| 234567 | > |
It’s been a while, I know.
This spring has been exceptionally busy in other parts of my life, and between that, general distraction, and a little creative stuckness, new stories have been slower coming than I’d like.
I’m still working on the continuation of Djinn of the Forgotten Lamp, and I haven’t abandoned it. I’m also wrestling with another story set in the Laurentian Mountains in Quebec, involving a werewolf and the trouble that happens when people are alone in the woods.
Both stories are still alive. I'm just stuck.
In the meantime, I’ve finished something shorter: The Taste of Surrender.
This one is not a big mythic fantasy or a supernatural story. It’s a bedroom piece. Very intimate. Very explicit. I labelled it a stroke story, but what interested me was psychology behind the scene. We've all experienced not being able to ask for something we'd like. This story is about that moment when someone discovers a desire they didn’t quite know how to admit — and then realizes their lover has already seen it.
That’s the pay dirt, really.
So that’s where I’ve been. Busy spring. Stuck on a couple of stories. Distracted by life. And, cranking out a small filthy story to try get unblocked.
Hope you enjoy it.
E
This is where Part I comes to a close.
It doesn’t wrap up neatly, and I didn't mean for it to.
Khalid found the lamp. He woke Zahira. That was simple. But their relationship has now moved beyond anything familiar—beyond control, beyond transaction. It’s become shared, and that changes the stakes for both of them.
By the end of this section, Khalid is tied into something much larger, whether he understands it or not.
It turns out that Zahira isn’t alone in the world.
There is a structure behind her—older, organized, and very real. A kind of court, if you want a name for it. It governs how beings like her exist, and how power flows in that world. It has held together for a long time and it doesn’t tolerate disruption.
This bond between Khalid and Zahira is exactly that.
Part II, which I’ll be posting shortly, moves into the consequences. What their connection actually means once it’s seen. How it’s judged. And what happens when something steps outside the order that’s been in place for centuries.
There are more parts in development after that.
But for now, this is the end of Part I.
-Eric
A lot of genie stories read like a little boy’s fantasy—find the lamp, control something all-powerful, get exactly what you want.
And then there's the version where you only get three wishes and, braniac that you are, you wish for more wishes—unh... right!
My new story, Djinn of the Forgotten Lamp, isn’t one of those. Nor is it I Dream of Genie. Nope. Not even close.
Zahaira is no Barbara Eden. She is a djinn—a near immortal magical creature of fire and smoke, a shapeshifter, an avatar of heat, change and intensity rather than stability. In this story, control is… negotiable. At best.
First chapter is up, and second will post in the morning.
Hope you enjoy them.
- E
P.S. As always, let me know what you think in comments or by personal mail.
P.P.S. I've included lots of em-dashes. Deliberately. The story (and this blog post) might be written by AI... or might not be. Who knows? Ask Zahaira, if you dare.
It’s been a while since I’ve posted here. November of last year, in fact. Not because I haven't been writing. I have.
Over the past few months I’ve been experimenting with writing styles to see what happens if prose is driven not by plot mechanics, but by something like musical architecture.
I’ve tried a Philip Glass approach — repetition with variation, small shifts accumulating into pressure. I’ve experimented with Beethoven-like structural escalation — themes introduced, stressed, resolved. I’ve leaned into Miles Davis minimalism — restraint, silence doing the heavy lifting. I've also tried the painter Jackson Pollock as inspiration-immersive saturation, narrative as surface, not sequence.
The most successful of these, in my view, is what I’m calling "Parker Unhinged" — a tribute to Charlie Parker.
Parker’s genius wasn’t chaos. It was disciplined volatility. Rapid phrasing. Fractured lines that recomposed mid-flight. Breath you could hear inside the instrument. Precision without politeness.
That’s the model.
Parker Unhinged on the page means rhythm over polish. Psychological immediacy over physical sequencing. Sentences that interrupt themselves. Memory colliding with present action. No tidy thematic summaries. No authorial reassurance. You stay inside the character’s nervous system.
The new story, 1:13, is the cleanest expression of that approach so far.
At 1:13 a.m., a message is sent — a confession that crosses a line long held in place. By morning, it’s been read. The story unfolds not as spectacle, but as interior detonation: two people on a borrowed couch confronting years of restraint in real time.
You’ll notice something else: it’s less explicit than some of my earlier work. That was a conscious choice. I wrote several more graphic drafts. They worked technically. They did not work rhythmically, and they broke the tone and voice of the story. In this style, explicit anatomical detail turned the story back into choreography.
So I pulled back.
The sex is there. It’s just not itemized. It lives in pressure, breath, friction, decision. In my judgment, that makes it more volatile — and more honest.
I’m continuing to experiment with this musical-structural approach to prose. I’m interested in whether the cadence carries the heat, whether the fragmentation deepens immersion, whether the restraint sharpens rather than blunts.
If you read 1:13, tell me what you think. Does Parker Unhinged work?
— Eric Ross
I have always loved music. Songs tell stories too, and many of my own tales have been sparked by a single piece of sound.
The Sitarist’s Requiem began after listening to Paint It Black—that sitar line was dark, frantic, searching. The story mirrors the grief that the song is about.
The Mask and Chain came together while Brown Sugar was playing and I found myself wondering, What if this energy belonged to a woman who knows exactly what she wants, and what it costs?
Usually, the music comes first. It's my spark.
But this time, I reversed the order. I wanted to see if I could craft a song that grew out of a story instead of the other way around.
That experiment became Tongue Tied and Terrified—a story about obsession, a man addicted to “dining at the Y,” and the lessons he learns from three very different women.
To follow that energy, I wrote a blues lyric to match the narrator’s voice and heartbeat, and used Suno to set it to music:
Woke Up This Morning (Tongue Tied & Satisfied).
It’s old-fashioned juke-joint "dirty" blues--rough, hungry, and full of the kind of double-entendre the old blues greats understood perfectly.
I’ve included the track with the story. It’s available as a standard MP3—
stream it if your browser allows, download it if it doesn’t.
Either way, I hope you hear the same rhythm I felt while writing.
Enjoy—and let me know what you think of this little creative detour.
-Eric
P.S. Many thanks to Laz for indulging my experiment and hosting the song file for me here on SOL. I could have hosted it offline somewhere, but he very kindly agreed to host it here.
| 234567 | > |