Nov 072015
 

My steampunk erotica story collection The Innocent’s Progress and Other Stories will be a part of The Circlet Press Steampunk Bundle which also includes the award-winning House of Sable Locks by Elizabeth Schechter, the bizarre and witty Erotofludic Age by Vinnie Tesla, and the exuberantly swashbuckling 1901: A Steam Odyssey by Lionel Bramble; along with Like a Wisp of Steam, edited by J. Blackmore.

This goes on sale November 15th, 2015, until February 15th, 2016. You can’t ask for a better deal than that.

Vinnie Tesla called The Innocent’s Progress:

Confident, humane, nuanced, slyly comic–it is excellent writing.

 Posted by at 23:20
Apr 062014
 

The final stop on my blog tour to promote “An Angel Has No Memory” is at the Scarlet Letters blog:

How long is a book? SFWA says that a novel has to be at least 50,000 words long, and most novels today are much longer. But a novel isn’t the same thing as a book. A book can theoretically be of any length, contain multiple works by multiple authors, or even just be a compilation of LOLCats.
How long is a story? Hemingway wrote a story in six words: “For sale: Baby shoes. Never worn.” I once asked a romance novelist what was the difference between a category romance and a literary romance. She said, “About 20,000 words.” Category romances are meant to be short, fast reads, compared to more involved reading of literary stories.
Mar 142014
 

The next stop on the blog tour for An Angel Has No Memory is at Stephen Zimmer’s blog, where I talk about straight men writing lesbian erotica.

First, should white people make hiphop? I say yes, for the same reason I think black people should make heavy metal, and indeed anybody should make anything. The claim that any particular group has a monopoly on any particular form of expression goes against the whole idea of freedom of expression. Hip-hop itself is based on promiscuous borrowing and recombination of culture items, defying conventional categories of race and class and genre.

Second, should white people dominate the charts and awards ceremonies for hip-hop, leaving black artists on the margins of the genre they created? That’s a thornier question.

Feb 152014
 

Just found a great review of my short story “Upgrade” in the Circlet Press anthology Jacked In: Transhumanist Erotica on Amazon.

Peter Tupper’s “Upgrade” is a beautiful, melancholy, elegiac but ultimately uplifting tale of one man’s final memories of physical sensation before transitioning to a new form, leaving behind and transcending the body in order to become a being of pure intellect. But not abandoning human curiosity. “When there is no possibility of loss,” Tupper tells us, “action becomes trivial. Even if we can’t die, We can feel fear, and feel even more ashamed because of that fear. We need to try new things. We need to find something that scares Us.”

 Posted by at 10:42
Jan 242014
 

After not updating for more than 6 months, I want announce some accomplishments.

2014 opened with two fiction publications:

The first is a short story, An Angel Has No Memory, published by Inkstained Succubus as a standalone ebook.

“Angel” began as a piece of fanfiction for Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse TV series. When I learned about a project called Filed Off, an anthology of fanfiction edited to be commercially saleable (like a certain bestselling trilogy). As a long shot, I did a find-and-replace on the character names and a few other terms and submitted it. The anthology didn’t get enough submissions, but the publisher decided to publish it stand-alone, though with substantially more edits. I accepted.

This proved to be more difficult than I thought. Fanfiction assumes the reader is familiar with the source text. To “de-fanfiction” it, I had to add a lot more exposition of the setting and description of the future technology. Also I had to shift the setting from the present to the near future, which presented another character problem. The protagonist is a closeted lesbian, and even in the present day I had to justify why this character was so fearful about being found out. Most people assume the future will be more culturally liberal, with less need for homosexuals to live in the closet, so I had to justify that even more in this new version.

The other publication is my short story “Upgrade” in the Circlet Press anthology Jacked In: Transhumanist Erotica

It’s a story of a casual encounter on the eve of a transhumanist singularity/apocalypse.

I didn’t finish a draft of my history book, as I pledged, but I did make significant progress by completing a few chapters, and I have a better understanding of the path ahead. I hope I can complete a draft by the summer.

The Master-slave history book I’m editing has shifted into a new phase of editing the contributions. I always thought of editing as a position of power, something I’m not comfortable with, though in actuality a lot of it is figuring out the difference between “imply” and “infer”, and the like.

The last big creative project I’m working on is a shared science fiction novel, or more accurately a series of connected novellas, with my writer’s workshop. No details on that for the moment.

 Posted by at 12:08
Jun 242012
 

Every Night Erotica just published my story, “Upstairs, Downstairs“. It’s a short-short story featuring Tangwen and Miss Ccri, two characters from my steampunk erotica short story collection, The Innocent’s Progress & Other Stories. 

I submitted this to another erotica publisher for another steampunk anthology, and they accepted it, but they insisted on a contract that gave them first refusal on those characters in any future stories. After I negotiated a bit and realized that they weren’t going to budge on this, I withdrew my submission and sent it to another publisher.

I always try to hang onto as many rights as possible.

Mar 152012
 

Adventurotica just posted a rave review of The Innocents Progress & Other Stories:

It’s been said that steampunk is more of an aesthetic than a literary genre, that aside from “machines and mad science are awesome; also, it’s brown” it has no underlying ethic, nothing to say.  I disagree, and books like this are why.  Tupper reaches for something more than atmospheric and sexy, and comes away with a handful of exceptional tales that illustrate what steampunk as an evolving genre is all about.

It is theme, not merely set dressing, that makes something steampunk.  The expected accoutrements – distant airships, strange devices, rare manuscripts, goggles – are present here, sometimes centrally and sometimes only peripherally, but what really makes these stories a part of the genre is the pervasive feel of a world on the brink of massive social and technological change.

 Posted by at 10:41