Like a Veil: Erotic Tales of the Arabian Nights, which features my story “Catch and Release”, is now officially out in a variety of formats from a variety of places. It’s an awesome little collection.
My story is a science fiction retelling of the 1001 Nights story “The Fisherman and the Jinni”. It’s a very rough retelling, adopting more the spirit of the story than sticking close to the original plot, and at first I wasn’t entirely sure how to approach it. But I drew some parallels in my mind between djinn imprisoned in lamps and strange, powerful alien entities imprisoned in drifting capsules, and taking the story and giving it a scifi bent seemed like an interesting way of going after it. The story itself turned into something of a fable regarding wanting to belong while at the same time rebelling against the things that threaten to tie you down to the merely conventional. The setting of a rebuilt, futuristic Baghdad, constantly in the background, served as a nice focal point for these two warring strands of past and future, the impossibly ancient and the profoundly new.
I also love the idea of Suleiman drifting in the solar winds, picking up all the trash that our space-faring descendants would doubtlessly generate. It’s an image that’s stuck with me long after the story was done.
NSFW excerpt under the cut.
In the Pale Moonlight, my queer medieval werewolf novella–man, that’s kind of a mouthful–is now on sale from Liquid Silver Books. You can find a
