Errant Ramblings: Mitzi Szereto’s Weblog

Check out my latest interview at Eden Fantasys, where I discuss writing, blogging, Mitzi TV, erotica, my new book In Sleeping Beauty’s Bed: Erotic Fairy Tales, the publishing business and, of course, being a social media maven! There’s even some advice for aspiring writers.

“Mitzi Szereto is best known for writing which mixes classical elements with current trends. How does combining the past with the present inspire Mitzi’s creative process? How does she see the erotic genre evolving in the future?”

Click here for full text of the interview.

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Shanklin, Isle of Wight

Now I ask you, what better weekend to head to an island off the southern coast of England than a weekend predicted to be filled with gale-force winds and slashing rain?

Being Britain, you can never count on the weather or, for that matter, the weather report. However, this time the Met Office didn’t lie. It was everything they’d predicted and more. Good thing I was headed to the Isle of Wight to teach a writing course, not rooftop yoga! Despite the ominous warnings, the crowded ferry ride from Portsmouth Harbour to Ryde wasn’t nearly as exciting as I’d hoped. In fact, it was highly uneventful. We didn’t sink.

Rude local drink

I’m pleased to say that this year the island was really geared up for my arrival. They’d even brewed up a batch of some special stuff in honour of Literotica, my erotic writing workshop at the Old Grange. Hell, I was lucky to get the last bottle – apparently they were flying off the shelf at the local shop (which isn’t just for local people!).

Yeah, I know: everyone thinks I schlep down to the Isle of Wight every autumn just to teach my Literotica workshop. The truth is, I actually go there because I adore the local pub in Shanklin’s old village. Oh sure, I do find some time to teach, but I live for Saturday night when I’m done for the day and can go chill out with a pint of real ale and listen to some live acoustic music.

This year I was disappointed to learn that my usual pint of Village Idiot would not be happening; apparently the brewery had gone bust. So I opted for a very agreeable Caledonian ale, which had somehow made its way from Scotland all the way down to the Isle of Wight. Those Scots are robust folk, I’ll grant you that. Must be all that haggis.

It seemed the pub was expecting me. Heck, I should’ve brought along copies of my new book “In Sleeping Beauty’s Bed: Erotic Fairy Tales” and had a book signing! My usual table situated right next to the musicians was empty and virtually had my name on it, so I settled in for the evening, getting up close and personal to the lead singer/guitarist, whose repertoire this year was far better than in previous years. He also looked far better too. Not quite sure why that was, but hey, who am I to complain? The sight of his nicely bulging… umm… tricep as he strummed his gee-tar was a right treat after the rather mediocre pub meal I hadn’t particularly enjoyed. Unfortunately Vampira, his apparent girlfriend, was hovering around like the proverbial vampire bat, putting a damper on everyone’s evening!

Despite the musicians finishing up an hour earlier than scheduled, we were in it for the duration, and yet more Caledonian ale kept appearing in front of me courtesy of one of the workshop participants, a lively Irish lass who clearly didn’t want me to leave. And the sudden downpour outside wasn’t exactly encouraging me either. However, with the music over and Teddy waiting impatiently in our giant bed back in our room, I was getting edgy. So too, were the pub staff, as tables were suddenly being polished right in front of our noses, chairs set upside-down on table tops, and lights switched off.

Like can we take a hint or what?

Teddy Tedaloo decides to go boating

And so passes yet another Literotica erotic writing workshop on the Isle of Wight. I wonder: will my regular table be waiting for me next year at the village pub? Will the same musicians be there entertaining the punters? Will I get guff off the bear for returning to our room so late?

Guess I’ll have to wait till autumn 2010 to find out.

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Yours truly (that’s me!) recently took some time out to chat with journalist Michael Casey at a local Essex watering hole about my new entrepreneurial Internet television venture Mitzi TV – its origins, its direction, and its future, as well as the business of books, blogging, and social media.

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The perennial passenger.

He started off in Belfast and finished up in Sheffield, a city famous for steel, the Arctic Monkeys, and the film The Full Monty, among other things.

So what does an Irishman who’d come by with his guitar to serenade me with weepy Irish songs (the Irish can compete with the Hungarians for misery, I’ll tell you that) have in common with a classic Iggy Pop song? Well, it’s the kind of thing that could only have happened to Yudge.

I’d been living in Leicester at the time, and one afternoon he’d taken the train down from Sheffield, armed with gee-tar and a bottle of red. We met up in town first, had a couple of pints at this dodgy pub full of arguing Scotsmen, then landed in a tapas place with a pitcher of sangria rapidly disappearing between us. After that it was back to mine, where Teddy and I were regaled with tragic musical tales of lovers lost at sea and potatoes that refused to grow – all this to the accompaniment of that very potent bottle of red. In between this melodic misery we had the comic relief of Iggy Pop – and I made my mate sing “The Passenger” at least three times, too. Damn, even now I still love that song!

When the bottle had run dry and we’d likewise run dry of songs (not even The Beatles were sacrosanct), I realised I either had to offer my sofa for the night or pack this Irish crooner into a taxi. The taxi won out, since there was plenty of time to catch an early evening train back up north to Sheffield. However, when the clock struck midnight (okay, the digital face on my bedside clock) and I hadn’t received so much as email or text, I became concerned; it was only an hour’s journey. I texted, I phoned, neither of which yielded a result. Where in hell had he vanished to? Had he run into a mate and gone down the pub? – or worse, run into his estranged wife and her gangster boyfriend? There was nothing I could do but go to bed and hope for the best. He was a grown man – surely he could look after himself. He may have had the heart and soul of a poet, but he’d grown up on a rough estate in Belfast.

The following afternoon the phone rang. No, it wasn’t Sheffield’s version of the Old Bill trying to touch me for bail money. It was the errant Yudge, telling me that never again would he go near red wine; from now on he’d stick to white. It seems he’d fallen asleep on the train and ended up in Leeds – and there were no more trains back down to Sheffield. Thus while I’d been frantically staring at my clock, he’d been wandering about Leeds city centre armed only with his guitar and a terrified expression, being eyed up by all sorts of shifty characters, until he finally ducked into a hotel that had a vacancy on offer at the extortionate rate of 160 quid. It ended up being the most expensive day out this “passenger” ever had. Clearly, this was no story that was destined to see print in a volume of my Erotic Travel Tales anthologies!

Now I’m not trying to upset anyone who might be from Leeds (heartfelt apologies to the Kaiser Chiefs!), but nearly everyone I know who’s been to Leeds has run into a spot of bad luck. One guy I know went there for a night out with his mates and ended up having the crap beaten out of him by some local lads just because he walked down the wrong street. Another guy I know had his wallet stolen from out of his jacket pocket while having dinner at a restaurant (along with his return train ticket home to the safety of rural Lincolnshire). Now I’ve been to Leeds, and I managed to get out unscathed. Mind you, I did leave before dark – and in the safety of a Peugeot that sped away on the M1 with pedal to the metal! So in my opinion, Yudge had a lucky escape.

Alas, he died three years ago this coming August Bank Holiday weekend.

On the day of his funeral, I had to fly to Greece to teach one of my erotic writing workshops on the island of Skiathos. He’d often spoken of moving back to Greece, where he’d spent the early days of his marriage. Since I couldn’t make the funeral (I don’t believe in funerals anyway), I thought it more significant to bury his photo in the sand at the beach. Afterward, I went to light a candle for him at a little church that I found open during siesta. It was empty, save for a handful of other candles that had been lit. Half an hour later I returned to look for the priest and hopefully communicate to him to say a prayer for Yudge (he was Irish Catholic, though I doubt he’d have minded being Greek Orthodox for a day). Unfortunately, there was no sign of the priest – or of anyone, for that matter. Nor was there any sign of the candle I’d lit. The other candles were still there, burning away – but mine had vanished. And yes, I’d put a euro into the box!

Was this my friend’s idea of a joke? Because there was no earthly explanation for that missing candle. It’s a shame Mitzi TV wasn’t around back then – we could’ve done a Greek Tales of the Unexpected!

It took a year before I stopped expecting my phone to ring at 1am in the morning. We thought nothing of calling each other at outrageous hours – we’d usually be up anyway. Perhaps we both suffered from the same malady: he always told me we were too delicate for this world.

He was right. And so was Iggy when he wrote that song.

My mate Yudge was, indeed, the passenger. And I’m willing to bet anything he still is!

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Mitzi Szereto on a Mitzi TV shoot in London

An entire hour of talk on subjects ranging from the internet, world travel, culture shock, life as an expat, fairy tales, erotic writing, Las Vegas, British drinking habits, English football, blogging, sex, and Mitzi TV! (Originally broadcast on 4 August 2009 on the “Sin City Sessions” programme with Marq Piocos, BlogTalkRadio).

Click here to listen now: BlogTalkRadio Interview

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Mitzi Szereto on a Mitzi TV shoot in London

A chat about my grand passion the internet, along with email etiquette, social networking, geekdom, and all things Mitzi TV; (broadcast on 4 August 2009, the Dave Monk programme, BBC Radio Essex).

Click here to listen now: BBC Radio Interview

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Mitzi Szereto with Teddy Tedaloo in the FM4 ORF Radio Vienna studios

An interview about erotic literature, “The Bad Sex in Fiction Award”, and my erotic writing workshops (broadcast on 17 July 2009, the Reality Check programme with Kerry Skyring, FM4 ORF, Vienna, Austria).

Listen Now: Radio FM4 ORF Interview

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Interview and discussion of erotic writing and male versus females writers; (broadcast on 24 June 2009, the Dave Monk programme, BBC Radio Essex)

Listen Now: BBC Radio Interview

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What better or more fitting way is there to spend Valentine’s Day than with a bottle of Lambrusco, copious packets of Walker’s crisps, a slew of horror flicks, two pervy cats, and four psychotic bison frise dogs breathing down your neck? Yup, that’s exactly how I spent what’s supposed to be the most romantic day of the year.

Rather than endure Valentine’s Day on my own (last year I’d given a talk on erotic writing to creative writing MA students at Roehampton University, which was followed by a “date” consisting of my being allocated one token drink, my evening culminating in a delayed train home due to a “fatality” on the line at Romford – not sure if the suicide was a result of a broken heart or a result of living in Romford), I decided to head to that exotic gem of northern England known as Blackpool. Bear in mind that this English seaside resort town has as one of its claims to fame a “space invasion” (where’s Ziggy Stardust when you need him?) featuring several hovering spaceships on Gynn Island (in reality a roundabout), not to mention copious doses of the clap from all those hen nights (a more sedate version of which can be found in my short story “Hen Night” on Amazon Kindle) and stag dos and assorted dubious establishments catering to – dare I use the word – gentlemen.

Now I’m not going to diss Blackpool. I’m sure it’s a damned sight better than Skeggie (aka Skegness, home to the proverbial “dirty weekend” – a place where I’ve yet to go and may well manage to live without having gone). Blackpool does have some good things going for it (other than the Tower, Blackpool rock, and zillions of cheap trinkets on offer) – one being that my good mate Ashley Lister and his lovely wife Tracy and their lovely son Ashley Jr. all live there, the other being that it’s known as “the gay capital of the North”. Although I always seem to miss the Gay Pride Parade, I did go to a drag club called Funny Girls there a couple of years back. It wasn’t too bad as far as drag revues go, save for the fact there was no place to sit and I ended up with a hell of a backache by the time the show ended. Plus the place was packed with raucous females out on a hen night which – in my humble view – is enough to turn even the most masculine hetero male into a raging queen. What made it even worse was the fact that these creatures all wore these cute little furry bunny tails clipped to their rather uncute and unlittle posteriors. The sight was enough to make any man’s mars and venus shrivel up and die.

Meanwhile back at the ranch. At Chez Lister, we partook of a romantic orgy of blood, zombies, cannibals, vampires, and crazed killers all weekend long, the lineup of which included: Sweeney Todd; Dracula, Prince of Darkness; 30 Days of Night; 1408; Hannibal Rising; and Vacancy. Now I must confess that I did feel a bit of the old amorous Valentine’s Day tingle while watching Hannibal Rising. That Gaspard Ulliel isn’t too shabby. In fact, I can conjure up some very romantic scenarios featuring him in the lead role (no pun intended). Oh, and Andrew Garfield too. Okay, let’s throw in Jamie Draven while we’re at it; I do want to be fair here. And if anyone out there knows one or more of these nice lads, kindly pass on the word that I’m single and an absolutely lovely lass – they’d be hard-pressed to find better! (Hey, if I can’t use my blog for my own sinister purposes then what’s the bloody point?)

Did I mention that I played Upwords with the two Ashleys? For those of you unfamiliar with this board game, think of it like council estate Scrabble, with the words forming those grim tower blocks you see all over Britain which were built in an effort to provide public housing and which in London you can now pay full market rent to live in – no extra fees for the graffiti, broken lifts and muggings. During our tourney, I somehow managed to end up with too many tiles of the letter U; I suspect it was part of some father-son plot to cause me to lose the game. Things really began to disintegrate when I was forced to repeatedly place words such as “oh” and “uh” on the board. I mean,  how lame is that? Three games and I’d had enough. I next embarked on a jigsaw puzzle, but got annoyed after about an hour, retiring to the living room for a PlayStation game featuring Darth Vader and a host of other butch animated male characters, along with a handful of pneumatic animated female bimbos emitting noises like their flesh-and-blood pneumatic counterparts in porn. I must admit that while playing I became increasingly aggressive, experiencing a killer instinct the likes of which I hadn’t experienced since I lived in Los Angeles – an instinct that usually kicked into gear whenever I drove on the freeways, which was pretty much all the time.

Now don’t go thinking that my Valentine’s weekend was all bloodshed, mayhem and crisps. There was some romance (other than that provided by Monsieur Ulliel). I got to lie back on the sofa in peel me a grape fashion listening to Ashley Jr. play the piano. Then there was my toast thief Spike, who courted me all weekend long by performing The Spike Dance. I tell you, it’s a real talent to be able to get your head and your arse at the same angle. Imagine a U-shaped dog and you get the picture. And hey, if you think it’s easy, YOU try doing it!

Hmmm. I wonder what’s in store for me next Valentine’s Day…

View the rest of my holiday snaps on Flickr.

Watch videos from my “dirty weekend”:
http://www.youtube.com

http://www.youtube.com

http://www.youtube.com

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Let me just say that rumours of my death have been greatly exaggerated.

It was like a scene from out of an Agatha Christie whodunnit: an old manor house, a howling wind blowing in from the raging sea, mysterious and menacing creaks in the night. Whispers of “Let’s kill the erotic writing tutor” could be heard emanating from dark corners – corners where hands might jump out at any moment to wrap around your neck.

Or rather MY neck.

Six women and one man, all locked up for Literotica, an erotic writing weekend on the Isle of Wight. Sure, they looked so innocent and friendly on arrival. So who would suspect that beneath these civilised veneers lurked a bloodthirsty desire TO KILL? I myself suspected nothing. (Mind you, I rarely do.) I conducted my workshop just as I’ve always done, imparting a bit of professional and personal wisdom, and inspiring participants to write freely, to strive high, and to leave behind their erroneous assumptions that erotica is nothing but poshed-up porn. I could see I was winning the battle. These people were actually creating work that would have been equally at home in a respectable literary novel as it would in a respectable sexy novel. “Get rid of the top shelf!” I cried. “No more one-handed reads!” I cheered. And the crowd roared back, hanging on my every word.

So why should one of these nice people wish to kill me – and to kill me in one of the most slow and agonising ways possible – by poison? Was I too hard on them? Did I give too much homework? Did they take offence at my bear’s critiques of their work? Or indeed, was it even one of the workshop participants at all? Perhaps the mild-mannered Greek proprietor of our windswept country house was behind it. Now I’ve heard of not wanting to pay someone for services rendered, but come on – isn’t this taking things a bit too far? (Actually, I did kind of wonder why that plumber’s van hadn’t moved out of the car park for the entire weekend.)

I admit they were clever. They waited until after I’d signed their copies of Getting Even: Revenge Stories-(Christ, I knew I shouldn’t have brought that one along) – and The New Black Lace Book of Women’s Sexual Fantasies. Just think how much these copies would have fetched on eBay had their sinister murder plot actually come to fruition!

It’s hard to believe that the people with whom I’d enjoyed a friendly Saturday night pint at the local pub could, within only a matter of minutes, turn on me like that. I was fine up until then. Had they put poison into my untended pint while I nipped to the loo? Had they coated the rim of the glass with some deadly nectar so that when I raised it to my unknowing lips, I’d ingest the substance? Had someone truly NOT enjoyed reading their copy of Getting Even? I mean, everyone kept saying how they couldn’t wait to get stuck into it, especially the story I wrote. So what gives?

I suspect the physicist. As the only male in a group of women, he was already anticipating the worst from before he’d arrived on the island. Yet I did my best to make him feel welcome and comfortable. I even spent extra time with him chatting about such things as parallel universes and cloud computing as we sat drinking cups of milky tea. What more could I have done? Hey, was it MY fault that someone said (no it wasn’t me!) that all men are crap in bed? Okay, so I nodded to be polite. I mean, wouldn’t you have done the same if you’d been in my shoes?

As you can see, I survived the weekend, albeit quite the worse for wear. And yes, I’m booked again for yet another erotic writing workshop weekend next November. I wonder though if someone might be trying to tell me something. For on the final leg of my journey home, the man seated behind me on the train kept singing about Nosferatu.

Hmmm… I have been looking rather wan of late.

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