Once upon a time, I used to keep my GI Joe figurine stripped and in bondage stuffed in his tank. We'd had a house fire, so this was one of those older, probably collectible, 12" figures that came from toys donated to us while we tried to recover. I never questioned why GI Joe got bound, tortured, and treated like Princess Leia as someone always in need of rescue. Over the decades, I realized this was just the sort of thing that made sense in my world bubble. And trying to interface my world bubble to the reality others share has led to intense experiences and misadventures that just kind of flow around me. The woman I lost my virginity to tried to slice herself up with a busted safety razor while I showered afterward. The women I loved in my early twenties fed both my rage and need for comfort. Passion rippled through my world without any boundaries - sometimes flooding us with unavoidable tsunamis and sometimes leaving us smoldering in a dry heat of rage.

Those wet and dry seasons, filled with the pulsing urgency of seeking and never finding, were the perfect conditions to sow the seeds of a fertile imagination and explore whatever fruit issued forth. There are grains of truth in every story - legends and fairy tales as well - but under the surface is the unavoidable fact that I'm always peeling back the layers of what we are thinking, feeling, and wanting while pursuing that most noble of pursuits: getting sexual fulfillment.

I had to think carefully when I decided to start publishing stories. I write in bursts, riding emotional waves and telling stories that force their way out of me, and that doesn't lend to a particularly structured approach. "Very Dirty Stories" volumes was a perfect medium for gathering together individual stories that were very important but only part of what was going on. Over time, collections of stories that fit together became "Cherish Desire Singles" and readers get a chance to read from beginning to end a specific arc of events or delve deep into a specific series of pathos and escalation in pursuit of pleasure.

Other than my somewhat haphazard story telling approach, everything else is a well structured machine. I go through my editing, tagging, and summation process on each story. Sometimes better than others. I've engaged a good drummer circle friend in England, and she now proofs longer collections for consistency and minor errors that I can no longer see. I read out loud to Moon to get a feel for fit and the way words flow. Then I consider how stories package and fit. That's really the business of writing.

But the writing itself... late nights and into the morning. Breaks where I just vanish for hours into a spare room in the house with my netbook while Angel whispers about her mishaps. Riding the upper deck on buses around London listening to the people while pouring out the strange and wonderful lives of Alexi & Andrea. Angry evenings in hotels where the city has no name, but Natalya and Max are digging deeper into it. Recording things on my smart phone while driving into the city to go clubbing. Jotting notes down at festivals while taking photos of what stood out about a woman whom later confesses to me her secrets.

It's all about life. It's all about how we fit together. Sometimes rough and jagged. Sometimes smooth and fulfilled.

Strangely... I'm not much of a romance or erotica reader. My favorite authors opened my eyes to what might be going on between people and the institutions that people cling to. And they probably show how much of a realist - or pessimist - I am after seeing humans in their current state around the world.

I always go back to Frank Herbert and the Dune series when I think of systems of people and motivations. He was telling a story so different from what is advertised. He was explaining how humans entrap themselves with their endless desire for stability and power. He was describing that system and how we fuel both the mystery and the manner of it. Herbert's work was a shock to my system and probably fed my paranoia. But in his framework of social and political systems I found patterns to describe what is going on around us all the time.

Asimov. Here is an author so absolutely hopeful about the future. There will be wars, famine, destruction - but for Asimov there will also be redemption, recovery, and expansion. Even his non-human characters recognize the hope for another day, and it doesn't require an army to achieve it. One man or woman can make a difference. Asimov invokes the faith we have in continuity and survival, tests it, and finds a way for us to escalate and ascend.

H.P. Lovecraft has always been a favorite treat as well. Really I read a lot of authors who expand and extend the strange cosmos that Lovecraft barely described. It's how he exposes our inner horrors and untested assumptions about the universe that always sucks me in. Growing up, my father believed we all have our place in the universe. Lovecraft was my first introduction to the notion that the universe is far more likely to be disordered and chaotic - and we just don't want to admit it because that's really terrifying.

I enjoy Greg Bear and Charles Stross. I have found amazing inspiration in stories and art from Neil Gaiman and Harlan Ellison. I have bookshelves of graphic novels which can capture in a single page of illustration what I don't think I could ever express in words with the same impact. Though sometimes I worry that only Alan Moore's fallen heroes really resonate with me.