Friday, February 08, 2013
Reminder: I'm Teaching For FantasyMakers Academy
(from M.Christian's Classes And Appearances)
Here's a reminder that this Sunday I'll be presenting a wonderful class for the celebrated FantasyMakers Academy: Making A Scene: How To Create Fun – and Most Of All – Hot S/M Play Encounters
Here's the info and links for how to register for the class:
February 10, 2013
1pm to 4pm
Doors open at 12:30am
Making A Scene: How To Create Fun – and Most Of All – Hot S/M Play Encounters
with: M.Christian
Donation: $20
You've got the kinky toys, you've taken classes in how to use them, you have a willing participant ... so what happens next? How do you take your skills and weave them together into a safe, sane -- and even better – a wonderfully erotic S/M scene?
In Making A Scene, participants will learn how to take the technical skills they've learned (from caning to impact play, bondage to edge play) and take the next step and actually put together a complete S/M play experience.
Beginning with the basics of physical and emotional safety then onto negotiation, safewords, then how to structure a scene with a beginning, middle and happy ending that'll give both the submissive and the dominance/the masochist and the sadist not just a great, fun, time but one that will include not just erotic excitement but also the roller-coasted thrill that can come from well-constructed theater.
Among the subjects that will be covered in Making A Scene will include:
Safety, safety, and more safety ... of every kind
What's hot in fantasy – and what doesn't, and does work, in reality
How to leave them not just satisfied but wanting more
Handling problems – and learning to improvise
How to hear your play partner ... even when they aren't saying anything
Expanding your limits as a top, as you explore the limits of your bottom
The important of aftercare – for everyone
Making A Scene is a class about technique, certainly, but its also about the important philosophies that separate a good S/M interaction from a truly memorable one ... the kind of scenes that go from being simply, wonderfully steamy to touching on a deeper, even more profound, level.
About the Presenter:
M.Christian has been an active participant in the San Francisco BDSM scene since 1988, and has been a featured presenter at the Northwest Leather Celebration, smOdyssey, the Center For Sex and Culture, The National Sexuality Symposium, QSM, San Francisco Sex Information, The Citadel, The Looking Glass, The Society of Janus, The Floating World, Winter Solstice, and lots of other venues. He has taught classes on everything from impact play, tit torture, bondage, how to write and sell erotica, polyamory, cupping, caning, and basic SM safety.
M.Christian is also a recognized master of BDSM erotica with more than 400 stories in such anthologies as Best American Erotica, Best Gay Erotica, Best Lesbian Erotica, Best Bisexual Erotica, Best Fetish Erotica, and many other anthologies, magazines, and other sites; editor of 2t anthologies such as the Best S/M Erotica series, Pirate Booty, My Love For All That Is Bizarre: Sherlock Holmes Erotica, and more; the collections Dirty Words, The Bachelor Machine, Love Without Gun Control, Rude Mechanicals, and more; and the novels Running Dry, The Very Bloody Marys, Me2, Finger's Breadth, Brushes, and Painted Doll. His site is www.mchristian.com, View his Amazon Page.
Here's a reminder that this Sunday I'll be presenting a wonderful class for the celebrated FantasyMakers Academy: Making A Scene: How To Create Fun – and Most Of All – Hot S/M Play Encounters
Here's the info and links for how to register for the class:
February 10, 2013
1pm to 4pm
Doors open at 12:30am
Making A Scene: How To Create Fun – and Most Of All – Hot S/M Play Encounters
with: M.Christian
Donation: $20
You've got the kinky toys, you've taken classes in how to use them, you have a willing participant ... so what happens next? How do you take your skills and weave them together into a safe, sane -- and even better – a wonderfully erotic S/M scene?
In Making A Scene, participants will learn how to take the technical skills they've learned (from caning to impact play, bondage to edge play) and take the next step and actually put together a complete S/M play experience.
Beginning with the basics of physical and emotional safety then onto negotiation, safewords, then how to structure a scene with a beginning, middle and happy ending that'll give both the submissive and the dominance/the masochist and the sadist not just a great, fun, time but one that will include not just erotic excitement but also the roller-coasted thrill that can come from well-constructed theater.
Among the subjects that will be covered in Making A Scene will include:
Safety, safety, and more safety ... of every kind
What's hot in fantasy – and what doesn't, and does work, in reality
How to leave them not just satisfied but wanting more
Handling problems – and learning to improvise
How to hear your play partner ... even when they aren't saying anything
Expanding your limits as a top, as you explore the limits of your bottom
The important of aftercare – for everyone
Making A Scene is a class about technique, certainly, but its also about the important philosophies that separate a good S/M interaction from a truly memorable one ... the kind of scenes that go from being simply, wonderfully steamy to touching on a deeper, even more profound, level.
About the Presenter:
M.Christian has been an active participant in the San Francisco BDSM scene since 1988, and has been a featured presenter at the Northwest Leather Celebration, smOdyssey, the Center For Sex and Culture, The National Sexuality Symposium, QSM, San Francisco Sex Information, The Citadel, The Looking Glass, The Society of Janus, The Floating World, Winter Solstice, and lots of other venues. He has taught classes on everything from impact play, tit torture, bondage, how to write and sell erotica, polyamory, cupping, caning, and basic SM safety.
M.Christian is also a recognized master of BDSM erotica with more than 400 stories in such anthologies as Best American Erotica, Best Gay Erotica, Best Lesbian Erotica, Best Bisexual Erotica, Best Fetish Erotica, and many other anthologies, magazines, and other sites; editor of 2t anthologies such as the Best S/M Erotica series, Pirate Booty, My Love For All That Is Bizarre: Sherlock Holmes Erotica, and more; the collections Dirty Words, The Bachelor Machine, Love Without Gun Control, Rude Mechanicals, and more; and the novels Running Dry, The Very Bloody Marys, Me2, Finger's Breadth, Brushes, and Painted Doll. His site is www.mchristian.com, View his Amazon Page.
Please RSVP to Atheris if you wish to attend this class or if you have any questions.
Reminder: I'm Reading At My Perverted Sucky Valentine Puts Out!
(From M.Christian's Classes And Appearances)
Just a reminder that I'm going to be one of the featured readers at My Perverted Sucky Valentine Puts Out.
Here's the basic info - with more coming soon!
My Perverted Sucky Valentine Puts Out!
Saturday, February 9, 7pm – 10pm
The Center for Sex and Culture
1349 Mission St. San Francisco, CA 94103
For an anti-Valentine's event of epic proportions, two of San Francisco's most celebrated erotic literary events join forces! On February 9, the Center will host the collision of Perverts Put Out and My Sucky Valentine! Come hear some of SF's favorite erotic authors read and tell stories about dirty love, dirtier lovemaking and the train-wreck delights of romance-gone-wrong!
Our three-way of hosts will be Carol Queen, Simon Sheppard and Thomas S. Roche; expect filthy heartache from Bay Area luminaries Charlie Jane Anders, M. Christian, Daphne Gottlieb, Philip Huang, Allison Moon and horehound stillpoint. This event is a benefit for the Center for Sex and Culture and the St. James Infirmary.
Here's the basic info - with more coming soon!
My Perverted Sucky Valentine Puts Out!
Saturday, February 9, 7pm – 10pm
The Center for Sex and Culture
1349 Mission St. San Francisco, CA 94103
For an anti-Valentine's event of epic proportions, two of San Francisco's most celebrated erotic literary events join forces! On February 9, the Center will host the collision of Perverts Put Out and My Sucky Valentine! Come hear some of SF's favorite erotic authors read and tell stories about dirty love, dirtier lovemaking and the train-wreck delights of romance-gone-wrong!
Our three-way of hosts will be Carol Queen, Simon Sheppard and Thomas S. Roche; expect filthy heartache from Bay Area luminaries Charlie Jane Anders, M. Christian, Daphne Gottlieb, Philip Huang, Allison Moon and horehound stillpoint. This event is a benefit for the Center for Sex and Culture and the St. James Infirmary.
Thursday, February 07, 2013
Wednesday, February 06, 2013
Taste of "The New Motor" From Betty Came: The Mammoth Book of Erotica Presents The Best of M. Christian
(from M.Christian's Technorotica)
Here's a teasing taste of my steam-punky erotic story "The New Motor" from both The Bachelor Machine as well as the (very flattering) Betty Came: The Mammoth Book of Erotica Presents The Best of M. Christian.
It is not our place, via hindsight, to say what exactly happened that one particular night. It’s easy to dismiss, with scorn or even a kind of parental, historical, fondness, that he was just visited by vivid dreams, a hallucinatory fever, a form of 1854 delusion (after all, we smile, frown, grimace, laugh or otherwise, this was 1854), or some hybrid kin of them all: a vision 1/3 unresolved traumas, 1/3 bad meal of steak and potatoes, 1/3 19th century crippling social situation. What we cannot dismiss—because it’s there with minuscule precision, in detailed blocks of blurry type in rag pulp sidebills, in the fine-filigreed pages of the genteel or just the skilled—was that John Murray Spear, a spiritualist of some quite personal renown and respect, did indeed depart Miss August’s Rooming House for Gentlemen of Stature (near the corner of Sycamore and Spruce in Baltimore, Maryland), and go forth to tell anyone who would listen—and some did, as those news- papers reported and those diaries told—about his visitation by the Association of Electricizers.
Close your eyes, metaphorically, and envision the images that might have fluttered through the expansive and trained consciousness of Mr. Spear as he lay, barely waking on a cheap mattress more tick than stuffing, the too-warm embrace of a humid Baltimore summer morning pouring through the thin gauze of the window. Amid the jumble and clutter of a day’s thoughts, they walk—as contemporary A. J. Davis expressed: “spirits with a mechanical turn of mind”—into the far-reaching mind of John Murray Spear. Perhaps gears lit with fairy energies, they turn and tumble through his waking, shining metal honed with eldritch tools, playing inadvertent peg-toss with his sheet- raising morning priapism. Maybe a great churning clockwork con- traption whose complexity echoes Medusa’s curse of knowing equally insanity or death. Or they might have taken the form of a Con-Ed employee in bedazzling ethereal refinements, in a saintly pose of divine grace while the animated logos and mascots of every power company that was, is, and will be flitted around his nuclear halo—commercial cherubs to His crackling, humming, arcing, power.
Their form was something that even escaped Spear himself, for when he spoke of their visitation—and he did, oh yes, he did from his own mount and other less spiritual soapboxes—a 220-watt gaze seemed to consume him and his articulations became less detailed and more abstract: “Their form,” he said to his breakfast companions and, often, for many weeks thereafter to any stranger on the street, “is fast and incorporeal. I don’t possess the mind to express their appearance in words, but their message, dear—” Sir, Madam, Officer, Friend “— is clear and ringing in my ears: Go forth, they spoke, go forth and with these two simple hands bring into the world a machine, a great work of engineering, that would take motive power from the magnetic store of nature, and therefore be as independent of artificial sources of en- ergy as this, our own the human body. Go, this conglomeration of spirits pronounced, and build the Physical Savior of the Race,The New Messiah... the New Motor!”
John Murray Spear did, indeed, say these words: from that rea- sonably expensive boarding house in summer heated Baltimore, to the swampy humidity of the capital, then upwards towards the cooler en- virons of the Northeastern states. He spoke of the visitation of the Elec- tricizers to a shocked and tutting crowd of theosophists in Providence, his hypnotic description of the coming glory of the Motor and how it would bring about a new Age of Man Through Machine ticking out of synch with their slowly shaking, disbelieving heads.
He spoke of the Motor in Boston before a hall not as packed as it had previously been for the spiritualist of some repute, and answered with complete sincerity questions of the Motor’s construction (“things of this earthly sphere coupled with the energies of transcendent mo- tion and ethereal force”), creation (“for a small donation you can speed its manifestation and arrival here, to us”), method of operation (“can one envision a locomotive, some new machine of human use and creation, that might come during the new millennium? The works of the Motor may be visible to some of us with the enriched spiritual vision, but the true powers of it will be as unseen as that machine of ages undreamed”), and patentability (“if the material servants of this, our Government of Country, should grant me the license of its man- ufacture then I see no reason not to accept”).
Coal-and-snow beard, hair wild with his feverish retellings, sup- ple (for a man of his forty summers) body bending wildly with each description of the glory of the Motor and his saving of mankind through its mechanical enlightenment, Spear made himself a sight as he traveled. For some he was a sight that brought smiles, frowns, or sadness at his state of affairs. But as he slowly, town by town, street by street, meeting by meeting, told his tale, made his claims, his en- treaties, he gathered people who listened earnestly to his description of the Mechanical Savior of the Race, the New Motor...
On a weird side note, the tale of the New Motor is based on reality - and you can read about John Murray Spear and his spiritual contraption in my non-fiction collection, Welcome To Weirdsville
Here's a teasing taste of my steam-punky erotic story "The New Motor" from both The Bachelor Machine as well as the (very flattering) Betty Came: The Mammoth Book of Erotica Presents The Best of M. Christian.
The New Motor
It is not our place, via hindsight, to say what exactly happened that one particular night. It’s easy to dismiss, with scorn or even a kind of parental, historical, fondness, that he was just visited by vivid dreams, a hallucinatory fever, a form of 1854 delusion (after all, we smile, frown, grimace, laugh or otherwise, this was 1854), or some hybrid kin of them all: a vision 1/3 unresolved traumas, 1/3 bad meal of steak and potatoes, 1/3 19th century crippling social situation. What we cannot dismiss—because it’s there with minuscule precision, in detailed blocks of blurry type in rag pulp sidebills, in the fine-filigreed pages of the genteel or just the skilled—was that John Murray Spear, a spiritualist of some quite personal renown and respect, did indeed depart Miss August’s Rooming House for Gentlemen of Stature (near the corner of Sycamore and Spruce in Baltimore, Maryland), and go forth to tell anyone who would listen—and some did, as those news- papers reported and those diaries told—about his visitation by the Association of Electricizers.
Close your eyes, metaphorically, and envision the images that might have fluttered through the expansive and trained consciousness of Mr. Spear as he lay, barely waking on a cheap mattress more tick than stuffing, the too-warm embrace of a humid Baltimore summer morning pouring through the thin gauze of the window. Amid the jumble and clutter of a day’s thoughts, they walk—as contemporary A. J. Davis expressed: “spirits with a mechanical turn of mind”—into the far-reaching mind of John Murray Spear. Perhaps gears lit with fairy energies, they turn and tumble through his waking, shining metal honed with eldritch tools, playing inadvertent peg-toss with his sheet- raising morning priapism. Maybe a great churning clockwork con- traption whose complexity echoes Medusa’s curse of knowing equally insanity or death. Or they might have taken the form of a Con-Ed employee in bedazzling ethereal refinements, in a saintly pose of divine grace while the animated logos and mascots of every power company that was, is, and will be flitted around his nuclear halo—commercial cherubs to His crackling, humming, arcing, power.
Their form was something that even escaped Spear himself, for when he spoke of their visitation—and he did, oh yes, he did from his own mount and other less spiritual soapboxes—a 220-watt gaze seemed to consume him and his articulations became less detailed and more abstract: “Their form,” he said to his breakfast companions and, often, for many weeks thereafter to any stranger on the street, “is fast and incorporeal. I don’t possess the mind to express their appearance in words, but their message, dear—” Sir, Madam, Officer, Friend “— is clear and ringing in my ears: Go forth, they spoke, go forth and with these two simple hands bring into the world a machine, a great work of engineering, that would take motive power from the magnetic store of nature, and therefore be as independent of artificial sources of en- ergy as this, our own the human body. Go, this conglomeration of spirits pronounced, and build the Physical Savior of the Race,The New Messiah... the New Motor!”
John Murray Spear did, indeed, say these words: from that rea- sonably expensive boarding house in summer heated Baltimore, to the swampy humidity of the capital, then upwards towards the cooler en- virons of the Northeastern states. He spoke of the visitation of the Elec- tricizers to a shocked and tutting crowd of theosophists in Providence, his hypnotic description of the coming glory of the Motor and how it would bring about a new Age of Man Through Machine ticking out of synch with their slowly shaking, disbelieving heads.
He spoke of the Motor in Boston before a hall not as packed as it had previously been for the spiritualist of some repute, and answered with complete sincerity questions of the Motor’s construction (“things of this earthly sphere coupled with the energies of transcendent mo- tion and ethereal force”), creation (“for a small donation you can speed its manifestation and arrival here, to us”), method of operation (“can one envision a locomotive, some new machine of human use and creation, that might come during the new millennium? The works of the Motor may be visible to some of us with the enriched spiritual vision, but the true powers of it will be as unseen as that machine of ages undreamed”), and patentability (“if the material servants of this, our Government of Country, should grant me the license of its man- ufacture then I see no reason not to accept”).
Coal-and-snow beard, hair wild with his feverish retellings, sup- ple (for a man of his forty summers) body bending wildly with each description of the glory of the Motor and his saving of mankind through its mechanical enlightenment, Spear made himself a sight as he traveled. For some he was a sight that brought smiles, frowns, or sadness at his state of affairs. But as he slowly, town by town, street by street, meeting by meeting, told his tale, made his claims, his en- treaties, he gathered people who listened earnestly to his description of the Mechanical Savior of the Race, the New Motor...
#
On a weird side note, the tale of the New Motor is based on reality - and you can read about John Murray Spear and his spiritual contraption in my non-fiction collection, Welcome To Weirdsville
Monday, February 04, 2013
I'm Teaching For The Center For Sex And Culture!
(from M.Christian's Classes And Appearances)
I'm thrilled to be able to announce that I'm going to be teaching three special classes for the fabulous Center For Sex And Culture!
Sex Sells: How To Write And Sell Erotica
Thinking Outside Your Box: Creative Adult Marketing
Tuesday, March 19, 7:00PM - 10:00PM
$20
Let's face facts, folks: the adult business world has totally, completely changed – marketing and advertising tricks that used to work simply don't anymore ... which is why, more than ever, thinking outside the box is key to raising above the rest. Twitter? Tumblr? Live Streaming? Facebook? While there are a lot of options, many of the techniques that a lot of gurus and experts say only really work for experts and gurus ... and not for most people. In this fun and provocative lecture you'll learn to learn the differences between what other people say you should do and what actually works – including when to play by the rules and when not to, how to rise above the rest, and how to manage your marketing time and dollars.Sex Sells: How To Write And Sell Erotica
Saturday, April 13th from 10:00AM to 1:00PM
$20
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.
How To Create An Effective Online Profile – And How To Write Messages That Will Get Good Responses
Friday, May 10, 2013, 7:00PM - 10:00PM
$20
The world is the now the Internet ... and if you don't know how to use it then you are at a serious disadvantage in making any kind of connection: employment, social, artistic and – most of all – erotic. This class will not just explore how to use the Internet and various sites as a resource to explore your own sexuality – in any form – but also how to create an effective and alluring online profile. But creating a digital 'self' is only part of it: participants will also get tips on how to reach out in imaginative ways that will get a positive response, the important things that are too often forgotten and other social niceties that can be the difference between frustration and disappointment and having a wonderful – and best of all – sexy time online!
Sunday, February 03, 2013
Creative Sex Play For Dr. Amy Marsh's Sexuality Salon
(from M.Christian's Classes And Appearances)
This is going to be a LOT of fun: I just agreed to lead a group discussion on the future of sex for the fantastic Dr. Amy Marsh's Sexuality Salon on February 22nd.
Here's a quickie write-up on the event ... hope to see you there!
Creative Sex Play
"Even the most experienced sexual adventurer may run short of ... shall we say 'inspiration'? In this wild and provocative seminar participants will not just learn al kind of new techniques and sexual worlds to explore – and do that exploration safely (both physically as well as emotionally) but they will also have lots of fun with various techniques to expand their basic imagination muscles: picking up new and enjoyable games to help them add a lot more to their lives – and not just their bedroom play."
About M. "Chris" Christian:
"As M. Christian I am - among many things - an acknowledged master of erotica with more than 400 stories in such anthologies as Best American Erotica, Best Gay Erotica, Best Lesbian Erotica, Best Bisexual Erotica, Best Fetish Erotica, and many, many other anthologies, magazines, and other sites. I'm the editor of 25 anthologies including the Best S/M Erotica series, Pirate Booty, My Love For All That Is Bizarre: Sherlock Holmes Erotica, The Burning Pen, Guilty Pleasures, The Mammoth Book of Future Cops and The Mammoth Book of Tales of the Road (with Maxim Jakubowksi) and Confessions, Garden of Perverse, and Amazons (with Sage Vivant) as well as many others. I'm also an Associate Publisher for Renaissance E Books/Sizzler Editions (premier publisher of BDSM erotica). I'm the author of the collections Dirty Words, Speaking Parts, The Bachelor Machine, Licks & Promises, Filthy, Love Without Gun Control, Rude Mechanicals, and Coming Together: M. Christian; and the novels Running Dry, The Very Bloody Marys, Me2, Finger's Breadth, Brushes, and Painted Doll. My professional site is at www.mchristian.com"
Don't forget to purchase food and drink from the Cafe, which is so generous in providing this space for us!
This is going to be a LOT of fun: I just agreed to lead a group discussion on the future of sex for the fantastic Dr. Amy Marsh's Sexuality Salon on February 22nd.
Here's a quickie write-up on the event ... hope to see you there!
Creative Sex Play
"Even the most experienced sexual adventurer may run short of ... shall we say 'inspiration'? In this wild and provocative seminar participants will not just learn al kind of new techniques and sexual worlds to explore – and do that exploration safely (both physically as well as emotionally) but they will also have lots of fun with various techniques to expand their basic imagination muscles: picking up new and enjoyable games to help them add a lot more to their lives – and not just their bedroom play."
About M. "Chris" Christian:
"As M. Christian I am - among many things - an acknowledged master of erotica with more than 400 stories in such anthologies as Best American Erotica, Best Gay Erotica, Best Lesbian Erotica, Best Bisexual Erotica, Best Fetish Erotica, and many, many other anthologies, magazines, and other sites. I'm the editor of 25 anthologies including the Best S/M Erotica series, Pirate Booty, My Love For All That Is Bizarre: Sherlock Holmes Erotica, The Burning Pen, Guilty Pleasures, The Mammoth Book of Future Cops and The Mammoth Book of Tales of the Road (with Maxim Jakubowksi) and Confessions, Garden of Perverse, and Amazons (with Sage Vivant) as well as many others. I'm also an Associate Publisher for Renaissance E Books/Sizzler Editions (premier publisher of BDSM erotica). I'm the author of the collections Dirty Words, Speaking Parts, The Bachelor Machine, Licks & Promises, Filthy, Love Without Gun Control, Rude Mechanicals, and Coming Together: M. Christian; and the novels Running Dry, The Very Bloody Marys, Me2, Finger's Breadth, Brushes, and Painted Doll. My professional site is at www.mchristian.com"
Don't forget to purchase food and drink from the Cafe, which is so generous in providing this space for us!
Saturday, February 02, 2013
Reminder: I'm Reading At My Perverted Sucky Valentine Puts Out!
(From M.Christian's Classes And Appearances)
Just a reminder that I'm going to be one of the featured readers at My Perverted Sucky Valentine Puts Out.
Here's the basic info - with more coming soon!
My Perverted Sucky Valentine Puts Out!
Saturday, February 9, 7pm – 10pm
The Center for Sex and Culture
1349 Mission St. San Francisco, CA 94103
For an anti-Valentine's event of epic proportions, two of San Francisco's most celebrated erotic literary events join forces! On February 9, the Center will host the collision of Perverts Put Out and My Sucky Valentine! Come hear some of SF's favorite erotic authors read and tell stories about dirty love, dirtier lovemaking and the train-wreck delights of romance-gone-wrong!
Our three-way of hosts will be Carol Queen, Simon Sheppard and Thomas S. Roche; expect filthy heartache from Bay Area luminaries Charlie Jane Anders, M. Christian, Daphne Gottlieb, Philip Huang, Allison Moon and horehound stillpoint. This event is a benefit for the Center for Sex and Culture and the St. James Infirmary.
Here's the basic info - with more coming soon!
My Perverted Sucky Valentine Puts Out!
Saturday, February 9, 7pm – 10pm
The Center for Sex and Culture
1349 Mission St. San Francisco, CA 94103
For an anti-Valentine's event of epic proportions, two of San Francisco's most celebrated erotic literary events join forces! On February 9, the Center will host the collision of Perverts Put Out and My Sucky Valentine! Come hear some of SF's favorite erotic authors read and tell stories about dirty love, dirtier lovemaking and the train-wreck delights of romance-gone-wrong!
Our three-way of hosts will be Carol Queen, Simon Sheppard and Thomas S. Roche; expect filthy heartache from Bay Area luminaries Charlie Jane Anders, M. Christian, Daphne Gottlieb, Philip Huang, Allison Moon and horehound stillpoint. This event is a benefit for the Center for Sex and Culture and the St. James Infirmary.
Friday, February 01, 2013
M.Christian ... Science Fiction Reviewer?
(from M.Christian's Technorotica)
I'm thrilled to be able to announce at the reviews I wrote for the always-excellent Dark Roasted Blend just went up! To start, here's some quickie capsule reviews of some classic cyberpunk titles ... with others going up very, very soon.
Neal Stephenson
Snow Crash
(review by M. Christian)
William Gibson
Virtual Light
It's interesting that after he finished his masterpiece Sprawl Trilogy of Neuromancer, Count Zero, and Mona Lisa Overdrive, Gibson – the master not only of cyberpunk but of postmodern literature as well – would step back in time but remain in the future to write Virtual Light, the first of another three-part series, the so-called Bridge Trilogy.
Interesting, because Virtual Light is a fine and at times brilliant book that owes very little to science fiction, even though it has some elements in common. Set in a very near future, it follows the adventures of bike messenger Chevette Washington and disgraced cop Berry Rydell, who get caught up in a McGuffin chase when Washington impulsively steals a pair of special, high tech glasses. Their chase takes them all over California, most fascinatingly to a squatter city built in the decaying spine of San Francisco's Bay Bridge. Darkly comic, the novel has all of Gibson's trademark vividness and wickedly cool language but is much more of a noir novel with some surreal/science fiction elements than the ferociously dark and vicious Sprawl books.
Because of this, it's a much lighter and almost refreshing read, which threw a lot of Gibson's previous readers who may have been expecting something with a sharper edge. Still, when taken on its own or as part of the other Bridge books, Virtual Light remains a work by a master – a master who successfully took a different direction with a wonderful new book.
As with all truly great science fiction novels, The Einstein Intersection is less about science and more about fiction – in this case, fiction told by one of the greats not just of science fiction but modern literature as well.
Surreal doesn't begin to describe the setting and characters of The Einstein Intersection. Ostensibly about aliens exploring and trying to understand human culture after mankind has either left the planet or died off, the book is much more about some of the more powerful human archetypes. From Lo Lobey himself, a goat herder based on the myth of Orpheus, to the subject of his quest, Billy The Kid (AKA death), the book is a literary stage, allowing Delany to explore the world of our myths, fables, legends and fantasies.
It's unfortunate that people often pick up the book only to be frustrated and confused by Delany's psychedelic style. But for those with imagination and patience, reading The Einstein Intersection can swing open a brand new universe of style, language, and story: it's a wonderful book by a magnificent writer, first, and a great science fiction author, second.
J. G. Ballard
Vermillion Sands
I want to live in Vermillion Sands. I want to wake up in the morning and look out my bedroom window at the hypnotic world J.G. Ballard has created.
A collection of short stories, Vermillion Sands is set, mostly, in a Palm Springs-type vacation resort. There are two kinds of people there: the rich and the people who serve the rich. More importantly, though, the resort is a way for Ballard – in these stories – to explore the artistic process via a whole plethora of new technologies, from cloud sculpting to sound jewelry and more.
But Ballard is Ballard, so just writing stories about a resort, the people enjoying it or working there, or even the arts, is not enough: each of the stories in Vermillion Sands is also laced with his trademark psychological depth and lyrical subtlety. Sure, the stories might not be as subversively perverse, emotionally enigmatic, psychedelically strange, or horrifically languid as some of his other books and stories, but these light and almost funny tales are still J.G. Ballard – and that means they will always be as a brilliant and elusive as the landscape outside of Vermillion Sands.
(review by M. Christian)
I'm thrilled to be able to announce at the reviews I wrote for the always-excellent Dark Roasted Blend just went up! To start, here's some quickie capsule reviews of some classic cyberpunk titles ... with others going up very, very soon.
(right image credit: Huxtable)
Neal Stephenson
Snow Crash
Considered by many to be the ultimate cyberpunk novel (or second only to Gibson's Neuromancer), Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash has everything the genre requires: high-tech toys and low-life characters, a flash and dazzle style, a noir beat, enough concepts and ideas for a dozen other novels, and heaping helpings of bad boy attitude.
Set in a run-down LA in an archetypal "not too distant future," the novel is basically the story of Hiro Protagonist (wink, wink), the "Last Of The Freelance Hackers And Greatest Swordfighter In The World" and ex-pizza delivernator for the mafia; and Y.T., a nimble and nubile adolescent "kourier."
In the course of trying to survive a world run by corporations, and where the endless suburbs are lit by the omnipresent loglow of franchises like Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong, and CosaNostra Pizza, Hiro and Y.T. stumble into a plot by billionaire villain L. Bob Rife to... well, rule the world using a special brand of information warfare with its roots in ancient Sumerian mythology. Along the way, Hiro and Y.T. meet characters such as Ng, the technofetishist weaponeer, and Raven Ravinoff, the nuclear bomb-connected Aleut harpooner and assassin whose preferred weapons are molecular-sharp glass knives.
Snow Crash, when it rocks and rolls, which it often does, is like strapping yourself in for a dose a blisteringly fast anime: a near-chaos of cyberdelic images, methamphetamine-fueled concepts, quick bursts of characters and characterization, along with flights of pure digital fantasy. For those new to cyberpunk, reading a chapter of Snow Crash is like taking a shot of science fiction espresso.
Luckily, Neal Stephenson also knows when to put on the brakes, to pull over by the side of his roaring information superhighway of a novel and let the rest of us catch up a bit. For all its flash and dazzle, Snow Crash also has some great moments of humanity. The scenes, for instance, with Y.T. and Uncle Enzo, CEO of the American Mafia and Hiro's ex-boss as head of CosaNostra Pizza, are charming without feeling cornball. Other characters, some of them only featured for a few paragraphs, manage the same.
Some have criticized Snow Crash as a perfect example of style over substance, sarcastically saying that it's cyberpunk's purest form. Sure, the book has some serious flaws – like when it slams on the brakes to lecture Hiro, and the reader, about Sumerian mythology's relationship to linguistics and human information processing. But what saves Snow Crash from being bubblegum and instead makes it a satisfying literary meal is the inescapable sense that Stephenson is not taking himself, the book, or cyberpunk itself, very seriously.
Snow Crash is, in its heart, a cartoon: a laughing, giggling, fun time. The heroes aren't heroes. The villains – for the most part – aren't villains. The Metaverse – Stephenson's version of cyberspace – is a bold and colorful place full of animated characters, and the real world the stages and settings are too bold and outrageous to be anything but Stephenson's elbow to the reader's ribs with a chuckle of "Get it?"
To press the point, just look at Stephenson's other novels. Some have the same pop and sizzle -- like The Diamond Age -- but after reading Snow Crash it gets pretty clear when he's going for serious and poignant and when he's taking us along on a digital, cyberdelic, outrageous, dazzling, bizarre, animated, good-time ride.
Set in a run-down LA in an archetypal "not too distant future," the novel is basically the story of Hiro Protagonist (wink, wink), the "Last Of The Freelance Hackers And Greatest Swordfighter In The World" and ex-pizza delivernator for the mafia; and Y.T., a nimble and nubile adolescent "kourier."
In the course of trying to survive a world run by corporations, and where the endless suburbs are lit by the omnipresent loglow of franchises like Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong, and CosaNostra Pizza, Hiro and Y.T. stumble into a plot by billionaire villain L. Bob Rife to... well, rule the world using a special brand of information warfare with its roots in ancient Sumerian mythology. Along the way, Hiro and Y.T. meet characters such as Ng, the technofetishist weaponeer, and Raven Ravinoff, the nuclear bomb-connected Aleut harpooner and assassin whose preferred weapons are molecular-sharp glass knives.
Snow Crash, when it rocks and rolls, which it often does, is like strapping yourself in for a dose a blisteringly fast anime: a near-chaos of cyberdelic images, methamphetamine-fueled concepts, quick bursts of characters and characterization, along with flights of pure digital fantasy. For those new to cyberpunk, reading a chapter of Snow Crash is like taking a shot of science fiction espresso.
Luckily, Neal Stephenson also knows when to put on the brakes, to pull over by the side of his roaring information superhighway of a novel and let the rest of us catch up a bit. For all its flash and dazzle, Snow Crash also has some great moments of humanity. The scenes, for instance, with Y.T. and Uncle Enzo, CEO of the American Mafia and Hiro's ex-boss as head of CosaNostra Pizza, are charming without feeling cornball. Other characters, some of them only featured for a few paragraphs, manage the same.
Some have criticized Snow Crash as a perfect example of style over substance, sarcastically saying that it's cyberpunk's purest form. Sure, the book has some serious flaws – like when it slams on the brakes to lecture Hiro, and the reader, about Sumerian mythology's relationship to linguistics and human information processing. But what saves Snow Crash from being bubblegum and instead makes it a satisfying literary meal is the inescapable sense that Stephenson is not taking himself, the book, or cyberpunk itself, very seriously.
Snow Crash is, in its heart, a cartoon: a laughing, giggling, fun time. The heroes aren't heroes. The villains – for the most part – aren't villains. The Metaverse – Stephenson's version of cyberspace – is a bold and colorful place full of animated characters, and the real world the stages and settings are too bold and outrageous to be anything but Stephenson's elbow to the reader's ribs with a chuckle of "Get it?"
To press the point, just look at Stephenson's other novels. Some have the same pop and sizzle -- like The Diamond Age -- but after reading Snow Crash it gets pretty clear when he's going for serious and poignant and when he's taking us along on a digital, cyberdelic, outrageous, dazzling, bizarre, animated, good-time ride.
(review by M. Christian)
K. W. Jeter
Farewell, Horizontal
Like most of Jeter's novels "Farewell Horizontal" is rich and vibrant, with amazing and engaging concepts, packed with imagination to spare, and populated with fascinating characters on bizarre yet human missions.
Set in a future where a large segment of civilization is living in – and on the outside of -- a monstrous building called Cylinder, Horizontal teases and tantalizes with a lack of detail, making the book seem more like a surrealist exercise than a traditional (quote) science fiction (unquote) novel. Still, there's enough intimate details present to draw you into Ny Axxter's strange world.
A graffex (which are sort of/kind of digital tattoos or markings) artist, Ny longs for the big time, a serious score that will lift him up – literally – from being a scavenging freelancer. And like everyone else who calls Cylinder home, he knows that his fame will come by not staying in the building, by being horizontal, but instead will come from what's on the outside, on the vertical.
The vertical is what makes Farewell Horizontal sparkle. Jeter has always had a brilliant imagination and with this novel, he lets it fly. Ny – and the rest of the outcasts and fringe folks of Cylinder – live their lives clinging to the building's staggering drop surface with a technofetish inventory of fun and interesting devices and technologies. It's when Jeter gets down – or up, as the case may be – with Ny and his life that the book really draws you in. You feel like you're there with him on the surface of the building, and when he sees what could be his score – a genetically engineered flying woman or 'angel' – you feel the exhilaration. The same goes when Ny is caught in a war between two warring gangs, a war fought on the same vertical he's trying to make his home. You are there alongside him as he tries to get through it all alive.
Unfortunately, Farewell Horizontal suffers from the feeling that it's just one part of a planned series, a series that was never completed: plot elements are left hanging, characters that are clearly meant to go somewhere go nowhere, and while the lack of details make the book refreshingly surreal (yet rich with cyberpunky elements), one gets the feeling that Jeter simply didn’t have the rest of the series he might have liked to set the stage and flesh out this fascinating world.
Still, Farewell Horizontal remains a very good book and deserves a read. While it might not be the perversely dark love poem to Philip K. Dick that his first book, Dr. Adder, was, or be a truly thought-provoking and sensitive book like The Glass Hammer, or – for that matter – a wickedly funny and strange thing like Infernal Devices, Farewell Horizontal is still more imaginative and vivid than many other books. If nothing else, it will change the way you look at skyscrapers … tripping your imagination into thinking what it would be like to live on the vertical and not just the horizontal.
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Farewell, Horizontal
Like most of Jeter's novels "Farewell Horizontal" is rich and vibrant, with amazing and engaging concepts, packed with imagination to spare, and populated with fascinating characters on bizarre yet human missions.
Set in a future where a large segment of civilization is living in – and on the outside of -- a monstrous building called Cylinder, Horizontal teases and tantalizes with a lack of detail, making the book seem more like a surrealist exercise than a traditional (quote) science fiction (unquote) novel. Still, there's enough intimate details present to draw you into Ny Axxter's strange world.
A graffex (which are sort of/kind of digital tattoos or markings) artist, Ny longs for the big time, a serious score that will lift him up – literally – from being a scavenging freelancer. And like everyone else who calls Cylinder home, he knows that his fame will come by not staying in the building, by being horizontal, but instead will come from what's on the outside, on the vertical.
The vertical is what makes Farewell Horizontal sparkle. Jeter has always had a brilliant imagination and with this novel, he lets it fly. Ny – and the rest of the outcasts and fringe folks of Cylinder – live their lives clinging to the building's staggering drop surface with a technofetish inventory of fun and interesting devices and technologies. It's when Jeter gets down – or up, as the case may be – with Ny and his life that the book really draws you in. You feel like you're there with him on the surface of the building, and when he sees what could be his score – a genetically engineered flying woman or 'angel' – you feel the exhilaration. The same goes when Ny is caught in a war between two warring gangs, a war fought on the same vertical he's trying to make his home. You are there alongside him as he tries to get through it all alive.
Unfortunately, Farewell Horizontal suffers from the feeling that it's just one part of a planned series, a series that was never completed: plot elements are left hanging, characters that are clearly meant to go somewhere go nowhere, and while the lack of details make the book refreshingly surreal (yet rich with cyberpunky elements), one gets the feeling that Jeter simply didn’t have the rest of the series he might have liked to set the stage and flesh out this fascinating world.
Still, Farewell Horizontal remains a very good book and deserves a read. While it might not be the perversely dark love poem to Philip K. Dick that his first book, Dr. Adder, was, or be a truly thought-provoking and sensitive book like The Glass Hammer, or – for that matter – a wickedly funny and strange thing like Infernal Devices, Farewell Horizontal is still more imaginative and vivid than many other books. If nothing else, it will change the way you look at skyscrapers … tripping your imagination into thinking what it would be like to live on the vertical and not just the horizontal.
(review by M. Christian)
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William Gibson
Virtual Light
It's interesting that after he finished his masterpiece Sprawl Trilogy of Neuromancer, Count Zero, and Mona Lisa Overdrive, Gibson – the master not only of cyberpunk but of postmodern literature as well – would step back in time but remain in the future to write Virtual Light, the first of another three-part series, the so-called Bridge Trilogy.
Interesting, because Virtual Light is a fine and at times brilliant book that owes very little to science fiction, even though it has some elements in common. Set in a very near future, it follows the adventures of bike messenger Chevette Washington and disgraced cop Berry Rydell, who get caught up in a McGuffin chase when Washington impulsively steals a pair of special, high tech glasses. Their chase takes them all over California, most fascinatingly to a squatter city built in the decaying spine of San Francisco's Bay Bridge. Darkly comic, the novel has all of Gibson's trademark vividness and wickedly cool language but is much more of a noir novel with some surreal/science fiction elements than the ferociously dark and vicious Sprawl books.
Because of this, it's a much lighter and almost refreshing read, which threw a lot of Gibson's previous readers who may have been expecting something with a sharper edge. Still, when taken on its own or as part of the other Bridge books, Virtual Light remains a work by a master – a master who successfully took a different direction with a wonderful new book.
Samuel R. Delany
The Einstein Intersection
The Einstein Intersection
As with all truly great science fiction novels, The Einstein Intersection is less about science and more about fiction – in this case, fiction told by one of the greats not just of science fiction but modern literature as well.
Surreal doesn't begin to describe the setting and characters of The Einstein Intersection. Ostensibly about aliens exploring and trying to understand human culture after mankind has either left the planet or died off, the book is much more about some of the more powerful human archetypes. From Lo Lobey himself, a goat herder based on the myth of Orpheus, to the subject of his quest, Billy The Kid (AKA death), the book is a literary stage, allowing Delany to explore the world of our myths, fables, legends and fantasies.
It's unfortunate that people often pick up the book only to be frustrated and confused by Delany's psychedelic style. But for those with imagination and patience, reading The Einstein Intersection can swing open a brand new universe of style, language, and story: it's a wonderful book by a magnificent writer, first, and a great science fiction author, second.
J. G. Ballard
Vermillion Sands
I want to live in Vermillion Sands. I want to wake up in the morning and look out my bedroom window at the hypnotic world J.G. Ballard has created.
A collection of short stories, Vermillion Sands is set, mostly, in a Palm Springs-type vacation resort. There are two kinds of people there: the rich and the people who serve the rich. More importantly, though, the resort is a way for Ballard – in these stories – to explore the artistic process via a whole plethora of new technologies, from cloud sculpting to sound jewelry and more.
But Ballard is Ballard, so just writing stories about a resort, the people enjoying it or working there, or even the arts, is not enough: each of the stories in Vermillion Sands is also laced with his trademark psychological depth and lyrical subtlety. Sure, the stories might not be as subversively perverse, emotionally enigmatic, psychedelically strange, or horrifically languid as some of his other books and stories, but these light and almost funny tales are still J.G. Ballard – and that means they will always be as a brilliant and elusive as the landscape outside of Vermillion Sands.
(review by M. Christian)
Thursday, January 31, 2013
The Next Big Thing ... Me!
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Even punks jump up to get beat down and M.Christian is no different! One of our senior editors has a lengthy career and since taking over duties at Sizzler Editions has done amazing things to help the company and our authors. But what about his own endeavors? We sat down to find out more!
1) What is the working title of your current/next Sizzler Editions book?
2) Where did you get the idea for that book?
Well, to put it mildly I have written more than my fair share of queer erotica and fiction – starting with "Stroke the Fire" that was picked up for Best Gay Erotica 1994 – and ending with this brand new best-of-my-very-best short gay erotica: Stroke The Fire: The Best ManLove Fiction of M. Christian!
The book is made up of my handpicked favorite stories from three of my queer erotic collections: the Lambda Award finalist Dirty Words, Filthy Boys, and BodyWork. What's even cooler than this brand new best-of-my-very-best book the great folks at Renaissance E Books/Sizzler editions – that also published Stroke the Fire – have re-released not just Dirty Words, Filthy Boys, and BodyWork, but my queer novelsThe Very Bloody Marys, and (the rather controversial) Me2 as part of a whole "M.Christian" imprint: The M.Christian: The Manlove Collection ... pretty cool, eh?
3) What's the genre of the book?
Even though Stroke The Fire: The Best ManLove Fiction of M. Christian is basically queer erotica is also contains a lot of stories that run the gamut from horror (like "Wet," Boy," "Echoes" "Matches" and others) to science fiction ("Blue Boy," "Utter West," "Counting," etc) and even stories that, sure, might be gay and erotic but are more-than-a-but off-the-map (like "How Coyote Stole Sun" and "Coyote And The Less Than Perfect Cougar").
I also kept the introductions to the three books that were used to make up Stroke The Fire: my own from BodyWork Felice Picano's from Filthy Boys and Patrick Califia's from Dirty Words.
4) How would you describe your book in one sentence (25words or less)?
Stroke The Fire: The Best ManLove Fiction of M. Christian is quite literally a collection of the best-of-the-best of M.Christian's short queer erotic fiction, taken from his acclaimed collections Dirty Words (a Lambda Literary Award Finalist), BodyWork, and Filthy Boys.
5) If you could pick actors to play the lead characters in your story, who would you pick?
Since the book is a collection that's really tough to say ... though I sometimes visualize actors when I write (like Christian Slater and R. Lee Ermey for my novel, The Very Bloody Marys) I rarely do it when I write short stories. But if I had to pick some actors to appear in Stroke The Fire: The Movie I'd have to pick Ian McKellen, Alan Rickman, Christopher Lee, Nathan Fillion, the boys from Supernatural -- sorry, girls, as it's a gay male book there aren't many roles for women, not that I wouldn't love to get Emma Thompson, Gina Torres, Judi Dench, in there somewhere ... if just because I think they are wonderful and it would be a blast to meet them.
6) Now this movie needs a soundtrack – what songs/tracks best fit your book?
Hum ... as it's a collection, I'd say everything from Johnny Cash to Daft Punk. It all depends on the story you're reading ;-)
7) How long did it take you to write the first draft of this book?
As the book is a collection – made of other collections – that's really tough to answer. Dirty Words came out in its first edition back in 2001 ... with the other collections coming out every could of years since then. But then the earliest story in the whole book, "Stroke The Fire," first appeared in Best Gay Erotica 1994 so you could almost say that the book took both a month to put together but the content took 18 years ... and, boy, does that sound like a long time when you think of it that way.
8) What other books within your genre are similar to yours?
For me, Stroke The Fire: The Best ManLove Fiction of M. Christian is a way of putting everything I've felt proud of writing – that's queer and erotic – into one juicy bundle of pages. Sure, there have been other collections but, as far as I know, there hasn't been a collection that's a collection of other collections ... so I think that Stroke The Fire: The Best ManLove Fiction of M. Christian is more than a tad unique.
9) Who or what inspired you to write this book?
The wonderful Renaissance E Books/Sizzler editions asked me to put this book together as part of their launch of their special The M.Christian: The Manlove Collection – to be the one place, if people interested in my queer erotica needed just one place, to go to get the best-of-my-best. If you like what's here, in other words, then you'll no doubt love the other books, collections, and anthologies I've done.
[MORE]
Seven Weeks Of M.Christian: Week 7 - The Future
Here it is: the last installment of my seven (possibly terrifying) weeks of M.Christian...
...my reasoning behind this is that I haven't really talked a lot about myself for a while so I thought it would be a fun little experiment to post a series of essays about little ol' me: where I came from, my professional journey, being an editor, being a publisher ... and even my hopes and dreams for the future.
Hope you like!
"From the age of 6 I had a mania for drawing the shapes
of things. When I was 50 I had published a universe of designs. But all I have
done before the the age of 70 is not worth bothering with. At 75 I'll have
learned something of the pattern of nature, of animals, of plants, of trees,
birds, fish and insects. When I am 80 you will see real progress. At 90 I shall
have cut my way deeply into the mystery of life itself. At 100, I shall be a
marvelous artist. At 110, everything I create; a dot, a line, will jump to life
as never before. To all of you who are going to live as long as I do, I promise
to keep my word. I am writing this in my old age. I used to call myself Hokusai,
but today I sign myself The Old Man Mad
About Drawing."
- Hokusai Katsushika
- Hokusai Katsushika
You may not think you know Hokusai Katsushika but you do,
he's the Edo-period artists and woodblock painter most famous for his The Great Wave off Kanagawa – which, no
doubt, you've seen a million times.
I don’t really have a bulletin board – at least not a
physical one – but Hokusai's statement is always right in front of me ...along
with Kipling's rejection letter from the San Francisco Chronicle.
Hokusai's sentiment is, to me, what I want in my life – how
I want the rest of my life to go: a long life, sure, but more than anything I
want to keep getting better and better ... both as a writer but also as a
person. I've already mentioned
that scene from The Paper Chase – and
with it the desire to create something truly wonderful – but there are
naturally more than a few things I want to happen in the future.
But before I say anything more I have be honest: writers do
not have careers. We have
determination and, most of all, luck.
We really can't plot or plan our professional lives – far too often
things just happen. I didn’t plan
on being a pornographer, an editor, or a publisher, though I am very grateful
for the opportunities and the lessons they, and my writing life, have taught
me.
With that in mind, when I look at the future I always keep
more doors open than closed: yes, I would like to have fun with a lot of
literary projects but I will always never let these fantasies get in the way of
stumbling across anything that could take me in a totally new, and possibly
wonderful, direction.
I'm a firm believer in stretching yourself creatively. Not to repeat, but I never planned on
being a pornographer (let alone a queer one), editor, publisher and so forth
but when the opportunities came I gave them a 100% shot. As I tell my students in my classes:
you never, ever, know what you might be good at until you try.
With that in mind there are more than a few things I want to
do that I simply have never tried before.
A great pal of mine, for instance, has written a lot of one-act plays –
so I'd love to try my hand at that.
The same goes for screenplays: I haven’t written one – and I love the
movies – so I’d trying something like that could be a lot of fun.
The same goes for comic books. I know I've missed the boat on that one – the good old days
of freedom and a sense of play -- but it still could be a delightful, and
revealing, experiment. I actually
have done a short one (called Masquerade,
with my pal Wynn Ryder) but I'd like to give a longer work a shot.
Even though I've written quite a few novels I have many more
sitting in the back of my mind that I'd really like to get out – and, not to
bite the hand that's fed me – I'd like to get away from queer fiction ... not
because I haven't had fun but because I'd like to stretch myself by trying not
just new sexual orientations but whole new genres.
I would also really like to play with the entire concept of
what fiction, storytelling, can be.
Not to give away any secrets but I've always been fascinated by
augmented reality games – if you don't know what they are it's where a story,
often with multiple endings, is told through a wide variety of modern media (Twitter
feeds, blog posts, traditional novels, and even text messages). I'd also like to experiment with even
more ... unusual forms of story-structure. Again, not to give too much away, but I do think the
entertainment of the future will be much more interactive: giving the
reader/player all kinds of options and choices.
Writing novels like Me2
and Finger's Breadth have been
incredibly challenging and rewarding – so even though I would like to do a lot
of very different books – I still think there is a lot more there to play
with. The book I'm working on
right now is another spiritual sister to these books: crowd dynamics, social
interaction, the subconscious need to conform, the manufacturing of lives and
lifestyles ... a very fun toy box to play with.
One of my more well-know books is a collection of science
fiction erotica called The Bachelor
Machine (originally put out by Greenery Press it was reprinted by Circlet
Press and a new edition is coming soon from Renaissance E Books/Sizzler
Editions). But the thing with The Bachelor Machine is that it's ... a
tad dark: very much reflecting the noir-ish cyberpunk feeling of the time when
most of the stories were written.
It bothers me – quite a lot – that the world seems to have
become terrified of the future become scared of the future: it feels like every
book, every movie, TV show, etc, that comes how shows the next few years are
either totalitarian and oppressive or post-apocalyptic. Of course a lot of it is that it's just
cheaper, easier to make the world an antagonist for the protagonist to combat
and overthrow but I'm concerned that all this negativity is beginning to leach
into our souls – that we can't think of the next few years with anything but
dread.
But the fact is we are living in the future: I can watch
pretty much every movie or TV show ever made, I can listen to just about every
song ever written, I can read ... you get the point. More importantly, though, is that we are now living in a world
where just about anyone can create anything: from films indistinguishable from
Hollywood blockbusters; songs that normally would have had to have been
distributed by corporations to be heard; books – of course – that can be
written and read that never could before; and even physical objects (through 3D
printing technology) can be designed and manufactured by anyone, anywhere.
Socially, as well, we are seeing tremendous changes in how
we live our lives: gay marriage is becoming more and more acceptable; marijuana
reform is spreading; and even the basic concepts of work, play, marriage, love,
affection, and life transforming right before our eyes.
So I'm working on a kind-of sequel to The Bachelor Machine – but this time my mission is to write erotic
science fiction stories that take the usual nightmare cliché's (genetic
engineering, mind and memory alteration, artificial intelligences, total
information awareness, and a lot more) but instead of sowing fear I'm working
to describe a world where, sure, things may be radically different – even
almost unrecognizable – but where people are happy and the world is not just
safe but also amazing.
Writers can't really know their futures, and I certainly
can't see what’s over the horizon, but like with these stories I'm working on,
I'm working very hard to see over the horizon at possibly-challenging,
maybe-even incredibly difficult challenges that will, hopefully, in the end
lead not just to beautiful stories but a more enlightened life.
That you all for reading these installments: its been a joy
to write and, hopefully, a pleasure for you to read. If I could leave you with anything it would be to paraphrase
the painter of The Great Wave off Kanagawa:
"To all of you who are going to live as long as I do, I promise to
keep my word. I am writing this in my old age. I used to call myself Chris, but
today I sign myself The Old Man Mad About
Writing."
Monday, January 28, 2013
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