Rude Mechanicals

Wow - and I mean wow - this is very, very cool: the great Sasha Mitchell over at R.U. Sirius’s site Acceler8or.com just posted this very cool review of my dark gay thriller Finger’s Breadth. Here’s a tease:

Did Oscar Wilde ever mention a baby-shit sofa, as fetishized by Tom of Finland, and crusted with salty, sweet sticky?  Cliche to throw out Wilde when reviewing a piece of m4m fic?  About as cliche as including a reference to Sex in the City in said fic. 

Really, I josh.  Because apart from a (for me) slightly delayed pick-up—and the more obvious fact that yours truly is of the vaginal realm—I had fun with, and eventually became engrossed by, M. Christian’s Finger’s Breadth. 

Boilermakers, mambo-fuck you gay bars, scenarios seemingly inspired by a homoerotic Misery, and of course the ever prevalent ”asses flexing into handful-sized tightened cheeks” (is that your technology chirping, or is throbbing a better adjective?), Christian flaunts a downright capacity for electric lyric as well as (sorry mum, must include this in such a review) all the “hard cocks, strong cocks, long cocks, thick cocks – bobbing up and down, swinging right and left, even swirling in a sweaty circle,” that you could empty. 

Not to mention a devilishly intricate plotline, which goes as follows: Fanning is a freelance cop on a most perplexing case.  He kicks himself for not having caught whoever is terrorizing the tequila sunrises of Boyz Bay (did I just coin that?) by luring men for nonconsensual finger lobotomies. 

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Oh, Ralph, you are a true star!  Not only does my great friend put something about Fingers Breadth on the great Von Gutenberg site - by the way, don’t forget that I have an article in the current issue - but then he puts up a fun post about my book on the Short and Sweet NYC site.  Yer the best, Ralphie!

Oh, and speaking of the so-cool Mr. Greco he is also doing an anthology that you all have to send stories in for: Sex in New York City - Tales of Pleasure and Perversity in the Big Apple.  I’ll put the call up in my very next post.

It is amazing what we have to do nowadays to get noticed, even people who already get press on a regular basis. In the world oferotic literature it’s probably even harder then usual to get a little look-see. Sure artists have their Twitter and Facebook accounts, and at super wonderful sites like shortandsweetnyc.com we do our best to get the word out about all that is out there, but there are still othermethods writers/film makers and musicians might have to consider in getting the word out. 

For instance.. 

With over 400 stories in such anthologies as Best American Erotica, Best Gay Erotica, Best Lesbian Erotica and inmagazines and Web sites; editor of 25 anthologies including the Best S/M Erotica series, Pirate Booty; collections that include Dirty Words, Speaking Partsand Rude Mechanicals and the novels Running Dry, Me2 andPainted Doll infamous scribe M. Christian has announced an act of pure desperation in his latest press release… 

M. Christian has threatened to amputate part of one finger to publicize his new novel, Finger’s Breadth! 

Finger’s Breadth– a gay erotic science fiction horror thriller – has garnered respectable reviews, still the wily M. Christian is not satisfied. When I asked the man if this is a publicity stunt, he said: 

“A stunt?  A STUNT?!  Of course it’s a publicity stunt. We writers have to be more than a bit outrageous if we’re going to get noticed! Hell, the book’s about a mysterious figure cutting off the tips of little fingers in a near-future noir San Francisco, so a pretend self-amputation is perfect I think!” 

I breathed a sigh of relief as I don’t want to see anybody ‘suffering’ this much for his art. But the author did ad: “They say that a good writer has at least a few good books in them, so if a finger is all it takes to get the word out about this novel … well, I have 19 more fingers and toes to go.  Seems like a small price to pay.” 

We shall see what the future holds for M. Christian and how well he’ll be holding it in the future. In the meantime you can visit the writer at http://www.mchristian.com and you can buy Finger’s Breathdt here.

This is simply beyond wonderful: check out this very touching review of Fingers Breadth by Zee of Firepages.  Swoon!

Someone is abducting young gay men in San Francisco, drugging them and cutting off the tip of their pinky. The entire city if on edge, especially after dark. The gay community fear for themselves, as they know that anyone could be next. Even though the police are looking for the Cutter, no one really knows who this person is nor the motivation of cutting a finger. Suspicion divides the community. There are people who have only nine-and-a-half fingers, and those who have ten fingers. The niners suspect the Cutter may have ten fingers and those who walk around with ten fingers hope they are not next.  

M. Christian has to be the most amazing writer I’ve ever read. He is a master manipulator with his words. You read his stories and begin to feel exactly what he wants you to feel - arousal, desire, anger, fear, hope. Readers find themselves surprised to feel this way, yet it is M. Christian’s way of pulling dormant and primal emotions out of you. And the crazy part is that you don’t mind embracing these perverse feelings as you are that pulled into the story. Not only does M. Christian push his characters in his stories to their limits, but he also pushes his readers minds to meet him in these faraway places. 

I loved how M. Christian addressed multiple facets of storytelling, like horror, thriller, and societal issues. The way the community split between those with 9.5 and 10 fingers was genius, and the horrible experience that the victims go through is downright chilling. Finger’s Breadth has a way of getting under your skin and sending chills to your bones in both a terrifying and arousing kind of way. Finger’s Breadth is not a story; it is an experience I highly recommend. 

Wonderful!  I’m proud to announce a brand new collection of my gay smut, from the always-wonderful Renaissance EBooks/Sizzler Editions: BodyWork - Gay Erotica!

There is simply no one better at writing hotter-than-hot gay erotica than the Lambda Literary Award Finalist M.Christian, and with this — his newest collection — you’ll see why!  From cowboys looking for some same-sex love on the range to jocks working out in unique ways this book is guaranteed to reach out and give your gay desire a good tug!  Check out this brand new book my an acknowledged master of genre and see why everyone says he’s an wonderful erotic writer. 

M.Christian is a literary stylist of the highest caliber: smart,   funny, frightening, sexy — there’s nothing he can’t write about …  and brilliantly.- Tristan Taormino 

M.Christian is one sick fuck – the reason I still read erotica- Shar Rednour 

Reading these tales is like climbing on for a sexual magic carpet ride through different times and places, diverse bodies, and infinite possibilities.- Carol Queen 

Rarely is raunch paired with such style and wit, M.Christian’s stries offer the sizzle of stroke-book sex combined with the dark lyricism of the perverse.-  Lucy Taylor 

M.Christian’s fiction has a sexy logic all its own.  He’s inventive and he’s irreverent.  His language can seduce, surprise, and body-slam you.- Cecilia Tan

I’m pleased to announce that the very-cool Gay/Lesbian Fiction Excerpts blog has just posted the first chapter from my new gay thriller/erotic novel, Fingers Breadth.  Here’s a taste - for the rest just click here.

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Looking from the window of the coffee shop. Watching from the windshield of a parked car. Staring from the glass of a very rare unbroken bus kiosk. Glaring from the side of a passing bus.

A brief summer rain had painted the city that night in reflections. Fanning saw himself everywhere, and everywhere he saw himself his expression said the same thing—Why haven’t you caught him yet?

In his ear, a Bluetooth bud whispered the Officer Wertz inquiry’s soundtrack; in his pocket, the video was playing on his phone. He didn’t need to hear or see it. No one would, but if asked he could probably rattle off every verb, every noun, every linguistic bit from when Knorr started it to when he stopped it. Knorr was good at what he did, just like the lab mice who studied crime scenes and picked up tiny bits of DNA with their finely honed tweezers.

Welcome to the decentralized world of the new San Francisco Police Department, where your specialty was all you did and generality was extinct.

Fanning was a freelancer but was supposed to be good at what he did, too. Sneering at himself reflected in the coffee shop window, he gripped the phone in his pocket. If he’d been stronger, or the plastic less durable, it would have cracked.

Glowering for an instant at his reflection in the windshield of the parked car, he pulled the phone out and flipped through a few key digital pages. As with the inquiry, he didn’t need to look at it again, but he did anyway. Better than sharing the street with his scowling mirror images.

It hadn’t changed—Wertz’s home address and where he worked were still the same. The first was across town, in the Mission. The second was just down the street, at a Gap Store.

Ten a.m. to six p.m. His shift hadn’t changed, either. But it was 6:17, and there was no sign of Wertz.

Fanning paced the wet sidewalk, searching up and down the street but mostly the blue-and-white bright- ness of the Gap store. In his ears, Wertz’s voice clicked into silence; then, as it was set on “loop,” it began again.

Just like the others. Same MO, same kind of pick-up place, same amount of Eurodin in Wertz’s system, the lab mice doing their usual fine and precise work, and the same mutilation—right hand little finger amputated at the first joint.

Again, his phone threatened to break in his hand, but again, he wasn’t strong or determined enough to do it. The beat cops who’d found Wertz sound asleep on the J Church train; the lab mice who’d analyzed the drug in his system; Knorr, who’d asked his carefully prepared and expert questions…

But then there was Fanning, who was supposed to assemble piece after piece after piece after piece until they made a picture of someone’s face.

Cutter’s face.

Looking up from where he’d been looking down, he saw a silhouette come between the blue-and-white of the Gap store. A dark shape that was about the right height, about the right build, about the right age, to be whom he was looking for. Fanning carefully released his tight grip on his phone and stepped back into a nearby alley, one carefully chosen for its heavy solitude.

Heavy solitude was just what Fanning wanted.

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Zumaya Books and M.Christian are pleased to announce the publication of a brand new gay erotic horror/thriller by M.Christian:

Look at your hand: four fingers and a thumb, right?  But what if you woke one morning and rather than four fingers and a thumb you are … short?  How would you feel?  What would you do?  What would you become?

The city is terrified: a mysterious figure is haunting the streets of near-future San Francisco, drugging and amputating the fingertips of queer men.  But what’s worse … this terror or that it can, so easily, turn any of us into something even more horrific?

Erotic.  Nightmarish.  Fascinating.  Disturbing.  Intriguing.  Haunting.  You have never read a book like Finger’s Breadth. 

You will never look your fingers - or the people all around you - the same way again.

Here’s what some people are saying about Finger’s Breadth:

Finger’s Breadth may well rank as one of the most psychologically astute erotic novels since Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs, and it deserves to be just as widely read.
- JKB, from the Circlet Press site

Finger’s Breadth is a real wild ride, the sort of novel you turn to when the apocalyptic mayhem out your window gets dull, and you lust for something to remind you of what it’s like to live life at full-throttle. M.Christian sends the reader hurtling like a hockey puck through a world of crime, out-of-control passions, mutilation, and madness. Terms like noir and hardboiled don’t quite fit - this is more like ultraviolet, the invisible light that makes the scorpions glow in the dark.
- Ernest Hogan, author of Cortez On Jupiter and High Aztech

It is not that hard to come up with an idea that can be turned into a horror story and that is why horror has been part of the folklore of America and why these stories are so popular on camp-outs as we sit around a campfire. To successfully do this, we need a combination of  characters and plot but more important than all else is a novel way to relate the story. For me that is the definition of M.Christian. This book is unlike anything I have read before and I suspect that it will stay with me for quite a while.
- Amos Lassen, reviewer

Finger’s Breadth creates a vivid portrait of a community torn apart by suspicion, where the thrills of hot, anonymous sex go hand in mutilated hand with the chill of fear, and no one is entirely what they seem. M.Christian skilfully mixes a dark, potent cocktail of lust, longing, paranoia and an overwhelming need for acceptance…
- Liz Coldwell, author of Take Your Slave To Work

To be effective, the act of literary intercourse between horror and erotica should be deeply unsettling. It should leave the reader feeling uncomfortable, overwhelmed by equal parts dread and anticipation. M.Christian understands this better than most, weaving a tale that permits the reader but a finger’s breadth of space between fear and arousal. His deft control of the story makes us feel the blade, but it’s his subtle manipulation of our emotions that makes us want the cut.
- Sally Sapphire, Bellasbookslut

M.Christian has seen the future — and it is hardboiled! If you love crime stories — gay or otherwise — and you love science fiction, you will love Finger’s Breadth. No other storyteller nails it quite like M.Christian does. This is a real page turner.
— Marilyn Jaye Lewis, author of Freak Parade

M.Christian is a force to be reckoned with. Just when you think you understand the path that his narrative and characters are taking, Christian throws a monkey wrench, or a limb, or a head into the works and you have to get your bearings and start all over again. No matter which book of his you pick up, prepare for an intoxicatedly weird ride.
-Ily Goyanes, author and filmmaker

Strange and sexy, Finger’s Breadth is a seductively suspenseful read.
- Paula Guran, Darkecho

Finger’s Breadth is as dark and rich and well-blended as good bourbon. Sexy, suspenseful, and believable in the details and elements of its world. Great stuff!
- Angela Caperton, author of Darkness And Delight

Finger’s Breadth is mesmeric storytelling, riveting in execution and appalling in implication.  M.Christian’s tale of erotic terror in a near-future San Francisco is imagined so skillfully that it grabs the reader with its easy familiarity, then refuses to let go as it careens to its shocking yet completely believable conclusion.  Evoking such Grand Masters as Armistead Maupin, Thomas Harris and Rod Serling while remaining strikingly original, Finger’s Breadth is Christian at the height of his considerable powers.  Like Charon the ferryman, the author takes the reader down the dark rivers of human sexuality and shows us things that would normally never see the light of day.  Ultimately the most compelling aspect of this fiction is how fascinatingly and terrifyingly plausible it is. Finger’s Breadth should come with a warning label: Read this before clubbing.
- Christopher Pierce, author of Rogue Slave, Rogue Hunted, and Kidnapped By A Sex Maniac

Zumaya Books
Paperback: $15.99
ebook: $6.99
ISBN-10: 1934841463
ISBN-13: 978-1934841464

About M.Christian:

M.Christian is - among many things - an acknowledged master of erotica with more than 400 stories in such anthologies as Best American Erotica, Best Gay Erotica, Best Lesbian Erotica, Best Bisexual Erotica, Best Fetish Erotica, and many, many other anthologies, magazines, and Web sites.

He is the editor of 25 anthologies including the Best S/M Erotica series, The Burning Pen, Guilty Pleasures, The Mammoth Book of Future Cops and The Mammoth Book of Tales of the Road (with Maxim Jakubowksi) and Confessions, Garden of Perverse, and Amazons (with Sage Vivant) as well as many others.

He is the author of the collections Dirty Words, Speaking Parts, The Bachelor Machine, Licks & Promises, Filthy, Love Without Gun Control, Rude Mechanicals, Coming Together Presents M.Christian, Pornotopia, and How To Write And Sell Erotica; and the novels Running Dry, The Very Bloody Marys, Me2, Brushes, and Painted Doll.  His Web site is www.mchristian.com.

Interested in reviewing Finger’s Breadth?  Write M.Christian at mchristianzobop@gmail.com for a copy

tachikota:

lol, wtf? This cover looks a lot like Batou and The Major… o___O

OMG!  The good - nay, the great - just keeps on coming: the fantastic Sally Sapphire at Bibrary Bookslut just posted this very touching review of my brand-new gay/erotic/thriller Finger’s Breadth.  Thanks so much, Sally!

To be effective, the act of literary intercourse between horror and erotica should be deeply unsettling. It should leave the reader feeling excited by uncomfortable, overwhelmed by equal parts dread and anticipation.

If you’ve ever read any of his work (and shame on you, if you haven’t) you know M. Christian understands this better than most. With his latest, he has woven a tale that permits the reader but a finger’s breadth of space between fear and arousal. His deft control of the story makes us feel the blade of the assailant, but it’s his subtle manipulation of our emotions that makes us desire the cut of the victim.

The story starts out with simple, if deliciously perverse, premise. A mysterious figure is haunting the underground community of San Francisco, abducting young gay men and cutting off the tip of their little finger. That’s it. No other torture or mutilation, just that missing tip of a finger. With his ounce of flesh taken, they’re free to go.

As creepy and unsettling as the abductions are, it’s what comes after that comprises the bulk of the story. Suffice to say, things get weird, for both the abductees and the community at large, as the story develops in directions that you can’t begin to imagine. It’s a testament to M. Christian’s writing skill that we never question what happens, no matter how weird it gets. Instead, we’re encouraged to embrace the guiltiest of pleasures by indulging in the tale, until we’re so deeply involved that we can’t pull away from the final horrors ahead - and then are left delighted, and deliciously spent.

I had a chance to give this an early read (I’m actually quoted on the publisher’s website, which is very exciting!), and only a desire to take a break and collect my thoughts prevented me from reading it in one sitting. If you’re at all intrigued, then I urge you to give it a read – you won’t be disappointed.

As teased for quite a while, I am extremely pleased and proud to announce the publication of my brand new queer/erotic/sf/thriller/horror novel, Finger’s Breadth, by the great folks at Zumaya Books.  While I’ll be doing a lot more about the book in a bit I just wanted to put out the word that the book is now available as both a ebook and print version.

Look at your hand: four fingers and a thumb, right?  But what if you woke one morning and rather than four fingers and a thumb you are … short one?  How would you feel?  What would you do?  What would you become?

The city is terrified: a mysterious figure is haunting the streets of near-future San Francisco, drugging and amputating the fingertips of queer men.  But what’s worse than this horror is how it transforms the men of the city.  For what’s worse, a horror or that it can, so easily, turn any of us into something even more horrific?

Erotic.  Terrifying.  Fascinating.  Disturbing.  Intriguing.  Haunting.  You have never read a book like Finger’s Breadth.  You will never look your fingers, or the people all around you, the same way again.

ISBN-10: 1934841463
ISBN-13: 978-1934841464
Paperback: $15.99
ebook: $6.99

Now THIS is very cool: check out the new cover of the re-release of my queer erotica collection Filthy [Now titled Filthy Boys], coming VERY soon from Sizzler Books.

Wow … and I mean WOW: check out this wonderful review of my science fiction/fantasy and horror collection Love Without Gun Control (from the always-great Renaissance/PageTurner Books) by Lisabet Sarai:

I know M.Christian primarily as an author of erotica—an astonishingly versatile writer who swings from gay to lesbian, from contemporary to science fiction, from cyberpunk to humor, without missing a beat. Anyone who’s not familiar with his energy and creativity in the erotic realm should get a copy of Coming Together Presents M. Christian (and support Planned Parenthood at the same time). Until he sent me a copy of his new collection Love Without Gun Control, I didn’t fully appreciate the darker side of his imagination.

The title story of this collection paints a hilarious but nevertheless chilling picture of a society in which everyone carries and uses deadly weapons—all the time. He cleverly spins out the implications of such a scenario, in particular the difficulties it poses for lovers.

Equally funny, grotesque and scary is “Buried & Dead”, a tale of political ambition amid the zombie apocalypse, overflowing with rotting flesh and dangling entrails. “Constantine in Love”, the impeccably satirical final tale in the collection, will also make you laugh, though not without a grimace, as the unflappable Constantine Foote, polymath, wine connoisseur, seducer and con artist, desperately chases the woman of his dreams.

These are the lighter tales. Most of the other stories in Love Without Gun Control will leave you queasy, terrified, or both. “Needle Taste” portrays a bleak future in which a vicious serial killer has the mass appeal of a rock star. “Hush Hush” unfolds like a nightmare in the narrow alleys of Beijing, as an adventurer watches one person after another being robbed of speech. In “Wanderlust”, a man cursed by a jealous goddess is forced to live out his days driving his Mustang from one lonely gas station to the next. “Shallow Fathoms” is pure horror, fueled by the repulsive fascination of madness. “Nothing So Dangerous” builds an intricately detailed dystopia of universal surveillance and arbitrary detention, in which trust is the most perilous thing of all.

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This is very special: my wonderfully sweet friend Amos Lassen just posted this very nice review of my science fiction erotica collection, The Bachelor Machine. Thanks so much, Amos!

Let me start off by saying that I am a huge fan of M. Christian and when he has a new book come out, I am on it immediately. Christian writes good erotica, something that is not easy to do. Anyway can tell a dirty story but not everyone  can put a story into prose and it is here that Christian excels (and that is true of all of his books—if you have not read him, you must). His casts of characters include a little something for everyone and he writes to us and pulls us into his sexual fantasies.

Finally this book is available to all of us and it contains eighteen very hot stories all pulled from the mind of M. Christian, a man who, in my mind, is a master storyteller. When originally published, Cecilia Tan wrote an introduction to the stories and that is reproduced here along with a new forward by Kit O’ Connell and a chat between Tan and Christian on how science fiction and erotica come together.

When I tell you that these stories are hot, I might be giving you an understatement. M. Christian’s erotica comes from the heart and I would love to spend an afternoon at a coffeehouse with him listening to how he comes up with the stories he writes. He manages to give us literary erotica or as I usually call it, literary smut but it is a notch above a lot of what I have read.

In this collection there is a lot of sex but the stories themselves are not about the act of sex but rather what sex means. Christian writes about humanity and being human and the sex is, like we said in Louisiana, lagniappe.  Christian is one of a kind and he again proves that here. By using satire and irony and combining that with science fiction and erotica, it is almost to say that he has created an entire new genre. His literary voice and style are uniquely his and every story here works. We go to places we have never dreamt of and Christian is our able and talented guide.

I have not singled out any of the stories for to do so would be to ruin a unique reading experience and I want all of you to find what I have found in reading M. Christian.

Here’s a pre-pre-pre-pre release teasing/tempting taste of my brand new novel, Finger’s Breadth, coming soon from Zumaya Books … stay tuned.

Here’s a (work in progress) blurb about it:

Look at your [WORD REMOVED]: four fingers and a thumb, right?  But what if you woke one morning and rather than four fingers and a thumb you were … short [WORD REMOVED]?  How would you [WORD REMOVED]?  What would you do?  What would you become?

The city is terrified: a mysterious [WORD REMOVED] is haunting the streets of near-future San Francisco, drugging and amputating the fingertips of queer men.  But what’s more frightening than this [WORD REMOVED] is how it transforms the [WORD REMOVED] of the city.  For what’s worse, a horror or that it can, so easily, turn any of [WORD REMOVED] into something even more terrifying?

Erotic.  Terrifying.  Fascinating. [WORD REMOVED].  Disturbing.  Intriguing.  Haunting.  You have never read a [WORD REMOVED] like Finger’s Breadth.  You will never look your [WORD REMOVED], or the people all around you, the same way again.

Check this out: the very-great Gay/Lesbian Fiction Excerpt blog just posted a very teasing taste from my novella, “Speaking Parts,” which is in my collection of technorotica: Rude Mechanicals. 

“Speaking Parts” is one of two novellas plus four expicit short stories of sex and technosex included in the collection Rude Mechanical: Technorotica by M. Christian. Two lovers, one with a camera-shutter eye, come together in a scorching, obsessive, edgy relationship that will take them both to the limits of sexuality and beyond.

Rude Mechanicals: Technorotica

Publisher: PageTurner (November 28, 2009)

ASIN: B002Z3Z9LA

Excerpt from “Speaking Parts:”

#

Pell remembered seeing Arc’s eye—it was the first thing she’d noticed.

Tourmaline and onyx. Silver and gold. A masterpiece watch set in a crystal sphere, the iris a mandala of glowing gold. Her blinks were a camera shutter’s, as imagined by the archetypal Victorian engineer but built by surgical perfection not found anywhere in Pell’s knowledge. The woman’s left eye was jeweled and precise, clicking softly as the woman looked around the gallery, as if the engineers who’d removed her original wet, gray-lensed ball had orchestrated a kind of music to go with their marvelous creation: a background tempo of perfect watch movements to accompany whatever she saw through their marvelous and finely crafted sight. Click, click, click.

An eye like that should have been in a museum, not mounted in a socket of simple human skin and bone, Pell had thought. It should have been in some other gallery, some better gallery, allowed only to look out at, to see other magnificent creations of skilled hands. Jare’s splashes of reds and blues, his shallow paintings were an insult to the real artistry of the woman’s eye.

That’s what Pell thought, at first, seeing Arc – but only seeing Arc’s perfect, mechanical eye.

Pell didn’t like to remember first seeing her that way – through the technology in her face. But it felt, to her, like it had its own kind of ironic perfection to deny it. So Pell lived with the biting truth that she didn’t, at first, see Arc – for her eye.

But later, right after she got momentarily lost in the beauty of Arc’s implant, the woman looked at Pell with her real eye, the gray, penetrating right one – and Pell forgot about the tourmaline, onyx, silver and gold machine.

She had finally seen Arc, herself – the woman, and not the simple, mechanical part. Next to her, the eye was cheap junk: a collection of metal, old rocks, and wires.

* * * *

She wasn’t Arc at first. She began as just the woman with the perfectly created eye. Then she was the beautiful woman. Then she was the woman where she didn’t belong. Seeing her eye, then seeing her, Pell lastly saw her as oil, the kind of oil you’d see pooling in the street, that had somehow managed to make its way into a glass of wine. Agreed, it was cheap red wine – something out of a box and not even a bottle, but, still – she was oil. She didn’t belong and that was obvious, despite the cheapness of the gallery. She could tell, cataloging her bashed and scuffed boots, noting her threadbare jeans, her torn T-shirt, that amid clean jeans and washed (and too black) turtlenecks, she was a discordant tone among the harmonious poseurs in Jare’s tiny South of Market studio.

The woman was aware of her discrepancy. She wandered the tiny gallery with a very large plastic tumbler of vin very ordinare, stopping only once in a while to look at one of Jare’s paintings.

Holding her wine tight enough to gently fracture the cheap plastic with cloudy stress lines, Pell watched her, stared at the tall – all legs and angles, broad and strong – woman with the artificial eye. She tried not to watch her too closely or too intently, sure that if she let slip her fascination she’d scare her off – or worse, bring on an indifferent examination of Pell. Through a sad ballet of a slightly curved lip and a stare that was nothing more than a glance of the eyes, the woman would see Pell but wouldn’t – and that would be an icy needle in Pell’s heart.

Pell had already taken too many risks that night. She already felt like she’d stepped off the edge and had yet to hit the hard reality of the ground. Traps and tigers, beasts and pitfalls for the unwary loomed all around Pell. She moved through her days with a careful caution, delicately testing the ice in front of her, wary of almost-invisible, murky lines of fault. She knew they were there, she’d felt the sudden falling of knowing she’d stepped too far, moved too quickly, over something that had proven, by intent or accident, not to be there. Pell didn’t push on the surface, didn’t put all her weight, or herself, on anything.

But then everything changed. She’d seen Arc and her eye.

The plastic cup chimed once, then collapsed in on itself. Turning first into a squashed oval, the glass cracked, splintered, then folded, the white seams of stress turning into sharp fissures of breakage. The red, freed of its cheap plastic prison, tumbled, cascaded out and down onto her.

Pell had worn something she knew wouldn’t fit with the rest of the crowd. The official color of San Francisco, she knew, would fill the place with charcoal and soot, midnight and ebony. White, she’d decided, would pull some of their eyes to her, make her stand out – absence of color being alone in a room full of people dressed in all colors, combined.

“Looks good on you.”

The shock of the wine on her white blouse tumbled through Pell as an avalanche of warmth flowed to her face. The decision to wear white that night had come from a different part of herself, a part that had surprised her. Now she was furiously chastising that tiny voice, that fashion terrorist who had chosen the blouse over other, blacker ones.

And so Pell responded, “Not as good as you would” to the tall, leggy, broad shouldered girl with the artificial eye. Which was beautiful, but not as beautiful as the rest of her.

* * * *

Pell’s reason for being at the gallery was Jare. Although she could never wrap her perceptions around the gaunt boy’s paintings, she still came when he asked. Jare, Pell, Fallon, Rasp and Jest. They weren’t close – but then foxhole buddies aren’t always. They weren’t in combat, but they could be. All it would take would be one computer talking to another – no stable job history, thus conscription.

All it took were two computers, passing pieces of information back and forth. Till that happened, they hid and watched the possibility of a real foxhole death in a hot, sweaty part of Central America fly by.

Foxhole buddies. It was Jare’s term – some fleck of trivia that’d hung around him. They didn’t have an official name for their tiny society of slowly (and in some cases not too slowly) starving artists, but Pell was sure that Jare would smile at his trivial term being immortalized among a band of too-mortal kids.

That was Jare. While the rest of them tried to focus on pulling their paintings (Pell, Jare, and Rasp), music (Jest), and sculpture (Fallon) as high as they could, there was something else about Jare – something, like his paintings, that refused to be understood. His techniques were simple enough, broad strokes of brilliant color on soot-black canvas, but his reasons were more convoluted.

Or maybe, Pell had thought earlier that evening (before turning a white blouse red and seeing the woman with the artificial eye for the first time) both man and his work were simple: broad, bold statements designed to do nothing but catch attention. He was like his paintings, a grab for any kind of attention – an explanation too simple to be easily seen.

In the tiny bathroom, Pell tried to get the wine out of her blouse. Contradictory old wives’ tails: first she tried cold, then hot water. The sink ran pink and so, soon, did her blouse.

The woman with the eye stood outside the door, a surprisingly subtle smile on her large mouth. Every once and a while she’d say something, as if throwing a bantering line to the shy girl inside to keep her from drowning in embarrassment.

“Who’s he foolin? I can do better crap than this with a brush up my ass.”

“You should see this chick’s dress. Looks like her momma’s – and momma didn’t know how to dress, either.”

“Too many earrings, faggot. What year do you think this is?

“Hey, girl. Get out here with that shirt. It’s better looking than this fucking stuff on the walls.”

Cold water on her hands, wine spiraling down the sink. Distantly, Pell was aware that her nipples were hard and tight – and not from the chill water. Down deep and inside, she was wet. It was a basic kind of primal moisture, one that comes even in the burning heat of humiliation. Finally, the blouse was less red than before. Planning to run to where she’d dropped her old leather coat to hide the stigmata of her clumsiness, her excitement in two hard brown points, she opened the door.

The tall woman smiled down at her, hot and strong. In one quick sweep of her eyes, Pell drank her tall length, strong shoulders, columnar legs. She was trapped, held fast between the hot eyes she knew must have been staring at her, pinning her straight to her embarrassment, and the presence of the woman.

Her eye, the eye, clicked a quick chime of precision – as if expanding its limits to encompass the totality of Pell. Pell did not mind her intense examination. It added, with a rush of feelings, to the quaking in her belly, the weakness in her knees.

“Gotta splash. Wait right here,” Arc said.

Of course she waited.

After a few hammering heartbeats, the door opened and she came out – butchly tucking her T-shirt back into her jeans – and Pell was again at the focus of her meticulously designed sight.

“You live anywhere close? I’m tired of this shit. You?”

“Down the block. Just on the corner,” Pell said, trying hard not to smile too much.

The woman downed the small sample of red in her glass and, looking for a place to put it down, and not finding any, just dropped it with a sharp plastic clatter on the floor. “Show me. It can’t be worse than here. Too many fucking artists.”

Here is a real treat, if I do say so myself … which I do because this is a very cool audio interview between myself and my wonderful friend, and Renaissance Publisher, Jean Marie Stine about all kinds of things, including the release of my brand new book, How To Write And Sell Erotica, and the new anthologies I’m editing for Renaissance.