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Rock and Roll Heresy

Rock music is heresy. It has a unique ability to slide ideas into one’s soul through the ears. Coming to you over FM or over the internet, rock is a worship service for the god Dionysos; the guitar is one aspect of the thyrsos, his phallic wand that gives milk and honey and sustains his worshippers in the wilderness. Unconstrained by mortal notions of proper behavior, the god changes genders onstage and in our heads. Ecstatic music is a gift from the spirit of drunken frenzy to humanity—a compensation for the inescapable fact that we will all die some day.

Rock music changes the world. When Pat Benatar’s song “Hell is for Children” hit the airwaves in 1980, thousands of suburban kids looked up and realized they were not the only ones ordered to lie to grandma and say they fell off the swing. And they learned that what was happening to them was not OK and never would be.

If you grew up thinking that “gay” was nothing but a terrible word to call other children, rock educated you otherwise.

I was ten when “Renegade” by Styx charted. I remember hearing that song and feeling…something when JY’s guitar wailed and crunched on the bridge and Tommy Shaw screamed at the top of his lungs that he didn’t want to die on the gallows. I didn’t have a word for that feeling until later. But I saved my allowance and spent it at the record store in the mall.

The pre-Shaw Styx album Cornerstone had a song entitled “First Time For Love,” which was the slow-dance song in middle school. I remember reading the tiny lyrics in the fold-out album cover. And there, right below that song—in the tiniest font ever—were the words, “For Paul.”

I kept reading, over and over, the words that meant that someone loved a man named Paul, and that—most importantly—everyone else in the band was OK with this.

If you’re paying attention to the lyrics of Cyndi Lauper’s song “She Bop,” you know what it’s about. But it takes a certain level of 1980’s cultural literacy to place Blue Boy Magazine. Ms. Lauper was, apparently, not reading a soft core gay rag for the articles.

And then there was “The Belle of St. Marks,” which Prince wrote for his good friend, the percussionist Sheila E. Prince never said what the song is about. We’re left to guess why Belle uses masculine pronouns. Why is he wearing his dad’s clothes? Doesn’t he have his own? Unless all of his clothes are dresses. No wonder he cries. Despite—or because of—his tears, the Belle is a hot man, and Sheila will die if she can’t have him. Doesn’t she sound like she’s singing with her hands down her pants at the end? Well done, madam.

Joan Jett covered a male vocalist to sing us a honey-dripping song, “Crimson and Clover,” about her love for a woman. And, by the way, she’s not ashamed to say that love is pain.

Fast-forward to 1998. Brian Molko of Placebo jumped off a London building in the video for “Pure Morning” and did not fall. The song has music-of-the-spheres guitar riffs and lyrics that would make Molko nauseous later; he’d have re-written them if he knew that the song would be Placebo’s highest-charting hit. “Pure Morning” might not have got quite so much attention if someone hadn’t decided to slap a self-harm warning on the video. Controversy ensued. Once more, thousands of isolated suburban kids took notice, this time of the androgynous rock star with the bare shoulders. Some of them went out, bought black nail polish and painted their toenails as the first tiny step towards figuring out who they were.

For a while, music was out of the closet. Now it’s feeling less and less safe to celebrate queerness with the joy that love and pleasure deserve. But pay close attention to those lyrics. Dionysos will be looking out from between the lines, laughing and changing genders without warning.

See you on the other side.

* * *

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Free Story: The Double-Edged Bomb

An older story of mine, The Double-Edged Bomb, is now available on TheoReads for free. Theoreads is a new online platform for sexy stories that has had a soft launch and is still building. Check it out!

In a grim, dystopian future that could be right around the corner, a gay man teaches his superhero lover what it means to be human.

The Double-Edged Bomb

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Wishbone Opening on TheoReads

What it says in the title: the opening of Wishbone is available for free on TheoReads, if you’ve been wondering if the book would interest you. More soon!

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AmWriting

New Project: Fraternity Alpha

Back in December while I was trying to avoid reality, I started writing a project that had been in the back of my head for a while.

I write mostly Fantasy and SciFi erotica. I know there are readers out there who are into this, because I used to sell them books. I’m sure I’ll find these people again. But fantasy erotica tends to confuse erotica and romance readers who are not familiar with fantasy tropes, angst and tragic backstories, not to mention characters who don’t have driver’s licenses and can’t prove they are over eighteen. It confuses fantasy readers…

Actually, that’s a good question. Why does fantasy erotica confuse fantasy readers? I mean, have you read any fantasy lately? Magic systems are really in. Most fantasy readers are used to reading books where the magic system is the main character, where describing it takes hundreds of pages. If you show them a book where much of the characterization happens through sex, they wander off to read another book about how red gems have different magical properties than blue gems.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

My point here is that my writing feels very niche. The correct way for me to deal with this is to meet readers closer to where they live. I decided to write something less niche, put it up on a new platform that I’ll mention in a bit, and see if people like it.

As I said, I had a huge incentive to focus on something other than the real world. I wrote a 100k word novel in five weeks. My left wrist is sore, but it was worth it. This book really wanted to be written.

It’s called:

Fraternity Alpha: A Genderqueer Love Story

I set some constraints on the project:

  • Real world. I was originally going to locate it in a generic city, but I was unable to resist making fun of Milton, MA. I love Boston, but the in-jokes are funny for a reason. I live in Cambridge; NIMBY’s can sit and spin.
  • Traditional romance plot structure, because plotting a novel is one of my weak points. Adopting the structure helped me organize all the hot sex and messy emotions. That meant:
  • A traditional Happily Ever After.
  • Female protagonist. Yes, this was a challenge for me. This meant:
  • Most of the characters are queer.
  • The queer people have real world queer joys and queer problems.
  • Their problems are human problems, human-sized with human resolutions.
  • All characters are over 21 and have ID to prove it.
  • The sex is the hot, kinky sort that gets me thoughtful reviews from people who say things like, “Her books are gutsy, emotional, well written, unusual, brave and just plain lovely.” The sex the characters are having is the sex that those characters would have. The sex tells you more about the characters than where they live, what they do for fun with their clothes on, whose kids they are, what they wear or what they eat.

There are some broader themes that people who have read my other fiction will recognize.

There’s a trope in romantasy where the MMC automatically understands what the FMC needs, because shadowdaddy with mind-reading powers. I’ve rarely found this trope fulfilling, though I couldn’t tell you if that was a problem I have with the trope or a problem I have with people who have read the trope and think they can pull it off in real life, with disastrous results.

What is far sexier to me–and far more worth writing–is characters who actively discuss what they want and how they can make each other happy. Relationships can come about through random acts of the universe. But they require active care and tending by all participants.

Someone very close to me once said that I have a trust fetish. He has a point.

The seed that sprouted this novel was planted in about 1992. I had to fill out financial aid forms for graduate school, and I was overwhelmed. By coincidence, I attended a house party where one of the hosts was a tax accountant and a rock singer. She offered to help me fill out the paperwork in exchange for some jewelry I was making back then. I visited her at her office at H&R Block, sat down and listened to her tell me that tax accounting is a fantastic job for creative people, because talking to people and solving their problems is part of the job, unlike waiting tables. She explained about getting laid off every year and rehired. She helped me fill out the paperwork, and I got a financial aid package that enabled me to get a CS degree.

I didn’t find out until later that she was a professional dominant.

So what’s it about?

Amy is a woman in her thirties, working in human resources and dodging attempts by family members to set her up on blind dates. But she dreams of being initiated into masculinity at the hands of a ruthless, paddle-wielding frat brother.

After meeting an old acquaintance at a disappointing kink convention, Amy goes home with the business card of a professional dominant who can help her realize some of her fantasies. All it will cost her is money.

There’s only one catch.

The dominant is a gay man, and sex is not on the menu.

But Amy will take what she can get while she dreams of so much more.

Fraternity Alpha is a high-kink, high-spice romance about gender identity beyond the binary.

A New Web Platform

There is a new way to read erotica and romance coming soon: TheoReads.com.

We’ve all watched access to erotica–especially queer erotica–be curtailed by major platforms and payment processors. If we want to see ourselves in books, we need more ways for authors and readers to connect.

Theo is a web based platform that will allow you to pick and chose among your favorite tropes and kinks so you can find and buy those stories that were written for you. You get something hot, and the authors get paid.

Right now Theo is still starting up. When it’s a bit more solid, you’ll be able to purchase access to Fraternity Alpha there. You’ll also be able to read Wishbone and some stories of mine that have been hard to find for years.

Stories are only exclusive to Theo for six months. That means that six months after Fraternity Alpha is available on Theo, you’ll be able to get an ebook or read it on my Patreon.

I’ll be sure to post as soon as I have news about Theo.

Categories
Screed

Cover art: Why are we doing this to ourselves (again?)

I have an aunt who, gods bless her, has written over 140 romance novels. I have a memory dating to some time in the 1980’s of her holding up a genuine paperback copy of one of her romances. “I can’t believe this cover,” she said, pointing out the gray-haired man groping the heroine who, according to romance traditions, was supposed to be about twenty-two. “He looks like a Geritol ad.”


Readers have funny ideas about cover art. For instance, they think that the author chooses it. In reality this never happens. The cover art in traditionally published novels is chosen by an art department, possibly but not necessarily in consultation with the editor and the author. The art is supposed to draw the eye of a potential purchaser and make them touch the physical book and, hopefully, buy it, bring it home, read it, review it, and convince their friends to read it too. The final book cover has always been constrained by artists, models, ideas about colors and assorted semiotics, all permuted through the hurry-up-and-wait publication schedule. If the characters in the cover look like the author thinks the characters look, it’s probably a happy coincidence.


Back in the day you could tell a book was science fiction because it had:

  • An aerodynamic-looking space ship. The ship had to be aerodynamic-looking even though it would never enter the atmosphere.
  • A babe breasting boobily in a chainmail bikini.


These elements were required on all sci-fi covers even if the actual book contained no boobily breasting babes or space ships. If the reader is disappointed by the lack of boobs and/or ships, it doesn’t matter, because they’ve already paid.


At some point this changed. I credit cover artist Michael Whelan. If you don’t know who he is, go look up his work.


The best piece of cover art I ever got was probably the cover for my first chapbook, Mate, published in 1992. The artist worked for free. I fed her an idea, and she ran with it. I got one phone call from her. She asked me, “Mind if I have some fun with the horse?” I told her to go for it (if people are doing things for you for free, you don’t feel like you can ask for much). She sketched the chess knight and the riding whip, and bolstered the details with the press-on stuff made by Letraset that everyone used to use. You can check out the attitude on that chess knight’s face on my web site. I have the knight and whip as a tattoo on my left arm. I remember the cover artist’s eyes opening very, very wide when I showed it to her. “Yes,” I said. “I will have your art on my body when I’m 90 years old and everything sags.”


Nota Bene: The artist who rendered the tattoo was, in fact, an artist, a highly-regarded, well-known one. She made some notable contributions, such as flipping the art left-to-right so that the horse would be facing front. This is the kind of detail that an artist notices, and why she was worth every penny.


For reasons that I’m about to get into, I’m unlikely to have cover art that I want on my body ever again. I’ll be lucky if I ever get cover art that I can look at without feeling embarrassed.


The reason for that is that the industry has decided that the way around the expense and bother of using human cover artists is to use AI generation. Let’s be clear on what this means.


There is no such thing as artificial intelligence. When I was in grad school in the 90’s, the word was that AI had been just around the corner for so many decades that researchers were advised to take whatever they had and call it AI or lose their funding. That’s an ongoing process.


Now we have large language models built out of surplus graphics cards sold off by failed crypto firms, using truly astonishing amounts of water and energy, sucking down all the Geritol ads, rocket ships, moths (for some reason moths are really in for book covers right now) and breastily boobing bikini babes that have ever been used to illustrate a cover and spit out the kind of uncanny valley results that will immediately provide a source of endless amusement to readers of r/fantasyromance or other such online gatherings. Artists will point out all of the obvious AI art tells, the six fingered hands and sunken eyes, and readers will immediately conclude that the authors who use AI art for their covers do not care about their readers, that the text of the books are probably AI generated and not worth anyone’s time or effort to read. They will think the the author chose the art, because readers always think that. The discussions will be hilarious, unless it’s your book, in which case you’ll read it and burst into tears.

How do I know this? It’s happening right now. Go look.


Let’s talk about skuomorphs. You know what they are. Just like early iPhones used a yellow lined facsimile of a notepad because users all (used to) know what a note pad looks like and how it’s used, just like early ceramic artists made jugs in the same shape as a hollowed out gourd because everyone knew how to use one of those, book covers these days are cast in the outdated form of something that used to be appropriate but now makes no sense.


If a book isn’t sitting on a shelf, if it’s read and consumed solely on a palm-sized device where the details are too small to see, why does everyone insist on having a human figure straight out of the uncanny valley on the cover? Who does this benefit? Certainly not visually impaired readers who are using text to speech or screen readers to navigate your books. And they’re the lucky ones, because they don’t have to see the figures with uneven eyes or cut-off fingers.

I’d much rather have a book cover with a readable font that says what’s inside. I’ve heard that readers have come to expect that the more discreet the cover, the hotter the contents.


But this is just about me. If you use an AI generated cover, I will not judge. Neither will I read.

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Patreon Discount Code

Are you interested in reading the sequel to Wishbone, Names of My Beloved? The book is being serialized on my Patreon. You can now use the discount code DD75A for 60% off your first month. This discount is good through December 20, 2024.

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How old is Wishbone?

Answer: He’s eighteen at the start of his eponymous novel.

Why? Because characters in erotica are supposed to be eighteen and up. Except in Nebraska and, I think Alabama, where they must be nineteen. Presumably fictional characters are completely asexual until they get close to eighteen, at which point they, I dunno, sprout genitals?

But the main character of Kushel’s Dart is old enough to be initiated into sacred prostitution the moment she turns sixteen. Why? Because Kushiel’s Dart is not shelved with the erotica. It’s fantasy. No, this doesn’t make a bit of sense. Certainly there exists erotica with younger protagonists. And sometimes there is trouble over it. There was a huge kerfuffle many years ago on LiveJournal over erotic Harry Potter fan fiction. Yes, someone went and deleted a bunch of blogs about fictional characters to protect real children.

Furthermore, fiction with gay characters will be scrutinized in ways that fiction with purely straight characters is not. If you don’t believe me, you’ve never struggled with Amazon “dungeoning” your books, even books that are not erotica, because they have queer characters. The bots that look for questionable content automatically categorize the love that dare not speak its name as, well, unspeakable.

Most authors know about this, but readers do not. Thus if you read the reviews of Wishbone, you may see people assuming that Wishbone is thirteen and being disturbed by this. I don’t blame them.

So why didn’t I come out and say that Wishbone is eighteen?

Because it feels really awkward to write, “Once there was a character who was eighteen.”

In real-world fiction it’s easy to handle this. A character is either old enough to drink legally (twenty-one in the US), or isn’t and has a fake ID. Or there are other cultural markers, like whether the character has attended or finished college.

In a secondary pre-industrial world, someone’s exact age isn’t important. They’re either functionally an adult–working for a living and capable of reproducing–or they’re not. They’re going to be married off as soon as there is a possibility of them having children. By the way, did you know that puberty for women is controlled in part by body fat? In a world without fast food, accumulating enough body fat to support ovulation is a huge struggle and takes longer. A woman is unlikely to get pregnant before she’s sixteen or so.

Wishbone was functionally an adult at thirteen or fourteen. He looks young for his age due to hard living and lack of regular meals, and is working in a profession where looking younger is a marketing feature. On top of this, he has lost track of his age because the number is not relevant, and because calendars are things that only rich people with secretaries use.

You can see me attempting to address this in Names of My Beloved. How’d I do?

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What’s your writing process?

I don’t travel well (except inside my own head). All of my writing is done sitting at my desk in front of a 2020 vintage iMac with a 27″ screen. The large screen allows me to use large fonts so I can still write even with the blurred vision and negative scotomata that are facts of life for me.

I type using a Kinesis Freestyle 2 Mac split keyboard and sit on an extremely decayed Aeron chair.

For writing software I use Scrivener, which is excellent for my pantser-style writing process. I don’t write character sketches. I keep files of quotes that I imagine characters saying and build the scenes where these quotes would be said.

I also use LibreOffice, especially for final formatting. In a few cases I’ve used Sigil, a free ebook editing application, to tweak an existing ebook.

As I said, I’m a pantser, not a planner. I was the kind of schoolkid who wrote the essay first and then wrote the outline because the assignment demanded it, not because it was going to help me write. Writing for me is largely a subconscious process where I have to fold away my thinking brain and connect my messy back-brain to my fingers and let the ideas flow out.

I have a cat who tries to help me write but isn’t all that good at it. She is very furry, though.