Following on with the theme of voyerism and exhibitionism, here’s a forray into a book about someone who spends a lot of time having sex in front of a camera.

The article below is by M. King

In Devil & the Deep Blue Sea, average—albeit slightly shy and geeky—guy Jacob meets and falls for the stunning, confident Laszlo. There’s only one problem: Laszlo works in adult films and, though he’s honest about it from the very first, Jacob finds the idea, and the reality, of dating a porn star deeply uncomfortable.

He tries to rationalize it; after all, he watches porn, and intellectually he knows there’s a thriving industry behind it, but he still struggles to overcome his prejudices…and his jealousy.

In contrast, Laszlo, both emotionally and sexually, is expansive and uninhibited. He’s a total exhibitionist, in the sense that he unreservedly enjoys both giving and receiving pleasure. Laszlo takes pride in the power his sexuality gives him, but he keeps his working persona, ‘Maxim Winter’, distinct from his personal life.

Though the book is written from Jacob’s point of view, we learn Laszlo is nervous about how revealing his line of work will affect things between them. Most of his past relationships have been ruined by the same pattern of jealousy and recrimination that now threaten his and Jacob’s romance, yet Laszlo refuses to feel a shred of guilt about what he does.

On one level, he treats it as any other career—he promotes himself on the internet, and shares anecdotes and gossip from the sets with Jacob, almost failing to realize that telling his boyfriend about something funny that happened while he was having sex on camera with another man is going to cause tension.

To Laszlo, personal and professional, or emotional and sexual, are totally different things. When Jacob challenges him, he is mocking and sarcastic, angered by hearing the same questions and complaints he has heard so often before.

Abruptly, Laszlo pushed away from the window, voice sharp and raw.

“Because the money’s good, it feels good, and I look fuckin’ awesome doing it! Okay? That what you want to hear?”[…] “Come on, next one.” He threw his hands up in spiteful encouragement. “Quick! Aw, come on. There’s always a next one. ‘Why aren’t I enough?’ How about that?”

For Laszlo, being Maxim Winter is about freedom. Exhibiting his body and sharing his most intimate physical moments with an unseen audience—potentially of several thousand people—is an empowering, liberating thing.

However Jacob, almost by default, finds himself cast as a voyeur, and he doesn’t enjoy it. For him, there is a clear and finite line “between fantasizing about a hot scene, and thinking about the reality of fucking for money in some anonymous hotel room or semi-public studio.”

Early in their relationship, Jacob forces himself to watch one of Maxim Winter’s movies. He’s turned on by what he sees, but at the same time hates the reality of watching Laszlo:

 Jacob couldn’t sit through any of those scenes to their completion. He hated seeing Lasz—Maxim—vulnerable in front of the camera, when his chest flushed and his breathing tautened and his body bucked against someone else’s. Stupid, Jacob told himself, because it was fucking hot and—in any other movie—he’d have loved it. Any other actor. But, knowing him, it just seemed wrong. 

 The problem for Jacob is that his voyeurism is automatically transformed into hypocrisy. He knows that, by being honest with him, Laszlo has nothing to be ashamed of, and no reason to apologize. But, next to his effortless, feral sexuality, Jacob feels inferior, and that enrages him.

As Jacob descends deeper into circuitous, self-absorbed jealousy, he is torn between his growing love for Laszlo, and the loss of control with which that emotion threatens him.

Ultimately, that—the question of how much we truly share ourselves with others, and how we deal with the act of doing so—is the central theme with which Devil & the Deep Blue Sea engages.

And there are no quick, easy answers.

 M. King writes predominantly for the His and His Kisses line, although she also has a short story – Whistlebait with Femerotica, and another – Filth, coming out with the TransFix line.

Bryn: You came to lyd with the Immortal Fire project… how did you get involved with that?

M King: Well, I was first approached by Nix Winter and Jaime Samms, who had the idea for a fantasy m/m anthology. It sounded great to me, especially as there are some pretty strong similarities in our writing styles. Nix suggested pitching the idea to loveyoudivine, so we did, and the rest was, as they say, history! 

From the first moment, lyd has been a lovely working environment. I can’t stress that enough. It’s clichéd to say it’s like a family, but that really is true. As the Immortal Fire project picked up speed, of course Clare London, Adrianne Brennan and, um, you came on board (*grin*), and the anthology really developed a distinctive feel that, I think, has carried through to the finished volume.

My copy is sitting on my shelf now, complete with Nix’s beautiful artwork, and it has been an unqualified pleasure, and a privilege, to be part of it.

Bryn: I get the impression from your website that you write as a number of people. How does that work, and do you ever get confused about who you’re being?

M King: Those who know me might suggest I’m always confused, but it probably doesn’t have much to do with pseudonyms….

It’s a fairly new thing, as a matter of fact. I’ve written anonymously or under different names for a long while, and M. King is the first pen name I’ve treated as a cohesive identity. It’s just a short version of my real name, after all. The idea behind using a set of different names came about because I’ve found a lot of readers identify M. King as a writer of gay and m/m fiction and little else, which isn’t really true. 

The plan might have been to break everything up into well-organised chunks that could be clearly identified – one name for horror, one for gay fiction, one for straight erotica – but of course I don’t find it that simple. Too much of my work cuts across various genres at once, and then there’s the whole issue of social media and networking. It’s one thing to list a webpage for a pseudonym, but I’m not sure I could hold down half a dozen different profiles as well!

Plus, frankly, I don’t think readers really need to be that mollycoddled. Sure, it helps to know that such-and-such author writes a particular kind of fiction, but I’m not sure how far readers expect them to do that and nothing else. I certainly don’t read just one genre, and I don’t write that way either. 

That said, there are probably issues of style in the different names I use. I’ve written very explicit erotica as Chastity Vicks that isn’t necessarily much like M. King erotica, while as E. A. Gray, I’m writing a series of mainstream medieval historical thrillers. And so on. It’s really about me trying to make everything I write as accessible as possible for as many readers as I can. 

Bryn: How much writing do you do in a typical day?

M King: In terms of ideas, I’m never off the clock, and I have a selection of notepads, backs of envelopes (and occasionally household bills, beer mats, napkins etc…) that I scribble notes down on to work up later.

Usually, I find time to clear a minimum of 1500-2000 words a day, in between the dreaded housework, doggy things, and various other stuff. But, if I have a deadline or something’s going really well, then barring accidents I’ll attach myself to the computer by an umbilical cord and just write until it’s done. That can mean anything from 5000-10,000 words…but sleep isn’t important, right?

Bryn: And you do covers as well… (gorgeous ones in fact). Do they take a lot of work?

M King: Thank you! It’s probably no secret that I learned most of my cover art skills from Emmy Ellis (http://emmyscovers.wordpress.com). I’ve always been a keen fiddler-about-with of artistic things, but she taught me a lot about adapting nebulous ideas into cover graphics that actually work!

Of course, loveyoudivine also boasts two other fab cover artists in the form of Nix Winter, who uses her own art and photography in her designs, and Dawne Dominique, who just topped the Pre-Editors’ and Editors’ Poll as best cover artist of 2009. They both produce awesome work, but probably the most difficult thing for me is filtering the first idea that I have into the final design. I’ll go through various different drafts to achieve the look I’m after, but that’s not always a bad thing.

Bryn: You and Emmy do have a similar look to your covers, but I’d not put that together at all. Ok, off at a tangent… you’ve just done a whole series of Gypsy tales, soon to be in paperback. I wondered what drew you to that theme?

M King: Mwah-hah! Yes, Travellers’ Tales. The stories are all inspired by traditional Romany folklore which–as readers may or may not know–is a wonderful, rich, intense oral tradition going back centuries in England and Europe. They only started to be written down in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and survived through people like John Hampden and John Sampson, who collected the tales as they were told by fascinating figures such as Matthew Wood, the famous Welsh Gypsy story-teller. I’d wanted to use these stories in some way for a long while, because folklore in all its forms is a passion of mine, and I’m also a strong advocate of Romani rights.  

Back in the Fifties, my mother spent her summers with a Romani family in Kent (South East England), learning to ride, listening to stories (and yes, eating baked hedgehog!) and she recalls how the Caravans Acts of the 1960s curtailed the traditional way of life for travelling families, leading up to the situation we have in England today, where there is not only a great lack of available permanent sites for travellers, but also an appalling degree of prejudice. I lived for some time in East Anglia, probably one of the worst areas for that kind of attitude, and it was terrible to see people actually having to box their horses and transport their vardoes (caravans) in plain trailers to avoid being stoned on the road. 

Obviously, my fiction has some pretty crucial differences from the original stories, which is why I’ve said ‘inspired by’. The fact the tales all feature gay characters wouldn’t have gone down well at the time they’re set (the first years of the twentieth century) and probably wouldn’t go down too well with many Roma communities today! The way of life, both for travellers and gaje (non-travellers, also known as gorgios, or various other forms of the word) described in the stories has changed a great deal since the time I’m writing about, and that’s really the point of the tales. Yes, they’re very much folk tale-inspired fantasy, but they’re also about the way society isolates people–whether by race, gender, orientation or culture–and how that can, and must, change. 

Bryn: And… where can people find you online?

M King: You can find full details on all my published titles, along with excerpts, free reads and more, at http://thenakednib.com, where you can now sign up for my monthly newsletter (exclusive freebies and special offers for subscribers!) 

 I also loiter on Twitter (http://www.twitter.com/mkingauthor), Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/originalcinnamon) and MySpace (http://www.myspace.com/originalcinnamon), and I love hearing from readers and fellow writers.

Thanks for having me.

If you were going to live forever, what form would you want to take? The eternal night of a vampire? The ability to heal from anything so that old age and death are never likely to catch you? Worlds do not live forever, so would you choose the ability to travel in space, or time?

 Eternity is a very long prospect. The bodies we have were not designed with it in mind. How much would we have to change? What would we give up, along with our frailty, to become immortal? What would it cost in terms of soul and self? It’s hard to know, or to imagine.

Could you bear to face centuries, millennia alone? Could you love those who remained mortal, doomed to watch them age and die? Perhaps the ability to bring others into your immortal state would be a good power to wish for. But what if they do not like it? What if, having all eternity to love, that passion decays into hatred? There are many dangers. The heart of an immortal is more vulnerable than a human’s. So much time in which to acquire bruises, and wounds. So many more years in which to experience betrayal, failure, disappointment.

How could an immortal being dare to love anyone?

How could he bear the solitude of an eternity alone?

With all the time in the world, the need for love becomes more desperate, more urgent than ever.

 Immortal Fire: Available now from amazon

The Gypsy & The Witch comes out today, so I thought I’d post a few words. It’s the third installment of M King’s Traveller’s Tales series (the other two being The Green Man and The Golden Horse) and there are more to come. Each story stands alone, they’re connected by theme, not characters or plot. M King takes her inspiration from folklore and Romany tales, creating beautiful dak fairytales of an m/m persuasion.

I’m a huge fan of these stories – I’ve had so much fun editing them. The writing is gorgeous, the stories engaging, the characters so easy to fall in love with. These are stories at the romantic and sensual end of the erotic spectrum.

The Gyspy & The Witch is one of the darker stories in the set. It’s quite creepy, with defnite horror elements. If adult fairy tales are your thing, I can’t recomend this enough. It’s on the front page at www.loveyoudivine.com