Cecilia Tan's Blog, page 2

Not my usual monthly update… (got married)

Yeah, so… biggest news of the week is that corwin and I got married.

You might be surprised to find that, given all the romance I’ve written, I considered myself “anti-marriage.”

I’ve never been anti-love, of course. I’ve always been a fan of soulmates finding each other. It was just “marriage” that made me itch.

When I was a teenager I rebelled against most things that required me to perform femininity. So I never fantasized about wedding dresses or diamond rings or being a bride. (I fantasized about swordfighting and bonding with dragons and piloting a starship.) By my twenties, I didn’t want to participate in any institution that my same-sex coupled friends were barred from.

By my thirties, gay weddings were becoming fashionable but not yet legal, and I was against the state having a say in my relationships.

But then same-sex marriage was legalized here in Massachusetts, the first state to do so, in 2004, thanks to a decision by our supreme court. My city, Cambridge, flung open the doors to City Hall at midnight, sat a marriage clerk right in the lobby, and started welcoming couples in. Hundreds of people gathered outside to cheer every time a newly married couple emerged from the building.

That’s the City Hall where corwin and I got married this week.

Because this year was the 20th anniversary, the lobby and hallways are decorated with photos from that historic night in 2004, with accompanying text.

We booked a 15 minute ceremony and were allowed to bring 10 guests. We brought nine. Two of them were longtime friends who were among that crowd who cheered outside. They told me that night was when they first talked about getting married. Years later, I was at their wedding. Their wedding (which took place at a local science fiction convention, Arisia) and mine were not historic in the same sense as those that took place on May 17, 2004, but the threads of connection are there.

corwin and I considered ourselves married after a public scene we did at a BDSM play party where we exchanged vows of a sort and I flogged him with tails of leather I had braided into his own hair. (This was also at Arisia, either 1992 or 1993?) A few years later we bought a house, and we put on the invitations to our housewarming party “this is as close to married as we’re going to get, so bring the gifts now.” (We were quite broke after buying the house so the housewares were quite needed at that point!)

Over the years, I mellowed my stance on marriage. Lots of friends have had lovely weddings, and when our financial guy recently suggested that we should get married when we turn 64 for the Social Security benefits, I found I kind of liked the idea. But some folks are probably wondering… why did we do it now? Well, after election day, when I literally spent a day in bed crying, the only thing that made me happy all week was when corwin suggested we get married. Every time I thought about it, I felt a little less sad and despondent.

And now here we are, married. We decided to order our rings from a company that makes chef’s knives (but who have a little section of their website about their damascus steel wedding rings). Since they wouldn’t be ready in time for our City Hall ceremony, I decided it was time for a callback to a joke I made around 1996.

A typical interaction between the two of us involves me doing something baffling like a silly dance move or hand gesture, and then he asks what it means, and I reply with something like “the dance celebrating the swapping in of fresh kitchen sponges” (or whatever other nonsense I have dreamed up). Sometimes there is a pun involved. Other times it’s just surrealist hilarity.

So we were in the kitchen cooking, and I took the bands off of two bundles of banshu somen (noodles). I put one on corwin’s finger and one on mine and he asked, “what’s that mean?” And I replied, “now we’re noodle married.”

And then we laughed our fool heads off so hard we couldn’t even explain to our house guest why we were laughing. So, when we needed temporary rings, I went and got them off of two bunches of noodles to bring to city hall. We didn’t write special vows: we let the city’s Justice of the Peace read the ones she had, which, it being Cambridge, were non-denominational and mostly non-gendered. I had given all our guests heart-shaped chimes and they rang them celebratorily. (Partly an obscure Babylon 5 reference…)

And then it was over. The whole ceremony took less than 5 minutes, but you know, the buildup took 33 years. 🙂

Speaking of rings, I know I said I didn’t dream about having a wedding ring as a little girl. But I do love symbols and symbolism—especially in writing. I think the first character I can remember writing who really wanted that gold ring on their finger was—don’t laugh—Draco Malfoy.

I wrote a Harry/Draco fanfic in 2006, and there was a magical plot device involving a ring in the story… and next thing you know I was like, oh, and of course, it has to end up on his finger at the end. (No, I am not linking to it…. IYKYK.)

Those of you who read Daron’s Guitar Chronicles also know there is a very extended plot arc (more than two whole books long…) that ends up at a jewelry store. I’m sure I can come up with other examples in my books and stories.

I really don’t think these were me trying to express my subconscious desire for a ring of my own. But now that I’m going to have one, I’m so happy. Not because of the ring per se, but because of what it represents. We already have each other, we already had our bond and our partnership, but now it’s official in a way it wasn’t before, with a visible marker. It’s a partnership that has withstood a lot of changes in us and our lives. I don’t know what the year 2025 will bring exactly, but I know we’ll be weathering it together.

Hmm. Maybe I’ll include an actual marriage in a romance novel one of these days…?

“And by the power vested in me by the state of Massachusetts, but more importantly, by your own love, I now pronounce you married.”

 

Voila!The wedding party

Duck Day 2024 Wrap-up & Picspam!

Duck Day 2024: Foods & Dishes You Can’t Get Anymore

Here we go, our annual Thanksgiving gourmet cooking extravaganza, in which we make no turkey, but do make duck. Each year with a different theme.

This entire menu came about because when we sat down to plan this year’s theme and looked into our notes for recipe ideas, one said “choco taco” and another said “numb nuts ice cream sundae.”

You might think that meant we wanted to do all frozen confections, but no… the common thread that connects those two dots is “Foods you can’t get anymore.”

The ChocoTaco was infamously discontinued in 2022, more on that later. “Numb nuts” were one of the bar snacks we often enjoyed at a restaurant called Night Market, which had been a terrific but somewhat short-lived (2014-2019) place in Harvard Square. At Night Market, chef Jason Tom plied his jazzy takes on Asian street foods in a tiny street-art decorated basement space that made it feel like a fried-rice speakeasy.

I’ve often recreated a few of Night Market’s standards at home, including their sweet kaya toast served with a raw egg yolk swimming in soy sauce. (This reminds me I have yet to try making their “Lik’Em Stik”, which was rice balls served with a “dip” of tasty bits that included black beans, fried garlic, and other stuff—maybe crunchy soy beans? maybe chili crisp? tiny dried shrimp?—I’m not sure exactly what was in it and this may be part of why I haven’t yet tried to recreate it.)

Anyway. We all know that yearning for a dish we can’t get anymore. This menu is an homage to restaurants we miss.

One note before we dive in, because it is a historic first: This year not only did we sit down to eat on time at 8pm, we actually stayed on our always-ambitious schedule of serving a course every 30 minutes!

For two amateur home cooks like us, the timeline is often blown out of the water immediately and only gets slower throughout the evening. We always create a run sheet with specific times for when things need to go in our out of the oven, when water should be set to boil, etc… but the timeline is typically “aspirational.” This time we actually managed to stay on time right until the last course when we actually slowed intentionally to give people a break!

A huge part of that was that we actually did all the prep we intended, including pre-plating some elements. We had started cooking on the Saturday before, and we both spent at least 6-10 hours cooking on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. This year we also did more test-cooking of new recipes in the weeks leading up than usual, and a lot of our skills continue to level up. So, incredibly, we were ready to serve dessert and coffee at midnight. This has never happened before–and who knows if it ever will again?

The menu:Jamaican Party Duck from HeckThe AntidoteA Journeyman-style “Salad”Suanla Chou Shou (But Duck)Pandan ice cream sundae palate cleanserBeef Brisket Chow Fun (But Duck)Tinga de Pollo (But Duck)An artisinal “choco taco”COURSE 1: EAST COAST GRILL

Jamaican Party Duck from Heck

based on the East Coast Grill’s “Jamaican Party Beef from Hell”

corwin and I had our first date at the East Coast Grill in 1991. Some of you might remember that at the time the two of us were both power bottoms, and when some of our friends in the BDSM scene heard we were going on a date, asked “But what will you guys do?” Did just how endorphin high we got on extremely spicy food that night have something to do with how instantly we bonded? Who can say?

Our delightfully sadistic waiter described “Jamaican Party Beef from Hell” as (complete deadpan) “We take beef slice it thin pound it thinner serve it with a spicy slaw made me cry.”

The East Coast Grill, which opened in 1985, became infamous in the 1990s for their “from hell” dishes, and for being on the leading edge of the 1990s hot sauce fad with their Inner Beauty hot sauce. They were a spark that ignited innovation in Boston’s food (and cocktail!) scene, and many alums of ECG went on to keep that fire burning (Tony Maws of Craigie on Main, Paul O’Connell of Chez Henri, Andy Husbands of Tremonet 647, Patrick Sullivan of B-Side Lounge, and I’m sure many others I don’t even know about).

When East Coast Grill celebrated their 26th anniversary, we celebrated our 20th, and we went there for a “Throwback Week” where they promised “the 1980s menu at the 1980s prices.” For the occasion, chef Chris Schlesinger recreated the party beef for us, but other than that, the dish only lived on in our memories. This is our first attempt at recreating something like it, though our spice tolerance isn’t what it once was.

“Party Duck from Heck” has been sliced thin and marinated in our recreation of Chris’s Inner Beauty Hot Sauce with one main substitution: mango juice for papaya juice. (The recipe used to be on Serious Eats. It’s gone now, but lives on in Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/seriouseats/...) We also used an assortment of peppers in place of the habañeros, resulting in a sauce that had that extreme deliciousness of Inner Beauty, but was not quite as scalding on the Scoville scale.

Here’s the recipe, which we scaled way down:

1 pound scotch bonnet peppers
12 ounces yellow mustard
2 ounces brown sugar
6 ounces white vinegar
2 ounces orange juice
2 ounces honey
2 ounces molasses
6 ounces papaya juice (we substituted mango juice and loved the result)
6 ounces pineapple juice
6 ounces oil
1/3 ounces each cumin, chili powder, curry , turmeric, and allspice
Salt and pepper to taste

Procedure: Throw everything in a blender and puree.

Inner Beauty is really freakin delicious and I had forgotten just how tasty it was.

Party Duck from Heck. The orange blob on the right is the home made Inner Beauty sauce, which was delicious all on its own.

PAIRING:

At ECG, on their infamous “Hotter Than Hell” nights—everything on the menu was “From Hell”—one item was listed on the menu as “The Antidote.”

The Antidote was a creamsicle, gleefully brought by the kitchen staff en masse wearing fire brigade hats. So the Duck Day pairing was an actual miniature homemade creamsicle (fresh squeezed orange and tangerine juice with home made vanilla ice cream), with an optional shot-sized creamsicle cocktail.

The orange portion of the creamsicle was based on the recipe here: https://www.coinedcuisine.com/orange-... using fresh squeezed orange and tangerine juice, agave, and heavy cream, and corwin made the vanilla ice cream on his usual recipe.

The antidote! At first I wasn’t sure how I was going to make miniature popsicles but it turns out to be a popular thing among parents of teething children, so many designs of silicone freezer molds were available.COURSE 2: JOURNEYMAN

A Journeyman-style “Salad”

If you know me, then you know I hate salad, but I love good fresh vegetables, which means over the years our salad course has been refashioned into everything from a lettuce wrap to  gazpacho. Even if I like all the components of a salad, the main thing I hate about salad is the unpleasant experience of eating a bowl of rabbit food.

At Journeyman, Tse Wei Lim and Diana Kudarova’s restaurant (2010-2017) that was our favorite pioneer to really highlight bistronomy in our area, the salad was always deconstructed. It was more like the concepts of salad—a light course, of vegetable matter, served cold, before the main dishes—assembled onto the plate in an aesthetically pleasing way. This is perfect because it’s everything I love about salad without the negative rabbit-food experience. A Journeyman salad was art. It allows you to enjoy all the things about a salad, but in a choose-your-own-adventure way.

All three of the radishes pickling overnight for the salad.

I knew the plate would need to have at least two smears or streaks of some kind, something green, some root vegetables (because seasonal), something cubed, and probably something pickled. Here’s what we ended up with based on what corwin could find at the winter farmer’s market:

Pickled radish three waysblack-skinned white daikon in yuzu rindwatermelon radish in rice vinegarpurple daikon in brineRoasted multi-color carrots (white, purple, yellow, and orange)Brussels sprouts (tossed in duck fat vinaigrette)Miso butter sweet potato pureeCompressed miniature cucumbersMango-pineapple gastriqueDuck fat sourdough croutons

Wine pairing: Sebastien Girost Rosé de Saignée Champagne

One of the plates of deconstructed salad has no cucumber because one guest couldn’t have cucumber.

Serving the individual leaves of the brussels sprouts is something corwin has been avoiding doing since our very first meal at a “tweezer food” restaurant, Radius, Michael Schlow’s place that ran from 1999-2013 and which was for a long time was one of only a handful of “Michelin star level”* places in Boston (along with Clio, L’Espalier, and No. 9 Park).

(*There are no Michelin-starred restaurants in Massachusetts because local governments refuse to pony up the rumored multi-million dollar payoff it takes to get Michelin to add a new city/region. Boston has no inferiority complex and therefore does not feel the need. We know we have Nightshade Noodle Bar and Giulia and Moeca and multiple Beard Award winners like Barbara Lynch… and heck, it’s already hard enough to get a table those places. If Michelin came in, we’d have to fight off tourists for those seats!)

The duck fat viniagrette came from The Pelleh Poultry website, and included shallots sauteed in duck fat, apple cider vinegar, honey, and mustard. I made it the day ahead, emulsified it with a whisk, and was amazed to see it was still emulsified the next day.

I cut the radishes in ways I thought highlighted their beauty and then pickled each one differently, overnight.

Sweet potatoes in New England are a seasonal staple, and far better than sweet potatoes grown anywhere else. The combination of the rocky soil and the cold weather here makes them incredibly tasty. Combined with miso butter, the puree could be eaten as is or used as a dip for other elements on the plate.

Compressed cucumbers were made in the chamber vacuum. corwin didn’t use a recipe; he just winged it.

He made the croutons from a pan au levain he had baked a week earlier. They were maybe a touch too hard for this salad, where they didn’t get softened at all by being tossed with a dressing, but if the rate at which we’re eating the leftover ones today as a snack is any indication, I would say they came out terrific. Duck fat for the win. (Cube the bread, tossed in duck fat and salt and pepper, bake at 350 degrees until the desired degree of crunch is achieved.)

The reason we can’t have a salad like that every night is that it takes a week to source and make all the elements. Came out exactly the way I wanted, though. (corwin kept trying to add lettuce to it; I kept saying no.)

And yes, I used tweezers to plate the salad.

One of corwin’s criteria for a great restaurant is if they can get him to like an ingredient he didn’t previously like, and that was Radius and brussels sprouts. He knew they were going to be fussy and a pain to separate, so he avoided it for as long as possible, but now was the time. (Normally I would have done it but I was deep in the long, multi-step process for making the next course…)

Suanla chou shou in appetizer-size serving bowls. Each bed of beansprouts is swimming in an unseen well of sauce and oil.COURSE 3: MARY CHUNG

Suanla Chou Shou (But Duck)

Duck wontons served in a sichaun sauce on a bed of refreshing bean sprouts

Ever since getting Andrea Nyugen’s book ASIAN DUMPLINGS, I’ve been making wontons and other dumplings frequently. Buy it. (At Bookstop or at Amazon) Every recipe in it has worked, and her website/YouTube channel has lots of tips. So almost every menu of ours has to have some kind of a bun or wonton or soup dumpling. So this was a natural, since Mary’s suanla chou shou is one of the most missed dishes in Cambridge history.

Mary’s first opened in 1981, then closed in 1989 or so when a medical testing company bought up some property in Central Square. Many many MIT alums decried the lack of “swans” (you have to say it with a Massachese accent) during the period when Mary Chung had no restaurant, but she re-opened in the 1990s, then retired at the end of 2022. I personally never liked most of the food there, but agree with the consensus that the dan dan noodles and suanla chou shou were the two best things on the menu. Suanla chou shou may be one of the most re-created dishes on the internet because so many fans of Mary’s have needed to feed their addiction.

Digging into the Mary’s lore online led me to a recipe from an earlier restaurant, Colleen’s Chinese Cuisine, which had originally introduced “swans”  to the area. Colleen taught Chinese cooking at MIT sometimes, and so her recipes are still floating around on the archives of rec.food and the like. Colleen’s recipes omitted some necessary ingredients, though, that you simply could not get in the 1970s and ‘80s (especially if you were a college student with no car), like chin kiang black vinegar and szechuan peppercorn.

Ultimately for the sauce I followed Kenji Lopez Alt’s recipe for the sauce from Serious Eats (https://www.seriouseats.com/sichuan-wonton-chili-oil-suanla-chaoshou-recipe#toc-making-the-sauce), except instead of toasting my own chili oil, I found it easier to adjust the heat level by taking some premade Lao Gan Ma Fried Chili in Oil (which is a different jar from their famous Chili Crisp) mixing it with sesame oil and letting it sit, and then using that.

I used the Colleen’s recipe for the wonton filling except I omitted the cabbage and egg, and replaced pork with duck (found in a archived thread from rec.food.restaurants). 

Filling

1 lb ground DUCK3 Tbsp Soy Sauce2 Tbsp Wine2 Tbsp Oil2 tsp Salt1 tsp Sesame Oil2 Tbsp chopped Scallion1 tsp minced gingerDash of White Pepper

Apparently the practice of serving the spicy wontons in chili oil on top of a pile of fresh bean sprouts was a Colleen’s invention, as it doesn’t seem to be done that way in other parts of the world, and now it’s a full-blown New England regional variation. In the various Mary Chung’s fan groups and Reddit threads, folks have reported finding “swans” served on bean sprouts in New Hampshire and Vermont as well.

Duck meat adds a level of depth to the filling flavor that pork often lacks, and home made wonton wrappers are much more delicious than the store-bought ones. It takes a pasta machine to do it right, but it was really worth it. This dish came out so good, I’m writing this post less than 24 hours later and I’m already craving it. I should have made more so we’d have leftovers. (We do have some leftover filling, but I need to make more skins… and of course we need more beansprouts. Talk about something that does NOT keep in the crisper…)

The pandan makes the ice cream very green!COURSE 4: NIGHT MARKET

Here come the Numb Nuts.

Palate Cleanser: After the spicy chili oil intensity of suanla chou shou, we served an ice cream palate cleanser: a scoop of pandan coconut-milk ice cream with accompanying numb nuts and fudge sauce, as a deconstructed sundae.

Thanks to Tse Wei (of Journeyman) who is getting ready to move out of town for a couple of years for a job, who asked if we’d hang on to his PacoJet ice cream machine while he’s gone, and we said yes, if we can pick it up ASAP? Because on Wednesday, our Whynter brand ice cream maker went kaput (for the second time in its life) and so this course was rescued by the Paco. (TseWei is also the one who pointed out which grocery stores in Malden were likely to have pandan leaves.)

Numb nuts, as mentioned before, were a bar snack. They are essentially candied peanuts with szechuan peppercorns and salt and cayenne. (I think at Night Market there might have been garlic, too?) I always thought they would be good with ice cream. Guess what, they are.

Me holding up a sheet of uncut chow foon noodle.COURSE 5: CHAU CHOW

Chau Chow Beef Brisket Chow Fun (But Duck)

Home made chow fun noodles stir fried with sliced duck breast, onions, and beansprouts

The old-old Chau Chow restaurant stood on Beach Street from the 1980s (or even earlier?) until around 2004. As often befalls a restaurant when it takes over the space of a beloved institution, the next place failed (I don’t even remember what it was called). Gourmet Dumpling House was there from 2007-2023, and was the first place in Boston to be a soup dumpling destination, often with a line out the door. Now it’s the fast-casual offshoot of NYC’s Nan Xiang, cranking out XLB on disposable plates. (Tse Wei has an absolute excoriation of Nan Xiang Express in his Substack newsletter that is a must-read: https://letthemeatcake.substack.com/p/no-76-insufficiently-disposable)

Not to be confused with the Grand Chau Chow across the street, or Chau Chow City, the dim sum palace around the corner, the old “cash only” Chau Chow was a hole in the wall where the only “decoration” consisted of hand-written menu items on paper (in Chinese only) taped to the walls. It was also the place where we saw the most dine-and-dash attempts. I say “attempts” because they were not successful. I do not know how exactly, in the days before cell phones, Boston’s Chinatown restaurants communicated that a party had dashed, only that the offenders would quickly be apprehended and marched back to the restaurant by cleaver-toting cooks from nearby restaurants.

The offenders would typically then apologize profusely, explaining that they were too embarassed to admit they didn’t have enough cash, and on seeing the “cash only” sign, decided to chance sneaking out. If they were able to produce credit cards at that point, they would be marched over to Grand Chau Chow — same food with a slightly better décor — where they did take cards.

After the would-be thieves were gone, of course, the staff would be all smiles. Catching dashers was probably the most fun they ever had at work.

My favorite dish at the old Chau Chow (one that gets eaten a lot in Daron’s Guitar Chronicles) was a beef brisket chow foon that every time I ordered it, the waiters would double check that I was okay with how fatty it was. Thus it seemed a good candidate to recreate with duck. We couldn’t quite replicate the globs of gelatinous tendon that was usually in the Chau Chow dish, but by passing the duck through oil, we could give it a lovely velvet-soft texture and a beefy, almost livery, flavor (by liberal application of oyster sauce).

corwin’s wok technique has really leveled up over the years, and one of our dinner guests, Phil, machined a new built-in wok ring for us, which he brought with him and it was used during the cooking of this dish.

Pairing: Trimbach 2015 Gewurztraminer “Seigneurs de Ribeaupierre”

(There pretty much always has to be a gewurz on the Duck Day menu.)

Chow foon noodles after being oiled and cut with a knifePlated chow foon (almost forgot the cracklins garnish)COURSE 6: THE FOREST CAFE

Forest Cafe Tinga de Pollo (But Duck)

Confit duck “carnitas” in a tomato-chipotle sauce, served with a traditional slaw & bicolor tortillas

Our favorite watering hole in Cambridge for years and years was a three-generation family business which sadly closed after the 2008 economic crash. What you might not have known from the exterior of the Forest Cafe, which looked like any other family-owned dive bar in the area, was that the cook, an Irish guy named Jim, specialized in Yucatecan mexican cuisine. A different molé would appear every few days, and tinga de pollo was almost always on the menu. Many, many nights when we failed to make a dinner plan until 9:45 pm, we’d end up hurrying in to the Forest before the kitchen would close for whatever Jim had simmering on the stove.

Tinga de pollo with a lime crema, bicolor corn tortillas, and a Napa, carrot, and red onion slaw.

What’s funny is we didn’t discover how great the Forest was until the middle of a snowstorm. In the 90s we didn’t eat (or drink) in bars because we didn’t smoke, but in 2003 Cambridge banned smoking citywide. On the weekend of the North American Blizzard of 2005 we were attending the Arisia Science Fiction Convention and got stuck at the Park Plaza Hotel due to the severity of the blizzard. When the travel ban was briefly lifted the next day, we got our car out of the garage and headed home before getting stuck at the hotel for another night.

At home we discovered 4-5 foot snowdrifts blocking our front door and nowhere to put our car. (We have no driveway.) We dug our way through to our shovels and were chipping away at the mountainous problem, when I threw my back out in one of those spine-tingling motions that sends shooting pain all the way down my legs and made me see stars. At that point corwin gave up, and ran down the street toward the sound of some snowblowers to beg for help. He handed the cash we had made on book sales at the convention to some guys who were clearing a driveway a few houses down, and they cheerfully came and blew clear a parking space for our car, and our walkways and stairs. “You’re lucky!” they told us. “We were about to quit for the night so we can catch the Pats game!”

Inside the house we discovered we had no power, so we decided, let’s walk to the nearest bar where they have Patriots football game on, and get some food. We made it through the snow to the The Forest without really knowing what to expect. Were we going to be welcome there? Was the food any good?

We really shouldn’t have worried, I guess. We got seats at the bar and within minutes we had been introduced to some of the regulars, who included the guy who used to write John F. Kennedy’s speeches, a composer of classical music, and a Smithsonian Institute astronomer who spent half of each year in Cambridge, half in Chile minding telescopes. The food was fantastic — a thick Mexican stew such as tinga de pollo is excellent on a winter night — and their bar featured a long list of tequilas and mezcals long before mezcal got hip. The astronomer knew his tequilas, and upon hearing of my back spasm, said “allow me to choose a tequila for you.”

Lo and behold, with five minutes my back pain was gone, and even more miraculous, the next day it was STILL gone. From that night on, The Forest became our regular watering hole, especially during baseball season, because Brian, the owner’s son who tended bar, and the other Brian, the other main bartender, would always have the game on. (Remember those were the very rudimentary days of streaming sports on the Internet and we did not have a TV or cable.) One night during the 2005 World Series, we stayed late into the night with Brian-1 watching the White Sox play an epic 14-inning game against the Astros. Since the game went on past not only the bar’s usual closing time, but the time they were legally allowed to be open, Brian just turned off all the lights and locked the door and the three of us sat there watching the whole thing.

After the Forest closed, the place that took over the space, the Rafiki Bistro, was not good despite their best intentions. Our experiences there included being served chicken wings that were still frozen inside and servers who didn’t know the menu. Rafiki didn’t even last two years. Giulia took over the space in 2012, and quickly became one of our favorite restaurants of all time, though nothing will ever quite replace the local watering hole spirit that was found at The Forest.

Pairing: A “margarita” (home made orange-lime soda with optional mezcal)

Choco tacos plated and ready to go out.COURSE 7: Dessert

An artisanal “choco taco”

Vanilla ice cream, hazelnut cocoa cream, bittersweet chocolate shell, peanuts, in a sweet taco-shaped shell

I loved the Choco Taco. I loved the concept of it, and whenever I found it on sale at, say, a highway rest area, I would buy it. But Klondike, a subsidiary of Good Humor, discontinued the manufacturing of Choco Tacos in 2022, and I see people selling them on eBay for $500.

Invented in 1983 in Philadelphia by Alan Drazen, the Choco Taco quickly became a popular staple of ice cream trucks and gas station convenience stores. Klondike supposedly axed the product because of “a sharp increase in demand across its brands and to ensure the availability of the remainder of its products.” (Associated Press)

I opine that the truth is that a Choco Taco had a lower profit margin than those other products. A Choco Taco had essentially the same ingredients as a Drumstick, but was much bigger, for the same price. (If you haven’t had one, a Drumstick has a paltry amount of ice cream and is barely worth eating, especially in contrast to the Choco Taco’s former glory.)

To recreate the Choco Taco at home without a waffle cone maker, I turned to a recipe for making homemade ice cream cones in a pan (Tiffin Box on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ylgNV...) which is very similar to the recipe I had previously used for fortune cookies, using powdered sugar and egg whites:

3 tbsp melted butter1/2 cup powder sugar2 medium egg white5 tbsp all-purpose flouroptional: a few drops of vanilla extract

Because I knew I wanted to make these fairly small so that out guests weren’t getting overloaded, I made 15 taco shells from a recipe that said it would make 10 ice cream cones.

One of the questions when shaping these into taco shells was how exactly to get them to take shape. Like with fortune cookies you have to form the dough sheet once it has been cooked but is still hot and pliable, because as soon as it cools, it hardens. Turns out my metal cannoli forms (which are tubes) were perfect for the bending, but I needed something to hold the shells in place until they cooled and to keep them upright while being filled.

A single handmade sweet taco shell bent around a pair of cannoli forms.

Turns out the perfect thing is that little plastic support doohickey with three legs that comes in the box whenever we get a pizza delivered from Joe’s.

Empty sweet ice-cream-cone taco shells awaiting filling.

Recently, Joe’s from Greenwich Village in New York City has opened an outpost in Harvard Square. They took over the space that had been shared by Momofuku Milk Bar and something called &Pizza (Ampersand Pizza? And Pizza? I never knew how to say it) &Pizza is a DC-based pizza chain that had coveted this high profile spot in the Square for a long time, tried to get the space in 2017 but it took until 2019 to finally get all the approvals necessary and open for business. (They’d brought in Milk Bar as a co-tenant to satisfy local opposition to “yet another (mediocre) pizza place in the Square.”) But they were only open about a year before the 2020 lockdowns happened.

And although other businesses in our neighborhood thrived on takeout business during lockdown, and you would think a pizza place naturally would… as a chain business not even based here, &Pizza could not apparently hire or retain enough workers to keep their operation running. Instead of thriving, they couldn’t compete with all the local restaurants who dove into take-out (and who cared about making sure their employees were taking care of…) and provided spotty hours and service. Even in 2021, when we were not under mandatory lockdown, but many many Cambridge residents were still relying heavily on takeout, &Pizza was dying and by spring 2022 it was dead. I can’t say I miss it because, after all, it was never anything more than yet another (mediocre) pizza place in the Square.

Joe’s, on the other hand, is a truly excellent pizza shop. The pizza is great, it’s always busy, and the guys in there making pizza always seem to be having a great time while they’re doing it. And the busier it is, the happier they seem to be.

If you’re not from New York, it’s difficult to explain why Boston pizza, which RESEMBLES New York pizza, is not, in fact, the same thing at all. New York pizza and New Haven (CT) a’pizza are very much the same, in fact, but somehow in the two-hour drive to the northeast, the necessary texture of the crust, the balance of cheese and sauce, and whatever it is that makes NY-NH pizza GOOD, is lost. Every time we order from Joe’s I am amazed all over again how it’s THE RIGHT STUFF. When you grow up in New York or New Jersey you take it for granted that that is what pizza is. Then you go anywhere else in the country and try the pizza and are inevitably disappointed because it just does not hit your senses the same way.

Probably whatever type of regional pizza you grew up with is the “right” pizza for you. I’m not saying New York pizza is better, just that for a New Yorker, any other pizza is a disappointment. (I’ve now lost count of the number of times in my books where some character laments mediocre pizza in Boston or elsewhere. Maybe now that Joe’s has healed my soul I can stop complaining…?)

Anyway, after decades without truly good pizza, Joe’s is here to save us. Which is good since we can no longer run over to the Forest Cafe at 9:45 pm on a weeknight when we have failed to make dinner.

All of that was of course an aside to the fact that I’ve been collecting the little pizza-box-anti-collapse doohickeys for the past year, and while making the taco shells, they turned out to be the perfect thing to hold them in place if you turn them upside down.

In the bottom of each shell I spread a bit of organic hazelnut cocoa spread (like Nutella, but one of the hoity toity organic brands), then carefully packed in vanilla ice cream. Then I tempered a bittersweet chocolate sauce to top it with, sprinkled with crushed roasted peanuts before the chocolate could harden. To serve it, I drizzled each taco with a salted caramel sauce, and served it with some extra caramel and fudge sauce on the plate.

A sweet end to a delicious meal, in a year where we have a lot to be thankful for, especially our friends and family, and the people who have worked so hard to keep us fed and happy all these years.

Additional thanks to Claudia and Regis for photos of the dishes I forgot to take pictures of because I was too busy trying to get them onto the table!

A single choco taco about to be devoured.

MORE PHOTOS:

ctan and corwin at the wokcorwin in the kitchenI got very artsy crafty and so these menu booklets are bound by being hand sewn (with a charm).Hand trimmed booklets for the menu this year.Numb Nuts and hot fudge, plated prior to service so the palate cleanser could be quickly served at the appointed time.Hand folded wontons! When you cut the skins and fold by hand, they’re not as stiff as the store-bought skins. Ample cornstarch helps them not to stick together.Eating a dumpling mid-bite. Duck meat is plenty sticky so no egg was needed in the filling to hold it together.The custom wok ring built by Phil.Another photo of the wok ring that Phil made.Duck cracklins! All the duck fat for the meal was rendered out of these.Duck chow foon garnished with duck cracklins, the menu just to be arty.The bicolor tortillas were corwin’s idea, to use two colors of masa. Festive!The finished choco tacos standing in the pizza-box-stands.

 

Sample chapter: The Vanished Chronicles Book 1: Bound by the Blood

I continue to be gobsmacked at how quickly the patreon jumped up over the past week! We’re now only $29 short of the monthly goal that will trigger the serialization of Bound by the Blood, the first book in my long-long-long awaited “BDSM meets sex magic in modern NYC” paranormal romance series.

To encourage folks to get us to the goal, I’m posting chapter one here! Now, you’d think I would post this on Patreon itself, BUT they have a rule that says if there’s anything naughty, it has to stay behind the paywall. So I’m posting it on my regular ol’ blog(s).

Enjoy!

Let’s start with the night I met Clive—boots laced up, my corset cinched, and a bag of whips on my shoulder. I’ll start somewhere you might recognize: a nightclub with an upstairs dance floor. The city is full of clubs like it—a thousand different vibes to suit a thousand different crowds. Upscale, downtown, psychedelic, cyberpunk, Bollywood, cowgirl, you name it.

A shirtless man would grab my attention in any of them, but especially in Purgatory.

Before I saw him, I had been asking myself why the hell I was there. The place was goth, but once a month the dance floor turned into a dungeon. People go to these places—all of these places—to hook up. Not just for sex. People go to bars when they’re lonely, when they’re looking for connection.

I wasn’t ready for connection. Not so soon after severing ties with Ethan. But there I was, anyway.

Clive—I didn’t know that was his name yet—was standing by the empty deejay booth, looking comfortable in his bare skin. A typical darkwave dance-trance playlist was on, but that night was for a different sort of dance. Two leathermen had been flogging a third on the St. Andrew’s cross, but they were mostly done, just running their hands up and down his bare back and buttocks. One of them snapped the elastic waistband of his thong and all three of them laughed. A witchy long-haired androgyne smiled in their direction and then glided down the stairs. A few mixed-gender couples nursed drinks at the tall cocktail tables along the far wall. It was early, not yet crowded, and the spanking bench and other play stations were empty…

I should have been sizing up the possibilities, psyching myself up to meet someone new, but I was trying hard not to think about my ex—which of course meant I was thinking of him—but what would I do if he showed up? I told myself he wouldn’t. Ethan had always said club nights were for posers. He preferred to play at private parties, where one could wear less and do more—even sex, if that was your thing.

Parties where you could draw blood.

If you’re reading this I probably don’t have to tell you why that’s sexy. But I will. After all, assumptions are what got us into this mess, and so much has already been lost.

For some of us, sex and attraction and lust are wrapped up in power, and invoking that power through pain or pleasure is what we do. It’s how we connect and it’s why people arrange club nights like that one, so like-minded souls can meet.

I remember looking at the empty palm of my hand, splashed red by the dance floor lights. Even if Ethan turned his nose up at club play, I might still run into someone who’d been at that party, that disastrous night when he had torpedoed our relationship (and I’d tried to send him down with the ship). What would they say? That I had no right to set foot in a “safe space” like Club Purgatory?

Don’t let anyone tell you BDSM is “safe.” It’s safety-focused, but—like parachuting and mountain climbing—danger is part of the attraction. The thrill is the point.

My worries were all in my head: I didn’t see anyone I knew. Just that rather enticing-looking guy in black jeans and engineer boots and nothing else. He had a lean-muscled chest and black tousled hair and I closed my hand like I was taking a fistful of that hair and getting ready to drag him to that then-vacated St. Andrew’s cross.

He looked up right then. Right at me.

I tightened my fist and read a flicker in his eyes—when you’re a thrill-seeker does fear look the same as desire? Was he looking for a goddess in black leather, ready to smite any she chose? And was that what he saw? As I held his gaze, his interest intensified rather than waning. So.

It had been so long that I’d forgotten how to do the next part, the two-steps-forward, one-step-back dance that was flirting.

I’ve always preferred negotiation over flirtation, anyway. If you could call marching up to him and saying “I have three whips in my bag. Are you interested in seeing them?” a negotiation.

He reflected my courage back to me: “I might be more interested in feeling them than seeing them.”

A surge of emotion flooded me at his answer—excitement, lust, curiosity, hunger—I don’t know a single word to describe the feeling that comes over me when a potential partner shows their willingness to play—to submit. All I knew was I hadn’t felt it in far too long.

I tried to tread lightly—didn’t want to scare him away. “Might?”

But there was no scaring Clive. His voice held a touch of bravado. “If you’d like to use them, I’d like to feel them.” The lights shifted to white and I saw his eyes were startlingly pale blue.

Me. “I haven’t even told you what kind they are.”

Him. “And you don’t have to.”

So. He was either too naive to know what he was in for, or he was extremely confident about how much punishment he could take. Confidence is sexy. Overconfidence equals disaster.

That was when he told me, with a slight smile, “I like surprises.”

Well. He was at least a masochist, a slightly cheeky one at that. But was he submissive? I liked self-confidence, but I wasn’t into brats.

I told myself it didn’t matter. It wasn’t like I was vetting him for a relationship. I was just going to flog him for a bit of fun. We probably weren’t even going to exchange phone numbers, right? He was pretty and he was willing. That should have been enough.

But I never know when to leave well enough alone. “How are you at following directions?”

“Give me some directions and you can judge that for yourself.” Rather than being cheeky, these words were delivered with a respectful nod of his head. “Is there a form of address you prefer?”

Good manners. Not a brat, then. “One has to earn the right to call me by a title. Address me by my name, which is Mira.”

He drew my name out—“Meerah”—like he was practicing to get it perfect. “Mira, I’m Clive.”

I repeated his name back to him, too, liking the way it felt in my mouth, the way my tongue brushed the roof of my mouth before my teeth, a spoonful of something delicious. I held out my hand, fingers angled downward. He took the hint, lifting my hand gently but surely to his lips. That kiss sent a delicious shiver up my arm and I resolved—if he took the beating well—to kiss him on the mouth when his lips would be ripe from surrender.

I asked for his safeword.

He chuckled a little as he said it: “Divinity.”

I was sure there was a story behind it, but that wasn’t the time to hear it. It was time to set the rules of engagement. “The three whips in my bag are two floggers and one single tail.”

He nodded. “Yes, Mira.”

“When I meet someone new, I only use the floggers.”

“Yes, Mira,” he repeated, but was it my imagination that there was a hint of disappointment there?

“What are you wearing under your jeans?”

His Mona Lisa smile returned. “I’m legal, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“That is, in fact, what I am asking. Put your boots next to the cross, strip your jeans, take hold of the handles, and then wait.”

“Yes, Mira.” Again that deferential nod, which almost made my name into a title itself. The thing that really cranked up my anticipation right in that moment, though, was the way he followed my instructions. Sometimes independence and initiative are sexy, but right then total obedience was like a balm on my soul. He did exactly as I asked, no more, no less, and then he got up onto the X-shaped cross and waited.

And waited. I knew from my early experiences in the scene—back when I didn’t know the difference between being attracted to a hot dom and being submissive—that a minute of waiting on the cross could feel like twenty. So I didn’t intend to have him stand there for too-too long. Just long enough to ratchet up the anticipation.

A little voice of doubt yammered in the back of my head: Get on with it, Mira. Don’t wait. He just wants you to flog him. Not everything has to be a test. You’re setting yourself up for disappointment when he gets bored and breaks character…

The minute, which I was counting out in my head, had almost passed when a voice behind me said, “Watch out. He’s a tough little thing. Your arm may get tired.”

I didn’t have to glance back to know one of my least favorite people in the scene was standing behind me, a man I knew by the name of Ira Dayton. I didn’t know at the time if it was his real name or a scene name. I’d served with Kanna, his wife, on the board of Gotham Kink United, and I liked her just fine, but Ira… Here’s what I did know about him: He was a doctor who liked extreme blood play. He would bring his own tarp, scalpels, and matched set of gay submissive puppy players to parties. There was nothing wrong with that. What was wrong was Ira’s disregard for the rules.

No, it was worse than that. Ira could couch his penchant for breaking the rules in such a way as to make it seem like he was upholding them. That was my conclusion after one time he had set up one of his extreme scenes right there at Purgatory. Afterward, when the club tried to ban him, he pointed out that in their rules prohibiting fluid exchange they’d failed to mention blood by name. When they pointed out that anyone sensible would know full well you shouldn’t be doing anything of the sort, he claimed he only did it to force the club to update their rules “for everyone’s safety.”

Yeah, right. It had been a dick move and I’d had the sound of puppies whining stuck in my head for weeks afterward.

With a little “excuse me” tossed in Ira’s direction, I began to swing the first of the floggers in the air. I figured I’d warm up my arm and maybe drive him away. If he was standing too close and got caught with a backswing it would be his own damn fault. And what did he mean by “little”? That word didn’t seem to apply to any part of Clive that I could discern. I’m sure it was just supposed to get under my skin. Being short myself, even in heels, has never bothered me, but Ira didn’t know that.

Clive had not moved a muscle. Another jolt of powerlust surged through me. I hadn’t bound him to the cross. Above his head, padded handlebar grips were attached to the wood and he was holding them tight as instructed. His shoulders curved enticingly. I don’t know who invented the St. Andrew’s Cross, but I said a little prayer of thanks to them before I let the suede tails of the flogger come into contact with Clive’s skin. Not hitting him hard at all, just swinging the flogger around and around in a circle, thwapping him lightly on each pass, to wake up his skin and get him ready for more.

Every flogging has a rhythm to it, whether you synch up with the beat of the music or let your own body set the tempo. I tend to start with the beats coming quickly but lightly, tap-tap-tap, but as I start to hit harder, I slow down and give more time between the blows. It’s all about judging when the moment comes to go to another gear. Has my dance partner been lulled into a sense of security that I want to shatter? Or are they literally aching to be pushed harder, to take more?

Clive was one of those who wanted more. He arched into the strikes, muscles bunching and tensing, skin turning a lovely shade of pink. I went from criss-crossing with my wrist to swinging from my elbow, laying longer strokes across his shoulders and his bare buttcheeks. Eventually I used my whole arm, letting all the suede tails thud against his back in unison until his breath was coming in quick gasps.

When his breath lengthened again, as he lost himself in the sensation, it was time to switch floggers. He shivered a little as I trailed the cool tails of the second one down his back, letting him guess what it would be like. The second one had a hide with a stiffer finish; it could sting or leave marks depending how I wielded it. I stepped up to the cross and pulled his hair the way I’d imagined, tipping hs head back and taking a quick kiss before he realized I was going to. He brimmed with vigor, his mouth taut with energy.

Number two genuinely caused pain. It did not damage, but it did hurt.

The body always resists pain at first, even with a masochist who craves it. That would be when Ethan would pull at his bonds like he was trying to get free and shout “no!” at me and curse me. But it was an act. He knew that to stop me for real, all he had to do was utter his safeword. Ethan just “needed” to struggle, he told me. At the time I had thought he needed to be relieved of the guilt over wanting to feel something, and lay the responsibility on me for “making” him feel that way.

At the time I failed to understand the true depths of his guilt.

But though I’m comparing the two of them now, at that moment I was not thinking of Ethan or failure. Clive was alive and present in front of me in a way I hadn’t connected with another human being in months. (Years, really, if you counted that E. and I had stayed together long past any true connection.) Clive captured my full attention. And as I began laying into him with the leather, harder and harder, he got past the struggle and into that place where all sensation is welcome, where each stroke is another step toward ecstasy. His breath and mine fell into synch, and although he never let go the handholds entirely, his fingers flared against the padding, like tiny fireworks blooming on the horizon.

When I stopped flogging him, it was to lick clean, freshly earned sweat from the back of his neck. Then I kissed him again, and this time the fight was gone. His lips felt supple and yielding in a way they only ever are after surrender. Like he was completely wrapped up in the state of mind known as subspace.

Completely mine.

He opened his eyes slowly—I’d forgotten they were blue.

“Welcome back, angel.” That was when I made the decision. “Remember how I said I wouldn’t use the single tail on you?”

“Yes…?” Oh, what a hopeful note he struck!

“Be honest. Did you want me to use it?”

“I want you to do whatever pleases you most.”

Pure bullshit. I tightened my grip in his hair. “I said ‘be honest,’ not ‘tell me what you think I want to hear.’” (There’s a difference.)

“Yes, Mira.” He swallowed. “Yes, I would like to feel it.”

“I normally won’t use it on anyone unless I’m sure they can take it.”

“I’m sure I can take it,” he said, eyes glittering. Such a courageous heart. “In fact, it would be an honor to.”

“An honor, eh?” It was like he knew exactly what I needed to hear to have my choices validated. “All right, angel.” That was the moment I decided to take him home.

Just like not using my signal whip on a new person, bringing home someone I’d just met at a club was against my usual rules. You were supposed to have a sober conversation in a coffee shop, and check their social media, and ask around about them, before you let a person you just met into your place or went solo to theirs. But he felt too different from all the others—so intriguing, so perfect for me—for the old rules to apply.

Or maybe I was just too desperate. I made him “remind me” of his safeword (“Divinity”) and he gave me a nod that seemed to say he knew I wasn’t reminding myself of it so much as reminding him that he could use it.

Me. “I’m going to give you three strokes.”

Him. “Three?” Plaintively, as if that were far too few.

Me. “I’ll give you the chance to opt out after each one and there will be no dishonor in that.”

“Ah.” He understood. This was going to be a challenge to get through. This was going to hurt. And then he asked, “Is this… is this how people earn the privilege to call you by a title?”

So sharp and engaging! He clicked with me on every level. “It’s not the only way, but yes, if you take it well, I’ll allow it.”

“Thank you, Mira.”

“Don’t thank me yet, angel.” I stole another quick kiss, prompting a pang of lust deep in my gut. It had been ages since I wanted anyone that much. I felt almost hollow with hunger for him, and that feeling alone felt like a miracle.

I pulled the braided leather whip from the bottom of the bag, where it lay coiled like a snake. Once upon a time I’d gotten good enough to do demonstrations for BDSM community groups. I could slice paper—or a banana—with it. (It was especially fun if a volunteer held the banana at their belt buckle. I could wrap the end of the whip harmlessly around the fruit from a distance, and then for a truly wicked finale, slice the tip clean off.)

I ran a hand down Clive’s bare back one last time, feeling the heat and welts left by the flogging, and letting him know I was there. Then I stepped away, pacing out my distance. I took my stance, left foot forward, whip swaying in my right as I rocked back and forth, preparing myself.

On the cross as he was, back bared to me, Clive couldn’t see me, but his head swayed in time with me. I figured it was probably just the rhythm of the music, but I liked the thought that we were in synch. The lights shifted to blue and it was like we were in a bubble under the sea, just the two of us.

The first blow cut diagonally across his right shoulder and I heard the breath go out of him—not a scream or cry, just a breath—followed by a shiver, a tremble. I gave him time to process it and there was no sign he wanted to stop.

I matched the first cut with one on the left, and this time a little cry came forth, and he shook, hands opening as if he could let the pain out faster through his palms.

I drank in that agony, like I could soak it right down to my bones.

When he was still again, and breathing in synch with my sway once more, I knew he was ready for the third and final blow. The dark red welts from the other two were clearly visible. I knew where the third would go.

My own breath went out of me as I laid a line of fire straight across his shoulders. The welt crossed the previous stripes and made him sing out clearly, an animal cry with a guttural end. A kind of phantom orgasm swept through me at that sound, a shiver of longing so intense it felt like relief when it passed. I pressed myself against Clive, then, tasting the sweat on the back of his neck once more… and sneaking a swipe of my tongue at the blood that beaded on his right shoulder where the two blows had crossed. I hadn’t intended to draw blood. No one did that here, not since Ira’s little stunt.

But no one had to know.

Clive practically vibrated against my tongue, legs shaking, pressing himself back against me. Alive and in the moment with me in a way that was more precious than I can express.

And then he hung his head. It felt almost like a different kind of heat was coming off of him, then. Was he… ashamed?

I ran my fingers into his hair, waiting to see if he’d speak, to see if he’d tell me about the change that came over him.

“Do I… did I still earn the right to call you by a title? Even though. Um.” He trailed off, trying to hide his face. Where had his bravado gone? Had I beaten it out of him?

I turned his head so I could look into his eyes. “You may call me ‘my lady.’ The fastest way to lose that privilege is to lie to me. What’s wrong, angel?”

“Just… my lady, you didn’t give me permission to come.”

He came from that? No wonder he’d made such a sound. How could he think I wouldn’t be thrilled that I could make him come that way? Good god. Another ghostly shiver of near-satisfaction flashed hot and cold through me and I clenched my fists, as if I could grab what I needed from the air.

But what I needed was much more solid than air. “Did I say that was a rule? My rules include no such thing. I have only one absolute rule, and it is that you always tell me the truth, the whole truth, with absolute honesty.”

“Yes, my lady,” he almost whispered.

I slid a hand between the cross and his abs, until just under the waistband of his thong, my fingers found the truth in his words. A masochist who could literally come from being whipped. What a treasure. I lay a line of kisses along his jaw. “I’m not disappointed at all that you came. The only thing that’ll disappoint me is if you don’t come home with me tonight.”

His breath caught in his throat, his eyes almost starry with hope and anticipation for a moment, before he grimaced, a flare of hot shame enflaming his cheeks.

Here it comes, I thought.

“I’m sorry, my lady.” He really looked pained. But I’d just told him I required absolute honesty, and there it was: “I… have another commitment tonight.”

The bubble burst. His gaze never left my face but I started to feel the people around us, hear the laughter and voices from the bar. The next couple, impatient to use the cross, lurked beside us. “Oh, really,” I heard myself saying, mind whirling. That connection I’d imagined had snapped like a lifeline and sent me tumbling back down the mountain. Reality, like gravity, would not be denied. “Another commitment.” That was the sort of thing I would say to slip away from an unwelcome advance.

Had it all been my imagination? My desperation? Maybe he wasn’t into me, after all. Maybe he didn’t give a damn about me or my rules and was only there to see how many tops he could charm.

Or maybe he was afraid. He’d wanted to earn something from me. Had I coerced him into taking those three stripes and afterward he regretted it? If he wanted to, he could easily accuse me of assault.

I still wonder why Ethan never did.

“I’m truly sorry,” Clive went on. “I didn’t expect to… to connect to you so well. And even so, I didn’t expect an invitation.”

He was right. I was far from the only one with a “Starbucks rule.” I was the one jumping the gun.

And I could handle disappointment like an adult. I stepped back from him and pointed at the tip of my boot. He hurried to kneel, to place one firm and respectful kiss on the leather, sending shockwaves up my legs. (Good god, I wanted him to place that kiss somewhere else.)

I held out my fingertips, still damp with his issue, and he licked them clean. By rights I should have just said good night, gone straight home, and forgotten all about him.

But before I went home to a vibrator and a pint of fudge ripple, I did one more thing. I gave him my card. He stayed on his knees to receive it.

“That is my number. Let me make one thing clear. I do not chase submissives. I expect you to call.”

“Yes, my lady!” Good god, those eyes. “I’ll call!”

Reader, he did not call.

(If you would like to see what happens next! Follow me on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/ceciliatan — as soon as the monthly total passes $300/month, the serialization will begin!)

The Time is Now (to support a sm*t writer in your life)

I sent out my email newsletter in the wee hours this morning, and in this post I’m going to expand on some things I said in it. (Because even 12 hours later, some things already need updating!)

“Pornography should be outlawed.  The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned .”

These are the literal words in Project 2025, the ultra-conservative blueprint for America that the Trump administration admitted yesterday they have been planning to use all along.

There are so many things I’d rather be writing about right now. There are dozens of fights for our rights we’ll need to have in the coming year, but since I am an erotica writer, I’ll stay in my lane for the moment and concentrate on the Project 2025 Porn Ban. Yes, it’s real. As Newsweek reports, it’s “a key agenda item in Project 2025.”

You might think in the wake of 50 Shades that BDSM is just accepted everywhere, and with the success of Sarah J. Maas’s ACOTAR and fantasy/romantasy books with a lot of “spice” in them, that whether something has sex in it is no big deal now. But this is not the case. It’s already more difficult to sell and publish erotic writing than any other genre, because it’s already against the ToS to promote erotic writing on Facebook or Google Ads. B&N just did a purge of erotic ebooks. Amazon regularly figures out what the hot erotic trend is and then suppresses it in search (as they did with bigfoot erotica, dinosaur porn, stepbrothers, and so on).

With Project 2025, they won’t just shut down sites like PornHub. They want to scrub sex-related content from all American life, which means increased pressure on Amazon and Patreon and Barnes & Noble to sanitize themselves—which they’ve already been doing! These efforts will only intensify.

But if you think wellllll maybe we can live without some smut, remember, for Project 2025 folks, “banning porn” doesn’t just mean going after the explicit “X-rated” material. It also means anything with queer or trans content, because to them, any representation of queerness is obscene.

But those of us who do write explicitly erotic material (as usual) will be the first to go. They’ve said in plain words that people like me belong in jail for what we write. If you don’t agree, and you believe we have the right to write about sex, and the right to read about it as well, now is the time to support your erotica writing friends as best you can, whether that is by buying their books or supporting their crowdfunds, or in reviewing, posting, and talking about their books, or even just posting an encouraging word to them!

Before the election, I was originally planning to ask for support of my patreon this month, anyway. My goal is launching the Vanished Chronicles series, finally. But suddenly that $2 or $5 a month someone could pledge means a whole lot more. It might soon become my only writing income, if my other books get blocked from sale online.

My plan now is that as soon as I reach $300/month on patreon, I’ll launch the serial for book 1 of the Vanished Chronicles, my very very very long-awaited kinky paranormal romance/urban fantasy thriller. (And if Patreon eventually decides we’re too hot for them, I’ll move to set up my own subscription site a la Daron’s Guitar Chronicles…. but I really hope I don’t have to.)

If you are not already a Patreon supporter, please consider chipping in over there. The quicker we get to $300/month, the sooner the story will start flowing! In fact, I have an update, since the newsletter went out this morning, we’ve already crossed the $200/month threshold! (Here’s the link to my Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/ceciliatan)

My next step is set up an online store for myself. In fact… I already have it up and running here: https://www.ceciliatan.com/shop

This past weekend when I was supposed to be writing, I was too keyed up from pre-election anxiety to be able to write. So I worked on the website instead. Right now only digital products are available. I plan to add autographed print editions soon.

You can even buy an online gift card to my shop ! Snazzy! If you don’t want a subscription but you want to support me now, a $25 gift card is a great way. I’ve also put a $50 card on sale for only $45 right now.

Help me test out the store by making a purchase and letting me know if anything goes haywire. I’m a one-writer operation over here right now, no assistant, but email shop @ ceciliatan.com with any issues.

Of course, if you’re unable to support with money right now, it always always always helps and is appreciated when you tell people about the books, review them on sites like Amazon and StoryGraph, post about them in your social media. Truly.

AND. If you’re already a supporter of mine, here are a few other smutty, kinky queer creators on Patreon who could use your support:

Lauren P. Burka – Lauren was Circlet Press’s second author (after me) and has just started serializing a very kinky gay fantasy that is a sequel to her book Wishbone. Lauren mostly stays off social media for mental health reasons, so doesn’t have a lot of ways to spread the word about it. Names of My Beloved is steamy hot with lots of corporal punishment and dominance and submission dynamics, beautifully written. https://www.patreon.com/LaurenPBurkaSinclair Sexsmith – Sinclair not only publishes crazy-hot D/s, there are classes on both writing and on BDSM and D/s relationship topics. Yes Sir. https://www.patreon.com/c/mrsexsmith/TammyJo Eckhart – Another longtime Circlet author and one who writes a fair amount from the dominant female perspective. https://www.patreon.com/tammyjoeckhartMidori – if you didn’t know Midori has a patreon, now you do. She is VERY active, with everything from online “office hours” chats, to BDSM-related classes by herself and guests, and much more. https://www.patreon.com/planetmidoriLaura Antoniou – Laura has not been active recently while revamping all her self-publishing efforts, but I’m expecting to see more soon! Look for her new website and webstore, and some new editions of the Marketplace books will be coming as well. https://www.patreon.com/kvetch

If you are, or know of, other 18+ erotica writers on patreon please let me know because I would love to keep amplifying. Spreading the word for each other is erotic creators’ only real means of discovery, since we’re blocked from ads and search, and suppressed by social media algorithms.

If the crackdown really comes hard, of course, patreon will cave, and even my webhost could change their ToS. If they really make good on the imprisonment threat… well, I guess I would be looking at moving not just my web server but my self to another country. (Any leads on offshore web hosting would be welcome!)

Part of me says I’m overreacting, but people underreacting to just how bad Trump and P2025 will be is how we got to this place. Honestly, I’m feeling extremely demoralized and finding it hard to get through writing anything (this newsletter included…) without crying right now. The grief is real.

Please contribute if you can, or just send me some words of encouragement that erotic writing is important to you and that you don’t want to lose access to it! We have a fight ahead of us and I need all the encouragement I can get.

Let’s Talk About Fear (and erotica)

Thinky Thoughts: Let’s Talk About Fear

Welcome to the spookiest month of the year! I figure this is a great time for some thinky thoughts about fear—specifically how crucial fear is in erotic fiction. For me, at least.

I was a fraidy cat as a child. I was one of those kids who would see Godzilla on television and then not be able to get to sleep for weeks, because I was convinced that Godzilla was definitely coming out of the sea that very night to step on our house. Or that space aliens were coming to kidnap me. Or whatever other horrible thing I could imagine.

What was extra-confusing to my parents is that things other kids were afraid of—like talking to adults, or jumping into the deep end of swimming pool, or snakes—didn’t bother me at all. My mom talked to the school psychologist about it and was told that “gifted” kids with vivid imaginations were prone to such terrors.

Tell her it’s just her imagination, they said. That went okay, I guess, when the reason I couldn’t sleep was my fear of “giant germs that could come through walls.” (No idea where I got that idea from…Star Trek, maybe? Or Space 1999?)

The “just your imagination” strategy failed, though, when …

…my kindergarten class had Fire Safety Week. Although it was super cool to meet the firefighters and all—they gave us hats!—after that I was afraid the house would burn down.

When I say I “couldn’t sleep,” it wasn’t just that I lay there “worrying” about the giant germs/alien abduction/fire/etc… I would be trembling, heart racing, feeling almost ill from the fear.

Experiencing fear throughout my whole body, from threats that were only present in my thoughts, was a nightly occurrence from about age 5 to 12, and then it got progressively less frequent until some time when I was probably 18.

It didn’t occur to me until recently that the dropoff in my experience of full-body fear probably maps exactly to the rise in my experience of full-body lustful erotic longing.

Instead of lying there unable to sleep because I was terrified of Godzilla, I would lie there rapt in hormone-soaked fantasies of my latest crush.

Erotic fantasies, especially ones that made all the skin on my body tingle and the deep center of my chest feel hollow, were far more pleasant than detailed imaginings of how the house would be crushed under Godzilla’s giant foot. But there was a lot of trepidation associated with sex in my upbringing, ranging from fearmongering stories that were told about teen pregnancy, to internalized homophobia and kinkphobia that kept my desires secret, to AIDS hysteria, to just plain fear of the unknown. Would it hurt? Would I ever find what I really wanted? Would sex change me? Would everything be OK?

One type of fantasy replaced the other, not as opposites, but as similar or kindred phenomena. It’s not like fear was dark and erotic fantasies were light. Given how kinky my sexual fantasies were (and still are), perhaps it should be obvious they were a function of the same obsessive imagination that would paralyze me with effervescent terror.

And so perhaps it is no surprise that although I rarely write horror, fear is part of what I like to flavor my erotic writing with. Telepaths Don’t Need Safewords has a kidnapping in it, after all.

Much of the time it’s simple fear of the unknown at play: our protagonist maybe hasn’t had sex before. Or hasn’t had this kind of sex. Or with this person (or creature).

I’ve always thought of myself as a “sex-positive” writer, and one reason I steered away from erotic horror in the 1990s is there was a bit too much of what felt to me like throwing in graphic sex stuff for shock value—to make the horror more horrific. Whereas I wanted the opposite, to use whatever means possible to make the erotica more erotic.

And if that meant adding a dash of fear, a sprinkle of dread, well, so be it. I write often from the submissive or bottom’s point of view, and, well, not to get too deeply into the kind of BDSM play I personally enjoy, but… if I’m not at least a little bit afraid of what my top might do to me while I’m tied up, then what’s the point?

The theme of fear in sex is on my mind right now because it seems to be cropping up a lot as I’m writing Windmark, and it definitely runs through The Vanished Chronicles—which none of you have seen yet, but you will soon. Fear and rapture go hand in hand to make the vampire mythos so erotic, right?

Overcoming fear (and trauma associated with it) to find sexual fulfillment has always been my idea of a happy ending. Now that I look over my shelf, that theme is in every one of my books. The vanilla ones like Daron’s Guitar Chronicles, and the kinky ones like Watch Point and Slow Surrender.

I guess it’s just that now I finally noticed it! Time, I guess, to embrace it.

-ctan

As you may have gathered by now, every month I post some thinky thoughts followed by various forms of updates. Here are the bits of news that follow:

“Freelance Heroes” Swag!DGC Volumes 1-8 now live in KUDGC Volumes 1-4 live everywhere elseWIP Report: Windmark at 76,000 wordsWhere I’ve Been LatelyMy Schedule for World Fantasy in Niagara Falls2025 Tour DatesBook recs, reversedParting thoughts[image error] “Freelance Heroes”

So, last summer I gave a keynote speech at the Editorial Freelancers Association on the theme of “Freelance Heroes,” complete with a powerpoint slideshow of funny and silly superheroes (and supervillains like “Sticklerman and Stetboy.”) The EFA has decided to run with it and sell some freelance heroes T-shirts, tote bags, etc, via Teepublic! Proceeds go to support the EFA’s mission! See all their fun designs here:

https://www.teepublic.com/stores/efashop

 

[image error] DGC Vols 1-8 are live in KU!

I’ve been steadily plugging along with adding volumes of DGC to Kindle Unlimited, and adding the fancier product listings that KU allows. Book 9 will release in November. (If you’re a KU reader, please give the series a look. *hearts*) If you’re not in KU, but do use Amazon to buy ebooks, Book 1 is A FREE DOWNLOAD right now. (Shutting off at midnight pacific time, I think?) Grab it for $0.00: https://amzn.to/4dNIzeO

There’s a Goodreads giveaway going on for Book 1 right now as well: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/209814488-daron-s-guitar-chronicles-vol-1

And I’m waiting on the LAST piece of cover art, for book 13, and then I’l finish up the production and layout for the ones that were never previously in book form, vols 11-13! Coming soon!

Meanwhile, volumes 1-4 are live everywhere, with vol 5 coming in the first week of November. Whew. I knew republishing the series would be a heavy lift, but I’m so glad it’s getting done.

WIP Report

Windmark (aka “the unexpected dragon book”) passed the 77K word mark and continues to get more and more twisted. I’ve been adding to it a bit more slowly the past 1-2 months because various editing deadlines have been sucking up my writing time, but I hope to wrap up a first draft before Christmas? Maybe? (Reminder I am still signing up beta readers.)

I’m at that stage of writing where I’m convinced everyone will hate the hero. Which isn’t necessarily bad, because we’re at the stage of the book where the heroine hates him, and if there’s one thing I’ve been good at, it’s making my readers feel what my main character does.

I learned somewhat the hard way that if book one of a series ends on a cliffhanger and the heroine feels betrayed and abandoned by the hero, the readers will feel betrayed and abandoned, too… by the author. So I’m aiming to avoid that, but as I mentioned last month, exactly where we’ll land, I don’t know yet.

 

[image error]

My Schedule for World Fantasy!

In addition to the “mass autographing” (to which I’ll bring a random assortment of my books?) looks like both panels I’m doing will be on Friday. At 12 noon, one on “Fanfiction’s Impact on Fantasy & Horror,” and at 5pm “Is This The Queerest Era of Horror and Fantasy?”

Let me know if you’ll be at WFC! Or if you’re driving distance to Niagara Falls! (I might host a small get-together for patrons and subscribers…?)

Tour Dates & 2025 Appearances

Looks like the dates of ICFA were announced incorrectly, so it turns out I will be able to attend after all! And I’ll be doing Capricon in Chicago again, as well. It’s a really nice sf/f con that is still somewhat underpopulated post-pandemic, so I encourage folks to consider attending!

January 17-20: Arisia, Cambridge, MA (new hotel: Hyatt Cambridge)January 30, 8pm “How to Write a Sex Scene” Class: online for Passionate InkFebruary 6-9: Capricon, Chicago, ILMarch 19-23: ICFA, Orlando, FLJune 2025: Daron’s Guitar Chronicles Pride Release Tour (details TBA)June 25-29: SABR 54 in Dallas, TXJuly 17-20: Readercon, Burlington, MA (back to the Burlington Marriott!)August 13-17: Worldcon in Seattle, WASeptember 25: Writing Bisexual Erotica class: online for Passionate InkBook Recommendations

Okay, so, you know if I did not like a book, I will not recommend it. So, unfortunately I have no recommendations this time around.

How about you guys recommend me some that I can pass along? Basically… what book would you recommend to someone who you know likes reading Cecilia Tan books?

Leave a comment with your suggestions! 

Parting Thoughts

You might remember I saw the Northern Lights back in May. Well, there was another geomagnetic storm this week and I went and saw them again.

This time corwin and I hopped in the car together at 11pm and drove two hours northeast to get out from under the clouds and into the likely aurora zone. I dithered for about half a minute as to whether it would be worth it, and corwin reminded me the best reason to live the life we do is to be able to just hare off in the middle of the night if we feel like it. Why not spend several hours in the car together, in search of adventure?

We were successful at seeing the lights, though not as bright as last time. The incredible thing we could see with the naked eye this time was the solar wind literally blowing, with flashes and puffs of particles looking for all the world like steam being blown off a coffee cup the size of the Earth.

There is wonder in this universe, and it’s worth chasing.

Until next time,

-ctan

Now Available: The Blossoms of Summer erotic steampunk

Available for purchase almost anywhere books are sold, including:

Porter Square Books (my local indie bookstore!)Powell’s!Amazon (ebook and paperback)Bookshop (paperback only)Barnes & Noble (ebook and paperback)Goodreads (to rate and review)

The Blossoms of Summer

by Cecilia Tan

An erotic steampunk adventure novella, told in epistolary fashion, through letters and diary entries.

A botanist travels by airship beyond the known lands of Canton in search of breathtaking beauty and finds himself seduced by his exotic discoveries.

Botanist Robert Meriweather has been tasked by the Continental Occident Company to travel beyond the known lands of Canton to search for the “forbidden flowers,” specimens of such breathtaking beauty that the mere sight has caused men to forsake their homelands. Robert’s orders are to bring these blossoms back to England, where all of society’s rewards—and his betrothed, Livia—await him.

Robert soon finds himself on an unexpectedly erotic adventure, in which he must abandon all his Victorian social moires to succeed in his mission. But he will never abandon Livia and his dream of marrying her as a gentleman of standing!

Paperback: $9.99 ISBN: 978-1-963897-16-6
Ebook: $2.99

 

 

 

English is Weird, Man…

I started drafting this entry while traveling in the UK. And while I am a “native English speaker,” I’m an American, and so hearing the English speak English always comes with some wee disconnects in my brain.

For one thing, posh British accents are so often used in Hollywood to indicate villainy. Have you noticed that? I’m not sure how much of that is the historical reliance on all those theater-trained British actors to play the heavy, and how much is a kind of Revolutionary War holdover here in the former colonies?

This was in my mind when we went to see some Shakespeare at The Globe: a production of Richard III with an all-female/AFAB cast which characterized RIII as a Trumpian womanizer. (“When you’re king, they just let you do it.”) I quite enjoyed the cognitive dissonance of the cross-gendered casting and the way it highlighted the theme of the many female characters in the story opposing him. But I had to remind myself that the British accent wasn’t one of the affectations to make Richard seem even more evil!

The other thing is that so much British English sounds, well, vaguely smutty? I think maybe that’s because so much of the British English that survives in American carries with it a kind of Victorian repression or understatement in it, where non-dirty words are used to stand in for the vulgar ones. The result is that sometimes a station announcement on the Tube produced snickers from not only me, but also, for example, drunk Australians. (“Cockfosters…! Wherezzat!”)

You could play erotic Mad Libs with the names on the National Rail. “He dropped his Hassocks to reveal Burgess Hill. Her Hayward Heath tingled.”

The third thing is that having grown up with so many British children’s books and fantasy books, actual British names just sound made up to us Americans. We took the train from Gatwick to Cambridge for the Cambridge Folk Festival, and after hearing the list of stations, corwin turned to me somewhere between Horley and Hitchin and said “These all sound fake. Those can’t be real places.”

This was not my first trip to England, but it was the first that was not for Harry-Potter-fandom purposes. Perhaps because of that, or perhaps because of how I’ve distanced myself after JKR’s anti-trans outbursts (if you missed it, she just fomented an Internet mob to attack two cis women athletes at the Olympics by accusing them of being trans), it became clear to me for the first time how many things that seemed brilliantly charming or whimsically original in the Harry Potter books are actually just … British?

That feeling struck me often, but particularly inside the Wren Library at Trinity College which is so very Hogwartian… except of course it’s the other way around, what with the Wren Library being there since 1676. I also felt it in Flourish & Blotts Hatchard’s Bookshop. The many nooks and crannies one goes through to find the women’s room in Harrod’s definitely could have led to the Ministry of Magic. I much preferred Fortnum and Mason, which was basically Honeydukes for adults, selling gin and tipples, tea, charcuterie, etc instead of candy.

It was also interesting to be traveling where the British belonged, rather than somewhere their colonial influence shaped, like Singapore. I came to no grand conclusion about it all, but as I’m just now releasing a Victorian erotic steampunk novella, it heightens my awareness of my portrayal of British characters. I stand by my intention in The Blossoms of Summer to both pay homage to the spirit of the adventuring naturalists of the age and also to critique colonialism and exoticization.

Yeah, another erotica piece with dual underlying purpose. I suppose the tension between love and hate just part of what drives my muse. In the end, I just hope people find it hot, though!

Speaking of The Blossoms of Summer…

It’s up for pre-order now, and I’m looking for a few more folks who want to review it? So if you think some nominally het erotic steampunk in which an adventuring botanist is sent to China to retrieve specimens and gets a far more erotic adventure than he was expecting might be your cup of tea, and you’d be willing to review it on Goodreads, Amazon, or elsewhere, drop me email at ctan.writer(at)gmail.com and I’ll send you the ebooks!

Pre-order links if you’d like to support your trusty erotica writer:

Amazon (ebook and paperback)Bookshop (paperback only)Goodreads (to rate and review)Mockups of the cover, not to scale! The actual paperback is only 40 pages thick.

Starting August 1: an erotic steampunk adventure

So….. I’ve been threatening to start publishing some erotic fiction over on my Patreon for a while now and I’m finally organized enough to get it going.

As a kind of test run before we do anything longer, I’m going to start with an erotic steampunk adventure entitled The Blossoms of Summer, which is an epistolary tale of an airship adventure told through a brave adventuring botanist’s letters and diary entries.

It’ll run every day for six days, starting on August 1.

Here’s the official description that will go on the book, which will launch after the serial runs:

Botanist Robert Meriweather has been tasked by the Continental Occident Company to travel beyond the known lands of Canton to search for the “the Blossoms of Summer,” secret and hidden specimens of such breathtaking beauty that the mere sight has caused men to forsake their homelands. Robert’s orders are to bring these “forbidden flowers” back to England, where all of society’s rewards—and his betrothed, Livia—await him.

Robert soon finds himself on an unexpectedly erotic adventure, in which he must abandon all his Victorian social moires to succeed in his mission. But he will never abandon Livia and his dream of marrying her as a gentleman of standing.

I actually wrote this first around 2010-2011, but never found a home for it. It’s a 10K word novella, and those were a hard sell then. But last year I got the call for submissions for the Passionate Ink “summer” fundraising anthology of erotica and erotic romance. (Passionate Ink is a writers organization dedicated to supporting erotic writers and was formerly a chapter of the RWA before disaffiliating.) The Blossoms of Summer was published as part of the Hot & Sticky anthology collection, and then the rights came back to me.

And now it’ll finally go out into the world on its own!

I’ll be posting about it a lot on my socials this month to try to build up membership of the patreon a bit more, too. I would love to get us back to my pre-pandemic level of support by the time the serial launches. If you’re not a member you can “follow” the public posts for free, but to see any of the “naughty” parts, those have to go behind the paywall, which starts at $2 a month: https://www.patreon.com/ceciliatan

And if this goes well, I’ll start preparing something longer!

Are we in a Golden Age of Queer & Trans SF/F?

Hello and welcome to another ctan monthly updatet! It’s Pride Month, so today let’s talk about queer science fiction and fantasy.

First some housekeeping: Mailchimp has been driving me nuts, with the newsletter sometimes displaying so tiny on mobile devices it was illegible. I’m trying on a new template today, with new fonts. Please let me know if this one looks better to you (or worse!) than before so I can keep improving it.

Second, my apology this is a bit later than I intended, but I had knee surgery on Wednesday and as you can imagine it’s put a bit of a cramp into my schedule. I’ve discovered I would rather have my knee hurt and my brain work than be “pain free” but feel seasick from narcotics. Apparently opioids are not my friends! Bleah.

And now to my slightly linkbait-y topic: are we in a “Golden Age” of queer and trans SF/F? Yes, yes we are, end of essay.

Just kidding, of course I’m going to explain WHY my answer is yes.

For the SFWA Nebulas Conference this month, I had proposed this question as a panel topic and was highly gratified it got chosen—even better, they let me moderate the panel, and SFWA populated it with a terrific slate that included Jordan Kurella, Charlie Jane Anders, Zabé Ellor, and L.P. Kindred. (I had also proposed “are we in a golden age of Asian SF/F?” which I also believe has a yes answer, but that one didn’t make the slate, so I’m trying to arrange it as a Zoom panel for later this summer for Capricon’s online programming. Stay tuned.)

Jordan unfortunately had to miss the Nebs, so the other four of us soldiered on without him. One terrific thing about the slate of panelists is we had basically three generations represented. (If only we’d had a Boomer, we could have had four generations!) We each had different entry points to SF/F. So when I asked “Who was the first character in SF/F you read who you knew was queer?” we had four drastically different answers.

Illustrating how far we’ve come: I, the Gen X “elder” on the panel, was the only one whose answer was a villain. Back when, it was a common trope to make a villain “extra evil” by slapping a coating of sexual deviance on them. Baron Harkonnen in DUNE was the first “gay” character I encountered. If only I’d stumbled upon Samuel R. Delany before Frank Herbert, eh? I didn’t get to Delany until I was in college.

The first positive depiction of a gay character I could think of I read around 1990, in Ellen Kushner’s lovely book Swordspoint (Amazon, Bookshop), but the gay relationship between Alec and St. Vier is so delicately written there’s a kind of plausible deniability about it. But at least they’re both main characters—heroes, even! That book remains one of my faves to this day.

Swordspoint was published in 1987, and right after I read it, another important book was published, Uranian Worlds, a bibliography compiled by Eric Garber and Lyn Paleo. Billed as “A Guide to Alternative Sexuality in Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror,” the book had first been published in 1980, and by 1990 needed a new edition because so many examples had to be added. Uranian Worlds was a complete bibliography of EVERY short story, book, or novella that included EVERY bit of representation of LGBTQ characters in sf/f/h for nearly fifty years… and it was only 280 pages long.

Think about that. The editors of Uranian Worlds had scoured literature for every possible inclusion, small presses as well as large ones, queer lit mags as well as Asimov’s, for decades. And what they came up with just barely filled one not-that-big book.

Nowadays, we have that much queer sf/f/h being published every year. If that ain’t a Golden Age, what is?

The panel also talked about who the first SF/F writers were who we knew were queer or trans: for me it was Samuel R. Delany and Rachel Pollack (Rest in Peace, Rachel!) Now, I know more than I can count just from among my Twitter mutuals—and that’s not even counting the hundred-or-so queer writers I edited at Circlet Press!

But speaking of writers being out. We discussed whether an author “owes” it to the audience to come out. Short answer: no. If you missed the discourse a few years back about “the helicopter story,” I won’t recap it here, but suffice to say it was just one high-profile example of an author being attacked online for apparently either being insufficiently “out” or not “visibly” conforming to audience notions of queerness, resulting in the author being treated like some kind of interloper or exploitative outsider…. which they might not have been.

At this panel was the first time I felt there was consensus in the room that harm has been been done to queer and trans writers (by members of our own communities!) with the incessant questioning of “authenticity” and the demands on the public baring of identity. We’ve sharpened our knives to attack the systems that oppress us, but we can all too easily turn them on each other if/when we judge someone is “part of the problem.” As LP succinctly put it: we have to allow writers some grace. Zabé made an excellent point: you can’t treat sexual identity marginalizations exactly the same way you treat other marginalizations. Sexuality and gender are fluid, complex, and changing. There’s a huge difference between a white author pretending to be an author of color “for clout,” and an author who is in the closet or in transition writing about queer characters as a way to figure out their own sexuality or explore their identity. Charlie Jane mentioned that she and I know multiple writers who started out looking like “straight women getting off on writing about gay men” who are living as gay men now.

Give people grace. Not everyone has the same safety, opportunity, or self-awareness to be “out.”

In the late 80s and early 1990s, right after Swordspoint we had a small spate of queer flowering in SF/F, with Melissa Scott and Tanya Huff and Mercedes Lackey (Vanyel is the ultimate “bury your gays” trope, though…!) and others. Book publishing in the 1990s also went through a pro-diversity spasm, self-castigating about being too white, and SF/F being too male-dominated, as well. There was much talk about trying to diversify the writers being seen in anthologies, in best-of lists, and on award nomination slates. But the writers couldn’t just appear out of thin air. Not then.

But they can now. We literally conjure them out of the aether—the Internet. What’s different now that has led to such increased numbers of queer and trans writers, but also the vastly increased representation of authors of color? It’s the Internet. The same Internet that is problematic as described above, nonetheless allows marginalized writers a visibility we wouldn’t have otherwise. It means that, for example, Hugo awards nominators can discover writers somewhere other than on a bookstore retail shelf. Editors can find and “meet” writers somewhere other than within New York publishing’s white-dominated cocktail circuit. This time when 21st century diversity initiatives have been launched, thanks to the power of the Internet, the writers and editors who emerged have been able to network and build a privilege structure of our own. Some of that happens with the help of SFWA, with things like the AAPI or BIPOC meetups at the Nebulas, and sometimes it happens with us building our own email lists, Discords, online magazines, anthologies, you name it.

Instead of backsliding when the industry loses interest in the latest diversity “fad”, we’ve been able to keep expanding the opportunities for each other, to keep pulling each other up the ladder. It’s still not as strong or wide-reaching as some “old boy networks” out there, but SFWA itself is a far more diverse and welcoming place than it was in the 20th century, and the Nebulas conference really demonstrated that.

There was much more said on the panel, of course, including what the four of us would consider a Platinum Age to be. (Btw, if you register as a Nebulas online attendee, btw, you can see the archived videos of all the panels from this year’s conference, including ours, and also participate in SFWA online programming all year round.)

One final thought: it’s worth remembering that not only is this proliferation of queer and trans voices in the sf/f genres a massive improvement over 35, 25, or even 15 years ago, it’s also happening at the same time as a ton of book banning and book burning all across the USA.

In fact, I believe book banning is so hot right now BECAUSE there are so many books coming out that don’t conform to the heterosexual conservative norms. SF/F has always been a place to dream of being different, and the genre is finally realizing its subversive potential. In the 1980s and ’90s we used to march through the streets chanting “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it.” It feels to me like within the SF/F world, people finally have.

DGC Vol 4 is live!

Another month, another new edition! Volume 4 (of 13) is now live in Kindle Unlimited. In book 4, Moondog 3 hits the road for a major cross country tour and Daron must contend with a homophobic opening act, a budding friendship/attraction with a rock journalist, and the inexorable magnetism of Ziggy pulling him into his orbit every night on stage.

READ IT NOW IN KU: https://amzn.to/3VuJvxN

AND DGC VOL 1 is now WIDE!

Book one is now on sale at various other outlets besides Amazon, although check out the “A+ content” I’ve added to the Amazon page, snazzy, no? Find vol one on Bookshop.org, Barnes & Noble paperback, Barnes & Noble Nook, and request the ebook to libraries through Overdrive.

OR ADD IT TO YOUR GOODREADS TBR: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9447189-daron-s-guitar-chronicles

WIP Report

I’m excited to report that one of the short stories I wrote while trying to get my brain back in gear after I had COVID in September has sold to Julia Rios for Worlds of Possibility! The title is “This Goodly Frame, The Earth,” which is a Shakespeare quote because I failed to think of anything else and Shakespeare is a good plan B. It’s about intergenerational diaspora trauma among the women of a filipina-american family, eldest daughter syndrome, and what happens when a ship full of humans that can bend space and time returns to an Earth in climate crisis far sooner than expected. It’s kind of hopepunk, I guess?

Meanwhile, Windmark, a.k.a. “the unexpected dragon book,” has passed 50,000 words, but I feel like I’ve barely gotten out of act one? But I’m notorious for misjudging how far into a book I actually am. Until I’m actually done I really can’t tell you where the act breaks or beats are. I just know when it is done, then it will be obvious.

A wisecracking nonbinary power bottom just showed up to boss around the hero (from the bottom, of course) and is in danger of taking over the story. I think I’m having the problem that both my main characters are suppressing their emotions so much because of the past trauma that made them hate each other, that they are coming across kind of flat and all the secondary characters seem much more colorful and interesting! Clearly something has to crack soon… I’m also having the problem that I’ve set up a really misogynistic culture, which means our heroine and all the female characters are very much living under a constant threat of sexual violence.

I know we’re in the post-Game of Thrones era, which was rapey as all get out, but I really did not set out to write what is essentially female body horror with this book. I sidestepped the issue in The Prince’s Boy by having no female characters… except in the end there is the body horror once the villain comes into physical contact with our heroes. I have to figure out where this one is going to land and how exactly my heroine is going to come into her power.

It’s funny, I had half convinced myself to just write another all-male cast book… and then this female-bodied character put her foot down and demanded to be written. So I just have to figure out how to do her justice.

AND NOW PHOTOS FROM THE NEBULAS CONFERENCE

Met Nghi Vo in real life for the first time! Many Circlet Press alums were at the Nebs (and Moniquill won one!)

Caught up with David D. Levine (another Circlet alum), here with Vela Roth and Amy Young-Leith (and me)

 With Kate Pennington. Who knows a lot about whales!

 And SB Divya. And I have way more photos than this but this is enough picspam, don’tcha think?

Tour Dates & Upcoming Appearances

2024:

July 11-14: Readercon, Boston areaAugust 7-11: SABR National Convention, MinneapolisOctober 16-20: World Fantasy Con, Niagara Falls

2025:

January 17-20: Arisia, Cambridge, MA (new hotel: Hyatt Cambridge)March 12-15: ICFA, Orlando, FLAugust 13-17: Worldcon in Seattle, WAUpcoming Cons

Readercon last year was a really great time, with a very good outdoor hangout area that turned into a nonstop literary green room party. I just got my schedule and it looks like tremendous fun. July 11-13 in Quincy, Massachusetts (just a few miles south of Boston proper).

My reading will be on Thursday night. Should I read from the unexpected dragon book? Or the hopepunk story? Or something smuttier? Hmmm……

 Parting Thoughts

Okay, no book recs this time, but I will leave you with a link to one recipe, because it is strawberry season here in New England, and that means it is strawberry PIE season, as well. It’s also the season when fresh basil starts showing up in the farmer’s market. Some years ago I took the idea for a dessert we often see: a sort of dessert salad of strawberries served cut up with chopped basil, with a dressing made of balsamic vinegar and maple syrup, but I made it a pie instead. Find the whole recipe at my blog: https://blog.ceciliatan.com/archives/2412

By next month maybe I’ll have read some of the books in my pile and will have some recommendations… I have to finish the proofs and edits on Daron’s books 11, 12, and 13 first, though!

Until then!

-ctan

The Unexpected, the Sublime, and the pastime of looking up.

Welcome to my latest monthly newsletter! If you’d prefer to get this directly in your email each month, you can sign up here: http://eepurl.com/TEWfv

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Thinky Thoughts: The Unexpected, the Sublime, and the pastime of looking up.

The last thing I expected this month, after just having seen the total solar eclipse in April, was an even more mind-blowing celestial event! But a Coronal Mass Ejection resulted in spectacular auroras at both poles of the Earth, and with little to no warming I decided to abandon other plans and hop in the car late Friday night to chase it.

Seeing a really spectacular aurora has been on the “bucket list” for most of my life.

I have seen the Northern Lights twice before, technically, once on a red-eye flight from LA to Boston in 2004, and with the naked eye once in 2015, but we really only saw it the white shimmers for maybe ten minutes before it clouded over.

That time I had bookmarked several helpful websites, though, which I checked before leaving the house (including the ClearDarkSky map of New England amateur observatories, NOAA Space Weather Prediction, and SpaceWeatherLive.com). The solar flare was strong enough that some feared it would knock out GPS, so I set my downloaded map data for a place called Cumberland, Maine, just inland from Portland, where it was predicted to have clear skies after 11pm.

On the drive, a tiny copper sliver of moon, the fingernail clipping of a god, was setting. Once it was gone, any light I saw in the sky I knew had to be either the glow of a city (or shopping mall…) or the aurora. As I headed north, I could not really watch the sky and the highway at the same time, but at one point I looked southeast and I could see clouds that were lit up white with a dark sky behind them. And when I looked to the north… I could see the clouds were DARK with a light sky behind them! That could only be one thing, then, aurora! I resisted the urge to just pull over then and kept on toward my more northerly destination.

It was just about midnight when I made it there, and fortunately Google maps was working just fine. I quickly found a place listed as a park “open 24 hours” where the map photos showed it was a large flat open field. Five minutes later I pulled in to a small parking lot and pulled out my camera. The photo you see at the header of the newsletter was the first shot I took to the north. At first it was the most visible through my phone’s camera, but as I stood there, the aurora continued to brighten. I decided to try heading north to see if I could get somewhere with no trees in the way. Google pointed me to something listed as a fairground on “Bald Hill Road.” A bald hill sounded ideal, no? So off I went again, but I hadn’t even gone five minutes north before I pulled over again and shot this one:
You can see that even with the blinding light of an oncoming car, the aurora is still visible. I pulled over by the fence and just watched the curtain wall thicken and shimmer. At this point it was easily visible with the naked eye, although the phone camera could still see more color. (Not just on long exposures either: just looking through the phone screen.) I decided to press on to the Bald Hill on my map, another 15 minutes north. When I got there, indeed, the fairgrounds were an ideal viewing spot, with a parking area for the car where it was safe to exit the vehicle. And this is when it turned extremely magical. I had been about to head for home, but I decided to check the space weather one last time and it showed I had actually been in a relative lull, and the strongest burst of the night was about to arrive.

The curtain wall seemed to be getting higher and higher in the sky. What I wasn’t expecting was that instead of looking at an aurora happening somewhere north of me… I was soon looking at an aurora that was happening all around me. The colors turned to pink and lavender and the pillars, instead of all in a row to one side in the sky, instead encircled the horizon and met above my head like a giant, flickering circus tent. In the one spot where there was still a little doorway of dark sky I could see flashes of lavender-white light as if I were watching the actual solar wind blowing a gigantic gas flame around. Here’s what it looked like directly overhead:

Merriam-Webster Online says the following for “sublime”: “implies an exaltation or elevation almost beyond human comprehension.”   I am having a hard time coming up with a better description. And to think, without certain properties of our planet, we would see no aurora at all. The magnetic field and the atmosphere are both necessary to create aurora… and to sustain life capable of seeing it. It makes me wonder… in the most wondrous sense of the word “wonder.” I’m writing this a week later and I’m still floating on air from it.

And to think, if I hadn’t checked Twitter, I might have missed it entirely. But I didn’t. I was at the right place at the right time to experience something sublime.

————-

Here are a few more shots from that night.

Stunning. With the naked eye the colors were more subtle than what the phone camera captures, but they were definitely discernible once I got away from other light sources.

—————

Meanwhile, I’m proofreading like mad…

When I haven’t been looking up at the sky, every other waking minute that hasn’t been taken up by other work has been spent staring at PDFs of various volumes of Daron’s Guitar Chronicles.

Volumes 1-3 are live on Amazon (and in KU!), with Vol 4 coming June 1. I just proofed volume 8. Cover art for books 7, 8, and 9 is almost finalized! So excited.

My goodness, so f***ing much happens in these books, I had forgotten, and yet they are really not about “plot” so much as they are about changes in the human heart and the changes we make in ourselves as a result of our experiences and the choices we make in the wake of our traumas.

Daron tests the bonds of found family, questions definitions of both queerness and masculinity, and examines art, music, and creativity as a reason for living. I’m still kind of amazed I wrote over a million words of that, and grateful every day that people read it, and continue to read it.

Here’s hoping KU helps even more folks discover it?

Upcoming Appearances

TONIGHT! Wednedsay, May 22, I’ll be reading something queer and chit-chatting on Neon Hemlock Live (on their Instagram).

But I just added a new virtual event to this September: Kink Between the Lines! KBtL, as it’s known, is an event specifically by and for members of marginalized groups who crossover into kink. I’ll be teaching my online “How to Write a Sex Scene” class and also hosting an erotica reading. (Stay tuned for who else will be joining me at the reading! I only just found out and haven’t herded any cats yet.)

2024:

May 22: Neon Hemlock Live!June 6-9: SFWA Nebulas Conference (in person!)July 11-14: Readercon, Boston areaAugust 7-11: SABR National Convention, MinneapolisSeptember 27-29: Kink Between the LinesOctober 16-20: World Fantasy Con, Niagara Falls

2025:

August 13-17: Worldcon in Seattle, WA

 

Works-in-Progress Report

But I know, I know, what you really want to know is… how are my writing projects coming along? I have a bunch of short stories & poems out on submission, but…

I’m focusing the most right now on Windmark, the working titles of the so-called “dragon romantasy” book, while the aforementioned DGC proofreading takes up most of the rest of my time. I’m honestly not sure if it is going to be “romantasy” in the end, since that definition seems to be a moving target? But it’s definitely fantasy (with dragons) and there is definitely romance.

I started at the end of January. The word count just passed 32,000, which is a lot more than I’ve done on anything else in such a relatively short period of time! I know, I used to write that much in a single month, but since 2016, not so much.

I’m planning to put a sneak peek of it on my Patreon on June 1st, for paying patrons only. (So if you’d like to take a gander, and you’re not already a member at the $2 level or above, now would be a great time to do that…)

Among the tropes that have fallen into this one like dominoes into a wicked cauldron of twisted eroticism:

love-hate triangle (that’s like a love triangle… except they all hate each other)enemies to loverspalace intriguetelepathic bonding with dragons (eventually)dragon breedingroyal companionsthird-gender dragons (and people)one person’s poison is another’s medicinemasochistic gladiatorseveryone’s probably bidid I mention dragons?

 

No book recommendations this month…

Because ALLLLLLLL of my reading time is going into proofreading Daron. But I did just bring home a haul of books that includes Justinian Huang and Olivie Blake… so maybe by next month I’ll be able to recommend one of those…?

 

Con Report: RomCon at the Ashland Library

This past Saturday was the annual romance celebration at the Ashland Public library, with panels and autographing all day.

It was really fun to catch up with some writers I haven’t seen in a long time, like Loretta Chase and Caroline Linden, whom I used to cross paths with regularly at NERW and RWA, but also to meet some new folks! Unfortunately Kosoko Jackson had a family emergency come up in the morning and could not make it. He and I did a virtual Romance Bookstore Day event back in 2022 so I had been looking forward to meeting him for real! Oh well.

It was fun to talk to Kathryn Ann Kingsley who writes “villain” romance (The Unseelie Prince), Jessica Martin who writes small-town with a Shakespearean twist, and Kate Canterbary who puts a high spice factor into contemporary series set in Rhode Island. I also got to briefly say hi to Tori Anne Martin who has a sapphic witch romance out now entitled This Spells Disaster. Head organizer Meena Jain says they’ll be doing it again next year, so keep an eye out!

 Me with Kathryn Ann Kingsley, who came to my rescue when I had brought gun to a knife fight, I mean, a pencil to an autographing.

 

With Meena Jain, the delightful organizer of the event in Ashland.

Kate Canterbary (In a Jam), Cecilia Tan, and Jessica Martin (For the Love of the Bard) about the speak on a panel on contemporary romance at the Ashland Public Library.

 

A Recipe: Kaddo Bowrani

One of my favorite recipes from the internet used to reside on the Chowhound boards, but of course Chowhound was recently shut down, then sold and restored, except the bulletin boards no longer appear to exist. But fortunately, my favorite recipe was also several other nerds’ favorite, and copies of it exist, including here and here.

The recipe is for the Afghan national dish, Kaddo Bowrani, which is on the menu at the Helmand restaurant(s) here in Cambridge and in San Francisco. Imagine a bed of basmati rice topped by a layer of deliciously caramelized roasted pumpkin, topped by a rich and tomatoey ground beef sauce (or “impossible meat” for vegetarians), which is itself topped by a dollop of garlic-yogurt. Yum.

The thing that has always kind of weirded me out about the recipe is that everyone on the internet seems to make it with “pumpkin,” and they use the common October “sugar pumpkin.” Far as I can tell from grilling the waiter at the Helmand restaurant here in Cambridge, this is not at all the “pumpkin” they use. The vegetable used by the restaurant is much more like a Kabocha than like an American, thin-walled sugar pumpkin.

When we started getting a farm share many years ago and rather large kabocha were showing up on a regular basis, I started making this recipe with it, and it is nothing less that carotene-laden deliciousness. So my first tip is don’t use sugar pumpkin, use kabocha.

My second tip if you are using kabocha, is that you DO NOT actually need the full quarter cup of sugar that the original poster insists on. Two tablespoons is great.

My third tip is do NOT overdo the garlic. One clove and one only. If you want to snazz up the yogurt sauce more, sprinkle it artistically with paprika.

Final tip: you can make basmati rice in the rice cooker, but cut down the water and toss in two pats of butter.

 

One Featured Backlist Book

Mind Games
A Paranormal Erotic Thriller
PB $14.95, Ebook $3.99
Bookshop • Amazon •
Audiobook on Everand •

This was the very first romance I wrote back in 2009! It was put out by to a “digital first” publisher and got really excellent reviews from the romance blogosphere (back when people read blogs). That publisher went under a few years later so I republished it myself. I brought a few copies with me to Ashland and they all sold! So I thought, hey, maybe this book is worth reminding folks about.

What happens when your stalker can enter your dreams? Ever since she foresaw the death of her parents, Wren has suppressed her latent psychic abilities. Avoiding strong emotions, Wren leads a placid but lonely life until her quiet is shattered by her sister Abby going missing… and the private investigator searching for her. Derek Chapman isn’t what Wren expects. He’s young, handsome, and immediately protective of her. Wren is attracted to him right away, but fears that deepening any connection with Derek-emotional, spiritual, or sexual-will open the floodgates locked in her mind. A mystery man appears in Wren’s dreams, dealing pain and pleasure. Is Wren’s subconscious warning her away from Derek, or longing for him? When the search for Abby leads to a secret sex club, it seems fate is pulling Wren into Derek’s arms, whether she is ready or not.

————

Okay, that’s it for this month. Next month I’ll let you know how the Nebulas conference in Pasadena went! And, no really, I’m getting some stuff ready to serialize on the Patreon. I just have to get this proofreading done first!

-ctan