Guest Blogger: Erica Kudisch

Hi all! Erica Kudisch here, promoting my debut novel THE BACKUP, queer urban fantasy with a side of myth and music. Thanks so much for keeping up with the blog tour! Be sure to swing by the other stops for awesome multimedia content and a $50 prize package giveaway!

It’s time for the COMPOSERS NIK HAS FUCKED game!

There’s a longstanding dialog in aesthetics and criticism about Apollonian versus Dionysian modes of creation and engagement. Basically, when people make art, some use practiced, scripted, mathematical methods, and take pride in honing their craft; others improvise, buck convention, and take pleasure in the process. Most people do both, of course, but artists rarely balance that particular scale completely, and entire artistic movements are built around catering toward one side of the spectrum. Think of it like yin and yang: they may represent opposites, but both are necessary, and the extreme of one looks an awful lot like the other.

In The Backup, Anthony, who doesn’t believe that Nik is really Dionysus, keeps testing him by asking which classical composers he’s had on his side of the aesthetic divide. Nik being Nik interprets this question as “how many of these dead white guys blew me?” Here are just a few of Nik’s answers that didn’t make it into the book:

de Vitry: Yes. It was good until de Vitry started trying to write it down and box it up and codify it. Then it got real boring real fast.

de Lassus: Fuck yeah. de Lassus knew how to party. He wrote songs about German catcalling tourists in four-part harmony. Who do you think he wrote them for?

Monteverdi: Of course Nik hooked up with the progenitor of opera! They painted Mantua red. Then Rome. Then Venice. Then Monteverdi took vows as a priest and shut Nik out of his life. Or tried to, at least. Whether it worked or not is lost to history.

Pachelbel: Imagine Nik hissing like a cat whose tail you just stepped on. Seriously, fuck that guy.

J.S. Bach: Ha. No.

J.C. Bach: Nope.

W.F. Bach: Nay.

K.P.E. Bach: Never.

A.M. Bach: Once when her husband wasn’t looking. Once when he was.

Vivaldi: Was too busy bumping uglies with every bassoonist who walked through his door.

Handel: Handel watched Nik jerk off a few times and did a line of snuff off his ass. Does that count?

Haydn: If he’d been sleeping with Nik, he wouldn’t have written the same string quartet eight hundred times.

(The Baroque was kind of a dry spell.)

Mozart: Go watch Amadeus.

Salieri: No, seriously, go watch Amadeus. I’ll wait.

(I kind of like to picture a Schikaneder/Mozart/Nik Eiffel Tower going on in a private box in the Theater an der Wien. While Salieri peeps tormentedly through the curtain and tries not to jerk off.)

Schubert: Let’s just say yes and leave it at that.

Nik’s opinions on a lot of the nineteenth century to the modern era are in the book itself, so I won’t spoil them here. If you’ve got a hankering to know whether he banged Rachmaninoff or Tchaikovsky, or both, you’ll have to find out the same way Anthony does. But that’s not so bad, right?

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About The Backup

I’m supposed to be better than this. I’m supposed to have a tenure-track job teaching music history to undergrads, writing papers about Bach, and proving to kids like me that you can work your way out of Harlem. I’m not supposed to be following a rock star around the country, fetching his mail, making sure his groupies are of age.

I’m definitely not supposed to be sleeping with said rock star, who claims to be the Greek God Dionysus. At first I thought it was a load of crap. Nik’s fans might think his music captures their hearts—and souls—but I knew better. Until one of Nik’s orgiastic concerts gets out of hand and I don’t know which is worse: that he might be a god after all, or that he has a body count.

Nik doesn’t care what I want or what I should be. He wants to tear down the world I’ve built, warping all I am, until his music is all that’s left of me. I can’t let him do that. I shouldn’t believe in him. I’ve seen what happens to the people who believe in him.

But I can’t get his song out of my head.

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About Erica Kudisch

Erica Kudisch lives, writes, sings, and often trips over things in New York City. When not in pursuit of about five different creative vocations, none of which pay her nearly enough, you can usually find her pontificating about dead gay video games, shopping for thigh-high socks, and making her beleaguered characters wait forty thousand words before they get in the sack.

In addition to publishing novellas and short stories as fantastika-focused alter-ego Kaye Chazan (What Aelister Found Here and The Ashkenazi Candidate, both available at Candlemark & Gleam) Erica is responsible for the BDSM musical Dogboy & Justine, and serves as creative director and co-founder of Treble Entendre Productions.

She also has issues with authority. And curses too fucking much.

Connect with Erica:

Facebook: Erica Kudisch

Instagram: hardhandmaiden

Tumblr:  shitmywriterwifesays.tumblr.com

Twitter: @EricaKudisch

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The Giveaway

To celebrate the release of The Backup, Erica is giving away iTunes and Riptide credit totaling $50! Your first comment at each stop on this tour enters you in the drawing. Entries close at midnight, Eastern time, on January 30, 2016. Contest is NOT restricted to U.S. Entries. Follow the tour for more opportunities to enter the giveaway! Don’t forget to leave your email or method of contact so Riptide can reach you if you win!