Eric Arvin's Blog, page 18

EXCERPT: Miss Locks

From my BRAND NEW short story, just released Friday from Untreed Reads: "Miss Locks." It's a bit on the disturbing side. I think I'm finding a niche in horror. You can get it HERE or through Amazon or - soon enough - anywhere you download from:




MISS LOCKS
Eric Arvin






Virginia Locks, a woman of established career and notable grace, found herself standing on the walkway in front of her house. 

“What am I doing here?” she wondered. 

The night was still around her. As if it was staring her down. Up and down the street of old Victorian homes she could see there had been a blackout. This was strange, as there had been no bad weather. But there were no lights. There was no life. There was hardly a sound to be heard at all. Not even the night bugs. 

“What is going on?” 

Her career had made her a world traveler. She knew the ins and outs of every major airport and expensive hotel on earth. She knew where to get the best gifts and souvenirs. She had put off settling down because she just couldn’t see herself being locked in to one place for very long. But she had found this city on one of her many trips and had fallen in love with it. Then she found this old house on this old street. It was perfect and seemed as traveled as she. She had been living there for a few months now. In a place as old as this there were ghost stories, but she had never thought twice about such things. That’s not to say she believed in ghosts or didn’t. She simply never thought too hard on the matter. 

Virginia—Ginny to her friends—placed her hand to her chest, as was her habit when, on the rare occasion, she faced confusion. Confusion was not affordable when one traveled as much as Virginia. She wore a slimming summer dress, the one she had chosen for the blind date her friend had set her up on. The description she had been given was of a nice handsome doctor. At least that meant he had to be somewhat intelligent. Virginia had not dated in a while precisely because of the seeming stupidity of every man she ever met. But, no matter his intelligence, how would her date ever find her now that the power was off? She wondered if it was off in his area of the city as well. He would be there soon to pick her up. She decided to go back in the house and finish… 

Finish what? She was already dressed. What more had she to do? And why was she outside? 

Strange that there was not a sound. Not a single insect chirp.

New Release: Miss Locks

My new short horror story, Miss Locks, is now available!


Miss Virginia Locks has a date tonight, but something is wrong. She finds herself standing outside her home without any knowledge of how she got there. But what waits for her once she is back inside, a crawling, gasping thing, is even more unsettling. A short story. Available HERE or Amazon...or a whole host of other places.

What Type of Writer Am I?

What type of writer be I?

I've been thinking about that a lot lately. What's my style? What do readers think when they read my name?
I've been spending some time on Good Reads lately - that online library/chat room/encyclopedia - reading over reviews. Not just reviews of my own writing, but those of other authors as well. While reading reviews of one's work can be a very affirming hobby, it can also be a dangerous one. As a writer, one is bound to run into negative reviews. Some of these can be quite helpful, well-written, and insightful. Others can be vicious, as if the reviewer now has a personal vendetta against the author. They draw blood.
Some people have been disappointed with my latest novel,  Galley Proof . While I wish that wasn't the case, there has never been a proven way to please everyone all the time. Some people just won't connect with me or my writing. That's fine. We are not clones. I wrote a book that perhaps means much more to me than it does to someone looking for a good romance.
A lot of this disappointment, I think, comes from expectations. Many of the less than favorable reviews come from people who have never read any of my other works. My writing, I have been told, is not typical. I write for Dreamspinner Press, a m/m romance publisher, but my books don't fall neatly into that genre. I have been lucky enough to find a publisher who believes in my work so much they'll publish me anyway. The best description of my writing I've seen so far was from a reviewer who said I wrote "gay fiction with romantic themes." I think it throws readers when they go looking for a balls out romance and pick up one of my books. They soon find my book doesn't follow a particular template. When you are not what people expect you to be, it's something akin to taking a big gulp of Pepsi only to find that it's really iced tea.
(Then again, maybe they just hate my writing.)
I hate the idea that I'm a disappointment to anyone. At heart, my books are about character more than story. I prefer the surreal and fantastic storylines to the contemporary ones. Of the TEN published books I have written, only THREE were intentionally written as romantic. Simple Men  succeeded the most, I think, in capturing the genre's template. I tried again with  Another Enchanted April,  and then once more with  Galley Proof.  The latter two branched off from the m/m genre as I was writing them. I freely admit that. Yet I find them much more interesting works because of that. Anyone who has read the latter knows how personal it is. Sometimes embarrassingly so. It's just shy of a memoir in parts.
I don't have it in me, the ability to write sweeping m/m romance. But maybe that's a good thing. There are a number of master traditional m/m romance writers out there. As long as I have a publisher, I'll be happy to be the weird guy at the party telling stories that might be just a little off. I might not be the most popular cock, but I shoot one hell of a load.

EXCERPT: Mad Bull & Glory

{Here be a very short erotic tale I wrote a while back. If you've read my book SubSurdity (not an erotic book itself)  you'll recognize the characters. I don't know if I ever really thought this would find placement anywhere. It's a tiny tale. But it was fun to write. Maybe I'll include it in a future anthology if I'm lucky anough to have another.}

Mad Bull & Glory
Eric Arvin
copyright, 2007


It would have been an exhausting day if it hadn’t been for the countless cans of Mad Bull energy drink he had gulped down. There was so much to do that David never even had the chance to eat lunch, just more and more Mad Bull. He supposed it was good marketing. He didn’t know; he was a writer, and this was just a job to keep some money coming in. But he worked for the Mad Bull company and he was at the bodybuilding expo which Mad Bull sponsored. Yeah. He was doing the company good while speeding his heart to ridiculous rhythm.

David rode the elevator to his room on the top floor, every so often taking a quick swig of energy juice. It was a nice hotel; nothing too special, but it was large, and honestly, what classy hotel would host a bodybuilding expo? He sighed. It was really too bad he hadn’t enjoyed his day, he thought. He had access to the backrooms, the back stage, the backs of these beefy showmen. Yet there hadn’t even been time to pause and admire the swollen mounds of oiled muscle parading about as humans. No. David was busy escorting agents here or family members there. Not a muscle baby within ten feet of his itchy fingers.

He took another swig. “Thank god for the drinks,” he mumbled. They had saved him from becoming limp and useless on the job. “Not one muscle Mary,” he huffed, watching the elevator button lights climb. One thing was sure. He was certainly never going to get to sleep that night, not with all the Mad Bull he had swallowed. He decided that he’d just have to look out over his room’s balcony, nicely situated over the pool. There would surely be some bodybuilders having some nighttime pool refreshment. With the lights to his room off and his adrenaline pumping be could stay out watching them all night. Those big guys would be just the rescue his libido needed in the form of continuous masturbatory fantasies. He was already getting hard thinking about it. He was glad he’d brought his binoculars.

The elevator stopped two floors below David’s nighttime rendezvous, and as the doors opened he was stunned to see the figure of one of the larger bodybuilders in the contest. His name was Cliff, or something like that. He wasn’t going to win the competition (he was perhaps too big and not strictly symmetrical), but he caused David’s maddened heart to quicken even more. He wore a workout shirt that hung from his massive shoulders, and baggy, plaid shorts. The man turned to David and smiled. David drooled, or at least he felt like he did. In truth, he said something pedestrian in the form of a greeting. He couldn’t take his eyes off the man, and he didn’t know if it was because of all his bottled energy or some true attraction.

Cliff looked at David again, kindly, gently, but with some sensuality. David tried to straighten up, to puff out his chest. He wasn’t a bodybuilder but he kept in good shape. His meaty elevator companion seemed to notice. His eyes covered David head to toe. David felt his skin going warm. Was this bodybuilder the type of guy to do some elevator sexin’? A pounding from him would break the cables. What a glorious death that would be!

But, as David was about to open his mouth and say something daring and worthy of the best gay erotic novel, the elevator came to a halt the floor below David’s own, and the doors opened. The cumbersome man climbed from the cage as David’s hopes for a wrestling match were dashed. He eyed with longing and heartbreak the large glutes as they as they took turns rising and falling, both still visible beneath the baggy shorts. Seeming to feel the stare, the bodybuilder turned around, playfully nodding an invitation back to his room. At the site of that grin, David pulled the closing elevator doors apart with more ease than a superman who’s had a whole can of spinach or carrots or whatever it was that supermen ate.

David tried not to follow too quickly or closely down the quiet midnight hallway, but this was the chance of a lifetime. To be the bottom boy of a towering muscle man; what guy wouldn’t want that? Maybe there’d be some hot muscle worshipping.

After a few seconds of respectable, if torturous, waiting once the bodybuilder had gone into his room, David slipped in through the propped door. His body tingled from the anticipation of being topped by such a man. His thoughts of himself as bottom boy vanished, however, as he came fully into the room. The bodybuilder’s clothing had been quickly shed to the floor, and the man himself was positioned on the bed on all fours, his beautiful ass shot proudly in the air, cheeks wide and gorgeous.

The nearly empty can of Mad Bull fell from David’s hand as he stared in disbelief – and sheer joy. He almost bounded out of his khakis, his eyes focused on the sight in front of him. His dick had never been as painfully erect, and in his mind came one thought: Fuck foreplay!

He found it surprisingly easy to gain entrance between the two palm-exceeding cheeks, but the well-used hole still provided extraordinarily sufficient pleasure. David felt as if his head was going to explode as he grabbed and clawed at the Cliff’s sculpted ass. He had never pumped so hard and so fast in his life. Surely, his speed would have killed a normal man. The Mad Bull had turned him into a frenzied, fast-forward fucking machine. The muscleman groaned and gasped loudly as his own body blurred from the rapid fire fucking he was receiving. David couldn’t tell if Cliff was saying “ho”, “go”, or “no”. At this point, with his head in ecstatic revelry, he didn’t care. The slapping of flesh, the noises of fucktasia coming from the bodybuilder, David was certain that when he did cum he was going to blast a hole through the wall. Their bodies shook, the bed shook, the room shook. David lifted Cliff in the air, going deep into his guts with loving rage. Cliff cried as if he were a virgin boy.

This Mad Bull was superhuman elixir. Market that! That’ll raise sales.

David felt the crescendo approaching. He leaned them both forward, pulling on his ride’s hair, and let loose with a stream of cum that, he was certain, had never been witnessed before by the boring walls of the room. Both he and the bodybuilder let out gaping cries of satisfaction before falling to the soaked sheets of the bed. 

They both lay there for a bit, silent and entranced by the remnants of euphoria. David was still hard. His cock lay against the Cliff’s ass. Every so often it would jerk as if straining to regain entrance to the bodybuilder.

The muscleman made a motion to rise. “You want something to drink?” he nodded to a corner which held cases of complimentary Mad Bull. He gave a grin of appreciation. “I can’t stomach the stuff myself. And I can stomach a lot.”

He rose (the bed jumped up in relief) and walked, albeit with a slightly wobbly gait, to the balcony. David watched him with lust and tenderness as he leaned out naked over the railing. The light from the room shone on the beautiful flesh of Cliff’s ass. David felt his cock wanting, uncontrolled. He looked to the corner at the cases of Mad Bull, then back at the great piece of art on the balcony.

“A superhero’s work is never done,” he said to himself.

Wonderful review of "She's Come Undone"

Ro-Always Inspired: SHORT STORY REVIEW: She’s Come Undone by Eric Arvin          Publisher: Untreed Reads Publishing (March 19, 2012)         ASIN: B007MTPEQW Rating: ★★★★ ★ Ju...

Men...Men with Penises

What is it that makes a man attractive?

For me, the answer to that question has changed over the years, as it should. The only thing that every man I have ever been attracted to has had in common is their essence of masculinity. This essence has really nothing to do with sex organs or the size of them, but is rather that certain sense of male-ness. Let me see if I can explain: There's a whole subgenre within a subgenre of gay erotica in which the male hero - a Superman type with bulging muscles - through whatever means, ends up with a vagina. His wiener be gone or pushed inside his frame, and he sportin' the cooter. Once I got past my initial shock at this idea, I found I wasn't too disturbed by it. Superman was still hot, even with a woo-hoo instead of a dingle-dong. His masculinity was still hanging out even if his balls weren't. The Masculine Mystique.

Still, masculine essence a given, my attractions have changed beyond that. My first erotic memory was about Bo Duke. You know. One of the good ol' boys riding around in the General Lee. Ick. This is strange for me since I'm usually not attracted to blonds. Occasionally I'll see one and be wowed, but that's a random occurrence. I much prefer darker-haired men.

For a large part of my life I was all about the boy next door look. Clean cut and handsome. I had a junior high math teacher who exemplified this look and who was positively distracting in his khakis. I remember watching his baseball trained ass wiggle as he wrote out math problems on the chalkboard. My distraction may be why I never made above a C in his class. Oh, Mr. Eckert...

I also found my interest in beefy musclemen around that time. My fantasies included adventures with huge stacks of hard beef. I even expiramented with drawing them. My art was actually quite good for an amateur. I was no Patrick Fillion, but... I felt bad about my pervy sketchings, though, and one day burned them up in the wood stove. Can you believe that? I shake my head over it to this day. I went for the hairless kind of muscle man then, with a near zero percentage of body fat. Hair at the time seemed an impediment to the muscle beneath. I liked my guys rippled and glistening, and, apparently, starving.

This attraction to the All-American guy grew in college to include the football types I worked out with in the gym. But I also became interested in the fit but nerdy guys. A hot guy reading a book with his glasses on stirred my loins. Still does.

My taste now has matured a bit. Pretty young collegiate things are still pretty. Don't get me wrong. But they're not what I find myself attracted to anymore. It has something to do with life experience. A few more wrinkles on the face can be very sexy. A little gray in the hair can make a man all the more attractive, especially if he's taken good care of his body. Last year I played around with a couple of older guys (though, not at the same time), and one of them ranks as the most erotic experience I've ever had. I refuse to name names...yet. Wait for the memoir.

Too, I've found that I rather like a guy with body hair now. Beards may exfoliate my sensitive skin, but they're so hot! And I even like a little fuzz on the bum. That was a major "ew" ten years ago. It's strange how that in particular has changed. Hehe. Fuzzy bums.

Men are amazing. Really. Right down to our often oddly shaped, but adorable penises. Speaking of, I had a gal pal in college who once told me that she thought penises were hideous things. That they were ugly and gross. I couldn't believe what I was hearing. My reaction was, if you don't like 'em leave 'em alone. More for me. And then...

But that's a whole other tale.

'SuburbaNights' gets a Blurb!

Here it be! The blurb for SuburbaNights , book 3 in my Jasper Lane series that started with Subsurdity . The new book will be out July 11th from Dreamspinner Press. Get excited! It's been a long wait.
On Jasper Lane, Cassie Bloom is gearing up for Halloween; Becky is expecting, and her father is overbearing and paranoid; Rick and James are their usual happy selves, though James has developed a porn obsession; Terrence is putting together an all drag cheer squad; and David is helping Cliff transition from adult film star to bodybuilder. Of course, that’s just what’s going on at the surface. This is suburbia, and its underbelly is teeming with secrets.


Like what’s up with that rather odd family that moved in down the street—the family with the big cross in the front yard who look nothing alike. Like where Cassie’s son, Jason, has disappeared to and why he hasn’t called. Like what on Earth Nanna Hench is doing with a scooter, a megaphone, and a clown car full of religious zealots.
[image error]When Cliff suddenly disappears, Jasper Lane goes on high alert. Terrence posts fliers, and Rick and James scour the gym. David is determined to get his husband back, but when he goes missing too—and with Cassie and Melinda on a road trip to find Jason—it’s up to Terrence to solve the mystery and save the day.

EXCERPT: Cloud Touching Mountain

This one will go in my next anthology, if I'm ever lucky enough to be offered another:

Cloud Touching Mountain
Eric Arvin
copyright 2007


Cloud touching mountain. High above the plains. Casting its shadow so far the sun can be forgotten. It stretches to the ends of everything. At least to the ends of anything I know. I don’t get far. I stay with my fields. They need tending to.

I watched from the farthest field; the one with the freshest upturned soil. So many things had disappeared into that mountain. All my life I had seen things leave that way. But this was the first time it ever affected me so tremendously. I lost something when he left. Something I never realized I had had to begin with. None of the other men mattered this much to me. But he did, and I couldn’t see it until he left. Not clearly anyway. Stupidity is so ignorant. What we see, what we don’t see. We are born equipped, I think, with life-blinders. Only a few of us ever shed them, and then it is usually too late.

For a while I didn’t know what I had seen. Was he truly gone? He had said he would leave, but he had said that hundreds of times before. I asked, Do you want me? Don’t you want to be with me?

He never replied. Not with words.

He did not want what I wanted. Not in the way that I wanted it.

The last I saw he was a shadow climbing, a silhouette disappearing upward. Into the clouds. Like an angel taking the hard way home to Heaven. Or a devil trying to sneak in by some cunning mortal trick.

I had to follow. There was nothing for it. My fears of everything else were overshadowed by my fear of losing him. Love is the worst thing. Painfully pulling us this way and that, jerking us around like rag dolls. I hate love.

Love is both Life and Death. I could never explain that adequately enough to the other men. The ones who worked my fields before.

There was no way I could even think of heading back home now. Not without him. It would be like a house without a roof. Did he love me at all?

I could have taken care of him. He didn’t have to leave. I take care of my fields. I took care of the other men.

Hearing my heart, the fear too real, I kick through the dirt and dust toward the mountain. Toward the white billows of cloud that crown its height. Maybe he’ll be there. Maybe that’s where he’s headed. To the very top, then he’ll stop because he can go no farther. Maybe he’ll scream at God. Maybe I will when I get there too.

What had he been trying to tell me? He had been silent for so long. His eyes spoke their own language. I just couldn’t decipher what they were saying. You would think if it were love, if it were real love, I would be able to know what he meant without him uttering a single syllable. One glance and I would know. But we were still a mystery to one another. We’re all mysteries looking for our solutions in the reflection of another’s eyes.

I hate love.

I thought he was sick. I thought that’s what he was saying. Maybe I was wrong. I should have asked him outright. Why are you leaving me? Stay and help me tend the fields. But he only stared back with an expression of…what was it? Fear? Resistance? Discovery?

Signs. There are always signs. Except when their too quiet, too subtle. Then they’re just gestures. Then you need sign language. But there again, I’ve never been too good at other languages. The language of love. Isn’t that what some aching poet called it? Well, it’s a cryptic, secret thing this language of love. There are no right words. It changes daily.

Kisses and touch. That’s a language. Tenderness. I was well-versed, I think, in that. Perhaps he disagreed. Perhaps that mountain is a metaphor; a big, tall symbol I have to climb over.

Come back! Don’t go so high. So far up. So out of sight and gone. I see you now. Maybe I didn’t before, but I do now.

Love is a battlefield. Love hurts. Love kills. Love is all those clichés because it’s a vicious emotion. It feeds off us like a sweet parasite. We carry it. We are its hosts and it feeds off us. Once we’ve had it we can’t live without it. Say no to drugs but whatever you do fall in love.

I thought I was in love before with every one of those other men. They helped me tend my fields. They help me still. But that wasn’t love. That was companionship.

Falling. I hope he doesn’t fall. How would I live? Would it be better to have him dead? Or alive somewhere in the world…without me? It’s a question for a psychopath. For a lovesick obsessive.

Each of my fields has a name. Each is named for a man I thought I loved.

What if I killed him? What if I found him and he spoke? What if he told me he was running from me? From me? I think I would kill him. No one else could have him. No one else would feel him inside them, on top of them, under them. He came into me first. His world and mine in that one beautiful moment and I begged him to stay. He agreed because I gave him what he needed. But it was he who planted the seed.

And now he wants to leave me. I could kill him. I could take a rock and bash his ungrateful brains in. His beautiful, lovely, ungrateful brains.

There are some rocks in my fields. Each field has a pile of them, and each a wooden cross in the center of with a name of a man I thought I loved.

I’ll find him. But I won’t kill him. I’ll knock him out and take him back. He’ll stay. I’ll force him to stay. This one is different.

He is blinded by obstacles is all. I see clearly. I see by love.

'Illusion' Review

An absolutely lovely review by Cole Riann of my very first novel, The Rest Is Illusion HERE. People seem to be discovering this of late, even though it's out of print. I'm tickled pink.

The Reality of HELL

The other night I was watching Ghost Hunters. I have no excuse for this other than I was bored and that show, believe it or not, relaxes me. Anyway, they were investigating an old TB sanatorium in Louisville not far from me called Waverly. In the course of the investigation one of the crew asked the ghosts "Are we in Hell?" Meaning, "we" as in all of humanity. There was no answer.

When I was a bright young thing in high school, I had a journalism teacher who had then just recently been diagnosed with MS. She was a woman who kept her emotions hidden, especially from her students. I was the co-editor of the yearbook and got to know her since she was the advisor working on it with us. One afternoon when it was just the two of us in the journalism lab we somehow got on the topic of the afterlife. More specifically, Hell. We wrestled through the various incarnations of the place and when I mentioned that maybe we were in Hell already, that it could only get better from here, her eyes lit up. I imagine my eyes looked the same to her because the idea had only just come to me then.There was a strange comfort in the thought, and I think we both felt it.

Growing up a Jehovah's Witness, I was taught that there was no literal Hell. There was a literal Heaven, but only 144,000 anointed by God would see that and I wasn't one of those. Hell, in the JW belief, is simply death. You die and you never wake up. Jw's believe that after Armageddon there will be a resurrection. Everyone who has ever lived. (Can we say "over-population"?)Those who are not of the 144,000 will live peacefully on a paradise Earth for 1000 years. Then, there will be a...ahem, cleansing of sorts, wiping out those who went back to their ghastly heathen ways, i.e. the gays, the feminists, etc. Those that remain are the ones who get eternal life. It always sounded a bit Orwellian to me. What a mess. Anyway, my point is, no literal Hell.

Whether it be the underworld of the ancient Greeks or Dante's Inferno, Hell has always brought to mind agony and twisted pain. As if anything in the afterlife could be worse than what we think up here, worse than what we do here. Just turn on the evening news. If you listen to them, Hell is right next door. I am left to wonder how many people actually still believe in a literal Hell. I for one think that if there is a literal Hell then God is a jerk who doesn't deserve my worship. He's but an omniscient sadist. 

Hell is different for everyone. I think it does exist, but as a state of mind. 


Hell is indeed other people sometimes. 


Hell is doing the same thing over and over, a trapped spirit in a dark house. 


Hell is being trapped in paralysis. I had a brief taste of that. Very brief, but it felt forever. 


Hell is the situation you can see no way out of. 


Hell is being alone. 


Hell is shattered dreams.

But buck up, Bucky Boo! There is a way out. There is always hope. I think, like everything, change and evolution happen because people will it to happen. Human will is a powerful thing, an almost supernatural thing. The great collective soul says, "We've had enough of this. Let's move on." And we do. Sometimes slowly. Sometimes with the simple nudge of a book or a film. Our minds, our beliefs, have given us great leaps in evolution in the past. I think it's time to jump again. Let's make better hells. Ones that are easier to control and ones that we can eventually get rid of altogether.