by tcmill

New story free to read online in Erozine Issue #7

I fully intended to write this post on Friday when the story went live, but I was caught up in a few things…still aiming to finish several projects my COVID bout derailed, and the end-of-year-rush, and also my NaNo novel.

Oh yeah, I kinda did NaNo this year. Only it lasted longer than the month of November and way more than 50,000 words. Turns out the plot bunny bit hard and despite…everything…I managed to get 200,000+ words written from mid-September to today. In fact I have the final scene of the epilogue to finish today or tomorrow, and then of course a lot of editing.

Certainly, that swallowed time I could have spent on other projects — and I do intend to get more responses out on Erato II submissions in the coming weeks — but when it comes down to it, if a year from now, December 2024, you ask me if I’d rather have done a variety of things or if I’d rather have completed the novel, I know what my answer will be.

More importantly for today, though: I have a ~3,000-word story free to read at the Erozine! My story, for this issue’s theme of “Post-Nut Clarity,” is “Aftplay.” A pun, of course.

The Plague

To make a long story short, I made a lovely 1,200-mile drive out to Maine to see a lovely person; someone else at the camp came down with COVID, then my lovely came down with COVID, I cut my trip short and made the 1,200-mile drive in reverse but it was not enough to avoid myself coming down with COVID. (On my retreat drive I masked and avoided any close contact with people so hopefully I didn’t pass the delight on.)

Hurray for vaccination, and Robitussin is magic, but I am miserably wiped out. And feeling weirdly guilty for getting to (read “having to”) lie on my couch all day resting. I am still able to read, but way slower than usual – in fact time seems to fly this past week in a way that would be terrifying if I had energy for terror – and my writing ability is not all there. I am discovering new indie music I love, so there’s that.

At least if I had to break my NO-VID streak I got to do it in an interesting way.

The timing isn’t great, but then the timing never would be.

Catch you all on the other side <3

-T.C.

New poem out in Strange Horizons

…and when you wander the orchards,
your robe’s light, long sleeves swimming
with your motion, the trees bear fruit
and flower on the same branch—both delicious (of course

I’ve tasted the petals too; if anything I have only become
more curious, knowing now how much more there is
to learn). Or you can roll up those sleeves to do
some gentle garden work, meditative and

invigorating. We do not, of course, need a harvest to eat—hunger
is a memory, starvation a silly rumor—nor blossoms
to add more beauty. You know I never cared much
for flowers, but all beauty is meaningful here, and everything is

beautiful, and everything beautiful
can be trusted.

-excerpt, “From Summerland“

This piece started in my car, as I was driving somewhere on a pleasant spring day and reflecting on how my ideal “heavenly” weather is exactly that–late spring, with lots of sun but not too much warmth. Summer used to be lovely, I guess, before the climate change, but it’s also muggy. If not outright dangerous thanks to fires and heat advisory. And then I have friends who are wild for autumn and even winter, which I find rather depressing.

But! This is not a poem about weather. It’s actually about death. Or after-death. “Summerland” is the name often given to the afterlife in Spiritualism, the religion based in mediumship that sprang up in the 1800s and is still going today. I’m certainly not the first bereaved person to get extremely interested in Spiritualism — in my case I’m not planning to convert (not sure they even do formal ‘conversions’) but it’s often moving to read about. Its paradise is an engaging mixture of the mundane and the spiritual, blissful but flexible, much more so than the constant-singing-praises-to-God-above-the-glassy-sea of the Christianity I grew up with.

So on my drive, I considered who decided Summerland was summery and whether its inhabitants might have other opinions. At my destination, I pulled out the notepad I keep in my car and started writing, considering other details of what this life after life is like, and how it might be described — if it can be. A common complaint mediums delivered from their communicants was just how tricky it was to put these things in words that living people use (a difficulty enhanced by the fact that dead people, as attested to by mediums and by a number of near-death experiencers, don’t speak but rather make use of telepathy). And that also adds a sort of edge to this poem — the uncertainty of communication — because even as I indulge in thoughts of how nice Summerland might be, I can’t yet trust everything beautiful. I’m wary of wish fulfillment when it comes to something as important as death and eternity. I kept writing through that wariness, and the final stanzas came as a sort of answer. Maybe. What do you think?

If nothing else it gets back to one of the themes I’ve written about again and again, which is longing. The basis of eroticism and grief and quite a bit of religion.

Several of the ideas behind the depiction of Summerland in this poem come from a short book by professor and philosopher of religion Stafford Betty, The Afterlife Unveiled. The reference to cigars and sex is about a communication Sir Oliver Lodge believed he received from his son Raymond (who died in World War One), which I first encountered in Colin Wilson’s Afterlife: An Investigation.

Midsummer Updates

I always go into something of a lull in late June and early July. Maybe it’s the heat (although here near the Great Lakes we’ve been much luckier than a lot of people temperature-wise). Maybe it’s the grief-iversary at the end of June. Or my birthday earlier in that month putting me in the cheerier version of a “I deserve to slack off a bit” mood.

The idea of lounging in the air conditioning and reading is just so seductive, you know?

And writing, too! I’ve done a bit of that — when I feel like June was a sunny void, a humid ghost of a month that left no trace, I remind myself I did finish three stories during it.

Plus some of what I’ve been reading are the submissions to Erato II — exciting stuff!

Anyway, here are some quick updates of interest to my fellow readers and writers:

This July, Smashwords is holding its annual Summer/Winter site-wide sale. You’ll find fantastic ebooks discounted 25%, 50%, even 75% or free. This includes a number of my titles.

It also includes the anthologies from the New Smut Project – most are 25% off, but Erato is half-off in honor of our open submissions call for the sequel.

If you don’t have a Smashwords account or would rather buy the book more directly, you can get 50% off the Erato ebook at our Gumroad store by using coupon code “EratoIISubmissions“. Plus remember, with discount code “newsmutprojectfan“ you’ll always get $1.00 off our paperbacks purchased through Gumroad, including Erato.

Do you have a flash fiction, prose poem, short-short story, or <1,500-word excerpt from a longer story you’d like to submit to Erato II? We’re open until August 31st (and can negotiate extensions where necessary – life happens). In the anthology guidelines, I get pretty detailed about the kinds of stories we get excited about, and those we’re more lukewarm about (“sex robots,” longtime readers will recite at this point, even as fans of NSP’s books will fondly remember the stories about robots who have sex – yes, those are different kinds of stories!).

I’ve had a poem published! It’s short and, to no one’s surprise, both sensual and haunting. “Three Years After” appears in Tiny Wren Lit’s first anthology of “tiny poems” (10 lines or shorter), All Poems Are Ghosts.

In somewhat sadder news, I learned this week that SinCyr Publishing is closing its doors. They were a landmark in the erotica press landscape for their creative anthologies (I had a story in a volume of Rule 34) and interest in building a consent culture.

SinCyr’s books are now out of print, though you can get paperback copies secondhand through some online stores. I’ll be looking into ways to reprint the stories I’ve published with them, including “Route 34” from Rule 34, “The Solution” from Dancing With Myself (this one’s actually expanding into a book-length work), and “Silver Bracelets” from the femdom anthology Getting It.

So that’s what my July looks like. Hope yours is going well, readers! Keep cool…except when you can be hot in a fun way.

Some 18th-century bondage in the Seattle Erotic Art Festival Literary Art Anthology

I’m psyched to announce that for the second time I’ll be in the annual Literary Art Anthology from SEAF, the Seattle Erotic Art Festival.

If you’re able to get to Seattle, you can get the anthology – and see the art! – at 301 Mercer Street, April 21 – 23. There’s a whole schedule of performances and readings.

In the Festival Store, you can also check out Erato and Cunning Linguists, both for sale there – along with my late beloved John Theriac’s short collection Kinky, Queer Love and my flash omnibus Soft, Sharp, and Tender.

As for the ’23 festival anthology itself, it includes over 30 writers and poets, including not only yours truly but Erato alumnus Micah BlackLight (full disclosure – I invited him to submit to Erato because the story of his I read in the 2018 SEAF anthology, “Surface, Locked, or Buried” is probably the best BDSM science fiction I’ve ever read), poets like Lyssandra Norton, Bill Wolak, and ZenKOAL, and others I’m sure I’m going to become a fan of once I read my contributor’s copy!

My story, “Le Nouvel Abelard,” is a kinky historical piece inspired by two philosophers: first, Peter Abelard, most famous for his castration, really did write about monk bondage and oral fingering in Eden as examples in his ethical ponderings. Then the title and setting evolved as a tribute to Rosseau, who was pretty kinky in his own right. Here’s a sample of what that philosophical inspiration looks like in practice:

Her hands trailed farther, over his breeches, up to the join where they felt so especially, excruciatingly, blissfully tight. She followed the shape and size, appearing thoughtful once again. This expression was one Julien had become used to seeing, but never in a thousand years could he have dared think of her wearing it while regarding his cock.

“I’m afraid,” she said then, “I can’t make all the use of this that I might desire.”

His unbound tongue bounded on—“I recall much Peter Abelard had to say about consent that fails to be rational, desires so far from reality as to—”

He hadn’t been entirely sure how he would complete the sentence, so it relieved him when her hand sealed across his mouth.

“Thank you,” she said with impish politeness. “But I fear I have no mind for such learning now. Your words and wisdom would be wasted on me.”

As her fingers trailed away, stroking his cheek, he asked, “What more would you learn today?”

“I think I have a way to silence you.”

Her hand returned, and his lips parted for it. She stroked with her fingers the way she had with her tongue. If Julien recalled correctly, one of Abelard’s philosophical predecessors, disdaining pleasure, had argued that in Eden, before the Fall, erotic congress had been no more exciting than the putting of a finger into a mouth.

And now Julien agreed, but not in the way that no-doubt celibate man of learning intended.

It was difficult to imagine anything else their bodies might do together could be sweeter than this.

To be soft, to be yielding, to be filled with her—to see the delight in her eyes, hear her breathing roughen—to taste the salt on her skin.

Her other hand went to his shoulder and pressed down. He yielded to this, too, until she had him lying on his back, tied hands resting over his head. She straddled him and pulled at what seemed like endless lengths of silk, baring her legs. Not as pale as her powdered face, nor as silken as her stockings—there was even a bruise midway up one thigh suggesting she had stumbled, inattentive, against some piece of furniture. So scholarship in his schoolroom had not completely tamed the impulses that sent her galloping in high spirits about the estate.

As if Julien needed further proof of it.

Poetry

I’ve talked about it in my newsletter and on social media, but I’m not sure I’ve yet broken the news here on this blog that my longstanding interest in reading poetry has, over the past year or so, turned into an interest in writing poetry.

It’s not completely out of nowhere – in 2018 I wrote a poem that appeared in the “Birth Control” issue from the much-missed Cliterature feminist journal. And “By Steam and By Sail,” in Litro, is a prose poem (I was challenging Carole Maso, particularly her Aureole, when I wrote it – indeed the bit of French slang that inspired the whole piece came from the first part of the book, “The Women Wash Lentils”).

Still, it surprised me as much as anyone. The kickoff was when I had some concepts I wanted to write out as stories, but couldn’t quite make work as a thousand+ words of prose. I started writing in lines and stanzas instead, and playing with sounds, and….

Fast forward to this winter, when I received my first acceptance! “Three Years After,” a six-line poem about intimacy and loss, will appear in Tiny Wren Lit’s anthology All Poems Are Ghosts.

Tiny Wren makes beautiful little chapbooks and I look forward to sharing this one with you when it’s published!

Maybe it’s no surprise that quite a few of my poems are about grief – but it’s also no surprise, I’m sure, that a ton of them are about sex. I entered a sheaf of especially queer sex poems (or especially sexy queer poems?) into the 2022 Penrose Prize for Excellence in Poetry from LGBTQIA+ Writers and I’m delighted to share that they made it onto the longlist!

You can see the full list and read the 3 winning poems on the Death Rattle/Oroboro Lit Journal site.

I’ll be looking for final homes for my Penrose entries this year – I really cannot wait to share them with you!

(Also, keep an eye on The Whorticulturalist, who accepted an early and very sexy narrative poem from me last summer.)

In the meantime, I’m continuing to share excerpts of poetry I’ve loved reading on my Tumblr, and also on the Tumblr of the New Smut Project – speaking of which, if you have erotic prose poetry or flash fiction seeking a home, NSP opens to submissions for Erato II, our second anthology of short-short pieces, on April 2nd! Full guidelines are here.

“For Myself” in Delicate Friend’s BODYLOVE issue and other updates

I’m delighted to announce my flash piece about self love on a sunny day, “For Myself,” has been reprinted in Delicate Friend, a quarterly literary magazine about eroticism and other forms of desire.

Clicking the cover below will take you to the full issue.

I’m very grateful to the editors at Delicate Friend, not only for including this story but also for remaining willing to work with me after their acceptance email landed in my spam folder, where it languished for the better part of a week before I did my irregular checking-if-anything-good-got-accidentaly-caught-by-the-filter check. If anyone needs a vivid reminder to check their spam folders more often – there you go.

If you haven’t had the chance to check out two February anthology releases, my femdom monster erotica piece “Her Lure and Jesses” is out in Beastly Tales and an expanded version of my BDSM science fiction romance “What He Brought Home” is out in Union.

Outside of writing (including irregular email checking, composing newsletter announcements, and failing to post on this blog on actual anthology release dates) life has been busy, mostly in a good way. Guinevere Chase and I are polishing the guidelines for Erato II so I’ll hopefully be sharing those soon!

Until next time – happy reading.

My femdom frottage story is “Best of the best”

My short story “Breakfast Time” has been collected in the first annual issue of the Trash Sandwich ‘zine, “collecting the best of the best in art and stories from last year’s issues” according to the editors. It originally appeared in issue #9. 

Both are available as free downloads on Gumroad and are not work safe (thanks to erotic art and comics alongside the writing!)

Hopefully that can help tide you over until next week, when my monster erotica debut goes live – and have I mentioned (or do I need to mention?) that “Her Lure and Jesses” is also femdom?

Monster Erotica, Sci Fi Romance, and a Year-End Sale

I’m especially excited to announce my latest short story sale because it’s a newish genre to me: “Her Lure and Jesses” will appear in Beastly Tales, a collection of monster romance and erotic romance from Dragon Soul Press!

I’ve always admired the enthusiasm and creativity of the self-titled monsterfuckers, but my own tastes hadn’t seemed to lie in that direction…except I have to say, creating the anatomy (and hints at the uncanny psychology) of my winged creature was a delightful exercise.

His fingers settled above her knee—bony, but soft with down to the first knuckle. They stroked her skin rather than seizing it. She followed his arm, caressing feathers so that they lay back the wrong way. He chuckled: an expression of pleasure not so different from human. She hadn’t taught him to do it, although she had taught him new things to laugh at.

Then she reached his shoulder, and over it, and his laughter was cut off.

She stroked his wing, following the silk-smooth, knife-shaped feathers. Epona leaned nearer to him to reach farther along the length of the pinion. It flexed, unfurling from where he’d held it tight against his back, canting toward her for more.

-“Her Lure and Jesses”

Another Dragon Soul Press anthology, Union, will include my short story “What He Brought Home.”

This kinky M/M romance originally appeared in an anthology several years ago, and this offered me the chance to revise and expand it.

He lay panting in its wake, cheek on his husband’s shoulder, pounding heart to pounding heart. As soon as he recovered, he began to unwind the cords from Kanovan’s arms.

“You should bring me things more often,” he said.

“I will,” Kanovan promised.

– “What He Brought Home”

***

Lastly, but not leastly (that’s a word now, shut up), these next two weeks mark Smashword’s End of Year Sale. From now to January 1, you can pick up ebooks direct from Smashwords for significant savings, while still providing authors one of the highest royalty rates around. A great win-win to end 2022 on.

My titles on Smashwords range from 25-50% off, and all New Smut Project titles are also discounted. Check my whole catalog out here.

Future New Smut Project Submission Calls

I’ve hit the point where the building pressure of NSP Anthology Ideas is almost too much to bear, so I’ve made a cautious update about future submissions, which I’m cross-posting here:

This is not a call for submissions yet, but more a “if you want to write for future submissions calls, here are the kinds of things you might want to start brainstorming/drafting.” 

Having done the accounting for sales and royalties to date, I’m delighted to see we’ve pretty much secured funding (especially given we’ll sell more books between now and the next anthologies! By the way, do you have anyone on your holiday gift-giving list who would enjoy collections of groundbreaking smut?) 

So now it’s the time factor – to write and promote the submissions call, read submitted stories, and then edit the accepted stories. Since I have several book-length manuscripts to edit as part of my freelance day job, this won’t happen right away. I also need to update my promotion plans. I thought I’d developed some better ideas for sharing calls on Twitter, but…well, we’ll see where that is in a month or two when I’m ready to actually do it. 

But sharing on this blog may be a good first step. Here’s a 2023 resolution for erotic short story writers and poets: sell me your smut! And let the erotic writers and poets in your life know about these upcoming opportunities.