Friday, September 21, 2012
MC In NYC
As I (ahem) keep mentioning I'll soon be winging my way to the Big Apple (for classes and - hopefully - tons of fun) so my blogging and such will be a bit spotty for the next week or so.
But definitely keep an eye on my Flickr feed for shots of my New York wanderings...
Thursday, September 20, 2012
Amos Lassen Likes Technorotica: Stories Shattering the Ultimate Taboo
Here's a very nice treat: a fantastic review of my new book Technorotica: Stories Shattering the Ultimate Taboo by the always awesome Amos Lassen!
I think of M. Christian like I think of hummus—both are acquired tastes. However, once you get to liking either, you just can’t get enough. As prolific a writer as Christian is, I never get quite enough. He is erotic and futuristic and has a sardonic sense of humor, However, above everything else, he goes where few dasn’t. In this anthology, Christian takes a step into the future and writes about bondage, fetishes, science fiction, and sex with robots and so on. In fact, we are taught by robots how to be great lovers. I suppose you could label this man/machine erotica as Christians unites sex and technology and there is a lot of Christian trademark kink. This is most definitely not your “everyday” read.
Eleven stories are sandwiched between the introduction, “Welcome to the World of Tomorrow” and the afterword, “Do You Know Where Your Children Will Be”? All of the stories are excellent but the one that stands out for me in “Blow Up” and that is all I am going to say. If you want to know why it is so special, you will have to get a copy of the book. Christian writes what I call literary erotica. He manages to infuse good writing with lots of sex and the result is almost a new genre. He is, however, the most difficult author to review because it is so easy to give away plots when discussing his writing. Therefore all I can say is for you to get a copy, clear an afternoon sit in the recliner with your feet up and the book open and enjoy every word.
“M. Christian is one hell of a writer. A no-holds-barred storyteller, he embraces his reader at the start and doesn’t let go until long after the end.” -Mari Adkins. “M. Christian’s stories squat at the intersection of Primal Urges Avenue and Hi-Tech Parkway … feral-eyed, half-naked … Truly an author for our post-everything 21st century.” – Paul Di Filippo, author The Steampunk Trilogy.
Wednesday, September 19, 2012
Monday, September 17, 2012
Reminder: M.Christian Is Coming To New York!
Just a little reminder that I'm not only going to be taking a nibble out of the Big Apple as a tourist in late September ... but teaching some very cool classes as well!
Here's what I'm going to be doing and where ... hope to see you there!
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TES MEETING: RELATIONSHIPS SIG - POLYAMORY: HOW TO LOVE MANY AND WELL
DATE: Wednesday, September 26, 2012
TIME: 8:00PM - 11:00PM
LOCATION: Joria Studios
260 West 36th St, 3rd Floor, between 7th and 8th Aves
CLASS DESCRIPTION:
Sure, you've heard of it – and maybe been intrigued by it – but what is polyamory and how do you love more than one person and make it work? How can you deal with jealousy, time-management, emotional rough patches, and more, to enter into multiple sexual relationships? We'll learn to separate the myths from the realities of polyamory, how to make tentative steps towards having more than one partner, and how to approach and deal with the problems of sharing yourself with others, and being involved with someone who, in turn, is involved with someone else.
Doors open at 7:30 pm - Meeting begins at 8 pm
COST: TES Members $4, Students with ID $4, Reciprocal Groups $6, Non-Members $10
FURTHER INFORMATON: TES (https://www.tes.org)
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MAGIC WORDS: USING EROTIC WRITING TO EXPLORE YOUR HIDDEN SEXUALITY AND SPIRITUALITY
DATE: Thursday, September 27, 2012
TIME: 6:30PM - 8:30PM
LOCATION:
SHAG ...a sexy shop
108 Roebling Street @ N. 6th Street
Brooklyn, NY 11211
347.721.3302
weloveshag@gmail.com
CLASS DESCRIPTION:
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, and to 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.
COST: $20
FURTHER INFORMATON: SHAG’S SITE
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SEX SELLS: HOW TO WRITE AND SELL EROTICA
DATE: Saturday, September 29, 2012
TIME: 1:00PM – 3:00PM
LOCATION:
The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual &
Transgender Community Center
208 West 13th Street
New York, NY 10011
Website: www.gaycenter.org
Phone: 212-620-7310
CLASS DESCRIPTION:
Celebrated erotic author M. Christian will be teaching his acclaimed sex-writing class and workshop Sex Sells: How To Write And Sell Erotica one time only in New York City!
The market for erotic fiction and nonfiction has always been popular but these days it's truly booming. Gay, lesbian, bi, straight ... you name it and it's selling like mad!
But even though the genre is more popular that ever, doesn't mean that there aren't important lessons to be learned in how to write, and sell, effective erotica.
For the beginning writer, erotica can be the ideal place to begin getting published, and - best of all - earning money ... and for the experienced author, erotica can be an excellent way to beef up your resume and hone your writing skills.
In Sex Sells: How To Write And Sell Erotica - this wildly entertaining class - M. Christian will review the varieties of personal and literary expression possible in this exciting and expanding field. Here you'll learn not just these creative techniques to writing stories that wonderfully sizzle but also essential lessons in dealing with editors, publishers, marketing your work, using social networking sites, and more.
In Sex Sells: How To Write And Sell Erotica you'll learn:
· How to create love and sex scenes that sizzle
· Current pay rates
· How to write for a wide variety of erotic genres
· Where and how to submit your writing
· The ebook revolution and what it means for writers of any genre
· How to cultivate your erotic imagination
· Where to sell your work to magazines, websites, anthologies, book publishers
· Techniques for writing convincing stories for sexual orientation and interests beyond your own
· The best Internet resources for writers of erotica
· How respond to fans, reviewers and criticism
- and much, much more
COST: $20
FURTHER INFORMATON: www.mchristian.com
Saturday, September 15, 2012
"Speaking Parts" Excerpt
Here's a teasing taste of my novella, "Speaking Parts" - that's in both Rude Mechanicals: Technorotica and the print-only Technorotica: Stories Shattering the Ultimate Taboo
Pell remembered seeing Arc’s eye—it was the first thing she’d noticed.
Tourmaline and onyx. Silver and gold. A masterpiece watch set in a crystal sphere, the iris a mandala of glowing gold. Her blinks were a camera shutter’s, as imagined by the archetypal Victorian engineer but built by surgical perfection not found anywhere in Pell’s knowledge. The woman’s left eye was jeweled and precise, clicking softly as the woman looked around the gallery, as if the engineers who’d removed her original wet, gray-lensed ball had orchestrated a kind of music to go with their marvelous creation: a background tempo of perfect watch movements to accompany whatever she saw through their marvelous and finely crafted sight. Click, click, click.
An eye like that should have been in a museum, not mounted in a socket of simple human skin and bone, Pell had thought. It should have been in some other gallery, some better gallery, allowed only to look out at, to see other magnificent creations of skilled hands. Jare’s splashes of reds and blues, his shallow paintings were an insult to the real artistry of the woman’s eye.
That’s what Pell thought, at first, seeing Arc – but only seeing Arc’s perfect, mechanical eye.
Pell didn’t like to remember first seeing her that way – through the technology in her face. But it felt, to her, like it had its own kind of ironic perfection to deny it. So Pell lived with the biting truth that she didn’t, at first, see Arc – for her eye.
But later, right after she got momentarily lost in the beauty of Arc’s implant, the woman looked at Pell with her real eye, the gray, penetrating right one – and Pell forgot about the tourmaline, onyx, silver and gold machine.
She had finally seen Arc, herself – the woman, and not the simple, mechanical part. Next to her, the eye was cheap junk: a collection of metal, old rocks, and wires.
* * * *
She wasn’t Arc at first. She began as just the woman with the perfectly created eye. Then she was the beautiful woman. Then she was the woman where she didn’t belong. Seeing her eye, then seeing her, Pell lastly saw her as oil, the kind of oil you’d see pooling in the street, that had somehow managed to make its way into a glass of wine. Agreed, it was cheap red wine – something out of a box and not even a bottle, but, still – she was oil. She didn’t belong and that was obvious, despite the cheapness of the gallery. She could tell, cataloging her bashed and scuffed boots, noting her threadbare jeans, her torn T-shirt, that amid clean jeans and washed (and too black) turtlenecks, she was a discordant tone among the harmonious poseurs in Jare’s tiny South of Market studio.
The woman was aware of her discrepancy. She wandered the tiny gallery with a very large plastic tumbler of vin very ordinare, stopping only once in a while to look at one of Jare’s paintings.
Holding her wine tight enough to gently fracture the cheap plastic with cloudy stress lines, Pell watched her, stared at the tall – all legs and angles, broad and strong – woman with the artificial eye. She tried not to watch her too closely or too intently, sure that if she let slip her fascination she’d scare her off – or worse, bring on an indifferent examination of Pell. Through a sad ballet of a slightly curved lip and a stare that was nothing more than a glance of the eyes, the woman would see Pell but wouldn’t – and that would be an icy needle in Pell’s heart.
Pell had already taken too many risks that night. She already felt like she’d stepped off the edge and had yet to hit the hard reality of the ground. Traps and tigers, beasts and pitfalls for the unwary loomed all around Pell. She moved through her days with a careful caution, delicately testing the ice in front of her, wary of almost-invisible, murky lines of fault. She knew they were there, she’d felt the sudden falling of knowing she’d stepped too far, moved too quickly, over something that had proven, by intent or accident, not to be there. Pell didn’t push on the surface, didn’t put all her weight, or herself, on anything.
But then everything changed. She’d seen Arc and her eye.
The plastic cup chimed once, then collapsed in on itself. Turning first into a squashed oval, the glass cracked, splintered, then folded, the white seams of stress turning into sharp fissures of breakage. The red, freed of its cheap plastic prison, tumbled, cascaded out and down onto her.
Pell had worn something she knew wouldn’t fit with the rest of the crowd. The official color of San Francisco, she knew, would fill the place with charcoal and soot, midnight and ebony. White, she’d decided, would pull some of their eyes to her, make her stand out – absence of color being alone in a room full of people dressed in all colors, combined.
"Looks good on you."
The shock of the wine on her white blouse tumbled through Pell as an avalanche of warmth flowed to her face. The decision to wear white that night had come from a different part of herself, a part that had surprised her. Now she was furiously chastising that tiny voice, that fashion terrorist who had chosen the blouse over other, blacker ones.
And so Pell responded, "Not as good as you would" to the tall, leggy, broad shouldered girl with the artificial eye. Which was beautiful, but not as beautiful as the rest of her.
* * * *
Pell’s reason for being at the gallery was Jare. Although she could never wrap her perceptions around the gaunt boy’s paintings, she still came when he asked. Jare, Pell, Fallon, Rasp and Jest. They weren’t close – but then foxhole buddies aren’t always. They weren’t in combat, but they could be. All it would take would be one computer talking to another – no stable job history, thus conscription.
All it took were two computers, passing pieces of information back and forth. Till that happened, they hid and watched the possibility of a real foxhole death in a hot, sweaty part of Central America fly by.
Foxhole buddies. It was Jare’s term – some fleck of trivia that’d hung around him. They didn’t have an official name for their tiny society of slowly (and in some cases not too slowly) starving artists, but Pell was sure that Jare would smile at his trivial term being immortalized among a band of too-mortal kids.
That was Jare. While the rest of them tried to focus on pulling their paintings (Pell, Jare, and Rasp), music (Jest), and sculpture (Fallon) as high as they could, there was something else about Jare – something, like his paintings, that refused to be understood. His techniques were simple enough, broad strokes of brilliant color on soot-black canvas, but his reasons were more convoluted.
Or maybe, Pell had thought earlier that evening (before turning a white blouse red and seeing the woman with the artificial eye for the first time) both man and his work were simple: broad, bold statements designed to do nothing but catch attention. He was like his paintings, a grab for any kind of attention – an explanation too simple to be easily seen.
In the tiny bathroom, Pell tried to get the wine out of her blouse. Contradictory old wives’ tails: first she tried cold, then hot water. The sink ran pink and so, soon, did her blouse.
The woman with the eye stood outside the door, a surprisingly subtle smile on her large mouth. Every once and a while she’d say something, as if throwing a bantering line to the shy girl inside to keep her from drowning in embarrassment.
"Who’s he foolin? I can do better crap than this with a brush up my ass.”
"You should see this chick’s dress. Looks like her momma’s – and momma didn’t know how to dress, either.”
"Too many earrings, faggot. What year do you think this is?
"Hey, girl. Get out here with that shirt. It’s better looking than this fucking stuff on the walls."
Cold water on her hands, wine spiraling down the sink. Distantly, Pell was aware that her nipples were hard and tight – and not from the chill water. Down deep and inside, she was wet. It was a basic kind of primal moisture, one that comes even in the burning heat of humiliation. Finally, the blouse was less red than before. Planning to run to where she’d dropped her old leather coat to hide the stigmata of her clumsiness, her excitement in two hard brown points, she opened the door.
The tall woman smiled down at her, hot and strong. In one quick sweep of her eyes, Pell drank her tall length, strong shoulders, columnar legs. She was trapped, held fast between the hot eyes she knew must have been staring at her, pinning her straight to her embarrassment, and the presence of the woman.
Her eye, the eye, clicked a quick chime of precision – as if expanding its limits to encompass the totality of Pell. Pell did not mind her intense examination. It added, with a rush of feelings, to the quaking in her belly, the weakness in her knees.
"Gotta splash. Wait right here,” Arc said.
Of course she waited.
After a few hammering heartbeats, the door opened and she came out – butchly tucking her T-shirt back into her jeans – and Pell was again at the focus of her meticulously designed sight.
"You live anywhere close? I’m tired of this shit. You?"
"Down the block. Just on the corner," Pell said, trying hard not to smile too much.
The woman downed the small sample of red in her glass and, looking for a place to put it down, and not finding any, just dropped it with a sharp plastic clatter on the floor. "Show me. It can’t be worse than here. Too many fucking artists."
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