About 35 years ago when I lived in Estes Park, Colorado, one night I had a vivid and detailed dream about a handsome young man of perhaps 19 years, who left his home of privilege with only his dog for company and launched on an epic journey to seek enlightenment and Love. When I awoke, I immediately wrote down as much detail from the dream as I could remember (a great deal as it turned out) and soon realized that was only the beginning. When I read through the story, as sometimes happens with imaginative fiction writers, I found I could easily enter again that rather fantastic world where, among other wonders, woolly mammoths survived, and the Moon had rings something like our planet Saturn.
Another element of the story was that the young man, like me, loved to masturbate but he was just beginning to learn to do so with any real skill, and his sexual attraction was towards member of his own sex. As I kept writing, the story grew from there, the only major change was that the dog in the story became a more unusual creature I call a "chameleon cat," able to render itself virtually invisible. My hero Dare (full name: Darrow Bardoon Miznevet III) thought that upon leaving home he would seek enlightenment. His adventures actually led him to discover the love of his life, another young man, Hosis (full name: Hosis Bar Sun), from a far northwestern country where mammoths were the sacred animals.
While Dare comes from a land with an openly homophobic culture, Hosis comes from Loonapoore, where all sexuality is so inhibited and hidden that a secret cult that teaches men the Phallic Mysteries thrives. In the course of the four novels of THE MOONTUSK CHRONICLES Hosis teaches Dare those secrets. As Shakespeare said, "the course of true love never did run smoothe," so the young lovers experience all sorts of awful challenges, as well as plentiful erotic ecstasy, depicted in graphic detail. I've never read a case of detailed world-building, good character and plot development, in the high fantasy genre that was also this erotically explicit, so I ended up writing it myself.
One criticism the first book, RENDEZVOUS IN A RUINED CITY, has received is because a woman manages to seduce young Dare before he meets Hosis, and though their relationship is not so explicit, it reflects some of my own early experience. I've always been attracted to my fellow men, but in my youth, some women wanted me, and I surrendered. Well, THE MOONTUSK CHRONICLES are not exactly autobiographical, but in an imaginary way, they are my own story.
Over the years, I revised these books quite a few times, polished the writing, refined the prose and the details of the characters and the world. Only after I met the love of my own life in 1995 was I able to render the large amounts of male/male eroticism so detailed and realistic. Into this saga I poured all I learned about Mindful Masturbation and Male Erotic Alchemy. In 2011 with the expert editorial help of gay author and scholar Toby Johnson, Book One was published. Over the next few years, its 3 sequels were published, and now I'm working on Book Five, THE WHITE MAMMOTH.
You can find Book One by clicking HERE.