Fiction – Literary

FESTIVAL SPECIALS

It is the Yuletide, that men call Christmas though they know in their hearts it is older than Bethlehem and Babylon, older than Memphis and mankind. It is the Yuletide, and we here at MMP HQ have some Saturnalian-next-level gifts for the weird-reader on your list to consume all Goya-style, if that’s their bent. AND WE KNOW IT IS.

From Friday December 20 through to Christmas Eve, The Ecdysiasts (a flash fiction collection by Scott R Jones), will be free for download to your Kindle or Kindle-enabled device from (where else?) the juggernaut that is Amazon, right here. Don’t have a Kindle? Well, you’re probably still a good person, and for that reason alone, if you’d like your free PDF or EPUB file of The Ecdysiasts, simply pop us a little Christmas card (or, y’know, an email, we’re not picky) indicating how you’d like your MMP Xmas gift formatted and we will get it out to you within 24 hours. Maybe even sooner, because we are frighteningly efficient that way.

Also, during that same time period, Justine Geoffrey’s collected Blackstone erotica volume, PRIESTESS (with killer cover art by Jim Pavelec), will be discounted with the Kindle program’s new Countdown Deal promotion. Starting at $0.99 on Friday December 20 (the deep discount! Starts on the 21^st in the UK) and getting progressively more expensive each day until Christmas, when it shall return to its usual pricing. Yes, it’s wacky, and we’re not sure how interesting that will make the book, but there it is. We’re all about the experimentation at MMP.

STRIPPED DOWN & TAKEN

Speaking of which, our latest lab work down in the steaming porn vats of Amazon is an experiment in (re)packaging. We love Justine’s Blackstone series, of course,  and think it’s just fine the way it’s presented, odd titles and all. Red Monolith Frenzy is, for us, evocative of so much subtle deviancy that we are loathe to change it. And yet, dinosaur erotica. Yes, saurian-based smut does better at the end of the day. So, a test: with Justine’s approval, we’re stripping down the Blackstone series to bare text files (no extra graphics or links), re-covering them for maximum pop, and re-titling the stories with the ever-popular prefix Taken by the [ BLANK ]. This is strictly for new readers on Amazon, of course, (we won’t be featuring the titles here on the MMP site, so as to avoid confusion) and at $0.99 we’re semi-confident that we’ll see a pick-up in sales for Ms Geoffrey’s excellent work. And in case you’re already a Blackstone fan with the original books on your device, don’t worry, the new stripped down Sex & Horror series is clearly labelled with a “previously published as…” caveat, so there’s little chance of doubling up. Unless of course you feel like doubling up, in which case go ahead, we won’t say no. Here are the covers so far. Wish us luck!

OUR SPLOOSH PILE RUNNETH OVER!

Submissions are now closed for the second Martian Migraine Press annual anthology, Conqueror Womb: Lusty Tales of Shub-Niggurath. Our editors would like to thank everyone who sent in work and are even now beginning their first tentative dips into what Editrix Justine has termed her sploosh pile. (Get it? Slush pile, sploosh pile? Hyuk. Archer reference.) We’re told there are a lot of woodland orgies in the sploosh so far, which was expected. Geoffrey and Jones will be reading over Christmas and starting to make yea-or-nay decisions by New Years. If you’ve submitted a piece for consideration, expect a response on or before January 15, 2014, and if you haven’t heard from MMP by then, do please drop us a line. Conqueror Womb: Lusty Tales of Shub-Niggurath is set to birth horribly into the world the second week of February, just in time to serve as a cautionary collection of tales for Valentine’s Day. Ah, breeders… you know not what you do!

Martian Migraine Press: the Best Kind of Headache