- to all the wonderful people who braved a beautiful San Francisco Sunday to take my Sex Sells: How to Write & Sell Erotica class on Sunday. It was a lot of fun to teach - and hopefully a lot of fun to attend.
Can you talk a bit about your inspiration for "The One I Left Behind"?
Well I tried to put a different spin on the whole idea of what a ghost could be: we know that it's supposed to be the 'spirit' of a dead person – but what if what died wasn't a whole person but instead just a part of us? We've all had dreams we've had to let go of, so what we were haunted by the partial 'self' we had to let go of, or was taken from us? That's what I was playing with – I just hope people like the result!
Have you ever had an encounter with a ghost?
Nope, sorry – not as far as I know. But then who's to say what's out there? Lots of people look like they're sleep-walking … maybe they're dead and just don't know it. Or maybe I am but I don't … ☺
What's your favorite ghost story (you can pick a movie if you prefer)?
Aside from classics I have a thing for ghost stories from different cultures, particularly Japan. It's lots of fun – and enlightening – to see how the idea of a ghost or a spirit reflects the values or worldviews of a culture. Like the Kasa Obake: in Japanese mythology if an object gets to be 100 years old it develops its own spirit – which is what an umbrella gets is called when it gets to be that ripe old age. Very fun stuff!
What are you working on now and where can readers find out more about you?
The main place to look is M. Christian which is my site. Right now I have whole bunch of fun things out: Brushes, an erotic romance novel; Me2, a gay horror/thriller; Filthy, a collection of my gay erotica; and from the fine folks at Lethe Press a reprinting of my gay horror/comedy The Very Bloody Marys, and my new noir/SF/erotica novel Painted Doll: An Erotist's Tale.
The polished humanism of Star Trek; the grungy mythology of Star Wars; the uncomplicated flesh versus machine of Battlestar Galactica, the Terminator flicks, and the Matrix movies –- the future is all around us. Bitter, sweet, dark, light: You just have to pick your flavor for what you want tomorrow to be.
But step back just a few decades and recall how looking at tomorrow was solely for newsstands and tawdry bookstores, which presented a loudly lurid universe of glistening glass tubes, gleaming chrome starships, and frantically faced diabolical scientists of the very-mad and very-bad variety. Amazing Stories, Weird Tales, Wonder Stories, Astounding Science Fiction, Planet Stories, and the rest of their pulpy kin were secret sins, magazines smuggled home to be read under the covers by the dying batteries of a Boy Scout flashlight.
At the time, the artists working for the pulps weren’t considered anything but cheap creatives providing cheap entertainment for cheap minds. But now we know what they were: visions of wonder, amazing vistas of the imagination, daring dreams of possibility, magnificent views of What Could Be -- but most of all we look back at what they did and recognize it for being truly magnificent art.
Unfortunately there isn’t enough time or space to touch on all of the artists who worked for the pulps that were printed between (roughly) 1920 (something) and 1950 (something), but here’s a quick guide to some of my own personal favorites, the artists who created a world of tomorrow when today was the only thing people could see.
You have no choice but to be amazed by Frank R. Paul’s Amazing Stories covers. While the world was coughing and spitting behind the wooden wheels of Model T Fords or barely getting off the ground in biplanes, Paul created wonderful scientific dreams for a wonderful array of magazines. His visions might have been built from the stuff of those early days –- tubes, wires, electrodes, sprawling cities –- but Paul had a bravery of scope: steamships flew through the sky, tidal waves cracked skyscrapers in half, dozens of alien vistas sparked the imagination, and scientists peered into the vastness of space with telescopes the size of mountains. But whatever the size of his scope, Paul also filled his images with incredible detail, giving each one a reality that made his work like a functional blueprint for the future and not just an enticement to drop a nickel for an afternoon’s amusement.
Although he’s also legendary for his covers, praise for Virgil Finlay has mostly been –- rightfully -- given out for his black and white interior work. Sure he also had scope, drama, crazy dreams, and pulp outrageousness but to see a Finlay illustration is to be hushed into silence by its beauty, subtlety, and sensuality. It's easy to picture his images from Weird Tales hanging in the great galleries of the world. The fact that much of his early work was for neglected and belittled pulps like Weird Tales is nothing short of infuriating.
Hannes Bok has to be on this stage of artistic magnificence as well. Like Finlay, his style is refined and elegant, so much more than the pulps he worked for. But he also brought a playful madness to his illustrations: a twisted kind of beauty to his figures and environments. Looking at a Bok cover, you didn’t know whether what you were looking at was a dream or a nightmare, but you always felt that it was rich, glowing with passion, perfectly composed, and absolutely brilliant.
Another inspired illustrator, one that jumped from the pulps to pretty much every kind of illustration, is was the legendary Wally Wood. It would take a book, hardly a short article, to just begin to touch on Wally’s scope: Weird Science comics, romance comics, Tales From The Crypt, trading cards, Mad Magazine and even some hilarious smut, including the legendary Disney orgy poster. Wood wasn’t just prolific or insanely flexible: whatever he did, and he did a lot, he brought with him a precise touch, a winking sense of whimsy, but also a carefully balanced sense of drama. You always knew you were looking at something Wood had done, and you were always amazed by it.
When you mention Frank Kelly Freas many people immediately think of his iconic cover for Astounding Science Fiction, the one that Freas also did for Queen’s album. But when I think of Freas I prefer to think of the delightfully winking cover he did, also for Astounding, for Frederick Brown’s Martians, Go Home. That, for me, is Freas: there is perfect technique, marvelous color, ideal drama and composition, but there’s also his marvelous sense of whimsy, a kind of bright and sparkling joy you can see in whatever Freas did, and what makes his work always compelling.
There are too many fantastic artists who worked in the pulps to touch on them all on this little space, but I can’t go without at least mentioning Chesley Bonestell. Even though you can’t really call Bonestell a ‘pulp’ artist, he deserves a bit of space for what he did for … well, ‘space.’ Considered by many to be the father of modern space illustration, Bonestell was the man who realized the scientific projections of Willey Ley and Wernher von Braun and the motion picture dreams of George Pal. His paintings –- elegant, quiet, and magnificent -- were, for many people, not what the future could be, but what the future would be: a world of rockets and starships and men looking back at the earth from the distant moon.
That’s all for now but if there’s a lesson to be learned it’s that even though we might live in a world right next door to the future, there’s still a lot the past can teach us. Like, that real treasures and fantastic art can be found in places we might stupidly dismiss as simple, cheap, or pulpish.
"Brushes" is great erotica set in a romantic setting. It is a multi-layered look at love, Paris and the world of art. We meet eight people, all of whom are involved in the art world. As their lives intertwine, each experiences a form of sexual contact that will change them completely.
Escobar is a very talented artist but exactly who he is and how he works is the essence of "Brushes". The world sees him as a genius. His mastery of color, form and shape is unequaled and he has taken the art world by storm. To discover who he, we look at him from different viewpoints. His wife, his manager, his forger, his brother, his model and others tell us about him in separate stories that all come together. However, these stories tell us more about the teller than they do about the man in question. In that, Escobar is like the art he creates. It is studied and it is open to different interpretations as well as misinterpretations.
M. Christian is a master storyteller. I have read a lot of him and each time I pick up something by him, I find myself so involved in the story that I feel it is actually happening as I read. "Brushes" evokes carnality and in dealing with the art scene of Paris and those that inhabit it, Christian gives us an erotic treat. He so captures the scene that I was completely engulfed by the novel by the third page. Sure the eroticism is very hot but it is the story that is better. The intriguing characters and the way that they come in and out of each others' lives in handled brilliantly. We see, though the characters that all is not always what it seems to be and surprises lurk and wait. This is a gorgeous book to be savored.
Georges Joseph Christian Simenon (pronounced [ʒɔʀʒ simˈnɔ̃] in French) (February 13, 1903–September 4, 1989) was a Belgian writer who wrote in French. He is best known for the creation of the fictional detective Maigret.At the age of three, Simenon learned to read at the Sainte-Julienne nursery school. Then, between 1908 and 1914, he attended the Institut Saint-André. In September 1914, shortly after the beginning of the First World War, he began his studies at the Collège Saint-Louis, a Jesuit high school.
In the summer of 1915, going against the grain of the Jesuits' chaste teachings, the twelve year-old Simenon had the first of many sexual experiences in his long life; in this case, with an older girl of fifteen. Many years later, Simenon was known as "the man of 10,000 women," a self-confessed sex addict who "needed" to have sex three times a day. Quite a few women were prepared to humor him for nothing, nevertheless, these 10,000 were said to include 8,000 prostitutes. It has been suggested that the real number of women in Simenon's life was, although prodigious, vastly smaller than 10,000. In this he was quite different from his fictional creation, Maigret, who can be presumed to have been entirely faithful to Madame Maigret ....
Simenon's first novel, Au Pont des Arches was written in June 1919 and published in 1921 under his "G. Sim" pseudonym. Writing as "Monsieur Le Coq," he also published more than 800 humorous pieces between November 1919 and December 1922.
During this period, Simenon's familiarity with nightlife only increased: prostitutes, drunkenness, and general carousing. The people he rubbed elbows with included anarchists, bohemian artists, and even two future murderers, the latter appearing in his novel Les Trois crimes de mes amis. He also frequented a group of artists known as "La Caque." While not really involved in the group, he did meet his future wife Régine Renchon through it ....
Simenon's father died in 1922 and this served as the occasion for him to move to Paris with Régine Renchon (hereafter referred to by her nickname "Tigy"), at first living in the XVIIe Arrondissement, not far from the Boulevard des Batignolles. He became familiar with the city, its bistrots, cheap hotels, bars, and restaurants. More importantly, he also came to know ordinary working-class Parisians. Writing under numerous pseudonyms, his creativity began to pay financial dividends.
Simenon and Tigy returned briefly to Liège in March 1923 to marry. Despite his Catholic upbringing, Simenon was not a believer. Tigy came from a thoroughly non-religious family. However, Simenon's mother insisted on a church wedding, forcing Tigy to become a nominal convert, learning the Catholic Church's catechism. Despite their father's lack of religious convictions, all of Simenon's children would be baptized as Catholics. Marriage to Tigy, however, did not prevent Simenon from having liaisons with numerous other women, perhaps most famously, Josephine Baker ....
A reporting assignment had Simenon on a lengthy sea voyage in 1928, giving him a taste for boating. In 1929, he decided to have a boat built, the Ostrogoth. Simenon, Tigy, their cook and housekeeper Henriette Liberge, and their dog Olaf lived on board the Ostrogoth, traveling the French canal system. Henriette Liberge, known as "Boule" (literally, "Ball," a reference to her slight pudginess) was romantically involved with Simenon for the next several decades and would remain a close friend of the family, really part of it.
I've been reading and admiring M. Christian's erotica since...well, since I began reading erotica regularly, over ten years ago. To quote myself (hmm, am I allowed to quote myself?) "With his amazing versatility and silky smooth prose, M. Christian helped forge the erotica revolution of the 1990s and he’s still going strong!" Not to mention, there is no more pleasant company in which to explore the eateries of the SF Bay Area--M. Christian, Sage Vivant, my chief editor and technical advisor (aka husband) and myself have started a wonderful supper club tradition, which I hope continues indefinitely. Timidly claiming the name "colleague" with a writer I've admired so long has been a dream come true--one of the many unexpected benefits of my arduous Amorous Woman promotion efforts.
Okay, enough about me--I have an exciting announcement about sex and writing. M. Christian is offering a one-day erotica writing workshop in San Francisco this October. Unfortunately I'll be off in New York on the east coast leg of my Amorous Woman book tour at that time. But that shouldn't stop you from signing up to learn sexy writing secrets from a man who helped make erotica cool and hot! Here are the details. Be there or be square!
Sex Sells: How to Write & Sell Erotica
With M.Christian
Sunday, October 12th, 1pm - 4pm
$40 before Sept 30; $50 after Sept 30
Center for Sex & Culture
1519 Mission Steet, San Francisco
Register via PayPal (Zobop@aol.com) or pay at the door
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.
Learn how to:
* Get started writing for and selling to this growing marketplace
* Free your creativity and get past inhibitions
* Avoid cliches, common mistakes, and pitfalls
* Write what editors and publishers will want to buy
Plus: current pay rates, how to write for a wide variety of erotic genres, from magazines to websites, where and how to submit your erotic writing, and more.
Students will also receive:
* Several informative handouts including a list of top-notch markets and venues for erotica, as well as funny and educational articles and columns
* A personal invitation to contribute to a special erotica project
* 50% off a wide selections of erotica books
* A free autographed copy of M.Christian's collection Filthy: Outrageous Gay Erotica=
The class is open to everyone (over the age of 21) interested in writing all kinds of erotica: gay, straight, lesbian, bisexual, fetish ... you name it!
M.Christian is an acknowledged master of erotica with more than 300 stories in such anthologies as Best American Erotica, Best Gay Erotica, Best Lesbian Erotica, Best Fetish Erotica, and many, many other anthologies, magazines, and Web sites. He is the editor of 20 anthologies including the Best S/M Erotica series, The Burning Pen, Guilty Pleasures, and many others. He is the author of the collections Dirty Words, Speaking Parts, The Bachelor Machine, and Filthy; and the novels Running Dry, The Very Bloody Marys, Me2, Brushes, and Painted Doll. His site is www.mchristian.com.
For more information write M.Christian at zobop@aol.com.
*no guarantees
My pal, Wynn Ryder, has a new project I can't praise highly enough. Check out his Flight of the Moths here.
For a few thousand years the biggest things in the skies were only in our imaginations, flying figments of myth and fable: the Roc from Sinbad’s tales, the Garuda bird from the Mahabharata, the Thunderbird from North America, the Brazilian Blue Crow, and other high-flying nightmares or soaring benevolent gods and spirits.
But then a few very clever, and rather persistent, folks got tired of only dreaming. With great inventiveness, they wanted to see what was actually above the clouds. They sought to create something as wondrously big, or nightmarishly immense, as those birds of myth and legend.
Talking about big planes is very much like talking about who should get the credit for man’s first flight –- it all depends on who you talk to. As the brilliant James Burke has pointed out, inventors rarely create something from nothing –- their successes are often the result of combining the partial successes, or learning from the downright failures, of other inventors. In some cases, it's just pure dumb luck.
The Wright Brothers are often given most of the recognition for the first powered flight but Gustave Whitehead, Alexander Feodorovich Mozhaiski, Clement Ader, and many others should get a share of the fame, too. Whoever is responsible, it wasn’t long before the skies were full of sputtering, creaking, and – for the most part – very unreliable aeronautical devices.
It took the first world war to change aircraft from a killing and maiming hobby for the rich to a killing and maiming war machine. War helped advance the science of flight and necessitated bigger planes.
The Short 184 is often cited as one of the first true bombers, a huge step up simply flinging grenades from the cockpit. Created by the legendary Short Brothers, the 184 was big enough –- a world full of fabric and string mayflies -– to carry a torpedo, which must have been a terrifying sight to battleships that, until then, had ruled the sea.
Another monster plane of that time was Igor Sikorsky's Ilya Murometz, a huge improvement over his legendary Russky Vitaz, the first four engine aircraft. But the Ilya Murometz didn't begin as a beast of the skies. Originally designed as a luxurious passenger liner featuring electric lighting, heat, a bathroom, and even a glass floor, the bomber must have been amusing as well as terrifying to its wealthy passengers.
In the years between wars, airplanes kept getting bigger. Take the elegant Handley Page HP42, for instance: a four-engined beauty with an impressive track record of no crashes while being used as an airliner -- which gives you an idea of how safe it was to fly back then.
One of the larger and more beautiful aircraft in the next few decades was the awesome 1936 Boeing Stratoliner. Unfairly called a ‘whale’ because of its chubbiness, the plane was not only huge but also state of the art; today we enjoy flying in pressurized comfort because of technology premiered in the silver flying fish of the Stratoliner.
Art and elegance may have been one of the early fatalities in the second world war, but striving to have the biggest (anything) certainly wasn’t.
To call the Messerschmitt Me 321 big is like calling 1939 to 1945 unpleasant. Created originally as a guilder, the Gigant could haul an insanely large amount of cargo. And an insane bunch of soldiers: 130 plus hardware ... 23 tons of hardware. Because the Gigant was so huge, getting the damned thing into the air was, at best, problematic. First it was towed up with a pair of Heinkel 111 bombers, which was alternatively unsuccessful or disastrous. Then they tried fusing two 111s together to make a Frankenstein’s monster of a machine –- almost as bestial as the Gigant itself. Finally the Luftwaffe stuck engines on the Me321, which made an ugly brute even uglier but at least it got off the ground.
On the other side of the war was an eagle, a silvery steel bird of prey: the huge and beautiful B-29 Superfortress. Although getting the immense B-29 up to its ceiling of 40,000 feet was a struggle, once it got up there nothing could reach it or, at 350 mph, catch it. Even if something managed to come close to it, its formidable defenses could cut any threat to shreds. Featuring many impressive advancements, and some frustrating problems, the plane was kept on active duty long into the Korean war.
With the advent of jet power, aircraft designers began to think really big. Think of your average doomsday film and you immediately picture the roaring ascent of smoke-blasting, eight-engined, B52 bombers. Like the B29, the B52 was an aeronautical powerhouse, a heavy-lifting behemoth. And like the B52, it was kept in service until … well, they are still being used today.
Unlike the B29 and the B52, which don’t show their size easily, the C-5 galaxy would look insanely monstrous even on a postage stamp. To give you an idea of the galaxy’s size, its wingspan is not just longer than the Wright Brothers’ first flight but the beast can also haul 180,000 pounds (which is about 90 tons). It, too, is still with us today.
The Aero Spacelines Super Guppy also has to be mentioned, which like the galaxy looks more like a prop from a Japanese monster movie than a real airplane. The Guppy is also high on the irony meter as it was mostly used to haul nearly-completed components -- of other airplanes.
Arguably the biggest plane flying today, or ever, is Antonov An-225, a 6-engine Russian beast that’s not only longer than the first flight in history but could probably carry one, two, or three whole aircraft museums. Numbers don’t mean much but here is an impressive one: the 225 can carry 550,000 pounds, which is 275 tons. Yes, you can say WOW.
The H-4 Hercules is the standard by which “huge aircraft” are measured –- as well as how “completely screwed up” is defined. Its one and only flight was in 1947, where it was airborne for a total of 70 feet. Originally planned as the ultimate military transport, it is more commonly known as its hated -- at least by its creator Howard Hughes -- moniker, the Spruce Goose.
We used to have the Roc, the Garuda bird, the Thunderbird, Blue Crow, and other soaring myths. Now we have machines; airplanes so big they’re even greater than those ancient, and magnificent, dreams.
