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You are viewing the most recent 20 entries July 9th, 200903:27 pm: Queen of Revels
A good friend, JW, whipped up this illustration for the novel proposal I 'm shopping around. (Thanks!) An editor said she wanted to hear about it on Tuesday, and I emailed her both an elevator pitch and a 1000-word treatment. No word back from her. Now I suppose I have to write the damned thing... Tags: qor, writing
June 19th, 200907:08 pm: Why didn't somebody stop me?
David Cronenberg says that when he was making Rabid back in 1977, he had a moment when he thought, "I'm making a movie about a porn star with a blood-sucking cock-thing coming out of her armpit. Why didn't somebody stop me?" That's about how I felt today once I put the signed contract with Circlet Press in the mail. I'm now committed to writing another 30,000 words of steampunk erotica by December 1st. That works out to an average of 200 words per day, which sounds much more manageable. I also felt a little when I listened to Mur Lafferty's "I should be writing" podcast and she reiterated, "You are allowed to suck." I have at least 3 stories in mind, and possibly some shorter vignettes. One should be an interesting take on the Jekyll and Hyde story. It's a pretty good deal, too. The advance is only US$75, but as its an ebook, 35% of revenue going to me. Compare that to the 8 per cent I get if it ever goes to print. Tags: erotica, writing
June 17th, 200911:08 pm: Getting back in the groove, hopefully
I submitted my first paying article in months, a review of Douglas Rushkoff's Life Inc. It was 70% over length and 2 days past my self-imposed deadline. My journalism output has dropped sharply over the past year or so, both in gross revenue and in total number of pieces printed. Part of that has to do with forgetting the first rule of freelancing: pester. I'm not competitive, yet freelancing involves fighting for the editor's scarce attention. I've sent several queries to a certain editor, and never followed them up, so I assumed that they were ignored. I'll also admit to taking this a little too personally, as an individual snub, instead of being the nature of the business. Of course, I have to try to get back into the freelancing game just when the money is drying up and everything is restructuring. Current Music: "Scrubs" on TV , writing
June 1st, 200908:24 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
May 10th, 200910:41 am: "Innocent's Progress" reviews and other news
Some more reviews of "The Innocent's Progress". Strangely enough, the reviews have become less favorable over time.
Peter Tupper’s “The Innocent’s Progress” is set in the theatrical world of the Commedia, where roles are strictly defined and stories never change. A woman auditions for the part of the innocent, a role that calls for a cute young thing. Despite her acting ability, she’s too old, too tall, and too big to play the part of the innocent. Refusing to accept that, she leaves the company in search of a role that fits her. While this story is well written and interesting, the sex scenes have nothing to do with the main story. They are asides, populated by characters that only existed for those scenes. I suppose they were tacked on to fulfill the erotica prerequisite, but they detracted from the story rather than enhancing it. That’s a shame, because the rest of the story was wonderful.
From Erotica Reviewed
“The Innocent’s Progress” by Peter Tupper – Miss Alwyx is auditioning for a part with the House of The Razor Lotus, a traveling performance group that performs plays written by The Bawd and then takes assignations from the Patrons to add coins to the coffers. This is an interesting look at the backstage happenings of the bawdy Victorians. It is also a tale of unrequited love.
From The Baryon Review
The first story, “The Innocent’s Progress” by Peter Tupper, follows the stage-acting career of Miss Alwyx, as told through the eyes of her employer, Ricar. The actors of the playhouse perform erotic plays which symbolically reenact human sexual emotions. Alwyx is frustrated when she doesn’t get to the role she wanted and Ricar struggles inwardly with himself as he tries to convince Alwyx to play a different role. Aside from a bit of light S&M, this story wasn’t very steamy, in terms of both erotica and steampunk. Only slightly Victorian and not very mechanical at all, this story would better fit the broader term of Speculative Fiction.
From Wings of SteamIn other news, "The Pretty Horsebreaker" has been accepted, though it won't be in print, or rather released as an ebook, until the fall. This works out well, as it gives me a chance to do a rewrite of the submitted draft, which was a bit of a rush. My trusty writers workshop comrades also alerted me to some of the problems, ideas which didn't quite work out as well as I thought they did. Some of the themes just slipped by the readers. I'm also working on a steampunk erotica story collection, though its too early to say much about this yet.
Tags: writing
April 2nd, 200909:38 am: "The Pretty Horsebreaker" is done
My contribution to the second Circlet Press steampunk erotica anthology is done. "The Pretty Horsebreaker" checks in at 12,400 words, Elevator pitch: "A courtesan searches for the lost pornographic manuscript of a former client at the behest of his widow, set in a pseudo-Victorian world." Sometimes I wish I could write short, fun, fluffy stories. Instead, I end up trying to be Kitsilano's answer to Alan Moore (minus the genius and the mysticism and the beard), talking about 19th century classism/sexism/racism, and working in cameos and in jokes that I think are great but are too obscure for anybody else. Most of the characters are based on real people (sometimes combined into one character), and I couldn't resist working in appearances by other Victorian eccentrics and social deviants. Oh, and most of the characters have Welsh names. How does one pronounce "Miss Ccri" anyway? I saw it in a list of Welsh baby girl names and it was too interesting to pass up. I think it's "cree" or "sh-ree". There were a few bits I had trouble with. First, it's written from a female character's point of view, a famous courtesan inspired by the great Catherine "Skittles" Walters, a remarkable woman who epitomized the "bad girls go everywhere" philosophy. I considered doing it first-person, but ultimately I wanted a little distance, as I felt a bit wrong about doing a female first person in sexual situations. Third person provided a certain distance. That problem continued with the FF sex scenes. In my original notes, it was something like, "Miss Ccri goes to Mrs. Braen's house. Talk. Sex." No more motivation or integration than that. I knew I had to work in a certain amount of fairly explicit sex. My previous story was set in a brothel/theatre and the two main characters were both sex workers, but there weren't many actual sex scenes. I knew I had to change that to get this story in this market. I think I managed to make the scenes between the women plausible and well-written, including that their reasons for having sex aren't exactly ideal (one is salving her wounded pride, the other is grieving) but there's also affection between them. The other problem was the action scenes. I don't like writing fights or chases, since nothing on the page or screen seems as fast or exciting as what I can imagine or remember from movies and TV. I can imagine the scene in which the protagonist crashes a gathering of elite gentlemen, but what I put in the story seems quite far from the excitement I imagined. I think visually, but I express in prose. I'm currently reading Iain M. Banks' Consider Phlebas (one of the Culture novels). The novel follows one unaligned character stuck in middle of a galaxy-spanning war. There are world-destroying weapons and the fates of trillions at stake, but also scenes of the protagonist trying to escape from a cannibal cult on an island or getting run over by a hovercraft while trying to kill the guy he's supposed to impersonate. Maybe it's because I never found the protagonist terribly sympathetic, but I had a ho hum reaction to the action scenes, yet I was fascinated by the setting and the larger story of a supposedly Utopian society going to war. Maybe to have action on a human scale is not that different from older forms of adventure fiction. If a guy's trying to escape from a cannibal cult on an island, does it matter that the island is on a Ringworld? After pulling a late night to finish it, I submitted the story on the last day of the reading period, and now I'm doing my usual stressing and stewing. Did I get the email address right? Did it get lost in the Net? Did I miss the deadline? Why didn't they send a response? All this for a market that pays $35. OTOH, I've invested a hell of a lot of work on this story and I want people to see it, or rather, more people than if I posted it here. Current Mood:  satisfied Current Music: 1.fm - Channel X (keep internet radio alive) March 3rd, 200909:25 pm: Two great reviews of "The Innocent's Progress"
My steampunk erotica short story, "The Innocent's Progress", was reviewed at Obsidian Bookshelf:
The Innocent's Progress offers a compelling story arc, superior world-building, and complex characterization; it's my favorite story in the anthology.
Val Kovalin at Obsidianbookshelf.com
Lizard Lez did another review:
In the marvelously imaginative world of "The Innocent's Progress" by Peter Tupper, troupes of actors perform the archetypal roles of medieval drama onstage, and are available for hire as sex workers offstage. "The Innocent" is always performed as a delicate female victim who attracts rapists and abductors. When a sturdy lass performs as "the Innocent" in an audition, she is told she is better suited to other roles, such as "the Virago," a tough woman who can defend herself. The actress eventually leaves the troupe and the male admirer that first hires her because she is seeking an elusive sense of integrity (a kind of moral virginity) which she can only feel when performing one role. When her admirer sees her in a thinly-disguised version of a famous play about a formerly-conventional wife who discovers her own will, he finally understands the role which has been missing from his world.
"The Innocent's Progress" is in the Circlet Press anthology Like a Wisp of Steam. Circlet plans to publish a second steampunk collection, and I'm working on another story set in the same world. Current Mood:  tired , writing
February 20th, 200906:19 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. Current Music: BSG on Space , publishing, qor, writing
January 30th, 200910:05 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
January 19th, 200902:06 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 Current Music: Definitely Not the Opera podcast from CBC , writing
January 9th, 200909:19 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. Current Music: 1.fm - Channel X (keep internet radio alive) , qor, writing
December 30th, 200812:46 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
December 16th, 200801:00 am: My editorial on sex work decriminalization
My second piece in THIS magazine, an editorial on sex work decriminalization in Canada, is now online. It's derived from my earlier feature article on decriminalization in the Tyee. While I'm glad to have another publication credit, I feel a bit of... not guilt, exactly, but discomfort. One of the points I make is that the discourse on sex work should have more actual sex workers in it, which probably would mean fewer contributions from people who aren't sex workers and have no personal stake in the issue (e.g. me). I write about how great Scarlot Harlot was, when perhaps they could have gotten an article from Scarlot herself. I also wish I knew about THIS magazine's special topic in advance, as I think I could have done a good feature on that topic, given all the research I've done on the history of pornography. Tags: journalism, writing
November 3rd, 200809:47 am: "The Innocent's Progress" now on Fictionwise
Like a Wisp of Steam, the Circlet Press steampunk erotica anthology that includes my short story "The Innocent's Progress", is now on Fictionwise.com. I'm rather pleased about this, particularly to be in such good company. Unlike the Amazon Kindle version I previously announced, Fictionwise sells ebooks in a wide variety of formats and without DRM, and they even take Paypal. Please buy and review a copy. Tags: writing
October 28th, 200801:34 pm: "Innocent's Progress" now on the Kindle
Circlet Press' steampunk erotica (how's that for a niche?) anthology "Like a Wisp of Steam", which contains my story "The Innocent's Progress" is now on the Amazon Kindle. I have reservations about the Kindle, as I'm against proprietary formats and hardware, but a publication is a publication. According to Circlet, it should be up on Fictionwise.com in other, open formats in a day or two, and on the Circlet site as well. Not sure if there will ever be a print edition. Steampunk erotica, incidentally, does have some followers. Check out Steamypunk.net. One could split hairs over whether my story is truly steampunk, as there are no technological artifacts in the story that didn't exist in the real world. Tags: writing
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