I'm Going To Be At Con-Volution!

(from M.Christian's Classes And Appearances)

This is gonna be a blast! If you're going to the great Con-Volution convention in Daly City look me up - I'll be doing more than a few panels, a reading and teaching a class on mixing sex in science fiction!

Here's my schedule:

Actual Science in Science Fiction
Saturday 10:00 - 11:15, Sumac (Hyatt Regency SFO)
Should we expect 100% accurate science from authors who are telling a story?
M Christian (M), Jay Hartlove, C. Sanford Lowe, Edward Pizzini Ph.D., Heidi Stauffer

Secret Panel
Saturday 11:30 - 12:45, Harbor B (Hyatt Regency SFO)
If we told you, it wouldn't be a secret, now would it?
Steve Libbey, Matt Marovich, Steven Mix, M Christian, Jennifer Nestojko, Emerian Rich, Sumiko Saulson, Linda Kay Silva, Frank Wu, Carrie Sessarego

New Wave SF
Saturday 13:00 - 14:15, SandPebble D (Hyatt Regency SFO)
Bradford Lyau (M), Dario Ciriello, M Christian, Chuck Serface

Video Games: Past, Present, Future
Saturday 16:00 - 17:15, Harbor A (Hyatt Regency SFO)
Rev. Dr. Christopher Garcia (M), Rob Miles, M Christian, Beau Safken

Reading
Sunday 11:30 - 12:45, Wine Room (Hyatt Regency SFO)
Dario Ciriello, M Christian, Jason Malcolm Stewart, Tyler Hayes

Writers Workshop: Let's Talk About Sex
Sunday 13:00 - 14:15, SandPebble D (Hyatt Regency SFO)
This class will focus on how to write credible and non-awkward sex and love scenes. How to write about the heaving bosoms without blushing and convulsing in giggles.

Up Now At FutureOfSex: Part Two of The Ten Greatest Sexual Innovations to Come!

(from M.Christian's Technorotica)

This is great news: part two of my three part series on The Ten Greatest Sexual Innovations to Come is live!

Check it out at the Future Of Sex site ... in the meantime here's a teasing taste:

In our first installment on future sex technologies, we took a look at upcoming developments in sensory tech: virtual reality, augmented reality, and direct neurostimulation.

But this time around we’re going to explore what may very well happen to the flesh and blood of humanity—and in fact how sex will no longer be just flesh and blood—by examining three promising innovations in sexual biotechnology: cybernetics, body switching, and genetic engineering.
Innovation Four: Cybernetics

Sure, Nathan S. Kline and Manfred Clynes may have coined the term cyborg in 1960, but the concept of enhancing humanity through artificial limbs and organs is actually an ancient one.

Through recent developments in direct nerve connections, exotic materials, and microscopic sensors, we are looking at a time in the not-too-distant future where we won’t just be able to replace missing or diseased organs with artificial ones—but may very well prefer them over the “real thing.”

This is especially true around our sex organs. Just look at how breast implants—in a way a form of artificial augmentation—have changed human eroticism. Right now, breast implants are mostly cosmetic, but what happens when we can alter our physical forms in any way we wish?

That’s the kicker: we’re limited only by our imaginations. More than likely we’ll first see people who look pretty much like people. Soon, though, we’ll begin to realize that we can become anything we want. With soon-arriving technology, we’ll be able to feel an artificial sex organ just as good, if not better, than the flesh and blood version.

What’s even wilder is that if you get tired of whatever new body part you’ve had installed, then you can just swap it out or upgrade it.

With artificial forms we’ll be able to turn any part of our bodies into sex organs, or use our entire bodies as one. We could make love to clouds, ocean currents, solar winds, or entire planets if we desired.

But we’d still be ourselves. This is where another huge development comes in: the technology that will allow us to become someone else.

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A DARK DOINGS AT MISKATONIC U Special: Jason Rubis

(from M.Christian's Meine Kleine Fabrik)

As part of a celebration of the release of Dark Doings at Miskatonic U (that I had the extreme honor of editing) here's a quickie interview with the author of one of the new Miskatonic tales in the book - the fabulous Jason Rubis:

Q: What's your favorite part of the Lovecraft mythos

The monsters! No writer ever created such memorably "indescribable" abominations! The nightgaunts, the shoggoths, Great Cthulhu himself ... they all feel as real as sharks or tigers, and twice as menacing!

Q: What do you think is the lasting "allure" of Lovecraft's work?

The man was simply a great storyteller. You can talk about existentialism and the insignificance of man against the unfeeling cosmos and such, but Lovecraft's fiction has that strange note of conviction you see in all great fantasists (and not a few other genres as well). When you start reading a really great HPL story like "Whisperer in Darkness" (one of my personal favorites), there's that oddly comforting feeling, of sitting down to hear a story, told by someone who knows what they're talking about. You imagine this someone--a very tall, gaunt someone from Rhode Island, let's say--sitting down with you, looking you in the eye and saying: "Listen ... there were these terrible floods in Vermont, way in the back country, and they found some bodies in the river afterward ... very *strange* bodies..." That may not be what initially brings people to Lovecraft, but it's the reason they keep reading him and remember him as one of the greats.

Q: What's the scariest thing, for you, in Lovecraft's work?

The way his stories--the later stories, in particular--are told as a series of hints and allusions, through invented bits of lore, newspaper clippings, journal entries, etc. You only see what's happening very obliquely, but there's a sense of some awful truth slowly coming into focus. And then suddenly--WHAM! It all comes together. Even today, after having read and re-read the stories many times, it works for me.

Q: Tell us a bit about how you came to write your story for DARK DOINGS AT MISKATONIC U?

Like the hero of "Signed First Edition," I spent way too many hours of my freshman year digging through the stacks at my university library. I found one very odd book full of very graphic pictures of people being tortured by people in skull masks and like that. Today my guess is that it was about Grand Guignol or European exploitation films, but the text was in French, so I had no idea at the time what the hell this thing was about, which made it even more disturbing. I carried that book around in my head for a long time, and when the opportunity came to submit to DARK DOINGS I knew exactly what I wanted to do with it.

Q: What's your area of study at Miskatonic University?

I'm currently "virtually auditing" several classes in cryptoarchaeology at the Misk. I do hold a master's in Unspeakable Blasphemies from the Eldritch Studies department, but it's not on my resume. ;)

Up Now At FutureOfSex: Part One of The Ten Greatest Sexual Innovations to Come!

(from M.Christian's Technorotica)

Alas, badoink is gone - fun while it lasted - but the great news is that I'm now writing for the fabulous FutureOf Sex ... and my very first piece, part one of a series called The Ten Greatest Sexual Innovations to Come is live!

Just click here and read The Future of Sexual Sensing: Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality and Neurostimulation!

As the old saying goes: the only constant is change—and the last few years have certainly seen a lot of it. So many changes, in fact, that it’s hard to think of any aspect of human society that hasn’t been touched by technological innovation over the last decade or so.

Books became ebooks, the Internet went from novelty to essential, electric and hybrid vehicles have become ubiquitous, gay marriage changed from “don’t talk about it” to “no big deal” (at least in some countries), and 3D printers left the prototype stage to become at-home appliances—just to hit some highlights.

But the greatest changes are right around the corner. Many of these innovations will occur in one of our favorite areas: sex.

Part one of our three-part tour into future sex developments is this speculation on sensory tech: how our seeing—and feeling—will be more than believing. These incredible sensory advances will be introduced to us via three innovative technologies.
Innovation One: Virtual Reality

Despite some initial clumsy attempts, virtual reality promises to become a societal game changer. Like many huge innovations, the basic idea of virtual reality is essentially simple: an artificial world accessed by miniature monitors over the eyes. These, coupled with motion sensors, means when you turn your head, the view through those monitors changes as well.

Where the game changing comes in is two pronged. The first is that VR promises a level of total immersion that we have never experienced before. With a VR headset—like the popular Oculus Rift—you’ll feel like you’re actually in whatever artificial world you’re visiting. Right now all we’re missing to complete this total immersion is haptics—touch technology, but that’s right around the corner.

The other prong is part of what drove the ebook revolution in publishing: privacy. With a VR set, no one will know where you are but you.

With VR you can visit—or create—any erotic world of your choosing in privacy. There is, literally, nothing you could not see nor do in a synthetic reality. As the tech gets better and better, soon the line between “real” reality and a virtual experience will get thinner and thinner.

Gazing into my—albeit cracked—crystal ball, it’s not too difficult to envision a few years from now. With VR we’ll not just be able to see films, but be parts of them. Interactivity will mean that entertainment, erotic or otherwise, will be multi-dimensional and totally immersive.

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Confessions Of A Literary Streetwalker: Confessions

Check it out: one of my fave Confessions Of A Literary Streetwalker essay just went live on the fab Erotica Readers and Writers site:

My name is Chris – though my pseudonym is usually M.Christian – and I have a confession to make.

I’ve written – and write – a…what’s the technical term? Oh, yeah: shitload of erotica. Some 400 published stories, 12 or so collections, 7 novels. I’ve also edited around 25 anthologies. I even have the honor of being an Associate Publisher for Renaissance eBooks, whose Sizzler Editions erotica imprint has some 1,300 titles out there.

I’ve written sexually explicit gay stories, lesbian stories, trans stories, bisexual stories, BDSM stories, tales exploring just about every kind of fetish, you name it and I can all but guarantee that I’ve written about it. I like to joke that a friend of mine challenged me to write a story to a ridiculously particular specification: a queer vampire sport tale. My answer? “Casey, The Bat.” Which I actually did write…though I dropped the vampire part of it.

Don’t worry; I’m getting to the point. I can write just about anything for anyone – but here comes the confession:

I’ve never, ever written about what actually turns me – what turns Chris – on.

This kind of makes me a rather rare beast in the world of professional smut writing. In fact it’s pretty common for other erotica writers to – to be polite about it – look down their noses at the fact that I write about anything other than my own actual or desired sexual peccadilloes. Some have even been outright rude about it: claiming that I’m somehow insulting to their interests and/or orientations and shouldn’t write anything except what I am and what I like.

To be honest, in moments of self-doubt I have thought the very same thing. Am I profiting off the sexuality of other people? Am I a parasite, too cowardly to put my own kinks and passions out into the world? Am I short-changing myself as a writer by refusing to put myself out there?

For the record, I’m a hetero guy who – mostly – likes sexually dominant women. I also find my head turned pretty quickly when a large, curvy woman walks by. That said, I’ve had wonderful times with women of every size, shape, ethnicity, and interest.

So why do I find it so hard to say all that in my writing? The question has been bugging me for a while, so I put on my thinking cap. Part of the answer, I’ve come to understand, relates directly to chronic depression: it’s much less of an emotional gamble to hide behind a curtain of story than to risk getting my own intimate desires and passions stomped flat by a critical review or other negative reaction from readers. I can handle critical reviews of a story – that’s par for the course in professional writing – but it’s a good question as to whether I could handle critical reviews of my life.
But then I had an eye-opening revelation. As I said, I’ve written – and write – stories about all kinds of interests, inclinations, passions, orientations, genders, ethnicities, ages, cultures…okay, I won’t belabor it. But the point is that I’ve also been extremely blessed to have sold everything I’ve ever written. Not only that, but I’ve had beautiful compliments from people saying my work has touched them and that they never, ever, would have realized that the desires of the story’s narrator and those of the writer weren’t one and the same.

Which, in a nice little turn-around, leads me to say that my name is Chris – though my pseudonym is usually M.Christian – and I have yet another confession to make.

Yes, I don’t get sexually excited when I write. Yes, I have never written about what turns me on. Yes, I always write under a name that’s not my legal one.

But that doesn’t mean I don’t feel when I write. Far from it: absolutely, I have no idea what actual gay sex is like for the participants; positively, I have not an inkling of what many fetishes feel like inside the minds of those who have them; definitely, I have no clue what it’s like to have sex as a woman…

I do, however, know what sex is like. The mechanics, yeah, but more importantly I work very hard to understand the emotions of sex and sexuality through the raw examination of my own life: the heart-racing nerves, the whispering self-doubts, the pulse-pounding tremors of hope, the bittersweetness of it, the bliss, the sorrows and the warmth of it, the dreams and memories…

I’m working on a story right now, part of a new collection. It’s erotic – duh – but it’s also about hope, redemption, change, and acceptance. I have no experience with the kind of physical sex that takes place in this story but every time I close its file after a few hours of work, tears are burning my cheeks. In part, this emotional investment is about trying to recapture the transcendent joy I’ve felt reading the work of writers I admire.

When I read manuscripts as an anthology editor, or as an Associate Publisher, a common mistake I see in them is a dedication to technical accuracy favored over emotion. These stories are correct down to the smallest detail – either because they were written from life or from an exactingly fact-checked sexual imagination – but at the end, I as the reader feel…nothing.

I’m not perfect – far from it – but while I may lack direct experience in a lot of what I write, I do work very, very hard to put real human depth into whatever I do. I may not take the superficial risk of putting the mechanics of my sexuality into stories and books but I take a greater chance by using the full range of my emotional life in everything I create.

I freely admit that I don’t write about my own sexual interests and experiences. That may – in some people’s minds – disqualify me from being what they consider an “honest” erotica writer, but after much work and introspection I contest that while I may keep my sex life to myself, I work very hard to bring as much of my own, deeply personal, self to bear upon each story as I can.

They say that confession is good for the soul. But I humbly wish to add to that while confession is fine and dandy, trying to touch people – beyond their sex organs – is ever better…for your own soul as well as the souls of anyone reading your work.