Best of Dark Roasted Bend: 2009

One of my favorite things is writing for Dark Roasted Blend, so it was a real treat that so many of my articles were mentioned in Dark Roasted Blend's Best of 2009, including:


Hellish Weather on Other Planets










Most Powerful Supercomputers: Brains & Beauty










Monstrous Aviation, Part 2: Huge Helicopters!









Apocalyptic Scientific Experiments










One-Track Wonders: Early Monorails









Incredible Astronomical Clocks









The World's Most Magnificent Pipe Organs










Mysterious Non-Egyptians Pyramids










Walled Cities: Keeping Out the Joneses










The Art of Science, the Science of Art









Here's to even-more Dark Roasted Wonderfulness in 2010!

Grace & Beauty

I'm very excited to have some stories recently posted to the very-fun Grace & Beauty site. So head on over if you want to read "Blow Up" from Rude Mechanicals, and "Nighthawks" from Licks & Promises.

Be sure and keep an eye on the site as even more stories and such will be going up very soon!

Love Without Gun Control - on your iphone!

Talk about a perfect match: my new collection of science fiction stories, Love Without Gun Control, is now available as an app on the iphone - technofetish stories on a technofetish device!

Masquerade: Page 10

Here's another preview of a very special project: Masquerade was illustrated by my great pal, and a fantastic artist, Wynn Ryder, from a story by ... well, me ... for an upcoming graphic novel anthology called Legendary.

I'll be putting up more pages from the final over the next few months ... or you can read the entire thing on Wynn's Deviantart pages.

Padded Kinky!

If you're like me and (ahem) appreciate a kinky BBW, then check out the newly-opened Paddedkink.com by the one-and-only Kelly Shibari - and featuring stories by yours truly and my pal Ralph Greco Jr.

And, yes, it's a pay site (pornographers gotta eat, ya know)

Dark Roasted M.Christian

Here's a brand new Dark Roasted Blend piece on the mysterious Chinese pyramids:


Egyptian pyramids? Sure, everyone knows about the ones at Giza - and a few aficionados might know about the 138 others scattered around them. Mesoamerican pyramids? Okay, a lot of folks know about them, too -- or even that the great one at Cholula is considered to be the largest one in the world.

But, unfortunately, not many people know that pyramids have come in other flavors as well, including the mysterious and legendary ones in China.

“Legendary” because the story of the Chinese pyramids initially reads like something from a wild and woolly dime-store pulp serial: JAMES GAUSSMAN AND THE JEWELED PYRAMID OF CHINA!

It all began in 1945 – well, actually it started way before that, but for most folks out here in the West, that’s when they first heard that pyramids might exist outside Mesoamerica and Egypt.

While winging his way from India to China, the aforementioned U.S. Army Air Corps pilot Gaussman supposedly saw ... well, a jewel topped pyramid. Depending on who you talk to or what books you read, either his was the first sighting of this remarkable artifact or it was just part of a surge of woolly dime-store pulp serial mythologizing. Even if Gaussman wasn’t the first to spot the pyramids, it’s still interesting that many photographs of them were supposedly locked away in military files for decades.


Making the subject even more murky was Hartwig Hausdorf's book on the subject, which fueled fires of outrageous speculation – aliens, anyone? – but didn’t give a lot of accurate or verifiable info.

Despite Gaussman’s sighting (and Hausdorf's book), the pyramids definitely deserve at least the same recognition and respect their Central American and Middle Eastern cousins have received. Also like the pyramids in Giza, many of them are truly immense: the one at Mount Li, for example, is an impressive 250 feet tall; and the Great White one is a close runner-up.

Also like their kin in the Middle East, the pyramids in China were burial chambers and mausoleums, monstrous headstones for royalty and various courtly hangers-on: Mount Li was built for the legendary Qin Shi Huang and the Great White was constructed for Emperor Wudi.

But what makes the Chinese pyramids so interesting for many people – serious archeologists as well as passionate amateurs – is what isn’t known about them. Although we know they were crypts for Emperors and Kings, their construction details are a mystery. What makes them even more elusive is that while many of them are obvious and impressive, there are others you could walk right by – and many people have for centuries -- without realizing they were
anything but just slightly angular rises or low hills. The current guestimate is that there are around 38 pyramids, but both the serious professionals as well as the dedicated hobbyists believe that number is just a fraction of how many actual structures there are scattered throughout China.


But this knowledge just raises bigger, and more bewildering questions. Naturally, people know about the ones in Egypt, the legendary structures at Giza. Absolutely, a lot of folks have heard about the huge structures scattered throughout Central America, including the gigantic one at Cholula … but only until relatively recently had any of us Westerners heard that there were pyramids in China – and maybe a century or so before that, even many Chinese didn’t know what was dotting their landscapes.

See that hill? See that mountain? See that slightly angular rise? I wonder what’s under them? I wonder what other secrets are out there, laying just under the surface … or under our feet?

Nobilis Reads Dead Letter

This is wonderful: the great Nobilis reads my story, "Dead Letter", from my new collection, Licks & Promises, as part of his excellent podcast series.

A Guest Post

This is very nice: Lisabet Sarai asked me to guest post on her blog, Beyond Romance. So I took the opportunity to write a little something about the Coming Together project she and Alessia Brio are putting together and that they were very sweet to ask me to become a part of. Here's a taste, for the rest just click here to go to Lisabet's site.

Before I get started with this post I have to throw out not one but two very sincere 'thanks' -- to the same person.

Lisabet gets the first because she was so nice to ask me to writes something for this blog, and she gets the second because she's been fantastic to work with on a very special project -- which brings me to the subject of this post.

Alessia Brio and Lisabet have been working on Coming Together, a series of books by a wide range of writers, where the profits are going to be donated to charity. Alessia and Lisabet asked me to join in -- always a way to get me to do anything -- so I, with Lisabet's invaluable help, have put together a collection of brand new and never-before-seen as well as some of my (I say this with tongue firmly in cheek) "classic" short stories.

For my charity -- well, my charity is the reason for this post.

[MORE]

Kiss, Kiss, Hug, Hug From Licks & Promises

Here's a fun little story from one of my new collections, Licks & Promises. Well, I hope it's fun for you - but it might make you tear up a bit as well. It made me sniffle - and I wrote it!

Kiss, Kiss, Hug, Hug
By
M. Christian

We had played other games, this circle and I. Games of sex, pain, pleasure and everything betwixt, between, and off to the side.

Preface: San Francisco in a place called a dungeon to some, basement to others. It was just a typical Saturday night if you travel in the right circles. Yeah, you could call them gays, lesbians, straights, dykes, fags, hets, twisted fuckers -- whatever. They were just friends. And this was just a party.

The game was Kiss and Truth. Before we started, a hat was passed and we all dropped slips of paper into it. “Something very unique or very special about you” was what we were told to write. We did, diligently scrawling them on the black leather furniture and on the nearest convenient black leather friend.

“If you hear me say what you wrote, and then you get kissed -- or kiss, sing out,” the leader of this said, a large, lovely woman in a white dress, chiming finger symbols for our attention.

The lights were put out, except for one on in the corner where she sat with her black leather beret on her head. The room was soft felt: a warm, comfortable, intimate kind of darkness. I’d done so much in that room -- traveled through pain to sex to pleasure to laughter and back again that I knew it like I knew my own fingers. I knew everyone else there just about as well -- maybe as well as my toes.

“I have a twelve year old son named Josh.”

Our mustaches met, bristly forests itching together. Faintly hiding silken lips, heated tongues, flashing whiteness of teeth, I kissed the man named Jack. From across the room a voice (female? male? Could have been both, or one, together. Many in the room were part way between the two) sang out, and giggled. “Here!”

“I’m pregnant.”

She was short, with breasts heavy and firm. Hair a mad burst of curls. Her feet chimed with tiny bells. Lips thin and hard, with a faint fuzz of hair. Mouth a furnace of heat, like she burned somewhere down deep and her tongue was a flaming anaconda, wrapping and constricting around my own. “Over here!” a light, sparking voice said from close by.

The room was bursting with laugher, with little clicking whirls of giggles and the silent light of smiles. “I had a bad day at work.”

I don’t consider Jay really between he and she so it’s hard to say it Jay was on the way to boy or girl. Jay was Jay, unique and himself: rail thin, face a perfect blend of hard and soft, full and not, Jay’s lips are strong (like both) and so soft (like both). We kissed hot, and long, even after half the room chorused with “Yes” “Right here” “Damned straight”. Laughter. Laughter. Laughter.

“I got a new tattoo.”

A mountain of mad fun. I didn’t know his name, but there was always a smile on his lovely lips. Ever since I’d seen him, smiling like a San Francisco Gay Leather Buddha, I’d wanted to plant one on his gorgeous face. It was a worshipful act, a divine act. Maybe not sex heat in it, but love all the same. He was next to me so I turned and looked him in the eyes -- matching intent with intent. His lips were spiced, a lingering bite of cinnamon and ginger from the cookies laid out upstairs. He didn’t offer me anything more than his velvet lips and I didn’t reach in to take more. This was a devout kiss, a spiritual kiss. My body remained limp meat, my mind soared at the sparks he brought into me. “Here!” someone sang very close, and all stopped for a few beats while she lifted her dress to show the serpent that ran, red and puffy from the recent needles, up her ankle to tickle her crotch with a brilliantly forked tongue.

“I got a new ring.”

When we’d made love at the last party I had almost been consumed by her. Ignited, our kisses had turned our tongues into tongues of flames. Sexual? Damned straight, but Dorothy’s hunger was almost scary, almost scalding. Our kisses seemed to last from foreplay, into sex, and into a still-warm after glow. Never did oral sex with my lover, Dorothy; couldn’t take our lips apart long enough to try.

Black like soot, not the kind of polished black some have. Her was a skin that looked like night rolled into breasts, belly, back and smile. Her lips -- how can I describe her lips enough? I can’t. You have to come all the way out to San Francisco and taste them. Words ... just ... will ... not .. work.

We kissed through the call of “Over here”: the young, slender reed of a man baring his chest to show his new nipple ring. We would have kissed even longer save for Dorothy’s insistence that we play “this game” a little more, first.

“I’m HIV positive.”

I knew Jerry. Knew him well. Friend, pal, something else -- very special. He mirrored me: long and lean, tapered and elegant. While mine was black, though, his was dirty blond. Look at pieces of Jerry and you would think him just another punk -- but I knew him from long nights of bad movies, tears (both of us) and many, many smiles.

Jerry’s lips were slightly scabbed from cruising downtown on his board, of biting them when he was nervous. His tongue was hard and strong, a vibrant touch that shivered me down to my bare toes.

“I am,” Jerry said, and I kissed him long and hard again.

The game lasted for a while more, before dropping away with the few remaining clothes. The toys game out: leather, latex, condoms, Saran Wrap ... the tools of our friendships. We played and kissed many times thereafter.

I could only wish that Jerry could have kissed me much, much longer.

Masquerade: Page 9

Here's another preview of a very special project: Masquerade was illustrated by my great pal, and a fantastic artist, Wynn Ryder, from a story by ... well, me ... for an upcoming graphic novel anthology called Legendary.

I'll be putting up more pages from the final over the next few months ... or you can read the entire thing on Wynn's Deviantart pages.

Pauline Likes Rites Of Spring, Chapter 2

I can't say it enough: I am very lucky to have some truly fantastic friends - and one of the most-fantastic is Pauline. Just check out this review she sent me for Chapter 2 of my "weird science fiction, bawdy adventure, sideways humor, and delightful strange" project, The Rites of Spring:

In this strange new world, Gazelle runs. Every beat is torture on her aching body. She is proud, she is the Messenger; stopping, pausing to catch her breath, never occurs to her. Her vocation as Messenger, dictates her raison d’etre. It is what she was born to do. Simple as that.

M.Christian opens chapter two of his serialized novel, THE RITES OF SPRING, with the pounding beat of Gazelle’s feet on the hard, unforgiving concrete. The vista of The City opens up before her, spell binding her, mingling with the endorphins racing through her blood; a rushing anaesthetic for her suffering body.

The Elders have whispered tales of the old City, around night time campfires. The mysteries, the mythologies, all the old stories mingle in Gazelle’s consciousness as the City opens up beneath the glaring sun. The City is haunting and holy; so is Gazelle’s run. The City is an infrastructure of totems, just as Gazelle herself is.

And then a shock. The scent of testosterone; the scent of man. Another totem. For the first time Gazelle is distracted from the world of the City. She wants to stop, seeing first one man, then another; then thousands. The men are wild, wanting her; Gazelle wants them too. But she doesn’t falter. The rhythm of her run doesn’t change, but Christian changes the pace into a frenetic frenzy. Gazelle’s imagination tips on the edge of insanity as she craves the naked, erect cocks in her every orifice.

M.Christian’s use of words, his instinctive use of language is a delight. I’ve used the words, ‘lyrical’ and ‘panache’ to describe his stories before. But I can’t think of better words to convey to a reader, what a breathtaking experience it is to read the perfection of a master storyteller. I want to know more about this strange city, that is at once, so familiar and yet so alien. And as with all the very best serializations, I want to know, what happens next in THE RITES OF SPRING?

OUT NOW: The Rites of Spring - Chapter 2

Here we go again, folks: What do you get when you cross weird science fiction, bawdy adventure, sideways humor, and delightful strangeness?

Frankly, I haven't the faintest idea, but if you want to see what might be might be pretty damned close, check out the second chapter of my serial story, The Rites of Spring - which was just published

So, if you like your science fiction weird, your adventure stories bawdy, your humor tilted, and your strangeness delightful then head on over to the great Paper Bag Press site and download the second chapter of my fun new project - or, if you want to pick up the story from the beginning, check out the first chapter.

And, naturally, if you want to write a review of either chapters drop me a line and I'll send you over a copy.