On Oh Get A Grip

This is very nice: the great folks at Oh Get A Grip - and I'm looking at you, Lisabet - asked me to write a little bit about writing, traveling, and my story "Wanderlust" from Love Without Gun Control - and, natch, I did just that:

Thanks again to the always-wonderful Lisabet Sarai for giving me another chance to reach out to the readers at the Grip.

This time Lisabet asked me to take a trip, so to speak. It's always odd, when you're a writer, to have a friend look at what you've written and point out ... well, 'things' that you weren't really aware of. For example, I recently learned that I like to start stories at dusk or dawn. That threw me for a loop, as I really had no clue I was doing that. Naturally when I write now I make a point of doing exactly the opposite...

But one thing I was both aware of and not really aware of is my love of traveling. I say aware and not aware because I know I write a lot about it – maybe too much, actually – but not aware because it wasn't until recently that I spent a bit of time roaming my own mind to find out why.

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Baton Blog Post

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.

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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

Rude Mechanicals

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Out Now: Mammoth Book of Erotic Romance and Domination

As I mentioned before, I'm extremely jazzed to have not one but two erotic science fiction BDSM stories in my pal Maxim Jakubowksi's new anthology Mammoth Book of Erotic Romance and Domination - which just came out! 

Steve Williams Loves Painted Doll

Steve Williams at Suite101.com:

Examining The Dark New Book From A Rising American Genre Writer

In a future where technology is key, what do you do when you are being hunted by a volume of unknown, lethal, cyberneticaly enhanced assassins that can be activated remotely and at a moments notice, sent after you by an employer who’s reach in the world is unparalleled, and the Far East is the last refuge after the disintegration of the United States of America? Well, you might go into hiding in the very best way possible. You might change your identity, your name, your speech and become everything that you were not. You might even hide behind the thick makeup of the porcelain like Geisha.

This is the story of rogue computer analyst Claire, or Domino the Erotist as she becomes, the heroin in a wonderfully dark new novel from M. Christian. Claire adopts the hard, frozen persona of Domino to escape the clutches of her ex-employer who believes she has been stealing from him. Claire goes into a protection program of sorts, becoming Domino, who, with her excellently conceived kit of neuron stimulating inks and large, wand like brush, is charged with giving various clients a special service: using the inks she can stimulate any emotion she so chooses and create visions of fantasy more real than anything the client has previously experienced. But more than this, the Erotist can gauge a client, and in the guise of Domino, Claire is able to discern what truly motivates them and ‘pushes their buttons’.

The character of Domino is a fascinating creation, but there are others here for those interested in the world of science-fiction. ‘Many’ is a creature capable of jumping between bodies through some sort of data transfer, and is an interesting edition to the plethora of characters. Unfortunately, we only meet Many on an ironically few occasions, but he/she is certainly memorable.

Less interesting is Claire’s love interest Flower, a girl from whom she has had to be separated from. Whilst Flower is characterized by M. Christian in such a way that she is immediately recognizable with her own distinct tone and voice, she seems to function largely as a sounding-board in Claire’s loss of identity as maintaining the persona of Domino becomes more of a threat to her emotional health. There is nothing wrong with this, but had M. Christian chose to split the narrative apart and had it from multiple points of view, rather than from solely Claire’s, it may have served to give more of a life to Flower than what she ultimately had. However, when dealing with what could be perceived as a split personality to begin with – Claire and Domino wrestle for hold over the other – this limiting of the narrative voice may have been the right move technically.

The only real problem here, and one that is easily forgivable, is that, after a while, it becomes apparent that in order to write good erotica one must avoid cliché and, if possible, hyperbole. With these limiting factors in place, there are only so many ways that you can describe an erection through the eyes of a foe-Geisha giving sexual pleasures to her male clients through some nero-stimulant paints, without it becoming repetitive. M. Christian does remarkably well however in grounding his stories in strong characters, and because of this, this problem fails to blossom into any kind of real issue. It would be apt to call M. Christian’s descriptions here minimalism on the page, and the story benefits from this greatly.

On the whole, this is a story about love, betrayal, fidelity and an exploration of the dark desires that we all have, things that are seemingly inexplicable to our waking selves, but fundamental to our being. Once again, M. Christian exposes the underbelly of his characters and shows us truths that are rarely found in this genre in which he writes so well. This is a masterful piece of work, and recommended.