Short Summary
It started at an orgy in France. Eunice met Franklin’s boundless optimism, Franklin met Eunice’s propensity towards gleeful and creative sadism, the predictable happened. Fast forward eight years to another orgy and we decided to write a book together!
And that’s where the magic started.
Last year, we asked for your help in developing a new genre of erotic fiction that tore down genre walls, and you responded. You responded with extraordinary enthusiasm, in fact! So much so that our first book, The Brazen Altar, was a huge success...despite being banned by Amazon for sexual content. So thank you all so much! It was a humbling experience.
Now let's see if we can do it a second time!
In Divine Burdens, the sequel to The Brazen Altar, we revisit the world of the Passionate Pantheon, with its advanced technology, AI gods, and ritual group sex. But this book takes things in a new direction. Where Divine Burdens was a lighthearted Utopian novel of sacrifice for sex and connection and joy, Divine Burdens looks at what happens when we twist the setting to erotic horror.
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In this book, you get to see a different City than in The Brazen Altar. It has kink, it has AIs who are worshipped as gods, it has a far-future, post-scarcity society...but this City also has tentacles! Because it isn't erotic horror without tentacles, am I right?
Come to www.passionatepantheon.com to learn more about the world!
What We Need & What You Get
Like the first book, this book is weird. And like the first book, this book stubbornly refuses to be categorized into any convenient niche.
When we first shopped The Brazen Altar around to publishers, we kept hearing the same thing again and again: "People who buy erotica like one thing. Readers of gay cowboy erotica won't buy bisexual cowboy erotica. Fans of kinky lesbian mechanics don’t hunger after kinky gay school teachers. Vampire erotica readers don’t reach for the werewolf books. You can't sell erotic fiction that can't be categorized."
Our first novel proved that “wisdom” wrong, and now we want to go on tearing down the silos. We’re going to prove it wasn’t a fluke.
Tentacles! Forests that bend to the will of the AI gods! Sacred parasites that make their home inside a host and secrete powerful aphrodisiacs! Ritual erotic combat in public arenas alongside ferocious, equally erotic gambling! A Temple run entirely by exiles! There's a lot going on in this book.
What do you, dear backers, get from all this?
An erotic book unlike anything you've read before, in your hands before publication date. Kazoo ball gags modeled after one of the drones on the cover of the book (because who doesn't love a bit of laughter with their kink, amirite?). All kinds of other goodies, like a poster of the cover, stickers, leather bookmarks, and a chance to have the two of us join you for virtual tea.
The Impact
We love writing. We love writing weird, kinky, geeky, post-scarcity, queer smut.
Most of all, we love variety. And we think the world doesn't have enough of that. We want to explore fiction that's exuberant, messy, unashamed, and not easy to pigeonhole.
We also think that science fiction is best when it asks questions about the human condition. We used Divine Burdens to ask: What is the nature of consent? What happens in a society that's built on a foundation of consent but takes a highly technical, transactional view of what “consent” means? And how can we address these questions...through the medium of really hot sex?
Remember how everyone used to think fantasy novels were only for kids and those who never quite grew up, then suddenly serious authors started showing that the medium can be used in decidedly grown-up ways to tell stories with decidedly grown-up, complex, thought-provoking ideas? We'd like to do the same thing for erotica.
Ambitious, we know. But there it is. (We did wonder if part of the reason The Brazen Altar was banned from Amazon while titles like Daddy Don't Pull Out are apparently totally okay is because we're doing more than just titillating the reader? Though of course we hope we're doing that, too.)
So we'd like your help in proving there's a market for that.
And a market for kazoo ball gags, too, though that's more a side gig.
Risks & Challenges
The book is coming out. Come hell or high water, it will publish in October. Your support for this crowdfunding will help determine how many books the publisher will print. That will determine whether the price will be affordable to more people and also whether it will get into stores and libraries that will enable others to find it.
Other Ways You Can Help
Share the word! Tell your friends! Tell folks who aren't (yet) friends, but might want to be! Tell folks whom you definitely don’t want as friends, but who might want to have a good old-fashioned bonfire (we’ll do them a bulk discount)! Tell people you think might enjoy kinks that would make that last set of people’s eyes water!
Even if you can't afford to throw financial support our way (and we entirely understand, given the current state of the world), or if far-future post-scarcity science fiction kinky inclusive theocratic erotic horror just isn't your jam, you can still help us get the word out.
Let’s change the way people think about erotica.
