Introduction by Mark:

The full title of this blog is ‘Eating the livers of my lovers and other poems I now have to write because Mark gave me a title’ Which was a writing prompt I gave to the ever wonderful Nimue Brown when she asked the world to do so. Having supplied this title I abdicate all responsibility thence*. The rest is all Nimue…

*I’m always delighted to use thence in a sentence, its one of my favourite words…

‘Eating the livers of my lovers and other poems I now have to write because Mark gave me a title’ By Nimue Brown

As it happens, the current work in progress on the poetry front is a ‘How To Love’ sort of collection. It’ll be my fourth How To title – ‘How to Unpeel a Monster’, ‘How To Make Bone Soup’ and ‘How to Adore a Horned God’ having already happened, and being available through my Ko-fi store

Not that I write especially conventional love poems. There was one about skin worms, I thought that was fairly romantic. A lot of what I’m currently working on is about love of landscape, wild things and life itself. Being in love with life is a good thing, and you don’t
get to spend so much time being unrequited. As a polyamorous person I spend a lot of my time being besotted with people, but I’ve had scandalously few actual relationships. And I’ve not eaten anyone’s liver, not even a little bit.

As with How To Make Bone Soup, I’m much more likely to be consumed, in the normal scheme of things. Bone Soup is what you make when there’s nothing else you can use, and it’s a metaphor that has loomed large for me. There have been too many rounds where it’s felt like I was making stuff out of my own entrails, and then out of my own bones. At this point, dear reader, you’re probably getting the impression that I’m an alarming mess both as a person and as a poet, and as sales pitches go, I’m probably not doing very well here.

I’m a hard sell, speaking as my publicist. I jump around between forms – graphic novels, novels, poetry, non-fiction, songs, short stories – I’ll have a stab at anything. I hop around between genres – gothic, steampunk, pagan, murder mystery, fantasy, erotica. I get bored
easily, but it makes it hard to explain to anyone what I actually do. Consistency is not my strong point.

That said, if you’re a monster too, or a monster shagger, or some other kind of lost and haunted meatsack, I may well be for you. I’m here for the walking wounded, the haunted and the lonely. I write for the people who do not know where they belong and who feel too much and think too much to ever really be comfortable. I write weird and bloody things, and sometimes I write ridiculous happy endings where impossible beings are finally able to find solace in each other.

Clearly the livers poem would have to be about werewolves, because so long as you can regenerate, that works. While I haven’t written any werewolf erotica in years (and not under this name, so there’s no point looking) I used to, and the scope for violent passion is a lot
higher when you’re going to regrow yourself the next day. You can have consenting liver consumption in that sort of context, and beings so obsessed with each other that they need to ingest each other. And this is why I’m not allowed to write romance fiction.

Aside from the ko-fi store, you can find me blogging in a mostly non-fic and Pagan way over here

And I contribute fiction over here 

I’ve got a silly enough number of books out there that probably the best bet is just to Google me and see where the fancy takes you.

Afterword by Mark

Nimue under estimates my skills with the internet if she thinks I am not going to at least try and track down her werewolf smut… I mean, that was just handing down a challenge, plainly… But even if you can’t track down the werewolf smut, and I will…. Do yourself a favour an track down some of Nimue’s easier to find stuff that hasn’t been hidden behind former names, in a locked filing cabinet, underneath the British Library and guarded by sentient statues of otters.

I recommend everything Nimue has written but if pushed I particularly recommend ‘Hunting the Egret‘, or ‘Intelligent Design for Amateurs‘ I wrote blogs about them and everything…