Tag Archives: writing

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 canting languages

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If you’ve ever played Dungeons & Dragons, you probably know that any thief/rogue character automatically knows a language called “Thieves’ Cant.” It’s not really all that well described, and it includes a lot of elements that aren’t technically part of a canting language. Back in the day I played D&D, which hasn’t been for some years now (I moved on to other, more flexible systems), I basically just thought of it as a secret language and left it at that.

Image: romanchazov27

But canting languages are really super-cool. The essence of a cant is it’s a means of communication you can use when you’re being observed without the people who are eavesdropping on you knowing what you’re saying.

The canonical go-to example of a canting language is probably Cockney rhyming slang. Take a common, popular two-word expression. Find a word that rhymes with the second word of the expression. Use the first word of the expression in place of that word.

So for example, you might say “mate, I’m in barney, did you bring the bangers?” Barney: Barney Rubble: Trouble. Bangers: Bangers and mash: Cash. “I’m in barney, did you bring the bangers?” means “I’m in trouble, did you bring the cash?”

It’s never been as popular or widely used as pop culture makes it seem, but it’s a cool and interesting example of a cant.

I quite like the idea of canting languages. They’re a way of concealing meaning in an open and hostile environment; kind of like obfuscated JavaScript on malicious websites, in fact. They’re subject to enormous adaptive pressure because, of course, authorities will learn the cants used by the criminal underworld, so they have to change rapidly, but if they change too rapidly they become unintelligible for the people using them. The idea of a universal cant like in D&D is a bit absurd; they’re really of limited use, and they’ve never been all that common.

For my novel Black Iron, I had tremendous fun researching Victorian-era British slang for a canting language used among street urchins:

“My qab!” Missy said. A grin of delight split her grubby face. She leapt to her feet, hands out imploringly.

“I beg your pardon?” Skarbunket said.

“She means her hat, sir,” Mayferry said.

Missy made an exasperated noise. “It’s what I said! My qab! Give it t’me!”

Mayferry took the hat from Skarbunket and peered into it. “Aye, it’s a rum qab for a brim couch as yourself.” He set the hat on Missy’s head. It fell until it nearly covered her eyes. “Where did you get it?”

“I tole you!” Missy said. “It was my pa’s.”

“That’s a rumple kaddie, lass,” Mayferry said. “Don’t snap me for a bemmer. Where did you really get it?”

Skarbunket and Bristol looked sideways at each other. “Well, well, Mister Mayferry, you never cease to amaze,” Skarbunket said. “What the blazes are you two talking about?”

“Thank you, sir. I told her it’s a very fine hat for a young child, but I know she’s lying about where she got it, sir,” Mayferry said.

“Obviously she’s lying,” Bristol said. “We’re wasting our time.”

Skarbunket held out his hand. “No day in which we learn something is a wasted day. Today we have learned something interesting about Officer Mayferry, I think. Pray continue, Mister Mayferry.”

Missy squinched up her face. “‘Pray continue, Mister Mayferry.’ ’E talks like a jeeve.”

“That’s not a very nice thing to say,” Mayferry said. “He got you back your hat.”

Missy looked from Mayferry to Skarbunket and back again. “Aight, I s’pose ’e’s jayed ’nuff.”

“It’s not nice to rim your friends,” Mayferry said.

“Posies ain’t my friends,” Missy shot back.

“These posies got you your hat back.”

Missy looked doubtful. “Well…”

“That’s what the posies are for, isn’t it? That’s why you came to us. To help you get what was rightfully yours. And you have it back!”

Her grin returned. “My qab!”

“We’re not going to take it away,” Mayferry said. “We just want to know where you got it for real.”

“It’s mine! I tole you already!” She folded her arms defiantly in front of her. “My pa gave it t’me! Now you go away!”

Mayferry spread his hands. “Okay. Tell us about the hackie cove who cleved your qab.”

Missy’s face darkened. “’E didn’t give me a shilling.”

“How did you know where he was when you came to us?”

“I followed him, I did! ’E’s a fox an’ duckie for sure. Went all over like ’e had a shortie waking ’im. I was too duckie for ’im. I waked ’im all the way.” Her small face beamed with pride.

“Translation, if you please, Mister Mayferry?” Skarbunket said.

“She’s saying she followed him. Apparently he went to some trouble not to be followed.”

Canting languages are interesting because they’re a playground for language, intended to obfuscate as well as communicate. One thing cants have in common is that, almost by definition, they’re a direct channel for communication. The meaning is hidden in the way they use language, obfuscating the intended meaning behind words that are used in unusual ways or behind invented words, but they’re still direct communication; as long as the sender and receiver know the meanings of the words as they’re used, the communication is straightforward.

My Talespinner and I have finished the third draft of our far-future, post-Collapse magical realism literary novel, so we’ve set it aside to percolate before we return to the fourth draft. In the meantime, we’ve started a new novel, this one a hyperurbanized retrofuturist court-intrigue gangster noir, set in the fictional city of Bander Lautan, kind of a mashup of Hong Kong and Singapore but in an archology that’s basically completely enclosed from stem to stern, but not, like, in a deliberately planned way; think Singapore’s Interlace reimagined as a sort of hotel/convention center on steroids that just so happens to have a population of eight million souls.

The protagonist, Indah Tam, is a gangster, a member of an all-woman organized crime gang that calls itself Warisan Kita (“our legacy”), divided into clans called kongsi. Her particular clan, Taman Kongsi (Garden Clan; informally, taman wanita, garden of women), is one of five kongsi operating in Bander Lautan. (Why all women? Because men are far too emotional for this life, of course. Men will go to war over something like “honor” or some personal insult, the poor dears. They just don’t understand why that’s bad for business.)

Indah is a “Diplomat,” a euphemistic title meaning her job is primarily concerned with dealing with other kongsi and with law enforcement. This sometimes requires actual diplomacy, but a kongsi’s Diplomat is also the tip of the spear, something like the gangland equivalent of the Culture’s Special Circumstances; she handles everything from skulduggery of various sorts to espionage and counterespionage to dirty tricks to sabotage to assassination. In the world of Warisan Kita, the Diplomat is the knife.

Indah Tam, Diplomat of the Taman Kongsi.

The language of Bander Lautan started as a pidgin, then a creole of Malay, Penang Hokkien, and Indonesian. It has a ton of loanwords from Malay and Hokkien, with a smattering of Singlish (which is itself a creole of Malay, English, Hokkien, Cantonese, Mandarin, and Tamil).

Kitty and I decided early on that the language of Bander Lautan, which we still haven’t named, would be atonal. We flirted briefly with the idea that it would have a gestural component that served the same function as tones in a tonal language, but abandoned it as unworkable. If you can’t see the person you’re talking to, the “tonal” component is lost.

What we did instead is give the Warisan Kita a cant, but the cant is gestural. Subtle gestures modify the words being said, negating them, inverting them, or in some cases changing the meaning entirely. Each kongsi has its own particular library of gestures and what they mean, but regardless of the individual gestures, the idea is the same: to prevent conversations from being understood by eavesdroppers.

The gestures address one of the weaknesses of a traditional cant: if a conversation is recorded, which is highly likely (Bander Lautan is a high-surveillance society), the recordings can’t be decoded even if someone who knows the cant is brought in to listen to the recording, or if law enforcement should happen to crack the code. You need a recording of the spoken words and its accompanying gestures, which is more difficult to do by, say, wearing a wire.

This isn’t technically a canting language, because in a conventional canting language, communication takes place in an overt channel, it’s just that the main communication channel is obfuscated to prevent an eavesdropper from understanding it. As long as the speaker and listener both understand the cant, communication is no different from any spoken language.

With the cants of the Warisan Kita, communication is sidechannel. The gestures modify the meaning of the words being spoken; a listener unaware of the gestural part of the language gets one meaning, an insider who understands the sidechannel gets a completely different meaning.

It’s been a ton of fun to develop this system. To my knowledge, there are no real-world examples of canting languages that work this way.

Advance review books available!

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After not releasing any new books in 2025, I have two advance review books available for 2026. Both these books come out midyear this year, and I’d love to find folks interested in reviewing them.

The first one, The Temperance Engine, is…um. I’m…um. I’m not sure what it is, and I co-wrote it.

It’s kind of an erotica novel (there’s a lot of sex in it). It’s kind of a historical satire. It’s kind of science fiction, sort of. It has elements of steampunk, maybe? It’s sort of a coming-of-age story, I guess, maybe.

The story is set in modern-day Buffalo, New York, and 1870s London. Odd-numbered chapters follow a group of college friends when one of them inherits a house from a relative he didn’t know he had. They find a diary and a hidden mad science lab in a boarded-up section of the basement. The even-numbered chapters, told through the diary they find, follows a London doctor in 1869 obsessed with finding a cure for the mental illness of furor uterinus, also known as “nymphomania,” and details his efforts to build an apparatus that would cure this dread condition.

The college students decide to replicate some of his experiments, for reasons of their own, and in the process discover some things about their own desires they didn’t previously know.

One rather clever person on social media describes it as “steamypunk,” which I suppose is as good a term for it as any.

The second book, Spectres, is much more straightforward; it’s an anthology of supernatural erotica, but with a new spin (no stereotypical vampire porn or ghost porn here!). It contains thirteen stories ranging from short fiction to full novellas, including stories about heartless gods, an archaeologist possessed by the spirit of a long-gone Hittite priestess, alien invasion, a very special hotel that’s visited once a year by a pair of Assyrian lovers, and more.

I have ePubs and a limited number of paperback ARCs available. If either of these books sounds like your jam, let me know!

OMG it’s finished!

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Last night, at 12:42 AM Eastern time, my Talespinnter and I finished the first draft of our novel Spin, by far the most difficult, ambitious writing project I’ve ever been part of.

This novel has a story. I mean, it also is a story, but on top of that it has a story. Lemme take you back.

I met her on Quora. She talked about beta-testing sex toys, I had some toys in need of beta testing, so I slid into her DMs with “hey, pardon the intrusion, but would you like…?” She said yes, I gave her some prototypes, she gave me an excellent beta report, she invited me to a tabletop role-playing game she GMed, and the rest is (still unfolding) history.

Anyway, I already have a wife, and a girlfriend, and a crush, so we needed something to call her. She’s a writer and a marvelously inventive creator of worlds, so we cast around for a bit, she called me her Toymaker, and I called her my Talespinner. A spinner of tales. A weaver of dreams.

One of her friends was like “The Toymaker and the Talespinner? That sounds like a YA novel!”

Naturally, we immediately started thinking of a way to write a novel about a Toymaker and a Talespinner. We invented a world, we sat down,a nd we started to write.

30,353 words into what we expected to be an 80,000-90,000-word book, we realized that the idea of casting it as a YA novel just didn’t work. The story that kept trying to emerge was not the story we planned out, but something much bigger, much more subtle, and much, much, much darker.

So we scrapped those 30,353 words and started over from a clean sheet.

We realized quickly that the complexity of the story meant we couldn’t wing it, so we drafted an extensive, detailed 11,000-word outline that also served as an extensive set of background notes on the world and its politics, much of which informs the story even though it’s not explicitly discussed in the story.

It’s now been over two years since we started work on this new, reimagined version of the story, with the working title Spin.

It’s a far-future, post-Collapse magical realism literary novel set in a world where the central United States is now a quasi-Calvinish theocracy called the Dominionate. Human population has crashed to under a billion people. Human fertility has crashed to about a quarter what it is now. As in The Handmaid’s Tale, fertile women are effectively slaves, but unlike The Handmaid’s Tale, the Dominionate has managed to build a stable society that actually works for most of its people. (That’s the true horror, I think, of slave societies; it’s possible to construct stable, prosperous slave societies in which most people—at least the ones who aren’t slaves—are reasonably happy. It’s a little distressing how quickly people can become inured to horror if their own lives are fairly pleasant.)

We’ve been grinding on this novel for more than two years. Narratively, structurally, and in scope and scale, it’s the most difficult thing I’ve ever written. We know the first draft is, well, a first draft, and still needs a lot of work, but I am immensely proud of this book.

At one point, we found ourselves having difficulty nailing down the timing of part of the novel, so I flew out to Missouri so that my Talespinner and I could trace the steps of one of our protagonists. That let us put together a detailed timeline, and get a sense of the kind of terrain our protagonist would journey through.

A few thousand years from now, this will be the site of Half-Circle Cothold, the tiny village home to Aiyah Spinner.

I just…I cannot tell you how I feel that this first draft is done. So instead I’ll leave you with this excerpt. I know this is first-draft material in need of polish, but I’m so delighted to have it done I want to share. Enjoy!

“Ever notice how God tells the powerless to respect the powerful, but never the other way around?”

Nathaniel tensed, so subtly Diego doubted she’d noticed. He raised a finger, a quick subtle signal to Nathaniel to stand down. “Perhaps that’s because those with the most power also bear the most responsibility.”

“Ha! Easy for you to say. Look at you. The Grand Inquisitor, sitting atop a mountain of skulls, with the full might of the Church behind you. People die at your command. You answer to nobody but the Emissary himself. Funny how those in high places seem to spend more time talking about their responsibilities than their power.”

Nathaniel tensed again. Diego folded his hands in his lap, observing her for a time. Finally, he said, “Do you love people?”

“What?”

“Do you love your fellow man? Do you wish for humanity to continue?”

She turned her attention out the window, away from Diego. “I like some people well enough, I suppose. Can’t say I much care for people as a group.”

“Ah, that’s where you and I differ,” Diego said. “You see, I am a fan of all mankind.”

“You have a funny way of showing it. You kill people. You enforce conformity with violence.”

“I protect humanity.”

“You protect the Church’s power. And your own.”

“Power, young lady, is a means to an end, not an end in itself. How much do you know of history?”

“Enough to know it has always been written by people like you.”

“You must know there once was a time when we built machines that flew through the air, that traveled the roads as we are doing now without the need of horses, that generated unimaginable power from the very elements of creation itself.”

“So?”

Diego held up his hand. “Indulge an old man with some measure of influence over your destiny, if you please. Do you know what brought that time to an end?”

“I suppose you’re going to say we turned away from God. We abandoned the Divine Plan.”

“No, I’m going to say I don’t know. Nobody does. The Church theologians have ideas, as theologians often do, but I would encourage skepticism of any theological answer that seems to suit the interests of the person offering it.” Larali’s eyes widened in incredulity as he continued, “What’s of greater interest to me is the cause of the cycle of growth and collapse that came after. Perhaps mankind wasn’t meant to live in large, complex societies. The ancients certainly didn’t think so. They believed our true nature to be tribal, suited to societies no bigger than a hundred and fifty or so.”

“What?” Larali leaned forward, engaged despite herself. “How is that possible? There were billions of them!”

“Indeed. Their scholars believed that in order for a large civilization to thrive, it was first necessary to replace loyalty to the tribe with loyalty to something else, something bigger than the individual, bigger than the family, bigger than the tribe.”

“Let me guess. Something like the Church?”

“Something like the Church.”

“So you’re the enablers of civilization.”

“Yes. What you say with scorn, I say in earnest. We are the enablers of civilization. The ancients built their societies by welding together feuding, warlike tribes through conquest, not just of armies, but of ideas. Disunity into unity through a single vision.”

“How convenient,” Larali snorted. “You cement your own power in the knowledge that it’s better for all mankind. The ends justify the means.” She stared into the darkness outside the carriage, where Lieutenant Blacklock’s horse kept pace. “You surround yourself with armed men to enforce your will, then sleep at night by telling yourself that you’re bringing the benevolent light of civilization to the wretched masses. How many of the ancients told themselves the same thing, do you think?”

“Spoken with passion, for one who doesn’t much care for people,” Diego said.

“Maybe I just don’t think you can slaughter your way to a perfect world.”

On Being an Experimental Subject

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A couple of years back, my co-author Eunice and I started work on a new erotic novel, told in two parallel narrative streams: odd-numbered chapters taking place in Buffalo, New York in the present day, and even-numbered chapters taking place in London in 1871. The even-numbered chapters follow a Victorian doctor struggling to find a cure for furor uterinus, the formal name for “nymphomania;” the even-numbered chapters, a group of college friends who find his diaries and decide to replicate his experiments for…more entertaining purposes.

This is an essay about being experimented upon in a bar, not about writing. I’m getting to that, I promise.

Anyway, the novel, which we abandoned for a while and have recently returned to (with the assistance of my wife and my Talespinner), includes this passage:

“Is this another sitting room?” Jason said.

“I think it’s a parlor,” Leigh said.

“What’s the difference between a sitting room and a parlor?” Jason said.

Olivia glanced around the posh, elaborately decorated room, its windows just as large as the ones in the master bedroom. Several couches, a large comfortable chair, and a tête-à-tête all lurked beneath white shrouds. “One’s more formal?” she guessed. “What’s that thing?” She opened what looked like a large cabinet built into the wall, to find a shaft with cables running down into darkness.

“Dumbwaiter!” Leigh said. “For bringing things up. Brandy, cognac, cigars…” She tugged on a chain dangling from a lever in the wall next to the dumbwaiter. A distant bell tinkled. Leigh giggled. “I say, old chap, do be a sport and bring up the cognac.”

“What’s cognac?” David said.

“Little fish eggs in a tin?” Natalie hazarded.

“That’s caviar,” Leigh said. “Cognac is whisky for snooty people.”

Now, those of you familiar with cognac will know that it is not, in fact, whiskey for snooty people, it’s brandy for snooty people.

I am not familiar with cognac, but that’s okay because the characters are also not familiar with cognac, so it’s cool that they get it wrong.

That’s the setup. The story I mean to relay here is utterly different.

So I’m currently in Orlando, helping my wife get her RV ready for a cross-country trip. She lives across the street from a small neighborhood bar which the three of us—me, my wife, and her boyfriend—visited a few days back.

Three things struck me immediately when we walked in:

  1. We were literally the only people in the place besides the bartender;
  2. The bartender looked exactly, and I mean exactly, the way I imagine the character Natalie from the novel, to the point I turned to Joreth and said “holy shit, it’s Natalie!”; and
  3. The house special that day was a cognac drink.

So naturally, I ordered the cognac drink (as did Joreth’s boyfriend); and naturally, that led to an entire conversation about cognac, which, as I pointed out already, is not whiskey for snooty people, it’s brandy for snooty people.

The special drink, which the bartender (whose name, as it turns out, was not actually Natalie, which is good because had it been, I’d’ve been quite convinced I’d fallen through a dimensional rift into a fictional world) had never made before, was a rather complex thing whose making involves, among other things, a blowtorch.

“It’s an experiment!” not-Natalie chirped as she got out the blowtorch.

I do not, Gentle Reader, understand the purpose of the blowtorch. I mean, I do, it exists to apply fire to things, but I’m not sure what role they play in making a drink. She stripped the peel off an orange, cut it into strips, sprinkled it with cinnamon and…um, sugar, I think?, slipped it into the glass, sprinkled more cinnamon on it, and…

I will confess that I am not generally an alcohol connisseur. I can’t tell a Scotch single-malt from a dry gin. But believe me when I say, Gentle Reader, that drink was delicious.

10/10, would recommend being experimented upon by a character from a novel again.

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.”