Reviewed by Susannah Indigo
(12/12/01)

"When I finish a story it's like a great fuck. When I sell a story it's like an orgasm that rattles your back teeth. When I get in a book with 'Best' in the title, it's like a come that is God giving you the thumbs-up. When I sell a book, it's like the petite morte that shows you the glories of heaven: I am the sexiest man alive, my penis is great and powerful, my semen boils with genius, and my orgasms destroy buildings in Anchorage, Alaska.... Sometimes."

Those are M. Christian's words on writing, in his new book, The Burning Pen: Sex Writers on Sex Writing, and it shows you exactly why this book is so marvelous.

Passion.

That's what I want from stories, and that's what I want to read about from writers, and here it is. A dozen erotic writers tell us about their passion for writing, and then, as if that wasn't enough(!), they give us their own favorite erotic story. There is Pat/Patrick Califia writing about the creation of Macho Sluts, and how writing and life has changed since then, along with a very hot story called An Insistent and Indelicate Muse, about a woman waiting and insisting on becoming a Master's next slave/student, whether he wants her to or not.

One of my all-time favorite erotic stories is also included -- Leslea Newman's Eggs McMenopause -- in which a woman buys 408 eggs from various stores, to represent all of her "lost" eggs as she reaches menopause, arranges them around her apartment, and then...she brings home a lover unexpectedly. High imagination, truth, humor, passion and sex -- what else can we ask for from a story?

In another story called Tension, a writer named R.L. Marsh, who I hadn't read before, writes about two men who are married (and whose wives are friends) getting involved with each other, and the complications that arise. It is hot, sad, and outstanding writing. Near the end, one of the men chases down the other and they end up on the side of the house:

Behind a trio of lilac bushes, beside an old water pump, he takes off his shirt, lets his pants fall to his ankles. His cock is engorged, engaged, jutting heavily from his groin. I take it in my hand and go to my knees, getting him in my mouth. I slip my tongue into the taut skin sleeve and tickle the sensitive head.

The sun catches us. His pubic hair shines like gloss. I heft his balls, squeezing them hard. "Tell me you love me," I say, my lips on his cock tip, blackmailing.

"Don't be ridiculous," he replies, touching the side of my face, pushing his cock into my mouth again.

One of the most interesting pieces on writing is from Jack Fritscher, who's been writing for forty three years and was the founding editor of Drummer, and is now writing as "www.JackFritscher.com":

Ask me no questions and I'll tell you no lies. The British critic Edward Lucie-Smith told me that if my once-upon-a-time lover Robert Mapplethorpe had written a monograph on how and why he shot his photographs, the world would have had an invaluable insight into his work. Because Robert wrote nothing, his beautiful work stands on its own. Answering why and how I write my literary erotica is like skating a figure 8 on an ice cube, naked. Anne Rice and I started out on Castro Street at the same time; both of us have double careers writing fiction and literary erotic fiction. Behind the mask of eros, I write literature. Erotica is literature with velocity. My writing is like thinking while coming. I'm Gatsby's Daisy: "I write because men are so...so...beautiful" and because of the incredible lightness of being male. I enjoy being a guy.

"Pornography changes the world," Pat Califia is quoted as saying, and this smart, complex book is an excellent place to read about how and why that just may be true.

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