Thursday, September 16, 2010

Ralph Greco Talks To Me

This is just too damned cool! My great/fantastic/amazing friend Ralph Greco Jr (with his equally wonderful friend Tom) sat down with me while I was in Jersey for the Floating World convention to chat about writing and other fun things - an interview that just went up on the EdenFantasies site. Thanks, Ralph!

San Francisco writer/editor/anthologist M. Christian has had erotic stories appear in every “best of” erotic anthology series you can name; Best American Erotica, Best Lesbian Erotica, Best Gay Erotica, as well as in 300 other anthologies and magazines. He has published best-selling short story collections, such as Dirty Words, Speaking Parts, and Filthy (with more to come), plus his novels Running Dry, The Very Bloody Marys and The Painted Doll, to name just a few. He is also an accomplished anthologist, having edited more than 20 books, including The Mammoth Book of Future Cops, More Extreme Stories about Extreme Sex, Vol. 2, and the just released Best S&M III. Christian’s work often crosses genre, mixing as he does sci-fi and horror with erotica as well as “straight” humor and mystery.

Editing the wickedly popular Frequently Felt, his author’s site, www.mchristian.com, as well as working as the associate editor for Renaissance eBooks, M. Christian is a busy man indeed. I was lucky to score some time with him during the recent New Jersey-based “Floating World” convention. This annual event boasts both professional “scene-sters,” organizers, writers, teachers, and folk from every conceivable walk of life and kink, who attend classes all weekend and play in a well-appointed dungeon at the convention center all night. It was really the perfect milieu to have this popular kinky scribe de-scribe the ins and outs of the adult fiction writing business, and to once and for all get to the bottom of that big question…

Porn versus erotica, what’s the difference?
You know I’m not sure there really is a difference; I certainly don’t like to use the labels. Sometimes you’ll find erotic writers saying: “I don’t write porn, I wrote erotica,” but I feel if you start saying that then people are going to start drawing lines, and there isn’t a line. It’s almost like we use one term to elevate over the other. We’re still talking about stories that are about sex, right? It’s all erotica. I just like to generically use the word erotica and use pornography as the keyword of the industry… Like the Supreme Court justice said…I know it when I see it.

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Zee Likes "Blow Up" From Rude Mechanicals

This is so sweet! Zee previously reviewed my story "I Am Jo's Vibrator" and also just reviewed "Blow Up" from Rude Mechanicals. Thanks so much, Zee!

I am thrilled to tell ya’ll that M. Christian is an absolute sweetheart. After my review of I Am Jo’s Vibrator, he so kindly sent me Rude Mechanicals. Isn’t this cover insane! I’m sure ya’ll know about my love of the short story, and I must say that M. Christian is a phenomenal short story writer. It really takes talent and a keen eye to compact essential details into only a few pages! I am truly excited to read and share all of the shorts with ya, but today I will just be talking about the first short: Blow Up.

To be completely honest, Blow Up is laugh-out-loud hilarious as well as sensual and erotic. Blow Up is about a man with a fetish for… a blow up ball. Picture an exercise ball, but smaller. Written in the first person, we get to travel with our man to the local Toys R Us to purchase his plastic ball, and then travel back to his house where he decribes his prep for and execution of his next orgasm.

I made the mistake of reading this short at work. My cubicle-mates were definitely looking at me when I would shriek with laughter one minute then have my mouth drop the next minute. I find his fetish so amusing because I know there is someone out there in the world who really does this! What I like best is how M. Christian’s writing style reminded me of reading someone else’s diary, peeking into their most secret habits, truly being a fly on the wall.

Well done! M. Christian. I can’t wait to dig in to the rest of your shorts, and I will never see a plastic ball the same way again! :) If you want a sneak peak, read an excerpt here!

A VERY Special Event: Sizzler Presents How To Sell Your Erotica


This is going to be WONDERFUL! If you live in the Bay Area here's a chance to attend the end-all, be-all, event on selling erotica:

HOW TO SELL YOUR EROTICA
(and More Than Double Your Income from Each Piece You Write)

Friday, October 8 2010 7:30pm – 10:00pm
Center for Sex and Culture, 1519 Mission Street @ S. Van Ness, 2nd fl.
Suggested donation: $5-$15
All proceeds go to the Center for Sex and Culture

Are you writing erotica? Do you write for yourself? Do you write for publication? Or, have dreamed of erotica, but haven't yet started?

Whatever you are writing, personal experiences, short stories, novels, you will learn about where you can sell your work and how to go about it.

Join a panel of five editors, anthologists, and published authors who will share practical tips and personal insights. You will learn:

Where you can sell your work
*Magazines
*Websites
*Anthologies
* Book publishers

How to
* use the key elements that make an erotic story sell?
* think sexy and cultivate your erotic imagination
* write plots and characgters that turn readers on
* put the right dash of sex in a sex story
* write convincing stories for sexual orientation and interests beyond your own
* find the best internet resources for writers of erotica
* get along with editors and publishers
* respond to fans, reviewers and criticism
* avoid the four taboo sex acts no one will publish
* boost your income on books
* triple your income or more on short pieces

Panelists:

Jean Marie Stine, author, former magazine editor, and publisher of ebook pioneer Sizzler Editions, which has more than 800 erotic novels and collections for available download at Amazon, Barnes& Nobel, etc., and has and recently began to publish erotica in paperback.

M. Christian, writer and anthologist who has sold over 300 short stories, five novels and edited over two dozen anthologies.

Gina de Vries’ writings about sex have appeared dozens of anthologies and publications, including Curve, On Our Backs, Femmethology, Tough Girls 2, Dirty Girls, and Coming & Crying.

Donna George Storey is a writing and book promotion columnist and the author of two books and over a hundred stories and articles in such places as Penthouse, Best American Erotica, and Best Women’s Erotica.

Plus other panelists to be announced.

Wednesday, September 08, 2010

Dark Roasted M.Christian

Check it out: a brand new Dark Roasted Blend piece I did just went up: this time about very weird, very wild, and very essential fungi (which, if you know anything about me, is a little too close to home).


Let's play a game: animal, mineral, or vegetable?

The answer? Two out of three. Ladies and gentlemen: the wonderful, and let's not forget weird, world of fungi.

But first a ridiculously quick science lesson, and an explanation for the opening above: scientists consider fungi to be part of a separate and unique kingdom, in that they aren't plants and they're not animals -- so they really are two out of three.

It's this 'not one and not the other' that make fungi wonderfully – and somewhat disturbing – to study. At their most identifiable they an fundamental part of our diet: buttons, portobellos, shitakes, oysters, morels, chanterelles, and more – including the expensive yet ubiquitous truffle. But fungi are also essential to make many of our foods ... well, food: without them we wouldn't have cheese, beer, wine, bread and too many others to name. If that isn't impressive enough, our odd not-quite-an-animal, not-quite-a-plant, is also indispensable to medicine: penicillin, the cornerstone of antibiotics, was mold found in a Petri dish, after all. In fact some experts claim that if anything were to happen to our fungal friends humanity would be, at worst, extinct, or at best, pretty miserable.


But mushrooms and yeasts and molds are only the public face of the fungal world. Beyond beer, wine, cheese, and medicine there's a stranger side – in fact a rainbow of oddness. Mushrooms, you may think, are brown or white, right? But fungi can also be spectacularly colorful: the Parrot Waxcap is as green as grass, the Crimson Waxy Cap is sunset crimson, and the Slimy Spike-cap is even bright purple. There are even varieties of mushroom that aren't just colorful but actually glow in the dark: Omphalotus olearius, the Jack o' Lantern, for example, is a celebrated bioluminescent fungus, as is the Australian ghost fungus.

Even when fungi are brown and dull appearances can be deceiving: the aptly named stinkhorn, for example, produces the aroma of rotting meat to attract flies, which help the mushroom spread its spores. Speaking of spore-spreading, the puffball mushroom and its various relations do it in a very dramatic fashion, quite literally shooting their spawn into the air when touched.

But for all their color and their clever tricks, fungi have an even odder side, one that might make you look at that blue cheese in your sandwich, or that beer you were planning to have with lunch, a little differently – if not with out-and-out fear.

Sure, fungi have given us much but they can also take it away, and not just for people who mistake an amanita phalloides for an amanita caesarea: Cryptococcus gattii, though rare, is alarmingly fatal and is airborne. How fatal? Well, it's considered to be one of – if not the – most lethal fungal infections you can get. There are other deadly fungi, and as most of them are extremely opportunistic and durable, they can spread wildly and are all but impossible to kill. Just think athlete's foot mixed with a rattlesnake.


It's fungi's ability to grow just about anywhere that makes it so amazing. If you name a hostile environment there's more than likely some form of mushroom or yeast that will not only grow there but prefer it over anywhere else. An extreme version of this is when researchers stuck their instruments into one of the most poisonous places on earth and found not only a species of mushroom growing there but one that actually appears to be feeding on the toxicity. How nasty is this place? Well, all you need to say is one word to shudder at the thought: Chernobyl.

But strangeness and fungi don't end with radiation-feasting mushrooms, for there are quite a number of them that feast on other things -- including animals. Nematophagous fungi, for instance, grow miniscule rings that, if a nematode happens to squirm into one, rapidly contract, trapping the unfortunate lunch ... I mean 'worm.' If this makes you a bit nervous take a bit of consolation in that the popular oyster mushroom is also a nematode killer – and it's also tasty, so while it eats them we also eat it.

But eating isn't the only dark thing fungi do. One particular species has an extremely disturbing lifecycle – and a terrifying one ... if you happen to be an ant. Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, if it gets half a chance, will infect an ant and (ahem) eat parts of its brain, causing the poor little insect to basically become the walking dead The fungus finishes it off only after it clamps itself to the underside of a leaf, just where the fungus wants it to die – a location that works really well for the fungi, but definitely not the ant.

Yes, they have given us much: all those mushrooms and other amazing fungi. Without them we would have very bland food, let alone no booze, and would probably die a lot quicker without antibiotics. Some of them are as pretty as flowers, a few may be deadly to the unlucky or the tragically ignorant, while further species lurk in the soil for the unwary nematode, but – basically – they have been our friends for a very long time.

Besides, we'd better watch our step: while the jury is out on the subject, many experts point to a certain forest in Oregon. What's special about this hunk of land, that particular stand of trees? Well, the honey mushroom that lives there, and occupies over 2,200 acres of that forest, may very well be the largest organism on the earth.

So we had better treat them well -- all those wondrous fungi -- just in case that they, or just that single huge mushroom, should wake up and remind us of all they've done for us ... or could do to us.

Tuesday, August 31, 2010

A Great Pirate Tale


If you're looking for Yo Ho Ho inspiration I highly recommend the LibriVox reading of Rafael Sabatini's Captain Blood. Just click here and be prepared for wonderful presentation of a classic pirate story. Now go shiver your or timbers or something ...

"I remember a time of chaos. Ruined dreams. This wasted land. But most of all, I remember the Road Warrior."

Never mind Burning Man - this is where I'm going.

Bachelor Machine: The NEW Edition!


This is GREAT news! I am extra-pleased and extra-proud to announce the release of a brand-new edition of my celebrated science fiction erotica collection, The Bachelor Machine, by the legendary Cecilia Tan's Circlet Press. While I put together a formal press release check out the book on the Circlet site as well as on amazon.

Thursday, August 26, 2010

Angela Caperton Likes Coming Together Presents M. Christian

... and the WOWs keep coming! The great Angela Caperton just sent me this very sweet review of my collection Coming Together Presents M. Christian (a special project where the proceeds are being donated to Planned Parenthood). Thanks so much, Angela!
I have a confession: I am the world’s slowest reader. I know readers who can plow through several hundred pages in a couple days. Talk to me in a month or more.

But there is a reason for my plodding pace. I don’t read. I digest.

Thoroughly.

I hang on word choice, structure, lyrical sentences. Plot and character are sacred to me, and if a story doesn’t convert me immediately, it had better redeem itself quickly.

M. Christian’s erotica is a sumptuous feast I will gladly enjoy again.

In Coming Together Presents: M. Christian, I found stories – some previously published, others new to print – that kept me filled, kept me coming back for more – and kept me guessing!

M. Christian doesn’t shy from sensitive subjects in his stories, and in this collection dives headlong into issues of body image, selfishness, couples on the edge, one great story of a raunchy breakup that was totally hot, and does all this while taking us to the past, living in the now, and hurtling us beyond the stars – and constantly wrapping the stories in the tendrils of relationship and sex.

Several of the selections have stayed with me. In “Missing Alice” I was completely drawn into the description of Alice’s vivacious personality, her freedom of style, and the void her absence causes the narrator. I especially loved M. Christian’s authentic portrayal of how we change, how relationships evolve, and how a wild child might one day be the couch potato you can’t live without.

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Tuesday, August 24, 2010

Lisabet Sarai Likes Love Without Gun Control

Wow ... and I mean WOW: check out this wonderful review of my science fiction/fantasy and horror collection Love Without Gun Control (from the always-great Renaissance/PageTurner Books) by Lisabet Sarai:

I know M.Christian primarily as an author of erotica—an astonishingly versatile writer who swings from gay to lesbian, from contemporary to science fiction, from cyberpunk to humor, without missing a beat. Anyone who's not familiar with his energy and creativity in the erotic realm should get a copy of Coming Together Presents M. Christian (and support Planned Parenthood at the same time). Until he sent me a copy of his new collection Love Without Gun Control, I didn't fully appreciate the darker side of his imagination.

The title story of this collection paints a hilarious but nevertheless chilling picture of a society in which everyone carries and uses deadly weapons—all the time. He cleverly spins out the implications of such a scenario, in particular the difficulties it poses for lovers.

Equally funny, grotesque and scary is “Buried & Dead”, a tale of political ambition amid the zombie apocalypse, overflowing with rotting flesh and dangling entrails. “Constantine in Love”, the impeccably satirical final tale in the collection, will also make you laugh, though not without a grimace, as the unflappable Constantine Foote, polymath, wine connoisseur, seducer and con artist, desperately chases the woman of his dreams.

These are the lighter tales. Most of the other stories in Love Without Gun Control will leave you queasy, terrified, or both. “Needle Taste” portrays a bleak future in which a vicious serial killer has the mass appeal of a rock star. “Hush Hush” unfolds like a nightmare in the narrow alleys of Beijing, as an adventurer watches one person after another being robbed of speech. In “Wanderlust”, a man cursed by a jealous goddess is forced to live out his days driving his Mustang from one lonely gas station to the next. “Shallow Fathoms” is pure horror, fueled by the repulsive fascination of madness. “Nothing So Dangerous” builds an intricately detailed dystopia of universal surveillance and arbitrary detention, in which trust is the most perilous thing of all.

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Wonderful Time At Floating World

Sadly, Floating World is now but a memory ... but WHAT a memory: I had a total, complete, and utter blast. Major kudos to the great folks who put on such a magnificent event (I'm especially looking at YOU, Corey).

Thanks to all the folks to attended my stuff (MAGIC WORDS: USING EROTIC WRITING TO EXPLORE YOUR HIDDEN SEXUALITY AND SPIRITUALITY; IMPACT PLAY BEYOND FLOGGERS AND CANE; SEX SELLS: HOW TO WRITE & SELL EROTIC; and the author reading). I hope you all had a good time!

It was an extra thrill to meet folks I hadn't seen in ages, like Laura Antoniou, Cecilia Tan, Karen Taylor, Lori, Ralph Greco, and so many others -- and to make great new friends like Tom, and the extra-special Loren.

I can't wait for next year!

Tuesday, August 17, 2010

How To Wonderfully WriteSex (6)

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):


Other writers get it, of course: romance writers live in rosy castles and have crinoline dreams; science fiction authors are pasty-faced nerds with more love for science than humanity; horror pros keep bodies in their basement for research.

It’s natural for people to think that because you write smut … well, it’s pretty obvious that they think: thin, greasy mustaches, seedy domains, hacks, perverts – the clichés pop immediately to mind. But what’s really interesting is that this isn’t the toughest of occupational hazards for the erotica writer. After all, life is full of surprises: the romance author is a cynical young guy, the science fiction writer can’t balance his checkbook, the horror fan loves Fred Astaire movies, and the erotica writer is just doing a job.

Who cares what other people think: it’s what’s inside you that counts – and what’s inside erotica can be very unusual, sometimes almost traumatic.

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