Tag Archives: Bernie Mojzes

Halloween Microfiction: Monsters Among Us by Bernie Mojzes

“Monsters Among Us”
by Bernie Mojzes

It’s not that he hated Halloween; he just found it tiresome. The incessant buildup in all the media promising unparalleled sights and frights, the ghosts and monsters of the past stalking through the modern world… ultimately a letdown. An adrenaline backwash.
And then, even worse, the interminable time afterward, a swamp of ennui and unexplainable depression, lingering days, even weeks.

Continue reading Halloween Microfiction: Monsters Among Us by Bernie Mojzes

2021 Halloween Microfiction Roundup

It’s a beautiful, sunny day here in Salem MA as I write this. The tourists have gone home. The locals are emerging from their homes bleary eyed and hopeful. Another wheel of the year has turned and brings with it new promise.

This year many of our stories  centered around death. Making peace with it. Saying goodbye. Eking out the very last precious moments with loved ones. If nothing else, the pandemic has taught us the importance of human connection. I do hope you will all take a moment to revisit these stories, or read them for the first time if October was too much of a whirlwind for you.

Cloudless Climes and Starry Skies by A.C. Quill
Danse Macabre / Memento Vivere by Bernie Mojzes
Desire by DJ Tyrer
The Offering by Jennifer Williams
A Little Magic In Me by Avery Vanderlyle
Eyes Wide Shut by Elvyra Venus
The Dark Room by Cecilia Tan

I’m not going to say goodbye this year. I don’t know what the future holds. Things are in flux. Change is afoot. But death is merely transformation. We’ll still be here one way or another. The Circlet Alumni are cooking something up for next year. So long as life doesn’t get in the way you’ll hear from us again.

Until then, thank you. Thank you to everyone who submitted work. Thank you to everyone who read and shared the stories here.

Have a blessed New Year and stay safe.

New Book: Superlative Speculative Erotica is here at last!

Our giant twenty-fifth anniversary collection is now available for download! Twenty of our best stories of the last five years.

$9.99 ebook
ISBN 978-1-61390-165-6
$19.99 print
ISBN 978-1-61390-187-8
285 Pages; 94,000 words

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Funded through a Kickstarter campaign run in 2017– the year of Circlet’s 25th anniversary– Superlative Speculative Erotica features stories voted on by the Kickstarter and Patreon supporters and reflects many of the genres published by Circlet Press: a little cyberpunk, a little high fantasy, a touch of horror, some superheroes, a bit of space opera, some paranormal… What unites these stories is their quality. Check this amazing list out:

Bête Noire” by Annabeth Leong from A Beastly Affair
“An Analog Christmas” by Kal Cobalt from Jingle Balls
“From The Shallows, Cold As Death” by Bernie Mojzes from What Lies Beneath
“Double: A Tale of Love and Engineering” by Nobilis Reed from Like A Love Triangle
“The Secret Life of Ramona Lee” by Michael M. Jones from Puxhill by Night
“Deflowered” by Avery Vanderlyle from A Beastly Affair
“Crow Luck” by Dame Bodacious from Like Fortune’s Fool
“Enchanted” by Shanna Germain from Charming
“Stolen Days” by TS Porter from Hard As Stone edited by Julie Cox.
“Bridge Over Shifter’s Chasm” by Raven Kaldera from Extraordinary Deviations
“Questing” by Charles Payseur from Nights of the Round Table
“The Night Air” by Mary Anne Mohanraj from The Stars Change
“The Closing Shift” by JJ Poulos from Coffee: Hot
“Wizard’s Staff” by Julie Cox from Hard As Stone
“Disarmed” by Vinnie Tesla from Silent Shadows Come
“In The Blood” by Kathleen Tudor from Like Fortune’s Fool
“Evidence of Things Unseen” by A.C. Wise from What Lies Beneath
“Season of Fire” by Sasha Payne from Wired Hard 5
“Primè Nocta” by Kierstin Cherry from Like Myth Made Flesh
“I Am The Very Model Of A Modern Circlet Editor” by H.B. Kurtzwilde & Alex Picchetti from Like A Circlet Editor

The anthology, like the cohort of authors and staff of Circlet Press itself, features characters who identify as lesbian, gay, genderqueer, bisexual, trans, and heterosexual. The erotic activities expressed within the stories cover a similar variety, though it’s not an identical match: a gay male author can write a lesbian witch who has sex with a gender-changing demon. What label do you put on that? We call it… superlative speculative erotica.

Here’s a little taste of the very first story: Annabeth Leong’s “Bete Noir:”

For a while, Beauty and I made each other invincible. She relished every beastly part of me, and so I found myself trusting her with anything and everything—even secrets I hid while I was still a lady.

Continue reading New Book: Superlative Speculative Erotica is here at last!

New book! The Flesh Made Word: Erotic Tales of Writing

silent_shadows_come_cover_iconsizeThe Flesh Made Word: Erotic Tales of Writing
edited by Bernie Mojzes

$6.99 ebook download
$12.95 paperback
ISBN 978-1-61390-123-6 (ebook)
ISBN 978-1-61390-119-9 (paperback)

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The ebook edition is also available at: Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, Smashwords, Kobo, AllRomanceEbooks, and the iBookstore and Google Play store.

The paperback is available from CreateSpace and Amazon.com.

Strip away everything external, and the act of writing becomes profoundly physical: writer, writing tool, medium. In this anthology of erotic stories, THE FLESH MADE WORD, editor Bernie Mojzes shows that from that seed grows the deepest intimacy — the hidden self expressed upon a surface, transforming it in the process, naming erotic possibilities.

The tap of typewriter keys on ink-wet ribbons, the tickle of the calligrapher’s brush, the press of fountain-pen nib to flesh. The scent of hot metal molded into text and the shuffle-clank of the printing press. Give yourself over to the sensuality of the words themselves, to the sound and the shape and the taste of them. The expression of ideas intersects with the body in all its physicality; pleasure is never distinct from how we express it.

Ten writers explore the seduction of written language from the sensual to the lewd, from a mysterious woman whose lovers write their stories upon her skin to a playwright who declares to his rival that he does his best writing in whorehouses. A broken typewriter awakens the searing ghosts of desire, and a woman becomes a living scroll of prophecy. Permanent or ephemeral, the lines etched in flesh reveal an astonishing vulnerability, offering both the opportunity for profound insight, and an instinct to hide and dissemble.

The Flesh Made Word features stories by A.C. Wise, A.B. Eyers, Andrea Zanin, Benji Bright, Trish DeVene, Nadine Wilmot, Delilah Bell, Kannan Feng, Sasha Payne, and Sunny Moraine, who show that while the word may indeed transcend the flesh for a time, it always comes back for more.

Hot excerpt, keep reading! Continue reading New book! The Flesh Made Word: Erotic Tales of Writing

Microfiction: A Blindfold. A Cigarette, Offered and Declined. by Bernie Mojzes

A Blindfold. A Cigarette, Offered and Declined.

There is the blindfold, of course. That always comes first, though he could always decline. He never does. The blindfold, and the wrist-binding rope. Then the long walk through cold, stone corridors. The scent of mold, of the sawdust that scuffs under his bare feet, and under the heavy-booted feet beside him. The creak of rusted iron hinges, and harsh step into the light. Hot sand between his toes, the sunlight warm on his face, spots of brightness–the closest thing to daylight he’s seen in a year–through the black fabric covering his eyes. The scent of gunpowder.

They’d played this scenario so many times, Emelia leading him out of her basement and onto the desert sands that sifted through the courtyard of her family’s home. Toe-tripping over rubble from the bomb blast. Pressing him against the hot stone of the courtyard wall.

The sound of the rifle being loaded.

Always, was this the time she’d actually do it?

There was an offered cigarette. Always. Part of the ritual, though he’d never taken it. Though Emelia knew he didn’t smoke. The one true thing she’d known about him. The rest–their courtship, their marriage, their shared love of cheesy romantic comedies–all a lie.

Now her family was dead. His fault. His mission.

Once a month, she’d lead him out of his cage, out into the courtyard, up against the wall. The blindfold, the cigarette, the loading, the gunshot.

Splinters of stone cutting his cheek.

Then her hands pulling at his belt, pulling his cock free, hardening in her hand.

The rustle of cloth. Rough fingers gripping his hair, forcing him to the ground, and then Emelia, his captor, his wife, his enemy, straddling him, taking him inside her, riding him hard and fast and angry. Shattered stone digging into his back, his ass, his thighs. His bound hands a painful lump in the small of his back. The scent of her enfolding him.

Her need is as desparate as when they’d first met. Of course it is, he’d been designed for her, sculpted to her tastes, his pheremones tuned to her locks. The perfect spy.

“I loved you,” she said, always said, her tears wet on his cheek, her cunt wet on his cock. Or, sometimes, “I love you.”

I love you, too. Thought, not said. He’d lost that right, when he’d sent the codes that disabled the compound’s anti-missle defenses. When he’d killed her family.

For God and country.

But he couldn’t kill Emelia. And though he could have escaped, how could he deny her this one thing?

It’s Pavlovian, by now. The blindfold, the long walk, his erection pressing against the thin cloth of his cotton trousers.

Emelia comes first, always, at least once. So much has gone into his design, down to curve of his penis and his sexual endurance. Nothing left to chance. The perfect lover, the one you don’t let go.

Sometimes, she sends him back to his cage, still hard. Aching. Sometimes, she brings him to climax, his seed sticky on her fingers, or spilling into her mouth to be spat back contemptuously on his face.

Now, today, there is the sun on his skin, the fabric on his face, the sand under his toes. The cigarette. The cartridge sliding into the chamber. The bolt being drawn.

Always, is this the time she’d actually do it?

It’s spring, and the gentle breeze brings the scent of desert wildflowers he will never see.