Posts tagged new releases
January NEWSCLUSTER: Orgy In The Valley Of The Lust Larvae and Other Updates
013 years ago
A few updates…
- All our Author Pages, Book Pages and of course, the Bookstore itself, have been updated. We had some broken links, apparently, but now all is repaired. Our Erotica pages were becoming rather unwieldy, actually, and we’re happy to have those nicely trimmed down now!
- Justine G’s gonzo sci-fi erotica novella ORGY IN THE VALLEY OF THE LUST LARVAE is now available for purchase in our Bookstore, on its own page, and of course for your Kindle via Amazon. Straight up? We realize that Justine’s predilection for “artsy” titles to her books, sans the usual smutty keywords, have probably not helped her sales over the past couple of months, so we’re keen to see what a title with two pretty obvious keywords does for that. As always, we are quite happy to see reviews thrown on the Amazon page for ORGY…: every little bit helps, so, if you’ve bought and read and enjoyed / suffered a reaction to it, please let others know!
- The 1 Year Anniversary of our weird little press is coming up! We published our first title, S R Jones‘ Soft From All The Blood, in March of last year. So, to celebrate, we’re putting together the Martian Migraine Press Year One Sampler, which will be absolutely free to download! Featuring previously published and new work by all our authors and plenty of bonus material!
- We’re currently sitting down with Canadian spoken word dynamos 2 Dope Boys In A Cadillac re: releasing the electronic edition of their amazing Anthropocalypse Now chapbook. More details to come, but as of this moment, this moment right now, we are v. excited about this!
Martian Migraine Press: the Best Kind of Headache
“Stephanie’s First Date”: A Conversation with the Authors of ‘Seawater and Stars’
013 years ago
The collective editorial entity of Martian Migraine Press known as “The Face” (on Mars, natch!) sat down for a virtual chat with authors S R Jones and Justine G, the morally bankrupt creatures responsible for Seawater & Stars: The Last Novel of Gideon Stargrave, to talk about comics, Grant Morrison, metafictional conceits, and the titillating challenges inherent with mashing up two-stage expansion steam engines and Victorian smut…
The Face Hoo boy. The geekiness is just coming off the screen here in waves! Let’s get started. Favourite Morrison creation?
Jones Oh, The Invisibles. Hands down.
Justine I found The Invisibles to be, I don’t know, almost impenetrable. Sorry to say, I did not get it. Though I can see where he was going, but dimly? If that makes any sense. Much preferred The Filth. Loved The Filth, actually.
Jones The assassin chimp.
Justine Spartacus Hughes. Richard Nixon as the submarine captain, with his trusty Gill-men. Brilliant.
Jones Hold on. You found Invisibles inpenetrable but The Filth was OK for you?
Justine There was more penetration. And satire. That’s what this little girl is made of, mostly. So yes.
The Face Jones, are you one of those “The Invisibles changed my life!” types?
Jones Oh, not so much, that. Somewhere, Morrison said that the series was designed to identify or activate or otherwise agitate Invisibles that were already out there, and I guess that’s how I feel about it. Being introduced to the work (and I was definitely one of those “what, comics? I don’t read comics anymore” people when it happened) was, OK, not an eye-opener so much as a realization that, y’know, these people were out there. And that I was one of them.
The Face The Invisibles seven-volume hyper-sigil doing what it does!
Jones Something like that, I guess. It certainly re-wrote me to a degree. I recall thinking, somewhere in Volume 2, was it? That whole infiltration of the underground military installation. “Let’s do Dulce.” I recall thinking “Jesus, this Scots bastard is just giving this stuff away!” and I loved it. And this was back in, oh, ‘98?
Justine And here it is, December 2012! We’ve got, what, twelve days left?
The Face It’s Sunday 9 December, so yes. Twelve or thirteen, depending on where you like your Mayan end dates. How do you feel about that?
Jones In general, or specifically to The Invisibles?
The Face Let’s hear both.
Jones As far as The Invisibles go, I think Morrison was spot on in giving us a preview of the spirit of the 2012 culture, if not the details. I re-read The Invisibles now, and I know it was a success, because it just reads as, I don’t know… almost quaint, if that’s even possible. We’re all Invisible now.
In general… I don’t know. Back in the 90s, for me, it was all McKenna and Timewave Zero. The Mayans and all this hippie consciousness shift hoo-ha never even came up on the 2012 radar in any kind of significant way, for me. Fractal wave forms embedded in the I-Ching were where it was at, y’know? Novelty theory. And there certainly wasn’t any of the kind of standard apocalyptic end o’ the world Learning Channel boilerplate like you see these days…
Justine You kids get off his lawn!
Jones Oh hey now. I was into 2012 before 2012 was cool. But yeah, even saying that, it doesn’t look like it’s gonna pan out now, does it?
The Face There’s still time.
Justine Twelve days.
Jones Yeah. And you know, now that I think of it… I mean, the whole deal with the Timewave… the Bros. McKenna said it themselves in The Invisible Landscape, right? All the major changes, or at least a good percentage, a large percentage in fact, all the big changes in their theory, and they were talking about the kind of grand changes akin to, you know, fish deciding to go for a stroll on the beach, all of them were supposed to take place in what they called “the short epochs” at the end of the wave.
The Face Which are… ?
Jones Which are something like the last half dozen hours in the final cycle. Maybe not even that. The last hour and a half, the last fifteen minutes of which will be white-knuckle.
Justine Hee!
Jones So, like, there’s still a chance? I guess is what I’m saying. It may look like bunk at this point, with only twelve days to go, but, y’know, get back to me on the 21st. And if for some reason you can’t reach me, I guess I’ll see you in the Supercontext!
The Face Thanks for the lead-in there, sir! Because of course, the inspiration for this weird little experimental effort of yours is a throwaway line in a one-off Morrison story that saw print originally in a Vertigo Winter’s Edge special in 1998. And We’re All Policemen is, basically, eight pages of the fevered fantasies of King Mob as he emerges into the Supercontext at the end of History and–
Justine In twelve days.
The Face In twelve days, yes, and he does so in the character of Gideon Stargrave, psychedelic hyper-spy and pop mega-star. And of course the character of King Mob, as has been noted elsewhere exhaustively and explicitly mentioned by Morrison, is Morrison. Or Morrison’s fiction-suit for moving through The Invisibles.
Jones So blurry and meta in there! Morrison, King Mob, Stargrave: it’s all much of a muchness, as me old mother would have said.
Justine My old mother would have said “if you’re going to wear character armour, at least make it fashionable!”
Jones Agreed.
The Face So in the panels in question, we have Stargrave activating his magic-mirror-goop sex-droid and instructing it to… Justine?
Justine Oh what! You’re testing me now? Shit. It’s “enhance tits a percentage” or something like that. And then the blurb! The blurb is what stuck with me, or at least made me remember that it was there. Which is why I floated the idea, what? A couple of weeks back?
Jones Not long, anyways. This thing has been fast. But then, we are living in the Sun of 4-Motion, in which things speed up.
Justine Twelve days.
The Face OK! OK! But the blurb!
Justine Right.
The Face We’ll just read our copy, shall we? “I want the nerdiest guy in school transformed by a gifted surgeon’s knife into a beautiful, sexy girl and exhibited as a living erotic sculpture at Dionysian ceremonies of heathen bondage…”
Justine Ha! You bastard. Had it there all along.
The Face Next panel! Stargrave: “That kind of look.” Text box: “Thus runs the promo copy on Stargrave’s latest, most frustrating sex novel; the alluring and racy cover conceals a dry marine-engineering text with buzzwords like ‘crawlspace’ and ‘Stephanie’s first date’ sprinkled throughout to help maintain the erections of the surprisingly substantial audience for brainy-geek-to-hot-slut gender pretender stories.”
Jones Damn.
The Face There you go. So, couple of questions for you two: how’d it go? Did it, or does it, work? Justine, you’re our pornographer…
Jones Yeah, I just edited all the dry stuff. Going on record.
Justine As erotica? Not really. It’s weird. As an experiment, I’d say it’s a little successful. The text Jones found was some public domain thing from way back in the day, and after he cleaned it up there–
Jones 1921. The fifth edition I pulled was from 1921. Those Google scanned documents are bah-rutal! Lemme check the deets, hold on…
Justine Well, I was reading through it and thinking how best to go about making it work as something a person could have a little wank over, and the archaic language was so… anyway, I just naturally gravitated to Lazenby’s The Pearl. Like you do. And of course, there’s all the pistons and pumping and warm valves and so on. Certainly the larger bodies of text made it easier than the bits that are all formulas and definitions…
Jones Tompkins, Albert Edward. “Marine Engineering (A Text Book)”… oh, sorry. Engineer-Captain A. E. Tompkins, C.B.E., Royal Navy (Retired).
Justine Albert was just a barrel of laughs to work with.
Jones He was a little light on the narrative end of things.
The Face Did you bother to work around that with Seawater & Stars?
Jones Not really?
Justine No. We pretty much took Morrison at his word there. It’s the text, with buzzwords. There’s some story in it, but it’s fragmentary at best. I pulled a couple of lines from The Pearl and there’s small chunks… small?
Jones Small-ish. I wouldn’t say chunks.
Justine There’s a sentence or nine from my own Blackstone series, yes. But mostly it was just me reading through this goddamn thing and dropping dirty stuff in when it seemed appropriate. Which, again, with all the pumping and heating of expanding vapours going on, was surprisingly often!
The Face The question that burns at the heart of things here, lady and gentleman! Can you wank to this?
Jones What can’t you wank to, these days?
Justine Get off his lawn! Darn wanking kids! Wankers!
Jones No, but see, that’s the point of those panels in And We’re All Policemen. Right? That the breakdown of information has brought us to a place where there’s only garbage left in the system. Is narrative even necessary, when sex-entertainment is involved?
Justine As a purveyor of high-class paranormal erotica, I’m obliged to say yes, but as a warp-speed denizen of these hectic End Times, I’d say no. Have you seen the animated sex GIFs?
Jones Nope. What?
The Face Oh yeah!
Justine It’s like, there used to be a process, when the technology for viewing your porn was your Times Square theatre or VHS or Cinemax or whatever the hell they had. You were, for the most part, obligated to slog through a narrative. A shitty one, but still. And then of course the Internet blah blah blah. Faster, weirder. And now, Jesus, they take maybe three, four seconds of the best bit of a porno, and loop it into an animated GIF.
Jones Like those little irritating avatars in profiles?
The Face Naw man, the tech is way better now…
Justine Yup. It’s not, like, full screen HD or anything, but fill a screen with these things and it’s overwhelming. Tumblr is full to bursting with… anyway, that’s the point. It’s all boiling down to sound bites, clips, a barrage of trigger images and phonemes. The fetishization of everything… obviously, I’m for that.
The Face So why not pepper a marine-engineering text with smut? So, it works.
Jones It works. It’s weird. But it works. Mostly it’s funny.
Justine All the funny. I like Chapter One the most. And the Preface.
Jones Which is likely as far as anyone will care to get.
Justine But there are themes. There’s a Madam who shows up randomly, and of course, there’s Stephanie…
The Face From ‘Stephanie’s first date’?
Justine That, and there’s a sorority hazing that’s referenced.
Jones Some of the leading lights in late 19th Century marine-engineering get a little play, too. Sorry, boys!
Justine And by the end of the thing, which is only three chapters…
Jones The second of which is terms and definitions. Three chapters of this doorstop was already topping out at 9000 words, I mean, c’mon! No one needs or wants that much experiment.
Justine By the end I’d started throwing in a lot more stuff from Blackstone, so it gets weirder and I think the final lines have a certain eerie pathos? We’ll see, right?
The Face We hope people like it, frankly. Why the last novel of Gideon Stargrave? If faithfulness to the text was something you were going for, then why the last? It clearly states that the novel in question is merely the latest sex novel from Stargrave…
Justine Umm. Because twelve days?
Jones Twelve days. Also, I’m not sure I’m up for another experiment. Bringing this thing up from 2D comic-book-space was more of a chore than I expected.
Justine Slacker!
The Face Twelve days. I suppose, if your novelty thing holds, that we could be meeting up with all our fictionsuits on the other side of Christmas this year. In a perfect, Supercontextual world, would either of you “collaborate” with Gideon Stargrave again?
Justine Well, why not? I like his style.
Jones And if that doesn’t happen, I wouldn’t say no to working with Morrison. And before you say it, yes. Yes I’m a cheeky bastard.
The Face That’s how we like you both. Stay cheeky, fella and lady!
S R Jones is the author of the short story collections SOFT FROM ALL THE BLOOD and THE ECDYSIASTS, both from Martian Migraine Press. He’s written for the Lovecraft ezine and has had his anti-poetry published in Broken City Magazine. He is a spoken word performer, a massage therapist, a dad (horrors!), a Gnostic-Chaoist with Lovecraftian overtones, and is thoroughly, unrepentantly Invisible. You can follow him on the twitter @PimpMyShoggoth
Justine G is the author of the BLACKSTONE Erotica series and the erotic sci-fi novella ORGY IN THE VALLEY OF THE LUST LARVAE (due out in January 2013), both from Martian Migraine Press. She’d probably eat you alive, mantis-style, but man, it’d be worth it. You can follow here on the twitter @BLACKSTONErotic
Eroticizing the Outer: MMP Interview with Blackstone Author Justine G
014 years ago
Justine G is the second author in our stable of weird writers and the entity responsible for the BLACKSTONE Erotica series, the first book of which, RED MONOLITH FRENZY, came out in April… and we’ve just released he second book in the series, GREEN FEVER DREAM. Explaining what Justine does and how she does it is not an easy task, as she’s been cultivating her mystery since she was wee; all we here at MMP know is that we get a perverse little kick from her amusing yet disturbing tales of strange sexual practices.
We are, as ever, excited to release Book Two and of course, see what arousing abominations she’s created this time around. We managed to actually get her on the phone (a rare occurrence, akin to an eclipse or, dunno, eel migrations? Something like that…) and, after some business-style chat re: formatting for GREEN FEVER DREAM, pressed our advantage with a couple of interview questions…
MMP: Ready for some probing, Justine?
JG: Oh! You know it.
MMP: Let’s start with your definition of BLACKSTONE… erotic romance or erotica?
JG: Oh, erotica. No question. Let’s put it this way: ain’t nobody in my books overcoming adversity and building a stable relationship with a view to happily-ever-after. There’s no romance in my books and no apologies, either.
MMP: Alright then, paranormal erotica or regular flavour?
JG: Paranormal is such a useless term now, y’know? It’s just become this catch-all category for the vamps and werewolves and sexy witches. Excuse me while I stifle a yawn. I prefer the term “weird erotica” for my stuff, which means, basically, harkening back to the old-school weird fiction of yesteryear. My monsters are actually monstrous. Magic that’s not shiny. Sex that’s heavy on the F in “WTF?”
MMP: Yesteryear. There’s a rare word.
JG: Oh my god, man! Some of that old stuff was not safe at all! Racy, disturbing, dark materials with a serious vein of kink running through it all. I mean, nothing as explicit as today, but still… so much of the so-called paranormal fiction and erotica today is completely dull. I’m trying to introduce danger, threat. And fun, of course!
MMP: It’s working. Getting the feedback from some of our advance reviewers for RED MONOLITH FRENZY was enlightening for us. The word transgression came up more than once…
JG: Well, good, because that’s what I’m going for. Transgressive material, boundary-defying sex.
MMP: Certainly a few lines get crossed in Book One! The closing orgy is like nothing we’ve seen before but even so, it’s all humans involved, albeit freakishly mutated ones. You’re going further with Book Two, though?
JG: Oh yes. The problem with writing erotica with and for humans is that the politics are inescapable, really. Every interaction, even the most casual, is loaded with politics. So, with Book Two, I’m moving beyond humans, or human-proxies, which almost happened in Book One, but it wasn’t the right time for it in the arc of the story. For me, sex has always been about eroticizing the Other, and there’s only so far you can take that when the Other looks, speaks, and acts like you do.
MMP: If it’s not too personal to ask, how do you identify sexually?
JG: Not personal at all. Seriously, so-called personalities just get in the way of being an omni-sexual creature. And that’s “me”; I’m all over the map. Probably this has a lot to do with my personal occult practice, but I’ve broken and re-combined my identity so many times by now that the sight of a glass of water can get me warm!
MMP: Half-full? Or half-empty?
JG: (laughs) Oh, about three-quarters full with a little condensation around the lip and a damp coaster underneath and I’m all over that glass! But you get what I mean. I think it’s a completely open and natural way to approach the Universe. I mean, if you’ve incarnated here, then clearly you enjoy a physical, sexualized existence. Binaries are present so that they may be unified; there are no polarities, only symmetries. Everything is sexy from the right angle!
MMP: We have a feeling all your angles are non-Euclidean, but yeah, we get it.
JG: You know how some people are all “I like to make love during storms”? I’m the same way, honestly, but I’d rather be with the storm itself.
MMP: And you say you’re not a romantic?
JG: (laughs) Yeah, I guess that’s kind of Baudelaire of me, isn’t it?
MMP: A little. So what we’re hearing from you here is less about eroticizing the Other than it is the Outer? Is that correct or close, would you say?
JG: Sure. The sexualizing of concepts, it’s just the natural place to end up if you believe that whole ‘the brain is the main sex organ’ deal. If ideas get you horny, my stuff is for you. I’d like to write a scene someday in which I fuck Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem, but I’m not a mathemetician. Still, that would be something else! Probably never, truly finish, though… but the synaesthetic overload!
MMP: (laughs) We’ll try to find you some prize-winning mathlete to work with on that. But that’s another thing about your fiction that we’ve received some queries about: you’re the main character! What are you trying to do there with the first-person perspective? Is it straight-up reporting?
JG: I like my erotica with strong female characters, and I’m the strongest one I know, so, it’s auto-biographical material from another dimension! The Justine from seventeen degrees to the left gets up to some crazy stuff, and I just write about it: I pass the screaming on to you, like a good journalist! Seriously, though, I do believe in that stuff. If I’ve learned anything here, it’s that in an infinite Universe, everything is happening somewhere. There’s no such thing as fiction…
MMP: We love the way you drop terrifying cosmic implications into casual conversation! You don’t really shy away from loading your books with magic, and with your background…
JG: Yeah, it’s fifty shades of legit occult invocation of Eros! (laughs) I mean, I know my readers are smart, so why would I talk down to them? In RED MONOLITH FRENZY there’s some discussion on language-as-reality-modifier, and in GREEN FEVER DREAM, the orgone-radiation theories of Wilhelm Reich are a key part of the plot.
MMP: Not something you’d find in most of the erotica being produced. It’s why we like you here.
JG: Thank you! I mean, it’s not like I go on and on about those things. My books are all about the sex, but y’know, may as well learn a little something as you go. I hope it makes them different enough from the usual fare.
MMP: Speaking of which, would you ever write something like Fifty Shades of Grey? Maybe something with a Lovecraftian flavour?
JG: What, like Fifty Shades of R’lyeh? God, no. I respect Lovecraft too much, the old prude! (laughs) See, that Fifty Shades… it’s just glossed over rape-fantasy which, y’know, others have analyzed elsewhere, so I won’t go on about it. Again, I like the strong female characters, which this James creature is clearly not a fan of. Meh. Leave it for the housewives.
MMP: Something she has in common with Lovecraft. No strong females in his fiction…
JG: Well, exactly. Barely any females at all, and the few he does have are either weak or monstrous. Lovecraft avoided sex like the plague, so of course, it seethes and breeds between every line of his work. There’s folks who, well, I guess you’d call them, what? Lovecraft traditionalists? Get upset about filmmakers like Stuart Gordon or authors who dose their Lovecraftiana with sex and I just don’t get that. It’s there, it’s complicit, embedded in the material, and we’re all big boys and girls and other things, so why not bring it out. Have some fun with it.
MMP: Sure, but does that defeat the purpose?
JG: Not at all! Now, I think we’re in danger in this society, in danger of becoming anhedonic. Of exhausting ourselves of the pleasure principle and more importantly, of those things that trigger wonder in us. Which is what sex should do. It’s wonderful and it’s horrific, also, and this is something we forget. I don’t want us to forget that. It’s transformative. So, use it as such. Use it to transform and as long as you’re transforming, why not become something more than human? Just seems like an obvious thing to me.
MMP: Not giving anything away here, but what’s next for Justine G in GREEN FEVER DREAM and beyond?
JG: She gets out of fucking Czechoslovakia, for starters! Let’s see… London, five-star hotels, new powers, new apprentice, new threats! Plenty of sex and then, as with the first book, a big reveal at the end. She gets some answers, and of course, more questions arise. Then it’s off to Boston for Book Three! And possibly something off-planet for Book Four…
MMP: Yes! As ever, looking forward to it, Justine.
Justine G’s BLACKSTONE Erotica series continues with Book Two GREEN FEVER DREAM, available as a DRM-free Kindle ebook
