Friday, November 30, 2012

One More Reminder: Cupping - Using The Ancient Medicinal Technique For Erotic Play

(from M.Christian's Classes And Appearances)




Just one more reminder that I'm going to be teaching my very fun (and hands-on) class and workshop Cupping: Using The Ancient Medicinal Technique For Erotic Play for the great folks at The Looking Glass on December 2nd.

Where: The Looking Glass Arts

When: December 2nd, from 2:00PM to 4:00PM

Cost: $20.00 per person, $35.00 per couple with Advance Tickets; $25.00 per person, $40.00 per couple at the door.
Cupping: Using The Ancient Medicinal Technique For Erotic Play 
For thousands of years, Asian cultures have been using 'cupping' as a remedy for a variety of ills – from muscle strains to just a wonderful way to relax. In this unique class, participants will not just learn how to use cupping safely but also how to use it to enhance all kinds of erotic – and kinky – play.  
Demonstrations will include not just how to use cupping on various parts of the body in new and exciting ways but also the different types of cupping sets that are available and what type is right for everything from advanced BDSM play to just soothing an achy back.

Fifty Impressions of Grey


Here's a fun little thing I stumbled across - which is way too apt considering that I just got my own copy of 50 Writers On 50 Shades Of Grey - which has some great essays in it - including one of mine - about the 'phenom' that is 50 Shades....

Thursday, November 29, 2012

Did Someone Say ZOMBIES?

(from M.Christian's Technorotica)


Just because ... BRAINS ... zombies are ... BRAINS ... popular, I thought I'd share ... BRAINS ... an except from my own zombie ... BRAINS ... story from my non-smutty sf/f/horror collection Love Without Gun Control.

Btw ... BRAINS...


BURIED WITH THE DEAD 

All in all, Presidential Aide Lawrence Tucker thought, it had almost been one fucking successful administration. He thought this while pushing the snapping, squirming corpse of the Assistant Secretary of Urban Affairs on a gurney. The gurney had one squeaking, spinning wheel, and it echoed down the flickering fluorescents of Access Tunnel B2, deep inside Cheyenne Mountain.

Yeah, he thought, almost –

**** 

They’d managed to get Hubbel into the seat with a clear 65%. For the conservative middles they’d used a budget-cutting and job development plank. Rehabilitation and civil liberties had pulled in the sandal-wearers and the granola-eaters. A hands-off business tax approach brought in the big campaign bucks from the old white men. A couple of clean overseas “actions” had cemented Hubbel as a man who took no bull. The loss of Peter, his eldest, in a gangland shooting had gotten him in real firm with the bleeding hearts – that, and his tearful plea to “stop the killing of our children” as he dedicated a big hunk of the domestic budget to education and law enforcement.

At the door of elevator shaft C2, Tucker unholstered the heavy army automatic that Major Clark had given him. Hitting the cycle button, he stepped out of the way of Henry’s clutching hands. The straps were definitely not slipping, but he was being extra careful. He’d had to pump six rounds into Julie, the personal secretary to the Chairman of Foreign Affairs, after she’d slipped free a week or so previous.

Leaning back and lighting a precious Marlboro, he watched the shaft door slowly crack, then ponderously open. Thinking, once again, of Hubbel.

[MORE]

Sunday, November 25, 2012

Reminder: Cupping - Using The Ancient Medicinal Technique For Erotic Play

(from M.Christian's Classes And Appearances)


Just a reminder that I'm going to be teaching my very fun (and hands-on) class and workshop Cupping: Using The Ancient Medicinal Technique For Erotic Play for the great folks at The Looking Glass on December 2nd.

Where: The Looking Glass Arts

When: December 2nd, from 2:00PM to 4:00PM

Cost: $20.00 per person, $35.00 per couple with Advance Tickets; $25.00 per person, $40.00 per couple at the door.
Cupping: Using The Ancient Medicinal Technique For Erotic Play 
For thousands of years, Asian cultures have been using 'cupping' as a remedy for a variety of ills – from muscle strains to just a wonderful way to relax. In this unique class, participants will not just learn how to use cupping safely but also how to use it to enhance all kinds of erotic – and kinky – play.   
Demonstrations will include not just how to use cupping on various parts of the body in new and exciting ways but also the different types of cupping sets that are available and what type is right for everything from advanced BDSM play to just soothing an achy back.  

Just Means The Writer Did Their Job -


Friday, November 23, 2012

SOLOMON'S SECRET by billierosie FREE READ!



If you want to read a great story - by an even greater person - then head over to by fantastic friend billierosie's blog to read her free story, "SOLOMON'S SECRET"

Here's a tease:

Only mid-afternoon and already it was dusk outside. And it was snowing again. Solomon watched the flakes falling faintly against the window pane. Faintly falling and falling faintly. A few flickering flakes were blown onto the glass in the freezing, gusting wind and stuck to the leaded criss crosses.

They were snowed in. Solomon’s heart sank. His stomach churned. He was trapped. There would be no getting away from it this time.

Amber was naked and moving gracefully around his large bedroom. She had disrobed playfully, like a burlesque dancer performing a naughty striptease. She was comfortable in her nudity, throwing him mischievous glances, tossing her hair. She was lighting candles, their flickering light casting shadows across the soft swell of her belly, her heavy, swaying breasts. Her skin glowed golden in the candlelight. Her long curly auburn hair glimmered with golden highlights, one hand gracefully behind her neck holding her hair back. She was a Pre-Raphaelite dream. Rossetti would have killed to have painted her.

The falling snow outside was mesmerising and Solomon stilled his fear and allowed his mind to drift.
He barely noticed Amber as she moved seductively around his bedroom. Any other guy would be turned on by the view. Solomon was not.

In a short while she would come to him and expect to have wonderful sex.

The snowy window, Amber; his gaze meandered around his bedroom settling on a large blue china bowl on a small wooden table. He used it as a place to keep keys, credit cards, replacement batteries, a cigarette lighter from his days as a smoker, a cork screw; all the random stuff that had no home, but you might need to put your hands on quickly. He watched as she scattered the contents of the bowl out onto the polished table and sprinkled in what looked like a heap of pot pourri. She struck a match and set fire to it, wafting out the flames with a fanning hand. She looked like a witch casting a spell.

[MORE]

Sigmund Freud's Letter Regarding Homosexuality


(from M.Christian's Queer Imaginings)
Sigmund Freud's Letter Regarding Homosexuality 
In a response to a worried mother's inquiry about the sexuality of her son, Freud writes, “Homosexuality is … nothing to be ashamed of." 
The original letter and complete transcript can be read at Letters Of Note
(via BuzzFeed)

Monday, November 19, 2012

Bravo!

(from Frequently Felt)


 

(via vicemag)

VIGILANTES ARE TAGGING EGYPT’S SEXUAL HARASSERS WITH SPRAY PAINT

Despite worldwide publicity and campaigning, the approach to actually solving the sexual harassment epidemic in Egypt has sadly been a pretty apathetic one, with police giving less than a gram of shit about the situation, leaving street perverts to grope away until their hands are content. So it’s perhaps no surprise that anti-harassment groups in Cairo have gone vigilante, taking what’s left of the law into their own hands and patroling the streets to fight the harassment epidemic themselves.

We first heard about “Be A Man,” one of the more radical anti-harassment campaigns, from a story on NPR. The members of the group patroled during the recent Eid al-Adha festival celebrations, armed with cans of black and white spray paint, attacking, pinning down, and scarlet-lettering the shit out of grabbers and gropers with the words “I Am a Harasser.” Mostly men themselves, the activists wore matching fluoro jackets with “Harassment Prevention” scrawled across their backs in Arabic. I spoke to Muhammad Taimoor, leader and founder of the campaign, about their controversial tactics during the festival.

VICEHey Muhammad. Can you tell me a little bit about what’s been going on in the past few weeks?

Muhammad Taimoor: Yeah, we’ve been working against harassment with our campaign, “Be a Man.” A big problem here is that women-only carriages on the subway are being invaded by men who are then harassing the women onboard, so we’ve been working against that. It was Eid a couple of weeks ago and we were expecting that would be a particularly bad time for harassment. In the three days of Eid that I participated in, we caught about 300 cases of harassment—that’s 100 every day.

Wow, good job. How do you “catch” these cases?
Our tactics this time were pretty violent—a lot of people were offended because they didn’t like what we were doing. Basically, we attacked the harassers and spray-painted “I Am a Harasser” on anyone we caught in the act. The police weren’t at all supportive of what we were trying to do and they clearly weren’t ready to keep Egyptian women safe during Eid, so we did all the work on our own.

Why did you choose tagging with spray-paint as a tactic?
Because, in our society, a girl blames herself when she gets harassed. When she speaks out to her family about it, they blame her. Sometimes they prevent her from going to school or going outside because they think that sexual harassment is the girl’s problem, not the harasser’s problem. So, when our group attacks the harasser, the girl feels confident in herself. She feels like she was right, she feels like the street is supporting her. She’ll have the confidence to walk in the street without fear and she won’t be afraid to speak out if it happens again.

Keep Reading

Sunday, November 18, 2012

A Great Night Of Godless Perversity



I had a real blast performing at the Godless Perversity reading at the
Center for Sex and Culture last night - as I just mentioned on my Classes And Appearances page.

If you (alas) weren't there I've posted a special, slightly-edited version of "Friday Night At The Calvary Hotel" that I performed on my M.Christian's Queer Imaginings site. The full version is available in both FILTHY BOYS: Male-Male Erotica and my brand new best-of-my-best queer erotica collection, STROKE THE FIRE: The Best ManLove Fiction of M. Christian.

BUT, as a special 'treat,' here's the piece I wrote but didn't perform - though if you happen not to be a Godless Pervert you might not want to skip the following ... but otherwise enjoy!



BIGGER THAN JESUS

"We're more popular than Jesus now ... Jesus was all right, but his disciples were thick and ordinary." – John Lennon

#

Your dad has one. Your brother has one. Your uncle has one. Your grandfather has one. Your great, great grandfather has … or more than likely had one.

Albert Einstein had one. Babe Ruth had one. Michelangelo had one. Leonardo had one. Shakespeare had one. Lincoln had one. Ghandi had one. Hitler had one. Stalin had one.

Paul McCartney has one. Ringo Starr has one. George Harrison had one. Mitt Romney has a small one. Barack Obama has a huge one.

Anne Coulter has one.

The Dalai Lama has one. Pat Robertson has one. The Pope has one. Jerry Falwell had one.

I have one.

And there it is: the lead in to the question. But, as I said, the answer is not quite as important, as revealing, as the reaction to it.

So ... just how big was Jesus?


Aside from a few unfortunate accident victims it’s a universal constant: men, human males to be specific, have a penis.

Keeping the argument Christian because, let’s face it, Jews shouldn’t really have a problem with the idea: why shouldn’t he have had one?

So just how big was Jesus? Bigger than average? He was supposed to be the Son of God, wasn’t he? So he was pretty damned big, but he probably wouldn’t want to be too big – after all, he did say something about humility, right? It wouldn’t be right if he, say, couldn’t be big enough to fit through the eye of a needle, but so big that he might have been a diversion from the Sermon on the Mount.

Circumcision is a given as he was the King of the Jews and all. But what happened to that part of him? Considering how precious various parts of Saints have been it seems odd that there haven’t been there many great Raiders of the Lost Ark adventures trying to locate that missing part of the Son of God.

We know that Jesus rose after three days -- but like most men did a certain part of his anatomy rise before the rest of him? Granting him superhuman control we can skate over certain embarrassing ponderings, but others just beg to be asked. For instance, there’s a hunk of his early days missing from the Bible: were those simply too embarrassing to report. He was, after all, an adolescent – and like most adolescent's probably spent a large part of his time locked in the bathroom with the Aramaic version of Penthouse.

“Was Jesus bigger than John Holmes?” was the question I asked people on the street on a sunny San Francisco Sunday. Most of them didn’t know who John Holmes but said that Jesus was bigger.

Those that did know about John Holmes came close to inflicting physical bodily harm, so I’ve chosen to take their answers as affirmative-via-threatened ... though I wonder about their purity as they knew who John Holmes was.

Universally everyone interviewed said that he was bigger than the Beatles, but I have to wonder how they came to that conclusion: average length, intimate knowledge, or commutative measurement: Paul, John, George and then Ringo – one dick after another? Personally I lean towards the first as putting the Fab part of the Fab Four together would more than likely would make them bigger than John Holmes.

See, isn’t science fun?

But if he didn’t have a penis then what did he have? Was God so offended by one of his own creations, i.e. the penis, that he didn’t even give his son one?

Logic being apples to the oranges of faith, these few people couldn’t see beyond the playfulness of the question -- instead ramming headlong into a wall so inflexible they could only accept The Son Of God ... with the underparts of a Ken doll.

That's the question – that's what I'm asking here and what I asked those unfortunate pedestrians on a Sunday – but there's more to it, a more than I find even more disturbing than fundamentalist threats of violence.

Why is the idea of Jesus having a penis so upsetting? Before writing this I asked some people – religious or not – and got answers ranging from “turn the other cheek” hypocritical outrage to simple “squirming in seat” discomfort. Bad enough thinking of your father’s, let alone the son of a supposed all-father, was the flavor of the conversations.

Folks – mostly folks like us -- have talked about how Christianity has perverted and criminalized our flesh and blood natures, created a totally unrealistic and honestly disturbing fantasy world that real no human being could ever inhabit. A group-think nightmare worked out from very human self-interests of power and control from a few scraps of parchment and horribly distorted myths and fables.

The atheists, the agnostics, the insincere party-pagans -- we’ve given the Fundamentalists their little spot of land to burn each other at the stake on, stone gays on, refute evolution on, believe the divinity of the president and the USA on – at least in this little piece, but you folks are fair game: Christianity as an ignorantly adopted default religion, the divinity of Davy and Goliath, the ‘based on a true story’ mythology of Satan and his kick-boxing Son Of God nemesis, and the ‘proofs’ of divinity in tortillas and cheese sandwiches.

They're a lost cause. We can – rightfully – kick them aside. The future is not for them ... hell, even the present is not for them: they dream of – and deserve – a Disneyland Yesterday of smallpox, stonings, keeping the darkies in their place, and sex in the dark ... and only to make babies.

The Bible Thumpers have long since gone, slamming the door behind them -- so it’s just you and me now.

When I asked about Jesus's penis you smirked, you laughed through gritted teeth: oh, sure, Jesus had a penis. You can laugh at that one, self-righteously giggle at my lame jokes about how big The Son Of God was ... but, honestly, truthfully, how many of you hedged your bets by flicking your eyes at sky ... hoping that the Hairy Thunderer won’t be too pissed at you for even thinking about it.

That's the frightening thing: give the Fundimentalists their hysteria -- they’ve certainly earned it for running away from reality and into a land where the drugs that save their lives, the computers that let them scream and shout about the evils of a secular society, the engineering that puts roofs over their heads, all came from what they fear more than Satan and his cloven tap-shoes: science and thought. The dick of Jesus is theirs to scream and howl about.

But why should people who haven’t drunk the sacramental wine of Christianity found the idea of Jesus’s penis uncomfortable?

It’s understandable that the Fundamentalist rockers and mumblers would foam and froth, but why is the idea so disturbing for folks who have never read the Bible, any Bible, or even set foot in a church, any church, or who are – to put it politely – vocal about being not just unbelievers but that anyone who does believe is a complete, total, and utter moron.

We -- the atheists, the agnostics, the insincere party-pagans – far too easily forget what we are not believing about: where the real danger lies.

The Fundamentalists make themselves easy targets, dancing clowns in front of neon-green bulls eyes, but when people who have never been in any church, read any religious tract, or even openly sneer any anything to do with the idea of faith squirm in their seats, flick their eyes skyward, it pulls aside the curtain and shows that irrational belief is not loud and cartoonish but hidden in plain sight.

Sure, the Fundamentalists have left the party. But far too many people on this planet have all the ignorance but none of the dedication: they are the ones who shake their heads at evolution, gay rights, sexual expression, freedom of expression, and the Separation of Church and State while not understanding exactly why.

Will talking about Jesus’s penis change anything?

Of course it won’t – not immediately at any ate -- but I hope that maybe a few of you will think about it when you look out at the world and see only the burning crosses ... forgetting that the true darkness of believing the unbelievable, of irrational terrors of punishment by Dad in the Sky, is not just in the face of a screaming preacher but in the same discomfort that comes from walking under a ladder ... or thinking about Jesus's dick.

But one more thing: just to show that Jesus and his followers aren’t the only ones being picked on here – and, perhaps, reveal how deep this seam of fear runs through even we who consider ourselves above and beyond all these foolish fears, these ridiculous beliefs, these silly irrationalities:

Just how big was Mohammad?

Dumb Ways To Die

Pod People



Jack Finney
The Body Snatchers
1955

Friday, November 16, 2012

Hashima Island ... and Skyfall?!

(from M.Christian's Meine Kleine Fabrik)


skyfall island
In Skyfall, the Japanese island of Hashima serves as the secret headquarters of Raoul Silva, the well-coiffed Bond villain played by Javier Bardem. In reality, it serves as a sobering reminder of the pitfalls of industrialization, and the human toll it can exact. Late last month, Messy Nessy Chic published a detailed history of the island, which, at the turn of the 20th century, was a bustling coal-mining town owned by the Mitsubishi Corporation. 
Things took a turn for the sinister at the dawn of World War II, when the Japanese turned the island into a bona fide labor camp for Chinese and Korean prisoners. By 1959, the island boasted the highest population density on Earth (139,100 per square kilometer), and living conditions soon...  
Continue reading… (from The Verge)


Well, now I HAVE to get out there and watch Skyfall ... as I wrote about the glorious ruins of Hashima island for Dark Roasted Blend, and - naturally - the same article is in my book, Welcome to Weirdsville:



Crumbling plaster, broken and splintered lath, cracked cement, fractured concrete, gap-toothed brick walls, rusting iron, daggers of shattered glass … no argument about it: there's something hypnotically alluring, darkly fascinating, about a truly great ruin.

What's now decay and rot once was bright and brilliantly full of hope: Who lived here? What were their lives like? What happened? How did it all come apart? How did it all crumble to almost nothing?

In the case of Hashima Island, or Battleship Island as it's often called, hope and optimism became dust and decay because one black resource was replaced by a cheaper black resource. Populated first in 1887, the island – which is 15 kilometers from Nagasaki – only began to really, and phenomenally, become populated much later, in 1959.

Hashima is, for many ruin fans, the rotting and collapsing grail, the benchmark all other crumbling structures are measured against – and seeing pictures of the place it's easy to see why. Not only is Hashima frighteningly preserved in some places, as if the residents had just stepped out as few minutes before, but it is also, contrarily, spectacularly falling down. Beyond its current awe-inspiring state of decay, the island's dramatic isolation and its bizarre history make it the ruin of ruins.


Before that day when coal, the old black resource, was replaced by oil, another black resource, Hashima was the most densely populated area – ever. On that tiny island, crammed into what are now decaying tenements, were thousands of miners, their families (including children), support staff, administration, and everything necessary to make their lives at least tolerable. It's hard to imagine when looking at the empty doorways, ghostly apartments, and hauntingly vacant corridors what the lives of those people might have been like.

Unlike the post-apocalyptic drama of Hashima, we can very easily imagine what the lives of the residents of the famous Walled City of Kowloon were like – in fact we can ask them, as their city was torn down in 1993. The reason why the Walled City gets so frequently mentioned as a ruin is, while it was there, it was as if the people who lived in it were living their lives in the guts of some great, monstrous, maze.

To say that the city had a long history is an understatement, as its roots go back to the Song Dynasty (960 AD, if you need to know the date). The city was a curiosity for a very long time – a strange bit of legal knotting making it Chinese and not British -- but the labyrinth didn't start to grow appreciably until after the second world war when it became a haven for … well, people without a state: refugees, squatters, thieves, drug-dealers, and much more (and much worse). Neither Great Britain nor China refused to have anything to do with the immense warren of walkways, apartments, workshops, factories, brothels, gambling dens, and opium dens.


The Triad, who represented most of the criminal element, were pretty much forced out in the 70s – by a police attack some 30,000 strong, no less -- but the city remained as a kind of anarchist warren, a world-unto-itself where the residents built and maintained pretty much everything. Looking at pictures of the city today, it looks like some kind of ramshackle prison, a cyberpunk nightmare of florescent lights, spectrally flickering televisions, and mazes of perpetually damp hallways and trash-strewn alleyways. Yet, for many people living there, it was simply home.

Alas, the end of the living ruin that was the Walled City came to an end in the 90s when the residents were evacuated and their fantastic city-within-a-city was torn down. Interestingly, the Walled City has a strong connection to Hashima as, at its height, the Walled City had a population density almost rivaling that Japanese island. Before the bulldozers came, it had a staggering population of 50,000 people, all living in an area the size of a few city blocks.

But if you're talking ruins you have to talk about the ruin FROM THE FUTURE .. or at least a ruin that looks like it came from there.

If you travel to Taiwan, up north to be specific, you will find yourself in a what looks like the fantastic set from some kind of big-budget science fiction epic: the resort of San Zhi. Built in the 1980s, the resort was supposed to be, planned to be, a vacation spot from the next century .. BUT TODAY!


Unfortunately, the dreams of the developers stayed just that and, beyond a few remarkably-well-preserved, sections, San Zhi never materialized. But what they did build, and that's still there in all it's ruinous glory, is amazing: crumbling residential pods on a bleak and blasted landscape, a mini-sprawl of the future falling apart BUT TODAY!

Decaying, rotting, crumbling, collapsing – ruins are the remains of what was, of the lives of the people who lived in them. In the case of Hashima Island, what remains teases us with thoughts of what it must have been like to live in the most densely populated area in the world, ever; with the Walled City of Kowloon, we instead dream of what it must have been like to a resident of a labyrinthine living, breathing ruin; and then there is the painful folly of San Zhi – a ruin not from the past but strangely, wonderfully, from a tomorrow that might have been.

Wednesday, November 14, 2012

Bitten By Books Likes The Very Bloody Marys

(From M.Christian's Queer Imaginings)



Here's a very nice review of The Very Bloody Marys (out now in a new edition as part of the M.Christian ManLove Collection)


Bitten By Books:
Valentino, a daylight hemosapien, is training to become a vampire cop for the Le Counceil Carmin. He has been training for over a century and his boss/trainer, believes that he is worthless. Valentino readily agrees with him. 
Valentino is running late for work as usual and is worried that his boss, Pogue, will get angry with him, again. He jumps in a cab with a driving corpse and heads to Pogues home. Ombre who is a liaison for the Counseil tells him that Pogue is missing and Valentino has been chosen to look for him. Ombre believes that the Very Bloody Marys have something to do with it. 
During the night Valentino must not only find his boss and the Very Bloody Marys but he needs to figure out how. As the night goes on his To Do list becomes bigger and bigger. 
I had a lot of fun reading this book. It was a nice change to have a bumbling vampire and watch him fight Vespa riding vampires. He tries so hard to make it look like he knows what he is doing but in the end it is all for not. The cast of extras were wonderful additions to the story. Saul a wizard who owns a cat that talks and is addicted to cat nip, a chef who is a coroner who works at a morgue/restaurant was hysterical. A worthy under dog story.

Tuesday, November 13, 2012

Yet More Philosophy



Confessions Of A Literary Streetwalker: What Makes a Good Publisher?

Check this out: I just wrote a brand new "Confessions Of A Literary Streetwalker" piece for the always-great Erotica Readers and Writers site - all my previous columns, of course, have been collected in How To Write And Sell Erotica by Renaissance Books.

Here's a tease:



Before I begin (again), a bit of disclosure: While the following has been written in an attempt to be professionally and personally non-biased I am an Associate Publisher for Renaissance E Books. 

Now, with that out of the way (again)...

#


The last time I wrote an intro like the above it was for my Streetwalker column Self Or Not? – about why I feel that, even though it can be very alluring, I still recommend writers work with a publisher rather than go the self-publishing route.

After writing that column I've been thinking, a lot, about what makes a good publisher ... especially these days.  Not to (ahem) brag but I've been in the biz for quite a few years and have worked with a lot of publishers – both when books were printed on (gasp) actual paper, as well as in the new digital age, so I think I can say a bit about what makes a good publisher.

As always, keep in mind that this is somewhat subjective: what I like in a publisher may not be what you like in a publisher ... but the somewhat is there because, tastes aside, it's a publisher's job to get your book out so, hopefully, people will buy bunches of copies.

The world – as I mentioned – as totally changed, and so has what publishers not just can do but should be doing.  It may sound a bit ... emotional, but I like a publisher I can talk to – and who talks to me.  Sure, many publishers are simply too busy to answer every email immediately but that they get back to me eventually is more than enough to keep me happy.  I've dealt with far too many publishers who I have to write, write, write and write again to get an answer to even the simplest question.

[MORE]

Reminder: I'm Performing At Bawdy Storytelling's Gender Blender

(from M.Christian's Classes And Appearances)




Just a reminder, folks, that I'm going to be performing - on stage (gasp) - at the very fun Bawdy Storytelling event tomorrow night in Oakland.

Here's the info on the whens and hows and what-else's:

Gender Blender

The Uptown Nightclub
1928 Telegraph Avenue
Oakland, California 94612

Buy your tix here: Bawdy Storytelling’s ‘Gender Blender’

$12 in Advance/$15 at the Door

Storytellers include:
  • Sex Educator & Role Model Reid Mihalko
  • GenderFork founder Sarah Dopp
  • Erotica Author M.Christian
  • More storytellers to come! 
Gender blending, gender hacking, gender mash-up… it all comes down to how you identify – and if not forever, at least for that scene, that night, that cab ride. Because freedom is all about CHOICE, now isn’t it?

This week, Bawdy Storytelling – the Mr. Right in your tighty whities – brings six sexy sagas of genderfucks, drag queens, drag kings, and one-eyed jacks to the stage of the Uptown NightClub in Oakland. These are real stories told by real people and guaranteed to incite, excite, and if you’re so inspired, invite someone home with you to create your very own bawdy story – and then tell us about it. We love the dirty details!

Tuesday, November 06, 2012

A-Touring I Will Go!


(from M.Christian's Queer Imaginings)

This is very, very cool: as part of the release of my best-of-my-best queer erotica, Stroke The Fire, the great Renaissance E Books/Sizzler Editions have signed me up for a fun blog tour - running from November 25th to December 17th.

Stay tuned for info on what blogs I will be on but for now here's the cool logo the tour-organizer created for me:


Season Of The Witch By Jean Marie Stine

(From M.Christian's Technorotica)


Do not - and I repeat DO NOT - hesitate: rush out and get the brand new edition of Jean Marie Stine's fantastic, and legendary, Season Of The Witch ... in a brand new edition.

I cannot rave enough about this book - and Jean Marie herself: a rare case where the author is not just supremely talented but also a wonderful person!



sizzler-editions:
Renaissance E Books/Sizzler Editions is beyond proud to be able to bring you - in a brand new edition, the legendary Jean Marie Stine’s celebrated science fiction transgender masterpiece: Season Of The Witch - The Transgender Futuristic Classic! 
She was the first woman he had ever been! An SF transgender classic! Chosen “One of the “Thirty Most Important Science Fiction Novels of the 1960s,” Season of the Witch tells the story of Andre, a man who rapes and murders a woman in a post-apocalyptic future. A dangerously low population has resulted in an end to capital punishment. Instead of execution, Andre has his brain transplanted into his victim’s body, while his own body is given to an aging, brilliant scientist. Andre’s search for his original male body takes him through a series of physically and spiritually disorienting sexual encounters to an unexpected denouement during an Agape ceremony in the temple of a strange, hedonistic cult. No wonder Foundation called the book, “A powerful tale of biological transformation and sexual identity.” Or, that 20th Century Science Fiction Writers hailed itbook as, “A special combination of science fiction and pornographic detail and rhetoric. The quality of the novel artistically justifies this radical strategy.” In 1995 the book was filmed as Synapse (U.K. as Memory Run), introducing its unique mix of transgender and science fiction to a whole new audience. Plus New Afterword.  
Jean Marie Stine has been editor of Galaxy SF and Starblaze Books, and is currently editor of Futures-Past Editions. Her short stories have appeared in numerous publications including Amazing Stories, Galaxy, Pegasus, and SF Sagas, and are collected in Herstory & Other Science Fictions. During the late 1960s she served as personal assistant to Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, working on special projects; and in the 1970s she wrote the now classic, The Prisoner: A Day in the Life, based on the cult television series starring Patrick McGoohan.  
MORE ABOUT THIS BOOK:  
• “Razorblade fiction!” -The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction  
• “Where science fiction is often male chauvinist this might raise male consciousness.” Worlds Beyond: A Critical History of Science Fiction  
• “A good SF book and a rather better novel qua novel. Stine never offers an explicit sexual scene in standard cliché pornographical terms — each one of his descriptions brings a personal and original observation into play. Many of these observations are not erotic — they may even strike some readers as anti-erotic — but they ring with truth. A genuine work of erotic realism, written far above the standards of pornography. The body of the novel lies in the male protagonist’s response to biological and physical constraints and the transformation of his personality forced upon him by his female body. Effective…rich…rewarding…engrossing and unusual… littered with genuine insights.” Ted White, editor, Heavy Metal  
• “What happens to a man’s mind in a woman’s body? Stine makes you inhabit that mind and slowly, imperceptibly, 
absorbs you into the existence of a woman until you as a man no longer exist. You become a woman, different from the one you raped and killed, and a better woman, at the end. Stine is a remarkable writer both for style, which is turgid with evocative detail and intense psychological insight, and for use of the second-person technique, which in fiction is used very infrequently, but which is required for the Punishment and Retribution parts in this book. There is eroticism in the book. The sex act is the most important sphere of life for this book, for Stine, for you, in the working out of the changes of psyche involved. …and it is there that Stine takes you to show the subtle altering of man to woman in the body of Josette Kovacs, deceased. If four-letter words bother you, don’t read this book. But then, perhaps you are precisely the person who should read it!” Science Fiction Review  
• “Passion, pain, real pluck … a good eye for physical detail and a strong feeling for the human predicament.” Fritz Leiber, Fantastic

Saturday, November 03, 2012

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Even though I have sincere doubts as to its effectiveness but, honestly, can't really say anything, really until I've tried it...

Which is a kind of convoluted way of saying that - ta da - I am now on Twitter.