This blog post shouldn’t exist.
Caffeine Addict Press shouldn’t exist.
It all happened entirely without plan. Franklin and Kitty met for the first time just prior to an orgy in Barcelona…no, wait, let’s back up a bit, because this story is wildly improbable, but more than that, it’s fractally improbable, with every part of the story as weird and improbable as the whole thing.
There’s a social media site called Quora. Franklin and Kitty “met” there, if you can really be said to meet someone who is, at first, just a collection of pixels on a screen.
Franklin is a mad scientist (mad engineer, technically, but people always confuse the two). He designs sex toys as a hobby.
Kitty is a gamer geek writer who has experience beta-testing sex toys. This is, as you might imagine, Gentle Reader, the beginning of a meet-cute that went to some delightful places.
Kitty mentioned in passing having experience testing sex toys. Franklin saw, amongst the hundreds of millions of answers posted on Quora, that particular nugget, at precisely a time when he had just finished some prototypes and was in search of willing vict—um, test personnel. He slid into her DMs, she was like “yes, of course I’ll help,” and thus was set in motion an unstoppable series of events that led us to this place.
They talked, then talked some more. Kitty invited Franklin to join a tabletop role-playing game she ran. Franklin invited Kitty to an orgy in Barcelona. They met for the first time in atom-space in Kitty’s hometown, where they went to a delightful rum bar to work on a novel together1 just before sharing an absolutely epic first kiss2.
Spectres, the erotic anthology, came to be when Franklin and Kitty and Franklin’s wife and her boyfriend and Franklin’s London co-author and lover decided to see a play in London on the way back from Barcelona. Kitty has a deliciously creative mind and a fondness for telling stories during sex. Whilst she and Franklin were doing the deed in London, she spun what became the nucleus of the story Forest Mists, the first tale in Spectres, and we thought hey, the world needs more of this.
So there you go, the tale of how Spectres came to be.
We were neck-deep in the reimagining of Spin at this point. Kitty referred to Franklin as “the Toymaker,” for obvious reasons, and Franklin to Kitty as “the Talespinner,” also for obvious reasons. A former partner of Kitty’s observed that the Talespinner and the Toymaker sounds like a YA novel, so we thought, hey, why not write a YA novel?
We got 24,378 words into Spin before we realized that the themes emerging from the story were far darker and more complex than we’d anticipated, and didn’t really work as a young adult novel, so we scrapped it and began again, with a much different and far more ambitious premise. What emerged was a complex, dark, and decidedly grownup literary novel a bit like Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale meets Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, with perhaps a pinch of Children of Men thrown in for good measure.
We worked on Spectres during our off-time collaborating on Spin, and often while having sex (sex, when properly viewed, is tremendous fuel for creativity, almost as good as tea at that task).
Once we’d finished Spectres, we were faced with a new problem: What to do with it? Selling an erotic anthology to a publisher is a long, hard slog (almost as bad as selling a far-future, post-Collapse magical realism literary novel!), so after some discussion we realized it would be easier to start a publishing company and do it ourselves than to find a publisher.
Yes, we’re serious. The state of publishing in the modern world is that dire.
The rest, as they say, is history.
Leave a Reply