eFestival of Words update

Remember the eFestival of Words last month? Fulani’s Museum of Deviant Desires story collection, published by 1001 Nights Press, didn’t win the Best of Indepdendent eBook Awards ‘Best Erotica’ category (the winner was Inky by J.B. Hartnett, and congratulations to the author and publisher).

But Museum of Deviant Desires was the runner up in the Best Erotica category. As far as we know it’s the first time we’ve had any kind of writing award, even as a runner-up, since Fulani won a competition in a local writer’s club when he was about 14. So it is kind of gratifying.

If you haven’t read The Museum of Deviant Desires it’s available from several places, including Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk. Currently selling at a dollar and some cents in the US and 77 pence in the UK, which is a tiny amount considering how much (cough) ‘research’ was needed to write it. Plus it’s been reviewed as a ‘braingasm’ and the ‘next generation of erotic fiction’.

Finally – thank you to the faithful band of voters who voted for the book!

Edgy, modern, industrial-flavored

‘Edgy, modern, industrial-flavored stories full of unlikely situations, grit, grease, and urban decay. Some are very strange, some are very sexy, and all are quite memorable… absolutely recommended if you are looking for something gritty, modern, playful, and strange.’ That’s the description of the Museum of Deviant Desires (also in the UK Amazon store) from BDSM Book Reviews. I put it out earlier this year with a new up-and-coming publisher, 1001 Nights Press.

BDSM Book Reviews gave it 5/5 overall and 4/5 for kink. Oddly, despite this and the other excellent reviews the story collection has garnered, it’s one of my lowest-selling titles. Am I not doing enough to publicise it? Or do people not like gritty, playful and strange? Have a look for yourself, see what you think. Amazon’s ‘Look Inside’ function should give you enough to make your mind up.

Museum of Deviant Desires reviewed

Cover image, The Museum of Deviant Desires

Just found this on Amazon.com, posted today. Me, ‘meta-sexual’? There’s a thought…

“What I need” the narrator of Fulani’s “Burnout” tells us, “is some startling image that comes from nowhere and burns itself into my brain, my desires, causes instant addiction. What I need is a new mythos of erotica. . .”

I love the way this guy thinks!

Fulani is one of that rare, as yet officially unclassified species of erotic writer, the “meta-sexual;” a delightfully self-referential species noted for its uncanny ability to pleasure open-minded readers with intense multiple “brain-gasms.” And there are many to be enjoyed in this collection of short BDSM-centered fiction, informed by everything from Roland Barthes and Stanislaw Lem to Nu Fetish, industrial bondage; flash fiction and on-line piracy; underground music festivals, and those pulpy sexploitation magazines of the 50s and 60s with their lurid cover paintings and thick black “censor bars” redacting all the naughty bits in the grainy photos accompanying the articles.

The eleven very-short stories in this collection are sexy and cerebral; breezy, thought-provoking, laugh-out-loud funny and utterly addictive. Like a big heaping bowl of literary-erotic Lucky Charms; you can’t get enough. The multi-colored marshmallow shapes are irresistibly delicious, but the oat-cereal part is actually good for you–who knew? Fulani strikes just the right balance between light fluffy diversion and crunchy intellectual substance, letting his horny inner nerd come out to play the most scintilatingly kinky games; whimsically creating new words and worlds even as he establishes fascinating new paradigms for the next generation of erotic fiction.

There’s beauty here, however unexpected; the language can be lyrical even as it educes degradation and pain; the poetry of domination and submission set amid dystopian landscapes of industrial decay and urban blight. We wonder if this is what sex will be like in the future. But as the narrator of “Something Different” reminds us;

“Once you know it consciously, it’s impossible not to see how the whole of society, economy, psychology is a dense network of sexual signifiers.”

It’s true. Fulani’s stories draw their inspiration from an astonishingly diverse cosmos of commonplace artifacts; vacuum cleaners, toasters, plumbing supplies, burned out autos, melted plastic forms, all weirdly apt when turned to the author’s singularly amusing purpose.

Entertaining, sexy, hilarious, often self-effacing, “The Museum of Deviant Desires” is a trenchant critique of contemporary erotic literature with its finger firmly on the g-spot of popular culture; a tasty treat, not to be missed.

Published by 1001 Nights Press. It’s available on Amazon.com (you’ll see the review there as well), Amazon.co.uk, and if you go back to this blog post from April 27 it lists all the other places you can get it.

Edited to add: looking at clicks out of this blog, one or two people haven’t picked up the reminder that Erotica-Romance-Ebooks no longer operates. It was a website run by Xcite for the sale of third-party books along with their own. It  now redirects to the front page of the main Xcite.com website.

1001 Nights and some other news

Quite a few of you seem to have been clicking on links to 1001 Nights Press from old posts on this blog, and may have come up with 404 errors. Sharazade is developing the 1001 Nights website at the moment, and the new web link is just 1001nightspress.com. We’ve updated links in the old posts and added it to the blogroll (look in the links on the left-hand sidebar, towards the bottom).

Meanwhile, some poking about on the internet reveals Fulani’s writing is available at All Romance Ebooks (search on author name) and a couple of short stories are on 1 Place for Romance. Weirdly, All Romance Ebooks lists some stories and novellas twice, with different prices for different electronic formats. No idea why – we’re just pleased the stories are available in more places…

The Museum of Deviant Desires – out now

Cover image, The Museum of Deviant Desires

We’re delighted to announce that Fulani’s collection of short stories, The Museum of Deviant Desires, is out today. It’s published by 1001 Nights Press, the brainchild of erotica author Sharazade (who you’ll see sometimes as a commenter on previous posts here) and in the course of barely a couple of months it’s become established as one of the most innovative and successful small e-publishers around.

The blurb for the book is as follows:

Eleven erotic stories to excite, entertain, enthrall, and overstimulate the imagination. In no particular order, they cover the attractions of men’s adventure magazines with their sleazy sexploitation and politically incorrect pictures of tortured women; sex and bondage in an abandoned building and a burned-out car wreck; and sex, photography, and the internet. They investigate the sense of anticipation just before a corporal punishment scene, and what characters in bdsm stories think about the painful pleasures the author inflicts on them. They explore internet piracy and how royalties may be collected in the future. And they expose you to the late-night weirdness of sex, perversion, and fetish at a music festival. And then there’s the question of vacuum cleaners. Vacuum cleaners can be erotic in a technosexual kind of way.

Fulani is a master of erotic writing and a prolific author whose recent publications include the lesbian vampire novella “The Vampire Skye,” and stories of sex, fetish, and bondage in the bohemian world of “Hanging Around.” Rich with insights into the passion that attracts and binds, his distinctive dark erotica blends bdsm, fetish, and futuristic themes with imagination and humor.

In other words, expect a lot of bondage and bdsm, and a certain amount of strangeness involving vacuum cleaners. The title story is ‘The Museum of Deviant Desires’ but in its own way, the whole collection functions as exactly that kind of ‘museum’, presenting and exploring a bunch of different ideas related to bdsm and desire.

If you follow this blog, some of the stories will be a little familiar. Several have previously been published here (in fact, those versions are still here – we haven’t pulled them) or Fulani’s other blog (ditto) though there’s new content as well, and the previously-published stories have been re-edited, re-worked, extended, and in all but a couple of cases are now rather different from the originals.

The advantage of the book format, apart from the new content, is its appeal to a wider audience. And it’s a small enough amount of money ($3.99 if you’re buying in the US) for the convenience of having the stories collected in one easily-readable place rather than navigating back through 250-odd posts spread across two blogs.

As of a couple of hours ago it was only available on Smashwords but in the course of the next day or two expect to see it on Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk and a bunch of other places. We’ll post up the additional links as they come through.

*** Update: also now at 1eroticaebooks (pdf, prc, lit and epub formats) and Barnes & Noble (for Nook users), Amazon.com  and Amazon.co.uk. A couple more options to follow! ***

Thank you for your attention. Normal service will be resumed shortly!

Sharazade and the 1001 Nights

A friend of ours recently decided to ‘experiment’ with self-publishing. The result is, in her own words, ‘A Short-Favored Thing, But Mine Own’ – and considering her online name and pen-name, Sharazade, are you really surprised she’s called it the 1001 Nights Press?

She has three books out to date, all of them relatively short – around 9000 words, so longer than most short stories but shorter than novella length. One, Good Girl, is her own (it’s also on Amazon.com, Amazon UK and some other places, and includes a second short story with it); the other two, Sharing Lucy and Taking Jennifer, are by James Wood. They’re all e-book only, and  Smashwords offers 10 different formats.

Good Girl appears to be trending rather well at the moment and Sharazade is already known for her book of stories, Transported, as well as contributions to other collections.

James Wood is newly-published, having been writing erotica for quite a while but not putting it out to a paying public. We’ve read Sharing Lucy, which is about a young freelancer who’s pressured by her manager (and lover) to make a business presentation ahead of schedule. However, when she arrives at his office to find him with a good-looking guy who turns out to be the client, she discovers it’s not so much a case of making a “presentation” as being the presentation. Some light bondage and heavy sex with both men follows…

Wood’s writing is, let’s say, rooted in the tropes of erotica from 20-30 years ago. It’s the kind of style that will be familiar to those who read Erotic Review magazine. But that’s not a criticism, and nor is it to say it’s outdated, really. Erotic Review has been undergoing a renaissance recently, since its re-launch as online-only; and anyway, Fulani writes for it. As a story, it has male characters whose attitudes and behaviours are somewhere between cavalier and chauvinist, but that’s perfectly acceptable for a good fantasy. It’s one of the best stories out there of its type and in that kind of style. Wood is certainly someone to watch for in the future.

And if that’s not your thing… well, there’s always M. Christian, with his generally more surreal and outlandish fantasies such as Love Without Gun Control.

So there you go – a heads-up on a new press, a short book review and namechecks for some other writers all rolled into one post.