That final ebook is a new one (sharp eye, you!). It collects two of my stories as well as a few samples from others (all of which are available already in other ebooks.) The idea was to create a cheap (99 cents!) ebook sampler for the curious. If you haven’t had a chance to check out my work, there’s not a better way. Except to go all out and just buy all of my ebooks. (Good thinking, you!)
In addition, because it’s my birthday, I’ve reduced the price of both Blowjob 3 and Rough Love by a dollar (to $3.99 and $2.99, respectively)! If you buy through either Amazon.com or Barnes and Noble, you’ll automatically save. If you’d like to buy from my store, use the coupon code “johnnymurdoclovesyou” (without the quotes)! This is not a permanent change (I’d imagine), so get them while you can.
Happy birthday to me. And you’re welcome.
If you find that you’ve been missing my blogging or writing, check out this week’s post on SEX+STL, where I discuss Barack Obama, gay rights, and The Grid’s “Dawn of the New Gay” essay that the entire gay blogosphere was upset about (and has already forgotten about).
The following essay is the introduction thatd Rob Wolfsham wrote for my book, Blowjob 3:
Environment as the Queer Prison
It’s striking how masculinity can be squeezed into homoeroticism by the mere oppression of place, whether it be the agoraphobic rural landscape so familiar to me (after years in windswept Lubbock, Texas), the college campus, the fraternity house, the niche coffee shop in a trendy neighborhood, or the packed subway car in an anonymous city.
Those are only a few snapshots, but the argument can be made that many settings can be prisons, these environs which tug dejected horny men along a chain gang under our society’s mundane commercialized authority that tells us: “You’re weak. Buy this to be cool. Talk this way to sound strong. Fuck women. Get married. Obey the law. Don’t put anything in your asshole.” And like all good prison tales, gay sex pounds on the walls like a phantom: fearsome, alluring and new to these captors regardless of identity. Johnny Murdoc’s writing realizes the queerness of rural isolation, urban alienation, social conformity, the ennui of the bored horny male and the desire for the new that a mundane place can induce in him.
I can recall jacking off with my freshman year roommate in a matchbox-sized dorm room. I had been with plenty of guys beforehand, but I’ll never forget the shakes I had on his bed with him. It was as new for him as it was for me. Seven years later, that roommate is packed into a submarine somewhere in the Pacific, and I wonder if it reminds him.
In retrospect the experience was probably just a sexual tangent for him, a blip, a twenty minute vacation from his mundane heterosexual prison (again, sorry straight guys), but Johnny’s storytelling makes me remember what it was and what it meant and didn’t mean. Johnny’s writing can memorialize those goose bump inducing thrills of a guy touching another guy, that relation for all our first and new contacts with men who increasingly affront and evade the most oppressive mechanism we perform under: the labels “gay” and “straight.”
The writing in this collection isn’t just transient coming out erotica. In flashes and undercurrents, there’s male love and brimming affection, spoken, contemplated and inferred. There’s writing concerned with the now of queer sociology, our mutating landscape of privacy and sharing, our health and how we are molding new queer cultural spaces for ourselves. This book is an artifact in that space, the realm of do-it-yourself creation and sharing that queer culture has always relied on but now holds greater possibility within the stochastic dissemination of online media and consumption. Aside from the mechanisms and environs of this book itself, the most important element is the content, and it is, quite simply, boner-inducing.
If you live in Chicago, you can find copies of Blowjob 3 at both Quimby’s and Chicago Comics. I’ve always had good success selling my zines at those two stores and the employees are always really supportive and engaging. They’re two of my absolute must-hits when I’m in town.
Those of you who follow me here and on Facebook know that I’ve been up to something for the past month or so, and I can finally tell you what I’ve been doing!
Now, I’ve done zines before, but Blowjob 3 is something entirely different: it’s a book. (It’s over 140 pages long!) Check out the trailer:
The stories include “Busted,” a never-before-published story and “Rough Sports,” which was previously only available in the anthology Tight Ends!
I’ll be blogging a little more about this today, and I’ll write about the production process some next week. In the meantime, what are you waiting for? You can buy the book in a multitude of formats right here:
I’ve seen really great rope bondage done twice now. The first was in a hotel room I wasn’t really supposed to be in. My discomfort at remaining was overridden by the bondage display going on in front of me. It was impressive. It was beautiful. It was, without a doubt, art. The second time was at a party, and I’ll leave out most of the details. At one point, though, a man was suspended from an i-beam with a masterful weave of ropes.
Rope bondage is one of those things that I’ve learned about lately that, while I may not really be into it, I can really fucking appreciate it when it’s done well.
I’ve been hard at work on Blowjob issue #3. I always try to make each issue a little different from the last, but I don’t think you guys can even prepare for this one. I have one last very important piece to add to it, and it will be ready. I’m hoping it’s ready for sale mid-April!
On that note, I’m off to bed. Have a good night, guys.
I finally watched No Country for Old Men last night. While I loved the majority of it, I felt really let down in the end. The dialogue was great, which is common for Coen Bros. films. One line stuck out, the one above, and I was pleased to see it came from McCarthy’s book. I’d still recommend the film, but it warrants discussion.
I do always enjoy Josh Brolin, though.
I’ve been thinking about the cover to the book a lot, lately. It’s a wonderful piece of design:
It’s by David Pearson, part of a series of McCarthy’s books that were re-released with beautiful typographic covers. You can read about how they were made here. I admit that I do the majority of design work on a computer, that I rarely get my hands dirty. I still love old printing methods, though.
Friday night we went to a street-long party called the Freaquinox down on Cherokee St. Cherokee is this wonderful area of St. Louis filled with print shops and art galleries, retro shops and for-the-hell-of-it shops, like Cranky Yellow. The print shops down there are real print shops, with letter presses and screen printing stations.
It was a magical night filled with walking and dancing. Giant bull pinatas. Projection graffiti. Handmade art. Dancing robots. Live stencil graffiti. Dancing. Fire pits. Scooters. Costumes. Book stores. Kosmonauts at Foam.
The last three photos were all taken by my sister. I’ll have more to share later. I kind of went crazy taking photos of the graffiti artists. Cute boys doing things that I love.
Today it’s warm and I’m almost optimistic enough to consider that spring might actually be here. It snowed last Monday, so it’s a careful optimism. I’m working on the third volume of Blowjob, which will put the first two issues to shame. I’m not done with it yet, and I’m already incredibly proud of it. I’m hoping to have it wrapped up this week, so that I can take copies with me to Chicago next month.
I’m trying an experiment. Over on Amazon, I’ve been selling a Kindle version of the first two issues of Blowjob under the title ofRough Love and other stories. My first cover for it was inspired by the covers of the two zines themselves:
The original zines had fairly simplistic covers, and I wanted to keep to that. I also wanted to keep a similar design language so people who had already bought the zines, in print or .pdf form, wouldn’t mistake Rough Love… for new material. It’s really not ever going to be my intention to swindle people into buying things twice. (Why, then, am I selling content that’s already available for free on the web? Simple: Some people are willing to pay to own the content they want in the package they want it in, and still others are willing to pay me for things I give away for free because they love me and they want me to be happy. I will admit, I love these people slightly more than the average person who reads my work. I love you all, mind you. I just don’t love you equally.)
However, it occurred to me that I might be doing something wrong with Rough Love… One of the ideas for collecting the stories for the Kindle was that Kindle users are, by and large, a wider audience than I already have. There’s an entire market out there that digs stories about dudes fucking, and I’m aware that I’m not on a lot of their radars. The other day, I decided to peruse the bestselling gay erotica books over on Amazon, and I noticed a recurring theme: The overwhelming majority of the covers have hot half-naked guys on them.
Now, I’ll admit that the original cover for Rough Love… (also, the cover to Blowjob Issue #1) has one of the hottest guys who has ever existed on it. I know this, because I took the photo of him. Those would be his sexy, sexy legs adorning the cover. While you can’t see more of him, I can attest that I have tested the goods many, many times and I assure you that he’s one of the best.
Anyway, all of that was to say that there weren’t enough stereotypically hot guys (re: shirtless, hairless dudes) on the cover of my ebook, so I’ve changed it. By now you know that design is important to me, so I wasn’t going to throw together a poorly Photoshopped cover using a stock image. However, being someone who largely does all of this for free, I couldn’t exactly afford to buy an original photo, either. I think that my design came out nicely, featuring a photo by Giovanni Dall’arto:
Since changing the cover the other day, I’ve already seen an increase in sales. By increase, I mean that two people have bought it. There are some other factors playing in here, considering that I also dropped the price one buck (down to $3.99), and you have to remember that the stories are already available for free on the internet, and the stories are over a year old, now. Still, I wanted to see if a more stereotypical romance cover would bring in more sales, and two sales counts as more sales.
Let me know what you think about the change, and I’ll keep you updated on how things go.
Last night, while driving home from Christmas celebrations, something like a New Year’s Resolution occurred to me. Resolutions don’t have a lot of appeal for me. They feel very much like a holiday that’s created to sell gift cards, except that they’re created to sell gym memberships or aids to help you stop smoking. Three (four?) years ago, my partner and I decided to become vegans on January 1st, not so much as a resolution but because it set a good date between our decision to go vegan and the practical application of that decision. We went through the house and finished eating everything that wasn’t vegan (we weren’t going to throw food away, what a waste) and visiting all of our favorite restaurants to eat our favorite dishes one last time. That was three (four?) years ago, and now we have new favorite restaurants, and new favorite dishes. We are better off for the decision. If you want to call it a New Year’s Resolution that worked, well, who am I to argue?
This year I’m not going to wait until the 1st to implement my new decision. My decision is a simple one:
Write every day.
It’s something I should have been doing anyway, and there’s nothing I need to do to prepare for it. I haven’t settled on a word-count requirement, yet, and there needs to be one. Cory Doctorow used to recommend 250 words a day. 250 words a day is easy, and it gets you a novel at the end of the year. It’s hard to argue with 250 words a day. Doctorow writes 1,000 words a day, now. He finished his latest novel in 82 days, taking off only for his birthday and for a hospital visit. If I can do 250 words a day, though, I can do 500. I’m not writing a novel (or maybe I am) but wouldn’t twice the productivity be twice as good? Because, really, I’m betting I could do 750 words a day. I tried that once and failed, but I’m a better writer now than I was then. So, maybe I’m really thinking about 1,000 words a day. If I’m going to be serious about this, then I need to be fucking serious.
I haven’t decided yet, though. That last paragraph is the compelling argument that’s going through my head right now. I’m also considering some way to announce my daily word count, something to help with accountability. I’ll let you know when I make my decision.
On Christmas Eve, Natty Soltesz posted a fantastic entry on his blog called “My (Legitimate) Sob Story.” What he writes in it is true for me, it’s true for nearly every other artist you love, whose work you enjoy. Natty vocalized what every artist should be vocalizing. Living costs money, and every artist has to live before they can create. I don’t mean to say that they need to live extravagant lives. I’m a happy blue collar person, and I know that Natty is as well.
The market for writers is disappearing, and it’s already disappeared for gay erotic writers. Probably for gay writers in general. We are our own support structure now, and that’s why we must ask you for money directly. Natty referred to this talk by Amanda Palmer, and I think it’s worth posting here. I think it’s worth shouting from the rooftops.
You should read Natty’s entire post, and you should send him a few bucks. You should think about every artist you love, and you should think about how you can support them as well.
I feel there’s something inherently wrong about posting something blatantly commercial after making an emotional appeal in that last section, but that’s the point, isn’t it? I’m one of the people I’m talking about above, too. So here’s my post-Christmas pitch:
Did you get a Kindle for Christmas? Did you know that I have not one, but two items available for download for the Kindle? The latest is a Kindle edition of my Blowjob zines. Titled Rough Love and other stories, it includes the four stories found in Blowjob issues one and two, and a new introduction. The other is the Kindle edition of The Horror in Dunwich Hall. You can buy them by click on the covers below
Also, if you don’t have a Kindle, you can still get Kindle apps for your iPhone, iPad, or iPod. They’re all available as .PDFs, too.
Speaking of being vegan, my partner has just made me what smells like an awesome vegan brunch, so I’m going to stop, now. I didn’t even have a chance to touch on so many topics I want to discuss, so you’ll be hearing more from me soon.
It’s been a busy week for me. I spent most of it writing a proposal for a rather big project, and working on a rather big story for another rather big project. I thought I’d send you off for the week with this wonderful image I stumbled across on Tumblr:
I was recently asked if digital editions of my zines were available, and I’m happy to say that they are now. If you click the tab above for BLOWJOB: THE ZINE you’ll be taken to the order page where you can buy .pdf versions of each zine. There are also still print editionstwo print copies of #2 available, but #1 is out of print, making the digital edition the only way you can currently buy the first issue.
Each issue contains two short stories as well as additional illustrations or photos, and I personally designed each issue. Zines have always been an interest of mine, and print and design a passion, so I’m very proud of both issues. The digital editions are a great way to see a well-designed presentation of my work for half the price of a print issue. The .pdfs are DRM-free and still licensed under a Creative Commons license.
The third issue of Blowjob will be available some time this summer, but it will be completely different in form and format than the previous two issues!
Buy direct from Class Comics by clicking the image above, or buy it from Amazon.
Written by Johnny Murdoc with art by TJ Wood and Colors by Lizz Ventura!
Note: This blog occasionally uses affiliate links, which earn me a small percentage on anything you buy when you link from my website. I promise that I will never promote anything that I do not personally love wholeheartedly in order to earn money from the aforementioned links.
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