She could tell, cataloging her bashed and scuffed boots, noting her threadbare jeans, her torn T-shirt, that amid clean jeans and washed (and too black) turtlenecks, she was a discordant tone among the harmonious poseurs in Jare’s tiny South of Market studio.

The woman was aware of her discrepancy. She wandered the tiny gallery with a very large plastic tumbler of vin very ordinare, stopping only once in a while to look at one of Jare’s paintings.

Holding her wine tight enough to gently fracture the cheap plastic with cloudy stress lines, Pell watched her, stared at the tall – all legs and angles, broad and strong – woman with the artificial eye. She tried not to watch her too closely or too intently, sure that if she let slip her fascination she’d scare her off – or worse, bring on an indifferent examination of Pell. Through a sad ballet of a slightly curved lip and a stare that was nothing more than a glance of the eyes, the woman would see Pell but wouldn’t – and that would be an icy needle in Pell’s heart.

Pell had already taken too many risks that night. She already felt like she’d stepped off the edge and had yet to hit the hard reality of the ground. Traps and tigers, beasts and pitfalls for the unwary loomed all around Pell. She moved through her days with a careful caution, delicately testing the ice in front of her, wary of almost-invisible, murky lines of fault. She knew they were there, she’d felt the sudden falling of knowing she’d stepped too far, moved too quickly, over something that had proven, by intent or accident, not to be there. Pell didn’t push on the surface, didn’t put all her weight, or herself, on anything.

But then everything changed. She’d seen Arc and her eye.

The plastic cup chimed once, then collapsed in on itself. Turning first into a squashed oval, the glass cracked, splintered, then folded, the white seams of stress turning into sharp fissures of breakage. The red, freed of its cheap plastic prison, tumbled, cascaded out and down onto  her.

Pell had worn something she knew wouldn’t fit with the rest of the crowd. The official color of San Francisco, she knew, would fill the place with charcoal and soot, midnight and ebony.  White, she’d decided, would pull some of their eyes to her, make her stand out – absence of color being alone in a room full of people dressed in all colors, combined.

"Looks good on you."

The shock of the wine on her white blouse tumbled through Pell as an avalanche of warmth flowed to her face. The decision to wear white that night had come from a different part of herself, a part that had surprised her. Now she was furiously chastising that tiny voice, that fashion terrorist who had chosen the blouse over other, blacker ones.

And so Pell responded, "Not as good as you would" to the tall, leggy, broad shouldered girl with the artificial eye. Which was beautiful, but not as beautiful as the rest of her.

* * * *

Pell’s reason for being at the gallery was Jare. Although she could never wrap her perceptions around the gaunt boy’s paintings, she still came when he asked. Jare, Pell, Fallon, Rasp and Jest. They weren’t close – but then foxhole buddies aren’t always. They weren’t in combat, but they could be. All it would take would be one computer talking to another – no stable job history, thus conscription.

All it took were two computers, passing pieces of information back and forth. Till that happened, they hid and watched the possibility of a real foxhole death in a hot, sweaty part of Central America fly by.

Foxhole buddies. It was Jare’s term – some fleck of trivia that’d hung around him. They didn’t have an official name for their tiny society of slowly (and in some cases not too slowly) starving artists, but Pell was sure that Jare would smile at his trivial term being immortalized among a band of too-mortal kids.

That was Jare. While the rest of them tried to focus on pulling their paintings (Pell, Jare, and Rasp), music (Jest), and sculpture (Fallon) as high as they could, there was something else about Jare – something, like his paintings, that refused to be understood. His techniques were simple enough, broad strokes of brilliant color on soot-black canvas, but his reasons were more convoluted.

Or maybe, Pell had thought earlier that evening (before turning a white blouse red and seeing the woman with the artificial eye for the first time) both man and his work were simple: broad, bold statements designed to do nothing but catch attention. He was like his paintings, a grab for any kind of attention – an explanation too simple to be easily seen.

In the tiny bathroom, Pell tried to get the wine out of her blouse. Contradictory old wives’ tails: first she tried cold, then hot water. The sink ran pink and so, soon, did her blouse.

The woman with the eye stood outside the door, a surprisingly subtle smile on her large mouth. Every once and a while she’d say something, as if throwing a bantering line to the shy girl inside to keep her from drowning in embarrassment.

"Who’s he foolin? I can do better crap than this with a brush up my ass.”

"You should see this chick’s dress. Looks like her momma’s – and momma didn’t know how to dress, either.”

"Too many earrings, faggot. What year do you think this is?

"Hey, girl. Get out here with that shirt. It’s better looking than this fucking stuff on the walls."

Cold water on her hands, wine spiraling down the sink. Distantly, Pell was aware that her nipples were hard and tight – and not from the chill water. Down deep and inside, she was wet. It was a basic kind of primal moisture, one that comes even in the burning heat of humiliation. Finally, the blouse was less red than before. Planning to run to where she’d dropped her old leather coat to hide the stigmata of her clumsiness, her excitement in two hard brown points, she opened the door.

The tall woman smiled down at her, hot and strong. In one quick sweep of her eyes, Pell drank her tall length, strong shoulders, columnar legs. She was trapped, held fast between the hot eyes she knew must have been staring at her, pinning her straight to her embarrassment, and the presence of the woman.

Her eye, the eye, clicked a quick chime of precision – as if expanding its limits to encompass the totality of Pell. Pell did not mind her intense examination. It added, with a rush of feelings, to the quaking in her belly, the weakness in her knees.

"Gotta splash. Wait right here,” Arc said.

Of course she waited.

After a few hammering heartbeats, the door opened and she came out – butchly tucking her T-shirt back into her jeans – and Pell was again at the focus of her meticulously designed sight.

"You live anywhere close? I’m tired of this shit. You?"

"Down the block. Just on the corner," Pell said, trying hard not to smile too much.

The woman downed the small sample of red in her glass and, looking for a place to put it down, and not finding any, just dropped it with a sharp plastic clatter on the floor. "Show me.  It can’t be worse than here. Too many fucking artists."

Always Remember