Interview with M.J. Rennie
Please welcome M.J Rennie to my blog today. On March 20, 2018,
author M. J. Rennie officially republish a quartet of books through his
own imprint, Emasculine Editions. This is the first in a four-books-at-a-time
release scheduled for the next year. The cover artist for all four volumes is
the extraordinary Rebecca, of Housewives at Play fame.
In order, the first four M. J. Rennie titles are:
Permission and The Perfect Wife
How To Adore An Older Woman
Worshipped Wives
Absolute Submission
Rennie’s fiction is usually classed in the adult erotica bdsm category, as his books are listed presently on the hosting service Createspace. However, the style and content of Rennie’s material is difficult to assign to any recognized category, as he likes to set erotic stories in many varied genres. Combine that fact with a master’s skill in composition, cadence, and wit, and you have fiction that is every bit as entertaining as it thought provoking.
Permission and The Perfect Wife
By M. J. Rennie
There is simply no one better at writing wonderfully hot Feminine Dominant erotica than M. J. Rennie:
“My stories invariably feature a self-assured, sexually aware, and typically mature woman in full possession of her powers. Older, vivacious, well-favored women are the most erotically interesting people around, if you ask me.”
—From BookAddict, on goodreads:
“This volume one contained one main story and other works by M. J. Rennie. The main story is titled Permission. In this story, Mark becomes the husband of Darlene. She is a sexually aware woman who knows what she wants and lustfully trains Mark to give it to her. The training of Mark blew my mind. The sensuality of it plus the possibilities of sexual delight made me envious of Darlene.”
Published as a tandem novel by legendary Masquerade Books Inc. in 1999, Permission and The Perfect Wife are a testament to the power of words. Here is how author M. J. Rennie elevated the lowly late 20th century F book genre to literary heights. Combining sensuality and sexual subversion in a seamless symmetry, Rennie’s celebration of dynamic women and the boys who love them is mind candy by any measure.
In order, the first four M. J. Rennie titles are:
Permission and The Perfect Wife
How To Adore An Older Woman
Worshipped Wives
Absolute Submission
Rennie’s fiction is usually classed in the adult erotica bdsm category, as his books are listed presently on the hosting service Createspace. However, the style and content of Rennie’s material is difficult to assign to any recognized category, as he likes to set erotic stories in many varied genres. Combine that fact with a master’s skill in composition, cadence, and wit, and you have fiction that is every bit as entertaining as it thought provoking.
BookAddict: How long have you been writing erotica for publication?
M.J.: Thirty years ago this fall. In a few months, I will republish one of my ancient favorites, two separate novellas that I call Rubio. It contains some of my earliest work, and I hope I won’t sound too immodest by adding that the material holds up pretty well.
BookAddict: Wow! And how many volumes have you published?
M.J.: Sixteen. Half are novels or novellas, the other half are story collections. I intend to put them through a rigorous copy editing, but the material itself will be changed very little—when I wrote them originally, I did it with an eye towards not dating them with styles and gadgets that quickly become outdated. I always groan when I read stories that revolve around some tech that’s already obsolete, although I will confess to a fondness for steampunk.
BookAddict: We know how you are classified in the metadata that goes into on line and print publication nowadays, but how would you classify yourself?
M.J.: Mainly, I am a jokester. It’s the relationship I’m interested in. The after-romance. The propaganda of Feminine Dominance I make up as I go along. Thirty years now I’ve been publishing stories and novels along similar lines, from pre-internet pulp fap mags to my super-ambitious later offerings like Manhandling, Total Femdom, and Brotherhood is Powerless.
All my works are concerned with strongly adult themes, although the tone and subject matter vary widely.
BookAddict: Funny guy... on a more serious note, are you part of an organized BDSM community?
M.J.: I answer that with a resounding yes, because I am part of the human race. At bottom, I suspect that as beings descended from reptiles overlaid with a mammalian forebrain, we are strongly sensitive to notions of domination and submission. But as for community, I’m not much of a joiner and besides, my chief mission in life is entertaining my spouse of three decades with witty conversation and wry cynicism. Five years ago, I freed myself from a stifling job in an oppressive bureaucracy and my motto currently is:
“Let the Party Begin!”
On the subject of humanity, I’m not much of a propagandist for my own species. While I am immensely enamored of select members of said species, on the whole I question our wisdom and capacity to survive long term. If my books mean anything at all, they are an inquiry into the rituals of domination and submission you see in evidenced in society. How well has unquestioning obedience to the leader served us in the organization and conduct of our nation states? Not always well, I’m afraid.
BookAddict: How did you get into writing Femdom?
M.J.: During the 1990s, I decided to explore the D/s phenomenon within the framework of a compulsive writing habit. The personal stories that started showing up on the internet contained some interesting ideas, but the writing was terrible. The lives these couples described might be fascinating, but they had no clue about how to present it.
Why not write one the way it ought to be written? With style, and touch of class.
The result was Permission. It soon became clear that this first story had something, and was published as Permission/The Perfect Wife in 1999 by the legendary Masquerade Books, whose founder, Richard Kasak, died in 2013.
To me, the idea of male domination was so standard, so usual. Practically all the published bdsm titles (with a few exceptions) featured male dominants. What if women were in charge and had something like the sexual obsessions that animate so many men? And what if men were a little more delicate, a shade more refined than most of them are? What would be the outcome? Not only did it strike me as an unplowed field literature-wise, it had wonderful potential for making backhanded observations on where we actually are in the current war of the genders.
I absolutely love this current #metoo movement, whereby sexual bullies are called out and humiliated. It’s long overdue. The idea that you can manipulate and push people around sexually because you’re some kind of a big shot is an idea that belongs in the dustbin, along with hoops skirts and side saddle horseback riding. But actions between consenting lovers in the privacy of a bedroom somewhere? That’s a whole different thing.
BookAddict: You describe yourself as an old-fashioned writer of contemporary erotica. What do you mean by that?
M.J.: The act of scratching out a story this way keeps me honest. No excess verbiage. The adjectives, for example, I keep few. Ladle on the verbs and nouns with gusto. Keep it romantic, but factual. Straightforward. Economical. Accurate. Every word counts. Then I dictate the material into my computer using a popular software program, and revise from there.
I spent many an agonized hour teaching myself to write and didn’t break through to publication until I was in my mid-thirties. The problem was that I was only interested in what was going on around me and I needed to learn how to pick and choose among my subjects. Or pretend to, anyway.
BookAddict: What does that picking and choosing entail?
M.J.: I still like to use people, places, and situations I’ve actually encountered because I think it is interesting and lends verisimilitude to any kind of literary work. It also makes it romantic at the very deepest level. It means more to say, “Remember, we’ll always have Paris,” if you’ve actually been there together.
The first simple truth is that like most forms of narrative entertainment, my stories are not like real life. And the second simple truth is that life itself is just too terrifying and grim to very often feature people in situations like the ones you will find in my stories.
That’s why we call it fiction.
BookAddict: Your stories can be quite romantic. The man loves this quirky, sexy, volatile, dominant, very hands-on woman. Yet one of your readers has called you the “Prince of Love,” despite the constant coupling that goes on in your stories.
M.J.: I like to incorporate the typical double think we’ve all learned as a result of living in a society like ours. There are a limited number of ways we may express romantic attraction in our society. Some are approved—others are not. The great thing about a Femdom romance is that you can cut to the chase.
In traditional romances you have all this phony back and forth over the question of whether or not they will get together. Spoiler alert! They always do.
In Femdom romances, you dispense with the phony stuff and start with a couple who are together with the woman in charge. This effectively opens a vast untapped field of comic consequences, if you’re sophisticated and have a nice sense of humor. Not every reader gets it, I am sorry to say.
And there is never coercion in my stories. No Harvey Weinsteins. The man is a happy, satisfied victim, if you want to call him that. He is capable of the essential submissive quality that I call “Surrender.” And he’s an indefatigable enabler.
I won’t go into politics, but Woman-Dominant is a far more common condition in real-life marriages than you might think. Once a couple is freed from the Do We or Don’t We? mumbo-jumbo, you get some interesting stuff happening. Make no mistake: I am writing these stories to entertain urban sophisticates everywhere. Many, if not most of my stories, are intended to be read before bedtime with the gadgets off (unless it’s a reader) and the music low.
The rhythm of the language in a number of my stories—Doing The Dishes in my Brotherhood volume or Lacy Sunday in the Femdom Omnibus collection are two examples of stories intended as deliberate bedtime reading.
I’m of the opinion that couples who regularly read to each other at night—using a Kindle, Nook, iPad, or even a solid, regular book, are couples who stay together. Especially if it’s sexy stories they read.
BookAddict: Where do you think your work is headed at this point?
M.J.: I consider myself a minor but interesting writer if you’re open-minded and knowledgeable. Prepare to meet hostile aliens, dystopian nightmares, alternate societies, political repression, time-space aberrations, and even Adolph Hitler. Nobody writes in the Femdom genre quite like I do, and thankfully I’ve had no imitators yet. I believe that by training my attention on the modern gender wars I have probed the dark heart of heterosexuality—perhaps going where no man has gone before. The conclusion that I have come to is as follows:
Women and men deserve each other.
My hero sees the strongly dominant, sexual woman and says, “Okay darling, I will concede your superiority but otherwise expect to match wits with me and do not forget that even though we are unequals, I am still the passport to realms barred to you without my presence. Beyond that my interior world is yours.”
BookAddict: Name some writers you admire and discuss them.
M.J.: They are all equally precious, equally important, in the scheme of things. Unlike the inarticulate ones, they have taken the opportunity to speak. To say. For non-writers and non-recorders and non-rememberers, there is only the present and future. Never the past. I don’t care what your medium happens to be— music , video, film, painting, poetry—whatever. Every human being is a cave painting artist, lustily singing of the beasts by torchlight while he or she paints, the tribe gathered round, enrapt by every word and gesture. Let a trillion flowers bloom.
Humanity could be on the verge of a glorious future, if only we don’t screw up.
In the history of Femdom, however, there are only two writers of real stature. The first is Leopold Sacher-Masoch, who invented the genre with his Venus in Furs in 1870, and the Canadian John Glassco, whose 1960 novel The English Governess is the masterpiece of the genre, even though it is totally politically incorrect. My novel How To Adore an Older Woman is essentially a tribute to Glassco, but with the political incorrectitude removed.
BookAddict: That’s another thing. You’ve got a political slant that reveals you to be a strongly pro-environment, pro-human rights, pro-libertarian liberal. How do you square that with your characters, who are often rigidly conservative?
M.J.: It is all based on the genetic blueprint of the human species. In my view, Feminine leadership in human life drives the success or failure of humanity as a whole.
When the Toba catastrophe reduced the number of human breeding pairs to about five or six thousand worldwide some 70,000 years ago, do you think it was the men who ensured our survival? No!
You can bet your bottom caribou that it was the women.
It is the nihilistic nature of many of our traditional men that I object to. All our crazy mass shooters are obviously defective men in need of disciplined love. Otherwise, a becomes a chicken pretending to be a hawk. When the most dangerous thing most men do is drive a car, why in heaven would anyone of them need an assault rifle?
Their attitude can be summed up as: I don’t care about anybody else. I only care about me.
The type, especially in politics, is common.
Adolph Hitler I never tire of featuring in my stories because to me he is the classic destructive male leader. And a big sexist, don’t forget. Beware the sexist male. He makes the worst possible husband. Adolph Hitler is useful because he exemplifies everything that is wrong with the male leadership principle, from our murky past onward to the hazardous present.
BookAddict: Do we have company in the universe?
M.J.: Not only that, this universe is a mere bubble in the big fat bubble bath of spacetime. Cybele and Attis frolic in the claw foot tub, his cock arisen and her eager hands upon it, churning the warm water, spawning new universes.
BookAddict: You’ve got a bunch of commercial publications under your given name to your credit besides erotica—sports, celebrity, civics, and collecting hobbies, mostly for middle school readers.
M.J.: Yes, and I really enjoy such projects because they keep me sharp and also produce checks ,for which I have, as most writers do, an insatiable need.
BookAddict: Anything to add?
M.J.: I want to thank you for supplying part of the back cover blurb for Permission and The Perfect Wife. I condensed it a touch, but changed none of your words. I really appreciated your opinion. Ecstasy for a writer is when somebody is clever enough to “get it” and while I’ve had my share of successes, the blockbuster eludes me yet.
M.J.: Thirty years ago this fall. In a few months, I will republish one of my ancient favorites, two separate novellas that I call Rubio. It contains some of my earliest work, and I hope I won’t sound too immodest by adding that the material holds up pretty well.
BookAddict: Wow! And how many volumes have you published?
M.J.: Sixteen. Half are novels or novellas, the other half are story collections. I intend to put them through a rigorous copy editing, but the material itself will be changed very little—when I wrote them originally, I did it with an eye towards not dating them with styles and gadgets that quickly become outdated. I always groan when I read stories that revolve around some tech that’s already obsolete, although I will confess to a fondness for steampunk.
BookAddict: We know how you are classified in the metadata that goes into on line and print publication nowadays, but how would you classify yourself?
M.J.: Mainly, I am a jokester. It’s the relationship I’m interested in. The after-romance. The propaganda of Feminine Dominance I make up as I go along. Thirty years now I’ve been publishing stories and novels along similar lines, from pre-internet pulp fap mags to my super-ambitious later offerings like Manhandling, Total Femdom, and Brotherhood is Powerless.
All my works are concerned with strongly adult themes, although the tone and subject matter vary widely.
BookAddict: Funny guy... on a more serious note, are you part of an organized BDSM community?
M.J.: I answer that with a resounding yes, because I am part of the human race. At bottom, I suspect that as beings descended from reptiles overlaid with a mammalian forebrain, we are strongly sensitive to notions of domination and submission. But as for community, I’m not much of a joiner and besides, my chief mission in life is entertaining my spouse of three decades with witty conversation and wry cynicism. Five years ago, I freed myself from a stifling job in an oppressive bureaucracy and my motto currently is:
“Let the Party Begin!”
On the subject of humanity, I’m not much of a propagandist for my own species. While I am immensely enamored of select members of said species, on the whole I question our wisdom and capacity to survive long term. If my books mean anything at all, they are an inquiry into the rituals of domination and submission you see in evidenced in society. How well has unquestioning obedience to the leader served us in the organization and conduct of our nation states? Not always well, I’m afraid.
BookAddict: How did you get into writing Femdom?
M.J.: During the 1990s, I decided to explore the D/s phenomenon within the framework of a compulsive writing habit. The personal stories that started showing up on the internet contained some interesting ideas, but the writing was terrible. The lives these couples described might be fascinating, but they had no clue about how to present it.
Why not write one the way it ought to be written? With style, and touch of class.
The result was Permission. It soon became clear that this first story had something, and was published as Permission/The Perfect Wife in 1999 by the legendary Masquerade Books, whose founder, Richard Kasak, died in 2013.
To me, the idea of male domination was so standard, so usual. Practically all the published bdsm titles (with a few exceptions) featured male dominants. What if women were in charge and had something like the sexual obsessions that animate so many men? And what if men were a little more delicate, a shade more refined than most of them are? What would be the outcome? Not only did it strike me as an unplowed field literature-wise, it had wonderful potential for making backhanded observations on where we actually are in the current war of the genders.
I absolutely love this current #metoo movement, whereby sexual bullies are called out and humiliated. It’s long overdue. The idea that you can manipulate and push people around sexually because you’re some kind of a big shot is an idea that belongs in the dustbin, along with hoops skirts and side saddle horseback riding. But actions between consenting lovers in the privacy of a bedroom somewhere? That’s a whole different thing.
BookAddict: You describe yourself as an old-fashioned writer of contemporary erotica. What do you mean by that?
M.J.: The act of scratching out a story this way keeps me honest. No excess verbiage. The adjectives, for example, I keep few. Ladle on the verbs and nouns with gusto. Keep it romantic, but factual. Straightforward. Economical. Accurate. Every word counts. Then I dictate the material into my computer using a popular software program, and revise from there.
I spent many an agonized hour teaching myself to write and didn’t break through to publication until I was in my mid-thirties. The problem was that I was only interested in what was going on around me and I needed to learn how to pick and choose among my subjects. Or pretend to, anyway.
BookAddict: What does that picking and choosing entail?
M.J.: I still like to use people, places, and situations I’ve actually encountered because I think it is interesting and lends verisimilitude to any kind of literary work. It also makes it romantic at the very deepest level. It means more to say, “Remember, we’ll always have Paris,” if you’ve actually been there together.
The first simple truth is that like most forms of narrative entertainment, my stories are not like real life. And the second simple truth is that life itself is just too terrifying and grim to very often feature people in situations like the ones you will find in my stories.
That’s why we call it fiction.
BookAddict: Your stories can be quite romantic. The man loves this quirky, sexy, volatile, dominant, very hands-on woman. Yet one of your readers has called you the “Prince of Love,” despite the constant coupling that goes on in your stories.
M.J.: I like to incorporate the typical double think we’ve all learned as a result of living in a society like ours. There are a limited number of ways we may express romantic attraction in our society. Some are approved—others are not. The great thing about a Femdom romance is that you can cut to the chase.
In traditional romances you have all this phony back and forth over the question of whether or not they will get together. Spoiler alert! They always do.
In Femdom romances, you dispense with the phony stuff and start with a couple who are together with the woman in charge. This effectively opens a vast untapped field of comic consequences, if you’re sophisticated and have a nice sense of humor. Not every reader gets it, I am sorry to say.
And there is never coercion in my stories. No Harvey Weinsteins. The man is a happy, satisfied victim, if you want to call him that. He is capable of the essential submissive quality that I call “Surrender.” And he’s an indefatigable enabler.
I won’t go into politics, but Woman-Dominant is a far more common condition in real-life marriages than you might think. Once a couple is freed from the Do We or Don’t We? mumbo-jumbo, you get some interesting stuff happening. Make no mistake: I am writing these stories to entertain urban sophisticates everywhere. Many, if not most of my stories, are intended to be read before bedtime with the gadgets off (unless it’s a reader) and the music low.
The rhythm of the language in a number of my stories—Doing The Dishes in my Brotherhood volume or Lacy Sunday in the Femdom Omnibus collection are two examples of stories intended as deliberate bedtime reading.
I’m of the opinion that couples who regularly read to each other at night—using a Kindle, Nook, iPad, or even a solid, regular book, are couples who stay together. Especially if it’s sexy stories they read.
BookAddict: Where do you think your work is headed at this point?
M.J.: I consider myself a minor but interesting writer if you’re open-minded and knowledgeable. Prepare to meet hostile aliens, dystopian nightmares, alternate societies, political repression, time-space aberrations, and even Adolph Hitler. Nobody writes in the Femdom genre quite like I do, and thankfully I’ve had no imitators yet. I believe that by training my attention on the modern gender wars I have probed the dark heart of heterosexuality—perhaps going where no man has gone before. The conclusion that I have come to is as follows:
Women and men deserve each other.
My hero sees the strongly dominant, sexual woman and says, “Okay darling, I will concede your superiority but otherwise expect to match wits with me and do not forget that even though we are unequals, I am still the passport to realms barred to you without my presence. Beyond that my interior world is yours.”
BookAddict: Name some writers you admire and discuss them.
M.J.: They are all equally precious, equally important, in the scheme of things. Unlike the inarticulate ones, they have taken the opportunity to speak. To say. For non-writers and non-recorders and non-rememberers, there is only the present and future. Never the past. I don’t care what your medium happens to be— music , video, film, painting, poetry—whatever. Every human being is a cave painting artist, lustily singing of the beasts by torchlight while he or she paints, the tribe gathered round, enrapt by every word and gesture. Let a trillion flowers bloom.
Humanity could be on the verge of a glorious future, if only we don’t screw up.
In the history of Femdom, however, there are only two writers of real stature. The first is Leopold Sacher-Masoch, who invented the genre with his Venus in Furs in 1870, and the Canadian John Glassco, whose 1960 novel The English Governess is the masterpiece of the genre, even though it is totally politically incorrect. My novel How To Adore an Older Woman is essentially a tribute to Glassco, but with the political incorrectitude removed.
BookAddict: That’s another thing. You’ve got a political slant that reveals you to be a strongly pro-environment, pro-human rights, pro-libertarian liberal. How do you square that with your characters, who are often rigidly conservative?
M.J.: It is all based on the genetic blueprint of the human species. In my view, Feminine leadership in human life drives the success or failure of humanity as a whole.
When the Toba catastrophe reduced the number of human breeding pairs to about five or six thousand worldwide some 70,000 years ago, do you think it was the men who ensured our survival? No!
You can bet your bottom caribou that it was the women.
It is the nihilistic nature of many of our traditional men that I object to. All our crazy mass shooters are obviously defective men in need of disciplined love. Otherwise, a becomes a chicken pretending to be a hawk. When the most dangerous thing most men do is drive a car, why in heaven would anyone of them need an assault rifle?
Their attitude can be summed up as: I don’t care about anybody else. I only care about me.
The type, especially in politics, is common.
Adolph Hitler I never tire of featuring in my stories because to me he is the classic destructive male leader. And a big sexist, don’t forget. Beware the sexist male. He makes the worst possible husband. Adolph Hitler is useful because he exemplifies everything that is wrong with the male leadership principle, from our murky past onward to the hazardous present.
BookAddict: Do we have company in the universe?
M.J.: Not only that, this universe is a mere bubble in the big fat bubble bath of spacetime. Cybele and Attis frolic in the claw foot tub, his cock arisen and her eager hands upon it, churning the warm water, spawning new universes.
BookAddict: You’ve got a bunch of commercial publications under your given name to your credit besides erotica—sports, celebrity, civics, and collecting hobbies, mostly for middle school readers.
M.J.: Yes, and I really enjoy such projects because they keep me sharp and also produce checks ,for which I have, as most writers do, an insatiable need.
BookAddict: Anything to add?
M.J.: I want to thank you for supplying part of the back cover blurb for Permission and The Perfect Wife. I condensed it a touch, but changed none of your words. I really appreciated your opinion. Ecstasy for a writer is when somebody is clever enough to “get it” and while I’ve had my share of successes, the blockbuster eludes me yet.
The blurb:
Permission and The Perfect Wife
By M. J. Rennie
There is simply no one better at writing wonderfully hot Feminine Dominant erotica than M. J. Rennie:
“My stories invariably feature a self-assured, sexually aware, and typically mature woman in full possession of her powers. Older, vivacious, well-favored women are the most erotically interesting people around, if you ask me.”
—From BookAddict, on goodreads:
“This volume one contained one main story and other works by M. J. Rennie. The main story is titled Permission. In this story, Mark becomes the husband of Darlene. She is a sexually aware woman who knows what she wants and lustfully trains Mark to give it to her. The training of Mark blew my mind. The sensuality of it plus the possibilities of sexual delight made me envious of Darlene.”
Published as a tandem novel by legendary Masquerade Books Inc. in 1999, Permission and The Perfect Wife are a testament to the power of words. Here is how author M. J. Rennie elevated the lowly late 20th century F book genre to literary heights. Combining sensuality and sexual subversion in a seamless symmetry, Rennie’s celebration of dynamic women and the boys who love them is mind candy by any measure.
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