mightyfastpig

07:34 pm: "The Pretty Horsebreaker" now on sale
Circlet Press' steampunk erotica anthology, Like a Corset Undone, is now on sale, which includes my short story "The Pretty Horsebreaker." It's set in the same world as my earlier "The Innocent's Progress", though most of the characters are based on real people of the Victorian era. The protagonist, for example, is based on Catherine "Skittles" Walters, a famous courtesan, equestrienne and celebrity.

It's not on the Kindle yet, but you can get it in a variety of formats at Fictionwise, All Romance eBooks, Smashwords and Scribd.

Not quite sure how to promote an ebook. You can't hand it to people, or autograph it.



Tags: fiction, writing

08:24 pm: Second draft of "The Pretty Horsebreaker" done
The second draft of "The Pretty Horsebreaker" is on its way to Circlet Press. Mainly I strengthened the subtext.

In an odd moment of synchronicity, I read this today in Susanah Breslin's Reverse Cowgirl blog, referring to the new film "The Girlfriend Experience". It goes remarkably well with what I was trying to do with Miss Ccri, the protagonist of my story. She's loosely based on the Victorian courtesan, Catherine "Skittles" Walters. Miss Ccri is famous, but also something of an enigma, distant from others, by the necessities of her profession and her social circle, and even somewhat alienated from her self.

She got called out for being cold or distant or impossible to read by various critics, but I agreed and didn't agree. One: Of course she is; that's how many sex workers are. Two: Simultaneously, of course she's not; she's only that on the surface. I don't know if it was me projecting based on my own experiences with sex workers, but I thought she did that, inadvertently or intentionally: revealed the sort of walking contradiction of sex work: that you are often totally there and very hidden. What appears to be invisible on the inside--if you look closer, is intensely complex beneath the surface. So, she worked for me.

Actually, "enigma" isn't the right word. You consider something enigmatic when it does something you don't expect, but have no theory to explain. If something doesn't apparently do anything unexpected, then it is not enigmatic. So, people can be highly visible to other people who think they know who the first person is, but the first person actually has vast areas of their life that are unknown to anyone else.



Tags: fiction, writing

06:19 pm: Ebook musings
My article on the Best of BC Books Online project is now at the Globe and Mail online. Actually, it has been online since February 10th, but I wasn't notified until today.

I've been thinking a lot about ebooks and epublishing lately. At the launch party for the Every Day Fiction anthology a few weeks ago, I got to know the inner circle of Every Day Fiction. To my surprise, they're based right here in Vancouver. The site runs basically as a hobby, with revenue from advertising banners. About one-third of the readers visit the site, another third subscribe to the RSS feed and the remaining third read via email subscription. This latter detail surprised me, as I would have thought that would not be a preferred method. This did persuade me to set up email subscriptions on my other blog.

While I was interviewing people about the ebook publishing, I told a person who works in publishing that the market for erotic romance is apparently booming, despite the commonplace that people don't like to read off screens. She said that this was because romances are sold in large quantities and not reread.

This got me thinking about how much the medium influences the message. Certain "low" genres are thought to be disposable, the kind of thing that is read once, superficially, and disposed of: romance, science fiction, action/adventure, mysteries. You don't keep them on your shelf as a visible sign of your taste and literarcy. That means that the media for these works can be cheap, portable and disposable. E.g. the paperback book, printed on cheap pulp, with an eye-catching cover for visibility on the retail shelf (sex and/or violence generally works).

The cheaper medium has other effects as well. Both the reader and the publisher can take a risk on new products because the cost of each unit is less.

And yet, these "low" genres can grow to have the characteristics of "high" genres: favorite auteurs, collectability, rereading, critical and academic attention. The medium itself can be popular because of material characteristic, like those who collect pulp novels for their lurid covers. I don't know about romance readers, but I know that science fiction and fantasy readers love to collect and accumulate books, the supposedly disposable paperbacks.

I can't back this up, but I have the strong impression that paperback books have gotten a lot more expensive and a lot thicker over the past couple of decades. At least part of that can be chalked up to inflation, but I think they're pricing themselves out of accessibility to the casual reader, and they're also becoming too long for the casual reader.

Years from now, the entire panoply of respectable literature may have developed around the supposedly ephemeral ebooks published by Ravenous Romance and Ellora's Cave. There could be retrospectives and collections of "cover" art and people writing their theses on what these books say about gender relations in the early 21st century and so on.

I'm preoccupied about this because I've been thinking a lot about the nibble I've had for a book from an erotic romance publisher. Would I follow up on this, even if it meant having to follow the genre conventions of erotic romance ebook: this many words, so many sex scenes with this degree of explicitness, a HEA ("happily ever after") ending? Yes, if it meant getting my name out. Compare that with slogging through the regular publishing industry or slogging through self-promotion of self-published, print-on-demand work. Attaching to a brand and a ghetto of the publishing world nevertheless means attention, means getting noticed at all. Literary greatness and respectability can come later.



Tags: fiction, publishing, qor, writing

10:05 pm: Would immortals reproduce?
I've been scribbling lots of notes about Queen of Revels, which might be a novel someday if I ever get a callback from a certain editor.

Again, it's the "immortal person follows the historical trends that leads to BDSM" idea.

Now, I do not want to do this person as a vampire. I think vampires are rather overexposed, particularly in the urban fantasy/erotic fantasy genre, and the trope has been, as it were, sucked dry. Plus, there are logistical difficulties of how influential a person in the past could be if they couldn't go around in daylight. Remember, most people in the past lived with the sun. There was no night life, really. Furthermore, when you do a vampire story you have to do your variation of "the list": crosses, no; garlic, yes; sunlight, yes; running water, no: etc.... It's tedious to do that. It diminishes the sense of wonder and/or horror if the creature is so well known.

So, non-vampiric immortals. I've been making notes about their psychology (how many lifetimes-worth of memories can a human brain hold?), their society (if you don't really need others of your kind, even for reproduction, why have a society at all?) and their physiology (Does inhaled dust accumulate in lungs over multiple lifetimes?)

The only point I can't make up my mind about is whether they are infertile. In the Highlander franchise, it's a big point that immortals, male or female, can't have children, but I don't see why. Naturally, a freely reproducing immortal species of humanity would rapidly overpopulate the world. That would easily be solved by saying that they can sire or bear children, but they are normal humans. Human males produce millions of sperm cells, and human females produce tens of thousands of eggs.

Furthermore, I want to take a relatively realistic take on immortals, so they are not completely unkillable. There could be a very slow attrition over the millenia, despite superhuman regenerative powers and lots of experience in avoiding danger. There could be a need for however infrequent reproduction, withere by nature or by design.

On the other hand, whether they are natural or artificial beings, immortals don't need to reproduce. They would have normal human sexual and reproductive functions, in order to blend in with mortals, but shooting blanks. (I want to have a joke about a female immortal complaining about 12,000 years of periods.)

It's hard to say which is worse: never having children of your own, or having to leave them to hide your secret, or sticking around and watching them get old and die? Immortality is bittersweet enough without getting angsty about drinking blood or never seeing sunlight.

It isn't a big part of the story as I envision. Either way, the story is pretty much the same. However, it is a question that will appear in the reader's mind, and to not give an answer would be bad faith.

The other issue is fitting the genre, since the editorial nibble is from an online romance/erotica publishing company. My view of the story tends toward some action scenes, cranked up to a ridiculous degree because the people involved consider chainsaws to be foreplay, but the publisher may not want that, or that much. They'll also want lots of romance, which is a new thing for me. In the first submitted draft of "The Innocent's Progress", it ended on a down note, with a potential romance still born. It took a major effort for me to do another draft with an ending that hinted they might get together.



Tags: fiction, qor, writing

02:06 pm: Jan 24: Every Day Fiction anthology launch party
My flash stories, "Rootless" and "Sparkers" are in Every Day Fiction's first print anthology, The Best of Every Day Fiction 2008. Come to Spartacus Books for the Vancouver launch party, and enjoy the readings, signings and celebration! I'll be there.

Time: Saturday, January 24, 2009, 4:00pm - 7:00pm

Location: Spartacus Books, 684 East Hastings Street, Vancouver BC


Tags: fiction, writing

09:19 am: "Queen of Revels" short story now live


My short story "Queen of Revels" is now live in the Ravenous Romance anthology Wicked Pleasures, edited by Cecilia Tan of Circlet Press fame.

"Queen of Revels" was initially written for another anthology that never got off the ground, so I resubmitted it to another. It's a fantasy story, about an immortal woman named Eb who was the model for the woman with black wings in the mural in the Villa of the Mysteries in Pompeii, and today rediscovers her place in the world in the modern BDSM scene. It actually grew out of my BDSM history research as I tried to imagine what that narrative would look like viewed forward instead of backwards. How would a person who had experienced slavery first hand feel about Master-slave roleplaying?

Something I wanted to include, but didn't quite work, was the idea that the immortal woman would perceive the world as a kind of cumulative layering. Every object or idea would make her think of something in her vast memory. A guy in a bomber jacket makes her think of real WWII bomber pilots. It would be something like the way Cayce Pollard perceives the world in William Gibson's novel Pattern Recognition, in which signifiers with depleted new-ness trigger her minor psychotic episodes.

I've been noodling about turning the idea into a longer work. I was intrigued by the idea of the immortal's regenerative ability. Usually, characters who have regenerative powers (e.g. Wolverine or Painkiller Jane) emphasize that they feel pain just like regular people. (Claire on Heroes is an exception.) However, a being with regenerative powers has less need to feel pain. Put another way, maybe an immortal being would have something better than the capacity to feel pain. They would be aware of injury, but not overwhelmed by it. What if, instead, using their regenerative power was actually pleasureable, and/or created an altered state of consciousness?

I also thought about the relationship between a few hundred unkillable and immortal beings and the rest of humanity. I didn't want them to be the "secret illuminati", but just one influence among many in history. One of the debates among the immortals is what secrets to tell humans, and particularly, the use of physical ordeal rituals to achieve altered states of consciousness. In this expanded story, Eb is the guardian angel of this idea, running from the Dionysian rituals in ancient Greece to the medieval flagellants to the flagellation brothels to the modern BDSM scene.

Tags: fiction, qor, writing

12:46 am: Missing the Rain Queen by 5000 miles
I'm working on a short story that should be an indirect sequel to "The Innocent's Progress." It's set in a loose analog of Victorian England, and there are loose analogs of real people as characters. One of them is an analog of Sir Richard Francis Burton (with a generous helping of TE Lawrence), explorer, linguist, author, soldier and what would have been called a libertine in the century prior to his life. Burton was a remarkably talented polymath, but what interests me is the paradox that the man who epitomized the heroic ideal of the British Empire, the world-traveling scholar/warrior, was also a writer of pornography and books advocating homosexuality for those who are sufficiently advanced. He was the colonial nightmare, the Englishman transformed by his encounters with the alien cultures at the far edges of the empire. He was H. Rider Haggard's Allan Quatermain and Joseph Conrad's Mr. Kurtz in one man.

The idea was that the Burton-analog went on an expedition into Africa-analog, and... well, exactly what happened out there is a big mystery in the story, but it strongly affected his psychology and sexuality. The manuscript of the portion of his book that might shed light on this is the story's Macguffin. But what did happen to him? What did the Burton-analog look for, and what did he find? (TE Lawrence's incident at Dera is also an inspiration here, both the actual event and the speculation and theories surrounding it.)

While researching fictional immortality for another story, I came across a semi-legendary figure of African lore, the Rain Queen of South Africa. This is a lineage of women granted great magical power, particularly weather control, dating back to the 16th century or earlier. The last one died in 2005, possibly of AIDS, and there has yet to be a successor. Some say the Rain Queen was the inspiration for the immortal Ayesha of H. Rider Haggard's adventure novel She.

I thought, maybe the Burton-analog was also looking for the Rain Queen. The real Burton penetrated (so to speak) into forbidden holy cities, so why wouldn't the fictional one try to live out his She Who Must Be Obeyed fantasies? And when the analogs of Burton and Speke found no magical, immortal queen in the African interior, what did they do?

The problem with this is that the Rain Queen hails from what is now South Africa. The Burton-Speke expedition went in search of the source of the Nile, through what is now Ethiopia and Kenya, nowhere near where the Rain Queen lived. Different climate, different cultures, different languages.

Now, these two stories take place in a loose parallel world. The names sound more Welsh than Anglo-Saxon, and I had a notion that it was something like England that had gone through a France-style political revolution as well as an industrial revolution, though this never came up in the story. This gives the writer a lot of leeway. I don't have to get bogged down in biographical details, or that this person couldn't have met that person because he would have been a baby and she would have been an old woman. I borrowed the conceit from Esther Friesner's Druid's Blood, in which Queen Victoria is a blond cutie, and she can hang out with Lord Byron and Sherlock Holmes and Lady Ada Lovelace. (Freisner freely mixed real people with renamed versions of public domain fictional characters, for some reason.)

And yet, I feel a little uncomfortable bending African history that much, enough to put analogs of Burton and the Rain Queen in the same area at the same time, even if they never meet. I'm not sure why this bothers me so. Maybe because this is playing fast and loose with a history that isn't "mine". Maybe because this fits into the pattern of viewing Africa, an entire continent home to millions of people and thousands of years of history, as one big undifferentiated mass. It's like saying, "Florida? Alaska? What's the difference, they're both American states."

Or maybe I'm making too much out of something that nobody will care about. Leopold von Sacher-Masoch and Richard von Krafft-Ebing apparently never met, much less fought a duel, but that didn't stop me from writing a story in which they did.



Tags: fiction, writing

09:45 am: Read "The Innocent's Progress" free for one day only.

As part of Circlet Press' erotic advent calendar, you can read my steampunk erotica short story The Innocent's Progress for free on December 5th only. They're posting a free science fiction and/or fanasy erotica story every day leading up to Christmas.

If you're reading this and it's too late, you can buy it in multiple ebook formats at Fictionwise.

Tags: fiction, writing

12:06 am: Irma Vep for the 21st Century
Warren Ellis called for a nouveau version of classic femme-fatale/antiheroine Irma Vep on the Whitechapel forums. Seeing as I can't draw worth a damn, I'll contribute here.

****

2015-12-01, 13:31:12-13:45:16 CET (UTC +1) Translated from French

"Your coffee, inspector."

"Good." [Drinking sound] "What do you have for me, Rachilde?"

"Well, the Imva Vep case. I've synthesized as much data as I could, and there's a lot of ambiguity. I had to apply fuzzy logic algorithms to--"

"I'm an old flic, Rachilde. Keep it simple."

"Yes, sir. I'll tell you one thing I'm certain of. There is no Irma Vep."
 ( Read more... )

Tags: fiction

01:20 am: "Sparkers" story
My flash story "Sparkers" is live on Everydayfiction.com. Please visit, comment and pump up the rating, thank you.

This is my second story inspired by my research on ibogaine and psychoactive substances.

Tags: fiction, science fiction, writing

07:12 am: Flash story "Burden"
My flash fiction piece Burden is now live on Everydayfiction.com, my second piece to be published there.

It's a variation, hopefully original, on the Deal with the Devil motif. I noticed that the lives of Christ, Buddha and Mohammed have incidents in which the holy man goes out into the liminal space, e.g. the wilderness, the crossroads, and is tested by external forces. I combined this with my more pessimistic observation that the Devil doesn't need to cheat most people. Most people given power will find some way to bring ruin on themselves or others or both, all by themselves.

Tags: fiction, writing

11:09 pm: "The Innocent's Progress" DVD commentary
The first draft of my short story "The Innocent's Progress" is in workshop now.

It's a distillation of a lot of things that I've absorbed over the past few years, while still working on the BDSM history research. BDSM operates on a set of archetypes, which suggested the archetypes of the commedia dell'arte, which is a traditional form of Italian improvisational comedy based on a set of stock characters.

Link that in with me wondering if we could somehow rerun the tape of human history from about 1700 AD or so, would we get BDSM or something different? Maybe it would evolve into some kind of theatrical style, as "actor" and "sex worker" were once largely synonymous.

Another thing was all the audition shows I kept watching, like "So you think you can dance." I kept wondering about the people who go in for these things. It became fairly obvious that some of the people in the auditions were not in contention at all, and you could pick them out pretty fast. Too big, too old, too graceless, and so on. I'm torn between the point that this is a professional dance competition, and there's a fairly narrow physical range of people who are that agile, strong and graceful, and the point that a lot of people get set up for being publicly rejected. Some of them seem to be one of those "beautiful losers", people who haven't the luck or the talent or the bodies to achieve their dreams, but they don't give up on them. They seem to exist in a different mental space on their own. I can't decide if they're blessed or doomed.

This cross pollinated with the numerous adult video documentaries they're running on Showcase Friday nights, which support my theory that Porno Valley is Hollywood on fast forward. When they decide to do another "Debbie Does Dallas", every female performer attached to the production wants to be Debbie.

BDSM fantasy depends on characters, one-dimensional characters, granted, but characters. And some performers make those characters credible, and some don't. Put some women in fetish gear and they look dominant, they project their authority, while others just don't manage it.

Yet another thread is me wondering why, in my experience, straight women's sexual fantasies mostly lean towards the submissive. (Actually, the same could be said of men, but to me that's a much lesser mystery.)

This bounced off David Lynch's "Mulholland Drive", which is set in Hollywood and is (or at least appears to be) about a young, umblemished woman arriving in Los Angeles and dealing with both the Hollywood casting system and a noir-style mystery. The story is actually much more dark and complicated than it first appears, and the lead isn't quite the sweet heroine she appears to us (and to herself).

"Moulin Rouge!" was a big visual influence, with late Victorian clothing and sets (Aubrey Beardsley, Alphonse Mucha), and modern music in the performances: Goldfrapp, Recoil, Massive Attack, etc. However, I actually didn't go into great physical detail. I just mentioned "the costume of an Innocent" or "a Servant's costume", but didn't describe them at all. The archetypal roles have recognizable analogs from our history, but those fashion elements might not have the same connotation in an alternate history. We wouldn't be able to read the clothes.

I think it's a good work, and will be even better in the second draft. However, I have no idea where to sell it. The people who won't say it has too much fetish sex in it will say it doesn't have enough fetish sex in it. My first choice would be Circlet Press, who actually were my first professional sale.

Tags: fiction, writing

03:40 pm: Shameless self-promotion
I don't actually have a website promoting my writing, which I've decided I probably need. I want to capitalize on whatever interest comes my way from the short-short story and other projects. My fiction credits are paltry compared to my non-fiction work.

However, problem one is that I've never managed to get the personal web space that comes with my ADSL account to work. Hopefully the tech support guys will help me with this.

Problem two is that I've never registered a domain before and I'm not sure if I'm doing it right. I'd hate to pay money I can barely afford on something I can't use.

Problem three is that now that the Vancouver Courier's site has been amalgamated into the Canada.com site, all my old articles are unavailable. They're trapped behind a paywall on the Financial Post website, for $4.95 an article (which is outrageous) and I can't directly link to them. I've heard from people in the Courier that this is a royal pain for them too, because the writers and editors can't search their own newspaper's archives anymore.

Anyway, I'll have something up in the way of a promo site by September.

Tags: fiction, work, writing

02:13 pm: My first fiction sale in a long time
I sold my short-short story, "Rootless", to Every Day Fiction, a new flash fiction. It will be in the first week of publication in September, hopefully when the interest will be at the maximum.

The story grew out of my journalism, and about a fictionalized version of a real entheogenic substance, ibogaine.

This is my first fiction sale in probably more than ten years. I think part of the problem for that is that fiction pays very little these days (Every Day pays US$1.00) and I decided I should devote my writing efforts to paying projects.

I'll post a note when it's online.

Tags: fiction, work, writing