Flat Warming: a Chemical Sex audio excerpt!

I’ve never been an early adopter when it comes to technology. If I gave a single shit about that, I’d blame my parents. We didn’t have Sky as kids, and we didn’t have the latest consoles; even when I persuaded them to let me have a TV in my bedroom at the tender age of 15, it was their old 14″ black-and-white set (bought from my Mum’s brother in the late 70s), rather than anything I could conceivably use to watch soft porn on Channel 5 the Atlanta Olympics.

They’ve never invested in a microwave (Mum: “come on, they’re just for people too lazy to cook properly”), they don’t believe in e-readers (in fairness, I’m with them on that), and any time their broadband goes down, my siblings and I get panicked phone calls from my Dad, who has to be talked down from the ledge with all the skill, tact, and patience of a professional hostage negotiator.

In other words, Luddism is in the blood. Everyone who knows me well has despaired of that at some point, most recently when I clung onto my ailing Blackberry long after it had been surpassed as a method of communication by Apple, Samsung, Sony, HTC, Nokia…(landlines, phone boxes, the telegram, actually talking to people…)

All of which is a roundabout way of covering my arse for what I’m about to post. This afternoon, I downloaded Audacity (initial release: 28/05/2000 …not bad!), and recorded an audio version of my story from Chemical Sex, Flat Warming. My laptop is shit, so take #1 was accompanied by a slightly unnerving whirring sound, but…well, I’m lazy, so take #2 never really happened. I did try to clean up the final document, until it became clear that removing the background noise also meant flattening the main vocal track and making me sound even more like I was reading for a radio broadcast in the 1950s. In the end, I just decided ‘fuck it, we’re good here’.

The editor of Chemical Sex, Oleander Plume, has the full MP3 file, which she will no doubt use at some point for her own devious purposes. Until she does, please excuse (and enjoy!) the excerpt I’ve chosen to post here. It’s my audio debut, and is a scene taken from the middle of the story, just as things are starting to hot up in Nick’s city maisonette…

Anyone who wants to know how that super-gay tale ends can find it buried within the pages of the Chemical Sex paperback, available from Amazon, and full of the very best of British and American erotica…

…or I *guess* you can download it from the Kindle store instead, if that’s more your thing.

If you enjoyed the excerpt enough to want more (Tesco Value) aural delights from me, please do get in touch; maybe I’ll figure out a way to make it happen without giving in to the overwhelming desire I have to stab myself in the throat every time I think about putting my voice online.

C