My shame revealed

Here it is.

And here, laid bare for all the world to see:

Yes, I bought a Kindle.

I've been downloading books for a while onto my PC. Research for my novel, and erotica on irresistible special offer, mostly. The thing is, I do not read on the PC. I just don't. I read on the toilet, and in bed, and occasionally on the sofa, but put me in front of a web-connected PC and I can't concentrate.

Bad Janine.

So at last I said "soddit" and bought an e-reader, which means that once again I can take my research and my erotica into the loo with me. Huzzah! Interestingly, I have bought more books since this purchase than probably in the entire previous year.

I'm afraid the very first one I read through on my new toy, though, was George Takei's Oh Myyy!(There goes the internet).
Quite.

And the really great thing is, I still download stuff onto my PC and it just APPEARS ON MY KINDLE BY MAGIC!!  I'm a wizard!

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(The Alice cover, by the way, was made by Klevercase and I bought it here. I love it to bits. I may love it more than the actual Kindle. I did struggle a bit choosing between Alice and a classic Dracula cover!)

Eyecandy Monday

I do believe that Spring has finally come to Land of Mud! Huzzah! A brief window of opportunity for blokes to get their tops off and do manly stuff outdoors - while I watch them:

Climbing...

Sailing...

Life-guarding ...

Playing football ...

Hangin' out with livestock...

Hoss-wrestlin'...

Seriously, wtf is going on here?

And boating.

I know this one's still got his shirt on but ... Uh, what was I saying ...?

And after all those sweaty exertions ... let's hope they get washed nice and clean ;-)

I just threatened to have her legs amputated

Lost in Translation

This is, I'm led to believe, the German edition of Fairy Tale Lust (which includes my short story Sleep Tight). I have no clue at all what the translation of the title is, but it's out in May :-)

Ye olde original

This is also the first indication I've seen that Cleis Press is selling books to the (appreciative) German erotica market. Hmmm. I wonder how the Germans feel about fallen angels...?

Burning Man

More inspiration for my Cover Him With Darkness novel - I've just sent my heroine off to the Burning Man Festival in Nevada ... because I really want to go myself - though I doubt I ever will. I know, I've travelled quite a bit, but I think BM is going to remain a Lifetime Ambition. Logistics too difficult (you need to take your own water and domicile into the middle of the desert), too expensive, too damn difficult to get hands on the tickets. And America is sorta scary, you know.

Burning Man, in case you haven't heard of it, is an interactive arts festival ... sort of. Fifty thousand people get together annually in the middle of nowhere to build a temporary city and go NUTS, risking sunstroke, bankruptcy and emotional breakdown for the sake of an experience unlike any other.

Every year, a new Temple is built - and burned

Depending on who you are, it can be giant frat party or a moment of life-changing spirituality. It's psychically (and to some extent physically) dangerous.

Clothing seems to be entirely optional...

But if you do wear some you should strive for mad-as-a-weasel:

They build a giant wicker man...

The Man looks different every year too

and every year they burn him at the end of the event:

Then everyone packs up and goes home and nothing is left behind but the empty playa.

Wow.

"Azazel would love this, I realized."

Some great pics here

Eyecandy Monday

My parents are here today so my Eyecandy must be fully clothed:

There - that's perfectly decent, isn't it?

Staring at the Wall

Just ask Mr Ashbless...

My BABY!!

It's here - clocking in at a respectable 1 lb and 14.2 ounces, my bouncing baby hardback copy of Geek Love! How I adore it - from its cute little contents page to its lovely little Kickstarter credits!

And of course I will bore you all with baby pics, as is my right:

What a pretty face!

It's got its daddy's eyes...

And its mommy's, um, mouth ...

It's got its endpapers from Uncle Lee and its pin-up from Auntie Jen

 But I am particularly proud of p102:

And, seriously, it's got my arse...

If you didn't back the Kickstarter, you can of course still buy the e-book
 (PDF version recommended)

Eastercon: the photos

So at Easter, I went to ... Eastercon!

It might look sunny, but snow was piled up on the sidewalks.

It's an annual SF/Fantasy convention with an emphasis on books rather than other media, and it's been going since the 1940s. Wow!

The first thing I thought when I arrived was, "Goddamn, I should be wearing a beard."

There were a lot of panel discussions, and  I sat on two of them.
"Editing and Being Edited", in which I tried my best to plug "Geek Love":

Me sitting next to Bella Pagan of Tor books - probably the nearest I'll ever get to a mainstream publisher!

And "Robert E Howard and H P Lovecraft," which - despite the serious faces - was a lot of fun for me because I ranted about the sexuality in their work and everyone else looked a bit nervous:

NB: Sarah Newton is currently writing the "Achtung Cthulhu!" game ... I want!

I also attended a lot of panels, and watched the new season premier of Doctor Who in a hall with 700 rabid fans ...

... and went out for a curry (well, it was Bradford, it would be crime not to) and did a (mostly clean) reading:

And watched a couple of Lovecraft films and signed some books and ate a ton of junk food and TALKED to loads of people, old friends and new ones and total strangers. And I met Paul Cornell at last.

I had lots of fun, and though I'd describe myself as too introverted to cope with this sort of thing for long, I seem - bizarrely enough - to be signed up for two more cons this year - Nine Worlds Geekfest and World Fantasy Con. I'm exhausted already!

Here I am with Adrian Tchaikovsky, author of the Shadows of the Apt fantasy series:

See? I so need a beard...

Adrian and I co-wrote a novella, Reading Between the Lines (NOT erotica: dark fantasy) a while back, and it's about to be published by Pandemonium Press this May.

Isn't this the most beautiful cover by Vincent Sammy!

Pandemonium specialise in high-quality extremely limited edition collectable print runs, so you'd have to sign up to their newsletter to get even a chance of ordering this book. But I think it's sorta cool.

Eyecandy Monday

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I've just been to a 1920's LARP weekend as an Unconvincing Fake Nun (my "real" character was disguise); telling people I did "missionary things ... with little orphaned babies ... that sort of stuff."

That still made me way more convincing than the nuns in the Eyecandy pic above! And I was not even a bit naughty, I might add. For a start, it was too bloody cold in Featherstone Castle to take my coat off. Also, where would I have kept my revolver?

Relatively plausible

Not plausible

The trope of the Naughty Nun, btw, has a veeeeeeeery long history in art and literature:

Heinrich Lossow: The Sin (1880)

Tell people "this is not allowed" - and what happens? They want it even more.

House Ashbless

Game of Thrones season 3 has started showing, so I do hope my Sky Fairy has been successfully recording it. If not, I will cry!

In the meantime I have had to content myself with this way cool app website...

Briterotica

Today I'm doing my bit for the fabulous Justine Elyot's "Briterotica" blog-post series, where she asks British authors to talk specifically about how living in this country has influenced their writing. In that context, the obvious book for me to highlight is Wildwood, my contemporary earth-magic novel of rival sorcerers and tree surgery ;-) It's set in deepest rural England (and a bit in London) and is just full of Weather.

(I so wanted the strapline to be "He's Got Wood"... it didn't fly, sadly!)

Here's the post

Book available at:
Amazon UK
Amazon US

Grinding - excerpt

Well, the e-version of Geek Love is now available for purchase, and the hardbacks are on their way to their Kickstarter backers ... so here's an excerpt from my fiction contribution to the anthology: Grinding.

You may spot the subtle WoW references ... and the minotaur ...

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Time was, when humans guarded their souls. They’d fence them about with prayer and rabbits’ feet, with four-leafed clovers kept in a pocket or medallions of the saints. In those days it was only when they slept, and their souls wandered away from their bodies, that I could find them and feed.

It’s so much easier now.

These days they just can’t resist sending their souls off—quite unchaperoned—into dreamworlds I could never have anticipated. For me, it’s a banquet. I feed and feed, and though I’m never sated—it’s not in my nature to be sated—I’ve almost forgotten the ravenous hunger of earlier centuries.

Take this man, for example. His avatar is a huge, bull-headed humanoid with broad shoulders and fists like hammers. I can’t help liking that promise of masculine virility, though I know that appearances here rarely correspond to fleshly reality. But what really draws me is the way the soul-light shines so brightly in it. Not everyone gleams like that. He’s inhabited this avatar for years, and invested a great deal of himself in it.

I find him among the luminous fungi of a great marshland, killing giant wasps. It’s late at night and he’s on his own. I only approach mortals when they’re alone … It wouldn’t do to have them colluding. The name tag hovering over his head reads Andrija Rade Dragan Popovic, Technomancer at Large.

“I have what you need,” I tell him.

“Hold on,” he answers. His voice, even through Ventrilo, is pleasantly deep. I like that in a man. He kills one last wasp with a flame spell and then stands still. I feel the cold ping as he tries to click on me with his mouse.

“Who are you?” he asks, curiously. “You’ve got no name. No icon.” He means the identifying texts that hover over every other avatar, the marks that reveal their guild and name and which side they are on in the endless skirmishing. I’m completely anonymous. No one in the game is anonymous.

“I’m Zee. And I have what you need, Andrija Rade Dragan Popovic.”

”You mean—a captive firefly?”

“Hah. No.”

“What, then?”

“This.” I step in to touch the bull-man, running my fingers down his chest and sliding them between his thighs. Avatars weren’t designed with genitals, of course. But that doesn’t stop him from feeling me grip his cock, straight through his soul to his flesh. My touch is like an electric charge, galvanizing his shaft and filling his balls with roiling heat. I hear his gasp over the microphone. And now that I’m in contact with his soul, I can look through it, straight out of his computer monitor. I can see him sitting bolt upright in his chair, his eyes wide with shock. He can feel my hand.

Some of them log out and run at this point. Not many, to be fair.

“Okay,” he says, his voice betraying strain. “This is a dream, right?” He’s tall, in the flesh, with nut-colored hair that sticks out at the front and a square face just starting to soften about the chin. He’s wearing a heavy metal T-shirt, but it’s nice and new and clean. No over-muscled warrior then, but attractive enough.

“Of course it is,” I answer soothingly, stroking his ballsack and feeling it tighten in my hand. I can see a room full of files and books and DVDs behind him. It looks like a domestic study. “Do you like it?” I ask.

“Uh. Yes.”

“Are you alone?”

“Yes. My … Everyone’s gone to bed.”

“What’s your real name, Andrija Rade Dragan Popovic?”

“Joe,” he whispers. His eyes look glazed. I can see him groping at his crotch, but he can’t intercept my hands. He can only feel the effect they’re having, and it’s making him buck and bite his lip.

“Would you like to fuck me, Joe?”

“Um. I guess.”

That’s good enough. I step through his avatar and right out of the monitor into the mundane world. Instantly I feel the aether tighten, resisting my presence. It wants to reject me because this isn’t my realm; only Joe’s acquiescence allows me purchase. I glance around. Everything out here looks flat and dim and unreal to me. I was right about it being a study in a house, and it looks lived-in and comfortably cluttered. There are Lord of the Rings figures on the higher book shelves: his, I guess. There’s a plastic toy tricycle in the middle of the floor: not his.
 
Bereft of my touch, he leans forward and stares into the monitor at his lonely avatar. “Damn. Where’ve you gone?”

“Behind you.”

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Buy via Stone Box Press

Eyecandy Monday

Is it Monday?
Was there something I'm supposed to do on a Monday?

A weekend at Eastercon has left me totally EXHAUSTED.  All I want to do for the next 24 hours is this:

and this...

and this ..

and this ...

And when I've done all them I'll need a nice lie down.
*Bu-boom-tshh!*