Christopher Rice

New York Times Best Selling Author

  • Books
    • Erotic Romance
      • The Desire Exchange Series
        • The Flame (2014)
        • The Surrender Gate (2015)
        • Kiss the Flame (2015)
      • The Chapel Springs Series
        • Dance of Desire (2016)
      • Other Erotic Romance
        • Desire & Ice (2016)
    • Supernatural Thrillers
      • Blood Echo (2019)
      • Bone Music (2018)
      • Ramses the Damned: The Passion of Cleopatra (2017)
      • The Vines (2014)
      • The Heavens Rise (2013)
    • Suspense & Crime
      • Blood Echo (2019)
      • Bone Music (2018)
      • The Moonlit Earth (2010)
      • Blind Fall (2008)
      • Light Before Day (2005)
      • The Snow Garden (2001)
      • A Density of Souls (2000)
    • Short Fiction
      • MatchUp (2017)
      • nEvermore! (2015)
      • Thriller (2012)
      • Los Angeles Noir (2007)
  • Biography & Photos
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  • The Dinner Party Show
  • Erotic Romance
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  • Supernatural Thrillers
  • Short Fiction
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What I’m Really Saying When I Say I Want To Bang The Mooch

August 31, 2017 by Christopher Rice 3 Comments

Let’s talk about what it means to have bad taste in partners. And no, I’m not talking about business partners. I am searching, rather, for some gender-neutral, all-inclusive use of the more specific (to my case, at least) phrase, bad taste in men. So, in my case, let’s talk about what it means when I say I have bad taste in men. More importantly, let’s talk about about it means when my friends say I have bad taste in men (i.e. not theirs).

Oh, screw that. Let’s just talk about how I want to bang The Mooch.

(FYI, because this is the Internet, let me take this moment to point out that if your answer to the previous question is, “No, let’s not talk about that,” now’s the perfect time for you to depart BEFORE you begin composing a tirade in the comments about how this should have been a blog post about something you find yourself more interested in today. Like the all female reboot of LORD OF THE FILES. Or you.)

It’s true. There. I said it. I want to bang The Mooch. Hard and fast and in a cramped room. A few weeks ago, I tweeted it (not the cramped room part). A little while later I tweeted it again in a thread about something else I tried to hijack. Foolishly, I assumed this “coming out”, if you will, would cleanse me, heal me, purge me of my sinful desire. But then, just a few days ago, I visited the social media profile of an ex whereupon I saw a post from him asserting that if he went into politics, he would, in fact, be The Mooch. And that’s when I decided this was a warped, but deeply embedded aspect of my character and only a village of contemptuous blog comments would be capable of extracting it from my fiber. (And a fair helping of social media judgment, which started trickling in the minute I announced my intentions to write this post.)

But before I get into The Mooch’s Moochness and how I want it to Mooch all over me, can we take a moment to define what it means to have bad taste in sexual partners? In my opinion, there are two different camps of bad taste when it comes to self-defeating sexual attraction. (Note: When you’re writing a reductive blog post about something, there are always at least two camps of everything.)

The first camp is what I call blind bad taste – an overwhelming desire to build a romantic future with someone who is crushingly wrong for you. This desire is often driven by a deep, unaddressed trauma in your past. It causes you to pursue people who are powerful reminders of past lovers or parental figures who wronged you early in life. Because they often bear a striking physical or behavioral resemblance to the person who either failed you or abused you in your past, you do your absolute best to lock them down, convinced that this time they’ll do a better job of showing up for you because this time you will be perfect and get it right and say all the right things.

It’s a serious problem, probably fodder for a more serious blog post than this one, as it often traps people in cycles of abuse. And in the person afflicted, it’s almost impossible to make them see the presence of it without an intervention involving multiple therapists. A befuddling aspect of human existence, for sure, so pervasive that good romance novels explore it in detail, but by all means, please give me another lecture on how your giant mutant bird novel is a superior literary endeavor, dudebro.

Then there’s a second type of bad taste; more manageable, but sometimes more astonishing because it pops up in people who not only should know better, they do know better. I call it filthy bad taste. As in, “I know this dude is filthy, but I want his filth all over me while we call each other filthy names.” It makes people who are usually fairly intelligent and self aware say horrible things they mask with self-deprecating humor. “Yeah, I know he’s a douche bag. But a little douching is good for you now and then, isn’t it?” (This judgment usually applies to straight women and people on the LGBT spectrum for the very simple reason that nobody’s all that surprised when a straight man goes to bed with someone terrible.)

That’s how I am with The Mooch.

Is he a terrible person? I’m not sure. I’ve never met him. But if he really did text his wife “Congratulations” after she gave birth to his son while he was in another city being The Mooch, then yeah, I’d say he might not be a very good person. But filthy bad taste doesn’t lead you to good people. But also – and this is the important part – filthy bad taste does not always lead you to people who are physically gorgeous and oozing sex appeal and confidence and Christian Grey whateverness while also being catastrophically stupid or morally suspect. Yeah. It’s easy for someone to say, “That guy seems like a sociopath, but he’s looks like a Michelangelo, so why not get naked with him, right?” That’s not what filthy bad taste is about. And it’s not about slumming it or just finding some sort of rebellious release either. I’m not some Regency-era aristocrat looking to sow my oats with the stable boy. (The Mooch is probably a lot wealthier than me. He’s also older …I think.)

It’s about an intense desire to get sweaty with someone you believe to be a not very good person because they are a not very good person. Because you believe deep down that the qualities that make them a not very good person are a certain kind of fearlessness, lack of remorse, lack of inhibition and delusional swagger that will allow them to effortlessly treat your body like a Thanksgiving meal. This concept kicked into place for me when a close friend said to me that he couldn’t quite figure out my physical taste in men, but the one thing all the guys I’d been interested in had in common was swagger. Swagger that was in some cases the result of foolish confidence.

This foolish confidence is the lure for those of us who suffer from filthy bad taste. When it comes to The Mooch in particular, the finer points of his ten-day career inside the White House – from his idiotic Steve Bannon self suck interview to the press briefing in which he addressed the White House Press Corp as if they were a college football team – suggest someone who simply can’t be bothered with the rules. And if you’re a grown up with a robust sexual history, you know that people who can’t be bothered with the rules don’t observe the “I did this for three minutes, now you do it for three minutes or ELSE IT’S NOT FAIR” rule that makes for terrible, predictable sex. They just gobble until they pass out.

I will concede that there’s another possibility, not as exciting, which is that people who seem like they can’t be bothered with the rules sometimes turn out to be people who were either too stupid or narcisstic to learn that the rules exist. (Case in point: our president.) And sometimes these people are terrible in bed because they’re afraid sex will mess up their hair.

I don’t think that’s who The Mooch is, but I’m not willing to make a federal case about it because that’s not what this blog post is about and I’m already defensive enough on this topic.

What I’m trying to do is establish a working definition of filthy bad taste by way of my desire to bang The Mooch. So let’s be very, very clear about what a desire to bang The Mooch actually is.

It’s not a crush. Say that with me again. It’s not a crush. When you have a crush on someone, you imagine yourself doing multiple things with them and enjoying all of those things in a giddy, youthful fashion. Sexual fantasy is often the smallest part of a crush, which is why heterosexual men and women are perfectly comfortable proclaiming their crushes on members of the same sex (and then having sex with them when they’re drunk.)

So let’s look at the actual words in the sentence “I want to bang The Mooch”. What other activities are described aside from banging? NONE! No other activities are described. In other words, Judgy Internet Person, if you assume my desire to bang The Mooch is going to involve any form of celebrating or enabling the more unsavory aspects of The Mooch’s character outside of that sweaty cramped room I referenced above, you can take a seat. I never said I want to buy a house in Connecticut with The Mooch, or raise a French bulldog with him. I said, quite simply, I want to bang The Mooch.

No doubt this post will be updated with defensive addendum based on how people respond to it. But I feel somewhat better for having written it. I can’t account for how you’ll feel after reading it….unless, of course, you, too, want to bang The Mooch.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Filed Under: Blog, Love, Personal Rants, Sex

The I’m-almost-finished place

September 4, 2015 by Christopher Rice 23 Comments

Sexy Cowboy

So I’m in that place. I call it “the place” because I can’t think of a more precise term which captures the combination of anxiety and exhilaration that defines the last few days before I finish a project. In this case, the project is another novella, scheduled to be released by 1,001 Dark Nights in February of 2016. (If you don’t know what 1,001 Dark Nights is, here’s the short version: a monthly series of cross-marketed novellas from some of the top names in erotic romance.) It started out as another installment in my paranormal-ish, New Orleans-set series, The Desire Exchange, and about halfway through, it turned into something entirely different. Something not paranormal. Something Texas based. Something with a gorgeous cowboy (see above!) and the kind of fast-paced, snarky dialogue I love to write (and read). And yes, something straight. It introduces a fictional town in the Texas Hill Country called Chapel Springs, where I plan to set multiple snarky, sexy stories. And in this one, there are no magic candles or supernatural beings who can make your deepest sexual fantasy manifest in your immediate environment just by pressing their lips to yours. (For that, buy ‘Kiss The Flame’, out this November.)

About this straight business. Let me get something clear. Some people freaked on my Facebook page when they figured out my first erotic romance novella, ‘The Flame’, was going to have a lady in it. So what if the novella was essentially a bisexual ménage romance! They didn’t care. And I guess given their initial reaction, they didn’t bother to actually read the thing. ‘Cause if they had they would have discovered some serious man-on-man action within its pages. But that’s their choice. And guess what? Writing about heterosexual relationships is mine. If that bothers you, that’s fine. Don’t buy it. Don’t read it. But please, holster that wagging finger.  I can think of so many better uses for it.

Let me be clear about something. My intention from the first moment I started writing romance was to create series universes (series universi?) in which I could depict all types of romantic configurations. That’s my plan for The Desire Exchange. That’s my plan for a little town in the Texas Hill Country called Chapel Springs. Forgive me if it all sounds excessive. But Kim Davis could be in jail for a long time. I have to give her something to read.

Point is, I’ve never been one of those people who says you can only write what you know. You start with a foundation of what you know, a layer of emotional authenticity you bring to the work. But you can write anything you feel. (Thanks to screenwriting guru Richard Krevolin for this last line, which I would love to claim as my own.) One of the great challenges of being a writer is stepping outside of yourself, of trying to hone your powers of empathy and compassion to create genuine and believable characters who aren’t exactly like you. Who don’t think exactly like you. Who don’t love exactly like you. This is, to my estimation, the very definition of writing.

Anyway, back to the “place”. The I’m-almost-finished-place. The anxiety-and-exhilaration-place. The way-too-much-caffeine place. That stretch of days where I decide after swearing off coffee forever after my last book tour that I should try some espresso again, just, to, you know, see if it still causes heart palpitations and dizzy spells, and oh, look, IT DOES! So I’m in that place. I’ve only got one thing scheduled this weekend. An appointment at my local Genius Bar for an iPhone that got all like, “I’m sorry. You want to do WHAT with this touchscreen?” And then that’s it. It’s all writing for the rest of the weekend, until this puppy is done! Wish me luck. With the phone and the novella. I think it’s a good one. The novella. Not the phone. The phone sucks right now.

coffee_-_is_the_planet_shaking_or_is_it_just_me1-234x300

Filed Under: Blog, Love, Sex, The Flame (1,001 Dark Nights), The Writing Life

11 Years Late* (*includes a picture of a hot guy)

April 7, 2014 by Christopher Rice 16 Comments

Four score and seven versions of Windows ago, just about everyone I knew was starting a blog and I was the guy on the sidelines, not taking them very seriously, choosing instead to focus on rageful anonymous Amazon reviews of my first few novels because I was in a period of my life when bathing myself in criticism from people I hadn’t met – people who, in their anonymity, could be transmogrified into every bully or ex-boyfriend who haunted my obsessive late night thoughts – made me feel like a real artist. One guy in particular, a friend and colleague, for whom I’d worked briefly at a now defunct gay men’s lifestyle magazine, kept going on and on about this strange Internet project that managed to combine photographs with his thoughts on the latest headlines and at the time it all seemed very niche and weird and like a giant distraction from the noble goal of writing books in which you turn the hot bartender you’re crushing on into a highly trained assassin. Well, now my friend’s weird Internet thing is this and he’s this. (And if it seems like I’m going crazy with the hyperlinks in this entry, you are right because, as this post will hopefully make clear, I am enjoying writing my first blog entry even though I’m about eleven years behind the curve.)

But despite my seemingly literate objections to the whole blogging thing – I had books to write, godammit, and I was also a heavy smoker and now that I’ve quit I can see in retrospect how much time it truly took to be a heavy smoker – there was actually a very simple and unflattering reason I didn’t want to join in. I simply couldn’t stand it when people disagreed with me. Really. I couldn’t. I outline (i.e. inadvertently reveal) these feelings in more detail in this recent piece, which I now realize was a blog entry, albeit on a blog owned by Arianna Huffington.  Here’s a clip:

I wrote a regular column for The Advocate for several years, doing my best to express contrarian and well-reasoned arguments about disturbing trends inside the community. Instead of a comments section, we had letters to the editor, where I was met toe-to-toe by such impassioned arguments as, “That column was crap!” from Luther S. in Sioux City, or, “Christopher Rice is a narcissist. Why is he still talking?” from Betty M. in Seattle. They weren’t technically anonymous like the Internet commenters of today, but it wasn’t like you could just walk into your editor’s office and say, “Could you give me the contact information for Betty M. from Seattle so I can throw a cup of my own urine at her?” The upside to the anonymity thing, though, is that writers can delude themselves into believing a jealous bitter ex wrote every negative word posted about them online.

Then social media happened. And unlike the blogging craze of the early 00’s, nothing about the social media craze felt optional for writers. So it was a good thing that, after avoiding Friendster, and for the most part, My Space (which, if you don’t remember, was in it’s final days little more than a maddening loop of blaring pop songs that would start roaring out of your computer’s speakers whenever you opened someone’s profile, causing you to grope for your computer’s volume control like Sigourney Weaver opening the airlock at the end of ALIENS), I had accidentally wandered onto Facebook when the site was in its infancy and become hopelessly ensnared. You see, the story goes something like this. For about two months, I had been dating a guy who basically looked like this…andy-taylor.1394653961

As the picture suggests, he was too young for me. (No, this is not actually a picture of the guy I was dating. This is Andy Taylor, the porn star who should play the guy in question if anyone ever makes a porn film about the story I’m about to tell, which they won’t because the story only involves sex in the past tense and it’s boring.) Anyway, the guy was technically too young for me, but because I’ve always had what people call an “old soul” (which means I am a neurotic hypochondriac who’d rather sit on the phone all night with my best friend Eric Shaw Quinn than visit what the other kids call a “club”) I usually ignored this whole “too young for you” business. From the age of seven on everyone felt too young for me. (Now I pay attention because I’m 36, which in the eyes of most West Hollywood residents, means I’m this.) Anyway, the guy dumped me. Hard. But a few days before, when it had seemed like everything was going great, he’d cheerfully informed me that he’d just opened a Facebook account and listed me as his favorite writer. So naturally, in my post-break up miasma of feelings (translation: unrequited horniness) I decided the best course of action was to go explore this Facebook business and see if the little heartbreaker had deleted me from his “favorite writers” section. Because if he hadn’t, clearly we we’re going to get back together/ have sex again.

Big mistake. For one, he had deleted me. (Small consolation. No one replaced me in his ‘favorite writer’ category. He was the kind of guy who no longer felt compelled to pretend he enjoyed writers after he stopped dating one. Welcome to L.A., kids) And two, Facebook somehow accessed my address book and alerted everyone I’d ever met or shaken hands with or crossed the street to avoid talking to that I had launched a Facebook profile. It was an experience similar to peering through your ex’s bedroom window only to have someone tap you on the shoulder and tell you there’s a production of Shakespeare in the park happening right behind you and everyone you know is in the audience.

So I was caught, is what I’m trying to say. Trapped, if you will. And ever since that moment, there’s been no looking back, and Facebook, and my interaction with my – ahem – rather large following there has become an entirely public experience. My posts are visible to anyone who accesses my page and everyone is allowed to comment. Except for the people I block and delete for acting like enormous, gaping assholes. My criteria for this is if I read your comment and it makes me think you’re an enormous, gaping asshole.

I could write a really long, meandering blog post about all the lessons I’ve learned on social media. Correction: I could write another really long meandering blog post about all the lessons I’ve learned on social media. But the most important one is this – important in that it freed me up to finally start a blog, 11 years late – I don’t take myself so seriously anymore. Social media has exposed me to such  a perpetual grinding wheel of hollow, manufactured outrage over mostly imagined slights in which the outraged have, in the absence of any meaningful understanding of context, endowed the outragee with a preposterous storyline based in their own deep insecurities (to say nothing of social media’s vast soup of baseless, boiling hatred from people who consider themselves revolutionaries while hiding behind indecipherable cartoon profile pics) I stopped being the person who feels personally done in by every cruel or insulting word written about them on-line. (Read that last line closely. I stopped being done in by every cruel or insulting word written about me on-line. Every other cruel and insulting word is still fair game for a total, irrational meltdown.)  That said, I still have an inclination to write sketches for my Internet radio show that play like this:

http://www.christopherricebooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/0113_FAT_PROMO.mp3

But little by little, with each post, with each cavalcade of attacks from self-deluded bigots who have gone from saying homosexuality is sinful and depraved to declaring it “no big deal” and “not worth talking about”, I stopped being quite so caught up in what other people thought of me that I couldn’t allow for moderated comments on my blog.

I know.

Epic personal growth, if I do say so myself.

So all this is to say, with a stiff(er) upper lip and a thicker skin, I give to you, The Christopher Rice Blog. This will be a  special place for me to put stuff that’s way too long for Facebook and twist insignificant episodes from my life into an excuse to post pictures of  my favorite porn stars. I am a real artist, after all. What else could all those one-star reviews from “a customer” mean?

Social media has also taught me that sarcasm is an effective tool for a. battling sanctimony in others and b. battling sanctimony in myself. And it’s great for responding to bullshit. I know, I know. People dismiss sarcasm as just another form of hostility. That’s true. But I find hostility to be an effective tool for fighting hypocrisy, lies and manipulative sanctimony designed to silence people who disagree with you. Simply put, there are situations in which good manners are not called for and when plaintive calls to “rise above” are really just the pleas of those too frightened or lazy to stick up for themselves or their friends.

That said, I also still write books and I’ll be talking about them here, along with The Dinner Party Show. This is also where I’ll make clear which jokes and snappy one-liners I’ve stolen from this guy, and which enormous leaps forward in my career were largely the result of this lady. ‘Till then.

xo C

Filed Under: A Density of Souls, Blog, Books, Light Before Day, Love, Personal Rants, Sex, The Writing Life Tagged With: A Density of Souls, Andy Taylor, Andy Towle, Anne Rice, Christopher Rice, Light Before Day, The Dinner Party Show, Towleroad

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