Tag Archives: fiction

When Fantasy Sex is Not Just Sex

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Eunice and I have written four novels and one collection of short stories in a far-future, post-scarcity world that emerged from a fantasy she had, a woman atop a ziggurat, strapped to an altar, given forced orgasms from sunup to sundown.

From that one image, an entire world, with fusion power and drones and near-Culture-level AIs and an entire society and religious system arose, the backdrop of five books (and counting!).

But that’s not what I’m here to talk about today. I want to talk about that big consumer magic show in Las Vegas.

So I ran across a question on the social media site Quora, What’s your go-to fantasy? And the thing is, I don’t have one of those. In fact, I kind of envy people who do…it must be nice to have something that always works for you, something that gets you off reliably.

My fantasy world is a weird place, where the thing that does it for me changes all the time. I answered the question with the fantasy that’s currently doing it for me right now:

The one that’s doing it for me right now involves me and one of my current real-life lovers going to that huge consumer magic expo in Las Vegas every year, you know the one I mean.

It’s always a rather dreary affair, giant corporations with a trillion-dollar market cap trying to convince you that this year’s new grimoires are, like, this radical new development in magic that’ll change the world when really they’re about the same spells as last year but with less mana requirements and maybe a bit less material components, or the new model scrying stones are some radical new earth-shaking invention when really they’re about the same as last year’s model but maybe with a bigger viewing crystal or something.

But hey, we’re there for work, and the hotel restaurant has real unicorn steaks (the kind where they dust the meat with powdered unicorn horn before they grill it so you get that tingle) and top-shelf fae cider, the kind that gets you high af and turns your eyes golden for a few hours…and it’s all expense accountable.

So anyway, we’re exploring the vendor hall when we find a little booth in the back advertising Eros magic, staffed by a cute but surly goth girl watching Shoot ’Em Up on Netflix on her iPad. (Yes, I know Netflix doesn’t have Shoot ’Em Up, it’s a fantasy, okay?)

The booth has all the normal tat you’d find at a place like that, love potions, lust amulets set in cheap brass jewelry, desire charms that have so little magic in them that you can resist the compulsion in your sleep. But we find some little black vials with a holographic moon on the label that look kind of interesting, and the sign on the display stand offers exquisite ecstasy beyond imagining, so we’re like, why not?

We get two of them and take them up to our room. The vials have those peel-to-open labels with all the instructions and contraindications and such printed in four-point type on the inside: do not take more than four doses in 24 hours, do not take if you’re allergic to pixie dust or succubus essence, yadda yadda yadda, not legal for sale or use in AR, MI, or AL, check state and local ordinances, blah blah blah…

So we both down the contents, halfway expecting a cheap gas-station aphrodisiac, something that makes you all frantic but leaves you with a hangover and itchy skin the next day, but this is not that.

It comes on slow, subtle at first, but absolutely irresistible, until I get an intoxicating buzz just looking at her. Every touch, however slight or fleeting, sends this long slow wave of indescribable ecstasy rippling through me. And kissing? Dear god, just the lightest touch of her lips is like the heavens open up and, for just that moment, I see the whole of the cosmos.

I won’t bore you with the rest, but yeah, that’s the fantasy that’s working for me right now.

Here, have a ghastly AI generated image that probably accelerated global warming by three months, because that’s the time we live in.

So anyway, there’s a guy I know from The Online who asked me, “Why does you need all these non-sexual details in your wank material? A lot of this context isn’t even very relevant to the foreplay.”

Which is a good question, one I started answering over on Quora before I realized it really needed a full fledged essay to answer.

Eunice and I share one thing in common: grunt-n-thrust doesn’t work for us. (In fact, this is something I share with my Talespinner as well; we’re currently a third of the way through co-authoring a hyperurban retrofuturist gangster noir novel that started as a sexual fantasy and became an entire world.)

There needs to be something beyond two (or more) people fucking. Who are they? Why are they fucking? Where are they fucking? What’s the context of the fucking they’re doing?

The context is actually, for me, part of what makes it hot. Every element of that fantasy changes the nature of the sex. So let’s look at it, and I’ll explain why.

Me and one of my current real-life lovers…

So this is about a rela person, someone who’s already an intimate partner.

…going to that huge consumer magic expo in Las Vegas every year, you know the one I mean.

Right away, this isn’t the real world. It’s a world where magic is real, and is as humdrum as electronics (which, seriously, are magic!) are here in this world.

It’s always a rather dreary affair, giant corporations with a trillion-dollar market cap trying to convince you…

So it’s this world’s equivalent of the Consumer Electronics Show. Right away that tells you even more about the world, but also that my lover and I are away from home. There’s something just a little extra about sex in a motel room, isn’t there?

But hey, we’re there for work,…

Which also adds an element of spice to the sex. Is this an illicit workplace tryst? Are we there from different companies? Dunno, but either way it changes the sex.

…and the hotel restaurant has real unicorn steaks (the kind where they dust the meat with powdered unicorn horn before they grill it so you get that tingle) and top-shelf fae cider, the kind that gets you high af and turns your eyes golden for a few hours…and it’s all expense accountable.

It’s a nice hotel, with an expensive restaurant that serves a high-end (and presumably very pricey) menu, but someone else is paying for it! Again, changes the nature of the tryst.

…we find a little booth in the back advertising Eros magic, staffed by a cute but surly goth girl watching Shoot ’Em Up on Netflix on her iPad.

Magic and consumer electronics are real. Oh, and the consumer electronics expo was, for a while, actually famous for having tons of little booths advertising sex toys, until the organizers actually changed the rules to ban them. (Why were they there? Because you get a whole bunch of people there on business because their companies made them go, far from home with hot co-workers or partners, it was A Thing™. Why did they get banned? They started overshadowing the big consumer electronics giants.)

…all the normal tat you’d find at a place like that, love potions, lust amulets set in cheap brass jewelry, desire charms that have so little magic in them that you can resist the compulsion in your sleep.

So basically the equivalent of those ridiculous penis pills or whatever, or cheap vibrators that break after the second use. And also, this is a world where recrational magic is a bit like recreational pharmaceuticals are in the real world.

But we find some little black vials with a holographic moon on the label that look kind of interesting, and the sign on the display stand offers exquisite ecstasy beyond imagining, so we’re like, why not?

We didn’t plan to investigate the tat at the little sex booth; this was a spontaneous decision. We didn’t come to the expo expecting to try some dodgy sex magic and shag. But we weren’t closed to it, clearly.

The vials have those peel-to-open labels with all the instructions and contraindications and such printed in four-point type on the inside: do not take more than four doses in 24 hours, do not take if you’re allergic to pixie dust or succubus essence, yadda yadda yadda, not legal for sale or use in AR, MI, or AL…

So these vials, whatever they are, occupy that legal limbo that cannabis products did for a while. Hmm, interesting. Means they probably legit have some effect, then.

It comes on slow, subtle at first, but absolutely irresistible, until I get an intoxicating buzz just looking at her. Every touch, however slight or fleeting, sends this long slow wave of indescribable ecstasy rippling through me. And kissing? Dear god, just the lightest touch of her lips is like the heavens open up and, for just that moment, I see the whole of the cosmos.

Fuuuck me, this is way more of an intense experience than either of us expected, and way, way better, too. We’re off in an expensive, swanky hotel room in an expensive, swanky hotel that neither of us is paying for, with an expensive, swanky restaurant serving from a menu that normally we’d never even consider buying from, and now we’re set to have this amazing sexual experience.

Every part of the fantasy informs the nature of what’s about to happen.

For me, when I say that I need the context and the setting to make a sexual fantasy work, that’s what I’m talking about. Whi is it with? Why are we shagging? How are we shagging? What informs the shagging? What sets the stage? What’s the context? Sex at home is different from sex in a hotel is different from sex while traveling to another country. Sex in the normal everyday world is different from sex in a dystopia where every sexual encounter is a subversive act is different from sex in a world where magic is real and is routinely used as part of the sex.

Everything changes the quality and timbre of sex. All these little background details influence the nature of the sex in the fantasy.

Sex as Fuel for Creativity

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Back in 2019, Eunice and I spent some time in New Orleans, a place I’d never visited before. We did all the normal New Orleans touristy things: explored an abandoned and partly-flooded power plant, did some urban spelunking in the ruins of an old mansion…you know, the usual.

While we were there, we also officially broke ground on immechanica, our near-future, hard-SF post-cyberpunk novel. We officially started working on the background of the world in a laundromat whilst waiting for our clothes to dry.

A couple weeks ago, a random troll on social media informed me, with the cast-iron certainty of those who make their home on the rugged and inhospitable slopes of Mount Dunning-Kruger, that I would never accomplish anything because clearly my entire life revolved around sex. (I’d include a screenshot, but honestly I’ve only had one cup of tea so far today and I absolutely cannot be arsed to go find it.) The dude is, and I’m sure this will come as a surprise to nobody, a conservative Evangelical Christian, and he also exhibits this weird quirk where he (randomly) puts words in (parentheses) whenever he (writes).

I’ve long suspected that folks who do that sort of weird inappropriate (emphasis)—sometimes it’s random Capitalized words, sometimes it’s random ALL caps—have a defineable, quantifiable mental illness, because it’s so overwhelmingly common amongst a certain type of Internet troll—but I digress.

Anyway, the thing is, he’s not exactly wrong, but he’s so wrong he has accidentally looped all the way around to right, in a manner of speaking, kind of like what happens in that video game Asteroids where you go off one side of the screen and reappear on t’other.

But I digress.

Whilst we were there, we went out one evening to a very nice seafood teppanyaki dinner. Before we left for the restaurant, I took some PT-141 (bremelanotide), a potent aphrodisiac that works gangbusters on me.

It started to hit in the restaurant. We walked back to the AirBnB through the French quarter hand in hand, with Eunice whispering the most delicious filth at me the whole time. We got back, got naked, spread out a huge collection of sex toys all over the bed, and…

…started talking about the book.

Then I got out my laptop.

The next thing you know, it’s past 2AM and we’re both sitting on the bed naked, writing, the toys forgotten around us.

See, here’s the thing: I like sex. A lot. I mean, yeah, a lot of folks like sex, but I might like sex more than the average bear.

But when I say I like sex, I don’t necessarily mean I like having sex, or having orgasms, or doing the bumping of squishy bits. Don’t get me wrong, I like all those things, but what I really like, what really drives me, is that the impulse toward sex is, in a literal sense, the most fundamental expression of the creative impulse. I do not see how it’s possible to separate sex from creativity.

Which is kind of a big deal, because co-creation is my love language.

I like sex, yet two of my lovers are on the asexuality spectrum, and that’s fine. They’re both creative, and all creativity is sex.

When I look back over the things I’ve created and am creating, sex is intimately tied up in all of them, even if the connection isn’t necessarily visible from the outside.

I mean, yes, often it is. Sometimes it’s pretty heckin’ obvious.

But sometimes it’s not. There’s basically no sex in our novel immechanica, but the writing of it was a highly sexual act, even though it literally, not figuratively, prevented us from having sex.

Last time I visited my Talespinner, a lover with a sex drive so breathtakingly vast and deep she makes me look like a celibate monk in a monastery, I got an idea for a novel I’m working on that I’ve been stuck on for a while.

In the middle of a very kinky threesome with her other boyfriend.

So I did what anyone might do in that situation: I excused myself for about an hour or so and banged out about 1200 words on the novel whilst they carried on doing their thing. When I was done, I rejoined them and the kinky sexy festivities continued.

Which is kind of my point. Yes, my life is, from a certain point of view, very much about sex (and caffeine), because sex (and caffeine) drives my creativity. My normal background emotional state is basically happy and basically horny pretty much all the time. I turn sex and caffeine into words…even when those words aren’t about sex or caffeine.

To be fair, they sometimes are; I write about sex rather a lot. But in the Passionate Pantheon universe, a series of novels that contain a lot of sex, we use sex to explore philosophy, radical agency, consent, justice, and morality. We’ve received feedback that sometimes people are left a bit confused by the novels because they skip over the sex, but important plot points, character development, and ideas happen during the sex—you can’t take the sex out of the stories and still follow what’s going on.

Right now, my Talespinner and I are writing a novel with the working title A Long Kiss Goodbye. It’s a hyperurban retrofuturist court-intrigue gangster noir. I’ve written before about how we created the book’s setting and plot during sex.

We’ve formally started working on it, and man, it’s been a ride. Indah Tan, our protagonist, is headstrong and stubborn and not at all afraid to tell us “no, I’m not doing that” when we try to write her scenes. I told my Talespinner it kinda feels like this book has three co-authors—her, me, and Indah—and of the three of us, Indah is the most well-armed. Still, it must be working, we’re already a quarter of the way through the first draft.

So yes, sex is an important part of my life. No, it’s not preventing me from accomplishing anything…it’s fueling the things I accomplish.

The United States is, by the standards of Western developed nations, Puritan and prudish to such a degree it’s almost self-parodying. There’s a deep, reflexive hatred and fear of sexuality wired into our collective consciousness, which of course makes us simultaneously fascinated by and repelled by sex. Our advertising is drenched in sex, but serious talk about sex and sexuality shocks us to our core.

In this kind of society, using the sexual impulse to fuel creativity is by itself almost an act of defiance.

Some Thoughts on Consent and the Right to Say Meh

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My Talespinner and I are just putting the finishing touches on a book we co-authored together with her other boyfriend, an anthology of supernatural erotica called Spectres.

This isn’t actually an essay about that, it’s an essay about consent, agency, and the right to say meh. Hang on, I’m getting there.

One of the stories (actually more of a novella; Spectres is a chonky book) centers on an archaeologist working at a dig site in Türkiye who unearths a Hittite artifact that, spoiler, contains the soul of a priestess of Šauška, the Hittite goddess of sex and healing. Shenanigans happen, she seduces a grad student named Sarah, they start a weird D/s relationship, and near the end of the story it’s implied that she may offer Sarah’s sexual favors to another of her lovers…something Sarah consents to.

I will have ARCs soon. Hit me up if you want a copy!

So. A few days ago I saw a post on social media to the extent of “Remember, if the consent is not enthusiastic, it’s rape.” And, of course, that post had the usual performative affirmations: upvotes, replies like “Yes! This!” and “Right!”

It kinda rubbed me the wrong way. Not just the performative virtue-signaling aspect of the responses, but the post itself.

Don’t get me wrong, I get where it’s coming from. If you wheedle, beg, pressure, coerce, whine, cajole, browbeat, bulldoze, blandish, exhort, compel, or otherwise arm-twist someone into shagging you, that’s not really consent. Consent, to be valid, must be free, informed, and uncoerced.

But here’s the thing:

Consent can be unenthusiastic without being coerced.

We like to draw hard lines. We like to put everything and everyone in neat, tidy boxes. But real life is messy and chaotic and it sometimes requires thought and judgment rather than platitudes and rules.

I’ve consented to sex unenthusiastically. I’ve agreed to do things I don’t particularly enjoy, because my lovers really really wanted to do them. That isn’t rape.

Yes, I know, I know, the person who posted on social media was (probably) trying, in a clumsy way, to say that sex without uncoerced consent is rape. And that’s true, but it’s not what she said.

Look, I get it. Enthusiastic sex between participants who are really into it is good. But you know what? There are times when one person is more into it than another, and that’s okay.

I have the right to say yes even to things I’m not overjoyed about.

I’m not a masochist. I don’t enjoy pain. I do enjoy making my lovers happy, and so I have freely, without coercion, consented to be spanked, cropped, caned, have needles stuck in me, and bottom for knife play. My body, my choice…and that means I have the right to choose things I’m not really into for the sake of a lover who is.

I am not, and I know there will probably be people who push back on this, but I am not a victim of a sexual assault when I say yes to something that I know in advance is not particularly going to crank my motor. I have the right to say yes to sex I am meh about.

In fact, thad this’ll really bake your noodle, not only do I have the right to say yes to sex I’m meh about, I think that under many circumstances it’s a good thing to do so.

We human beings are terrible at predicting in advance how we will respond to unfamiliar things. I have said yes to sex I was sure I’d enjoy and discovered after the fact that I didn’t like it at all and will never do it again. My consent was not violated.

I’ve said yes to things that I was pretty sure I wouldn’t like in order to please a partner, and then discovered that, wow, it really turned me on. My consent was not violated.

Part of having agency means, I believe, having the right to agree to do things I’m not enthusiastic about doing. I may express that thus-and-such isn’t really likely to float my banana, but I can still choose to do it anway.

So. Back to Spectres.

Why would our character agree to have sex with someone she doesn’t want to have sex with and wouldn’t choose as a lover? Because it’s not about him. It’s about her relationship with the protagonist; it’s her way of showing that she is willing to give herself to her lover in that way, by consenting to allow her lover to choose another person for her to have sex with.

I’ve done that in real life, by the way; consented to have sex with someone I wouldnn’t otherwise choose to have sex with because another lover told me to. If you play with D/s, that’s a very powerful form of submission. (And isn’t that what D/s is, for a lot of us? Being willing to do things that another person tells us to do, things we wouldn’t otherwise do, because we’ve chosen to surrender power?)

Look, a lot of folks don’t play this way, and that’s fine. Part of what makes me willing to play this way is the fact that I’m not sexually attracted to people I don’t already have an emotional connection with, so it pushes my buttons in a big way, and that’s where the power, the kick, comes from.

If you don’t understand that, hey, that’s fine. You absolutely don’t need to play that way. The point I’m making here is not that you should run out and do things you don’t want to do because a lover tells you to; the point I’m making here is that it’s absolutely possible to give free, uncoerced consent that is not enthusiastic, to sex you know you’re not likely to enjoy particularly…and that isn’t automatically rape.

The problem with morals that fit conveniently in one Tweet or on a bumper sticker is that people are more complex than bumper-sticker morality. Trying to reduce human ethics to bumper-sticker slogans causes harm.

You personally don’t need to embrace the meh to acknowledge that others can, if they choose.

Hyperurbanized noir retrofuturism: Inventing literary genres during sex

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This morning, I answered a question over on Quora, the social media site where I spend most of my time these days.

The question asked, What do partners say to each other in sex, like when you are thrusting and such?

As it turns out, I had an example from some rather spectacular sex last night, the kind of sex that makes you see the face of God, that may have led to my lover and I creating a new literary genre…one that we’re tentatively calling “hyperurbanized noir retrofuturism.” It’s kind of a spinoff of the cyberpunk retrofuturism of entertainment like Bladerunner or Akira or Cyberpunk 2077.

Okay, so.

I call my Talespinner my Talespinner because she has a gift for weaving worlds from words, something she does pretty much all the time, including during sex.

When we have sex, we build shared worlds—we talk about fictional characters and settings in which characters are having sex. We explore fantasies together by inventing these characters and setting them loose in a shared universe very different from ours.

Like the dystopian, oligarchical world we’ve created where the State is controlled by a kleptocratic class and the apparatus of the State, modeled loosely on Stalinist Russia, arrests political dissidents who are conditioned and brainwashed to serve as pleasure objects, leased to the oligarchs for staggering sums of money to fulfill the oligarchs’ most perverse desires. (We’ve opened this shared world to my crush and her other boyfriend, and written over 170,000 words of fiction with a cast of dozens of characters.)

So before I go further, a bit of backstory is necessary.

Some time ago, I shared this H. R. Giger image with my crush:

I said it looks like a machine for forced sexual stimulation, she pointed out that all sexual stimulation can be forced sexual stimulation if it goes on for long enough, and at that point it was off to the races.

Before long we’d invented a world in which an all-female Yakuza-style street gang had arisen with a unique punishment for members who erred: rather than cutting off a finger to atone, they were strapped into this device, then raised into a soundproofed plexiglas cube in the middle of a posh restaurant owned by the gang, where the machine forced orgasm after agonizing, unendurable orgasm from their helpless bodies for eight or nine hours while they screamed and sobbed in uncanny silence for the amusement of the restaurant’s patrons.

I shared this scenario with my Talespinner. One of the things I love about my polycule is that it’s fertile ground for creativity: my Talespinner’s other boyfriend is contributing to an erotic anthology my Talespinner and I will be publishing next year, my wife has created the entire history of fashion for my Black Iron universe; my wife designed the Victorian house that serves as the setting for a novel my crush and I were writing, that my Talespinner may help finish…you get the idea.

It’s magnificent.

Anyway. I shared this scenario with my Talespinner, and together we fleshed out the world a retrofuturist, quasi-cyberpunk world that abandons the signature chrome-steel, neon, weirdly Orientalist fetishistic background of traditional cyberpunk:

for a more grounded environment that’s less chrome and neon and more Cubist hyperurbanization:

Imagine an endless, densely packed urban environment, but not the Sprawl from Neuromancer; rather, this is an immense vista of great towering Cubist architecture, spanned by a complex web of covered pedestrian bridges far above street level—a huge multilevel Cubist metropolis in which you can walk for a dozen blocks or more without ever descending to street level.

Subways accessed through stations beneath the buildings allow travel to the far corners of the immense city without ever setting foot on the street (which is dominated almost exclusively by robotic taxis and self-driving supply vehicles).

Our main character is a member of this all-female gang, young but ambitious and on an upward trajectory through the ranks.

You will notice that the Giger painting features space for two people. What, then, happens when only one person transgresses against the gang’s rules?

In such a case, another gang member may volunteer to serve alongside her or, if no volunteers are forthcoming, one is chosen at random. Serving in this capacity awards a certain measure of honor and respect, more if it’s voluntary than if it’s assigned randomly.

The tale my Talespinner and I wove over many hot kinky sex sessions during the past week or so, involves our unnamed gang-member heroine and an unnamed gentleman who happened to be dining in this restaurant (owned and operated by an ostensibly retired former gang member, of course) on a day when our heroine is randomly chosen to endure hours of unimaginable sexual torment alongside another member caught transgressing the gang’s rules.

He becomes so enamored of this mysterious tattooed woman locked in this cube, suffering so magnificently, that he waits until the restaurant closes and follows her, still shaking and weeping, home.

A dangerous game to be sure, but he is a civilian and has no idea what he’s up against.

He spies on her for weeks, but somehow whenever he tries to follow her to figure out what she does for a living, poof! She vanishes like a ghost.

Eventually, he works up the courage to ask her out for coffee, and is quite surprised when she accepts. They have a few dates, and soon become lovers…

…but…

…but…

…she knows, of course. She knows how she first came to his attention. She knows he has stalked her. And she resolves to teach him a lesson.

Which brings me, in roundabout fashion, to my answer to the question, what do lovers say to each other during sex, like when thrusting and such?

You need to understand that at this point, my Talespinner and I had had sex…um, four times, I think? Not including the threesomes with her other boyfriend the night before.

The last time we had sex, I’d already had…oh, man, I don’t know how many orgasms. Enough I was convinced I couldn’t have another.

That’s when it started.

My Talespinner murmured in my ear an entire scenario in which our heroine took this fellow out on a leisurely day-long date, one where she gave him every possible opportunity to come clean. She even took him to the indoor garden cafe in the building across the street from her apartment, and had lunch with him at the one table overlooking her apartment from which he spied on her.

She was disappointed, of course, that he failed to be forthcoming about his behavior prior to asking her out. Disappointed, but prepared.

So when she invited him back to her apartment, she’d already set up the chair with the straps and the projecting rod and all the implements she needed to impress upon him the value of open, honest communication in a relationship.

Including a rather lovely item of jewelry something like this, but with the blades blades on the fingertips wickedly sharp:

She has, while she binds him, a calm, reasoned conversation with him, about honesty and openness, and how she’d really hoped he’d be more forthcoming, but regardless, the time for that conversation had come, and now there was nothing for it but to talk.

It was around the point where she described the narrow, almost thread-thin, but very strong cords she wrapped around his body to encourage him to remain very still without struggling lest the cords cut painfully into his skin, and the way she ran those thin sharp blades down his skin, that I had the last, strongest, and definitely most painful orgasm of the evening, and indeed of the past several months.

We will likely end up writing a novel set in this world, but there are so many projects in the pipe ahead of it I don’t see us starting on it until 2027 at the earliest.

Now, of course, I’m not suggesting this is what you, dear reader, should necessarily talk about during sex. It may be that hyperurbanized noir retrofuturism isn’t your particular taste.

Perhaps you’d rather talk about the interpersonal social dynamics of My Little Pony, or the alternative economics of non-monetary tips for the pizza delivery dude.

The point is, talk about your interests. Listen to your partner talk about their interests. Find the overlap. Explore the area between.

This might mean that you talk about what you’re doing, or what you’d like to. It might mean you invent characters in fictitious worlds and talk about them. It might mean you talk about Vulcan philosophy, or pon farr rituals, or how the latter doesn’t really mesh with the former but is really more about Gene Roddenberry’s own particular and peculiar sexual tastes.

Whatever.

You don’t need someone else to tell you what’s okay to talk about. Explore! It’s your life and your relationship.

An Unexpected Journey

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A couple weeks ago, I ended up on an unexpected last-minute trip to Dublin, Ireland (my client literally emailed me on Thursday evening to say “hey, can you be at the airport on Sunday?”). On the way back from Dublin, I spent a week or so in London visiting Eunice, my lovely co-author.

Our novel London Under Veil, about a young British infosec worker in Shoreditch who ends up drawn into a secret underground war between an ancient guild of spellcasting sex workers and a society of Tory rage mages, is (rather unexpectedly) turning out to be the most popular thing we’ve written so far.

Whilst I was in London, we spent a couple of days visiting some of the important places in the novel. All of the locations in the novel except the headquarters of the Guild are real; we wanted the novel to be as grounded as we possibly could.

We had a blast touring and taking photos of the key places in London where the story unfolds.

The first key location, where May takes refuge from the people trying to kidnap her, learns that magic is real, and finds herself drawn into the Guild of the Women of Saint Thais Under Royal Charter of Her Majesty Catherine Parr, Queen Consort of England and Ireland, founded in anno Domini nostri Jesu Christi 1544, is the Lalit, a tiny luxury hotel and restaurant:

We had high tea in the dining room, the very place where May meets Serene, the leader of the Guild and a powerful spellcaster.

The table on the right hand side of the photo, on the balcony, is where May has her first introduction to Serene.

“So, okay, just so we’re clear.” May folded her arms. “You’re telling me you can cast magic spells. Something like that.”

Serene smiled benevolently. “Something like that.”

“And the people who were after me? Can they…cast magic too?”

“They can, though they use a different system. A different way of seeing the world. A different programming language, if you like.”

“And you expect me to believe this, just by a sleight of hand trick with ID badges and some tea.” Even as she said it, May thought of the metal badge, hard and smooth beneath her fingers, a visceral memory that still lingered in her fingertips.

“What do you think?”

“I think you’re crazy. I think you’re trying to manipulate me. I think you’re trying to trick me for—for—for reasons of your own. I think you’ve arranged to drag me here so you can mess with my mind. You…you put something in the tea.”

“You haven’t had any of your tea.”

“Even so, this can’t be real!”

“All of those are sane, rational, and reasonable responses,” Serene said. “Offered a choice between accepting that which is by its very nature impossible, and accepting that someone is trying to fool you, the smart money is on someone trying to fool you every time. Normally I would suggest you go home and sleep on it, get adjusted to it a little, then come back with your questions, but this situation is not normal.”

“Because people are trying to grab me.”

“Because people are trying to grab you.” Serene sipped daintily at her tea.

“You seem quite blasé about all this.”

“Would you like to finish your tea before we go?”

“I’m fine.”

“I expect you’re not, but you are doing well considering. And you have a healthy degree of suspicion that will serve you in what is to come, I think. Still, time for us to be going.”

The Lalit is gorgeous, and we ended up staying there until well into the night.

Next up, the Barbican, that sprawling marvel of Brutalist architecture. Not many people know this, but the pools in the Barbican are part of a sophisticated magical warding system.

Toward the end of the novel, the Guild seeks shelter at the Barbican:

May finally broke the silence as they neared their destination, the sprawling Brutalist retro-dystopian complex of the Barbican, with its pools and gardens giving rise to slablike concrete buildings like strange plants. “I keep thinking nothing else can surprise me, and I keep being wrong. I suppose you’re going to tell me the Guild owns a flat here?”

“Several,” Janet said.

“Of course you do. We do. Whatever.”

“Why wouldn’t we? On hindsight, perhaps we shouldn’t have abandoned it for our new headquarters. It seemed a sound decision at the time, but this is a far more defensible position, magically and practically speaking. The pools—”

“Forget I asked,” May said.

She helped Janet slide the stretcher from the back of the van. Spencer’s tail whipped back and forth, back and forth. Serene’s expression didn’t change as the wheels hit the pavement. “Where are we taking her?”

“The flat to the left,” Janet said.

May guided the stretcher through the door into a posh, beautifully-furnished flat with large windows overlooking the reflecting pool in the plaza. “Nice digs,” she said.

“It’s maintained by a small corporation owned by a holding company that’s a subsidiary of a concern operated by the Crown,” Janet said.

“Seriously? I kinda thought, with the Tories being all Them—”

“The Adversary’s takeover of the Tories is a recent development, historically speaking. Our special relationship with the Crown has endured for longer than any of us have been alive. I see no reason that won’t continue for as long as the Guild exists.” She looked down at Serene’s placid face. “Which I fear might not be much longer. We need to prepare a response.”

The Shard doesn’t occur in the story directly, but there is a version of the Shard in the weird surreal magical alternate London, and it tears a hole in the sky.

Which, honestly, it kinda looks like it’s trying to do anyway.

When her stomach quit spinning, May walked to the edge of the roof and looked around. London spread out below her…not her London, but a bizarre, fantasy London, a storybook London from one of those stories spun of equal parts wonder and dread.

The buildings sprawled in classic London chaos, dark and forbidding, an urban canyon of twisting passages, all alike. A bit south of her, along the Thames, the grand clock tower rose hundreds of metres from the Tower of Westminster, its glossy obsidian sides black and brooding, tipped by a yellow crystalline spire that blazed with incandescence. Beyond it, the Shard thrust upward from the ground, transparent as glass, its peak piercing the heavens, creating a jagged rip in the bowl of the sky through which the stars gleamed like hard pinholes in the black velvet of night. She turned her gaze across the bridge, to where the London Eye spun madly, a glowing blur of red atop a tall monolith of grey steel and white concrete. What she had taken as boats floating along the river were actually scribbles, charcoal impressions of boats hastily sketched by the hand of an impatient artist, each identical, each with a gleaming lantern in its prow. Static fuzz rippled just beneath the water, as if the river itself were a television signal badly degraded.

The story’s climactic showdown takes place in the Guildhall, which is a stronghold of magic if ever there was one. The door they enter through is on the right, behind the group of people standing there.

“Ah. Right. Just so I’m clear, it’s us, the people in this room right now, breaking into the Guildhall, which is also not coincidentally the stronghold of a fantastically powerful band of, and I say this with some reservation, evil spellcasting wizards, without any idea what we’re walking into.”

“That’s about the long and short of it, yeah,” Claire said. “I might feel better if I knew exactly how you plan to keep the Adversary’s prying eyes off us.”

“No way,” Claire said. “That’s a terrible idea, from an opsec perspective. Compartmentalization of information. If you’re caught, you can’t compromise the rest of us.”

“You don’t know, do you?”

“There is a certain…improvisational element to the plan, I will grant.” She turned to Zoe. “All-Girl Nude Beach 2014?”

“Got it in my pocket,” Zoe said.

“I’m sorry, what?” Lillian said. Zoe pulled a small thumb drive from her pocket and handed it to Lillian. The thing, badly scuffed and scratched, had a strip of masking tape stuck to it with “All-Girl Nude Beach 2014” scribbled on it in felt-tip pen.

“I don’t get it,” Lillian said.

“Loaded with all the best malware money can buy,” Zoe said. “When it falls out of my pocket in front of some mark, I guarantee he’ll race to his office just as fast as he can to plug it into his computer.”

“And then?”

Claire grinned. “And then we root his system. Hasn’t failed yet.”

We also spent quite a lot of time at the British Library, in the member’s room since Eunice is a member (because of course she is).

Some libraries have rare books rooms. The British Library has four immense walls of rare books, visible through the charming round porthole by these cozy chairs.

We wrote another book!

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Somehow, between a lot of other projects we’re working on and this last-minute trip to Europe, the fact that Eunice and I have released another book sort of fell through the cracks.

So hey, we released another book!

Presenting, the fourth novel in the Passionate Pantheon series, Unyielding Devotion. Sexy far-future post-scarcity science fiction theocratic body horror philosophical erotica, for your reading pleasure!

I’m particularly proud of this book. It’s probably the most philosophical of the Passionate Pantheon novels, but still has a ton of sex so kinky the kinks don’t even have names.

It follows a group of people who meet at a party hosted by Jakalva, a power broker in the City who worships none of the AI gods but nevertheless is still one of the City’s most influential citizens, and explores how their experiences at the party change the course of their lives.

You can read it as really really kinky porn, and it works, but it’s also sort of a sustained meditation on unconventional choices, growth, and relationships.

Sex! Zero-gravity gladiator matches! Skydiving from the tops of buildings! More sex!

Here’s an excerpt:

Jakalva leaned back. “My, my. A person comes to our City seeking to atone for her wrongdoing, and instead is selected to punish others for theirs. You have an interesting story indeed.”

Kaytin looked down. “I don’t feel interesting.”

The music stopped. A melodic chime filled the air. Jakalva touched Kaytin’s arm. “A moment, please.” She rose. “Friends, the entertainment is about to start. I invite those of you who wish to watch to be seated.” With the music gone, the drone above Kaytin flitted away.

Two doors in the far wall slid open to admit a tall, muscular man and an equally tall, strong-looking woman. He had bronze skin and brown hair that fell around his shoulders, and looked out at the world through piercing aquamarine eyes with cross-shaped pupils. She had shoulder-length hair of brilliant purple that matched her purple eyes, pale skin, and a warm face that smiled easily. They met in front of the cage. She offered her hand. “Hi! I’m Lanissae. I don’t think we’ve met.”

“Royat.” He shook her hand. “This is only my second party. I came here for the first time last month. I agreed to serve as entertainment at this party, so here I am.”

“Royat.” She inclined her head. “It’s lovely to meet you! This is my fifth time as a cage entertainer. Do you know what to do?”

“I think so. Jakalva explained it to me.”

“Good.” A door in the round cage folded upward. Lanissae stripped, then stepped nude into the cage. Royat undressed somewhat more awkwardly and followed her. A drone flitted down to whisk away their clothes. The cage door folded back down. The woman who had given Jakalva and Kaytin their vials approached the cage, moaning with each step. Her tray now held only four vials, two bright red and two deep turquoise.

“What’s happening?” Kaytin asked Chasoi, who stared at Lanissae and Royat with bright, hungry eyes.

“They’ll each take two Blessings,” Chasoi said. “The first one ensures their bodies will remain physically aroused no matter what happens to them. And the second, well, that’s the magic.”

“The magic? What does that mean?”

“One of them,” Jakalva said, “will become desperately horny beyond all reason. Are you familiar with the Blessing of Fire?”

“Yes,” Kaytin said.

“It’s like that, but more violent. It removes inhibition and obliterates self-control. The other does just the opposite, causing intense aversion, repulsion even, to the idea of sex. The cage makes sure neither of them can escape.”

“Oh.” Kaytin blinked. “So whoever gets the first vial will…”

“Yes. But that’s only half of it.”

“Half of it how?”

“That’s the beauty,” Chasoi breathed. “The moment either of them has an orgasm, they switch. Whoever was needy becomes averse. Whoever was averse becomes wild beyond control. They stay in the cage until they collapse from exhaustion.” Her eyes glittered.

This is not a novel for the faint of heart. You’ll find some pretty radical kinks between its covers.

Check it out! It’s available on Amazon US, UK, and Canada.

Pondering: Ancient Military, Modern Doctrine

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Image: Chris Chow

Looking for insight for an upcoming novel.

Okay, so. It’s thousands of years in the future. A global calamity has caused civilization to collapse. The population cratered to less than a billion people. Modern technological infrastructure was wiped out: power generation, mining, logistics, everything.

Eventually humanity recovered, up to a point. Right now, in the real world, all the world’s near-surface deposits of metals, oil, and most minerals are depleted; a society that lost modern infrastructure would no longer be able to mine iron, find or use oil and other petrochemicals, coal, and so on.

Metals in the fictional society still exist, though in limited quantities. They have to be “mined” from landfills, and the capacity to smelt steel without coal or oil is highly limited. Fortunately, landfills are largely anaerobic environments, so metals would still exist in unoxidized states, but can you imagine trying to smelt anything useable from, say, a stainless steel oven or a car frame without coal or oil?

No oil means limited plastics. Firearms exist, but without modern machining they’re quite crude compared to modern firearms. Computers? No. Electrical power in large quantities? No.

Thing is, the knowledge to make these things still exists; it isn’t lost. Many books and so forth survive (though not, obviously, computer records). People would know how electricity works, how to smelt high-quality steel, and so on; it’s just that without ores, without coal, without oil except for plant oils, it’s difficult to do on a large scale.

So: Horses and carts are the predominant non-pedestrian travel. Simple firearms exist but not in mass-produced, industrial quantities. It’s a weird society: technologically backward but with full knowledge of what has been lost.

My question relates specifically to military doctrine and combat tactics.

Horse-mounted calvary and foot soldiers, armed with swords and mmmmaybe simple cartridge firearms brings to mind, say, Revolutionary War or Civil War tactics…but in this world, the knowledge of modern combined arms tactics, military doctrine, and small-unit tactics still exists, it wasn’t lost, only the technological infrastructure was lost.

So, what would military units look like? What would military tactics and strategy look like? Definitely not Civil War, but not modern either. How would industrial military techniques and doctrine adopt to that level of technological infrastructure?

I’d love to hear your ideas!

A quick teaser

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Eunice and I, for those who may have missed it, released a new novel earlier this month, London Under Veil. It’s a departure for us (though to be fair that happens often; we can’t seem to find a genre and stick to it)—a sexy contemporary urban fantasy that follows a coven of spellcasting sex workers in their secret underground war with Objectivist Tory rage mages on the eve of Brexit.

We launched the book at WorldCon Glasgow, and sold out by Saturday morning. The first printing is completely gone.

Since then, I’ve received a surprising number of emails, DMs, and Facebook Messenger messages asking if there will be a sequel. Honestly, you guys are amazing, I’m so glad the book has resonated with so many folks!

The answer is yes. We’re working on the second novel in the Guild and City series, working title London Falling, right now.

In honor of all the people asking if there will be a second novel, I’d like to offer up this teaser, from the first draft of the still-in-progress sequel:

Eventually, the door opened. A bald man in a white shirt, sleeveless and sweat-stained, glared out at them. “I don’t imagine you’ll just go away if I ask you to?” he growled.

“I’d prefer not to,” Serene said. “We’ve travelled quite a distance.”

He paused for a moment, his expression sour, then his face changed, as though he’d reached some sort of decision. “Suppose you might as well c’mon up, then.” He turned and climbed a steep set of narrow, worn wooden steps. Serene followed him up. May hesitated, then climbed after her. Lillian and Iris followed. Iris shut the door, plunging them into gloom.

The steps ascended for longer than what seemed, strictly speaking, reasonable. Bare lightbulbs overhead cast a dim yellow glow that didn’t seem to illuminate the stairs so much as provide opportunity for shadows to gather. May frowned. A tingle swept over her skin. The acrid scent of ozone stung her nose.

The stairs ended, an entirely unnatural distance from the long-vanished entrance, at a small landing, before a massive wooden door carved with intricate reliefs of men and women cavorting lecherously beneath the boughs of an enormous tree. It swung open silently, into a penthouse suite lavish beyond the dreams of decadence. Luxurious white carpet covered the floor. To one side, a long bar, lit by glowing neon, ran the length of the wall. Bottles of exotic liquors, some with labels that seemed to twist the eye, lined up on shelves of dark polished wood. Along the other wall, huge windows that May couldn’t quite imagine belonging to the shabby industrial building looked toward the New York skyline. Three shallow steps descended into a large rectangular pit in the centre of the room, occupied by the largest sectional couch May had ever seen. A small round fireplace of brass-coloured metal squatted in the centre of the sectional, filling the space with warmth and light from a cheerful fire.

The man, Sam, turned to face them. May blinked. She’d somehow expected to see a stereotypical American, a middle-aged man with a paunch but no hair, in a grungy, sweaty tank top that whose best days were well behind it, and hadn’t been particularly good even then. Instead, a tall, slender man with long flowing hair and eyes the colour of honey, features as beautiful and androgynous as a Renaissance painting, scowled back at her. When she thought back, he’d always looked this way; why had she imagined anything else?

“Serene,” he said in a voice that carried Arctic frost. “I wish I could say this is an unexpected pleasure. It’s certainly unexpected, at any rate. Why you, of all people, might possibly believe you would find welcome here is beyond—oh, hey, Iris!”

“Sam!” Iris squealed. She flung herself forward, past Lillian and a gobsmacked May, to throw her arms around him. He embraced her warmly.

May’s jaw dropped. Lillian burst into laughter. Serene lifted an eyebrow. “Okay,” Lillian said, once Iris had release him. “I have got to hear this story.”

“A bit before your time,” Iris said. “Hey, Serene, you remember that infosec conference you sent me to in Glasgow, right after I started working for you? You know the one, securing private networks against intrusion? Defence in depth for network-facing servers?”

Serene folded her arms. “I have some vague memory of that, yes.”

“I met Sam there! He was brushing up on design of low-latency content delivery networks for streaming media.”

“And the rest is history,” Sam said. “Iris gave me her email—”

“Of course she did,” Serene said.

“—and we stayed in touch. I’m glad to see you’re keeping a better class of company these days, Serene.”

“Sometimes I wonder if I’m really necessary at all,” Serene said.

“Humble, too.” Sam looked her up and down with his strange eyes. “One almost might wonder if you’re the same Serene I know and love—well, I know so well. I’m less familiar with your other companions.”

His gaze met May’s. A physical jolt ran up her back. She found herself falling into his eyes, like pools of shimmering gold. A long slow flush passed through her body, a wave of tingling pleasure that flowed across her skin. She wondered, for just a moment, what it might be like to taste his lips on hers. “I’m May,” she heard herself say. “I’ve been part of the Guild since—” The shields slammed down in her mind. “Wow, nice trick. You’re good.”

“May and Lillian have been with us for a small while,” Serene said. “You need not concern yourself with them.”

“I concern myself as I choose. And yes, I am.” He turned his gaze away from May, who shuddered at the sudden absence.

His eyes locked onto Lillian. She blushed scarlet. “Okay, you’ve made your point,” Serene said.

“Have I?” he said, tone mild. “What point do you believe I am making? No, never mind, I don’t care. I’m more concerned about what ill wind has tossed you up upon my shore.”

“I’m certain you must’ve heard the news, even in a magical backwater like this,” Serene said. “The Adversary, open war…”

“Ah, yes, now that you mention it, I do think I heard some rumblings,” Sam said. “Rather nasty affair, from the sound of it. But what I cannot quite grasp is how that relates in any way to me. Where’s the proud Serene, the Serene so confident in her ability to manage her own affairs?”

“Believe me, if I felt I had any other choice, I wouldn’t be here.”

“Oh, I have no doubt. It must’ve been terrible, swallowing your pride. Though I am pleased you brought along such lovely company. Iris, it’s been far too long. Your work on waveguide-thaumaturgy over digital packet-switched networks is remarkable.”

“Your who what?” Lillian said.

“Casting spells over the Internet,” Iris said. “I’m still not certain it’s possible.”

The crowdfunding for Divine Burdens is now live!

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She had been in exile for three hundred and seventeen days when everything changed. Her exile from the City happened with little fanfare. A somber group of High Priests, Priestesses, and Clerics representing the major temples in the City informed her that she was to be banished. They gave her durable clothes, a few simple tools, and a small amount of food and water. They told her the Providers throughout the City would no longer respond to her. Then they escorted her to the shield. She stepped through, condemned to spend the rest of her days wandering the Wastelands. There were no friends to see her off; by the time she was exiled, she had no friends left. For the first few days, she treated it like a game. She had always thought of the Wastelands as some vast, barren desert, but once she was past the enormous automated farming towers with their spiraling ramps loaded with crops, she found an endless series of rolling hills, lush and forested. She spent the first couple of days near the City. She tried to steal food from one of the tower farms. The farm drones blocked her, giving her unpleasant shocks whenever she tried to force her way past them. She threw rocks at the drones, which bounced off their outer shells with no effect. On the third night of her exile, she attempted to sneak back into the City. The shield, which for all her life had been no more a barrier than a fog bank, became as hard and impenetrable as stone.

Divine Burdens, the second book in the Passionate Pantheon series of far-future, post-scarcity science fiction erotic novels I’ve co-authored with Eunice Hung, is now available for pre-order on Indiegogo!

This novel is a bit of a change from The Brazen Altar, the first in the series. While that book was Utopian science fiction kinky erotica, this one is dark erotic horror.

Eunice and I think that science fiction can be used to explore the edges of human sexuality, just as it can be used to explore other aspects of what it means to be human. The world of the Passionate Pantheon is a post-scarcity wonderland ruled by AIs worshipped as gods by the citizens, largely through ritualized group sex. You’ll find tentacles, runs through a forest that bends to the will of the AI gods, sacred parasites that grow inside a host and exude potent aphrodisiacs, and kinks so exotic they don’t even have names.

Plus if you back the crowdfunding, not only can you get an eBook or a signed paperback of Divine Burdens before publication date at a super-cheap price, you can also get a kazoo ball gag inspired by the drone on the cover! Back the crowdfunding now!

Unwrapping a new project: an uncensored Amazon erotica search tool!

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I am a self-published erotica writer. I write BDSM fiction, including the novel Nineteen Weeks, a story I’m very proud of.

A couple of years ago, I discovered that the number of books I was selling suddenly fell off a cliff. I did some research and found that the same thing was happening to a lot of erotica writers, especially self-published writers. Amazon’s Search function on their Web site was filtering out a lot of erotica, particularly erotica with themes of non-traditional relationships like BDSM.

However, I discovered something interesting a few months back: The Amazon search API, a set of programmer’s tools that allows Web programmers to search Amazon’s book titles, doesn’t filter search results. You can log on to Amazon and do a search for a particular book and see no results, but if you write a Web site that uses Amazon’s API and do a search, ta-da, there it is!

I’m sure you can see where this is going.

On and off for the past few months, I have been working on building a new Web site, called Red Lit Search. This site has a database of erotic books in Amazon’s catalog–so far only about eighteen hundred or so, but the list is growing–and also allows you to do uncensored searches of Amazon. My hope is to grow it into a portal for erotic books; if it succeeds, I plan to add new sections with things like articles, interviews with erotica writers, and all kinds of fun stuff like that.

So check it out! Spread the word! Kick the tires, test the software, and let me know what you think!

[ Visit Red Lit Search, the erotica search engine ]