A Nice Little Cybersex Pic

Amos Lassen Likes The Bachelor Machine

This is very special: my wonderfully sweet friend Amos Lassen just posted this very nice review of my science fiction erotica collection, The Bachelor Machine. Thanks so much, Amos!

 

Let me start off by saying that I am a huge fan of M. Christian and when he has a new book come out, I am on it immediately. Christian writes good erotica, something that is not easy to do. Anyway can tell a dirty story but not everyone  can put a story into prose and it is here that Christian excels (and that is true of all of his books—if you have not read him, you must). His casts of characters include a little something for everyone and he writes to us and pulls us into his sexual fantasies.

Finally this book is available to all of us and it contains eighteen very hot stories all pulled from the mind of M. Christian, a man who, in my mind, is a master storyteller. When originally published, Cecilia Tan wrote an introduction to the stories and that is reproduced here along with a new forward by Kit O’ Connell and a chat between Tan and Christian on how science fiction and erotica come together.

When I tell you that these stories are hot, I might be giving you an understatement. M. Christian’s erotica comes from the heart and I would love to spend an afternoon at a coffeehouse with him listening to how he comes up with the stories he writes. He manages to give us literary erotica or as I usually call it, literary smut but it is a notch above a lot of what I have read.

In this collection there is a lot of sex but the stories themselves are not about the act of sex but rather what sex means. Christian writes about humanity and being human and the sex is, like we said in Louisiana, lagniappe.  Christian is one of a kind and he again proves that here. By using satire and irony and combining that with science fiction and erotica, it is almost to say that he has created an entire new genre. His literary voice and style are uniquely his and every story here works. We go to places we have never dreamt of and Christian is our able and talented guide.

I have not singled out any of the stories for to do so would be to ruin a unique reading experience and I want all of you to find what I have found in reading M. Christian.

Can't Say It Better

War Is -

"War is God's way of teaching Americans geography."
~ Ambrose Bierce

Picasso on Inspiration

“Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.”

- Pablo Picasso

Teasing/Tempting Taste Of Finger's Breadth

Here's a pre-pre-pre-pre release teasing/tempting taste of my brand new novel, Finger's Breadth, coming soon from Zumaya Books ... stay tuned.

Here's a (work in progress) blurb about it:

Look at your [WORD REMOVED]: four fingers and a thumb, right?  But what if you woke one morning and rather than four fingers and a thumb you were ... short [WORD REMOVED]?  How would you [WORD REMOVED]?  What would you do?  What would you become?

The city is terrified: a mysterious [WORD REMOVED] is haunting the streets of near-future San Francisco, drugging and amputating the fingertips of queer men.  But what's more frightening than this [WORD REMOVED] is how it transforms the [WORD REMOVED] of the city.  For what's worse, a horror or that it can, so easily, turn any of [WORD REMOVED] into something even more terrifying? 

Erotic.  Terrifying.  Fascinating. [WORD REMOVED].  Disturbing.  Intriguing.  Haunting.  You have never read a [WORD REMOVED] like Finger's Breadth.  You will never look your [WORD REMOVED], or the people all around you, the same way again.

M.Christian At The Looking Glass

Here's a great opportunity to not just meet little ol' me but also to hear me teach one of my favorite classes!  On February 13th, from 2:00 to 4:00PM, I'll be doing Magic Words: An Erotic Salon for the great folks at The Looking Glass in Alameda, California (the Bay Area).

Here's a quickie write up about the class and here's where you can order tickets ... and get details on where the class will be held.

There are many ways to reach your inner sexual and spiritual self -- but one of the most surprisingly powerful paths is through the written word. In this lecture/workshop, participants will hear how erotic writing (fiction as well non-fiction) can reach hidden places that often lay unexposed, help make personal discoveries and to assist in a personal journey of self and sensuality. Participants will learn how to free their erotic writing voices, how to develop their writing towards discovering their erotic spirits within, and when to silence -- and when to listen -- to the inner critic.

In addition to being a recognized master of erotica -- with over 300 short stories, nine collections, and six novels in print -- M.Christian has been in the San Francisco scene since the early 90s and has taught for QSM, The Center for Sex and Culture, San Francisco Sex Information, Janus, and has been a featured presented at The Floating World and many other venues. He is so kinky he doesn't even walk straight. Please check out his website here: www.mchristian.com

Odd Balling (1)

Here's some very cool news: I have a wonderful new gig writing for the great folks at YNOT and part of my new job is writing a bi-weekly column on the week in strange sex: Odd Balling: Weird, Wacky, Warped Sex News.  

And here's a taste of a brand new installment.  For the rest just go to YNOT.

#

Even though the year is less than one month old, it's looking like 2011 very well may go down in history as “The Year Of The Weirder-Than-Weird Sex Stuff.” At least we won’t be bored.

Case in point: During a trip to Las Vegas, New York City resident Hubert Blackman secured the services of a lady of affordable virtue. Nothing unusual about that, right?

Au contraire. Seems Mr. Blackman's experience with a woman he hired through hook-up agency Las Vegas Exclusive Personals left him less than satisfied, so he is suing the escort service because, as he notes in court documents, she "did an illegal sexual act on me during her paid service to me."

Blackman seeks a refund of the $275 he paid and "a $1.8 million verdict for the tragic event that happened." Las Vegas Exclusive Personals hasn't responded, but we imagine their business is booming with clients asking for the “Blackman Special.” Anything worth $1.8 mil is definitely worth checking out.

[MORE]

And What Do Indecent Men Protest??

How To Write And Sell Erotica - Now On Amazon!

For all you folks you may have been waiting to buy my brand-new book, How To Write And Sell Erotica, until it was up on amazon well, ta-da, it's now up there.  So buy the damned thing, will ya?

Dark Roasted M.Christian

Check it out: a brand new Dark Roasted Blend piece I did just went up: this time about artists who work with the earth itself.

Go to a museum and look at the paintings, or the sculpture.  Go to a bookstore and read the novels, or the stories, or the poems.  Go to a concert and listen to the music.

Look out the window ... and see art?  Some artists use oils, charcoal, watercolors, words, or notes but others use the earth itself, sometimes on a scale that, to appreciate it, means stepping far away from it: very far away.

Travel to Catron County, New Mexico, for instance and you'll see a work that is immediately, and quite literally, striking.  Created by Walter De Maria, The Lightning Field is 400 steel poles set in a grid covering one mile by one kilometer portion of desert land.  The Lightning Field is impressive, a haunting visa of steel spears against the dramatic landscape of the Southwest, but what gives it that literal striking beauty is that De Maria plan for his work involves those poles interacting with one of the most beautiful signs in the desert: lightning.  Given the right set of circumstances, nature itself paints itself in brilliant illuminations of forked electricity, shaped and sculpted by De Maria's metal rods.

Not that far away, in Rozel Point, Utah, you'll see an installation that, because of the on-again, off-again nature of the material it's made of actually vanished for close than 30 years.  Created by Robert Smithson using natural rock, Spiral Jetty is exactly that: a coiling formation of stone that, when it was first created in 1970, was harshly black but as it aged its become more and more pink and white because of the its home in the Great Salt Lake.  As with The Lightning Field, Spiral Jetty works with the earth itself, not just in appearance, meaning color, but also as in appearing and disappearing: when the water rose in the lake the work it did it's already-mentioned disappearing act, only to reappear again recently.

While not as large in scale as Smithson or De Maria, there's an artist whose work has been known to bring tears to even the most jaded of eyes. Andy Goldsworthy works with nature, and nothing else, to create some truly unique, and absolutely beautiful, art.

 No glue, no supports, no paint ... nothing but grass, stone, ice, and the earth: Goldsworthy creates wonders with just the at hand wonder of the natural world.

Still existing on the earth, the art of Jim Denevan, is so large, so staggering, that to appreciate them you have to step away from it all: from the ground and even, in some cases, the earth itself.  Created, like Goldsworthy, with nature itself, one of Denevan's creations is acknowledged as the largest artwork created.  Ever.

At over nine miles across, this Denevan's creation in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada, is the one for the record books ... that is, until Denevan or another artist likes him, goes for something even larger:

Another earth artist is Michael Heizer's work-in-progress called City, in Nevada.  Almost as big as it's namesake at one and a quarter miles long, Heizer's creation, however, is not steel and cement but stone and other natural materials.

James Turrell, too, uses the earth itself for his work but unlike some other environmental artists he uses not just the ground but also the sky above.  His Roden Crater, which is considered on the list of immense artworks with Denevan's creations, is an ongoing work that will, eventually, transform a natural crater in Flagstaff, Arizona, into an open air observatory where the earth will provide a naturally framed view of the sky above.

But if we have to talk about the earth and art, as well as art so big it can only be appreciated by being far above it, we have to travel to Peru, and back several thousand years into the past.

A favorite of ancient astronaut believers, the fact is that the Nazca lines were created by men and women who may have been working with simple tools but utilizing their very intelligent minds.  Created by removing the native gravel to expose the different-colored ground under, the lines depict a wide variety of shapes and forms, some purely geometric, but others representing the animals the Nazca natives were most familiar with: spiders, fish, llamas, lizards, hummingbirds and others.

While the execution is phenomenal, a low whistle is absolutely needed when that level of skill of coupled with the size of the lines.  The largest of the forms stretches almost across 900 feet across and pretty much all of them are all but invisible ... unless you happen to be high above the earth they were carved into.

Jack Clifton, author of The Eye of the Artist, said, "Man's reaction to his earth expressed by means of a medium is art."  In the case of these wonderful artists, the ground beneath our feet and the sky above our heads their art is the earth itself, a celebration of the world literally all around us.

Weirdsville On The Cud

Here's another special piece I did for the great folks at the Aussie site The Cud.  This time it's about the theft of a very famous work of art.

 

If it had been done in this age of iphones, ipads, and the rest of our high tech ilives, the movie would have had Clooney or Willis dangling upside down over a pick-up-sticks weave of alarm lasers while a geeky cohort (maybe Steve Buscemi or Alan Cumming), face green from the digital overload bouncing up from a laptop, rattles off a second-by-second update on the imminent wee-oo-wee-oo arrival of the stern-jawed Groupe d'Intervention de la Gendarmerie Nationale.

But while the lady did vanish – a very, very special lady – the means of her vanishing, while maybe a tad less dramatic, is no less fascinating.  While you'll no doubt immediately recognize the lady in question, you may not know her full name, or some of the more interesting details of her portrait.  Begun by a certain well-known artist back in 1503, the likeness of Lisa del Giocondo wasn't finished until some years later, around 1519.  After the death of this rather well known artist, the painting was purchased by King François I, and then, after a certain amount of time and other kings, it finally ended up in the Louvre.  An interesting note, by the way, is that – while not a King – the painting was borrowed from the Louvre by Napoleon to hang in his private quarters, and was returned to that famous French museum when the Emperor became ... well, not the Emperor.

Its official title is Portrait of Lisa Gherardini, wife of Francesco del Giocondo but the smile says it all, and in 1911 it was stolen – and wasn't returned until 1913.

While much of the theft is still a mystery, what is known is that on August 22, 1912, Louis Béroud, a painter and fan of the legendary Mona Lisa, came into the Louvre early one morning to study the famous work of Leonardo da Vinci, instead finding a bare wall.  In a pure Inspector Clouseau bit of history, the museum staff didn't immediately put bare wall and missing painting together and instead thought the painting had been taken to be photographed.  It took Béroud, checking with the photographers themselves, to bring it to the attention of the guards that the painting had been stolen.

Suspects were many and varied: a curious one was Guillaume Apollinaire, the critic and surrealist, who, because he can once called for the Louvre to be burnt to the ground, was actually arrested.  While no-doubt annoying, he was eventually cleared and released, but not before trying to finger, unsuccessfully, a friend of his for the theft, another rather well known painter by the name of Pablo Picasso.

Alas, the actual thief and the method of the robbery are almost painfully plain, though the man and the means weren't discovered until much later.  In 1913, Vincenzo Peruggia, a Louvre employee, was nabbed when he contacted Alfredo Geri, who ran a gallery in Florence, Italy, about the stolen painting.

The story that emerged after his arrest was that on August 20th, 1912, had Peruggia hid in the museum overnight.  On the morning of Sunday, the 21st, he emerged from hiding, put on one of the smocks used by employees and, with ridiculous ease, simply took what is arguably the most famous painting in the world and put it under his coat and walked out the door with it.  When the gendarmes later knocked on Peruggia's door they'd simply accepted his excuse that he'd been working somewhere else the day of the theft, while the painting was hidden under his bed.

What isn't plain, though, was Peruggia's motivation for the theft.  While he constantly argued he'd stolen the Mona Lisa for patriotic reasons, to hopefully return it to his native Italy, many believe a more intriguing, more nefarious, more devilishly elegant explanation – an explanation that involves one of the most legendary crooks and conmen who have ever lived: Eduardo de Valfierno.

Born in Argentina, Valfierno, who liked to call himself a Marqués, was a man with not just a plan, but a remarkably clever plan.  According to those to believe he had a hand in the affair, the Marqués began by commissioning not one, not two, not three but instead six copies of the painting from the equally-legendary forger Yves Chaudron.  Now there's no way anyone would buy a Mona Lisa when the real one was clearly hanging on a wall in the Louvre, so Valfierno hired the poor Peruggia to make off with the original.

Once the original painting was reported missing, Valfierno took his six perfect forgeries and sold them to illicit collectors all over Europe, convincing each and every one that the Mona Lisa they were purchasing was the one and only.  Waiting for the elegance?  Well, even if Valfierno had been caught, the only thing be could have been nailed for was selling forgeries, which none of the collectors he'd sold to were ever willing to report as it would have incriminated themselves as well.  What was an extra bonus, Valfierno could have sold as many copies as he'd wanted as long as the original painting stayed missing.

For those who like to tie Valfierno to the crime, Peruggia only tripped up the whole scheme when he realized that Valfierno had stuck him with the serious end of the crime – the theft – and he'd stumbled when trying to sell the Mona Lisa or, as he claimed, simply trying to return it to his native Italy.

The tale, though, does has a somewhat happy ending: Peruggia, despite the outrage over the theft of the painting in France, was given a rather lenient sentence by the Italian authorities, who felt moved by Peruggia's claim to have been motivated by patriotism.  While little is known about the possible mastermind, Valfierno, considering the brains and creativity involved it's not a huge stretch to imagine him doing quite well afterward.

Meanwhile, The Portrait of Lisa Gherardini, wife of Francesco del Giocondo, was returned to her noble spot in the Louvre where she smiles out as us to this day: her cryptic expression as mysterious as the shadowy history surrounding her theft in 1911.