"Do You Know What Your Children Will Be?" Guest Post For Kit O'Connell

There's cool and then there's kick-ass-totally-wonderfully cool: my fun little vision of the future of sex and such has just gone up on the "approximately 8,000 words" blog of my wonderful friend, Kit O'Connell -- who also wrote an extremely touching forward to the new, Circlet Press edition of The Bachelor Machine.  

Look for Kit's guest appearance here, on my own little blog, in the next day or so.  You are a star, Kit!

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M. Christian is one of my literary heroes — as evidenced by how I fawned over him in writing my forward to the new edition of The Bachelor Machine. When I met my lover Mz Honey J, it was a sign of how compatible we are that she not only already knew his work, but plans to turn his short story “The New Machine” into a puppet show someday.

I am thrilled to have his writing here on my blog, as Approximately 8,000 Words’ first guest blogger.

Do You Know What Your Children Will Be?

by M. Christian

Not that long ago — not long at all, a few decades at best — you would have caused quite a stir. It wouldn’t have been because of anything as baroque as your facial piercings or that your hair is toxic-waste green. Nah, if you were a woman somehow transported back those few decades you would have been the source of more than a few outraged stares and even some hysterical outbursts. That’ll teach you, after all, for wearing pants.

So who knows what you might face if you were on that same spot in a few more decades in the future? Stoned to death for your fashion sense? Leered at for showing your nose and ears? Or, more than likely, frowned at your being such a prude … wearing clothes in public? How rude!

Things are changing … fast. There’s nothing new in that, but what is brand-spanking is how fast things are changing. It’s easy to forget that — living as we are on the edge of that social and technological wave — that those faces staring at your pants were only your grandparents, only your parents.

It’s a universal constant that while technology might not be used for fun — for sex — first, it certainly will be shortly thereafter. We are a sexy species — smart, but still sexy. Thinking with our minds first, our genitals second.

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See Me At Fogcon

If you're going to be in San Francisco next weekend - March 11th to the 13th - then here's your chance to see me at Fogcon, "a literary-themed San Francisco SF/F con in the tradition of Wiscon and Readercon."

My panels and such are on Saturday, March 12, but I'll probably be floating around the event the other days as well:

Saturday, 3:00-4:15 P.M.

Inside the Sausage Factory

Oregon Room

Pro writers talk about their process: how they write, what works for them, what doesn’t work for them.
M: Jed Hartman, Steven R. Boyett, Cassie Alexander, Michael Shea, M.Christian

Saturday, 9:30-10:45 P.M.

What happened to “Punk”?

California Room

One of its core principles of cyberpunk is the repurposing of tech by the streets. But since Cyberpunk, we’ve had witpunk, splatterpunk, biopunk, and steampunk, and “-punk” seems to have become a word meaning “an SF genre”. Is the punk still there, or do we need to admit we’ve made it meaningless? Is it time for punkpunk?
M: Nick Mamatas, M.Christian, Nabil Hijazi

Future Fire Likes The Bachelor Machine

This is very grand: Future Fire ("social political & speculative cyber-fiction") just reviewed the new edition of my science fiction erotica collection, The Bachelor Machine.  It really made my day!

 

This collection of erotic science fiction short stories (first published in 2003 by Green Candy Press), is re-released now in e-book format by Circlet Press, publishers of erotic romance with “a sex-positive outlook” (12). The PDF reviewed here was a little rough around the edges; I understand that another print edition may materialize presently. There is an uncommon variety of material in here, from cyberpunk to space opera, alternative history to dystopia. The science-fictional settings are manifold, as are the sexual positions and inclinations—and, more importantly, the role of the inevitable explicit sex within each story. From the frivolous to the poignant to the socio-politically scathing, there’s something in this book for everyone. (Except, perhaps, titillation, but more on that later.)

The opening story in this collection, always important because it sets the reader’s expectation for the rest of the volume, is the finely crafter ‘State’. A blue-skinned, élite (and expensive) robot-whore with a secret welcomes a discerning john into her room in the bordello and fulfils his fantasies with machine-precision. There is not much plot in this story, just one sexual encounter between a whore and client; apart from the protagonist’s robot nature (and blue silicon skin) this wouldn’t really need to be a science fiction story; nor is it particularly sexy. “Fields” (the whore) technically has a certain amount of initiative and therefore power by virtue of her deceit, but this is still the story of a john using a hooker, and neither character has much to endear them.

The next couple of stories in the collection (‘Bluebelle’ and ‘Winged Memory’) did little to dispel the notion that characters were all going to be shallow and obnoxious, and the sex graphic but unappealing. But then comes perhaps the darkest and most poignant piece in this volume, one much more about the characters than about the sex. ‘Eulogy’ is a very dark tale of a man and woman who get together to remember a flawed genius engineer they both mourn, and they seem about to topple into a pathetic (although at least guiltless) comfort fuck which she thinks of as a eulogy to her dead lover. But their memories and their relationships with the dead man (and his mysterious disease) are obviously more complicated and more problematic than the reader at first realizes, and what starts as a depressing but harmless seduction scene becomes deadly serious. The lightly but convincingly sketched characters reveal surprising depths of complexity. From the sci-fi perspective, there is some beautiful description of water-parting wave technology in the backstory.

One of the short pieces, ‘Fully Accessorized, Baby’ is more or less a vignette, recounting a kinky, gender-twisted single scene of paid-for-sex with cyberpunk toys and countless role-reversals (both physical and behavioural). The cyberdildo technology didn’t strike me as terribly creative, but the erotic tension of domination play with what was effectively two tops made this one of the most impressively original pieces in this collection. (And, yes okay, pretty hot.)

Perhaps the best crafted piece in the volume is ‘Guernica’, which recounts a hard core S&M sex party in a futuristic dystopian state where all such pleasure is strictly banned and penalties for abuse are brutal. Although in outline this story is little more than an extravagant litany of transgressive and sadomasochistic sexual scenarios, it somehow builds to a whole greater than its parts. The dystopian message is a powerful one, and the piece ends up casting light both on the intolerance of society and on the mentality behind sexually motivated threat/fear play. Here is a great example of graphic erotica that serves the purpose not of titillation, but of social commentary and satire. After reading the end of this story, I had to put the book down for a while and get my head around what I thought, which is an excellent sign for any piece of writing.

In a more traditional cyberpunk story, the heroine of ‘Heartbreaker’ is an undercover cyborg vice cop, infiltrating the hidden, run-down premises of a ring responsible for “drugs, puppets, illegal stims, stolen memories, and [...] slavery” (107) in a high-stakes sting operation. She has been hunting the notorious kingpin, known only as “Heartbreaker” for years. Inside, she encounters only a naked young girl, almost as modified as she is, who appears (but only appears) to be “barely legal”; there follows a lengthy scene of very hot, very dangerous, almost violent lesbian sex, as the cop keeps the perp occupied while her backup team can trace the operation and mount a raid. But she has more than met her match in this sexed-up cyber-girl, ultimately both sexually oustripped and (of course) outmanoeuvred. There’s not so much of a moral to this story, but it is a well-constructed short thriller.

‘Skin-Effect’ is a much darker, but essentially much simpler tale of a military cyborg—a “brain in a polyarmor combat frame”—who has evaded the obligatory PSTD treatment and misses the rage, violence and distruction of war. On the recommendation of a now-lost comrade, he visits a patchwork whore-bot who is even less human and more fucked-up than he is, but who may have a solution to his problems. Ironically, all of the sex and all of the kink in this story are in the world of flesh, pre-war and pre-cybernetic, so neither the military technology nor the psychotic pathology are invoked.

At once more mundane and more fantastic, ‘Sight’ is the story of the only human artist whose work is popular with the superior alien race who bestow limited technological largesse upon the people of Earth. Our artist is horrified to discover that his priceless works are, to the clients who have made him super-rich, mere pornography. His artistic purity sullied, he is unable to create until he relearns—graphically, of course—the value of “beauty and lust” (156). Despite (or perhaps because of) the present of the aliens, this may be the most human story in the collection.

Finally, we are ushered to a climax by the title story, ‘The Bachelor Machine’, saved for last, and perhaps containing the most pathos and poignancy of all. It is also probably the least sexy story in the collection, in as much as the graphic descriptions of flirting, foreplay and fucking are designed to be unattractive rather than titillating. Our hero, a drifting in a post-apocalyptic cityscape, visits a decrepit and barely-functioning robot whore; reminded at every step of her artificiality (both in terms of manufacture and of faked sexual interest), of the countless men she has serviced, and the disrepair this has left all over her ruined chassis. Telegraphed a mile off, it is no surprise to learn that the drifter is actually the whore in this relationship, paid to make the has-been sex-bot feel wanted when no one would pay to have sex with her now; more surprising is how Christian manages to imbue this relationship with a certain tenderness, a sense of sympathy for these decayed characters whose best is behind them. Another case of the erotic motif used to tell a human story, perhaps the most important story of all.

There are technical problems with this book; not really enough to spoil the reader’s pleasure, but more than you would expect even from a small-press publication. A scattering of infelicities and repeated words, clustered more in some stories than others, are little more than typos, although they should have been caught by an editor. More interesting, although a subjective taste, is Christian’s penchant for rich and poetic metaphors, sometimes bordering on the synesthetic, whose beauty he then undercuts by feeling the need to explain them in the adjacent phrase (an example: “pulsing advertisements: product-placement nebulae” [157]; either half of that expression would have been enough). On the whole, the erotic passages are a bit better written than the science fiction.

Perhaps it is not the role of erotic literature to titillate or sexually excite the reader; this is not, after all, mere pornography. Personally, I find most erotica too personal, too geared to the kinks of the writer (or, I should say, of the implied narrator, since the author’s own sexuality is not necessarily revealed in his work), to work for me; I couldn’t even appreciate a classic eroticist like Anaïs Nin, for her brand of mildly kinky sex is not mine. So I would be reluctant to argue that Christian’s erotica fails to titillate, as I hinted above and have been suggesting throughout this review; in fact on the contrary, there is such a wide variety of sexual preference, performance, and function in this collection that there will be something for almost everyone (and something to turn off almost everyone).

More to the point, however, the sexual content in stories such as these serve rather to remind us that we’re human, that our concerns such as love, lust, companionship, rejection, nostalgia, however fleshy or base, are universals. The sex in these stories serves as a microcosm for all of life, for social observation, for political satire, for the promotion of tolerance. In other words, the role of sex in well-written erotica is analogous to the role of technology in science fiction, or magic and beasts in fantasy: yes it’s exciting, yes we take a geeky or prurient interest in them, yes we enjoy them for what they are, but ultimately they’re the tools that tell a bigger story, that paint a more important picture. And on these terms, Christian’s science-fictional erotica is very well-written indeed.

Reviewed by Johann Carlisle

Some Interesting Exposure

This may very well fall into a "Too Much Information" category, but keep your peepers peeled for an upcoming (ahem) 'revealing' exposure of of a certain moderately-well-known writer by the absolutely wonderful Shilo McCabe as part of her Sex Positive Photo Project.  You have been warned ....

M.Christian Teaches Sex Magic Manifesting Positive Life Energy Through Erotic Play

If you live anywhere near San Francisco here's your chance to attend my class, Sex Magic Manifesting Positive Life Energy Through Erotic Play, at the Citadel on Tuesday, March 8th, 2011, from 8:00PM to 10:00PM.  I'm really looking forward to this very fun event and can almost guarantee that a good time will be had by all!

Sex, without a doubt, is a powerful personal force: it has the ability to not only give tremendous pleasure but also lift us up beyond our normal selves, and sometimes even to higher states of consciousness. Whether through sex with a partner or via masturbation, this class will explore how sex can be used to explore sometimes hidden spiritual and sensual dimensions, grow as a sexual being, manifest positive life-changing energy, or simply have a lot of wonderfully erotic fun!


But sex also has its emotional risks as well, and participants will also learn how to protect themselves as they explore sex magic and deal with sometimes shocking revelations about who they are as a sexual being.

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.

"All Tied Up" Bondage Article From Pornotopia - Now On Josie-whip.com

This is a kick: the great folks at the brand new Josie-whip site just put up my piece on sensual bondage, All Tied Up, from Pornotopia.  Check it out here ... and in the meantime here's a tease:

 

The old chestnut goes that while it's easy to catch a man, it's hard to keep him - well, hopefully, after this brief introduction to the art of sensuous bondage, some of you out there will not only know how to keep him, but also, should he slip loose, have him coming back for more.

It's hard to see how bondage gained its popularity - at least from an outsider's point of view. It's kind of like looking at an artichoke: many heads have been scratched pondering the first caveman (or cavewoman) who boiled the ugly thing then peeled away the barbed leaves for the tasty insides (let alone scrapping the leaves themselves). Bondage is much the same - getting pleasure out of being tied up?

But for those who've tried it, the allure of sensuous bondage is obvious: the emotional relief of being freed from all physical actions; the danger of being at the mercy of another person (and a female person at that!); and the physical sensation of being wrapped, held, immobilized - many people might turn up their noses at S/M, of what they see as "pain", but not the idea of being restrained and ministered to. You can't whip me but - yeah! - you can sure tie me up!

Like everything, there is a wrong way, a right way, and room for exploration in bondage. The wrong way is pretty obvious - your submissive is in pain (not the good kind) or suffers some kind of injury because of your bondage.

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Odd Balling (2)

Ladies and gentlemen (and all the folks between), here's a taste of my brand new Odd Balling column for the great folks at YNOT.  For the rest just click here. 

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YNOT – While the first two weeks in February ushered in the Chinese Year of the Golden Rabbit, they may as well have been called "The Week of the Transvestite Platypus" for all the outrageous, bizarre and just-plain-weird things that have popped up.

Not to insult transvestites, you understand ... or platypuses, for that matter.

Take, for instance, Asia News Network’s report that Thai airline PC Air will be offering flights featuring cabin staff with ... well, “staffs”: transsexual cabin crews.

"We are the first airline to hire all the genders. This has brought us a positive perception," airline spokesman Chuthathip Ratanasophon said — though no one has commented on what passengers are supposed to pull in case of emergency decompression.

Protection seems to be the obsession of the week, beginning with the theft of 726,000 condoms. As reported by Digital Spy, the rubbers vanished on the way from the manufacturer, Sagami Rubber Industries, to Japan.

"This has never happened to us before, and we are very perplexed,” Norinari Wakui of Sagami Rubber said about the theft. “We are not certain if it was of a premeditated nature."

While it is not YNOT.com’s business to offer investigative advice, we suggest the Japanese authorities keep an eye out for a shifty-looking character with a suspiciously bulging wallet.

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Watch Out For The Mysterious "M"

Okay, I know I can be a bit of a character but this is beyond 'meta:' my sweet friend Fulani recently sold a book of his kick-ass erotica to a certain publisher I work with, and whom I am rather partial to, and in celebration he wrote this very cool little piece ... guest starring someone you may recognize:

He first saw me at the art exhibition. Would have seen a lot of me, I guess, since I was one of the exhibits. He left his business card with the organizers. Fulani, it said. Just the one name, or nickname.

People said he was genuine, but reclusive. They said he lived in a suburban house with a workshop in the back garden and did most of his business online.

He was older than I’d thought, but puckish. He looked at me as if to say “I didn’t recognize you with your clothes on.”

He read my stuff and said he wanted to introduce me to M. M would want to publish it.
Only thing was, I didn’t know who M was, and I’d only just met Fulani.

Fulani was supposed to be straight-up, a good reputation, a well-known figure on the fetish scene, a man of his word.

I told him I wanted to know more about his bona fides. He nodded. “You want to know I am who your friends say I am, that I’m not going to rip you off big time.” Also he noticed I was looking at the earthenware pot in the corner of the room. It contained a selection of canes and crops.

His outhouse had a big, heavy vintage flatbed press.

“I use it to make limited edition prints and books,” he explained as he tied my wrists to the top of the frame. “I could make a photo print of your journal and publish a hundred copies. But whether there’s a market for them in that format – that’s the question.”

I tested the bonds. They were tight. He knew his ropes. I made a sound that came out halfway between a purr and growl.

“My opinion is, as a new author you’re better off selling to a publisher who can move a lot of copies.” He unzipped my skirt and noticed for the first time that I hadn’t bothered with underwear. “Also,” he said, “my opinion is, you have a wonderful ass. I shall enjoy putting marks on it.” Judging by the way he ran his fingers over my ass cheeks, he’d noted that I had a few faded bruises on there. Tomas’s doing, from a couple of days previously.

He left me there while he went back to fetch the canes. It was a warm afternoon. The scent of honeysuckle drifted through an open window, mixed with the richer smell of printer’s ink. I planted my feet wide apart and tried to relax. He was probably five minutes. In my head it was about five hours: I was after all naked in a shed in a suburban garden, visible through the window, about to be marked up by a complete stranger.

It was that familiar, deliciously deviant feeling.

What can I say? He knew his stuff. Started gently and built up the sensation slowly, on the well-known principle that you can always go harder but can’t take back one that’s too hard. He began with a crop, then a longer, stiff riding whip that was moderately stingy. I wriggled. He chuckled. I started to get into the zone. He noticed my breathing changing, I think.

The cane he used was heavy, about as thick as his thumb. Made me present my ass. One stroke. I pulled against the cuffs, the sting of it reverberating through my body. He let me compose myself, slow down my breathing, present my ass again.

Six strokes. I felt all the little jumping, twitching, sizzling connections from ass to pussy to thighs belly spine back of neck and crawling into my brain. I felt fevered. I was ready for him to take me, then and there, in that position.

Instead he made me turn around, face out from the frame.

Through half-closed eyes I saw a wooden tray with pegs on it, and a length of string.

Pegs in two lines, starting at each collarbone and running across my breasts, towards my navel, then to just above my clit and a couple on the inside of each thigh.

“I’m sure you can figure this out,” he said, threading the string from each peg to the next in a long line. I was more interested in the sensations from the pegs on my breasts, my belly, my thighs.

“This process tends to make victims quite vocal,” he murmured. Victims, plural, I noticed. There was a ballgag in his hand. Then it was in my mouth and buckled tighter than was strictly comfortable. I did a lot of mmmph-mmmphing just for effect.

He seemed to enjoy the effect. When he brushed against me I could feel his erection pushing on my hip.

He left the pegs on for a quite a while. Assured me this would add to the effect.

Certainly made me breathe harder, trying to put myself in the right mental space to handle the sensations. Trying to still my body, not squirm, not move my hips the way they really wanted to move.

Fingers moved gently over my tits, belly, clit. No fair. I’m ready, just fuck me.

When he pulled the cord that yanked off the pegs it was a massive headrush. You’d think it should be painful, but the sensation just disconnected my head from my body and cushioned me in endorphins.

I was dazed, limp and hanging in the cuffs, eyes refusing to focus. The ringing in my ears was the echo of me squealing through the gag, I think. And all I could think to say was the one thing I wanted to happen. Uck ee oww. No consonants because the gag prevented them, but he got my meaning and fulfilled my wish. Spread me over the flatbed of the press, opened my legs. And yes, I was juiced up.

This guy was, I’d say, twenty years my senior. Back where I grew up, that could have made him old enough to be my father.

I’d figured that before I came here. Was it, unconsciously, why I’d chosen the over-the-knee socks, the short skirt and cropped top? The deviant schoolgirl look? Had I wanted the age-play aspect of this?

These were thoughts I only had afterwards, because he was long and vigorous, and twenty years older or not, he kept going a hell of a long time.

When I finally came round, got mind and body back together, he was looking though my handwritten journal again.

“Interesting stuff,” he remarked. “It’s like a renaissance of erotica, in the classical sense of the term.”

“Huh?”

“Renaissance: a re-awakening of artistic and intellectual inquiry into the world and the human condition. Never mind. Let’s just say it’s good.”

***

I rewrote a lot. Put entries in date order, changed names and some details to protect the guilty. Rephrased the whole thing in the third person, so I was a character in my own stories.

Here’s what the mysterious M said: “Great news, sweetie – the publisher loves your book. Please sign the attached contract.”

I could have been fucked sideways.

Actually, I was. Fulani did. It became our regular thing. Especially after I threatened to write another book that would be about him.

He knows I’m not joking. Says he’ll have to make sure I have enough material for it.

Bibrary Bookslut Talks To Me

This was a LOT of fun: the fantastic Bibrary Bookslut just did an interview with yers truly.  Here's a taste and to read the rest of the great chat just click here.

♥ For those who may be new to your writing, and who haven't yet checked out your writing, please tell us a little about yourself.

Oh, boy, where to start?  Well, my usual pseudonym is "M.Christian" (though I have others) and I'm mostly known – if I'm known at all – as an erotica writer (though I've written many other things).  My primary writing site is at http://www.mchristian.com/ (though – you guessed it – I have others).

♥ The journey from 'aspiring' to 'accomplished' can be a long one (and you clearly qualify as accomplished!). When did you begin writing, and how did you feel when you first saw your work in print?

Oh, you (blush)!  Like a lot of writers I certainly don't feel 'accomplished' ... it's all kind of relative, I guess. 

You could say I've always been creative ... the kid in the back of the class drawing pictures of rockets and robots when he should have been listening to what the teacher was saying. I remember writing my first story in the 4th grade, though it wasn't until early high school that I heard that (maybe, possibly) there were people out there who wrote stories for a living. Shortly thereafter I went after that with a kind of (to be polite) pathological vengeance: off and on I tried to write a story a week, though it took me close to ten years to finally sell one.

♥ So, why did you choose erotica as a genre of choice? Is there something specific that draws you to it, or something you feel it offers that other forms of literature do not?

You could say that it chose me: that first story I sold was to a magazine called FutureSex, and then that same story was picked up for Best American Erotica ... and it all sort of took off from there.  I really never planned on being an erotica writer but, always the pragmatist, if someone's buying them I'm writing. 

But I'll let you in on a secret: even though I mostly write erotica, I'm secretly not really writing it.  When I sit down to write something for an erotic market I'm actually writing what I want to write – mystery, horror, romance, science fiction, whathaveyou – and 'leave the lights on' when it comes to the sex scene.  Beyond that, though, I have to say that erotica is actually a very welcoming, supportive, and flexible genre – much more than a lot of others I write in.  A pal of mine once described erotica as being like science fiction back in the 50s, or mysteries in the 30s: where everything was still fresh and new and writers were having a blast creating everything from scratch.   

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An Early Birthday Present: Model of A Theo Jansen Strandbeest

It may be a month or so early but here's a cool birthday treat I bought myself: a model of a Theo Jansen Strandbeest (thanks J-List)

The Looking Glass - Thanks, Folks!

Just wanted to toss out a well-deserved thanks to the great folks at The Looking Glass and the fun folks who attended my Magic Words: An Erotic Salon class yesterday.  It was a real blast to do!

Love Without Gun Control - The Introduction

Here's a bit of fun: the introduction to my collection of fantasy/science fiction/horror and (believe it or not) very little smut, Love Without Gun Control.  This was a lot of fun to write ... hope you like!

Congratulations on your purchase of the Write Way Automatic Introduction Writing Machine. Utilizing the finest in Hack Technology, we at Write Way guarantee that if correctly used and maintained the Write Way Automatic Introduction Writing Machine can give you years of successfully written.

After removing the Write Way Automatic Introduction Writing Machine from its ecologically protective shipping container, place it in a convenient location where it will be away from direct sunlight, moisture, dirt or dust, or undue criticism. Next, attach the Write Way Automatic Introduction Writing Machine’s Driving Force inlet jack to the nearest source of creative energy. We are Write Way recommend a standard Emotionally Vacant Upbringing (EVU), or Societally Isolated Childhood (SIC) coupled with the optional Write Way Rare Parental Approval (RPA) module for efficient creative drive. Warning: Insufficient creative energy can result in repetitive, arrogant results (see Appendix A: MeMeMe Syndrome) or false modesty (Appendix B: Blush Syndrome).

After attaching your Write Way Automatic Introduction Writing Machine to an available Driving Force, open the Inspiration Input panel located on the lower right section of the machine. Using a small, sharp instrument (such as your penis), activate/deactivate the appropriate DIPshit to assign the desired introduction inspiration input. Warning: Failure to activate the correct combination can result in various undesirable results, leading to arrest and criminal prosecution and/or Literary Awards.

Next remove the deebing support ring (located under the forelock wheel assembly) and carefully stipple the mantune cage until the blue light rotates into the green. With the loose pin in your left hand, then proceed to osculate the frandip to achieve maximum caustic relux feedback. If the frandip doesn’t achieve enough caustic relux feedback, consult the enclosed Troubleshooting Guide or kick the mantune cage wearing a size twelve steel-toed boot, aiming specifically for the wizzing input slot.After the caustic relux feedback has been achieved, it is time to select the Editorial Interface Mask (EIM). Please note that three pre- set Editorial Interface Masks have been preloaded into the Write Way Automatic Introduction Writing Machine, specifically the Father Figure (FF), the Tyrannical Ogre (TO), and the Uninspired Hack (UH). If you are interested in other Editorial Interface Masks, the Automatic Introduction Writing Machine Upgrade contains ten others as well as additional viewpoint features such as Alcoholic Blurring (AB) and World-weary Cynicism (WC).

To fully utilize the Write Way Automatic Introduction Writing Machine’s Deadline Matching Feature (DMF) it’s important to configure the Irresponsibility and Compulsiveness scale, located on the back of the machine, next to the Frustrated Author Input (FAI) and the Destructive Relationship Exhaust Fan (DREF). Turning the pip knob to the left will increase the Write Way Automatic Introduction Writing Machine’s dependability in meeting responsibilities (real or imaginary), though it will also affect the Spontaneity Output Mechanism possibly resulting in a creative, if predictable, column. Reversing the pip knob will diminish predictability but can also result in what is commonly referred to as Deadline Lapse Syndrome, which has been proven to be a leading cause of Writer Termination (WT). Correct balancing of these two forces is integral to the correct operation of the Write Way Automatic Introduction Writing Machine.

While we at Write Way understand that even after utilizing the excellent technology embodied in our Automatic Introduction Writing Machine there are other, unknown factors that can affect Creative Output (CO) and Monetary Input (MI), we must still insist that payment for the Write Way Automatic Introduction Writing Machine be received within one month of delivery (depending on location and volatility of local delivery personnel). Failure to expedite payment will result in financial and physical penalties, possibly including fines, levies, liens, testicular removal, spinal rearrangement, dental extraction, and colonic impaction.

You are now almost ready to use your Write Way Automatic Introduction Writing Machine to produce admirable and possibly noticable introductions. Before continuing, however, it is important to observe the three-stage Safety Feature Checklist (SFC):

• To ensure proper lubrication of the Write Way Automatic Introduction Writing Machine’s internal assembly, a fifth of cheap bourbon must be fed into the Inhibition GearBox (IGB) on a daily basis. If suitably cheap bourbon is not available, a bottle of cough syrup or rubbing alcohol can be used.

• If overheating occurs, the Write Way Automatic Introduction Writing Machine must be automatically switched into standby mode by turning the fiddle switch to the Moderate setting. This will cause the machine to “wheel-spin” until it cools satisfactorily. Failure to place the Write Way Automatic Introduction Writing Machine into this mode if overheated can cause the sensitive gibber line to vaporize, resulting at a ten x thousand foot-pound force explosion. This, naturally, voids the Write Way Automatic Introduction Writing Machine’s warranty, as well as any operator within three hundred feet of the device.

• Before final activation of the Write Way Automatic Introduction Writing Machine, the operator must completely fill out the attached Waiver of Responsibility (WoR), absolving Write Way of any damages – real, emotional, or imaginary – that the operator may experience during the operation of the machine. Failure to do so will result in the gibber line to vaporize, resulting at a ten x thousand foot- pound force explosion.

If you have followed these instructions carefully, you are now ready to use the Write Way Automatic Introduction Writing Machine and produce profitable and possibly entertaining columns for years to come. If however the machine fails to operate, place it back in its ecologically protective shipping container and return it to an authorized service center or convenient landfill.

If you are in need of an introduction in the meantime, we suggest that you simply retype this manual – god knows, manuals are just like introductions: no one reads them anyway.