(
from M.Christian's Technorotica)
This is very fun: I just took part in a kind of round-robin blog post
with some very cool folks - including my great pal, Brent (
Made In DNA). Enjoy!
1) What am I working on?
Let's see ... aside from the very cool stuff that's happening with Renaissance E Books (which includes our
Futures Past Editions sf/f/h imprint and the erotic
Sizzler one), where I am an Associate Publisher, and
Digital Parchment Services, where I'm a Publisher (stay tuned, great stuff coming very soon), I just finished a sequel to
The Bachelor Machine
(a new edition coming out soon, btw), tentatively called Skin Effect. I
also just started a brand new, non-erotic, allegorical/satire SF novel
called
Blue ... which (fingers: crossed) I hope to finish by the end of the year.
Beyond those, I'm still plugging away on a few dozen other projects that are way too nascent to chat about just yet.
2) How does my work differ from others of its genre?
Well,
my work has always been – to put it mildly – rather unusual. Yeah,
I've thought about trying my hand at more "commercially viable" things
(despite having penned two vampire novels and a romance) but I'm simply
having way too much fun writing odd stuff. Not to say that I haven't
been open to opportunities: 90% of my stuff came because someone asked
for it – erotica, gay fiction, romance, non-fiction, the whole enchilada
– but I've always put my own odd spin on it.
In the case of
Skin Effect ... well, the original
Bachelor Machine
was rather a creature of its time: full of cyberdelic psychedelics,
dystopic architecture, and circuit-pattern tattooed outlaws. Not to get
up on my soapbox but I'm frankly tired of the knee-jerk negativity that
still seems to permeate SF these days. But what honestly scares me is
that it could very well become a self-fulfilling prophecy: that we are
looking forward to the apocalypse. So I challenged myself to create a
book of erotic short stories that take some of the old cliché's of SF
(memory manipulation, genetic engineering, AIs, etc) and give them a
positive spin. I had a blast writing them ... just hope people enjoy
reading them.
3) Why do I write what I do?
I
don't really have a choice: while my day-job might be working for the
wonderful Renaissance E Books and Digital Parchment Services in my heart
I'm a writer – though my Publisher duties do give me a chance to try
and be the Publisher I'd like to have as a writer. Sure, it can get
damned hard to create anything these days – when everyone on the planet
seems to have written a novel, a screenplay, become a photographer, or
[fill in the blank] but I always try to stay to the fact that I just
love to write stories. There's really nothing more ... to be woo-woo
for a sec ... magical about putting words together to make a tale that
has never existed in the history of ... well, history and, if I'm lucky,
will outlive me by hundreds or maybe thousands of years by changing how
people see the world. Can't get much better than that.
4) How does my writing process work?
While
my Publishing jobs take up most of my time, I've been working very hard
to give myself at least one or two days a week to just write. I don’t
follow a regular schedule because I've always been very good about
knowing what I have to do and when I have to do it. An odd thing about
me is that I can't work in dead silence, so I have my Xbox running
Netflix or Hulu or Amazon or whatever all kinds of tone-setting movies
or TV shows. Another odd thing is that I don't read a lot of the genres
I write in – sure, I do when I have to, as a Publisher, but for the
most part I find it just gets in the way of what I want to do as a
writer. But that's just me and my style ... your millage may vary.
+++++
And now it is my great pleasure to introduce to you four authors (in no particular order):
Jason M. Griesse
Jason
M. Griesse is an author from Southern California who dabbles in all
kinds of storytelling. Not content to stick to one genre, his books
often incorporate elements of horror and science fiction with a pinch of
mythology for flavor. He also writes articles and books concerning PTSD
and Mental Illness and is two semesters away from finishing a degree in
Psychology.
Brandon Black
Having
learned to read at an early age in part due to an ancient cardboard box
in his uncles’ room at his grandparents filled with Golden Age comic
books, Brandon Black has read science fiction and fantasy his whole
life. Raised by a physicist father and sociologist mother, instead of
receiving a teddy bear as other children did, Brandon was given an
inflatable astronaut.
Falling in love with shows about
space travel, exploration and combat from an early exposure to Star
Blazers and Robotech, Brandon was inspired to write his own science
fiction after hearing the narrator’s line in Robotech — “Meanwhile,
twenty light years away…” The idea that a story could have such scope
and breadth as to involve relevant, simultaneous events light years
distant from each other was a miraculous thing to young Brandon who
decided then to give writing a try.
Brandon received a
Bachelors in Military and Political Journalism from UNO and went on to
receive a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from LSU. Brandon’s
time travel story, “Time and the Wrinkled Prostitute” has been published
in Dark Oak Press’Dreams of Steam III. His stories, “Songs of the
Divine Pulsation” and “The Gift” were published in New Orleans By
Gaslight, an anthology of gaslamp fantasy and steampunk poetry and
fiction set in Victorian-era New Orleans, which Brandon edited with
Christopher Wong. Brandon’s most recent short story publication is “I
Knocked Up My Fairy Girlfriend” which appears in Seventh Star Press’ A
Chimerical World: Tales of the Seelie and his steampunk poem “Ballad of
the Dashing Skywayman” has been recently published in Cowboy Poetry
Press’ Unbridled anthology.
Brandon’s upcoming projects
are Cairo By Gaslight, a steampunk anthology set in Cairo, Egypt and
The Other World, an anthology of modern-day short stories about the Fey.
He has also written a children’s book, The Tortoise and the Little
Witches Three, and is currently writing his first steampunk novel.
Brandon lives with his charge and protector, Battle-cat Princess
Kaleidoscope, in his home town of New Orleans, Louisiana.
M. Christian
Calling
M.Christian versatile is a tremendous understatement. Extensively
published in science fiction, fantasy, horror, thrillers, and even
non-fiction, it is in erotica that M.Christian has become an
acknowledged master, 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 in fact too many anthologies,
magazines, and sites to name. In erotica, M.Christian is known and
respected not just for his passion on the page but also his staggering
imagination and chameleonic ability to successfully and convincingly
write for any and all orientations.
But M.Christian has
other tricks up his literary sleeve: in addition to writing, he is a
prolific and respected anthologist, having edited 25 anthologies to date
including the Best S/M Erotica series; Pirate Booty; My Love For All
That Is Bizarre: Sherlock Holmes Erotica; The Burning Pen; The Mammoth
Book of Future Cops, and The Mammoth Book of Tales of the Road (with
Maxim Jakubowksi); Confessions, Garden of Perverse, and Amazons (with
Sage Vivant), and many more.
M.Christian’s short
fiction has been collected into many bestselling books in a wide variety
of genres, including the Lambda Award finalist Dirty Words and other
queer collections like Filthy Boys, BodyWork, and his best-of-his-best
gay erotica book, Stroke the Fire. He also has collections of
non-fiction (Welcome to Weirdsville, Pornotopia, and How To Write And
Sell Erotica); science fiction, fantasy and horror (Love Without Gun
Control); and erotic science fiction including Rude Mechanicals,
Technorotica, Better Than The Real Thing, and the acclaimed Bachelor
Machine.
As a novelist, M.Christian has shown his
monumental versatility with books such as the queer vamp novels Running
Dry and The Very Bloody Marys; the erotic romance Brushes; the science
fiction erotic novel Painted Doll; and the rather controversial gay
horror/thrillers Fingers Breadth and Me2.
M.Christian
is also the Associate Publisher for Renaissance E Books, where he
strives to be the publisher he’d want to have as a writer, and to help
bring quality books (erotica, noir, science fiction, and more) and
authors out into the world.
Shon Richards
Shon
Richards is allegedly an erotica writer who writes science fiction,
pulp adventure, sexual magic and the occasionally suburban bondage. He
is really a herald of an unnameable erotic entity who writes to prepare
the psyches of the human population for the coming Apocafuck. His latest
book, Doom Vagina, tells the story of a groupie for the world’s most
demonic girl band. His current plane of existence can be found at
ShonRichards.com