Sumiko Saulson's Blog, page 18
May 6, 2019
Meet the Authors of Scry of Lust
Dark and seductive, alluring and imaginative, perverse, shocking, and at times hilarious—Scry of Lust is an arousing collection of erotica, paranormal romance, sexy poetry, and kinky tales that will spark your desire and quicken your breath. Indulge in the lustful imaginings of this diverse group of writers, all by your naughty self, or share it out loud to entice your lovers. Scry of Lust will charm the pants off of you—literally!
Profits from this collection are being donated to the San Francisco AIDSWalk, through SFGoth Team #5015, in memory of Gregory Hug.
The Kinky Writers Group meets weekly at Wicked Grounds Cafe, home of the San Francisco Bay Area’s kink and BSDM scene, at the center of the City’s Leather & LGBTQ Cultural District. We welcome writers of all experience levels, races, genders, orientations, and sensual proclivities.
Group: fetlife.com/groups/183690
SFGoth AIDSWalk Team: 5105 SFGOTH
This anthology was published by Iconoclast Productions, a San Francisco Bay Area media arts nonprofit organization that works with artists with disabilities, in African American community, produces multicultural programs honoring the African Diaspora, in the homeless community, and in the LGBTQIA+ and Kinky communities.
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~ Sumiko Saulson ~
Sumiko Saulson (Mauskaveli on FetLife) is a cartoonist, science-fiction, fantasy and horror writer, editor of Black Magic Women and 100 Black Women in Horror Fiction, author of Solitude, Warmth, The Moon Cried Blood, Happiness and Other Diseases, Somnalia, Insatiable, Ashes and Coffee, and Things That Go Bump In My Head. She wrote and illustrated comics Mauskaveli, Dooky and graphic novels Dreamworlds and Agrippa. She writes for the SEARCH Magazine. The child of African American and Russian-Jewish parents, a native Californian and an Oakland resident who’s spent most of her adult life in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is pansexual, polyamorous and genderqueer.
~ Lydia LaRue ~
Lydia is well known for her intricate erotic stories filled with crime, blood, humiliation and a bit of cat play. She can be found drinking coffee with gluten-free banana nut bread at Wicked Grounds where she’s a proud Patreon supporter. She currently co-hosts the Kinky Writers Group with Sumiko/Mauskaveli.
~ Mimi Heft (Ouroboros Sings) ~
Mimi Heft (Ouroboros Sings) isn’t a writer: she’s a musician, graphic designer, businessperson, community organizer, event producer, and foodie; and a romantically monogamous, sexually poly, sapio-semidemisexual hedonist. But not a writer. Nonetheless, she writes deliciously naughty stories featuring her lovers, offered as gifts of affection. Occasionally, she even writes poetry—some of it not so bad. Mimi is not a writer, but words delight her, as does sex, and she shares both with a certain, awkward ebullience.
~ Charlee Verrette ~
Charlee Verrette is a 59-yr old Burlesque Performance artist, Writer. Musician, Actor, Cat Slave who performs as Charlee Debris. They have been performing and creating since 1979 and knew some of the Beats.
~ Serena Toxicat ~
San Francisco-born and bred Serena Toxicat scratches out dark fiction, lyrics, plays and poetry in English and in French. She sings in a Black Catwave band called Protea, and her parallel recording projects include Starchasm. An actor, model-turned-designer, former-pro Domme, NLP life coach, and literary translator, Toxicat leads a scattered, sketchy life and delights in showing her paintings, taking part in LGBTQ+ and kink-focused activities, traveling and collecting tattoos. Serena is a psychic reader, healer, priestess and feline Tarot deck creator. She lived almost 8 years in Paris and traveled to Egypt, where she recorded vocals in the King’s Chamber.
~ Francesca Gentille ~
Francesca Gentille (Priestess on Fetlife) is relationship counselor, clinical sexologist, Therapeutic Domme and sacred BDSM educator who is both a Priestess Domme & Tantric Slave. She is the radio host of Sex: Tantra & Kama Sutra, the award winning co-author of The Marriage of Sex & Spirit, and the co-director of “The Somatic Sensual Healing Institute.” She teaches a Kink Conscious Therapy Certification for Clinicians as well as on Sacred Kink, Ritual BDSM, Therapeutic Kink and Tantric Kink around the world.
~ Lif ~
Lif, born a hyperbolic, living bundle of literary tropes, was meant to be a storyteller since day one. His erotica ranges from taboo fantasies meant to thrill, to more serious pieces meant to raise awareness for emotional and mental health. Outside of erotica, he writes horror-fantasy and science fiction, sings, and produces audio dramas. He is a lifestyle dominant and erotic hypnotist who happily lives as a partial recluse with his cat, experimenting with new mediums of artistic expression.
~ Ev Joy Lokadottr ~
Ev Joy Lokadottr has been a part of the BDSM community for 22 years, and has enjoyed writing for even longer. She is best known for her “how-to” kink lifestyle guides, but has also been known to write an erotic story or three.
~ Merlin Monroe ~
Merlin Monroe, Kaleidoscope Eyes, Seruus Ualerium Tristissima Liber, Pope Uncommon the Dainty, Skunkheart, etc., has 15 names. Fey’s a muppet wannabe nun and aspiring trophy wife, longing for both a family and a temple to tend. Identifying as a toy, fear primary sexual identity isn’t gay, straight, bi, or pan, but submissive. Fey mostly writes RPG material, poetry, and graphic fiction, and is currently writing a book about DD/ss (Divine Dominance/sacred submission) with Priestess.
~ Kathleen Mahnke ~
Kathleen Mahnke is a kinkstress and writer of stories, author of the Planar Helix series. Maria’s proclivities are often derived from Kathleen’s kinky escapades. She was a regular part of the Bay Area/San Francisco kink scene before she moved up into the mountains to escape Bay Area rent, only to be caught in the Paradise Camp Fire. She survived the fire but it’s been a challenge keeping the creative part of her alive.
~ Sara the Black ~
Sara the Black is an introverted California native hermiting deep in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Proudly multicultural, this primarily Sephardic Jew/Kaldresh Romani was raised in Southern California. A Gender Queer, Asexual, Intersex disabled adult living with multiple chronic illnesses, Sara opted for retirement off-grid with a fiercely independent private contractor/writer companion and neurotic female feline minions. -She- is an unapologetically voracious reader with a healthy appetite for street tacos, good beer, and Hello Kitty
~ Akasha Vampryssa (Buffie Peterson) ~
Akasha Vampyrssa (Buffie Peterson) is a freelance editor who enjoys off-roading, spending time with her sons, grand babies, and her husband. She is from Nevada and when she’s not editing or writing, she is out driving across the desert.
~ Max Silver ~
Max Silver (aka Montease Python in Burlesque) is a raunchy rascal rakehell and a ludicrous shaper of words. He hails from San Francisco, and now lives in Oakland. He is part of a Burlesque troupe known as Organized Chaos Oakland, hosting such events as the Lingerie Lounge Open Mic and Organized Chaos Burlesque.
April 18, 2019
A Travesty in Timbuktu
Sawfish headress. Ijo. Nigeria – Musée du quai Branly – Wikicommons
Ya’ll act like I’m Killmonger when I try to tell you
About how they looted my ancestral home in Benin
And burned down the libraries at Timbuktu
You think I am trying to be edgy
By claiming my history
Defending your European roots
As the true source of all mystery
All art, love and light and all that is true
The source of shiny, happy feelings
With vaulted Gothic ceilings
The art of the European masters
Not their Bertha Mason enslaved mulatto bastards…
Half my bloodline arrived in American in chains
From West Africa, where it pains me to say
The colonizers burned and looted as well as enslaved
Erasing our history so they can pretend
That we don’t have any today
How you brag and bray
About your superior role
In the cultural landscape of history
Dismissing me and my kind
For being behind a movement
To fund black churches that burned to the ground
Because you find them of less import
And historical relevance
And European elegance
If you know what I mean
The Quai Branly museum in Paris
Just a thirteen minute drive away
From Notre Dame still houses, today
Some of the thousands of treasures
The French stole from my ancestors
In 1892 from the Kingdom of Dahomey
So if I decide to send some funds
To a black church in the south
Instead of Notre Dame
Try not to pout and act out
Like I defamed you
For my ancestor’s histories were stolen
Burned and erased
With no reparations made to this very day
No, the artwork has not been replaced
To the land from which we were also stolen away
By the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade.
April 17, 2019
Scry of Lust Book Launch Party
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Dark and seductive, alluring and imaginative, perverse, shocking, and at times hilarious—Scry of Lust is an arousing collection of erotica, paranormal romance, sexy poetry, and kinky tales that will spark your desire and quicken your breath. Indulge in the lustful imaginings of this diverse group of writers, all by your naughty self, or share it out loud to entice your lovers. Scry of Lust will charm the pants off of you—literally!
Profits from this collection are being donated to the San Francisco AIDSWalk, through SFGoth Team #5015, in memory of Gregory Hug.
Book Launch Party
Buy yourself supper at The Octopus Salon, pick up copy of Scry of Lust! We are debuting the anthology/chapbook Scry of Lust at the event. It contains erotic poetry and prose to raise money for the SF Goth Team #5105 or San Francisco AIDSWalk! Join us for HOT HOT HOT SEXY READINGS, and PG-rated public beatings as the cheap kinky toy SpankyBats are demonstrated.
It is a weekday supper time (5 pm to 7:30 pm) at Octopus Salon on Tuesday, May 28 featuring readings of erotic poetry and prose by participants in the Kinky Writer’s Munch!
Additionally, Select items are for the AIDSWalk cause. Buy a $5 Kinky Bat! Sign up to sponsor a walker! Sign up to walk yourself! Buy selected jewelry, buttons and charms vended for the cause at the SFGoth AIDSWalk vending area.
https://www.facebook.com/events/855121411506480/
https://fetlife.com/events/773400
Confirmed authors include:
Sumiko Saulson, Ouroboros Sings (Mimi Heft), Serena Toxicat, Charlie Verrette, Ev Joy Lokadottr, Francesca Gentille, Merlin Monroe (Skunkheart), Kathleen Mahnke, Lydia, Lif and Sara the Black.
(Individual writers may also have books and other items of their own available for personal sale in a separate area. If so those won’t be going towards the funds raised.)
Kinky Writer’s Munch
[image error]The Kinky Writers Group meets weekly at Wicked Grounds Cafe, home of the San Francisco Bay Area’s kink and BSDM scene, at the center of the City’s Leather & LGBTQ Cultural District. We welcome writers of all experience levels, races, genders, orientations, and sensual proclivities.
Kinky Writer’s Munch (hosted by @Mauskaveli aka Sumiko Saulson) meets every Monday from 7pm to 8:30 pm at Wicked Grounds)
For more information, visit our FetLife group: fetlife.com/groups/183690
The Kinky Writer’s Munch’s group of kinky people who write kinky (and sometimes not so kinky) things is coming out to read poetry and short fiction at The Octopus Salon! To raise money for the #SFGoth #AIDSWalk team #5015 for the 2019 AIDSWalk!
https://fetlife.com/users/4115162/pictures/80195775…
Group: https://fetlife.com/groups/183690
SFGoth Team AIDSWalk:
SFGoth AIDSWalk Team: https://sf.aidswalk.net/SFGOTH
April 1, 2019
Extended Call for Submissions to Wickedly Abled
[image error] Dark fantasy, sci-fi and horror by disabled authors featuring disabled protagonists.
Tired of future worlds so-called utopias where disabled people have been erased by eugenic scientists? Dreaming of science-fiction that properly labels such depictions as dystopias for those of us who are physically and neurologically atypical? Are you sick of horror stories where mutation, mental illness, and deformity are signs of inherent evil? Are you interested in dissecting the way in which old tropes about disability informed the oldest of fairy tales and camp side stories? Do you want to demystify disabilities that have been considered by the able- bodied as signs of some sort of curse? Challenge the abliest and saneist realms which have plagued world-building in fantasy, horror, science-fiction and fairy tale mythologies since the dawn of mankind?
Are you a disabled author? Do you want to turn you distinct view into something wickedly political, bitingly political, darkly funny, and disturbingly heart-wrenching or atypically challenging to norms? Then perhaps you are one of the Wickedly Abled.
Wickedly Abled is a dark speculative fiction anthology challenging well-worn tropes depicting disabled persons in solely villain or victim roles by promoting darker themed works of fantasy, sci-fi and horror by authors with disabilities artists which feature disabled protagonists.
Wickedly Abled is the brainchild of Sumiko Saulson, the editor of and mind behind the best-selling horror anthology Black Magic Women, a showcase of eighteen different black female horror writers from the African Diaspora on Mocha Memoirs Press.
Looking for 1,500 to 5,500 words in length short horror and dark fantasy by disabled authors. Paying $10 flat and an eBook copy, plus offering unlimited at-cost print books to authors in the anthology. Previously unpublished original work preferred, but we will consider reprints if the original work is currently out of print and has been for over a year. Please let us know if it is a re-print. No simultaneous submissions. We will want exclusive e-publication rights for one year (first publication rights if it’s unpublished).
Please submit it as a .doc or .rtf or .txt document, double spaced, 12 pt, Times New Roman or similar, to sumikoska@yahoo.com
Deadline: May 31, 2019
Cover art by Lillian Rose Asterios
March 28, 2019
Editor’s Pick: Horror Bites
HorrorAddicts.net continues our Horror Bites series with
a bundle of new fiction by our Next Great Horror Writer Contestants.
[image error]Featuring work by:
Jonathan Fortin
Naching T. Kassa
Daphne Strasert
Jess Landry
Harry Husbands
Sumiko Saulson
Adele Marie Park
Feind Gottes
JC Martínez
Cat Voleur
Abi Kirk-Thomas
Timothy G. Huguenin
Riley Pierce
Quentin Norris
With introduction by Emerian Rich.
HorrorAddicts.net is proud to present our top 14 contestants in the Next Great Horror Writer Contest. The included stories, scripts, and poems are the result of the hard work and dedication these fine writers put forth to win a book contract. Some learned they loved writing and want to pursue it as a career for the rest of their lives. Some discovered they should change careers either to a different genre of writing or to a new career entirely. Whatever lessons came along the way, they each learned something about themselves and grew as writers. We hope you enjoy the writing as much as we did.
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A sneak peek inside…
UNDER THE WATER
by Sumiko Saulson
Submitted for the Poetry Challenge, Episode #141
Over sea, floating ye, staying abreast of watery crests.
Midwinter air caresses curls unfurling over briny sea.
Cool wet skin, paper thin… I can see your soul within.
Every capillary pumping blood, intestinal processes digesting food.
Your loving heart plain to see… How intimate your transparency.
A sea-deep mystery, stories untold, windows into your ancient soul,
Your eyes speckled, flecks of gold cascading within jet black coal,
Encasing your exquisite charms, enfolded within my fragile arms.
I am the contemplator of your delicacy. Hear ye now my mortal pleas.
May your ethereal heart, thorny spine, and eternal love be ever mine.
Adrift on my back, your tentative fingers in mine entwined.
Long slender tail wrapped around my thighs, tendrils twixt toes.
The smooth flesh of your undercarriage where barnacles grow.
My flesh puckers where their tiny mouths burrow into my skin,
Digesting the healthy white blood cells within.
Risen have you from the darkest depths where men do not reside.
I gave you a place within my skin where creatures dark abide.
Do not leave me alone nor recede like the sand does from the tide,
But carry me along with ye… Astride my floating bounty be.
Feast upon the only vessel strong enough to return ye to sea…To read more, click here.
Author: Sumiko Saulson is a cartoonist, horror writer, editor of Black Magic Women – on the 2018 Stoker’s Recommended Reads List – and 100 Black Women in Horror Fiction. Author of Solitude, Warmth, Moon Cried Blood, and Happiness and Other Diseases. Comics Mauskaveli, Dooky, Dreamworlds and Agrippa. She writes for SEARCH Magazine. SumikoSaulson.com.
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HorrorAddicts.net
for Horror Addicts, by Horror Addicts
Listen to the HorrorAddicts.net podcast for the latest in horror news, reviews, music, and fiction.
March 25, 2019
March 8, 2019
March 3, 2019
Cancer, “Positivity” and Misogynoir
CW: Cancer, End Stage Cancer, Realities of Multiple Myeloma, Depression, Misogynoir, Racism.
I wrote this blog but never published it, back when my mother was still fighting for her life. She passed away January 14, 2019 after a nine and a half year long battle with cancer. I was frustrated with all of the misogynoir my mother and I had to deal with, as in America, a strong black woman stereotype attaches to black women and keeps perpetuating itself even when we are dying, or those close to us are dying. My mom had to be a strong black woman until her dying breath. I had to be a strong black woman as she lay dying.
What follows below the break is what I wrote and how I felt in late September 2018, edited to update it to reflect that she has passed on. Please don’t read it if you feel you might personalize my feelings of frustration over my mom’s death.
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Mom and I at Windsor Care in Vallejo
So, in May, at BayCon 2018, my mother gave me the bad news: her cancer was no longer responding well to chemo. Her doctor was going to try an older chemo med she’d been on previously, Revlimid. Sadly, it didn’t work either.
In June, she went into the hospital with respiratory issues. Some of you may know that she had a close brush with death around my birthday in March of 2017. That was due to a cardiac issue, as she is seventy years old now and has comorbid conditions along with her cancer. The heart disease and a-fibrillation is related to high blood pressure. So last year she almost died of heart disease. They were able to stabilize her. She always was a fighter.
Since she is a fighter – and she has miraculously pulled through any number of times – when I first became concerned about her latest battle with cancer back in May 2018, I got a lot of “your mother is strong” kind of comments. A lot of people are unaware of how culturally tone deaf it is to repeatedly refer to a black woman as strong when she is facing a major crisis. Yet this notion of me, and my mother, as “strong” persisted. It persists to until the day she died, and many people had no idea how serious my mom’s health problems were because they didn’t want to know or understand.
Fundraisers were going around for mom’s end of life expenses and her burial and people still thought she was “getting better”… she made some recovery from the seizure, stroke and heart attack but she was never going to recover from cancer because they were refusing to give her chemo. They said the chemo wasn’t working anymore.
Mom was not getting better. She was running out of treatment options. Her cancer was in its final stages. Whenever the family got excited or happy about some sort of improvement it was because she just bought a little time with us – not because she was going to pull through. All we could do was buy her time, but every time we did we had to face the reality that her quality of life had declined considerably over the past grip of months.
When I tried to talk about that, people either issued still more platitudes about how I need to “let her go” or, unfathomably, acted like my mom’s cancer wasn’t that serious and gossiped that I was being a “drama queen” or exaggerating mom’s terminal condition. Others were so in denial that she was dying that they said I was being negative and babbled about homeopathic medicine, medicinal marijuana, prayer, and cayenne pepper.
This all boiled down to ways in which my mother’s death was taxing and inconvenient for other people and they just needed me to shut up about it because was depressing them. And please don’t read ANOTHER WORD if you are going to come out of reading this with any sort of need for me to help YOU deal with MY mom’s death or YOUR feelings, because this is me talking about me. I need to.
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Mom, aunt Yvonne and me in 1993
It has gotten to the point where I no longer reach out for any moral or emotional support. I just post prettied up photos of mom with Snapchat filters and journal about what movie was am watching with her or song was am singing to her, so I could keep up some sort of benign dialog with people in order to have some sort of social contact with people outside of my mom. I had to figure out how I could communicate with others without feeling like my pain, my family’s pain, and my emotional needs were tedious and draining for them. At first, a few people thought the pictures were morbid but after a while, some people got what I was doing.
I had a partner dump me because my need for emotional support during my mother’s death was apparently “manipulative.” Gossipy idiots who decided that my mother’s failure to die in a timely manner meant I am being “dramatic.” Another partner got drunk the night mom had a heart attack and ran down the street acting crazy and wound up in jail. It seemed like everyone was more upset about Mom dying than I was.
Except my brother, and nieces, who were in the trenches along with me.
Minimizing death isn’t “positivity” it’s just your own personal fragility and entitlement kicking in, telling you that people who have real life crises are “problematic”… if you are someone who makes your personal relationship drama more important than someone dying , yes, this is about you. Constantly calling black women “strong” to get out of offering us any real moral support isn’t just toxic, it’s racist. Ignoring black suffering in order to shield the dominant culture’s fragility is the cornerstone of misogynoir, something a bunch of people who think they are liberal sometimes have an excess of.
My mom was my mom, not someone else’s inspiration porn – not a “strong black” woman who could inspire people by stoically clinging to life. I should have nor should I now be required to be likewise stoic, unemotional, positive, and more concerned with the feelings of others than my own. Even as my mother lay dying, I was to assume the caretaker, nanny, “mammy” role assigned to all black women in relationship to others.
Is this the way white women are treated when they are dying or grieving?
February 13, 2019
Call for Submissions Wickedly Abled
[image error]Theme: Dark fantasy and horror by disabled artists featuring disabled protagonists.
Looking for 1,500 to 5,500 words in length short horror and dark fantasy by disabled authors. Paying $10 flat and an eBook copy, plus offering unlimited at-cost print books to authors in the anthology. Previously unpublished original work preferred, but reprints will be considered if the work is no longer in print or the work is older than ten years in age.
Please let us know if it is a re-print. No simultaneous submissions. We will want exclusive e-publication rights for one year (first publication rights if it’s unpublished).
Please submit it as a .doc or .rtf or .txt document, double spaced, 12 pt, Times New Roman or similar, to sumikoska@yahoo.com
Deadline: March 31, 2019
Cover art by Lillian Rose Asterios
