M.Christian is - among many things - an acknowledged master of erotica with more than 300 stories in such anthologies as Best American Erotica, Best Gay Erotica, Best Lesbian Erotica, Best Bisexual Erotica, Best Fetish Erotica, and many, many other anthologies, magazines, and Web sites.

He is the editor of 20 anthologies including the Best S/M Erotica series, The Burning Pen, Guilty Pleasures, The Mammoth Book of Future Cops and The Mammoth Book of Tales of the Road (with Maxim Jakubowksi) and Confessions, Garden of Perverse, and Amazons (with Sage Vivant) as well as many others.

He is the author of the collections Dirty Words, Speaking Parts, The Bachelor Machine, Licks & Promises, Filthy, Love Without Gun Control, Rude Mechanicals, and Coming Together: M.Christian; and the novels Running Dry, The Very Bloody Marys, Me2, Brushes, and Painted Doll.

Muse: First of all, Whispers of the Muse welcomes you to the site. Tell us a little about yourself. What part of the world do you live in? Tell us about your background?
M Christian: My dear, I live in my own little fantasy world: elves, fairies, vampires ... compassionate conservatives....

In all seriousness I’ve lived in the San Francisco Bay Area since 1988, having moved up here from LA, where I was born.  Between here and there I’ve lived in Europe for a year and seen just about every state in the union, as well – as have most of us I believe – as having had a wide variety of jobs.  Right now I drive a truck for an organic mushroom farm.  Thrilling, I know, but I do it for the fresh air and exercise more than the staggeringly huge paycheck.

Writing-wise, ever since I was a wee little one I’ve always been very imaginative, but it wasn’t until high school that I heard I could use my imagination to make a living by maybe, perhaps, being a writer. 

For the next ten years I tried my best to do just that ... and failed each and every time, though I did periodically come close.  But then in 1993, on pretty much a larf, I took a class in erotica writing and handed the teacher my very first try at smut.  Shock!  Amazement!  She not only bought the story for a magazine she was editing but it was then reprinted in Best American Erotica 1994.  The rest, as they say, is history.

Muse: Who are your favorite authors?
M Christian: I like to say that I like what I like, in that while I certainly have some faves I think good writing is good writing, no matter where it might pop up: TV shows, comic books, romance, Westerns, shopping lists – whatever.  Right now my tastes are all over the place: I’m a huge fan of Alexander Jablokov, Adam Warren, Grant Morrison, Hilary J. Bader, Eiji Otsuka, Alfie Bester, and ... a lot more I know I’m forgetting.  I zealously resist really popular authors because, one, they usually are pretty damned awful but, two, as a fringe writer I feel the least I can do is support other writers who have avoided, or been denied, the spotlight.

Muse: Why do you write SciFi Fantasy Horror? What other genres do you write in?
M Christian: To paraphrase Chico Escuela (look him up): “Erotica’s been very, very good to me.”  So, yeah, I write a lot of it because that’s where my ‘name’ seems to be and while I enjoy it I’m also a firm believer in stretching one’s wings, to try all kinds of genres, styles ... and what have you.  After all, you simply don’t know if you’re going to be good at something until you try it.  So I’ve also written – with varying degrees of success -- some romance, a few Westerns, quite a number of horror stories, a smidgen of fantasy tales, a pretty big parcel of non-fiction, and everything betwixt and between.  I was very lucky that the great folks at PageTurner books not only liked my science fiction, fantasy, and horror attempts but even went out on a limb to put out a book of them. 

Muse: What is your writing regimen? How often do you work on a novel? Do you set daily time or word goals? What keeps you meeting your deadlines?
M Christian:
I have a tremendously serious work ethic.  I like to say that I don’t have a muse, that I don’t wait around for inspiration: I work.  I work very, very hard.  I know pretty much what has to happen and when it has to happen and push to meet that deadline.  For novels, I can usually finish one in about six or so months ... though the last one took way longer than that because life simply got in the way.  But in an ideal week I can write one or two non-fiction pieces, deal with email and the like, and maybe finish either one story or a chapter of a book – all between a weekly visit to my elderly mom, and driving the mushroom truck three days a week, 12 hours a day.

Muse: Does the way you personally look at life reflect in your writing style?
M Christian: I like to call myself ‘pathologically kind,’ in that I try my best to help my friends and family – sometimes to my own detriment.  To other writers I’m especially conscientious because I’m all too aware how difficult being a writer can be: little money, no respect, catty reviewers ... so the least I can do is try and be nice to them.  But my writing has a tendency to be a bit, well, dark.  Not pointlessly horrific, just a shade on the pessimistic side.  Reaction to my regular personality?  Maybe.  But I do know I like telling stories that deal with ethical problems and moral ‘grayness,’ where good guys aren’t really that good and the bad guys maybe not that bad.  It’s just more exciting to tell those stories, rather than ones where you know what’s going to happen at the end: the white hats getting the girl and the black hats getting buried at Boot Hill ... so to speak.

Muse: What are the creative jumping off points for you? Are you inspired by dreams? Music? Nature? The occasional black nightmare? What triggers your imagination?
M Christian: My mind is pretty much chugging away all the time – which can be very annoying, especially when I’m trying to get to sleep.  All kinds of weird stuff can set me off: the book I’m reading, the show I’m watching – you name it.  One of my biggest sparks is a series of games I play with myself: like trying to think of a different ending for a book or a flick, or a sequel to something, or to fix what I saw or read that didn’t work as well as it could have.  I also challenge myself to do things like trying to tell a story from a different viewpoint, write a movie or visualize the film of a book.  I firmly believe that imagination is a muscle and that if you don’t exercise it constantly it will let you down when you need it the most. 

Muse: Tell us about Love without Gun Control. What was your inspiration?
M Christian: Well, let’s see: it’s a collection of some of my fantasy, horror, and science fiction stories I’ve written over the years, some previously published, some brand new.  It’s got zombies, weird magic, androids, the ghost of Chairman Mao, a couple of tales featuring Nicolai and Constantine Foote (characters I plan to work into a novel or two one of these days), and some other really fun – and definitely odd – things.  Since it is a collection my inspiration is all over the place: the zombie story was written for a zombie book ... so there you go, one of the robot stories (and one of my faves) was written because one of my hobbies is building little electronic gizmos and gadgets, and the title story is a muse on -- kind of obviously -- what life would be like in a world where lead flies at the slightest provocation. 

Muse: What is your favorite scene from the book and why?
M Christian: Humm ... I don’t really have a single favorite because they are all very different, though writing about the Foote brothers was a lot of fun, as was the title story.  “1,000” has a theme I’d like to expand on in a novel, so that’s also one I really like – the same for “Needle Taste.”  The title story is the one I like to send people because it kind of sums up the book itself: weird, wild, funny, scary ... and, hopefully, as much fun to read as it was to write.

Muse: Have you written other books?
M Christian: I have about nine collections of short stories out there, have edited some 20 or so anthologies, and have written six novels – and more coming out very soon.  My site at www.mchristian.com has links to most of them, including to my amazon list that has all of my books.  Buy many copies, buy many copies, buy many copies ....

Muse: Tell us about your other books?
M Christian: Boy, where to start ... my novels are kind of all over the place: Brushes is an erotic romance about the people surrounding a famous artist, Painted Doll is a science fiction noir erotica tale, The Very Blood Marys is a vampire detective novel, Running Dry is another vamp story but with a totally unique reinterpretation of the myth, and Me2 is a book about losing your identity – which, ironically, is odd because I still say I didn’t write the thing.  But no one ever believes me (sigh).

I also have several collections that just came out: Rude Mechanicals is an erotica collection, as is Licks & Promises.  I also have a collection of my how to write erotica columns I did for the Erotica Readers and Writers site coming out soon.  Beyond all these I have two new anthologies I edited that will be either out soon or were just released: Sex in San Francisco (about getting it on in Bagdad by the Bay), and Best S/M Erotica Vol. 3, which is – naturally the third book in a serious about weapon’s grade kinky stuff.  I have other things coming in the future but don’t want to jinx them by bragging too early ....

Muse: How do you feel about the current publishing marketplace?
M Christian: Like a lot of writers I feel like the floor’s dropped out from under me: classic book publishing is pretty much dead and ebooks are roaring up to take their place – which is a good thing but until the dust settles I think there’s going to be a lot of anxiety.  Unlike some writers, though, I, for one, welcome our ebook overlords: sure, print books gave us advances, but they were never good for writers.  That our value had to be constantly weighted against the cost of printing and distributing books meant that we all had to begin in the red and, hopefully, work our way into enough black to make us and our work worth paying for again – which very few writers could do.  What’s great about ebooks is that because they practically cost zilch publishers can take risks and put all kinds of books out there ... which is also the bad news, alas, as this now means that since everyone can be a writer the competition is now to be heard over the din.