I’m foregoing the semi-usual Muse Monday-Tuesday-Wednesday-Whenever-The-Hell-I-Write-It post in favor of one in 
honor of a release I have today: Jane Litte’s (of Dear Author) BDSM-y anthology Agony/Ecstasy. You can pick up a copy here and I highly recommend it, because I’m in some extremely good company.
I’m also a bit of an oddball, though, and I’d like to mark the release by talking about why.
“Wetwire” started out just straight-up erotica, but part of the way through the inception process, something interesting happened: I started to think about Themes. Those themes eventually expanded to fill most of the mental space of the story, until I ended up feeling like the sex was mostly a way of talking about something else. Two primary something elses, actually. They are:
– William Gibson’s idea of how “the street finds its own uses for things”. “Burning Chrome” is one of my favorite short stories ever, and Gibson is one of my favorite authors ever, so of course, setting out to write cyberpunk porn, it makes sense that he would be lurking in the background (not like in a creepy way). But the idea is interesting to me beyond that. What I ended up writing about was that initial moment in the emergence of a new form of technology – or a new evolution of an existing one – when it’s not yet widespread or widely commercial, when the only people making much use of it are techies and hackers. At those moments, its actual use might be extremely up for grabs – people might use it for a whole set of things for which it was not originally designed, and for which it may not be used by the public in general once it goes mainstream.
Hieros (m/m fantasy)
Like a Thorn – “That Wicked Witchcraft” (m/f/f menage)
Like a Long Road Home – “Neither Bird Nor Tree” (m/m post-apocalypse)
Like a Veil – “Catch & Release” (m/f science fiction)
Queerpunk – “Upload” (f/f science fiction)
