Oh Get A Grip!

The Big Reveal

2012-02-13T05:17:00.002-05:00

By Kathleen Bradean

I was thrilled when I saw this week's topic. What advice helped us as writers and do we pay it forward? Do we have an obligation to help? Is there such a thing as giving away too many secrets?

Writers will often tell new writers that the only way to improve is to sit down and write. That's the big secret. I've given it away. Every other writer has given it away. It sounds too simplistic though so it's routinely ignored. And why should you believe something like that? You just know there's a vast conspiracy to keep the real secrets from you.

Thank goodness I'm willing to share the real truth.

1) You are a special snowflake. You are a rebel special snowflake, and no rules will ever hold you down.

2) Everyone else on earth is trying to hold you down.

3) They've also conspired to make sure your work of art is never published. Really. We had a meeting. Skype makes worldwide conspiracies a breeze.

4) You have more intense feelings than any other person on earth. You feel everything so keenly that anyone who dares to suggest a single change to your deathless prose is actually attacking you as a person and they're mean, and evil, and have no taste, and they suck, and they probably wouldn't know the best story ever if it was printed on solid gold plates and titled "The Best Story, Ever."

5) The only reason anyone judges a writing contest is to steal your ideas and to make sure their friends win prizes.

6) The only reason a person becomes a literary agent is to steal your ideas and your money.

7) The only reason anyone becomes a publisher is to steal your ideas and drag your delicate artistic soul down into the scummy cesspool they live in.

8) Every other writer who has ever been published sold out and is merely a hack whilst you epitomize the height of artistic endeavor.

9) Grammar is just an excuse to be mean to you.

10) So are spelling rules.

11) Ordinary stories follow an expected arc. You write extraordinary stories and your readers will surely be grateful for the non-conformist structure.

12) If it's a real surprise twist, no one should see it coming. It should totally throw out all the rules of the world you set up before, because, it's, like, a twist!

13) You didn't rip off a highly popular novel. You improved it and made it your own. And you totally changed the character's names with different vowels and stuff. Besides, no one owns anything. Real artists share.

14) You should have been born in another century. You would have been worshiped.

15) You look fabulous in that tin foil hat.

Okay, so maybe I've had my fill of Lady ImAllMysticalAndShit types. It makes me a bit sarcastic. (A bit? Me? *gasp of astonishment* No.) Because the thing I find the most frustrating is people who say "I want to write, but..." But WHAT? A pack of roving werewolves ripped off your arms and stole your speech recognition software? That doesn’t fly, honey, because I know a writer without a hand. I know writers with dyslexia so bad they have to dictate their stories. I know writers who have suffered debilitating strokes. Guess what? They're still telling themselves stories and finding a way to communicate those tales to others, so I'm pretty sure you can too. If you truly can't, I have to see your excuse note. With video. And a copy of the police report from the werewolf attack. Because I'm pretty sure that excuse note will be the finest piece of fiction ever crafted and I do enjoy a ripping yarn. (not to be confused with a werewolf ripping off your arms yarn, although...)

Lord knows I understand writer's block. I understand periods of not writing. What I don't understand is not ever trying in the first place. Turn off your damn TV. Demand one hour a day to yourself. Trust me, no one is going to begrudge you one personal hour a day on even one a week. No one expect maybe you. Stop the excuses. Don't have a story? Fine. Then work on a writing exercise. No time spent writing is ever wasted. Even if your computer crashes or your pad of paper bursts into flame before you can save anything, you did not waste your time, because you practiced your craft.

So, really, just write.

And take off that tin foil hat. Real writers wear berets. (Charlotte says so)

Legacy

2012-02-12T04:02:00.006-05:00

By Lisabet Sarai

I'm not a great writer, and never will be. Please, don't object – this isn't false modesty, just realism.

I'm a competent writer, with excellent nuts and bolts skills. Give me a theme and I can spin a plausible yarn that will amuse or arouse my readers. My plots are for the most part believable and consistent, without the truck-sized holes one sometimes sees. My sentences generally read well. My characters might not jump off the page, but they're not cardboard either.

Still, I know I'll never win awards, never be called a genius, never write something that will change my readers' lives. I just don't have anything that important to say – possibly because I've lived nearly six decades without experiencing any great trauma or tragedy. My tales aren't mindless smut, but they don't have the emotional or moral depth of great literature. They're basically throw-away entertainment. When I die, I will not leave an enduring body of work behind me. Oh, I've got a pretty long back list, don't get me wrong, and I hope it will continue to grow, but I doubt that anyone will have heard of Lisabet Sarai ten or twenty years in the future.

That's one reason why I work so hard on behalf of other authors, especially those new to the publishing game. Maybe, just maybe, one of the authors for whom I do crits or whom I edit will turn out to be a truly Great Author. And then I'll feel as though I've done a bit to help make that happen.

I'm better at mentoring and critiquing than I am at writing, and believe me, I realize these are valuable skills. I try to apply them for the benefit of my colleagues. I know a few authors whom I really admire, who truly have the GA Potential, but still have difficulties with grammar, or pacing, or coherency. I'm pleased when I can assist them in smoothing the rough edges of their jewels.

Sometimes I fantasize about winning the Pulitzer Prize. Hey, I'd be thrilled with an EPPIE! My identity isn't tied up in those dreams, though. I've always written, but I never envisioned myself as a Writer with a capital 'W'. So honestly, it doesn't bother me – too much – to acknowledge my limitations.

If one of the authors I've worked with, though, won a prize, I'd be over the moon. I imagine their work, becoming classics, receiving the accolades they so justly deserve. If that ever happened, well, that would be my true legacy – not the slick and superficial novels and stories I list on my website.

And honestly, I'm okay with that. I don't need fame to be happy – luckily, since I'm certain I'll never be famous, at least not for my writing! The knowledge that I've contributed to the creation of something with lasting value is enough.

And speaking of contributions, let me add a quick plug for the Coming Together charitable erotica imprint. Writing and editing for Coming Together is another way I “pay it forward”. All through February, I'm having a Coming Together event called “Share the Love” over at my blog. Every day I'm hosting a different CT author. They're talking about why they support Coming Together, sharing provocative excerpts from their stories, and in many cases giving away free books or other prizes. Please drop by and join in the fun.

Work? Nah, I'm Just a Writer.

2012-02-10T00:01:00.000-05:00

by Kristina Wright

I have not had a full-time job in over 20 years. I have, however, had a series of part-time jobs, some of which were in the 30+ range, some of which were concurrent with other jobs. I have also been a part-time student and a full-time student pursuing both Bachelor and Master's degrees. Over the past two years, I've been become a mother twice over. In the midst of all the jobs and education and babies, I've been a writer since forever and an anthology editor since 2009.

The lack of a full-time job makes me seem like a slacker to many, including myself. I take my writing seriously, but those who don't write have no concept of how I spend my time. Or that it truly is work. This might explain my driving need to say yes to every project, every contract, every opportunity. The truth is, I'm extremely lucky and very grateful that I don't have a full-time job. I am able to write, to edit, to spend time with my babies. My schedule is flexible and fluid-- and that often translates into me working at 1 AM, as I have more than one night this week, because I have a part-time babysitter and full-time writing and editing commitments.

Just because writing is my calling, something I would do even if I won the lottery (which, to be honest, I feel as if I've won by being able to write), it is still work. It is hard, laborious, exhausting, disappointing, frustrating work. I could walk out of the coffee shop right now and find a job where I would work less and make more. Hell, I don't even have to leave the coffee shop. I could work behind the counter and make more. That's the truth. But we're not talking about our writing work this week, we're talking about the work that pays the bills. And I'm afraid I don't have much to say on the topic. I'm also afraid the people I respect the most-- the authors on this blog, my writing friends who work just as hard at I do and also have "real" jobs-- won't respect me.

Here's the truth that both motivates me and embarrasses me: I don't have to work. I don't have to earn a penny this year or next. Maybe sometime in the future I will need to put all of this education and knowledge to real use at a real full-time job with real work hours, but it will be after my husband retires from the military. It hasn't always been this way, but his 25 year career provides a comfortable life for us, even with babies. I am lucky we don't require a second income. Certainly, we could spend the money if I made it, if writing and editing were more lucrative than they really are or if I suddenly lost my mind and decided to be an accountant or a nurse or a retail manager-- anything that pays better than writing fiction, which is pretty much everything. But our bills are paid, there's money in savings and college funds and we are reasonably happy with the stuff that we have. In fact, we probably have too much stuff by some standards. We don't currently need the money of a second full-time career and I don't want to be away from my babies 40+ hours a week or forced to sacrifice my precious writing hours in order to buy more stuff.

So. That's my secret, which isn't so secret because most people know where I am on most weekdays--and it's not in an office. My work ethic is such that I would never be comfortable not working, but how I define work is not dictated by a paycheck. Don't get me wrong, I'm not the type to do without everything in order to pursue my writing. But I am lucky enough to be able to choose the things I enjoy over the things that pay the most. It is something I am grateful for on a daily basis. Saying I don't have to work is not the same as saying I don't do anything, though there are those who may look at my life and think I've got the cushiest deal around.

My lack of a full-time job is a conscious decision. I choose (we choose) a lifestyle that is conducive to a single income. Sure, I make money writing and editing-- sometimes I'm pleasantly surprised by a royalty check-- but anyone who has ever done this writing gig knows you can't count on it. Contracts dry up, markets turn fickle, editors have babies and retire... there are no guarantees. Our lifestyle is not extravagant, nor is it impoverished. I am not a starving writer, not matter how much street cred that title would give me. (If any.) We are solidly middle class. I drive a 20 year old car I love, but a new one would be nice, too. But not having a car payment is nicer. And not having to work at a job I only tolerate is nicest of all. We bought our house over a decade ago, before the housing market boomed. Our mortgage is reasonable-- and less than friends who've bought smaller homes in recent years. We considered moving before we had children, to a bigger/older house in a funkier, more urban neighborhood. I balked at the inflated prices and the knowledge that a substantially higher mortgage would provide us with what we already had, just more of it. So my income is discretionary, a nice cushion for those months we come up short (like December) or to cover unexpected expenses. A royalty check from my first book served as a down payment on our current house, a writing check paid for my oldest's second birthday party. And so it goes.

I willingly make choices in order to be able to avoid "real" full-time work. My luxuries are iced mochas and the occasional lunch or movie with a friend, not designer clothes and sparkly baubles. Does it sound like I'm trying to justify my slacker existence as a writer/editor/mom? Perhaps I am, though I try not to. I know it's about luck as much as it is about choices and priorities. I was raised to believe I should always be able to take care of myself-- that I shouldn't rely on a husband or anyone else to support me. And yet, here I am. I married a sailor who made less than I did and stayed married to him as his career progressed. A career that is somewhat economy-proof, I might add. His income provides for a lot of things, but most of all it provides me with the choice to not work. That is priceless.

But it's that ominous lecture from my my mother that all men leave, that life is hard, that I will have to take care of myself, that nags at me. I have degrees I don't really need, in case I someday do. (Plus, I really like school.) Right now, I am a writer, editor and mother. There is no time for anything else unless I want to put my children in daycare full-time. (In truth, I would pay less for full-time daycare than I do for a part-time babysitter in my home. This is also my choice and the reason for the 1 AM nights.) I have worked in a library and taught college, both of which I would consider doing again if I needed to make more money or if my boys were school age. I miss teaching and I miss the library, but neither job is my calling. I spend my time-- babysitting hours, after babies' bedtime hours, weekend hours, late night hours--doing the only thing I have ever wanted to do. Writing. Editing is a subheading of the publishing category and it also fulfills a need in me-- and it's covers the babysitter. Barely.

I have often contemplated what I would do if I were single and had to rely on my own income. You know, just in case it ever happened. There are no guarantees, right? I would likely be teaching or working in a library or pursuing more lucrative writing and editing (nonfiction, technical). I would work just as many hours as I do now (actually, probably less) making a lot more money doing something I don't love-- at least not the way I love writing fiction. But that's just so much daydreaming about a life I don't have-- until I read things like this that make me feel like I need to run out and apply for a full-time gig doing anything but writing just to justify my existence to people who would judge me:

"You tell most people what you do and you get this look — it’s a look that perfectly contains a tempest of information, a tangle of thoughts (and none of them good). You get a mixture of, Oh, he’s one of those, or, Look, another hipster-slacker-socialist-asshole stealing all our precious unemployment, or, He doesn’t look like he’s starving so he must have a trust fund keeping him alive, or, Ugh, that’s not a real job. Swamp logger, that’s a real job. Writer’s just something you say when you like to smoke drugs all day. It’s really quite disheartening. You get those looks often enough it starts to crack your egg a little bit, dontcha know?" ~ Chuck Wendig

But then that moment of insanity passes and I am grateful I have a choice to work full-time at the only job I've ever wanted to do. Despite the skeptical looks. Despite the snide comments. Despite the nagging urge to justify my existence to people who hate their jobs. Despite my own insane work ethic that has me sleeping less than 6 hours in order to meet deadlines... But whatever the future brings in terms of contracts (or lack thereof) or the need for a second household income, I am grateful that today I am a writer and an editor.

(Do read the rest of Chuck's hilarious 25 Reasons That Writers Are Bug-Fuck Nuts. You will laugh. You will cry. You will nod in agreement.)

plowing more than one field

2012-02-09T09:16:00.005-05:00

"I owe, I owe, so off to work I go."

"Work is the curse of the drinking class."

"Behold the lilies of the field. They delve not, neither do they spin."

"Lucky you." (This line is often spoken by non-teachers & non-writers when they find out that my teaching job only requires me to be in the classroom for certain hours.)

I am typing this at 8:00 a.m. local time, after staying up until 4:00 this morning, moving every movable thing out of the kitchen and first-floor bathroom in the house I share with my female spouse so the renovators can come in, tear down and replace everything (cupboards, countertops, floor, ceiling) while we are in Cuba for 2 weeks, attending the wedding of some Cuban musician friends.

Cubans understand work (saben por que & como trabajar?). They won't see us doing it, so they will see us as norteamericanas ricas, rich bitches with endless leisure time.

I have to bring 2 thick sheafs of student essays with me so I can grade them before we return. I dearly hope (please, Creator or Fates or Loas) to find time to finish my novella, which has been stalled for months because I haven't had a spare moment to work on it.

So how have I been wasting my time? By teaching, grading, dealing with students who visit my office in despair once they realize that they probably don't know enough English to pass a mandatory literature-and-composition course. Yet the university keeps recruiting students in non-English-speaking countries, not providing enough language training when they get here, and letting them register for (and pay for, a very important point) classes that are intended for the fluent. No one wants these classes to be "watered down."

Whatever the instructors do is guaranteed to make someone indignant.

I get paid a comfortable salary, partly because of my seniority in this job. How ungrateful of me to want less tangible rewards as well.

One of my stepson's roommates casually told me that the whole English Department is known to non-English majors as a nest of snobs who think they are better than everyone else and who are obsessed with minor grammatical details. Presumably, we should all get a life. And we should all be fired for not teaching the next generation how to write clearly. The contradictions in a stereotype never seem to prevent anyone from accepting it.

I have two adorably young, eager, attractive young women Teaching Assistants (both English majors, one for each of my current classes) who have both politely refused to teach the rules of grammar -- they don't know them & clearly aren't planning to learn.

I come home from school to cook supper (usually) and try to sort out some of the chaos in our house left over from the earlier renovating job (entire second floor walls repainted, carpeting removed & new flooring put in, new bathroom cupboards installed during the winter holidays).

I write reviews, mostly of e-books, at least one per month and usually more. I feel flattered when I get private emails from Big Names in erotic writing or the history of various lesbian/gay/non-traditionally-gendered communities, asking me to review their books. This work is unpaid, and I am rarely acknowledged as anything other than a reviewer. At a writers' conference in September, a fellow erotic writer thanked me for showing an understanding of her work in my review of it, and seemed surprised that I also write fiction -- apparently as an afterthought. (She & I have had 8 stories in the same anthologies.)

It seems I'm neither a real academic or a real writer. Yet there is no part of my life that doesn't involve teaching in some form, writing in some form, or basic life maintenance (cooking, cleaning, etc.) so I can continue to teach and write.

Retirement beckons to me like a mirage, a shimmering oasis in the desert which will probably look shockingly different up close. I don't have to retire at age 65, and I'm afraid to be completely without an earned income. I would love to spend full working days writing fiction (with days for self-promotion, like baking days & laundry days for a housewife of yesteryear). But in today's publishing market, I still might not earn much. I would have trouble convincing anyone (mostly the non-writers in my life) that my writing is more than a hobby. (But how much do you make?)

Somewhere deep down inside, I am something other than my various jobs. I am definitely other than the roles I play. So are we all.

Writing always holds the promise that a writer can speak directly to a reader, not in a conventional role, and not paid by the word, the volume of sales, the hour or the month. This is what causes me to lose track of time, both as a writer and a reader. It's the antidote to burnout on the job.
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The Budget Committee Power Point Presentation

2012-02-08T00:51:00.003-05:00

C. Sanchez-Garcia

Default Position

2012-02-07T18:46:00.003-05:00

A few weeks ago, I took a taxi to the only other job I have, outside writing. I teach two creative writing classes a week, for a couple of hours a piece, and while on my way there the taxi driver asked me what I did at the college.

I teach, I said.

And then he asked me:

So is that what you do for a living?

And for the first time in my life I didn't say yes. I don't teach for a living, anymore. My earnings from writing now far exceed my earnings from teaching, so saying I'm a teacher would have been a lie.

I'm a writer, I said, because that's what I am now. Though I want to be absolutely clear, to anyone out there who might think I've got it made, that I'm living in the dream, that they don't know what I'm complaining about, all things considered:

Being a writer doesn't make all of the bullshit just magically go away. I don't get up in the morning and put on a beret, then lounge on a windowseat with birds twittering on my shoulders. There isn't all the time in the world to do whatever I want, because I set my own hours so obviously my life must be an endless spree of breaks and telly watching and putting a few words on a page.

There's other bullshit to contend with. Like realising I haven't seen the sun for four days. Like being unable to get a story to go right - a problem that seems very minor, when you're still relying on a regular wage to keep you afloat. But it's less minor, when this is your real job. The passion quickly dies, and is replaced by what can only be described as desperation.

And a need to compulsively play Solitaire, rather than face the fact that you don't know how to go on.

But this isn't the only problem. There are others, too: like the fact that you can't just take a while to get over a crippling bout of depression. You have to deal with it, and move on. You have to deal with it and move on, not only for your writing, for the wage that you're now trying to earn, but for the people around you who are used to seeing you be a certain sort of person.

Your followers on Twitter don't want to see you be sad. They don't want to know that you can't cope with some Bad Things What Have Happened. They want to see you be Charlotte Stein. Readers of your blog want to see you be Charlotte Stein. Readers of this blog want you to be Charlotte Stein, and you want to be too, because you're aware of how grateful you should be for all the incredible things that have happened to you.

And I am. Grateful, I mean.

It's just that...I guess I'm sad sometimes, too - and I don't know why. I think I've just always been this way. I've always believed the very worst about myself, and rejected the best. There's always this thing in my head that says somehow, I don't deserve these things. I'm not worthy of them. It was all just a fluke, an accident, and soon everything will return to its default position, where I am the loser I always suspected I was.

And that doesn't change, because I'm now a writer. There's no winning the race, no sudden triumph, no moment where you're done, when you're a writer. I feel the same way now as I did when I first started: a moment of happiness, when something goes right. And then I'm just fumbling in the dark again, looking for the light switch.

I'm just waiting, for the default position.

Slave to the Rhythm

2012-02-06T05:28:00.000-05:00

By Kathleen Bradean

I know only one truly professional writer, in that he makes his entire living from writing. Every other writer I know, even the critically acclaimed, have another source of income. Many are academics. Several offer editing services. A couple are librarians. A good many, especially erotic romance writers, are stay at home moms, and I know that's work even if there's little appreciation from society or monetary reward for their 24/7 profession. Of course, everyone who works outside the home also has at home duties, so who on earth really gets to write full time?

And would I want to?

Oh sure, it sounds good, but writers know that creativity isn't a bottomless well that you can draw from forever. Even if think you know the secret to writing highly commercial novellas, as Lisabet states, I'm sure at some point you'd hit a wall, a stubbornly blank page, a dry run. And then what? Bills don't come with a "ran out of plots? this month is on us" coupon.

People don’t respect a writer's time. They don’t get that it's work. When I'm in my office, I can shut the door and put the phone on automatic rollover to voice mail and no one would dare tell me I need to be the Girl Scout cookie mom since I'm "not doing anything," but a writer or stay at home mom? It's like their time becomes community property, and oy vey, the guilt trips if they try to keep any for themselves!

Stephen King, in his book On Writing, admits that he's not sure where stories come from. He can point to a few things that stuck in his mind when he worked as a janitor in the local high school, but he can't explain the leap from that to his novel Carrie. Likewise, I'm not sure exactly what it is that links weird things together in my brain and sets my imagination to fill in the gaps. What if I shut myself off from all that by writing every day? Freaky little unrelated things have a way of flipping switches in my mind and suddenly a plot problem is "oh yeah! And that ties in with that stuff in the first chapter..." So I won't give up my day job any time soon. But that count down to retirement? That clock is ticking loud and clear. Then I'll have to get serious. Or not. Maybe I'll try being eccentric instead.

My Not-So-Evil Day Job

2012-02-05T04:06:00.006-05:00

By Lisabet Sarai

I complain a lot. Anyone who's been in touch with me lately has heard about how I'm busier this term than I've ever been; how I'm teaching two brand new courses and don't have time to breathe with all the preparation, let alone write; how I leave at 9:00 AM and don't get home until 9:30 PM some nights; how I feel like Alice in Through the Looking Glass- I have to run as fast as I can just to stay in one place.

You might assume, listening to me, that I hate my work and would rather be writing every day. Indeed, for many writers, that's the ideal: to make enough money from book sales that you can quit your ordinary, boring day job and write full time.

Honestly, I don't feel that way. Perhaps that suggests that I'm not a “serious” writer. So be it. Despite the stress I sometimes feel – especially when I try to balance the demands of writing and marketing with the requirements of my public profession – I'd never want to give up my “real world” job.

My work requires a huge investment of time and energy, but it also provides great rewards. I don't mean financial rewards – I make just enough to meet my needs – but I've never aspired to wealth . I'm talking about less tangible benefits: the opportunity to be creative, the freedom to try new approaches, the respect of my colleagues and (sometimes, at least) my students, the satisfaction that comes from knowing that I've been a positive influence on the lives of at least a few young people every year. I also enjoy the fact that I'm able to use my long years of study and experience in positive and productive ways. And finally, my day job is just plain fun.

Writing is fun too, of course. I wouldn't do it if I didn't enjoy it. (I think the secret of happiness may be to only do what you enjoy, or conversely, to enjoy whatever you do.) One reason I don't have much of a desire to make my living off my writing is that I suspect that might kill the joy. If I were forced to write, day after day, I strongly suspect that the stress would leach away any creativity I can claim now.

I believe that I could support myself, at least at a basic level, by writing erotic romance or BDSM smut. I think I know what sells, and I could churn that out if I had to. I write quickly and my first drafts are generally in a lot better shape than many authors. I could put out one or two 15-20K novellas a month, if I had to.

I really would rather not. In fact, I find myself deliberately choosing to write genres and styles that don't sell as well, out of a kind of perversity, I guess. My M/M books have outsold anything else I've written, by several times. I find myself shying away from writing more because I don't want to make money my object.

Plus I hate stress. I can function when the chips are down. I can make tight deadlines if I have to. But the pressure takes its toll, draining me of psychic energy and basically making me miserable. Yes, my day job is stressful, too, but it provides enough variety to keep me excited. It also includes natural breaks, for midterm and final exams, vacation periods and so on. If I were writing full time, none of that would be true. I know authors who support themselves with their work, and you really can't take much of a break. You have to produce that three or four or five thousand words per day, rain or shine, in sickness and in health, or you'll fall behind. You'll miss deadlines. You'll lose readers.

My husband tells me that much of the stress is of my own making. I think there's some truth in that. I'm the one who agreed to do a new column for ERWA, who signed up to edit the Coming Together Presents series, who was willing to take on the course orphaned by the other faculty member who's on sabbatical in order to “help out”. Probably I need to learn how to say no. Maybe my unwillingness to refuse requests can be traced back to my submissive nature. Hard to say!

In any case, I'm not a wage slave. I'm not oppressed by my employer. I work long hours, but not at some repetitive, meaningless occupation. I'm incredibly lucky.

I tell my students that money will not make them happy. The first key to happiness (according to what I've learned in my close to six decades of life on earth) is having a partner whom you love and whose company you enjoy. The second key, almost as important, is finding work that feeds your soul, work that ignites your passion. I'm fortunate to have succeeded in both these areas. Really, I have no right at all to complain.

Who, Me?

2012-02-04T04:02:00.003-05:00

By D. L. King (Guest Blogger)

Yeah, I know, I write some pretty wild stuff, stuff that often involves picking up boys in bars and having my way with them. Well, not my way, exactly – my character’s way. And, if I’m – I mean my character’s – not picking them up in bars, she’s having her way with her husband, her friend’s husband, her boyfriends, or total strangers… whatever. She’s usually tying them up or anally penetrating them. (I used that terminology, of course, because I don’t know whether I can say fucking them in the ass on Oh Get a Grip. I guess we’ll find out.) She’s spanking them or whipping them or piercing them or, on occasion, humiliating them. Best just to say she’s subjecting them to anything and everything her little heart desires.

A long time ago, when I first thought about writing, people said “Write what you know.” The problem was, I didn’t actually know anything interesting – so I didn’t write. I read a lot. Science fiction, speculative fiction and horror, mostly, but I never put two and two together to form the thought that those writers probably hadn’t been to planets light years away. They didn’t personally know those alien races and they probably hadn’t interviewed any vampires or watched world-ending plagues play out.

What I’m saying is writing can be anywhere from zero to 90% imagination. I say 90% because at least some of it has to have a basis in reality. I do write what I know – mixed in with what I imagine. Here’s the thing: I’ve never picked up a guy in a bar.

Really.

Never have.

But I do know a lot about bars. I spent a lot of time working as a cocktail waitress and as a bartender. Now I just spend a lot of time hanging around in them.

I never participated in a research project dealing with male – or female, for that matter – sexual stimulation and response. I have, however, headed up several other research projects of a decidedly more boring nature. That sexual response research would be fun, though, wouldn’t it?

Looking back on my life, I think I blew my best years. My twenties and thirties weren’t spent in a sexual frenzy; you wouldn’t need your toes to count up my conquests. (You have to remember, we’re talking pre-AIDS here and I was on the pill.) Now, my college roommate, that was another story. I used to make lists – on multiple sheets of paper. I’m just sayin’…

I became expert with a eight-foot bullwhip when I was thirteen. I used to practice in the front yard. I didn’t think it was the least bit strange or inappropriate. And you gotta hand it to my parents; I don’t remember them once saying, “Hey, why don’t you practice that in the backyard.” I’m just sayin’…

When I was in high school, I dated a twenty-six year old biker. I was still a virgin. He was shocked when I told him. He didn’t believe me. I guess I didn’t present as a virgin. He was an extremely nice guy. I really liked motorcycles. When I was in college, I got to go 126 miles per hour on the back of a friend’s bike. It was exhilarating.

But really, I think I was, and continue to be, fairly boring. I mentioned that to Lisabet and she said that she thought I was pretty outrageous. (She actually knows me; we’ve shared alcoholic beverages and food on several occasions.) “Outrageous?” I said.

“Well, yes,” she replied. “There’s the fact that you pay your computer consultant in pain and domination. That’s pretty wild.”

Oh, that. Hmm, now that you mention it, I guess it could be considered wild in some circles…

Shameless Plug: Voyeur Eyes Only: Erotic Encounters in Sin City has just been released by Xcite Books. The print and ebook version was edited by D. L. King with Genevieve Ash and Essemoh Teepee. There is also an audio version, edited and performed by Genevieve and Essemoh. All royalties for the book go to the Erotic Authors Association to help defray costs of the erotica writers conference. You can pick up a copy here.

I'm just sayin...

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The Best Wildest is Yet to Come? Maybe.

2012-02-03T00:01:00.001-05:00

Wildest thing I've ever done? Started a bar fight with seven Hell's Angels after one of them said something rude about my song choice on the jukebox. Spent three days in the hospital with a concussion and busted ribs and I still have a couple of knife scars to remember them by.

No wait, that's not right.

The real wildest thing I've ever done? Piloted an airplane after the pilot had a heart attack. I relied on my dead steady nerves and a few years of flight sim practice and put that plane on the ground without so much as spilling a glass of champagne in the first class cabin.

No, no, no. That's not it.

You want to know the wildest thing I've done in my life? Delivered a baby on the Autobahn. My baby.

Um... no.

Rescued a family of four from a Yeti in the Serengeti.

Nah.

Climbed Everest. Blindfolded.

Nope.

Auditioned to be the voice of iPhone's SIRI and was told my voice was too sexy.

Uh uh.

I, um... huh. Wildest thing, you said? Wildest? Like safari-wild? Girls Gone Wild? Wild, Wild West? Oscar Wilde? (Gene was Wilder.) Wild.

Hmm.

I suppose I have my share of youthful wildness. Underage drinking in bars on the Ft. Lauderdale strip (and being an extra in a couple of very bad 80s movies as a result). Riding through Coconut Grove in convertibles with rich boys I didn't know. Dating wildly inappropriate people who did far wilder things than I ever did. Having sex in cars and on playgrounds and on the living room floor of a friend's apartment while four other people slept around us. But everyone does that, right?

There's the whirlwind 1000 mile relationship with the man who would become my husband... on January 1 he was my boyfriend's roommate whom I hadn't even met yet, by October he was my husband after spending less than 3 weeks together. Is that wild? Even if it is, the story is 22 years old.

There are a few things here and there over the past couple of decades that I'd call brave or crazy or impulsive or just plain dumb, but I don't know if any of them were truly wild. Maybe I've set the bar too high. Maybe I've seen too many YouTube videos (and porn) and read to many confessional blogs to think that anything I might ever do could be classified as wild.

When do we outgrow wild? I ask this question with a bit of panic in my voice (fingers?). I don't want to think that my wildest moments are behind me, unless being wild is inappropriate once you're past a certain age. I don't want to be the middle aged mom being made fun of because she's being wild. (I doubt teenagers call anything their parents do "wild." I'll let you know in about twelve years.) I don't want to be the cougar dating her son's best friend. That's not wild, it's just... ick. Plus, to be honest, I will be whatever comes after cougar by the time my boys are in high school. That's what I get for waiting until my 40s to have babies. Sigh. Wait... is that wild? Having babies in my 40s? No... probably not.

Sadly, I don't think I'm all that wild. I'm a pretty responsible person (barring those youthful wild moments) and tend to make careful choices. My wildest moments are the times when I'm impulsive and make a snap decision without thinking it through in my usual careful, analytical way. I almost never regret the outcome of those impulsive moments, they just don't happen all that often--and they aren't often very wild at all. My last truly impulsive decision... well, my memory is a little fuzzy right now, but I think the end result was my second baby. See what I mean? Not exactly wild.

It's difficult to be impulsive at this stage in my life. I mean, sure, I could hit the highway for points unknown when the babysitter shows up on Monday morning, but I'd have to be home before my husband goes to work on Tuesday. Not that that's not enough time to be wild, but... well, I'm tired and I have deadlines and I can't afford to get arrested right now, okay? What would I tell my husband? Or the babies when they're older? Or, worst of all, my publisher? Sheesh. Why are you trying to get me in trouble?

This is the wildest I'm going to be, at least for the next little while. And I'm more than a little okay with that.

Working for Slo-Mo

2012-02-02T01:00:00.002-05:00

(Note: This poster is for a reading in Toronto during Gay/Lesbian/Bi/Trans Pride Week 2007.)
------------------

“Executive Escorts Wanted.” Heh. The word “executive” didn’t fool me into believing that sex work was glamorous, or that it would lead to a high-status career – on the contrary. I dialed the number and asked for the man who had placed the ad because I needed money.

Was I always a Bad Girl? You tell me. I had not planned to sell sex for a living. In my twenties, I had assumed that an ability to type, file and serve the public could always get me an office job if nothing better was available. As a bride, I had assumed that if all else failed and my marriage ended, the legal system would force my husband to help provide for any children we might have, if not for me. As a graduate student, I had assumed that I could complete a thesis in a year or two, and then re-enter the job market with a versatile Master’s degree in English.

When I turned thirty, I was facing the collapse of everything I had counted on. Advances in office technology had dried up the jobs that had supported me through my first college degree, and I didn’t understand computers. As a divorced mother, I was told that I was entitled to child support, which my ex-husband refused to pay. His claim that he could not afford it seemed to satisfy the legal system. As a graduate student, I learned that I really had no rights. As my advisor continued to put off reading my latest chapter, I was repeatedly warned that I could be dropped from the program for failure to complete my thesis within the time allowed.

Bad Girls seem to be made, not born. I “came out” as a lesbian by going to the local gay bar, where I met my first bar dyke lover. While I was pressuring her to find a job and control her drinking, she rebelled by stealing the contents of my bank account. Then I learned that her sticky fingers were well known to most of the other dykes in town, who serenaded me with “You should have known better.”

I swallowed what was left of my pride and applied for welfare. I was told that I was not eligible as long as I still had any savings. Jesus, Mary and Joseph. As Janis Joplin sang it, “Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose.”

Slo-Mo (as I’ll call him), the pimp who asked me to meet him for an interview, had a colorful history of his own: he had sold dope of various kinds, including heroin (on which he was hooked), repossessed furniture and played pool for big prize money. He was running an escort agency as a sideline. He moved and spoke like an old 78 RPM record being played at 33 & 1/3 speed.

Sex was part of the interview, and it felt strangely businesslike. It was really an audition. Like other employers, my new boss explained the rules: safety on the job (regular use of condoms plus medical checkups), reliability, appropriate dress (tight skirts, not ragged jeans). We had a deal.

In some ways, going to work at Slo-Mo’s house at noon and leaving at five o-clock with several hundred dollars in cash was similar to jobs in which I had been expected to please male clients and supervisors who patted and patronized me because I was a “girl.” It was also like dating men who expected sex on the first date, either because I had a bad reputation or just because they wanted it – except that, in this case, they paid in cash. In advance.

Was I having wild adventures? I was nervous every time I went alone to a hotel or a private home to meet a new john, but really, I wasn’t taking any more of a risk than a woman who meets men on the ‘net. I knew very well that any woman can be perceived as “asking for” male violence.

My johns didn’t turn out to be monsters. Some actually seemed shy and grateful. The real Boogie Man in my life was “the system” (government, police, the courts, the mental-health system, even academia), and this is the hardest thing to explain to those who have not tried to walk in my five-inch pumps. All I can say to those who believe that all the major institutions of our society exist to serve the needs of citizens in general is: it just ain’t so.

Slo-Mo turned out to be very reliable in his way. At the end of a working day, he would come home, where I was usually alone in his house. (Most of his stable worked the night shift.) He would offer me a drink, and he seemed impressed that I never helped myself in his absence. Like a considerate husband in an arranged marriage, he would ask about my day, and I would tell him how many “calls” I had when I was not working on my thesis. Then he would ask for an agency fee for each call, or (more often), he would invite me into his bedroom to collect his “fee” in trade.

One day he told me and all his other “girls” that he had sold his business – which essentially consisted of us – to a woman he knew who never contacted us. Apparently she regarded us as outdated furniture from the old business, and chose not to include us in her plans for re-opening.

Years later, I heard that Slo-Mo had died of a heroin overdose. To call him a Good Man would be a stretch, but from what I saw, he wasn’t bad at all. He might have been the only man I’ve ever known who never lied to me.

Still later, I was invited to a birthday party in a local pool hall. I hesitated to pick up a long stick and aim it at those little balls on the table. I was so far from being a pool shark that I barely qualified as a sardine. Luckily, no one was playing for money. That night, it seemed, I couldn’t make a wrong move. I was more surprised than anyone in my audience.

A gay-male friend jokingly said, “Well, we all know about dykes and pool, don’t we?” Did we?

Oh, Slo-Mo. I bet you were there; it’s the only explanation I can think of. Like the junkie musician for whom Sarah McLachlan’s song was written, I hope you’re resting in the Arms of the Angels.
-----------------------------

(A longer version of this piece, “Getting Paid For It,” appeared in the “women’s work” theme issue of a local leftist newsmagazine, Briarpatch, in 2005.)

The Great Zebra Lesson

2012-01-31T00:04:00.000-05:00

Texarkana Arkansas April 1980

The team captain said he’d be back in an hour. As I turn away from the county road, the tail lights of the Dodge van wink around a bend and vanish. An hour is plenty time. It’s dark enough now that the movie on the other side of the meadow is well under way.

I’m chewing gum because I’m nervous. Gum calms me, like giving the mind a rubber ball to bounce, a kind of sink for nervous energy. Like fear, a bad case of nerves goes unappreciated. Nerves are good, if you can ride your personal chaos it can push you beyond your limits and tonight I have to get beyond my limit or die. I check the cardboard box I tossed into the grass just before I jumped out of the van, and its all there, mostly Peanut Brittle and Peco Pies. Peco Pies are this kind of Southern thing, esssntially a rock hard kind of peanut brittle made with coconut. Some of them are pink, some are white. Then there several boxes of Old Dominion peanut brittle.

We call it MFT, which means “Mobile Fundraising Team”, but we like to say it means “More Fun Today”. I don’t know if the next forty minutues will be fun or not, but it will be seriously weird. This is the second time I’ve done this. The first time was a disaster, because I was so clueless and it was something no one had done or figured out. I was just tossed in there to figure it out on my own. Which is what I'm usually good at, but not that time. But I’ve had time to think. Now I have an plan. Now I have a clue.

I pick up the box and make my way through the dried up weeds and high switchgrass. it occurs to me that rattlesnakes come out at night in Arkansas to hunt for mice in the high weeds just like these, and I feel a little scared. So I move slow to give the venomous a chance to see me coming. An old farmer with snake skins hanging off his porch told me – after buying some candles I was selling for my church – that rattlesnakes are basically peaceful and shy. Animals in general are practical creatures because they live in a world of sudden violence. Rattlesnakes are practical animals. It takes two weeks to build up a charge of poison they could be using to catch their food. Biting someone out of fear is a waste of juice, it’s a last resort because they’ll go hungry for two weeks. That’s why they rattle at you, they don’t want to bite you.

I shuffle my feet, and freeze when I hear a loud buzz in the grass and something moving away. I don’t know if it’s a bug or a snake. I just move slow, making a lot of noise with my feet until I reach the barb wire fence.

I take a little keychain flashlight off my belt and shine it along the ground under the fence. I know its going to be here someplace. After a few minutes I find it, a hole where the fence has been lifted up because the local kids are always sneaking into the drive in movie to turn on a speaker and smoke and make out and drink, whatever these small town kids do at night. I can see the back most row of cars, and yes, many of them have steamed windows rolled up. One of them has a girl’s bare feet and calves sticking out the rear window. The girl is curling and uncurling her toes.

I kneel down and push the case of peanut brittle and peco pies through and then get down on my back and scoot under. I glance at my watch. Forty minutes to go, minus ten minutes to leave and get to the road. And that’s if nothing bad happens. Here we go.

I skip the back row of cars completely, that was one lesson I learned from last Friday night. If they’re engaged in embarrassing activities, if they’re irritated and suspicious, they’re not likely to buy.

So I move straight to the second row and go right at the first car I see.

I’ve learned not to plan or to think past this moment. That’s what killed me mentally last time and had the manager looking for me in the dark with a big steel railroad flashlight. You can’t think about this. I go into automatic mode. Some things are too weird to contemplate. If you think about what you’re doing, what can go wrong, you’ll lose your nerve. You’ll turn sensible. Sensible gets you killed. That’s what I’ve figured out from last week’s debacle.

What I learned is this -

When you do something that’s totally weird, totally inappropriate and most of all unprecedented, people won’t know what they’re supposed to think. So, since you’re the guy doing the weird thing – people look for their cues from you. That’s an amazing thing. If you think you’re doing something weird, they think so too. If you think what you’re doing is totally normal, they think so too. It must be normal, or why wouldn’t this guy be embarrassed? When confronted with something new, people want to be told how to respond to it. People want to be told what to feel.

So I go up to the first car, but I don’t want to startle them, so I go “Hi! How’s the movie?” in a big cheery voice from about fifteen feet away so they have plenty of time to see me coming, just like the rattlesnakes. The man in the driver’s seat turns to look, worried at first, but he sees the big happy grin on my mug and the candy case under my arm. “Hi!” he says, like we’re old friends. Maybe for two seconds he even figures we might be. At this moment there’s a rolodex of faces scrolling in his head and coming up empty.

“Listen, my church is fund raising in the drive in movie tonight? And guess what we got? Peanut Brittle! Wow!” I grab a box and hold it up. He has to squint to see it, but yes, sonuvagun, it sure is peanut brittle all right.

“Your church is selling stuff in a drive in movie?”

“Yup! We sure are! Wow! You can get one box for two dollars, or three boxes for five!”

He turns to the young woman in the passenger seat who is slouching down and it looks like she’s quickly fiddling with the buttons of her blouse. “What do you think darlin’?”

She nods. “Yeah, okay. Peanut Brittle’s okay.”

"Is it good with beer?"

"Sure is! Wow! Peanut brittle!"

The man fishes out his wallet. “Five?”

He hands me a five. I give him three boxes. God bless you, enjoy your movie, and I move right along to the next car.

There’s not a big crowd tonight. I work through most of the middle and do well on the front row because that’s where most of the families with little kids are, near the playground area under the big screen. By the time I gotten through 25 minutes, most of the candy is gone. One person was definitely annoyed and I’ve kept on eye on his car. He’s heading for the snack stand. Maybe popcorn. Maybe a complaint. Time to go back to the fence anyway. Once I get to the fence, I check my watch again, and hunker down in the weeds and watch part of the movie. After a few minutes a squadron of mosquitoes radios in my position and dives in.

That’s not the weirdest thing I’ve ever done by a ways, but its one of the weirdest things I’ll tell you.

That was a long time ago. I was a different person. I couldn’t do that today. I wouldn't have the guts. I wouldn’t know how. The mechanics of it are simple, a chimpanzee could do it better. What I couldn’t get back is the mental position, the correct state of mind, and the state of mind is absolutely necessary. Here’s the rule of fund raising in a drive in movie – if you believe it, they believe it. If you think its weird, they think its weird. When confronted with something unprecedented, if you’re the man in the spotlight, people around you will take their attitudes by picking up their cues from you. Suspension of disbelief.

When you hear hoof beats coming at you, you expect to see a horse. The one time in a million it turns out to be a zebra you don’t know what to do. So you look to see what the other guy is doing. That’s how 9/11 happened. The first three planes were zebras. By the time the fourth zebra, United 93, came along, the passengers on board that flight had stopped believing in horses and began dealing in zebras.

I think about the drive in, and there were many of them back then, when I watch politicians on TV these days. Its all about the confidence. If you look like you believe something, people believe it. People want to believe it. People want to believe something. If you doubt yourself, even if you’re right, people will doubt you. That makes for so much mischief in this world.

C. Sanchez-Garcia

Ohio, As Seen Through Rear View Mirror

2012-01-30T05:55:00.002-05:00

By Kathleen Bradean

You could say I'm jaded by now, but even trying to look at my life through more innocent eyes, there isn't much there that qualifies as wild. This really dismays me. I seem like the kind of person who would have done some really stupid, crazy shit over the years, but I didn't. What the hell was I thinking? Why didn't I have the foresight to plan my life out so that it would be fodder for a bestselling memoir? But no. I always had to think about the consequences. What a putz.

Once in high school, I was pulled over by a cop after visiting a drive-thru known for selling beer to minors. I'd bought a six pack of 7Up. The cop was apologetic after he searched the entire car and found nothing. I had a stress attack and couldn't stop shaking enough to drive for another twenty minutes. Clearly, I wasn't cut out for life on the edge.

Every morning during home room at my Ohio high school, they announced the names of every kid who had to report to the principal's office. The usual suspects got no reaction, but if it was someone unusual, everyone hooted as they did the walk of shame out of the room. My senior year, a group of parents sued the school board for discrimination. From then on, the kids of those parents, including me, were regularly summoned to the principal's office. We'd gather in the school office and wait through most of our first class until the secretary released us. We never saw the principal. It was pure harassment. Even though I knew I hadn't done anything wrong, the humiliation was crushing. Finally it got to the point where my name was called so often that no one in my home room made a sound when I shuffled out of the class, books clutched to my chest like protective armor. But did I make the most of that bad girl reputation I'd earned? No. Again, what was I thinking? I should have sashayed my ass down the aisle between desks like a saucy minx. I should have paused at the door and winked at someone, someone like one of the real delinquents. I totally had cred and didn't use it. What a waste!

It wasn't until after my eighteen birthday that I decided to do something mildly wild. College was a nightmare. My parents forced me to leave a small college I liked to go to Ohio State. I was not a good fit for that place. Back then, schools didn't have to report crimes on campus, but we knew about a rape a week in those huge parks in the center of the campus. This was way back in the dawn of PCs, so I had to go to the computer center to do my programming homework. Since I was a lowly sophomore, the only time block I could schedule was from eleven PM to one in the morning. Then I'd have to walk across both those parks, in the dark, alone, to my dorm. Campus police refused to escort, and the only group of guys willing to help out wouldn't escort girls who weren't in sororities. So I was on my own. I walked with my keys clutched through my fingers in one hand and a massive Ronson cigarette lighter with the flame turned up eight inches in the other. As you can imagine, this constant state of siege did a number on me.

I knew that I couldn't continue in the college major my parents had picked for me, and I knew if I changed majors, they'd quit paying my tuition. I also didn't think I could get a loan to pay for my tuition. So at that point, I figured college was over for me. (I eventually returned and got my degree, graduating at with honors) SO I started planning my escape. Every week, I'd pack a box with things that I felt I had to keep and mail them to my boy friend in California.

The last day of school, I drove home and spent a week hanging out with the family. In my father's eyes, that was six and a half days too long to not be gainfully employed -something he reminded me of every morning at about 6AM when he told me to get my lazy ass out of bed and go look for a job. In the entire five years I lived in Ohio, I never once saw a help wanted sign. It seemed every factory in town was shuttered. A Red Lobster opened up and had 700 applicants for jobs. I cleaned houses back in Columbus for spending money, but I couldn't find a local housekeeping firm that needed another maid. My parents were oblivious to this reality. On day eight, I told my parents that I'd found a job. I just neglected to tell them that it was in California.

After breakfast, I hugged the dog goodbye, tossed my suitcase into the trunk of my car, filled my gas tank, got on the highway, and drove west. Maybe I should have been scared, because I knew my parents would be furious when they found out I'd dropped out of college and left without asking for permission, but I knew they couldn't drag me back because I was eighteen and no longer their property. Besides, I didn't foresee talking to them again any time soon. They'd said plenty to me over the years and I'd had enough.

Perfectly calm - okay, a bit exhilarated - I rolled down my window, let my hand ride the heated thermals rushing past, and cranked up the radio as I passed over the border into Indiana.

Even now, Ohio looks best in a rear view mirror. I keep my eyes on the road ahead.

Wild Wedding

2012-01-29T04:02:00.003-05:00

By Lisabet Sarai

His name was Kevin - or maybe Keith - anyway, I'm moderately certain it began with a 'K', and I guarantee that I did know his name at the time. After all, this was nearly thirty five years ago. He was the bride's kid brother, a skinny but surprisingly self-confident nineteen year old with messy dark hair and glasses. As for me, I was twenty four, an experienced woman of the world, I suppose, from his perspective, though most of the time I felt confused and awkward.

His sister was marrying my ex-housemate, the smooth-talking, golden-haired business student who'd flirted with me until I couldn't bear the sexual tension any longer, until I climbed into his bed one night while my steady boyfriend (also a housemate) was away. (I wrote about this encounter for another Grip post, on the topic of bad decisions!). Of course, that boyfriend (or rather, ex-boyfriend) was also among the guests at the posh wedding, held in the manicured garden of his parent's home in an upmarket Connecticut coastal community. The rest of the former occupants of that crazy group house attended, too. The whole absurd scene would have been hilarious in a film, but this was my life.

The groom graced me with a smug smile when I arrived, then ignored me. My bitter ex-lover wouldn't even say hello. My other housemates offered embarrassed greetings then moved on, clearly uncomfortable at being caught in the middle of a romantic divide.

So there I was, more or less alone near the edge of the tent, drinking wine and trying to look like I belonged, a middle class Jewish girl in the midst of wealthy W.A.S.P. guests I didn't know. Then Kevin sauntered over.

He wasn't the sleek, muscled teenage boy of a romance reader's dreams. I would have labeled him a nerd, if that term had been been invented yet. Still, he had a certain charm. He leaned against the tent-pole, engaging me in clever banter with a powerful undercurrent of innuendo. In ten minutes, he had me laughing. In twenty minutes, he'd suggested we adjourn to the motel where he and his family were staying. And I'd agreed.

I can't help blushing in retrospect, but at the time, there was no way I was going to refuse. So what if he was five years younger than I was? Who cared that he was a member of the wedding party and likely to be missed? He wanted me, I wanted him, and nobody else there seemed to give a damn about me or what I did.

That afternoon burns in my memory as one of the most perfectly entertaining sexual encounters of my life. It was pure fun. I doubt he was a virgin, but he was certainly less experienced that I was, young enough to be impressed by my boldness and grateful for my attentions. I recall giving him a blow job, probably his first, and the gleeful pride that added an extra sheen to my arousal. I saw myself through his eyes, mature, sexy, a daring woman of the world. His horniness turned me on as much as his lively intelligence.

He was no slouch, though. He surprised me by asking if I'd pose for him to take photographs. With an exhibitionist streak a mile wide, I was only too happy to oblige. I would really love to see those shots now!

By the time we returned to the reception, many of the guests had left, among them my old lover. I'm sure I got some strange looks, but honestly, I didn't care. Kevin grinned like the cat who'd devoured the canary. Nevertheless, he was unfailingly polite and solicitous as he drove me to the station so I could catch a bus home.

Of course I never saw or heard from him again. That doesn't matter. In fact, I suspect that any further contact would only have diminished the pleasure we both derived from our impromptu encounter.

I've done quite a few wild things in my life. I've visited sex clubs and gone to swinger's parties. I've had sex on the floor of a church, in a Greyhound bus, in a parking lot. Still, I'm not sure any of those experiences can compare to my slipping away from a wedding to fuck the bride's teenage brother.

Sounds like the premise for a wonderful erotic story, doesn't it? But now if I write it, everyone will know it's not fiction.

Writing Outside the Box

2012-01-28T05:10:00.000-05:00

by
Stephanie Beck

buy link

I’m not a doctor, but I play one on TV.

Wait, no I don’t. I’m a female romance writer who lives in the Midwest. When I’m not writing romance I’m chasing my kids, knitting, driving to and from school, running errands for my husband, and baking some wicked yummy cupcakes.

I admit to writing a few characters who do some of the above. They are some of my favorite characters because I feel like I really got to know them and if we met at a coffee shop we’d totally be best friends. However, if I wrote those kinds of characters all the time the fun wouldn’t last.

To be completely honest, I bore the pants off myself at times. I couldn’t subject my awesome readers to that sort of dish washing and dog walking torture.

Writing outside the box can be a daunting task. I’ve heard writers lament about not being able to get into the opposite sex’s head. Or maybe they’ve tackled a story with a heavy sexual kink and can’t quite get the motivations right. Then there is the sexual orientation question and how to write something sexy when the writer personally doesn’t find the situation sexy.

Every writer is different and each tackles this issue differently with varying levels of effectiveness. Two mistakes I’ve witnessed: Muscling and Stereotyping.

Examples of Muscling: when a woman wants to write a tough, standoffish man, she can’t have him thinking constantly about his feelings just because it’s easier. Just as women are not little men who misplaced their penises, men are not big women who lost their boobies. Men, for the most part, show more through action than talk. That’s not to say a man can’t have moments of deep thought, affection and emotion, but men and women approach problems and emotions differently. If a writer forgets that, they run the risk of putting their big strong alpha male in a preverbial tutu. The same can be said for male writers who write women. Women can be super badass and tough, absolutely, but there are still feminine aspects that need to come through if you want a feminine character.

Example of stereotype trouble: while writing a gay character, if a writer relies only on Lifetime reruns and porn, the character runs the risk of never really getting past a few one liners. There’s nothing more disappointing than a thrilling plot with a character who never makes it to life.

To avoid the dreaded flatness that comes with honestly not knowing the ins and outs of a character, I’ve come up with a few tricks:

**Research: Ask questions and pay attention to people, mannerisms and habits. Sure, it sounds a little stalkerish, but how are you going to learn if you don’t ask? Finding people who are open and comfortable with questions is key. Asking the perfectly nice lesbian mom at story time about her sex life is rude (please don’t do that). Posing questions in a forum devoted to lesbian fiction and picking up lesbian fiction is the safer route. You wouldn’t try to write about a doctor without brushing up on medical terminology. Setting out to write a BDSM story without a basic knowledge of doms, subs and what drives a person to choose that sexual path will only lead to frustration later.

** Layering: If the character’s occupation is something I’m unfamiliar with, I give them a hobby I know well. If the character’s sexuality is one I can only appreciate in pictures that make me wiggly, I give them the kind of sheets and blankets I love. If their romantic relationship is intense and out of my realm of comfort, I add another relationship (friend, parent, sibling) that I understand really well. This works great no matter what sex or orientation a writer wants to try. Balance what you know with what you learn.

**Details: Just because the character is not one I identify with, doesn’t make them any less human (you know, unless they are a werewolf or cyborg—that presents another layer). They need to have the details a reader needs to get to know the character. How do they like their coffee? What kind of shoes do they wear? Do they like cats or dogs? The devil is in the details. It’s easy to fall into stereotypes with this…and some people are stereotypical, it’s just the way it is. However, to avoid making your character the token anything, give the character details, make the details match and support each other, but let them have surprises too. Example: Scott, from my story, Unraveling Midnight, is a badass werewolf. He’s the sole supporter of his three kids, works as a security guard/thug and has the shaved head, scarred face of an ass kicker. However, he willingly picks up a set of knitting needles for his daughter. He bakes oatmeal raison cookies. He drinks his beer in bottles. Rounding him out gives him features readers can identify with.

Writing in a completely different point of view can be daunting. I think with practice and attention to detail, most writers can push out of their comfort zone and write a really interesting, engaging character. Remembering that every character needs a purpose and drive and a reason to rock is the first step in writing outside the box.

~
Stephanie Beck
Even before she understood what all the thrusting meant, Stephanie Beck loved reading romance. When the stories didn’t end the way she wanted, writing her own was the perfect solution. From ridiculous humor to erotica, Stephanie loves being transported within a story. Her latest, Unraveling Midnight brings together a werewolf single father and a knitting extraordinaire—combining love in unexpected places. When she’s not elbow deep in words, her husband and three beautiful command her attention. After they are sleeping she knits or bakes cookies...or squeezes in more writing.

Visit Stephanie Beck at http://www.stephaniebeck.net

Authenticity and the Writer

2012-01-27T00:01:00.001-05:00

There is a difference between writing "other" for the other and writing other for those like you. I was considering this notion of writing other-- writing from the perspective of someone who is not like me-- and realized I haven't done it all that often when the audience is able to authenticate my writing. Regardless of the topic, it's scary to have an expert say, "You got it wrong." Being told that I got it wrong by someone who lives and breathes the life I'm writing is not only scary, it's embarrassing and shameful. It's an insult to the "other" that I am writing about. So perhaps that's why I don't do it very often.

I have written from the male perspective dozens of times, but I have written it for women. In romance and erotic romance, the audience is primarily women. Writing alpha males comes from a place in me that likes the idea of alpha males but would likely run screaming if I were in a relationship with one. On the page, my male characters are written with an audience in mind-- and that audience is me, not a guy who served twenty years in the army and rides a motorcycle, like the character I'm writing. That guy--reading about the fictionalized version of himself--might laugh at my portrayal. I'm too scared to ask, to be honest.

Which brings me to the point of writing "other"--for me, at least: bringing the reader a fantasy she can enjoy. My "other" writing skews to the female fantasy side of fiction-- male characters as women fantasize about them and otherworldly creatures as perceived by me with no one to suggest my portrayals are inaccurate. I have also written lesbian fiction from the perspective of a bisexual woman with some experience, though I sometimes feel distanced from the experiences of those characters.

I have occasionally tackled a character of a different race, tapping into my own experiences as a minority in various communities. Yet I'm always wary of stereotyping, of being a voice for someone whose life is so far removed from my own. I have not yet written a transgendered character because I don't feel I could do the experience and emotions justice. I believe I have written only one story from a gay male perspective and while I was honored it was published in Ultimate Gay Erotica (from the defunct Alyson Publishing), the story was very much tongue-in-cheek with a fantasy theme and a level of humor to suggest erotic satire. In other words, it wasn't written to be taken seriously as the gay male experience.

I am an advocate for writers writing anything they choose, from any perspective they choose. If an author is comfortable writing the other--and can do it with a level of authenticity--I wish them all the best. But as a woman who has encountered her share of inaccurate and insulting stereotypes written by men who didn't have a clue about the female experience (or even the female anatomy, in some cases), the key word there is authenticity. Like every other aspect of writing, research is paramount when you are not completely familiar with the subject at hand. Never is that more true than when it comes to writing about people who are different than us. I may write fantasies for women with male characters who are too good to be true, but if my audience were men I think I'd have a couple of those men authenticate my work before I sent it out into the world. It's embarrassing to have someone say that you didn't get their experience right-- but it's a hell of a compliment when they say that you did.

Identity Wars

2012-01-26T01:00:00.004-05:00

No one who was present at the sites of battle could forget either the Feminist Sex Wars or the wars over appropriation, variously defined (Appropriation of Voice or of Culture), especially among women writers of the 1980s. The dust hasn’t completely settled yet.

I still think of Toronto, Canada, as Ground Zero for the conflict between freedom of expression (as defined by its advocates) and cultural authenticity in literature. In 1988, the collective that ran The Women’s Press of Toronto broke into open warfare when the “Front of the Bus Caucus” locked the other collective members out of the building. The locked-out members filed suit. This was the climax of several years of tension, during which three white women writers who had signed contracts with the press were told that their work was not acceptable because they had “appropriated” (written about) the cultures or identities of “people of colour.”

The lawsuit was extensively covered by Canada’s national newspaper, The Globe and Mail. Eventually, the locked-out collective members formed Second Story Press, which advertised itself as a feminist, anti-racist press. Its ads and list of titles actually looked much like those of The Women’s Press, IMO.

Meanwhile, at the Third International Feminist Book Fair in Montreal in 1988, Anne Cameron was singled out for public humiliation. To understand this, you need to know that she was (still is) a West Coast writer with a cult following among feminists and lesbians, especially in western Canada. Her book-length version of a West Coast First Nations creation story, Daughters of Copper Woman, was passed around and read until its covers fell off. We all wanted to identify as daughters of the First Woman rather than of Eve, the afterthought formed from Adam’s rib.

According to her various bios, Anne Cameron had grown up in the mountainous interior of British Columbia where her closest companions included local indigenous people. ( I also pictured her hanging out with the odd Saskwatch, ogopogo or talking raven -- mythical animals said to live in the mountains, the lakes and the trees). She had children and grandchildren of First Nations descent. She was contributing her proceeds from Daughters of Copper Woman to a First Nations land-rights case. She seemed like the very model of a self-reliant, politically-correct, earth-loving lesbian-feminist.

But she was undeniably white. At the book fair, she was publicly confronted by a First Nations writer, Lee Maracle (also a woman from B.C.), who claimed that the time had come for white women writers to “move over.” Anne Cameron apologized for her writing and promised to stop appropriating a culture that wasn’t hers. This exchange was the talk of the book fair.

Soon afterward, a manifesto appeared from a white lesbian poet, Betsy Warland (blonde, healthy-looking, originally from California) who had given readings and a workshop at the book fair. Her piece took up two pages in the centre of Broadside, a feminist newsletter from Toronto. She described her internal struggle, as a white writer wanting to write about “the other,” and her realization that she could never “get it right” when writing about life-experience that wasn’t hers, in the context of a culture that wasn’t hers. She apologized to those who had been hurt by literary colonization. She promised to go forth and sin no more.

To say that I was disconcerted by all this would be an understatement. I had enjoyed writing first-person short stories about characters whose religious backgrounds (Jewish, Catholic) were different from mine, whose physical characteristics (including skin colour and hair texture) were different from mine, and whose social class was debatably different from mine. I had written a few first-person stories in a male voice, but I sensed that no male reader was likely to accuse me of harming him by “appropriating” the consciousness of a person with facial hair and balls. I sensed that this had a lot to do with who has more power and who has less.

So far, no one had torn a strip off me. This was probably because I was still below the general radar, a writer without a following.

Maybe fantasy literature could be a welcoming closet for a writer who wanted to achieve cult status without being told off. Or maybe not, since elaborate sagas involving supernatural beings or other planets are thinly-disguised versions of events on this earth. Ever since the blockbuster film Avatar hit the big screen, we all know that any plot about “primitive” tribespeople (even with blue skin) and their natural environment is guaranteed to spark a political debate.

My writing output slowed. In the long run, I didn’t stop writing about “the other.” By definition, writing fiction seems to require going beyond factual first-person testimony. This is one of the reasons why writing is dangerous. Every time I describe a character with a different identity or cultural affiliation from mine, I run the risk that someone from that community will accuse me of stereotyping or exploiting them. Yet no one can explain how any writer could fight bigotry by writing only about middle-class White Anglo-Saxon Protestants (of which I’m not a pure example). In any case, expressions of extreme WASPness could look even more politically incorrect than "appropriation."

And I haven’t even touched on the ever more complex list of current sexual identities: gay, straight, bi-dyke, boi, High Femme, transmasculine, gender-queer, Dom, sub, switch, et al.

There have been skirmishes over literary “appropriation” since the 1980s, notably within self-defined anti-oppressive collectives. I think it’s fair that the representation of oppressed or marginalized people in works of art should be analyzed and discussed.

But a debate can now escalate and go viral almost instantly. (Showdowns in the 1980s generally had to take place in real space and real time.) Complexity gets lost, and hatred prevails, at least until a new fight breaks out somewhere else.

Lynching – the spontaneous execution of a presumed culprit by an enraged mob – has always seemed to me to be one of the worst grassroots traditions ever. And not only because it was so often based on racism.
-------------------

Becoming an Incubus as a Spiritual Discipline

2012-01-25T00:55:00.001-05:00

A long time ago Ray Bradbury wrote a short story called “The April Witch” about a love sick teenage girl named Cecy. Cecy has been born into a “remarkable” family as they call themselves. They are witches, Cecy is specifically an “April Witch”. She has the ability to leave her body and travel the night “like a black kite on the wind” and invade and occupy the consciousness of anyone or anything, a bug, a bird, a boy or a girl. In another girl’s body she falls in love vicariously with a muggle, but Harry Potter is still a good 60 years away and it cannot be. Poor Cecy.

I’ve read that story many times, and it only recently occurred to me what the story is actually about. The interior metaphor of the story is Ray Bradbury himself, the fantasy writer jumping into the consciousness of a young woman who jumps into the consciousness of the young man she fancies. The writer as incubus. The incubus as succubus. What fun!

I think the hardest, and most awkward stretch for a male writer is to inhabit the other gender well enough for the reader to see herself there. This is the soul of erotica and romance literature, the crossing of the abyss between lovers and trying to imagine what pleasures them. Usually male writers create deciding characters that are male, and women writers create deciding characters that are female, because, as they say, write what you know. But sooner or later you have to step off into the dark and challenge the world of the story through the eyes of someone you will never be. In my case a very disenfranchised young woman.

For instance, before I go on, here is a longish fragment of one scene of a story I’m working on, one which is pulling in all my creative attention like a black hole. This is only the opening movements of a much longer scene and the story may not be ready for months. When I have a big one on the hook, there’s nothing I love more than working with a slow hand:

“ . . . . . Nixie opened the little Bible in the middle and ran her fingertips down the thin onionskin pages, lips moving, guessing at the sounds the stately ink marks would speak, picturing herself speaking as Father Ambremelin would, preaching a stern homily to the cannibals. Without knowing the words, only knowing the sweat scented leather and the paper and the tiny marks of ink, even the nostalgic little sigh of blood on the inside of the back cover, Father Ambremelin’s gift was a thing of beauty and kindness. Once she was in the convent, a bride of Jesus with the Augustinian sisters, they would teach her to read this book. She would be an educated woman.

There were people in the hallway outside the closed door. She stood still and listened, feeling them through the door, irritated, wishing they would go away. A soft, almost apologetic tapping and then silence. Thrown out like a prayer, waiting for an answer. Nixie waited too, gathering stillness around herself like a wall. She waited for the person to go away. Another soft, diffident rapping. Another silence.

The air seemed heavy with anticipation. At last, defeated, she closed the little book and pushed it away, got to her feet and crossed over to the door. “Jah?” She waited on her side of the door.

The tapping came again, more insistent now. They wouldn’t go away, knowing now she was awake at this late hour. Maybe it’s important. Something bad has happened. She turned the knob, opened the door and Wloji was there. Nixie sensed someone else, maybe Papa, behind her further down the hall, also waiting. “Yes?”

Wloji stood firm and waited.

“Yes?”

“Are you fine, goose girl?” said the African. “Dinner good?”

Nixie felt bewildered. She thought of the battered pocket Bible on the desk, with its blood stain from far away lands, Father Ambremelin’s blood. She thought of the Cameroons. “Come in.” She stepped aside and Wloji entered.

“So nice now, yes?” said Wloji. “A fire? Sitting late?” Wloji stood next to the desk and planted herself there. “Nice time, yes?”

Nixie closed the door. “Wloji,” she said. “Is everything all right?”

“Fine, fine.”

“I want to ask you, what my Uncle Snorri said. Are you a slave?”

Wloji stood a little straighter. The room had become disturbing with the African filling it, her exotic skin and being of menacing ironic deference hinted of a merciless and alien way of life.

“Are you Uncle Snorri’s slave woman? He says you’re just monkeys, not people.”

Wloji turned her back and opened the window. She lifted the frame to let in a little more of the air and closed the curtains. “It’s nice tonight. Sorry, goose girl.” She went to the little desk, gently opened a drawer and took out a small wooden hairbrush.

“Nixie, that’s my name. Please.”

Wloji drew the chair away from the desk and set it next to the big bed. “Sit, now. Nixie girl.” She patted the back of the chair and waited. A cuckoo bird was calling in the dark, and the wood fire gave a rosy spiciness. As the night air lifted the curtains the world seemed so perfect and mysterious for a moment that it seemed a shame to leave it for a stuffy cloister. She came over and sat in the chair. The tall African stood behind the chair and bent close, whispering in her ear. “Fire nice. Evening nice. What is not fine, Nixie girl?” The fingers behind her were lifting her hair in a bunch, caressing and straightening it. The hair brush bristles slipped delicately against the strands and began to move. She closed her eyes. “Slave,” said the voice behind her. “In the Cameroons, we have moth, yes. This moth she come only night time, like Wloji. She so big because she have so much food, yes. She drink tear. Tear from elephant, she cry. Tear from bird, she cry. All tear. But she moth, she most like tear from woman. So sad womans in my Cameroons, many slave womans, you ask me. She big fat moth from drinking so much cry tear. At night she come, knock on you door, knock on you soul so she come inside. Inside you sad dream, she stay. Too much tear, my land.”

Behind the strokes of the brush it seemed the woman was smiling or laughing, maybe at her. Just like everybody.

“Once upon a time,” says the woman to the little girl, “There was a tortoise.”

The little girl is seated on a little stool next to a butter churn, before a fire in a stone hearth. On a hook over the fire an iron pot of soup is boiling, rattling softly against the lid. The farm woman’s calloused and knobby fingers scoop up a handful of the girl’s cornsilk soft white hair, pick at a lump of mud and begin stroking it with a silver hairbrush, a wedding gift from her husband’s wayward brother Snorri. The brush rises and falls, rises and falls. The pot bubbles. The girl ducks her head like a kitten under the easeful petting.

“This was a very happy tortoise, who had many good things. He lived in the forest near a lake, and he ate lots of mushrooms and flowers and caterpillars and no one treated him badly and so you see, he had a very good life.”

The girl wipes her nose on her arm. She had come home crying again. The tears have dried and crusted on her cheeks.

“But the tortoise crawled on the ground, as he does, and he saw the small birds that could fly very fast and the butterflies in the meadow who float on the air like sailboats. And the tortoise thought – why can’t I fly? Why can’t I be like them instead of a slow clumsy tortoise? If someone would teach me to fly, I would fly so fast, faster than any of them.”

The fire snaps sharply on a knot and the girl ducks her head a little more. Her mouth feels suddenly very dry and she wants water. She looks at her hands.

“There was an eagle who lived in the forest and fished on the lake, and the eagle was so strong and so beautiful and the tortoise thought of the eagle, soaring high over all on his big wings, and diving down to the lake and snatching up fish in his fierce claws. Das Experten! said the tortoise. He should be my teacher, because he is the very best of all. So he went to the eagle and begged him, every day, to teach him to fly. Soon the eagle became worn out because the tortoise, you see, was very stubborn. So the eagle said ‘yes tortoise, I’ll bring you up high and you can practice flying with me.’ So the eagle picked him up in his big strong claws and together they flew high, high, very high in the sky.”

“Mama.” The little girl is holding out her arms and feet, like a kitten being carried.

The woman smoothes her hands soothingly over the girls head and together they sigh with pleasure. “And the tortoise, well, he was very happy as the eagle carried him in the clouds, in his pride of place, and far below the forest and the lake, they were so beautiful. And the tortoise began to flap his little feet and little legs like the eagle does and said ‘I’m surely flying now!’ but the poor eagle was so tired, because the tortoise he was very heavy, you see, and he said ‘Tortoise, I have to let you go now. You must fly by yourself.’ And he let the tortoise go.

“Mama.” The little girl is clenching her hands into fists and holding out her fingers. She blinks at the fire and her eyes grow wide. “Mama.”

“The tortoise fell down, down, down from the sky and landed on the rocks and was broken all to pieces. And as soon as he was dead, well, seeing there was nothing to help it, the eagle came down and gobbled the poor tortoise all up and away he went.”

The little girl is shaking violently. She blinks her puffy eyes and looks again and a golden aura is expanding brightly around her hands. Her ears feel wooly and big and hot. She turns suddenly and looks at the woman’s face and the golden aura is glowing there too. “Mama,” she says, softly. “The angels are coming.”

Nixie pushed Wloji’s hand away and began to weep. She felt the warm weight of the woman’s palms pressing on her shoulders as the tears burst. “Aie, mein gott,” she whispered. “I’m so alone!”

A shadow moved behind her. The woman’s perfumed hair was next to her nose. Cool large lips kissed the edge of her eye, and then the wet of her cheek.

Rough Draft fragment from
“The Tortoise and the Eagle” by C. Sanchez-Garcia

Aristotle said that fiction is good for you. It’s good for your soul. It’s good to write it. It’s good to read it. A good love story makes you kinder and better. A good love story stretches the heart even as it gives love a bad name. Aristotle believed that stories were essential for the emotional education of a person. The vicarious suffering or difficulties of a fictional character were an exercise in compassion and awareness of humanity.

I’ve become more and more convinced that the most important thing, even more important than the love of God is compassion. Passionate love of God is so often about being in love with an idol, an image of God we’ve constructed for ourselves or more likely allowed authorities to construct for us. Idolatry leads to cruelty and spiritual pride. Compassion is what you have in common with other people, and other people will defeat the idols you make of them every time.

C. Sanchez-Garcia

Other Worldly

2012-01-24T13:14:00.005-05:00

I don't write about the "other". I never have, and never particularly want to - not because it doesn't interest me, but because I worry too much about getting it wrong. I don't even want to use the term "other" in all honesty - unless it specifically means just something besides myself. The term is too loaded to me, too full of memories of university and tales of marginalisation and disenfranchisement.

Which is precisely why I steer clear of writing MM fiction. Though I want to stress - it's not because I think women shouldn't write MM. Far from it. Men have been writing about us (sometimes very successfully, I might add) for centuries without so much as a by your leave, so I don't see why not. And as my fellow Grippers have already pointed out: you don't need to be a serial killer or a rocket scientist or what have you to write about being a serial killer or a rocket scientist.

So I think it's perfectly possble for a woman to write a gay man, or vice versa.

I just don't want to do it myself. I don't feel qualified enough, I don't think I know enough, I'm not confident enough in my own abilities.

But I am confident in my own abilities to write about one sort of "other". It's the one I spent the most amount of time at university studying, the one the term other was most often applied to: women. I even thought of writing a book called Other based on this studying and all my own experiences of Gothic novels and how Victorian society viewed differences, pitching the strangeness of an otherwordly creature against the perceived strangeness of a woman with otherly desires.

So I suppose in that sense, there's another layer of otherness I'm willing to explore - that of the paranormal creature. It's probably why I like horror and sci-fi so much, because it gives me a chance to look at all of these issues - of difference, of marginalisation etc, without the terror of getting it wrong. I can create my own boundaries, and cross them.

And that's something I'm always willing to do.

My new novella, a steamy hot twin menage, is out now! You can get it here:

http://www.jasminejade.com/p-9858-doubled.aspx

http://www.allromanceebooks.com/product-doubled-672406-144.html

http://www.amazon.com/Doubled-ebook/dp/B006X0JUNO/ref=sr_1_2?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1326478833&sr=1-2

Getting It Right

2012-01-23T05:42:00.001-05:00

by
Kathleen Bradean

I doubt Tolstoy bothered to ask permission to write a female character when he wrote Anna Karenina. J.K Rowlings obviously couldn't have asked the wizarding world if she had permission to write about their teenage boy hero. Ah yes, you might think, but a man can write a convincing female character and fantasy characters don't count. It isn't the same thing. But it is. If Stephen Hawkings can say that women are the greatest mystery (I'm convinced that he was teasing the reporter), and he's arguably the smartest human on the planet right now, then how could a mere writer ever hope to know what a real woman thinks and feels? And Harry Potter is at his core a teenage boy, which J.K. Rowlings is obviously not. Yet no one challenges their right to create those characters.

So why do people get so worked up about straight women writing slash or white writers writing African-American characters? Part of it is economic. The few bookstores that remain have limited shelf space that they're willing to give over to books about minorities. A queer writer writing queer characters is competing for a tiny available space on that bookstore shelf and the last thing they want is to be muscled out by a book written by a straight person. Worst case scenario: every book on that shelf is written by a writer who is "other." Now readers are left with only inauthentic stories. That brings us to the other part of the problem: identity. Who are the other to tell us who we are?

This might change in the future, but so many people I know first found themselves in a book. They all talk about their sense of relief when they found out that there was someone else out there like them. That person wasn't real, but that didn't matter. If there was one in a book, there had to be more in real life. No longer alone, they took their first step toward finding a community. But as long as the story is positive and relatable, does it matter how authentic it is? I can't answer that.

I consider myself more of a "straight" supporter than a member of the queer community. Yes, I spent most of my teenage years trying to kill myself because I hated (and still loathe) being female. But I'm not sure that qualifies me as trans. I've had sexual experiences with women, and am still drawn to women more than men, but I'm not sure if that makes me bisexual. I know many queer folk and recognize the huge gap between my life experiences and theirs, so I'm more comfortable hovering on the edge of the community than trying to claim to be part of it. But that doesn't stop me from writing queer characters. The way I see it, if I get it terribly wrong, my stories deserve to be mocked, ignored, and forgotten.

My current work is set on an alien world. If she lived on this world, my main character would be a Pacific islander. Her home has been colonized by a country that's a mixture of the city/state of Venice and an Asian superpower. While writing it, I was strongly aware of the two dominant western stereotypes of Asian women: perfect submissives and the dragon lady. The dragon lady stereotype bothered me most because my main character is enigmatic, devious, cruel, and at times inscrutable. Ack! But even if she were a white gal from Scranton, she'd still be all those things. Or would she? My character wasn't born that way, no matter what Lady Gaga might say. My character is shaped very much by the world around her. Scranton isn't under colonial rule. Most of Scranton's population probably doesn’t live in tin shack slums.

I hope that being hyper-aware of the stereotype was enough. I didn't try to refute it by having her do things out of character. What I did was make her a complete person with depth beyond the stereotype. When it comes down to it, that's what we truly want from writers. That's what makes a character authentic. A writer's gender, sexuality, and skin color shouldn't matter when it comes to the heart of human matters. But, of course, the writer has to get the world that character inhabits right too. That's where most of the real mistakes happen.

Deja Vu

2012-01-22T04:02:00.002-05:00

By Lisabet Sarai

When I heard Kathleen's proposed topic for this week, “Writing the 'Other'”, I experienced an eerie sense of familiarity. Surely I'd composed an article on this very topic, sometime in the past... Combing through my files, I discovered that indeed, I'd discussed my struggles to create characters distinctly different from my self right here at the Grip, almost three years ago. Of course, that was before Kathleen's tenure here (or any of the other current Oh Get a Grip contributors). How time flies!

Given the volatility of the web, I thought it was likely that none of my esteemed colleagues had read that post, and was tempted simply to recycle it. After all, did I have anything new to say on the subject? I couldn't bring myself to that point, though. I want to keep our readers coming back, and nothing discourages a visitor (at least based on my personal experience) like rehashed content.

So here I am, starting at the same realization as three years ago. Pretty much every one of my characters is similar to me in some ways.

It's not as transparent as it was when I began publishing. Kate O'Neill is my fantasy self – younger, sexier, with the green eyes and red hair I've always wanted. Like me, she's a dancer, software engineer, and born submissive. Raw Silk isn't autobiographical but it borrows a great deal from my own experiences. Anyone who knew the real me would find Kate distinctly familiar.

My more recent heroines are less similar to my real world self. Ruby Jones in Wild About That Thing is a black single mother from Chicago. Not a lot of factual connections there! Nevertheless, I share her determination to be independent of the men who want to take care of her, and her openness to sexual experience. Perhaps the most notable similarity is the way she has internalized the voice of her bossy, critical mother. It has taken me decades to mute the mental harangues of my own mom.

What about male characters, though? Kyle McLaughlin in Necessary Madness is an orphan and outcast, driven to the brink of madness by his devastating visions of the future. Given that I had a fairly happy childhood with two loving parents, and only very occasional brushes with the paranormal, you might consider Kyle a prime example of the “other”. Yet Kyle is my psychic twin. Like him, I know what how it feels to be temporarily insane – the terror, the darkness, the sense that the world is crumbling to dust. I've spent time in the same state psychiatric facility where he is a patient in the novel.

Actually, Kyle's lover Rob Murphy is more of a stretch – a thirty-something, divorced city cop who enjoys sports, pizza and beer. What do Rob and I have in common? Stubbornness and a possibly over-blown sense of morality, to start with. Rob tries to push Kyle away even though he's attracted to the tortured younger man, because of Kyle's fragile emotional state as well the age discrepancy between them. I can imagine myself doing just that – being tempted, but sticking to a determination to do “what's right”.

Possibly the most “other” character to spring from my pen is Rafe Cowell, one of the heroes of my forthcoming scifi novel Quarantine. Unlike me, and most of my characters, Rafe has very little formal education. He's a twenty eight year old black man from the notorious ghettos of Ellay, a gang member and convicted murderer (though in fact he's innocent of that particular crime). He's also a foul-mouthed, homophobic, jingoistic bigot, at least at the start of book. Not much resemblance to his white, middle-class, Jewish, bisexual, bleeding-heart liberal creator!

Look deeper, though, and you'll see the strands of commonality. Despite his rough history, Rafe loves to read – quite a distinction in a society where the majority of the population are functionally illiterate. He's a fundamentally decent guy who's confused by the way reality conflicts with his prejudices. He's also something of a slave to his passions. He strives to be rational but his sympathy and desire for the plague rat Dylan overcome his common sense. His decisions are driven more by emotion than reason.

I can identify. I like to think of myself as a deliberate, careful person who weighs all the factors before making a choice. Sometimes I do in fact behave this way. On the other hand, I set off on with my husband on a three week coast-to-coast voyage across the U.S. when I barely knew him. I quit my job and moved to Thailand for two years with barely any reflection on the possible consequences. I sent off a manuscript to a publisher even though I knew the odds were heavily against it being accepted. Not exactly the behaviors of a rational woman.

I sometimes wish I did a better job creating truly original people in my fiction, but I have to face the fact that when I look into the hearts and minds of any of my characters, I see myself. Perhaps that's inevitable. Certainly, it appears I haven't progressed much in three years. Peer carefully enough at the people in my tales and like me, you'll get a sense of deja vu.

Back in the olden days...

2012-01-20T00:01:00.000-05:00

I am old enough (ahem) to remember research before the internet. Before Google. Before Wikipedia. We did get a taste of life without Wikipedia on Wednesday, a reminder of what it was like before that global encyclopedia of information (most of it accurate...) existed. But even then, there was still the vastness of the web to inform us. In the past decade or so, I have said more times than I can count, "What did I do before the internet?"

Well, I went to the library. A lot.

I remember the days of research in my high school library or the neighborhood public library or the local university library. I remember card catalogs with neatly typed information about each and every book in the collection. Unless someone had torn the card from the catalog. It happened a lot in my high school. Annoying.

I remember discovering books that hadn't been opened in years, the smell of their musty pages, the crinkle of yellowed paper beneath my fingers. I remember the little slip of paper in the back, stamped with the book's due date. I remember marveling at being the first person to check out a book in 10 years. Or 20 years, even.

Libraries still exist, of course. And kids actually still do research the old fashioned way--using books. (Though the card catalog is now a computer in most instances.) I started working in the children's room of the public library in 2001 and in the nearly five years I was there, I helped many students find information in books. More times than I can count, I heard them say, "Why do I have to look it up in a book when I can find it on the internet?"

Why, indeed.

As a writer, editor, avid reader and perpetual student who would love to get another degree (or two), I love research. (Usually.) I also love books. But I have found myself wondering a lot in the past several years if doing research the old fashioned way has become obsolete. The last time I did library research--including checking out books and periodicals--was when I was finishing my Masters program in 2007. All of my writing research since then has been on the internet.

I miss the library, I really do. I miss the experience of discovering old books or stumbling over new topics in the quest for information on something else entirely. I miss the adventure of that kind of research, for lack of a better word. That moment of "Yes!" when I find something that is exactly what I need.

And yet...

Google is god, isn't it? The entire world at my fingertips. Everything. Anything. Wikipedia covers nearly every subject. Snopes covers nearly everything that's ever been rumored, even those things that happened pre-internet. (Spiders in cacti, tiny dogs that turn out to be rats). The Erotica Readers and Writers Association provides information about nearly everything that relates to my genre of choice. WebMD, Baby Center, Publishers Marketplace, Amazon, CNN, BBC-- they're all in my recent history. Research, research, research. Every newspaper, every magazine and yes, nearly every book, can be found on the internet. I don't have to leave home, I don't have to leave my bed. Hell, I don't even need a computer anymore--my smartphone is an instant tool for the research that used to take hours or days.

I still miss the library. It's a part of my history, my identity. I don't think the current generation has the same connection to the library, because libraries are now multi-media centers with banks of computers front and center and books relegated to the back shelves. But the books are still there, growing older and mustier (until they're taken out of circulation), still available, still full of information. Still an adventure waiting to happen.

The Truth Is Out There

2012-01-19T01:00:00.002-05:00

1. When were contractions (don’t, can’t, even ain’t) first used in speech?

2. Is “picnic” really a racist term?

3. Who is buried in Grant’s (or Shakespeare’s, or Mary Magdalene’s) tomb?

4. Where is Queen Street West, and why should we (readers) care?

5. Why do writers of historical erotica so often ignore biological facts (e.g. if a young woman has random, unprotected sex with one male or several, she is likely to become pregnant)?

These are questions that haunt writers as well as readers. Who, what, when, where, why and how?

As a reader, I want to know. As a writer, I need to know. As a teacher, I am expected to know.

Google is my friend – sometimes. At least it provides me with a starting-point in the quest for knowledge.

Re contractions, I still don’t (or do not) have a clear answer for this. I would like to know.

Re “picnic,” I was surprised to learn that some folks believe it is a reference to the grosser-than-fiction but absolutely factual tradition of lynching: torturing and killing someone accused of a crime but not tried in court by the usual methods. Lynch mobs of the 1700s/1800s sometimes enjoyed an outdoor meal after leaving the body of a victim prominently displayed as an example to others. However, I haven’t found any evidence that “picnic” is short for “pick a nigger” or “pickaninny” or any such term.

Re supposedly racist terms, apparently “blackmail” was originally distinguished from “whitemail” in Scotland in a time when cattle-stealing was a popular sport. Payment of rent (“mail” after the bag it was carried in) could be in silver coins (whitemail) or in cattle, particularly Black Angus (blackmail), which was actually under-the-table protection money to the outlaws who would steal more of your cattle if you didn’t sacrifice a few. “Extortion” is the current legal term, and it’s more accurate.

Re who is buried where, it’s hard to know without doing a forensic investigation. In past centuries, graves were often used more than once. In Dan Brown’s books, it’s possible to locate the body of Mary Magdalene, the widow of Christ and source of the “sang real” (holy bloodline). In the real world, this would probably be harder to do.

Queen Street West is in the city of Toronto, and the use of terms like this in fiction and journalism is one of my pet peeves. The population of North America has become increasingly urban for at least two generations (“How Ya Gonna Keep ‘Em Down on the Farm After They’ve Seen Broadway?” Apparently you can’t.) The general migration from small towns to Gotham City is reflected in modern literature in all genres. Stories, novels and articles take place in particular neighbourhoods with particular landmarks that the reader is expected to recognize. The current Comedy of Manners deals with street names as coded references to cultures and lifestyles (“Queen Street West/East,” “Park Avenue,” “The Castro”), usually without footnotes for the ignorati in the wilderness.

On the other hand, few readers in the Western Hemisphere are expected to know how to spell or pronounce “Saskatchewan,” or even recognize the postal abbreviation, SK. I’m just saying.

Biological omissions are just annoying. Dealing with biology at all (which all sex-writers must do) should involve carnal knowledge in the most literal sense.

Sometimes a crucial piece of information will drop into one’s lap without warning, as though the universe at large wanted to encourage us all to be researchers.

Years ago, I met and then married a Nigerian who claimed to have been born in 1944, but he was always strangely vague or momentarily confused about his present age. I was 22 at the time we met (born in 1951), so could he have wanted to appear younger than he really was so as not to seem like a pedophile, relatively speaking? He claimed that all his official ID disappeared during the Nigerian civil war, which seemed possible. Wars destroy all sorts of evidence. On arriving in London, England, he went to a notary public and had a full set of identification papers produced that showed his birth date as August 17, 1944.

After our separation (1978) and divorce (1981), my mother told me that while sorting through some of our laundry, she found an old passport for my then-husband, showing his year of birth as 1935. She kept this information to herself, not wanting to open a can of worms.

After my ex-husband’s death in 2006, his niece found me on-line. And one of the first things she sent me by email was the scanned photo of the family patriarch, Karibi Ikiriko, husband of five wives including my ex-husband’s mother. Notice the chief’s date of death. (Dr. Sagbe Karibi Ikiriko is the brother of my ex and the father of his niece.)

So there it is. Either my late ex-husband was not the son of Chief Karibi Ikiriko, or (more likely) he was born earlier than he claimed.

There is something inexpressibly sad about discovering information long after it could have been most useful, but – to use a current buzz-word – such a discovery provides closure. The answer has been found.

Whether research is a trivial pursuit or something bigger depends on whether one would rather know or not know. Me, I would rather know.
--------------------------------------------------

A Billion Wicked Lopamudras

2012-01-18T00:46:00.003-05:00

Stephanie’s neck was jacked back ferociously as the giant male vampire king in the black wool Giorgio Armani suit and wrap around Rayban sunglasses bared his enormous fangs and she felt a thrill of pure and undiluted lust rocket through her moist loins. For the first time in her life she felt pure mind blowing, incredibly lustfully hot lustfulness for Wrathebone Lebodeux, the Internationally famous opera star, multi media magnate and Nobel prize winning poet with the widest shoulders and narrowest waist and most prominently muscular butt she had ever gazed upon.

Stephanie had a svelte figure and small mink like face with firm round melon shaped breasts, wide hips and a narrow waist, long legs and blonde hair, While wearing a Krizia cream silk blouse and matching Krizia cream tweed skirt, she kicked at Wrathbone with her small delicate feet in d’ Orsay silk satin pumps.

A young man, a beta male dressed in poor clothes with pants cuffs that didn’t reach to the tops of his shoes tried to interfere. “Mr. Wrathbone, I beg you please don’t harm the girl. There’s no reason we can’t all get along and be friends.”

“Away with you!” Wrathbone snapped the man’s spine in a deeply sensitive manner that soaked Stephanie’s panties with animal need and maternal yearning for Wrathbone’s obviously wounded inner child and yet appropriately offended her womanly sensitivities. Moaning with wild desire as her orgasm blasted her senses, she went limp in protest as his hungry animal lustfully dominating claspings groped her deepest being.

He tore her clothes assertively as her aggressively erect nipples jutted helplessly outward to the yearning stars. “I must have you for my queen!” He tore his clothes and his massive, engorged organ entered

Organ entered organ played organ penetrated
Cock penis joint
His massive joint. No.
Wrathbone’s exploding boner. No.
His tumescent penis. No
Shit

I take a swing from my coffee at Barnes and Noble, and push down the lid of my scuffed up IBM Thinkpad to chew on a pencil. Organ. Dick. Prick. Ding. Dong. Prong. Wong. Wang. Weenie. Meatloaf. Johnny. Johnson. His hot throbbing meatloaf. No. Wrathbone’s overweening weenie. No.

Without letting my laptop quite out of my sight I go down to the reference book shelves and skim through the titles holding my head sideways. Not a lot of slang books for this kind of thing. Here’s one by Cosmopolitan, called “The Penis Name Book”. I bring it back to my little table, slouch down and pull my jacket collar up over my face and start thumbing through it.

Meat thermometer.
Tickle Pickle.
Boomerang (boomerang?)
He thrust his burning boomerang into her –

Magic Stick
Lincoln Log
Anaconda
Beaver Cleaver (like it)
Energizer Bunny
One Eyed Monster
Trouser snake.
Popeye.
Pipe Cleaner
Sea Biscuit
Pleasure Pump
Dick-tator
Pinnochio
Dildo Baggers
Beanstalk

I dunno. This isn’t helping, although I do like Beaver Cleaver which conjures up images of sex starved suburban housewives in perms and pearl necklaces. I’ve been studying a book called “A Billion Wicked Thoughts” to try to figure out how to write the perfect sex scene and populate it with the most technically alluring participants formula can calculate. According to the author’s research, there are universal male cues and universal female cues in successful erotic literature which I’m assured are archetypically derived from reproductive evolution.

The ideal fantasy woman would be statuesque, but roughly six inches shorter than the given male, with long legs, wide hips, round ass, full calves, big eyes, small feet, firm tits and upturned erectile nipples. Her disposition should be sexually ravenous though otherwise acquiescent and submissive, easily conquered but not quite servile. Intelligence is optional, if it doesn’t get in the way of more practical things. If upon being undressed, the lady is discovered to possess a hermaphroditic penis some guys have a thing for that too. What ever.

The ideal fantasy male would be a man of world class wealth and social status, with a glamorous creative profession which generates a lot of money while proving his vulnerable character, a hidden side that will only be revealed to the right woman. He should also be a good dancer, maybe with colorful feathers. His penis doesn’t have to be especially big, but involuntarily, and even painfully hard in her presence as a display of his uniquely urgent desire inspired by her alone. He should be physically strong with large muscular buttocks, very broad shoulders and narrow hips and fierce expressive eyes and a chiseled face, poetic and witty, dangerous, competent and confident, endearingly but not habitually an asshole, and clearly the man in charge wherever he goes. Also protective, hence having supernatural powers is a plus.

Sneer if you dare. For those of us in high school who watched the bad boys from auto shop class nail all the hot girls this shit isn’t funny. We know its true.

Why does a Wrathbone appeal to women? Why do such women appeal to men? It might be evolution, but I think because they represent something not available in nature, because such characters are so much less disappointing compared to the mundane realities of dealing with men folk who spend a lot of time on the couch watching sports or come home from dull jobs and we just want to crawl into our shells and not come out for hours. It might also be because they are so disposable in the end, compared to the people who actually live in our space with all that they need and give to us.

In Indian mythology one of the authors of the Rig Veda was a scholar named Sage Agastya. One day he went into a cave and found his ancestors hanging upside down from the ceiling like bats. Of course, he asked them why. One told him that because Agastya had no offspring to carry on the lineage they had no one to perform the correct funeral ceremonies and launch them off into the after life. They needed him to have offspring. So he decided to create an ideal woman for himself, composed of the most desirable parts of domesticated animals, called a “Lopamudra”. The idea of sitting down and custom designing myself an ideal sexual partner and magically bringing her into the world makes my imagination boil, but I have to admit composing her from the selected components of common barnyard animals isn’t the sort of thing that would occur to me. Maybe guys like Agastya need to put the books down for a while and get out in the world and meet some nice girls. But it raises a question that writers run into. How do you construct a fantasy lover that is better than the real thing? The only way is to make them simple, much simpler and easier to get along with than a real woman with all of her emotional, you know, stuff. A kind of Stepford Wife.

Is that what guys want? Is it what women want?

I’ll get back to you when I figure it out.

C. Sanchez-Garcia

Writer's Library

2012-01-16T05:30:00.000-05:00

by Kathleen Bradean

I've been away from my computer, so I had to write this before the topic was posted. Sorry that it's off topic.

On Face Book, I recently commented that I'd be hard pressed to explain my collection of reference books in court. It doesn't matter how innocent you are, if an attorney mentions that you have The Poisoner's Handbook and Deadly Doses within easy reach of your computer, the jury is going to sit up and take notice. If he also mentions The Poison Master, The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes, Wisconsin Death Trip, The Medical Detectives, Johannes Cabal the Necromancer, In Cold Blood, Forensic Detection, twelve issues of Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service, three of Chew, Gorky Park, half a dozen Agatha Christie novels and everything ever written by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, juror number nine is going to tut-tut while making notes on her court-supplied pad of paper and you can be sure she'll bring that up during deliberations if no one else does.

No less incriminating are The Grifters, Rip-Off - Crimes of Deception, Famous First Bubbles, and The Flimflam Man.

I can only imagine the raised eyebrows if they passed around exhibits a) Everything that Creeps, b) The Dark Erotic Visions of John Santerineross, and c) Visions From Within the Mechanism: The Industrial Surrealism of Jeffrey Scott (1019). As art books go, they're a bit, well, disturbing. But the imagery works for me.

If the passed around the more interesting titles on my shelves, The Art of Seduction might disappear into one of those huge purses women use nowadays to tote around half the cosmetics department of Macys, one tissue (slightly used), a mint (which is mating with the fuzz collected at the bottom of her purse), three nickels, and a small refugee camp. Dr Tatiana's Sex Advice for all Creation would probably get pawed half a dozen times between the evidence locker and the court room. For various reasons with would lead to a rant so we'll just leave them at reasons (thank you, Charlotte), none of the pages of 101 Best Sex Scenes Ever Written will be stuck together. In fact, anyone who steals that deserves it.

I have no idea what they'd make of my Russian Fairytales (with the sales slip from the Hermitage used as a bookmark), The Winter Child, Vampires Burials and Death, A Midsummer Night's Fairy Tale, and A Fire in My Heart: Kurdish Tales. I can't imagine not having them on hand for reference. There's a lot of subtext going on in folk tales, and the closer we get to original sources rather than the castrated versions we were given to read when we were kids, the better we understand the people who shared those tales. But let people think it's just whimsical of me. In their Disnified world, things like The Red Shoes don't exist.

The only books on my shelves that a non-writer would consider actual writer's reference books are Self-Editing for Fiction Writers, On Writing by Stephen King, The Browser's Dictionary of Foreign Words and Phrases, The First Five Pages, a thesaurus, A Story is a Promise, Plots, 101 Best Beginnings Ever Written (much better than the sex scenes book), and possibly the autobiography of Mark Twain, volume 1. Although it would be wise to withhold the Mark Twain from them. I think they'd be terribly insulted by his observations on juries, judges, and trials.

My Favorite Kind of Research

2012-01-15T06:51:00.004-05:00

By Lisabet Sarai

When it comes to research, I'm a bit lazy. Occasionally I'll get bitten by the research bug and spend a bunch of money on books – I dropped nearly a hundred bucks on material about Mayan mythology and culture when I was working on Serpent's Kiss – but usually I'm content with relatively superficial visits to Google or Wikipedia to answer my factual questions. It helps that I don't tend to write much historical fiction. My few attempts in that genre have confirmed my expectations that it's a huge amount of work! No, I have to admit, I'll coast if I can, trusting my imagination and my intuitions when a more scrupulous author would be hitting the reference department.

There's one area, though, where I'm willing to do almost unlimited explorations in the interest of verisimilitude – preferably going to the original source – and that's my settings.

Anyone who's read much of my fiction (all three of you!) knows I often set my stories in foreign destinations. That's merely a symptom of the fact that travel is quite my literally passion. I've probably already shared the story of how my husband seduced me with tales of his adventures in Paris, Instanbul and Bali. Sex, love and travel totally intermix in my mind and my memories. So perhaps it's not surprising that I get story ideas when I'm on one of our international jaunts.

My very first published short story, “Glass House”, draws heavily on my experiences in Prague a few years before I wrote it. Even now, a decade later, rereading it brings back the weird, almost absurd beauty of that venerable city, the edgy, offbeat magic that infects its cobblestone streets and stone bridges, soaring cathedrals and basement pubs.

******

“Let us walk down to the river,” he says, bringing me back to the present. “It is nearly sunset. And there is something that I would like to show you.”

We make our way westward toward the Vltava, in companionable silence. I am struck by the fact that, after all, I do trust Lukaš. For all his swaggering and sexual innuendo, he has treated me with respect. I know how easily he could have taken advantage of me; he probably knows it, too. Somehow, though I have told him nothing, he also senses my conflicts. He knows without being told that I am not free.

Clouds stained by the sunset heap high over the water, which flows gray and smooth like molten lead. Vermilion, ocher, coral, azure: ordinary color names do not apply to these flowing, burning shapes.

Against this multicolored background the spires and towers of Prague Castle on its crag across the river are fairytale silhouettes. For a long time, I simply stare, as the forms merge and change in the dying light. When I finally remember Lukaš, I see he is grinning again, as if he could take credit for this spectacular display.

“Is this what you wanted to show me? It is wonderful!”

“Not exactly. Look across the street.”

The first thing I see is a massive rococo building of yellow stucco, dripping with ornamentation and topped by an onion dome. Then I see the building beside it, and stop short.

It is totally fantastic, whimsical, and bizarre. It began as an ordinary, modern office building, with square windows and a flat roof, facing the river across Smetanova Street. But grafted onto this edifice is a second building, all of glass, shaped like an asymmetric egg timer and leaning at a crazy angle against the staid office block. The sunset colors reflect in its multifaceted façade, so that the building seems to shift and move.

*****

Then there's Amsterdam. I've been there several times, but six or seven years ago we spent an entire week in a tiny guesthouse just around the corner from the train station. Something kept drawing me back to the red light district – maybe the fact my previous visits were prior to my rebirth as an erotica author. I found myself fascinated by the women in the narrow, rose-lit windows, wondering what their lives might be like. The experience ultimately produced my BDSM tale “Shades of Red”.

*****

I've been obsessed ever since last night, when Jane and I wandered through the red light district, staring at the women who waited behind the glass in their rose-tinted rooms. We wove our way through clumps of nervous, intoxicated men who were all staring, too. I could smell their sweat, underneath the beer and the pot smoke. I could feel their lust. It infected me.

They barely noticed us, two teenagers in jeans, although the tight denim in my crotch was so wet, I half-expected they'd catch my scent and turn to me. They had eyes only for the bodies displayed in the rows of windows lining the canals.

Some of the women were ripe, blond, Slavic-looking, their breasts exploding out of their lace brassieres. Others were slight, deliberately child-like in Gidget-inspired bikinis or brief plaid kilts. There was a Brazilian beauty with golden skin and coffee-colored eyes; a voluptuous African princess with strings of ruby-hued beads dangling in her ebony cleavage; a serious-looking brunette wearing dark-framed glasses who sat, shapely legs crossed, like a secretary waiting to take dictation.

Some of the women posed. Others danced suggestively, or made lewd gestures at their prospective customers. There were masked women in leather, snapping riding crops against their boots. There were women whose pierced nipples and labia showed clearly through their translucent garments.

Men clustered around the dimly-lit windows like moths hovering by a candle. Mostly they'd just look, inflamed by the mere thought of all this available flesh. Sometimes I'd see a hushed conversation through a half open glass door. Such conversations might end with the man turning away, disappointed, rejected, or perhaps simply unwilling to pay the asking price. Other times the door would open wider, just enough to admit the supplicant. Then it would close and the red velvet curtains would be drawn, hiding the rest of the dance.

Those curtained windows drew me. I couldn't stop imagining what might be going on behind them. I knew it was a straight commercial transaction in most cases, a workman-like blowjob, or a quick, bored fuck. Still, I imagined occasional revelations, epiphanies, ecstasies -- meetings of strangers pre-destined to be lovers, brief but unbearably intense conflagrations of lust, lewd and mystical connections that would live in his memory, or hers, long after the curtains were flung open again.

I'm nineteen. I've had enjoyable but ultimately frustrating sex with two boys my age. I know that, practical as I am, I'm a bit of a romantic. Otherwise, I would not have continued to roam the red-lit alleys long after Jane gave up and went back to the hotel in disgust. As the Oude Kerk chimed two AM, I wandered up Molensteeg and down Monnikenstraat like some horny ghost. The crowds had thinned. The curtains were mostly drawn. Some of open windows were empty. Next to them were the signs: KAMERS TE HUUR. Windows for rent.

*****

I remember those church bells, ringing through the damp, mostly deserted Amsterdam streets. I just had to capture them in a story.

Then of course there's Bangkok, familiar and yet ever strange after two years of living there and many visits since. I was there not long ago. The city's changing – there are more skyscrapers now, and everyone including the beggars has a cell phone – but the description I wrote nearly a decade ago, in “Butterfly” is still pretty accurate. Except for their piercings and tattoos, the bar girls haven't changed much...

*****

One of my mates, Charlie, knew the city well. He checked us into a comfortable, ridiculously cheap hotel in the middle of the tourist district. Bewildered and dazzled, I followed him along sidewalks crammed with vendors hawking watches, tee shirts and toys, trying to avoid tripping on the broken pavement.

Beggars with shriveled limbs extended their bowls in silent entreaty. Blond, ragged-haired tourists in shorts and sandals, slender Thai women in tight jeans and silk blouses, monks draped in saffron, policemen standing stiffly at corners, their revolvers prominently displayed: it seemed that the whole of the Bangkok was here on this one street. Meanwhile, an endless line of vehicles crawled by us: tint-windowed Mercedes, sooty trucks, and rickety buses with people hanging out the doors. The air was heavy with diesel fumes, frying garlic, and jasmine. We dined at a quiet restaurant on a side lane, where the young waitress giggled every time we spoke to her. Then Charlie took me off to see what he called "the real Bangkok" - the go-go bars and sex clubs.

We sauntered into the "entertainment plaza". Three stories of indoor bars and clubs surrounded a central court, which was crowded with open-air bars and stalls selling skewers of grilled chicken, fresh fruit, and fried locusts. As we walked along the second-level balcony, bikini-clad girls tried to lure us inside their establishments.

<"Come inside," they crooned. "One beer fifty baht. No cover charge." Briefly, the woman would hold back the dark cloth draping the door, offering a tantalizing glimpse of flickering lights and bare flesh. "Take a look, no charge, come inside."

The more energetic of these young marketeers would grab us by the hand, and laughing the whole while, try to pull us in. It was all good-natured, though. We'd extricate ourselves from her strong fingers and thank her. "Not now," we'd say. "Maybe later."

"Why not now?" she'd say, stamping her foot in mock anger. "Don't you like me?"

*****

I've been lots of places I haven't written yet. There are stories inside me set in Instanbul, in Tokyo, in Lisbon. I'm sure they'll find their way out eventually. Of course, sometimes I'll want to set one of my tales somewhere I haven't traveled (at least not yet). Then I do have to do some research – but it's a pleasure.

A few months ago I wrote a short story that takes place in Varanasi (Benares), India. My one trip to India didn't take me anywhere near that ancient, sacred center. I spent delightful hours pouring over websites, gazing at maps, trying to grasp a sense of the place. I don't know if I succeeded (I haven't heard yet whether the tale has been accepted), but I'll tell you one thing: I've added the place to my (all too long) travel wish list!

Resolutions

2012-01-14T00:08:00.000-05:00

I need to say, before I write anything on the topic of resolutions, it’s an absolute pleasure to be a guest blogger here at OGAG. I have fond memories of my time writing with you folk and there are not many days go past when I don’t think about you all. Perhaps I should be making a resolution to stay in touch?

On another blog, on the last day of last year, I made a few small promises for 2012.

I’m going to carry on being brilliant.

I’m going to carry on being wonderful.

I’m going to write more poetry.

They weren’t the most earth-shattering resolutions I’ve ever made but I intend to abide by these.

The first two should be easy. I should be able to carry on being brilliant and wonderful without any major problems. I don’t need to quit smoking as I gave that up back in 2010. I don’t have any other vices in large enough quantities that they merit the onerous weight of a New Year resolution.

But I do want to write more poetry. Over the past few years I’ve developed a growing interest in reading, writing and performing poetry. It’s absorbing.
I suppose I’ve always been interested in reading poetry. It’s one of those things we learn when we begin to appreciate the musical cadence of a nursery rhyme that’s sung to us from the lips of a parent or protector.

Similarly, writing poetry has always entertained me. It takes a different set of skills for writing a poem than is needed to write an essay, an article, a short story or a novel. As a writer, I find it’s exciting to use words in such a different way. I’m still using the same computer and the same fingers to type the same words. But I’m putting those words together in such a different way it’s completely unlike anything else I’ve produced.

Performing poetry is another aspect to the delivery of writing that demands a whole new set of skills. When I chose a word for a line of poetry, I find myself shaping it with my mouth, rather than simply thinking it as a thought. I might change the word if it doesn’t feel right as I’m speaking my way through the poem. I might add a line just because one word lends itself to another.
The whole process is exhilarating and fun and it’s presenting me with new and exciting challenges on a daily basis.

One of those challenges is that readers and poetry audiences find it very difficult to disassociate themselves from the poet and the content of the poem. Consequently, I wrote this poem to address that issue.

I Am Not the Poem

By Ashley Lister

Perhaps the biggest problem with my poems
A problem plaguing all of poetry
Regardless of what my poem is about
You think the content is all about me.

So if I write about cross-dressing,
Half of you are second-guessing
How I’m scoping out cheap deals,
On suzzie belts or patent heels
And all of you suppress your snickers,
As you picture me in frilly knickers
Not one of you cites inspiration.
Or says: that’s from his imagination.
And any word I care to chant,
adds further proof I’m deviant.
And I have to say I’m wounded: hurt.
You all think I’m just a pervert.

Or if I dare to broach a subject,
That applies to many men
If I talk about small winkies:
You think the problem’s mine (again).

You’re sitting there with a smug grin.
Convinced my parts are short and thin
And gloating in your own smug thrall.
Assured my bits are wee and small
And whispering that in a pinch.
I’d barely measure a full inch.
And once again I have to say,
You’re only hearing poetry
The difference should be crystal clear:
‘tween who I am and what you hear.

How can I drive this message home?
I am the poet: I’m not the poem

And so I share a risqué rhyme,
about a man whose bedroom time
Is hurried to a point that’s swift
And causes him marital rift
And plunges him to the darkest depths
Of the cruellest emasculation.
You place a hand across your smile:
Let’s laugh at premature ejaculation.
And you turn to me, your grin a flicker
And you joke: the punchline could come quicker
And someone, acting like a tool,
Asks about the three minute rule.

And I have to say:
Writing poems is my profession
There’s not a word that’s self-confession.
Please remember that as I say goodnight
From me: the tiny-togered swift transvestite.

Ashley Lister

Better Late Than Never

2012-01-13T00:01:00.005-05:00

As I write this, I am twelve days past due to turn in my latest anthology. If you know anything about me, you should know I have a work ethic that does not include missing deadlines. This is only the second time I've been late submitting a book-- the other time, I was 2 days late because the deadline fell on a weekend. This time, my excuses are holidays and illness, but the truth is that this book has been a challenge since the beginning. I received very few submissions and extended the deadline twice. Many of the stories I received were too similar, too dark or simply didn't fit the guidelines. I begged and pleaded for more stories. I was promised stories that I received long after any reasonable hope I would make my deadline-- and I never received a few stories I was promised from authors who had never let me down before. Ultimately, though, it was my responsibility to wrangle this book into shape by the January 1 deadline and I failed. I spent a number of days beating myself up over it up until Christmas and then I got sick and decided I wasn't going to spend the week between Christmas and New Year's driving myself into the ground physically or missing out on the holiday fun with my family and friends. I asked for, and got, an extension. The book is nearly done, I'm pleased with how it's shaping up and I'm ready to move on to a new project.

What does this have to do with resolutions, you ask? Everything.

Every year, I make resolutions (or goals or a To Do list or whatever you want to call it) and I blog about it--twice. I put my goals down at the beginning of the year and then I reevaluate them at the end of the year to measure how successful (or not) I was. For awhile, my resolutions were based on the year-- 7 in 2007, 8 in 2008. That started to become unwieldy so I stopped. My resolutions have ranged from the very specific (finish my Masters degree, finish my NaNoWriMo novel, etc.) to the vague (do something important, go on a trip, etc.). I didn't make any resolutions for 2011 because on December 30, 2010 I found out I was pregnant with my second baby and it seemed unwise to put anything in writing other than "survive." So I vowed to "roll with the punches" (I believe that was even the title of my resolution blog post) and I did. Boy, did I roll with the punches. And 2011 turned out to be a mostly amazing (if exhausting) year.

I was a week in 2012 before I realized that, despite talking about it, I hadn't made any resolutions. I blame the holidays, illness and the Book That Would Not Be Finished for my forgetfulness. (You could probably add babies and lack of sleep to my list of excuses, if you like.) And then I saw that this week's topic on OGG was "resolutions" and my first thought was, "Oh shit, I'd better think of something."

But I haven't really thought of anything.

Oh sure, I could fall back on some old favorites. "Learn something new." "Take care of my physical and emotional well-being." "Write more." All resolutions I have made numerous times. All I have succeeded at to varying degrees. All pretty damned boring, right?

I could adopt a motto or mantra for the new year, like some people I know. 2012 is Shanna Germain's Year of Yes, for instance. That's a good one. I think I resolved to say "yes" to more things a few years back. I'm not sure I did. Some things, and some people, deserve a resounding, "NO!" after all. I'd love a new tagline or theme song or cover picture or whatever the newest thingy is to convey a change in image or attitude. But I probably should've been working on that for the past few months. Maybe I should start now for 2013, huh?

I've been thinking about author branding a lot in the last few months and how my "brand" is essentially who I really am-- pretty boring again, right? Real name, real life. This is me, for better or worse. But I need outside help with that branding thing, otherwise I'll be inviting y'all over to go through my underwear drawer and it won't be nearly as sexy a chore as it should be for an erotica writer. I could resolve to be... more what other people think I am. That could be good or bad. Some people think I'm fabulous and talented and inspiring and beautiful (and they receive a monthly stipend from me for announcing these thoughts in various venues) and some people think I'm a cold-hearted bitch or, at the very least, not a very nice person. I am probably both, at times. But only when it's deserved, I promise.

If you're waiting for some great revelation of my resolutions, I'm afraid you're going to be horribly disappointed. For one thing, I have 15 minutes before I need to be home and now my mind has drifted away from work (and this is work, no matter how much I enjoy it) and is on its way home to my babies. For another thing, if I learned anything in 2010, otherwise known as the Hardest Year of My Life, it's that you can't possibly know what the universe has in store for you. One year is hell, the next is heaven. Well, not entirely true. Even in the midst of hell there are moments of pure joy and happiness and even while basking in the glow of happiness and success there are difficult days and experiences that make you weep. Life is like that.

And here we are midway through January 2012 and I've already dealt with a couple of major challenges and had some good days and some rough days and been depressed and happy and exhausted and at peace. And I imagine the rest of the year will follow suit. I am hoping it will be as good a year overall as 2011. I am hoping it won't be as physically draining and emotionally difficult as 2010. But these are hopes, not resolutions. I need resolutions since the theme is resolutions!

So... my resolutions: To write. To laugh. To honor all of my commitments and say yes to as many things as I possibly can-- but not be afraid to say "NO!" if it's in my best interest mentally, emotionally and physically. To balance fun and work, but not feel guilty for leaning more toward fun. (Which isn't so hard, since I do love 95% of my work.) To take a few trips. To make a few new friends. To be happy, but most importantly to remember what happy feels like when I'm feeling sad, angry, hurt, lonely, depressed or misunderstood. To roll with the punches, even the sneaky, unexpected, where-the-hell-did-that-come-from punches. To be kind--to children and animals and strangers and those who don't necessarily deserve my kindness... and to myself.

Hopefully sometime before my 45th birthday in May, I will come up with some tangible goals to see me through the second half of my 40s. Until then, Happy New Year! Make the most of it, won't you? I resolve that I will.

The Alternative Future Me

2012-01-12T01:00:00.002-05:00

OMG. I am an old woman already. How did that happen?

I’m not really complaining. The problem is not how long I’ve lived but how little I’ve accomplished along the way. In my youth, I expected to be steeped in life-wisdom, knowledge & skills by my current age. How shocking that I’m still myself, just more faded on the outside.

My previous resolutions are still not resolved.

Here are the goals I was supposed to have reached years ago:

- Fluency in Spanish and French as well as English, possibly a working knowledge of some other language (e.g. the Kalabari dialect of the Ijaw language, as spoken in the Niger Delta by my late ex-husband’s relatives).

What I’ve accomplished: I wrote down about a dozen Kalabari words (written phonetically) while living with the late ex-husband. Eventually, I passed that list to my adult daughter. That’s it.

When anyone asks me: Habla(s) espanol?

I answer: Hablo un poco, y comprendo un poco mas. Not impressive. I never hang out in Spanish-speaking watering holes to discuss Latin American Magic Realist literature in Spanish with serious fans.

Re French: I can read street signs in Quebec and bilingual labels on groceries. “Vente” means sale (useful to know for such pursuits as shoe-shopping). “Arret” means stop (very useful to know to avoid arrest in the English sense). “Congele” means frozen (okay, that’s not usually on any street sign in Canada – it would be too obvious in winter – but it appears on all frozen food packages).

On days like today, I can hum a kind of French-Canadian national anthem: “Mon pays, c’est ne pas un pays; c’est l’hiver.” (My country is not a country, it is winter. To be sung to the tune of “I’m a Star in New York, I’m a Star in L.A.” Melody & French words by Gilles Vigneault.)

Comment je ne parle pas comme il faut? Because there are only 24 hours in a day, & I probably waste most of them.

More goals left over from my hopeful past:

- A Ph.D. in English and possibly a Post-Doc. In real life, I never wrote a monster thesis or gained a “terminal degree” (i.e. Ph.D., sometimes granted after death). I never applied to a university with a Ph.D. program, since that would involve moving away. For several reasons, that never seemed feasible.

- At least one critically-acclaimed novel. (I gave myself permission not to write a bestseller, just a book admired by the most critical critics.) No sign of that either.

- At least one book of lit-crit or reference work (my concordance on the work of Ntozake Shange which remains a work-in-progress years after various publishers turned me down) or raunchy composition handbook (still just an idea and a few grammar exercises). No, no and no.

- Artwork displayed in an exhibit or a publication. Never happened. To see my artwork, you have to know me personally and look at my old drawings. Or come to my class and watch me make cartoon images on a blackboard to illustrate grammatical concepts or metaphors in poetry.

- Proficiency in a musical instrument. No. I used to make godawful sounds on a violin. Be glad I stopped.

- Proficiency in ballroom dancing. No. I’ve been told I have rhythm and an ability to follow steps – after getting them wrong a few times. I never learned an award-winning routine.

- A professional (i.e. paid, even if spotty) acting career. Ha.

At this rate, it’s clear that I have to live to be about 150 to reach all my goals.

I can imagine doing all these things, of course, and becoming the improved new Jean, Model 400, or some such.

I could make resolutions. I could. That would be a minor accomplishment. Then I could look at my list at the end of each year and feel like a huge failure.

Here is what I did last year: Having read up on the harmful effects of caffeine, I broke my addiction to coffee by weaning myself off it, one cup at a time. That doesn’t mean I never drink the stuff, it just means I no longer feel the need to drink it every day. I can go for a week or two without a drop of coffee in my system.

Maybe that’s how these things work: drop by drop, cup by cup. Sigh. I need to reread my entry-level Spanish textbook before my trip to Cuba in February. Not that I’ll understand much Spanish spoken at Cuban speed. With patience & amusement, someone there might understand me.

As they say, life is what happens when you were planning something else. Maybe that's the life-wisdom I've gained in all the detours away from my goals.

Here’s hoping I don't lose all my resolve along the way.
--------------

From a Bed, Late at Night

2012-01-11T00:13:00.000-05:00

Green thoughts sleep furiously.

Sleepy red thoughts exfoliate drowsily.

Glassy notes drown helplessly.

Mossy bells cascade lazily in a carillon in the stone tower, and the girl with the silver hair listens with her face uplifted.

I reach over to the nightstand and pick up the little plastic pencil sharpener, a good one I bought in an art store and give my wooden Skilcraft No. 1, a rare and sensuous instrument, a twist or two and turn back to my yellow pad. The connecting bathroom door is open and I can hear my wife starting up her shower in there. I’ve already kicked our cat Ronnie out of bed and the day is winding down.

Adjective then Noun then Verb then Adverb

Ugly babies play innocently.

Adverb then Verb then Adjective then Noun then Verb then Adverb.

Swiftly brillig the slithy toves ejaculated furiously.

Studying a sentence form works better when the words are nonsense and don’t actually mean anything. Then its pure form and sound. Content is profoundly affected by form and structure, like watching women walk by. I'm trying to teach my ears how to read. I haven’t learned how to hear iambic meter but I’m always messing with it, trying to get the ear. A SENtence IS a SINGle CRY. Pffhh. Writing with a wooden pencil feels for me what playing an acoustic guitar must feel like for a musician. Right now I'm just practicing my scales.

I love words. I’ve always loved words, but recently I’ve begun really working with words, which I think is one of the advanced steps in a writer's apprenticeship. I’ve begun to discover what I think of as “cadence”, which really isn’t the right word, but it’s the word that comes to mind.

Green tongues loll furiously. Hell, no.

I’m a little better than I used to be, which is all you can hope for. I find as I work my way up the basic elements of story craft there always seems to be another level I didn’t realize was there before. As soon as I think I know something I rediscover my colossal ignorance. One of the pleasures of getting older is that ignorance isn’t as threatening as it is when you’re a young person. Ignorance loses its shame. In the things I’m passionate about ignorance becomes a source of excitement.

Ignorance thrives thrillingly.

I have this little pocket planner notebook laying on the bed and I’m thinking, should I make a resolution? Should I resolve to be a better writer? It seems silly somehow, like resolving to grow another toe, or resolving to be taller. You fix what you can fix. I can resolve to study more. I can resolve to do more crits for people, because crits help me learn. I can do that. I can’t make myself a better writer. All I can do is put in my time at the keyboard.

My hand fumbles for the pencil sharpener and it drops off and rolls out of sight. Shit. I put down the yellow pad and throw aside the covers. In the bathroom I can hear my wife in there showering, and it sounds like she’s singing something soft and low.

As I throw my legs over the bed and try to stand, thunderclaps of pain shoot up my thighs. This is good pain, it even feels good a little bit which makes me wonder if this is what athletes and maybe sexual masochists see in pain. It’s so closely related to pleasure that sometimes they cross notes.

The pain came from doing barbell squats yesterday in my back yard. That and yoga stretching. I didn’t resolve to be more fit. Its just that I’ve been sitting around so much that my body began to cry. My body begged to be stretched, to lift, to push, to run, to strain at its limits. It needs to be exactly what it is, muscle and bone and nerve, as a horse needs to run and a bird needs to fly. The spirit wants to be spirit. The flesh wants to be flesh.

The shower goes on. My wife is standing naked under falling water while I crawl on my knees searching for my lost pencil sharpener. Water is falling on her shoulders and soap is moving down the modest swell of her familiar breasts.

The pencil sharpener is under the nightstand and I snatch it up and fall backwards into bed, because it hurts to hold my legs straight. I suppose I should get some aspirin, but the pain is interesting. I should be trying to figure out how to describe it, taking notes or something. The room is filled with the sound of her showering, like rain. I’m imagining her with the sudsy water running down her back and pooling between the cheeks of her ass.

One of the great discoveries of my life was after shave cologne. It represented a major shift in consciousness.

I personally never cared how I smell. Men generally never do. We have to learn stuff like this. We’re not born with that knowledge like bugs and animals, which if they could speak would have told me, the way you smell isn’t supposed to be for you, bub. It’s for getting women. It’s for mating. My wife kept buying me after shave which I simply used to kill the burn of the razor after shaving. Then I noticed I got lucky in bed after splashing some on at the end of the day.

And meanwhile that shower in there goes on and on.

Along with aftershave, another fairly recent discovery for me is that a woman likes to be seduced. To be romanced and eased along. It’s not like they don’t know what you’re doing. Women are the gatekeepers of paradise and they see you coming way before you see them jingling the key.

And still that shower in the next room goes on and on. What if . . . ?

The incantation each fiction writer conjures by. What if?

I’m feeling very aroused right now. It’s not a question of what I’ll do next, because I don’t even know. The thrill is . . .that I don’t know. The incantation each reader conjures by – “And then what happened??” What can happen next if I drop my underwear and go in there and . . . and . . . maybe she’s tired.

What if she’s not?

That has changed for me too. Sex isn’t about getting it in and getting it across the goal post anymore. It’s the essence of this tormented feeling I have right now. Its what makes male birds fluff out their plumage and do silly dances. Its what makes males lions fight, and stags lock horns. It’s this feeling I have right now.

Should I do it? Pull aside the shower curtain, step in and babble something apologetic about washing her back, when we both know the real reason I’m there is sticking up stiffly in front of me?

Should I do it?

The real stuff, where the soul lives, you can’t make resolutions for. You just can’t.

I resolve to be a better writer. No. You will not.

You will never resolve be a better writer, because you can’t. You will observe humanity and try to make your craft a little truer each time if you can and shovel shit with your keyboard until it smells better.

I resolve to become strong and healthy. No. You will not.

Because your body has a lot to say about that. That’s why your legs feel like hell right now. But you can care for your body, the wife of your spirit and allow it to express its nature through pleasure and toil and appetite.

I resolve to be a better lover. No. You will not.

You will love. Or not. That you will do. And you will be kind, no matter what.

I sit here in bed with my ridiculous pencil in my hand and my hopeful hard on and listen to that shower and my pudgy, sore, middle aged body is saying yes, get in there cowboy and saddle up before she turns the water off. Catch the moment before it gets away. Birds want to fly. Isn’t that right? And what do you want, cowboy?

I put down the pencil and the legal pad. I throw aside the blanket and look down at my tent poled underwear with its tiny little wet spot of anticipation and that exquisite fear, that feeling of adolescent mystery is there squeezing my balls. Is this what women feel when they see the candles on the dinner table after a long day? How do I capture that feeling in words? I’m still so goddamn ignorant.

And meanwhile her shower goes on and on.

C. Sanchez-Garcia

Aim Low

2012-01-10T19:20:00.004-05:00

I never make resolutions. I can't, because inevitably it will mean ending this year on a low note. December 31st will roll around and I'll look down at the things I promised myself, only to find I haven't accomplished a single one of them. I didn't crash a blimp into another blimp. I haven't invented the world's first sex-robot, with a face like Armie Hammer's and a body like...well...Armie Hammer's. In fact I was really just intending to grab Armie Hammer and stuff him in a bin bag, then haul him back home to the sex den I've made for him under the stairs.

But on December 31st I won't have achieved that, either. And then I'll just have to kick my own ass, and no one wants that. Last time they found my leg in a tree, and I had to be put together with the spare parts I had left over from my failed Armie Hammer sex-robot plan. Now I have one big leg, one tiny one, and a third enormous one that I'm not quite sure what to do with.

Am I supposed to use it in some sort of...tripod type configuration? And when it goes all droopy, do I just wind it up and store it in his conveniently gigantic belly button?

Thought so. But enough thinly veiled references to Armie Hammer's immense tripod penis! Onto resolutions so insane that anyone could achieve them, just by existing:

1. I will not fail to definitely maybe not sort of eat less chocolate. Yeah, take that December 31st me. Your chances of deciphering that sentence are slim, to none.

2. I might do that thing one time.

3. Continue to sometimes wear clothes.

4. Answer the telephone and talk to the person who has also used a telephone.

5. Agree with something - or if the thing is really bad, then maybe disagree with it.

6. Want something because of reasons.*

And there is my list of totally possible resolutions.

*I think this comes from a Kate Beaton comic, so I'm not sure I can claim it as one of my own resolutions. It's really more this guy's resolution:

But then, that guy is ORSUM. I'm thinking of subscribing to his newsletter. Wanting things because of reasons! HOW did I never think of that before? I intend to want things for reasons all the time, from now on.

Resolved

2012-01-09T05:21:00.001-05:00

By Kathleen Bradean

I don't do New Year's resolutions because if I feel a need to change something, I just do it when the mood strikes. However, since my post last week was a bit of a downer, I'll try to be more positive. Something did change at the beginning of this year, just last night actually. For the first time in months, I wrote something.

I've always had intermittent periods when I haven't written anything. They used to make me panic. Would I ever be able to write again? Was my creativity gone forever? Eventually, the answer (to will I ever be able to write again) is yes, so I've learned to face those months with acceptance and patience.

The good thing about not writing is that I have plenty of time to read. I read a blog not long ago that said something along the lines of 'listening to music doesn't mean you can write music any more than reading makes you a writer,' and while I understand the sentiment behind that, I also think that reading helps writers. Besides, I like reading. I love stories. I love stories more than beautiful language and turns of phrases, meaning that if the prose reads like poetry but nothing happens, I'll chuck the book across the room and pick up something with interesting characters doing interesting things even if the language isn't a rare and beautiful piece of delicate craftsmanship. Any writer that in love with his/her own words should be allowed to carry on the affair without me peaking through their window. However, give me a ripping yarn and you'll hold my soul in your hands until the last page. Sometimes, even longer. Like Sleeping Beauty, sometimes I stay under the enchantment for years.

So I guess my resolution is to pay back the favor and tell someone a damn fine tale. If I do it right, I'll weave a spell of words around them that transports them into another world. I'll make them ache to return to my world when they have to leave it for real world commitments. That's a daunting challenge to slap my own face with.

~~~

My reading list these past few months:
The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern (absolutely wonderful)
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John le Carre (there's a reason he still sells)
The Honorable Schoolboy by John le Carre
Jonathan Strange and Mr Norell by Susanna Clark (did I really enjoy this book? undecided)
Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs (meh)
True Grit by Charles Portis (no wonder why they keep making this into movies)
The Mermaids Singing by Val McDermid (early work by a master of the mystery craft)
As She Climbed Across the Table by Jonathan Lethem (I liked the writing more than the story)
The Forever War by Joe Haldeman
Dracula by Bram Stoker (sorry, Judja)
Boneshaker by Cherie Priest (liked)
The Osiris Ritual by George Mann (meh)
The Affinity Bridge by George Mann (why am I still reading his work?)
The Immorality Engine by George Mann (I'm done with this writer by now)
St Lucy's Home for Girls Raised By Wolves by Karen Russell (hmmm)
The Poison Master by Liz Williams (liked)
Leviathan by Scott Westerfield (liked)
Crocodile on the Sandbank Elizabeth Peters (I've read this at least ten times)
Chew by John Layman (issues 1- 3. I just realized that 4 was out and ordered it)
The Adventures of Sherlock Homes by Arthur Conan Doyle

(these are only the ones I finished, and don't include books I read for reviews)

Inner Space

2012-01-08T04:02:00.001-05:00

By Lisabet Sarai

When New Year's comes rolling around once again, and every blogger begins to ponder his or her resolutions, I try to ignore the trend. For one thing, why should anyone else care about my goals or commitments for the year ahead? For another, I don't really like the concept or the timing. If I'm focused on self-improvement, what's so special about January first? I'll be making decisions, working on adjusting my life objectives, all year long. It's not as though the New Year offers me the only chance to reflect on my status and my progress.

Still, Garce has invited all of the Grippers to address the issue of resolutions, and I don't want to be a spoil sport. So here's my one and only resolution:

During 2012, I resolve to maintain the quality of my inner space.

When I look back over the past year, I remember a lot of tension. I've been feeling pressured by the combination of job demands, relationship demands and the demands of my writing career (such as it is). Even the Grip contributed to that uncomfortable sense that I'd never be able to satisfy all my commitments. I love this blog, but lately I've been feeling as though it's just one more deadline hanging over me, week after week. To an alarming degree, the joy has melted away.

Now it's true that I've been busy in 2011. My course load has been double the usual. I've had a variety of special projects and proposals to address. I'm mentoring several graduate students by email, on top of supervising my own students' research.

I've been blogging here once a week, at Beyond Romance at least three times a week (plus posting articles by my many guests), and producing at least two or three guest posts for other blogs each month. I finished a novel and several short stories, and just put together a new collection that will be out in a few days. And now I have a new commitment: starting in February, I'll be writing a monthly column in the Author Resources section of the Erotica Readers & Writers Association, called "The Erotogeek's Guide for Technologically Challenged Authors". In fact, I have to work on my first installment today...

I find myself getting panicky even as I list all these tasks (and think about the many other more ephemeral items on my to-do list which I haven't bothered to mention - correspondence, blogs to check, quizzes to grade, etc.). When I'm stressed like this, I take it out on the people around me, most notably my husband. And yes, I do think our relationship has suffered over the past year because I've been so focused on all the tasks I have to complete. I've been unwilling to take time off just for fun - I can't forget all the stuff that will be waiting for me when we get back.

Now, you might be thinking, "Well, she should make a resolution to cut back on her commitments." But honestly, that's not the problem. Kristina (just to pick a random person!) has far more commitments than I do. On top of writing, editing, promoting, blogging, and making a living, she has to care for two young children. Aside from my highly capable husband, the only person I have to take care of is myself.

No, the real problem is my inner space. It's not what I'm doing or not doing. It's how I'm looking at things, and how I'm allowing myself to react.

I recently had a reminder of a truth that I've known for a long time. Everything comes from inside. My physical and emotional state depend primarily on how I'm viewing the world.

I might not be happy with my behavior. For instance, I feel guilty for slacking off on exercise, and for drinking too much. But I'm not going to change those things by resolutions. That will just increase the overall level of stress. On the contrary, I have to start work inside. I have to feel healthy and strong - then I can demonstrate those qualities in the physical world. I need to remind myself that I have all the intelligence, energy and creativity I need to follow through with the tasks I've chosen.

And yes, I need to recollect that I did choose this life - and for the most part I love it. Nobody held a gun to my head and said "You're going to take over management of the Oh Get A Grip blog, or else." I agreed to accept the extra course load, the students, the projects, because I felt I could learn something and make a contribution. Heck, I volunteered to do the ERWA column, knowing that it would be fun as well as an opportunity to get my name out in cyberspace.

In 2012 I vow that I'll try to live up to my core philosophy, namely, that our minds create the reality we experience. I believe that each of us has at our core a well of Spirit - love, compassion, joy, intelligence, creativity. The secret to happiness is letting that inner light shine. When we do, the outside world, no matter dark, will brighten.

This year, I resolve to keep the windows of my soul clean, and to allow what's inside out.

Cannot Predict Now

2012-01-07T10:26:00.002-05:00

by Shanna Germain

Long before this year began, I already knew what I wanted it to be. I wanted it to be my year of “yes.” I even did a blog post about it in December. How I was turning 40 this year. How I had done the divorce and the rebound and the internal exploration. How I wanted to start saying yes to the good things, the important things, the scary things. And start saying no to the obligations, the negatives, the non-joys. I’d looked into the crystal ball of my brain, and I knew what I wanted and how I was going to get it.

I’m like that. A planner. No Magic 8 Balls. No Ouija boards. No fortune cookie futures.

I had a second post started, all about the goals I’d set for this year. Finish my trilogy. Teach more. Do more writers’ events. Write x number of stories for x number of anthologies. Submit to a specific list of publications. I had it all laid out in numbers and checklists and plans.

But before I could finish and publish that goal post, something happened.

My atoms got rearranged. Literally. Okay, maybe not literally but it certainly felt like it. Sometime between Christmas and January 1st, something happened that changed me so profoundly I have no words for it. Some, I suppose, might call it a miracle. Being a woman of science, I would call it the moment when every cell in my body died and was born again. When my skin replaced itself on a fast track. When the me I’d become ended and the me I was supposed to be began again.

There are lots of ways that can happen to a person. A near-death experience. A car accident. Giving birth. Finding love. Finding lust. Occasionally, smaller catalysts can jump start an internal rearranging.

But this particular catalyst? For me, this one is big. This one is me breaking open and some greater force putting me back together the way that I’m supposed to be.

I should say right here: I don’t believe in fate. I don’t believe in soul mates. I don’t believe in love at first sight. I don’t believe in the powers that be.

I do believe in magic.

All this time I thought I didn’t. All this time I was writing about magic and lust and love and I was thinking, “I would really like to believe in these things.” And I was thinking, “At least I’m making them real in fiction.”

That second post is sitting there in my draft folder. Unpublished. It will never be published because it’s no longer true. Not only are the goals no longer true, but the sentiment behind them isn’t either.

For the first time, I don’t think I know what the future will bring. I can shake my Magic 8 Ball ten times a day and believe every answer I’m given. I can ask the Ouija board a question and then walk away before I’ve gotten a response. I can share my fortune and my cookies with the world and know that tomorrow it will all change anyway. And I’m okay with that.

This is all I know about tomorrow: Reply hazy, try again.

And I will.

Be Careful What You Wish For, You Might Have to Work to Get It

2012-01-06T00:01:00.005-05:00

by Kristina Wright

I love making predictions. I'm usually wrong, but sometimes I'm right. It really depends on what I'm predicting. I'm generally an optimist, so I tend to lean toward positive "everything will work out" predictions. Is that a prediction at all or just wishful thinking? is there a difference? Maybe a prediction is nothing more than a wish. Which does make me wonder about all the end of times predictions, as Garce wrote about. Why would anyone wish for the end of the world?

I think my interest in predicting my own future comes from having to write my own obituary for a high school psychology class. I was a smartass gifted student and didn't particularly like our pompous teacher (who modeled himself after Sydney Poitier in To Sir, With Love--a movie he made us watch) so I didn't take the assignment too seriously. I dashed off a couple of lines and turned it in--and got a C-. Not my first in my high school career, but certainly unexpected for a busy work assignment. There was more red ink on the page from his pen then there were words in my obituary. The gist of the justification for the grade was that I hadn't put any thought into the assignment. Which I hadn't. Who wants to think about their own death? But he made a comment to me when I complained about my grade that caught me up short. "If you put this little thought into your future, what will you have to look back on?"

It wasn't as if I had no ambitions at seventeen. I was college-bound and knew I wanted to be a writer. But beyond that... yeah, it was all pretty vague. I mean, who knows what they want to do with their entire life when they're seventeen? In retrospect, I think he was a little hard on me because I had more direction than most kids I knew, as well as having always known that I wanted to be a writer. I think he wanted me to imagine a bigger world and fuller life for myself. He offered me the opportunity to rewrite my obituary for a better grade, but with a solid A in the class already and a busy extracurricular life, I declined. But I did not forget the assignment or his comments. Since high school, I've spent a lot of time contemplating questions like, "Will this matter in a year?" "Where do I want to be by the time I'm 25, 40, 65?" and "What is really important to me?" They're difficult questions to answer because the landscape of my life has changed so much and whatever path I have set out on has often led to me meandering down unmarked side paths-- amazing, wild, wonderful side paths-- that have put me somewhere else entirely from where I thought I was going to end up.

About fifteen years ago, I succumbed to the tradition of writing a newsletter to include with my holiday cards. You know the type-- the ones that rave about all the wonderful things that have happened to the family. I didn't keep it up for long (I prefer to write personal notes in my cards, even if it takes forever), but for a few years I amused myself by writing the following year's newsletter before anything had happened. Then when the holidays rolled around, I would pull out the letter and read what I had "predicted" for the year and make the changes accordingly. It was fun to consider the year in advance that way and also interesting to see whether what I'd written had "come true." Surprisingly, a lot of it did.

Reading a letter written by me talking about my imaginary year was eye opening in a number of ways. For one, it showed me how ambitious I am. Not for wealth or accolades or a size 0 body or any of those "be a better you" type New Year's resolutions, but ambitious to be... happy. To be balanced. To feel complete. To feel like my life is full of good things and good people. To be a well-rounded person who loves and is loved, who has had more joy than sadness over the course of a year, who has set her expectations crazy high--but only for herself. I often think back on that seventeen year old kid I was and realize there's still a lot of her in me. Wishing and dreaming, but afraid to wish for too much. Afraid I don't deserve it, afraid if I ask for too much it will all disappear. Putting my wishes in writing in the form of predictions seemed like tempting fate, but it also unlocked some part of me that said, "You deserve this happiness you're writing about. You deserve it."

When I turned 39 I did a one year plan for where I wanted to be when I was 40. It wasn't so much a list of predictions as goals I wanted to accomplish. But I didn't list them as goals, I stated them as facts the way I had in my fake holiday newsletter. "I won a Nobel Peace Prize." Like that. (Though that wasn't among my goals.) I tucked the list away for a year and pulled it out again when I turned 40, amused to see that some of the things that had seemed so important the year before had totally fallen off my radar. I was also pleasantly surprised to see that I'd met a number of my goals. There was nothing magical about any of it--it was simply a way of making note of what was important to me at the current moment and checking back in a year later to see what I'd accomplished, what I'd forgotten, what I'd failed. Being a rather motivated person (most of the time), I accomplished more than I failed. No magic there.

When I turned 40, I made a 5-year prediction list. That proved to be a little more difficult and not nearly as accurate as a one-year prediction list. For one thing, a lot of my "predictions" were contingent on certain things, so if A didn't happen, neither did B or C. For instance, I said we'd be moving, but that was contingent on Jay's orders in the Navy and we ultimately stayed put. Among my correct predictions were that I would have a baby, edit an anthology, still have my car (which turns 20 this year), teach college, celebrate my 21st wedding anniversary and go to London. Then there were the ones I missed entirely-- I don't have a MFA or PhD and I don't think I'll be able to get either before May when I turn 45. We didn't even move locally, something I was quite certain I wanted. But then the real estate bubble burst and the economy tanked and I decided our house with its reasonable mortgage was just fine. I didn't learn how to play a musical instrument, either. I didn't write a novel, though I started several. I didn't go to Venice with Jay for his 40th birthday because I had a baby.

I turn 45 this year and I am wondering whether to make another 5 year prediction plan. I like dreaming about my "ideal" life five years from now, though I know what I consider ideal now might be different by the time I turn 50. When I'm 50, I will have an eight year old and a six year old-- and while I might have predicted one baby, I never predicted two! If I keep editing anthologies at the rate of three a year, I will have over 20 anthologies under my belt by the time I turn 50. I will have been married for 27 years when I'm 50. These are the basics-- the predictions I can make based on everything staying on track. But what about wild, out there predictions? Should I make some? I'm still pondering over that.

Accurately predicting the future (my future) doesn't mean I have any mystical powers-- or even a particularly good imagination, since I stick to rather reasonable predictions. If I were psychically gifted, I'd have predicted the housing boom and subsequent crash and made the most of it. There is really nothing magic about any of my predictions coming true, but putting them in writing seems to trigger something in my brain. Reminding me what's important, what I really want and where I ultimately want to end up. Granted, I'm not always right and sometimes I forget what it was I even wanted in the first place. But the big things, the really meaningful things, those stick. Those predictions I wrote over the years in faux newsletters and one-year and five-year plans are the wishes I wanted to come true. While I'm guilty of thinking far too often that I don't deserve certain good things, I'm optimistic enough (and stubborn enough) to believe that if I want something badly enough, I can make it happen. And though I didn't get every one of my predictions right, the end result has been the same--I am happy. Sappy? Yeah. Age and motherhood have softened my sharp edges and sarcastic wit (mostly). But at the end of the day--or the end of a year--my wish is to be happy.

So for 2012, I predict... happiness. Children's laughter. Love. The best kind of challenges. Deadlines that make me grateful to be a writer. Meeting new friends in far (and not so far) away places. Writing. Learning. Being passionate. Falling head over heels again with this wonderful thing called life. And while I dislike the idea of writing my obituary now that my own mortality is much more real than it was when I was seventeen, I would like very much if some day one line of it reads, "She was so happy."

Sometime soon, I'll work on my 5 year plan. I don't know yet what will be in there. There are things from my last five year plan that won't make the cut or wishes that I have outgrown or laid aside in favor of new wishes. I'll try to be practical as I was the last time, but maybe I'll throw a couple of wild predictions in there, too. Only if they are things that I really, really want, though. Like a pony. Or a summer cottage. Or Eric Dane, naked. But maybe wanting to be happy, wanting to love and be loved, wanting to live a life that is big and full and passionate and magical... maybe that's wild enough, huh?

Dona Juana Predicts

2012-01-05T00:34:00.005-05:00

I assume everyone here knows that the Mayan Calendar predicts the end of the world in 2012, right? However, some say this just means the end of the world as we know it, and that things will change for the better.

To clear up any confusion, I’m channelling Dona Juana the Mayan Seer (given a Spanish name like Juan Diego, the Aztec peasant who reported seeing a vision of the Virgin Mary in Mexico in 1531) to explain it all for us. The fact that “Jean” translates into Spanish as “Juana” is a lucky coincidence, but only for those who fail to see the Grand Design of the Universe, in which nothing happens at random (muahaha), and “coincidences” are really clues.

O ye Children of the Light, you will be saved from unspeakable suffering if you dig deeply into your pockets and send me a generous donation.

Oops. The wrong personality came through. It's like picking up the radio station that plays Top-40 tunes all day long when you were looking for classic jazz. Turning the dial slowly . . .

Children of Fear, there will be war.

Dona Juana, you may speak Spanish if you prefer.

No. One language of the conquistadores is as good as another. I know that few of you understand the language of my childhood. You may consider this a clue.

Please explain.

History repeats itself. The rich eat the poor until the poor rise up in bigger numbers and eat the rich. Then it begins again.

Por favor, Dona, please tell us why the Mayan prophesies end in 2012.

Oh, that was my cousin the scribe. He ran out of patience.

Or ink.

Mostly patience. He grew tired of repeating the same prediction: there will be war, treachery, lies, pestilence, famine, slaughter and the occasional bad joke that doesnt translate well. There will be great sex and feasting and sunshine and children and friendly animals and shiny toys, but none of these pleasures will prevent suffering and death.

He should have indicated that the story goes on.

Maybe he thought it was obvious. But it only goes on for the human race as a whole. The story ends for every one of us. Sometimes it ends for a whole -- however you want to say it -- nation, tribe.

Here is what you need to know: you will die. No matter how you try to outrun Death, she will find you and take you away. This will happen even if you are spared from war, pestilence and famine and spend a fortune on cosmetic surgery so you can eventually bear an eerie resemblance to your own grandchildren.

Is that the great prediction?

Thats it. What says it better than words that come to an end?

I feel cheated.

Not my problem. Next time, ask me to tell you the story of the jaguar and the snake. You might find it more entertaining.

-------------

If The Rapture Comes, Can I have Your Lexus?

2012-01-04T00:55:00.000-05:00

Tonight is the big night. After a day of loafing and a late dinner, little more than a snack of left over ham and some wheat bread, Karl took a cool shower to wake up. And all the time—
through the mouthful of bread and meat, the sulking with chin in hand, the late nap, the cold water and soap—the same thought was constantly there. Tonight is the night.

Coming out of the shower, he ran his hand over his rasping
beard stubble and thought of shaving. But then, what's the use?
What's the use of anything? Tonight is the night.

In the mirror, his face, still young looking thanks to excellent health care,
nano-bot infusions, and hormone injections, looked tired. Behind
the eyes, whatever was living behind the eyes that would be
snuffed out by this time tomorrow, that person no longer felt
young.

from "The Rapture" by C. Sanchez-Garcia

appearing in Coming Together As One Ed. Alessia Brio

The end of the world is coming this year, sometime around December 21 2012 right after the presidential elections and just before Christmas and hopefully after dinner, I suppose. This is somehow according to the Mayan calendar. Archaeologists are quick to point out the Mayans never actually said the world will end then, they just stop writing or projecting records past that point, which doesn’t make it any less amazing, oh, those cute Mayans. I guess what I wonder about is, why do so many people seem to be so thrilled at the idea?

The first time I ever came across the end of the world in fiction was in Arthur C Clarke’s Retrospective Hugo Award (who knew there was such a thing?) winning story “The Nine Billion Names of God”. There are these Tibetan monks, oh those cute Tibetans, who have this idea that the Universe was created to list the names of God and then it will come to an end. They’ve been doing it by hand for three hundred years and they’ve made some progress, but its tedious going. Then they discover computers. Computers are so much better at this and a couple of Americans come to install the operation for some good money and get it going and think the monks are crazy and bound for disappointment but when the last name of God ticks out – whoa, sonuvabitch.

So I’m wondering whether to max out my credit cards between now and December 21 and what to do about that book club. The Mayans presumably weren’t Christian, or evangelical Christians at best, but it’s the Evangelicals who seem to be the most enthusiastic in this business. Tim Lahaye’s Left Behind series of books has sold roughly fifty million copies world wide, out grossing, in many senses of the term, Hal Lindsey’s “The Late Great Planet Earth” which was a big deal in the 70’s. It would be interesting to know how seriously Jesus’ admonitions to give all you have to the poor fit into that kind of wealth.

Along with lucrative book deals, the Rapture has provided some good side businesses as well. Worried if your pet hasn’t accepted Christ as it’s savior just yet? There are services, notably run by atheists, who will be glad to babysit your animals until they change the policy up above;

http://eternal-earthbound-pets.com/

Aw shucks, everybody else got raptured and you weren’t? Are you screwed? Not necessarily, go for Plan B at:

http://incaseoftherapture.com/

And Mayor Bloomberg assures us that if the Rapture occurs there will be a suspension of alternate parking rules.

It’s a lovely world generally, in spite of what we’re doing to it, why do people want so badly for it to end?

Tim LaHaye explained where the idea for his million dollar book project first came to him:

"This is an idea that the Lord gave me when I was on a plane. The airline captain came out of his cave and he started flirting with the head stewardess. I noticed that he had a wedding ring on. She did not. I began to see the sparks flying between these two and as he went back into the [cockpit], I got to thinking, "What if the Rapture occurred right now? On this plane, a third of these people would be gone. It would be pandemonium." I imagined this guy, married to I assumed, a Christian, and all of the sudden it would dawn on him, "When I get home, my wife will be gone, and I have been left behind." That’s where the title came from."

I would imagine the other two thirds of surprised passengers left behind on the plane would be very grateful for the Captain’s flirting with a woman if that was all it took to land them safely on the tarmac.

According to Wikipedia, people expected the end of the world in 1844, no less than three times which inadvertantly gave rise to the Bahai movement, not a bad thing. Then 1981, 1988, 1989 and 1992, 1993, 1994, then it got a little rest and was predicted again by Harold Camping and the Family Radio ministries (they often had their cheerfully painted bus parked outside my Starbucks, which was kind of charming, in a '70s way, as if the Grateful Dead might be in town for a show) for May 21st of 2011, and when that misfired moved it up to October 21st and when that didn’t seem to go anywhere, left it alone, at least until December 21st this year. I suppose it was better than the dark paranoia of worrying if the rapture had come in May and you were one of the leftovers and didn’t know it.

Let's play a game, you and me. Listen -

You and I are talking here in my favorite Starbucks at Barnes and Noble where the cute barrista girls know me by name (a talisman against being raptured) and at this moment while you sip the White Chocolate Mocha With a Double Back Flip Espresso Shot and Macchiato Caramel Twist I’ve paid for – Oh! and also a cheesecake, some Cheesecake Factory Red Velvet cheesecake, mmm - MMM! Good! – so in this luxurious situation, which is conducive to sinful behavior later, in fact you know with certainty your house is on fire.

Your house is on fire. Seriously on fire.

You have children in the house, and the door is locked from the outside and cannot be opened, and just to be sure I boarded up the damn windows too. As we are talking and nibbling on cheesecake and woo-woo coffee, you know with a certainty your children are roasting alive and cannot be rescued, thanks to me.

But, don't worry. You're okay. You're with me. Enjoy your cheesecake.

So how are your babies doing right now? Let's get a feel for it, try this -

Turn on the burner of your stove, set it to high. Wait till the coils are nice and red. Hold your head over it and I will accommodate you by pressing the side of your head down hard on the red coils. I will hold your head down as long as it takes me to sing the first verse of “Nearer My God to Thee”. When you try to raise your head your ear and most of your face will stay behind on that burner.

That’s what’s happening to your children right now while you and I are having coffee and praising me indefinately for the nice cheesecake.

And by the way – it usually takes a long time to die by burning to death. Ask Joan of Arc.

Are you enjoying your cheesecake? Not so much? A little distracted are we?

And you'd better keep on thanking me for that cheesecake, little buddy. Or I might change my mind.

I don’t understand people who love the idea of the Rapture. Or the end of the world, because they think it won't include them. What will heaven be for people who rejoice in luxury while those they loved and brought into the world are in the worst physical and emotional misery? What does it say about you if you’re okay with that and you’re willing to spend eternity praising The Guy who locked your kids in that burning house?

To my way of thinking the rapture, or any self serving desire for the world to end for the rest of us, represents that most insidious and universal of spiritual diseases – spiritual pride. The desire to be elite and somehow superior in God’s eyes, which perhaps more than any other single idea in the Gospels was openly dispised by Jesus, who went out of his way to preach the opposite of spiritual pride. This was an idea that screwed me over for a long time, and the only cure is when you finally reach that broken place where you’re not sure what’s going on and no longer believe you know.

Before I finish, how about a Bible story, a good one from 1 Kings 19: 9-13 about the prophet Elijah. I've always liked this story. Maybe you will.

Elijah goes up on Mount Sinai, where Moses received the ten commandments and he knows, I forget how, that God is going to pass by there. It is, after all, God’s mountain. So he’s hiding in a cave. The Bible says a great strong wind passed by that split the mountains and smashed rocks, but God was not in the wind. And then there was a huge earthquake, but the Bible says God was not in the earthquake. Then there was this huge fire burning the forest, but God was not in the fire.

Then the Good Book says there was a silence. A very powerful silence. A silence so strong that Elijah threw his mantle over his face and came out of the cave. A still voice came to him from the silence. It never says God spoke to him. It says a small voice came to him how of the deep, compelling silence.

“What are you doing here, Elijah?”

C. Sanchez-Garcia

Bad Magpies

2012-01-03T19:08:00.007-05:00

Predictions scare me. I can't make them. If I make them, they'll never, ever come true. But I know they're out there, just lurking around some corner, waiting for me. I mean, even if I don't make them because I know that when I do, they won't come true...well, it then follows that the opposite of what I'm thinking will almost certainly come true.

So basically, the opposite of my predictions about something for myself will be the actual predictions that happen. Or something like that. Mostly I'm just confusing myself now, though when I put it in these terms, it works:

a) I predicted that I would never, ever get an agent because I'm rubbish.

b) I queried an agent because of something good that happened, and everyone telling me that the good thing meant I needed one.

c) I actually got an agent.

I mean, you can clearly see a through-line there, right? I predicted something, and the opposite miraculously happened. I'm like a psychic, in reverse - though I must warn you...this mystical talent only extends to me.

When I predict things for other people, they almost always come true.

Like, I'll say to one of my author pals: you're going to get that contract. And lo, they do get that contract. Or I'll predict that some publisher will do this one thing, and lo, the publisher does the one thing. I'm actually quite good at guessing stuff for everything and everyone else.

Just not for myself. I have to reverse everything I'm expecting, just to keep myself sane and not freak out whenever I see a magpie. Because a single magpie intensifies the Opposite Psychic effect, you know?

No really, it totally does. Like this:

a) I expect to get an acceptance.

b) I see a single magpie.

c) I DO NOT GET THE ACCEPTANCE.

Though just to be clear: I am not in any way superstitious. I do not touch a glass egg that I've got every time I send a submission off, and I don't post things in a certain why to get optimum luck, and I never, ever say the magic words, right before I press the send button.

I swear I don't. Except all of the times where I totally do.

Oh For a Drop

2012-01-02T11:50:00.000-05:00

There isn't a drop of gypsy blood in me despite my Romanian heritage. At least, I don't think that there is. It would come in useful right now. If I couldn't see the future then maybe at least I'd have some skill in sounding as if I do. All I can predict is what will happen to me, and base it on my past.

My plan is to find an agent for my novel. What will happen is that my editor will return it to me with helpful suggestions to improve it and I will make them and it will be then be the best it can be. Full of zeal, because the editor I work with is, above all, a nurturing person who gives me enthusiasm for my work, I will start preparing my submission. Then, bit by bit, I will lose faith. I will start bringing my expectations down. I will think once again of self-publishing. I will look to publishers who will accept it but not give me the publishing experience I want because it will look like the path of least resistance. I will fall out of love with my story.

Hopefully, I'll get past that and soldier on with my original plan. I'll make myself believe in my work enough to reach for my original goals. Hopefully, I'll stop being my own worst enemy. Hopefully, I'll stop being the first person to say No to myself.

There have been so many anthologies I've wanted to write for this year, but I haven't been able to produce a decent short story for many months. I have some ideas, but they are, I'll admit, difficult ideas to convey in story form. One is about an erotica writer whose driving fantasy no longer works for her. This fantasy has been, in a way, her muse for many years, but now it's been used so many times that it doesn't get her off any longer. The well of her imagination is dry and no matter how hard she tries to summon erotic thoughts, her body remains dry too. Sometimes there is a trickle of desire, but the best she can do is wring a few drops from the old fantasy. What she needs is a new fantasy, something that will grip her imagination with the passion that the old one did, something vivid. She will try on many fantasies while she's with her lover(s), her eyes closed, her head tilted back, her body aching for release. And then one day the veil between the world of her desires and imagination will rip, and stories will burble up from her again like water from a mountain spring.

No Crystal Ball

2012-01-01T00:53:00.003-05:00

By Lisabet Sarai

And if California slides into the ocean
Like the mystics and statistics say it will,
I predict this motel will be standing
Until I pay my bill.

~ Warren Zevon, Desperadoes Under the Eaves

A few days ago I finished reading I'll Sleep When I'm Dead: The Dirty Life and Times of Warren Zevon. The book, a biography/oral history written by the artist's ex-wife and long-time friend Crystal Zevon, impressed me on several levels.

Warren Zevon was the prototypical tortured genius. He had incredible talent as well as solid musical skills (he studied piano with Igor Stravinsky), and is responsible for some of the most brilliant songs I've ever heard. Yet he spent much of his life lonely, miserable, and haunted by personal demons. An alcoholic, obsessive-compulsive, insecure sex addict, he hurt and disappointed the people who loved him (of which there were many) over and over again. When I read his story, I wondered (as I often do) if only individuals ravaged by insanity or self-destructiveness, like Zevon, are capable of creating truly great art.

The other message I took away from Zevon's biography is a renewed appreciation for the unpredictability of life. In 2002, after decades of personal struggle, Zevon's life seemed to be looking up. He'd been clean and sober for more than a decade. His relationships, especially with his children, had improved. He was negotiating with a record company about a new album. He was strong and fit, spending hours in the gym, but a persistent shortness of breath led him to consult a doctor. After a battery of tests, the specialists informed him that he had a lethal, untreatable form of lung cancer and would be dead within three months.

Unpredictable indeed. You never know when that sort of news will slam into you like a speeding truck. And yet randomness still reigned in Zevon's life. After his diagnosis, he lived more than a year, long enough to finish a final album, see his daughter married and witness the birth of his twin grandsons.

Positive events are equally impossible to predict. Although I always dreamed about traveling, I never expected to be living overseas. A child of divorce who saw few successful marriages growing up, I would have pooh-poohed the notion that I'd end up wedded to the same person for nearly thirty years. And despite that fact that I've always written for self-expression and recreation, it never occurred to me that I'd become a professional author.

Who can predict the consequences of a chance encounter? I happened to pick up a salacious Black Lace title in an Instanbul hotel. Thirteen years later, I've got a respectable back list of erotic fiction of my own.

So I'll pass on the crystal ball. There's no way I can tell what the future holds – good or bad. Furthermore, even if I had that kind of foresight, I wouldn't want to exercise it. Honestly, I'd rather be surprised.

In any case, I really don't want to focus on what's coming down the road. One thing I've learned over the years is that true joy exists in the present moment. When you allow yourself to be distracted from the now, by nostalgia over the past or concern for the future, you lose the chance to appreciate the gifts of today.

I'll see what 2012 brings, day by day. I'm an optimist, so I generally expect positive outcomes, but I know we're all a short step away from death, too. I'm not going to let that spoil my celebration.

Happy New Year to all. May your 2012 be full of sweet surprises.

A (Reluctant) Horror Fan

2011-12-30T00:01:00.001-05:00

by Kristina Wright

Horror was my genre of choice for most of my teen years. Nothing was too scary. Stephen King, Dean Koontz, Peter Straub, , Richard Matheson, Clive Barker... they were my heroes. I read the classics-- Dracula, Frankenstein, Poe's short stories and poetry. I saw all of the horror movies. The Evil Dead, Rosemary's Baby, Burnt Offerings, The Omen, The Exorcist... I loved them all. Unlike Charlotte, there were a couple of horror novels that did scare the bejesus out of me, most notably King's Pet Sematary. Holy freakin' crap, that book scared the hell out of me. I had to put it away for a couple of weeks and the only way I could finish it was to read it during the daytime. ::shiver::

I have become a big 'fraidy cat in my old age. I don't watch many horror movies anymore. Even those grainy trailers for the Paranormal Activity movies freak me out. I won't see anything that has children in it. Children in horror movies = terrifying. But it's not just children in horror movies that scare me. It's anything kid related that has been used in a horror movie. I'm afraid of baby monitors. Seriously. I rarely use the one we have because the quiet static is creepy and every sound is amplified to a nerve wracking level that reminds me of a horror movie. I'm terrified that I'm going to dream about one of the babies whispering, "I'm coming to kill you, mama," and wake up from the nightmare to discover it isn't a dream. Ahhhhhhhh!

When I lost my taste for horror films, I started avoiingd the movies that involved supernatural elements-- demons and ghosts and the like. Then I stopped watching anything seemed like it could happen because, hey, it could happen. Now I even stay away from the horror that's seems more like over-the-top blood fest than horror. A coworker loaned me the first Saw movie several years ago and I returned it to her three months later, unwatched. Just the concept freaked me out. I really have no idea how realistic/scary the Saw movies are. I just can't watch them to find out. Sigh. I'm a wimp now.

My Barnes & Noble has done away with the horror section and books that were once considered horror have been reshelved in general fiction or fantasy and science fiction. There seems to be a lot of Young Adult horror. I suppose there just aren't many writers writing horror anymore? Or has the fantasy genre simply been expanded to include horror and sparkly vampires and anything that isn't grounded in reality? Or is it the horror genre that has become so diluted and vague that it no longer fits its own description? I really don't know. I still read horror or horror-ish stories, but I rarely realize that what I'm reading is horror until I'm well into the story. Probably for the best--otherwise I would miss some really great authors.

The thing that always stood out to me about horror was how few women horror writers there were (are?). I have no explanation for that, either. It's just one of those things that has always puzzled me. Is it a gendered thing-- men won't read horror written by women? Women are perceived as being too "soft" to write good horror? Women aren't interested in writing horror? (I know better than that.)

I am delighted to know three women authors who have sent a few shivers up my spine. One is our own Charlotte Stein, whose story "Dolly" in Red Velvet and Absinthe gave me chills the first time I read it and I still read it two more times. Charlotte is one of the funniest writers I know--but she is also one of the best at creating dark, descriptive pieces that leave me with goosebumps.

Then there's Kristina Lloyd, whose story "Living Off Lovers" in my anthology Dream Lover, was described by one reviewer as "probably the creepiest" story in the collection. And it is! But it's also erotic as hell and worth more than one read. Trust me.

The best horror story I've read in the past several years (straight horror, with no erotica or romance chaser to give my poor faltering heart something else to focus on) is Shanna Germain's Trill. This one will stay with you, folks. It's truly... horrific. Seductively so. I've read it several times, trying to pinpoint the exact moment when every muscle in my body goes tense. The moment when I want to stop reading. That moment seems to start earlier and earlier every time I read Shanna's story, but yet I still have to finish reading it. Again. Every time. Even though I know how it ends and that I will not like it even though I love it. Read it and tell me I'm wrong. Read it and try to stay relaxed and not hold your breath and not cringe and not squirm in your seat with discomfort. The kind of discomfort that starts as a little bug crawling on the hairline at the back of your neck and ends with you clawing at your own flesh just to make it stop.

Whew. I may not read (or watch) much anymore, but I still love horror. And I hate that I love it.

Now that I have blood under my nails, I think I'll say good night.

Roots

2011-12-29T01:00:00.003-05:00

by Jean Roberta

I admire horror writers who can pull readers into their disturbing imaginary worlds, but I rarely venture into that territory, probably because I'm afraid I might write something unintentionally funny (not scary enough) or too repellent for readers who might like my other stuff.

However, I'm sometimes inspired by unlikely sources.

The following is an excerpt from "Roots," my lesbian horror story which was featured in Monsters, an anthology from Torquere Press which was launched on Halloween 2004.
(There is some head-hopping in this story -- I hope it's not too confusing.)

The actual backstory: while looking up info for a concordance on the work of U.S. fiction writer Ntozake Shange (& while teaching her work to first-year university students), I discovered that according to historical records, a better, stronger (i.e. commercially viable) indigo plant was developed by 17-year-old Eliza Lucas in the 1740s on the family plantation in South Carolina. Her father was governor of Antigua and he was often away from home. Eliza's mother was a semi-invalid, and Eliza seems to have been an only child. The family plantation would have been worked by slaves, & in that era, at least some of them might have been brought directly from Africa as adults.

My guess is that someone with a knowledge of plant-breeding developed the better indigo plant, but since that someone had no legal rights, credit was given to Miss Eliza because she was the only white adult (loosely speaking) who was present and healthy at the time.

In any case, the indigo trade helped the American colonies become economically independent, Miss Eliza married well and became the foremother of a line of prominent politicians in her state.

Indigo was originally a kind of wild grass native to the American South. Who really bred a hardier version that could be used to dye all the blue police and military uniforms of the time? Perhaps the plant-breeder still bears a grudge, long after death. Perhaps both the knowledge and the grudge were passed on to a descendant. Where could a botanist be found in our own time? In a greenhouse or flower shop.

Welcome to a most unusual store . . .

---------------------------------

The florist shop looked and smelled exactly as Rosa expected. The perfume of ripening flowers was like a melody over a bass line of wet earth. Sunlight poured through the windows to spotlight leaves in all sizes, shapes and shades of green, from deep-forest through emerald to fresh lime. The light glowed on the smooth features of a mahogany face that never changed expression while two sets of long, gloved fingers pressed the spongy soil around a newly-transplanted begonia. A nametag pin identified the woman as Lily.

In spite of the sweetness of sunlight on flowers, Rosa shivered. She had often passed by this place on her way to and from work, but something about it had discouraged her from coming in before now. She felt sure she had met that woman before, that she had felt those competent fingers on her own skin.

“You’ve come,” remarked Lily, the owner, “to find flowers for a special occasion?” She had a faint accent that Rosa couldn’t place, and her full, insinuating smile implied a lifetime of intimacy.

Rosa’s normally-tawny face looked bloodless. She hated feeling like a slow learner, but something was clearly happening that her conscious mind couldn’t grasp. She had awakened in the morning with a vague but strong conviction that she had to go to the florist shop immediately after work to find something she needed – something living and growing, which might be lost if she waited too long.

“No,” stammered Rosa, wanting to gain control of the conversation. After all, she was the customer. “I just – I need a new houseplant.” She glanced around as though looking for a particular type, genus, species and form.

Lily stood up, and Rosa noticed that she was over six feet tall. Her name suited her surprisingly well; she had the regal grace of one of the newer, richly-colored and curly-petaled hybrid lilies. Her breasts looked heavy on her willowy frame, and they bounced slightly with her movements under a loose green shirt. Her hair was done in neat cornrows that showed the elegant shape of her head. Rosa was embarrassed by her impulse to throw her arms around Lily and press herself against her.

“There are so many beautiful plants here,” purred the owner of this indoor garden. The gleam of her teeth did not inspire trust, but it added to Rosa’s excitement. “Let me show you.”

Rosa barely heard the names of annuals and perennials, succulents and hostile-looking cacti, flashy tropicals and plants like precocious little girls: baby roses, lily-of-the-valley and gerbera daisies. None of them spoke to her in any language.

Turning away from Lily, Rosa was startled by the impression that the tall, solid woman had disappeared. She was nowhere in Rosa’s peripheral vision. Rosa turned her head quickly, and Lily abruptly sprang back into view. “I need a low-maintenance houseplant,” the customer blurted, smelling her own sweat mixed with the smells of other life all around her. “The ones that need special care always die on me.”

The stare that Lily fixed on her made it impossible for Rosa to look her straight in the eyes, especially since this would have required looking up. When not studied closely, Lily’s skin looked exactly like polished wood, poreless and immobile. “Uh,” remarked the expert. “Their needs are simple compared to ours. And they give us so much. Would you want to live in a world with no green things in it?”

Rosa mumbled something that sounded like “No, but.” She felt both guilty and resentful, like a smug white donor to a tax-deductible charity who has been called on her unacknowledged prejudice toward races, cultures and neighbourhoods other than her own. On a deeper level, she was afraid.

Lily wrapped a cool, strong arm around Rosa’s shoulders like an old friend. Rosa shivered, but didn’t object. “These are my children,” Lily told her. “You must see the ones that need special care. I keep them in the greenhouse at the back.”

Chills were still running down Rosa’s back from the places where she had been touched as Lily strode to the front door and locked it. “Come,” she ordered softly, directing her customer’s attention to a door in the back that looked too small to accommodate modern adults.

Rosa was guided forward with a hand on her waist. Despite being shorter than average, she had to duck to pass through the opening. The narrow width made her uncomfortably aware of her fleshy body; she thought she was too fat but couldn’t resist comforting herself with food. Followed by Lily, Rosa had an unsettling sense that the taller woman had shrunk at will.

The greenhouse was humid and cool, full of rustlings and the gentle hiss of moisture on plastic walls. Rosa noticed several large-leafed plants and potted trees that looked exotic, wild and sentient. She was afraid to touch them, and she wondered if they were really for sale.

“My father studied plants all his life,” Lily explained. “I learned a lot from him, but some kinds of knowledge must be gained directly from them.” Rosa vaguely remembered reading an old story about an obsessed botanist with a beautiful, poisonous daughter. She had thought the plot was based on the author’s fear of everything beyond the limits of Victorian, white Anglo-Saxon respectability.

Rosa told herself that she had nothing to fear. By now it was clear that Lily wanted her, that anything could happen between them. Rosa was eager to discover the depth of the other woman’s passion as well as her own because she believed that this adventure wouldn’t count. Random sex with strangers would never have to be part of her official life-story as long as there were no human witnesses or mutual friends, and no commitment between her and the momentary lover except to keep the encounter buried in silence. For the present, Rosa reminded herself that plants are the least aggressive life form, and that women lack the piggish assumptions of men.

Rosa didn’t call herself a lesbian, or even bisexual. For years, she had told her parents that she would marry and give them grandchildren once she had found the right man. In the meanwhile, she kept losing boyfriends. She preferred to blame this on her weight than to admit that her air of self-sufficiency and her relationships with women, sexual or not, made the men in her life feel like mannequins in a store window.

Moisture trickled through soil to nourish roots, and trickled into Rosa’s panties as her heat rose. “My dear,” purred Lily. “Let me introduce you to the guards.” She gestured toward several large plants near the entrance. “They are related to the Venus Fly-trap, and they keep this place almost free of insects. Don’t put your fingers in them.” Rosa couldn’t be sure she was joking.

“And see this,” Lily went on. The tub of murky water that held some kind of wild grass looked unremarkable compared to the other inhabitants of the greenhouse. “Indigo,” the expert named it. “Incredibly valuable when it was the only source of blue dye. American indigo was inferior to the French kind until my father bred a stronger strain, more productive. Economies rise and fall by such discoveries. Who knows what America would be today if not for these little plants that used to grow wild? Yet my father is never mentioned in history books. His work was credited to those who owned him, according to the law.”

Lily looked like a woman of her time, but she seemed older than civilization. With a flash of panic, Rosa wondered if the storyteller knew that commercially-viable indigo for dye was developed on a colonial plantation before American independence, long before the lifespan of any human being in living memory. The woman had to be lying or deluded, probably the latter. In Rosa’s mind, the voice of her common sense screamed: Get out now! But she wanted to stay and learn all she could. She told herself that she would never have to come back.

-----------------------------------------

(Warning: the conclusion of this story is gruesome. If you want to read it, ask me for a copy or find the whole story in the Torquere Press anthology, Monsters.)

The Grown Ups With Far Away Eyes

2011-12-28T00:38:00.004-05:00

I’ve just walked home from school where my teacher has humiliated me in front of the class for drawing cartoons of Top Cat and Yogi Bear on the back of these wet mimeographed worksheets, after sniffing the purple ink for several minutes, and Jeannine Williams who I have a huge crush on and am terrified to speak to but want to kiss passionately bent over backwards like in the movies, has borrowed my pencil and chewed on the end of it and her tooth marks are now a treasured religious relic in my Lone Ranger pencil box. I will stash this pencil in my underwear drawer with my aging Halloween candy and once in a while take it out and suck on it rapturously.

As I push open the screen door mom is off with my baby brother Dave somewhere, maybe yakking with the Arnolds across the street. I give my baby turtle Patches some dried flies from a little tin, take down some cornflakes and fix up a bowl with some milk and go right to the TV. The TV has a huge gray eye, two knobs, and some gawky rabbit ear antennae on top next to a ceramic panther lamp. In the back are vacuum tubes and capacitors that I have been sternly warned never to touch because my brains will fry and my hair will catch on fire and I will die a horrible grisly agonizing electric chair death, not like in the cartoons where people’s skeletons just light up, and instead of feeling sorry for me everyone will say how stupid I was after having been dutifully warned by my parents but the idiot kid never listens to anybody, what can you do with him, Jesus H Christ? Dad always lets me have the vacuum tubes when they conk out and I zoom around with them making whooshing noises and pretending they’re rocket ships.

I turn the bottom knob until it clicks and give it some volume. I sit down cross legged with my corn flakes and wait. The screen makes a crackly sound and I turn the knob on top –thump-thump-thump- to KCCI out of Ames and wait for the Mel Jass Matinee Movie (“with me your host – Mel Jass!”). And sure enough, there it is.

Like a recurring nightmare there’s this one movie that shows up about once a month.

Planets and stars move by, a spooky choir goes “wooooah ” and a paternalistic baritone voice speaks ominously about planets and higher forms of intelligence. In a nice house a boy exactly my age jumps out of bed to squint through a telescope at “Orion in zenith which won’t happen again for 6 years! Gee whiz, Dad!”

His parents are awakened by his big wind up alarm clock. These are perfect story book parents such as nobody ever had, who sleep in pajamas in twin beds chastely separated by a nightstand. The mother is a Teutonic, perfectly goyische blonde shiksa such as would turn Jewish boys into pillars of salt if they lusted for her, and speaks in cultured, meticulously cadenced tones, addressing her husband as “darling” while smiling. The father is a broad shouldered and generically handsome lovable lug, incapable of irritation or coarse desires. After he goes back to his own bed, definitely not Mom’s (who might have gasped, “Goodness, darling, what’s gotten into you?”) a lightning storm wakes up little David who sees a flying saucer land in a field of sand. He goes after Dad who doesn’t believe him but will take a look in the morning. Dad goes out and promptly disappears in the sand. He comes back, changed. Glowering, glassy eyed and tyrannical. As soon as the kid gets on his nerves he smacks him one across the mouth hard enough to flatten the little brat. And so it goes.

A pair of cops go to investigate the kids desparate phone call. They come back grim eyed and mean. Then Dad escorts Mom to the sand pit and she disappears. Finally the boy sees his playmate Kathy go to the sandpit and disappear. He runs to tell her mom (Kathy’s father is a physicist. We’ll get back to him.) then Kathy shows up with a tell tale scar on the back of her neck, an evil eyed zombie demeanor and a handful of flowers for mom. So the boy is discredited, no one believes him when the house is set on fire and he says Kathy must have done it and then takes off like hell.

Still with me? Hang on.

He scurries off to tell the Chief of Police and is stuck by the bureaucrat at the front desk until the Chief shows up. But the police chief has joined the zombie people too and throws the boy in a cell until they can bring in his parents. A lady psychiatrist named Dr. Blake arrives on the scene and believes his story enough to think they should consult an astronomer – he’ll know.

When the parents arrive at the police station, Mom is much changed. The Stepford Wife milk and cookies veneer is gone, and she’s a fierce, icy eyed bitch severely dressed in black with a plunging neckline like Dracula’s Daughter. One can definitely imagine having sex with this woman, along with a bull whip and hand cuffs.

Dr. Blake says the boy is running a fever and she suspects polio (this is the 1950s) and won’t hand him over. She brings him to an astronomer, Dr. Kelston, who believes him totally and explains about UFOs while whacking a map of the solar system with a briar pipe, and and even knows about an atomic rocket project the Martians are worked up about. Soon they’ve got the Army involved.

Okay, that’s enough.

There’s some high minded silliness with infra red rays and “mu-tants” and a battle and the Martians are defeated and so it goes.

Now if you’ve been patient this long, here’s the pay off. This cheesy sci fi flick gave me terrible nightmares for years as a child. I dreaded it. It made me vomit. Yet as often as it came around, I could never look away. It was an icon of my development as a fiction writer and one of the very few movies which ever sincerely scared the fecal matter out of me, not once but many times.

Why? How?

Let’s get out the tool box, unscrew the back and have a look at how this stuff works when it works so very, very well.

Darling.

Freud said this amazing thing about the unconscious mind. He said the unconscious does not distinguish between fantasy and reality. That’s what the conscious mind is for. I’ll repeat that, the unconscious mind does not distinguish between fantasy and reality. If a man sees a picture of a naked woman and imagines going at it with her hot and heavy, he gets hard, because the unconscious doesn’t distinguish between fantasy and reality. If a woman reads a romantic, erotic story and gets wet down there, it’s because the unconscious doesn’t distinguish between fantasy and reality. Jung carried this further by saying the unconscious speaks in the language of images, even universal images passed down genetically.

So here’s how it works. I saw this movie when I was a little boy, about the same age as the kid in the movie, so the movie kid is an image my unconscious vividly connects with. In this movie, nice mom and nice dad turn mean and don’t love him anymore. The authority figures in his world don’t believe him and try to chase him down and imprison him. Little Kathy Wilson, his friend turns evil. And did I mention she gets killed?

She collapsed suddenly off stage from a brain hemorrhage, “keeled over as if she’d been pole axed”. The Martians exploded the zombie gadget they drilled into her brain and pulled her plug by remote control. Zap. Now, her father is working in his laboratory doing like, you know, scientist stuff. Taking a test tube and dripping something important into it from an eye dropper and holding it up to the light and scowling thoughtfully and putting it away and moving to the next. A lab coat munchkin comes in and remarks on how sorry they all are about little Kathy. Wouldn’t he like to knock off work early and go home and, like, maybe grieve or something? Without even looking up, Daddy Wilson responds with “No, thank you Brannon. I always work at night. Must go on, you know.” And he goes back to what he’s doing. Aw shit, the Martians got him already! No, it turns out he’s not a zombie, just an asshole. He really doesn’t care, that’s all.

So you have a kid, me, who’s instinctively terrified his mom and dad are going to get divorced someday. He hears the fighting, the shouts, the smashing dishes, the slamming doors, mom crying and sulking and locking the door. Daddy, the lovable lug who takes him fishing and squirts him with the garden house and shows him how to catch fireflies in a jar in the cornfield, sometimes takes down the belt or the hair brush and lets him have it good.

A little girl dies and Daddy goes on working because he doesn’t love her and doesn’t give a shit. Authority figures are out to get you. Grownups don’t believe you. The world is full of mysterious creatures who want to snatch you out of bed and take you away and maybe pop your brain like a balloon, and nobody will even come looking for you because you’re a crappy kid and nobody loves you anyway and they’d probably have a big party if you died. Hello?

The specific elements for me in 1962 and the present have changed, but the underlying night terrors are still the same terrors. What terrors are universal? If you want to write horror fiction you should spend some time on this question. Stephen King said the most frightening novel he’d written, the one he almost stopped writing was Pet Semetary. This was a novel in which a perfectly adorable little boy is killed and comes back as a murderous monster. I would imagine the poor parents of the kid who shot Senator Gabby Gifford, or the parents of Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris would find that book very, very hard to read and enjoy.

And this raises another question. What if I, as an artist, were clever enough to convey that fear effectively to you? This isn’t fun fear, sexy vampires and werewolves fear. This is the real stuff, the stuff that can happen to you, the stuff that hurts until it isn’t fun anymore, where you realize in your gut how illusory and fragile your domestic happiness is, and someday that can be your child on the evening news? Should I do that? If I could bring you real horror, the kind that destroys your happiness, would you want to pay money to read that?

What about horror fiction’s slutty cousin, erotic fiction? Male triggers and female triggers?

The individual fetishes may vary widely, even sexual orientation is much more a mark on a spectrum than a fixed compass. But some things are more or less universal. Women are excited and eroticized by fictional male heroes who are strong and protective even supernatural. They like their men confident and sexually dominant, with high wealth and social status. Sexually aggressive bad boys, but with a tender hidden spot of authentic sensitivity that can be elicited only by the magic hoo-hoo of the heroine alone. A woman fantasizes of being sexually irresistible and adored even by several men at once. Even strong independent women want that man who will make them weak in the knees, seduce and dominate them in the bedroom. Men want that woman who is vulnerable, who can be brought to a full surrender, and validate their mighty male potency. If women want the relationship and intimacy, a man can walk through a plate glass window, have great sex two minutes later and then go look for pizza and beer. Men are fine with anonymous sex or a variety of sexually aggressive partners and then moving on. Part of what a prostitute is paid for is her disposability.

Recently I read a discussion on whether there was any such thing as forcing a woman to orgasm, a common feat in erotic stories, usually the ones written by men. I don’t think such a thing is possible, but this is still a universal male fantasy, to render a woman helpless with his sexual prowess so completely that she must cave under the onslaught of his superior potency, and be forced to ecstatic surrender. This is a common element of BDSM fiction. Real life? I’ll believe it when I see it. Meanwhile writers who incorporate these formula elements in their stories do very, very well commercially.

Which brings up one more, slightly squicky element I got from this movie, sitting there in the past with my bowl of cornflakes. There is a scene in the movie when nice Dr. Blake is beaten and captured by the Mu-Tants and they’ve got her strapped down on the table, laying ass up on her tummy, and the big brain drill is descending with its fatal implant that will turn her into a gimlet eyed robot. A beautiful mature woman, her blouse revealingly torn and vulnerable, who in a moment will exist only to slavishly obey her master’s whims. Any whims, darling. Watching wide eyed as the brain drill descended and the choir “woooahh”ed and the woman looked so tranquil as The Very Bad Thing was about to happen, I remember clearly and distinctly being not afraid but - very turned on.

A little kid with a pencil with a girl’s fresh tooth bites, hidden away in his underwear drawer. I’ve always wondered -

What in the world was he thinking right then?

C. Sanchez-Garcia

Birthday Laziness

2011-12-27T18:48:00.003-05:00

Dammit! I picked horror for this week's topic, and even though people don't like it they've written these amazing, intricate, beautiful posts. But it's my birthday today and I'm all drunk on cake and can't write a big, amazing, beautiful post! I just want to lie somewhere and watch my birthday presents and marvel over the fact that I'm now a whole 32 years old.

So forgive, my fellow glorious post writing Grippers. Forgive me, readers. I'm just going to do a quick list of my top five fave horror movies.

Here we go:

1. Ringu. A girl comes out of the telly. A GIRL COMES OUT OF THE TELLY. It remains the only horror movie I was too afraid to watch the end of on my own, as an adult. I had to wait until Husband came home.

2. 28 Days Later. I had to watch this one until the end, because unfortunately I made the mistake of watching it for the first time at a cinema. People cried when I shit my pants.

3. IT. Yes, I know it's just a crappy made for TV serialisation of a Stephen King novel. Yes, I know that this usually equals total disaster. But Tim Curry as Pennywise is actually and literally responsible for the pervasive modern day fear of clowns. He just is. I was in a caravan full of friends when I first watched this, and I still hid my eyes whenever he came on.

4. A Nightmare On Elm Street. So terrifying that I couldn't even look at the main bad guy's face, as a kid. And still, today, when Husband does Freddy Krueger's voice, I scream.

5. Fright Night. I'm putting this on the list because it's one of the few truly great comedy-horrors, but unlike most comedy-horrors, it also happens to make you shit pants when her face is all wrong at the end.

And that is my list. I was going to do a list of horror books, actually, but then I realised - I never find books half as scary as movies. Weird, huh? I mean, I've never put a book down because I was so scared - not even in IT when he pinches the kid's arm.

Maybe horror just has to be more in my face, to really get to me.

Imagination is a Dual-Edged Sword

2011-12-26T05:24:00.002-05:00

By Kathleen Bradean

Like Lisabet, I'm not a huge fan of horror. The problem is too much imagination. A good writer gets a grip on me that I can't shake even when the story is over, and I can spend nights jumping at noises. Movies get me too. It took five times to get through just the opening sequence of John Carpenter's The Thing before I could brace myself to see the whole movie. It's the music in movies that creeps up my spine. I learned that long ago when my oldest sister wanted to watch Frankenstein when we were alone one night. She lowered the sound and put on Carpenter's music so I could stand to watch it with her. Knowing that it's the music doesn’t make it any less effective.

Horror and erotica are closely related. More than any other genres they try to provoke a physical response from the reader. Both want your heart to race and use a lot of sensory detail to make it happen, but to different ends. L.A. Banks, who passed away earlier this year, talked about how to use that sensory detail to make a horror scene work at a writer's convention years ago and I still find her observations useful although I turn them from horror to erotica.

The odd thing is that I have no problem reading or seeing horror in manga and graphic novels. I'm eagerly awaiting the next issue of Chew. In it, the main character can see the entire past of anything he tastes, which makes eating food a real problem. One taste of bacon, and he can see the pig in the slaughterhouse. This unusual ability comes in useful when solving crimes, although, yes, it means tasting part of the victim. So it's gross out horror, and yet, I love it.

Another manga series I follow is The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service. A group of college students with differing abilities are brought together by an enterprising and not terribly ethical female student to find bodies and (with the help of one of their group) reanimate them long enough to try to figure out how to make money from helping the spirit with any unfinished business. They run into some other unsavory types, including a funeral home that reanimates murderers so that the victim's family can extract revenge, usually in the form of torture. As with most horror, it's a hard look at society and never features easy answers. Unfortunately, since I'm not Japanese, I know that there's some subtext that I miss about how their way of making a living puts them outside society, which is very much a part of the continuing story arc through the episodes. The drawings can be gruesome, but that doesn’t bother me.

I want to like horror. I'm sure that horror writers are just barely on the rung of respectability above erotica writers. But the good horror writers do their job too well. I'm spooked for days by the atmosphere created in the story. At night, shadows in the corner of the room take on sinister forms, sort of like seeing shapes in clouds but not nearly as fun. Imagination, it's a writer's best friend, but as a reader, I wish I could crank it down a few notches.

Inchoate Dread, Indescribable Foulness

2011-12-25T09:00:00.003-05:00

By Lisabet Sarai

I'm not much of a horror fan, in film or in literature, partly because the genre tends to evoke unpleasant emotions. Poorly conceived or executed horror just seems silly and useless, a waste of my precious time. Horror written or filmed with skill and subtlety scares the bejesus out of me and can trigger nightmares. I don't seek out either extreme, though occasionally I'll end up subjecting myself to something gory, gruesome or terrifying by mistake.

There are two exceptions. One is Edgar Allen Poe. In Poe's hands, horror become poetry, and my literary appreciation overcomes my aversion to fear. The other is H.P. Lovecraft.

During my undergraduate days, someone introduced me to Lovecraft's work. In turn, I introduced my father. Together we devoured the Lovecraft oeuvre: “The Colour Out of Space”, “The Shadow over Innsmouth”, “At the Mountains of Madness”, “The Dunwich Horror”. Through Lovecraft's tales, dad and I prowled the streets of Arkham – modeled after a Massachusetts city not far from our home - and roamed the wild. stony hills to the west, where ancient horrors lay buried under the still waters of the modern reservoir – never named but obviously the Quabbin. We joked about altars to Cthulu; we contemplated the ghoulish music of Erich Zann. For decades, dad and I would return to Lovecraft again and again. My current volume was a Christmas gift from perhaps a decade ago, only a few year years before his death.

Why did Lovecraft's work hold such appeal? From the perspective of craft, the peculiar recluse from Providence, Rhode Island didn't begin to match Poe. Lovecraft's stories seem flowery and over-written, especially by today's standards. His complex, meandering prose is studded with polysyllabic adverbs and self-conscious inversions of structure. Nevertheless, somehow, Lovecraft managed to capture a true sense of dread – to hint at an impenetrable darkness underlying the banal realities of every day life. And that, it seems to me now, is the essence of horror.

Explicitness is one notable characteristic of today's horror. Last week Charlotte talked about “Alien”. In the one scene I recall (perhaps from a trailer – I'm really not sure), a parasitic alien creature forces its way out of the chest of a character in which it has been growing. You see every detail of ripped flesh, every disgusting inch of the emerging monster. Horror these days means geysers of blood erupting in the wake of a slasher's axe, or the corruption and decay of a long-dead body - rotting intestines, eyes torn from their sockets, white bone glimpsed through rifts in blotchy, diseased skin.

Lovecraft's horrors are more often glimpsed, sensed, or intuited than fully revealed. Even when the protagonists are finally confronted with the awful truth, the horrors they face are “indescribable” and “unimaginable”, too monstrous to be more than imperfectly captured in human language. Then, too, Lovecraft often wrote about inner terrors – the threat of madness looming over us poor humans as we try impose some order on a chaotic, evil-infested universe. “Inchoate dread” is one of his favorite phrases – incipient, formless, hovering on the edge of being, but nevertheless a shadow one cannot escape.

Lovecraft skirted the edge of madness himself – and so have I. I spent months in a state psychiatric hospital as a teenager. The shambling, zombie-like walk of my drugged fellow patients still haunts my dreams. Actually, I discovered Lovecraft only a few years after that stay – perhaps the recognition accounts for my perverse attraction to his work.

Quite a while ago the Erotica Readers & Writers Association had theme challenge on their Storytime list: parody. I ended up writing a tale that captures the flavor of Lovecraft's prose, while including a great deal of (pretty horrible) sex. The title is “The Shadow Over Desmoines”.

My hand trembles as I pick up the pen to begin this chronicle. Every fiber of my being recoils from the thought of reliving the events that led to my incarceration in this house of madness. However, my doctors here are convinced that writing about my "delusions", as they call them, will help to purge me of them. I have my doubts. The lights here in the hospital burn day and night, and we are always attended, but this does not dispel the irremediable darkness in my soul, nor assuage my awful loneliness.

Still, I will make an effort.

It began six months ago. I moved to Iowa to make a new start, after my dear wife passed away and I suffered a moderately severe heart attack. I had been a newspaperman in our small New England town, but my cardiologist recommended that I retire from that relatively demanding occupation. After Evelyn's passing, I was troubled by nightmares, distorted melanges of disturbing imagery suffused with a indescribable sense of horror. In coming to Des Moines, I sought peace, a respite from my grief-induced visions. Iowa, I reasoned, would be the essence of normality, sanity, midwestern friendliness and common sense.

How mistaken I was in my sanguine rationalization.

I purchased a pleasant, sunny bungalow on a quiet, maple-lined street near the bus line. Once I had settled in, with my books and my records neatly stored, I looked forward to days of reading and contemplation, interspersed with an occasional fishing trip, and tranquil nights. At first, it seemed that I had achieved my objectives. I slept soundly and dreamlessly. I took long walks, and made a start on the book that I had always planned to write. I became friendly with Horace Farmer, the librarian at the neighborhood branch, who I discovered enjoyed a game of chess, a beer, and a philosophical discussion as much as I did. Though I am nearer fifty than sixty, my heart problems have left me somewhat frail. I welcomed the opportunity to relax and appreciate the deliberate pace of midwestern life.

I met Leonora Gratsky two weeks after I moved in. She appeared at my door with a home-baked blueberry pie and an irresistible smile. Though properly, even primly, dressed, and extremely well-spoken, she radiated some indefinable quality of carnality that made me distinctly uncomfortable. Leonora was petite, with sharp elfin features. I could not refrain from noticing the voluptuous curves of bosom and derriere under her high-necked blouse and calf-length skirt. Her gray-streaked black hair was pulled into a conservative bun, but when I looked into her dark eyes, I saw an untrammeled sensuality that simultaneously attracted and appalled me.

We conversed in a neighborly fashion for several minutes. Apparently, she inhabited the house across the street, a dwelling somewhat larger than mine but equally neat and ordinary. Perhaps the gardens surrounding it grew a bit more wild and rank than was typical on our street, but the place appeared to be in good repair. I told myself that different people have different standards, although somehow the lush vines tumbling over her fence and creeping across the sidewalk engendered an inexplicable uneasiness in my soul.

She lived with her nephew Frederick, she told me, a strapping young man of twenty five year who, unfortunately, had the intellect of a child of seven. He was a comfort, managing the heavier tasks around the house and never causing any trouble. Since her husband passed on two years ago, she was especially glad of Frederick's company.

Leonora encouraged me to drop by and visit anytime, but I doubted that I would take advantage of her offer. Shivers ran down my spine as I watched her swaying hips retreat down my path and across the street to her own dwelling. Nevertheless, I found my body reacted to her as if I were fifteen intead of fifty four. I had to spend a quarter of an hour reading Popular Mechanics before my tumescence subsided.

I tried to forget my curvaceous and disturbing neighbor. Despite my best intentions, I found myself looking over toward her house from my window, both night and day, straining to catch a glimpse of her. I never saw her, though occasionally I discerned a hulking male figure shambling around the place, dragging heavy black bags of trash. I assumed that this must be the feeble-minded nephew. I like to think of myself as compassionate toward those less fortunate than myself, but something about his fleshy form and beetling brow repelled me.

You can read the rest of the story on my website, if you're so inclined. It's pretty funny, in considered opinion, but I'd like to think it captures a hint of the terror Lovecraft, at his best, evokes – indescribable but nevertheless real.

Seeyoo, Skah -- Fine, Thanks

2011-12-24T23:45:00.011-05:00

By Kayelle Allen (Guest Blogger)

Foreign words become part of English every day. We don't look twice at words such as café or fiancé, and everyone seems to understand what a double entendre is. Yet café, fiancé, and entendre were all foreign words at one time. Alien, in fact.

When I began writing Science Fiction, I studied the concept of how to build a world. What steps did I need to take to make my worlds real to my readers? How could I blend reality and the Tarthian Empire? One way was to create at least a smattering of words in an alien language. For my Kin people, feline humanoids, I wanted something catlike, but which humans could speak. I named it Felis.

I would need it to be easy to pronounce, and not look too alien to readers. I knew that using copious amounts of alien words would result in what my mother quaintly referred to as the Wheelbarrow Syndrome. When she'd come across a foreign word that she couldn't discern from the context, if her ever-present dictionary didn't help, then she substituted the word "wheelbarrow" and kept right on going.

I began my quest for a new language by studying how languages are formed. I read articles, watched documentaries, and pored over books by other SciFi authors. Certain words and sounds are formed by the placement of tongue against teeth; that led me to wonder how fangs would affect speech. The letter B seemed the least likely to be used, based on studies I read, so I decided to leave that letter out of Felis.

Languages go two ways. They develop from society, and in turn, they change society. What would the world be like if we did not speak different languages? Certain cultures place more emphasis on family, or independence, or the assumed/assigned gender of non-living items. In French, for example, most words ending in -ble have a masculine connotation, with the exception of table.

Over the last six or seven years, I've developed well over 650 words, plus a number of phrases. I also created customs, family relationships and meanings, and a history of the people. Because the Kin were genetically designed, I used a smattering of human languages to create theirs. Words were taken from English, French, Latin, and Cherokee (Tsalagi). I used phonetic spellings, kept -ing, -ed, and the traditional English -s and -es for plurals. I then incorporated the sounds of cats in the way they form words. Words use the letter H to indicate a breathy pause, with two Hs meaning a longer pause (hheenah means sexual). Kin are never in a hurry to speak. Their language takes time, much to the chagrin of fast-talking humans.

As an aside, the human language in my books is referred to as Etymis, from the word etymology, or study of languages. In the Tarthian Empire where my current books take place, Etymis is the trade-standard tongue.

Here's a brief excerpt from the book Surrender Love, in which the hero, Luc Saint-Cyr, speaks with one of his Kin employees. Mynkoh Ceeow is the aunt of Luc's as-yet-unmet new lover. The scene portrays a traditional Kin greeting ritual.

“Welcome, Mynkoh.” Luc indicated a white leather chair and came around to stand before the matching one.

The sleek Kin female looked lithe and exotic in her tight black leather skirt and gleaming boots. She’d left her white shirt open, unfastened to a point below her breasts. She draped her black leather coat across the arm of her chair. “Hook leather” matched hair color, which, among the Kin, was an honor permitted only to warriors.

Mynkoh laid back both her ears and bowed only enough to be polite.

He bowed in return, using the ritual Felis greeting. “Dok cho, sten neeleesah?” Hello, how is your family?

After a pause, she answered with the same formality and a deeper bow. “Seeyoo, skah, yl tu?” Fine, thanks, and yours?

She lived alone, as did he with Wulf gone. Hardly an appropriate greeting for two bachelors like themselves, but it was the Kin way and she always seemed to expect it.

The enjoyment of creating an alien world, a language, and customs are some of the reasons I write Science Fiction. Developing those aspects along with a sensual plot is why I enjoy Science Fiction Romance. It's the big picture mixed with the intimate look at a character, whether human, immortal, alien, or some combination of the three.

Readers who want a deeper taste of Felis are welcome to visit my website, where a PDF lexicon of words may be downloaded. http://kayelleallen.com/Felis_Glossary.html A tour of the Tarthian Empire is also available. http://kayelleallen.com/TTC-Home.html

About the Author

Kayelle Allen's motto is "romance lives forever." She enjoys hiking, movies, reading, and SciFi conventions. A multi-published, award winning author with character-driven, plot-heavy SciFi Romances, her world-building skills include alien languages and 10k years of future history. Kayelle is known for unstoppable heroes, uncompromising love, and unforgettable passion. You will find her on the web in these places:

Homeworld
http://kayelleallen.com
Facebook
http://facebook.com/kayelleallen.author/
Twitter
http://twitter.com/kayelleallen/
Blog
http://romancelivesforever.blogspot.com/
Romance Lives Forever - Group
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/romancelivesforever/
The Edge of Peril - World of the Immortals
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/edgeofperil/
LINK to Surrender Love: http://www.loose-id.com/Surrender-Love.aspx

Everything I Know About Science Fiction. Really.

2011-12-23T00:01:00.005-05:00

by Kristina Wright

Oh woe! You want me to write about science fiction? Science fiction?? Argh!! Not my genre. I have read some science fiction, of course. Though I always get confused between what is science fiction and what is fantasy. Science fiction has spaceships and fantasy has unicorns, right? Or can there be unicorns in science fiction? I mean, there are wookies and ewoks in Star Wars and that's science fiction. (Right?) Oh sigh. In this week filled with holidays--Hanukkah, Winter Solstice, Christmas--do we have to talk about science fiction?

Fine. I will tell you what I know about science fiction:

I have written one and only one science fiction story. I wrote it about twenty years ago so my memory is fuzzy, but it involved a woman who was desperate for a baby. She purchases a fertilized embryo and grew it in an artificial womb, much like a terrarium. Ultimately, she discovered motherhood is not all it's cracked up to be. I submitted the story to only one market, a major science fiction magazine. I received a pre-printed rejection letter, the kind that says: "Dear Author, Thanks for letting us consider your work. We regret we will not be able to use your story." That was disappointing in itself, but some editor had taken the time to scrawl in the margin of the form rejection, "This topic has been done to death and done better." Ouch. I still have that letter somewhere.

I read some Robert Heinlein in my formative years. The problem with reading science fiction that was written in a previous era is that the contemporary conventions of the time often creep into the narrative no matter how impressive the world building skills of the author. I found his work strangely discordant--his futuristic worlds seemed contrary to the sexism I perceived. But Heinlein did give me reason to consider the benefits of alternative relationships, including polyamory.

Hmm. I'm wracking my brain for other science fiction I've read. Does The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood count as science fiction or fantasy? Brilliant (and frightening) book. I also read and enjoyed Suzette Haden Elgin's feminist science fiction novel Native Tongue for a women's studies class called Women, Language and Power. I've read some Alan Dean Foster and have fond memories of his novel Flinx in Flux, mostly because I was reading it on a visit to my soon-to-be husband.

I'm running out of science fiction anecdotes to share...

I'm a reluctant fan of the original "Star Trek" series. My favorite character was Spock and my favorite episode was "The Trouble with Tribbles." That is the only episode title I know, actually. I have only seen bits of the other "Star Trek" series, but I have seen all of the Star Trek movies, always at the suggestion of other people. (I'm a movie slut, I'll go see just about any movie. Really. Even stuff with Adam Sandler.) My favorite Star Trek movie was the last one, but I don't remember the title.

I've seen all of the Star Wars movies, too. Both the first (middle) trilogy and the second (first) trilogy. I always found that confusing, but whatever. I preferred the first trilogy, despite the low-tech special effects. I was never much interested in the Death Star or light sabers or storm troopers or any of that. I was interested in the relationships. I was interested in lurve, as Charlotte might say. I thought Luke and Leia belonged together and that Han Solo should travel through time and marry me. Sadly, that was not to be. In a soap operaish turn, Luke discovered he had made out with his own sister and that his father was the ultimate Bad Guy. Poor Luke. But Leia got Han (and a skimpy harem girl outfit) and all was well. And then George Lucas went back to the real beginning and introduced a bunch of new (old) characters and completely lost me. Poor Darth Vader. So sad.

And that concludes my knowledge of science fiction. Oh, I forgot, I've also seen Firefly and Serenity, though I can't remember which was the series and which was the movie. Personally, I prefer Nathan Fillion in Castle, even if he does look amazingly hot with a gun strapped to his thigh...

On that note, I leave you with a science fiction tribute to the season. Happy Holidays to you all!

The Reno Effect

2011-12-22T01:00:00.003-05:00

Do home-owners become part of their domiciles over time? Do changes to the house affect those who live in it?

Consider the Reno Effect.

Jean Roberta is Not at Home. This does not mean she is a Victorian socialite who chooses to snub certain callers by sending word that she is not to be disturbed.
She is actually not living in her home at the moment. She and her spouse are currently staying in a motel for a few days.

This is part of the Reno Effect: homeowners disappear temporarily.

The entire second floor of their house had to be vacated so that a reno crew could come in to take down the wallpaper (even though it put up a good fight), repaint the walls and remove the off-white wall-to-wall carpeting. (Actually, it was slightly off-white in 1999, when Jean & spouse moved in. It has since become very off-white due to the presence of 3 little dogs. The cats are neater & prefer their litter-box.)
The floor will then be covered by laminate flooring and a few throw rugs.

Disconnecting a computer can cause the home-owner to appear invisible to those not in her immediate physical vicinity when she is off-line. You can test this out by trying it at home.

The renovations are planned to be completed by Christmas Eve, but then all the furniture has to be replaced in the second-floor rooms where it belongs.

Quite a few of the books in Jean's voluminous library are scheduled for disappearance. She is not willing to move them all again in this lifetime. The books to be removed will undoubtedly reappear somewhere else (Value Village, a second-hand book store, or the hallway outside Jean's office at the university, where there is a tradition of offering books to all interested takers this way).

Completed home renovations are said to make the inhabitants more visible once the dust has settled, since an appealing environment helps to inspire thinking and writing. Time will tell whether the experiment is succussful.

Meanwhile, Happy Holidays from the invisible blogger, sending you this mesage from another dimension.

:~) :~) **** ^^^^^

Dude, Where’s My Jet Pack?

2011-12-21T00:45:00.005-05:00

The lady down the row from us fell asleep during the last hour which was all full of loud gunfights and car chases. She must have been really wiped out. I suspect that some people these days may come to the movies to get some shut-eye, just like years past people went to the movies in the summer to get some good air conditioning. That’s how Dillinger got himself shot.

“What was the question?"

My son leans in and yells over the closing credit music. “She’s asking how the movie ended. She fell asleep.”

The dim house lights come on and we all get up and I look down at the floor to make sure nothing’s dropped out of my pockets and we head for the lobby.

This little theater will someday be a dear part of my kid’s childhood memories of Augusta. It costs two bucks. When we first moved here, tickets were one buck, but everything goes up. This little place called Masters Cinema is easy walking distance from the famous golf course where they hold the Masters Golf Tournament with Tiger Woods and those guys. It used to be a bowling ally, and then it became a dollar theater. This is where movies come to die. A new movie has its day in the sun at the big Regal theater over at the shopping center, where its ten bucks a head, and it stops here one last time when its star begins to fade towards that lonely afterlife as a DVD. There aren’t many movies out there I would want to pay ten bucks a head plus popcorn to see. But it turns out there are a lot of them I’d pay two bucks a head to see, and “In Time” is one of them.

My wife and kid and I are walking with the lady, a cuddly middle aged woman with wire glasses, bright and intelligent, who has a very educated vibe but likes to dress in dumpy sweaters like Albert Einstein in his old photos. She sees movies alone, which suggests her husband and kids probably aren’t around anymore and maybe like someone a little down on her luck but living exactly as she wants other than money. And probably pretty wiped out from whatever job she does, if she can sleep through a movie like that.

“During the movie I was thinking about Occupy Wall Street and the thing with rich people these days.” I say as we all walk beside her.

“Yes!” she says, “I got the metaphor right away. Except that in the movie time is money. Literally.”

“The wealthy get to have all the time and the other ninety nine percent only get twenty five years to live,” says my kid.

“And they get to have all these fun lines,” I say, “Like ‘don’t waste my time’, and ‘I had enough time to buy this gun’.”

“I love that,” she says, which makes me appreciate her even more.

“Stephen King wrote this book,” I say, “It was a non-fiction book called ‘Danse Macabre’ which was all about the history of horror fiction including movies and TV. In this book he says that movies are the dreams and nightmares of a nation at a given time in its history. Like in the fifties and sixties the science fiction movies were all about giant bugs and monsters that were created by nuclear bombs back in the years of the cold war when everyone was scared of nuclear armageddon. These comic book heros you see in the movies, like Spiderman and Fantastic Four all have their super powers from radioactive accidents. The Hulk even got his powers because he was this scientist who was exposed to a test blast from a big nuclear weapon. So these are the nightmares of the early sixties and fifties.”

“Right now there’s plenty of anxiety going around about money,” says the woman “and so there’s going to be more movies like this about one percenters and ninety nine percenters.”

“Don’t be surprised if they do a remake of ‘Soylent Green’ too ,” says my kid.

By now we’ve reached the parking lot and its cold outside. The woman laughs and waves goodbye and disappears among the rows of parked cars. My wife wants to go to the Publix and pick up some bread and cat food.

In the aisles of the Publix my kid and I keep talking. He wants to have a career in the movies someday, working with the film part of it.

“I liked it,” he says, “but it had a lot of logical inconsistencies.”

“I always think of those as ‘holes’,” I say “I try to avoid them when I write. Sometimes you can’t.”

“Like the phones. Its supposed to be the future, but they don’t even have cell phones.”

“Yeah,” I say “and the cars. They were stealing cars all over the place. Even today they have technology you can buy that connects your car’s computer to a satellite. If someone steals your car and the cops are chasing them, they can send a signal to a satellite and the satellite will tell the car’s computer to shut down the engine. So you have to figure in a repressive future like that, the cars would all have those. Bingo. Shut down. End of chase.”

“’That’s a bingo!’ “, he says, quoting the Gestapo officer in “Inglourious Basterds”. Movie language is already becoming a cultural code for us.

“The fact that the holes don’t bother you anymore means you’re learning how to watch movies better. Like you didn’t like “Dragon Wars’, you thought that was dumb.”

“It was dumb.”

“That’s cause you didn’t know how to watch it. Like the Japanese science fiction movies of the ‘50s, those were all about nuclear weapons too, and that was just a couple of years after American turned Hiroshima and Nagasaki into parking lots. You have Godzilla which is this giant lizard that walks around kicking buildings over, and then you have Mothra which is this giant moth with little flying fairy girls hanging around him. If you watch that as a scary science fiction movie you’ll pull your hair out. But if you watch it as a metaphor or a fantasy, it’s a lot of fun. You have to watch it the right way.”

“So holes don’t matter?”

“They matter sometimes. It depends on the movie. It depends on what the story wants to do. The story is The Boss. That’s the rule.”

“How is the story the boss?

“There’s ‘hard’ science fiction and there’s ‘soft’ science fiction. Soft science fiction doesn’t try to explain everything. It’s just an anything-goes platform for telling what you really want to tell.”

“So this movie was soft science fiction, because they have holes and they don’t explain anything.”

“Right,” I say, “Like take time travel. Ray Bradbury wrote this short story they made a movie of called ‘A Sound of Thunder’. These safari hunters go back in a time machine and hunt dinosaurs. It’s about how little things change history.”

“Like stepping on a butterfly.”

“Yeah. Bradbury doesn’t explain the time machine because he doesn’t know and he doesn’t give a shit. He wants to get to the dinosaurs so they all just go ‘zap’ and a miracle happens and there they are hunting dinosaurs.”

“You said ‘shit’.”

“Yeah, but –“

“You won’t let me say ‘shit’.”

“You probably say ‘shit’ when I’m not around.”

“Yeah.”

“I’m the grown up. I pay for everything, so I get to say it, and you don’t. Listen. Now you take Michael Crichton, he writes ‘hard’ science fiction. He wrote a time machine story too called ‘Timeline’ and he spends the first three chapters explaining quantum physics and how the time machine works through quantum foam, whatever the hell that is and – “

“You said – “

“Shut up. And with quantum foam there’s multiple universes which is interesting to think about if you like that kind of thing. He just has to tell you how it all works, like ‘Jurassic Park’ using DNA, because that’s part of his style and brand. It’s what readers go to him expecting to read. Bradbury started out in the old sci fi pulps in the ‘40s, where your number one job was to tell a ripping good story and forget the science. When you read Bradbury you won’t get any science but you’ll get a good story. Writers have a style and a unique brand after awhile that people look for when they pick up their books.”

“The other thing I noticed about ‘In Time’ was that no one used computers or the internet.” my kid says, “It wasn’t really about this world. The whole movie was a metaphor. I keep hearing about ‘HAL’ in 2001 Space odyssey – “

“Which is a classic movie you need to see, 2001 is hard sci fi all the way. People used to watch that movie on acid.”

“But they didn’t have cell phones or Internet in that movie either.’

“ ‘2001 Space Oddessey’ was made in 1968 by Stanley Kubrick. It was a landmark movie, because it was the very first respectable, big budget science fiction movie ever made. It was made by a big name director, with a big name hard sci fi writer – Arthur C Clarke – and it tried to show the future and the next step in human evolution. Of course they got the technology all wrong too. You were around in 2001. We had the internet and cell phones, but no manned space flights to Jupiter because we never had the money or political will to develop the technology.”

“Which is depressing.”

“Very depressing. But you see the other side of this too. People used to think by the year 2011 we’d be like Buck Rogers flying around in jet packs and living on the moon. But none of that happened. Politicians have to go around pretending they don’t even believe in science now in order to get elected. Nobody predicted the rise of computers because for a long time computers were these boring number crunchers that filled up a whole room. Then transistors were invented. And that all runs on quantum physics. Nobody saw that coming either. My car out there has more onboard computers in it than the Apollo 11 moon lander. That's a fact. That’s how the future really works. It’s all based on caveman values.”

“What the hell’s that?”

“Hey!”

“You said it first.”

“Caveman values means people want technology that appeals to our basic monkey nature. People will never fly around in jet packs because flying is scary and dangerous. But social networking is an extension of tribal nature, sitting around the fire in the cave and telling stories, so that will always catch on. And pornography of course. And of course lots of food, even artificial food that makes people fat. Successful technological innovations are almost always connected to cave man values. Values a cave man would understand."

“Why would you write a sci fi story instead of a regular story?”

“The sci fi stuff I’ve written, and sci fi in general is about ideas. That’s what good sci fi is. Its not about getting the future right, because you never will. You’ll only get part of it right. ‘Brave New World’, ‘Fahrenheit 451’, and ‘1984’ all got stuff right when they were dealing with big ideas, based on cave man values. Brave New World is about using eugenics to create priveleged, elite social classes. That’s happening right now. ‘Fahrenheit 451’ is about a society distracting its citizens with shallow entertainment while things fall apart around them, and that’s happening right now. ‘1984’, which really isn’t science fiction, is about how language and ideas are manipulated to keep a totalitarian government in place and that’s happening right now too. All those ideas are real. But there aren’t any jet packs. That’s why when you approach a movie or a story like ‘In Time’ you have to ignore the holes and think about the ideas that are being noodled on.”

We’re standing in the check out line by now and I swipe my debit card. It’s rejected. No dough.

I start thinking about the lady in the movie theater. I pull out a credit card. That’s new too. You don’t have to starve when you’re broke. I wonder how she’s doing now. I hope her kids come see her. In real time. For Christmas.

C. Sanchez-Garcia

Imprinted On My Psyche

2011-12-20T18:04:00.003-05:00

Although I love most genres - erotica and erotic romance and all its subdivisions, horror, literary stuff, action, drama comedy etc - there's one in particular that has the power above all other genres to make me excited just because it is what it is. And by that I mean: if I see a trailer at the cinema for a sci-fi movie, I'll automatically be excited because it's sci-fi.

Some drab drama about gritty things happening in political situations? Nope. The latest gore-fest installment in the Mutilation Is Orsum franchise? No excitement from me. Some comedy starring what's his face and a cut-out love interest? I was too busy rooting through my pic and mix to be interested.

But give me some spaceships and aliens and other worlds and time travel machines and I will at the very least pay rapt attention to the trailer.

And to this day, nothing affects me more strongly, film-wise, than the Alien franchise.

No movie has invaded my dreams more intensely than the those three films have. No movie has informed my idea of what a strong heroine should be as clearly as those three films have.

And I know all of this now, more than ever, because of my response to the trailer for the new Alien movie, Prometheus.

I swear to God, summat happened to me when I heard that music. When I heard some woman saying we're sorry, we were wrong, so wrong. I'm not even sure why that voiceover resonates with me so strongly, and reminds me so definitively of the Alien movies.

But try as Ridley Scott might to deny it's not really a prequel, those things tell me it is. It's like the DNA of a true Alien movie has imprinted itself on my psyche, and everything about that first trailer awoke that DNA inside me. I watched it over and over, greedy for more details, for more of the iconic imagery I so love - the horseshoe shaped ship, the agony of that obscene birth, the space docks and the confined spaces and Noomi Rapace's beautiful face.

I hope they don't waste her, in it, because they couldn't have picked a better woman to take up Ripley's mantle. As Lisbet Salander, Rapace cut a jagged swathe through Dragon Tattoo, and all while maintaining a kind of gentle woundedness behind her eyes.

That's what I want. I want my heroine, fierce and sharp and still a woman all at the same time. I want the true Alien movie of my childhood again, to remind me of why I started loving science fiction, in the first place.

I love it because of Alien. And when I see that sci-fi trailer on the big screen, that's what I always dream and hope for: Ellen Ripley, last survivor of the Nostromo, signing off.

Such A Lovely Topic

2011-12-19T05:06:00.002-05:00

By Kathleen Bradean

Such a lovely topic, but where to begin?

"Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end: then stop." The King of Hearts to the White Rabbit

Solid advice indeed.

In grade school, our assigned reading included short stories of travel to the moon or mars, none of which interested me too much. I loved Disney's version of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea though so I borrowed every Jules Vernes novel I could from the library. It never occurred to me that they were science fiction though because most of what he'd written about was, by then, technological fact. The book that made me realize I was a science fiction fan was Frank Herbert's Dune. Asimov's Caves of Steel sealed the deal.

I could make long lists of science fiction books that keep me enthralled: David Brin's Kiln People. Gordon Dahlquist's Glass Books of the Dream Eaters. Liz Williams The Poison Master. Ursula Le Guin's Left Hand of Darkness. Richard K Morgan's Altered Carbon. The manga series Fullmetal Alchemist by Hiromu Arakawa. China Mieville's Perdido Street Station. Dragon Riders of Pern by Anne McCaffrey. Everything by Lois McMaster Bujold and Octavia Butler. But lists don't explain why these stories creep into my brain and wrap themselves comfortably around my imagination. They don't explain why I'm so sad to leave those worlds when I've read the last page of the story.

A solid world-builder makes such a difference. I have to feel as if I could peek around the façade where the action is taking place and see everyday people living everyday lives in a complete, full-functioning world. It has to seem as if there are other stories waiting to be told. After all, there isn't just one story about earth! If I sense an unsustainable economy or rules of magic that defy physics or anything that can't continue to work in the long run, the story will disappoint me.

What matters the most though, as with any genre, are the characters. Even if it's an alien species, there has to be a sense of humanity. I want to feel that the heroine or hero has bad days, family pressures, obligations that s/he'd rather not have to deal with, enjoys friendships, loves, cries, and even on occasion enjoys beauty in silent awe. It's wonderful when the villains show some of that too. Dual-natured characters are like complete worlds instead of decorative facades.

While I get why, given the current state of the world economy, dystopian futures are all the rage right now, I like a sense of hope. I'd like to think that trying to change things for the better isn't an entirely futile effort. A scientist once said that the reason people like Star Trek is that it depicts the universe as full of interesting places to see and people to meet, while in reality, it's vast nothingness. Yes, I get the reality, but there's nothing wrong with hoping that out there somewhere there's something to reach for. Science Fiction promises that there is.

First Love

2011-12-18T08:03:00.002-05:00

By Lisabet Sarai

Almost as soon as I could read, I started reading science fiction. I couldn't have been more than seven or eight when I discovered Eleanor Cameron's Mushroom Planet books. At this point I don't remember the plots at all, only my emotional reactions – an overwhelming sense of wonder and excitement. (It's fascinating to read adult reviews of these books on Amazon. Clearly I wasn't the only child thus affected.)

Then came Jules Verne, Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov. When I was perhaps twelve or thirteen, Asimov was a guest on a local radio talk show, and I called in to ask him some question about the relationship between modern politics and the world of the Foundation trilogy. This might not seem surprising unless you knew that I was the shyest child in the world, absolutely terrified of making telephone calls.

Meanwhile, I suspect that Stranger in a Strange Land, which I devoured when I was fifteen or so, may be partially responsible for my personal attraction to polyamory.

My husband introduced me to Philip K. Dick. I started with The Man in the High Castle, Dick's subtle exploration of an alternative world in which the Japanese and the Germans won WWII. I used to think I'd read everything Dick ever wrote, but new titles keep coming to light. Just a few months ago I finished the weird, apocalyptic and sexually charged Dr. Blood money. (I supposed I could have omitted the adjectives “weird” and “apocalyptic”, since they apply to most of Dick's oeuvre...)

In the eighties we joined a science fiction reading group. Every month a dozen of us would get together for wine, potluck, desserts and discussion. We read Sheri S. Tepper, Olivia Butler, Greg Bear, Harry Harrison, John Barnes, Pat Cadigan... a whole new universe of authors. After a year or so, the group fizzled, but not before it had rekindled my early love of the genre.

Recently I discovered Jonathan Lethem. He might not characterize his own work as science fiction, but Gun, With Occasional Music, in which farm animals have achieved a near-human level of intelligence and individuals require custom blended drugs to survive, certainly fits my criteria for the genre.

I'll read almost anything that calls itself scifi, but my favorite tales focus more on people than technology – so-called “soft science fiction”. The best books, in my opinion, start with a relatively simple premise and then explore its societal implications. I read a book in the eighties by Kate Wilhelm, which is an ideal example. (Unfortunately, I can't seem to find the title. Sometimes things that predated the Internet seem to drop into a black hole.) The world passes through a cloud of interstellar dust. At first it appears that there are no negative effects, but soon people begin to die. It turns out that the dust causes water to become more viscous. Since humans are mostly composed of water, exposure to the dust is fatal – and the thickening produces a variety of other consequences as well. Society begins to fall apart, in a most convincing way

As you might expect, I also have a particular fondness for speculative fiction that plays with changes in gender and sexuality. The 1997 Circlet Press anthology Genderflex is my touchstone in this area.

So, now I'm a writer. Given my love of science fiction, one might ask why I don't write some sci fi of my own.

Well, I'll be honest. With all the fantastic models from a lifetime of reading the genre, I'm just plain intimidated. Science fiction demands a level of imagination that I'm not sure I can deliver. I've read so much scifi that all my own ideas feel stale or derivative.

Furthermore, it's not enough to create a vivid, surprising, different alternative universe. Your fictional world must also be at least somewhat plausible, and internally consistent. In science fiction, details matter almost as much as they do in historical fiction. Indeed, writing historical fiction might be easier, because you can consult external sources when you get stuck.

Writing sci fi is hard. I know because, finally, I just finished my first science fiction novel, and it required a level of pain far beyond anything I've experienced with any other book.

Actually, I'm cheating a bit here. Quarantine is sci fi erotic romance, not “pure” science fiction. It will be judged as much on its sex scenes and the bond between its heroes as for the dystoptic future it presents. So in fact, it doesn't feel quite real. Nevertheless, I'd be lying if I said I wasn't somewhat proud of the book. For one thing, it focuses on changes in society and their implications for the characters – the sort of soft sci fi that I personally enjoy.

Quarantine is set some thirty years in the future, after a plague has decimated the population of America. The epidemic had its start in the gay community before spreading to heterosexuals, and thus gays are blamed. All surviving men with a genetic marker for homosexuality have been rounded up and sent to remote quarantine camps in places like eastern Oregon. (If you've never been through eastern Oregon – it's flat, empty, dry and desolate – and that's before the effects of global warming.) One of the heroes is an inmate who has been imprisoned in the camp for seven years. The other is a camp guard, an ex-gang member sent to work at the camp in lieu of a prison term. The inmate seduces the guard, who helps him escape. They both end up as fugitives, hiding in Plague-ravaged San Francisco where they are forced to help the queer underground in its battle against the homophobic, nationalistic Guardians of American Greatness.

Ugh. When I describe the book, it sounds like a million other stories. And indeed, it's not such a stretch of the imagination to move from today to my imagined future, which seems all too plausible. Oh well. I suspect that my erotic romance readership will enjoy it anyway. It's likely that most of them did not cut their reading teeth on Bradbury and Heinlein.

I had planned to conclude with a brief excerpt – but I couldn't find one that was obviously science fiction. My fictional world is too much like our own. Instead, I'll give you a snippet from the only other sci fi I've published, a novella called Bodies of Light. This is a bit of space opera (with plenty of sex thrown in), but even so, it's no more than half a century in the future. I guess I don't dare boldly go where no one has gone before!

The bridge was as silent as the suspension bay. However, a survey of the blinking panels and rotating 3D displays revealed that the ship still had power. The pods had been some kind of anomaly. Relieved, Christine settled into the pilot’s chair (Sven Harlsson, gone like all the rest) and searched the cluttered controls until she found the viewport activation button. The curved shields slid open, revealing a hemisphere of blackness. For the first time, Christine gazed out into the emptiness of interstellar space.

Terror tightened her throat. She was falling into the immense void before her, drowning in the utter absence of light or form. She closed her eyes, trying to summon the scientist within her. No one had seen this before, the vast reaches of the universe outside Earth’s solar system. She was the first.

She forced herself to peer into the darkness, pressing against the transparent carbon-crystal of the viewport. As her vision adapted, she found she could see faint glowing clouds that must be galaxies and pinpricks of light that were distant stars. The universe was not totally empty, after all. She swallowed her fear and tried to speak.

“Request interstellar coordinates.” Her long-unused voice came out as a croak, but Archimedes understood her command.

“359˚ 56’ 39.5’’ galactic latitude, -2˚ 42’ 46.3’’ galactic longitude,” the ship replied crisply.

“Request distance from Sirius cluster.”

“Approximately thirty-four-point-seven light years.”

“What?” That was farther away than they’d been when they started! “There must be a mistake! Recheck your calculations.”

The ship’s computer hesitated for a fraction of a second—almost as though it were offended, Christine thought. “There is no error. Current position is 34.68643 light years from Sirius, 41.321966 light years from Terra. Current speed is .917 c. Heading is 22˚ 13’ b by 9˚ 2’ l.”

Forty-one light years from Earth! Had they overshot their goal? Of course, a tiny miscalculation in their initial trajectory would be magnified into an increasingly large discrepancy the farther the ship travelled from its starting point. “How long has it been since departure?”

“Four years, sixty-two days, four hours and twenty-two minutes,” the ship intoned.

Only four years? “That’s not possible,” Christine objected. Given their maximum velocity, they could not have travelled anywhere near this far. Something was very wrong.

“Run full self-diagnostics,” she ordered. “Report any faults.”

The computer was silent for about ten seconds. Christine stared out of the viewport, wondering whether any of the faint, flickering points of brightness might be Sol.

“Self-diagnostics completed,” Archimedes announced. “No faults detected.”

Christine leaned back in the padded chair with a weary sigh. Pain pounded in her temples. Her usually nimble mind felt stiff and rusty. She had to figure this out.

Once again, she saw Ravin’s blank, lifeless face. She had not loved him, but she had respected him, and he had given her pleasure during their pre-launch familiarisation exercises. She found that she missed him. “The crew are all dead,” she murmured to herself. “I’m the only one left, and I’m lost in space, billions of kilometres off course.”

“All suspension pod power was terminated,” the ship commented. “A collision with unidentified debris damaged the electrical distribution cables in the hull. Backup systems failed to engage.”

“What? How long ago did this happen?”

“Sixty-two hours and seventeen minutes ago.” Less than three days! If she had awakened a bit sooner, she might have saved them. The impact must have triggered the reactivation sequence in her own pod. Or perhaps the backup had kicked in to handle the life support for her pod alone.

“EVA is recommended to repair the breach,” Archimedes added. “Probability of atmospheric loss over the next twenty-four hours is point-four-six.”

Christine collapsed on to the control panel, her face buried in her hands, squeezing her eyes tight to hold back the tears. The ship wanted her to risk her life, venturing outside to patch the hole before the air escaped. But why should she bother? She was dead one way or the other.

The vastness of space weighed on her, even when she was not looking at it. The unending blackness threatened to smother her. She felt as empty and hollow as the universe stretching into infinity on every side.

Indulging My Own Needs

2011-12-17T12:23:00.000-05:00

by Nan Andrews

Around the holidays, it's easy to over-indulge. There is so much delicious food and drink beginning at Thanksgiving and going all the way through the New Year. Everywhere you turn, there are holiday parties and cookie exchanges, candy canes and fruitcake. A toast or two, followed by another, and we all seem to be indulging ourselves. But there are other ways to indulge yourself, ways that don't affect your waistline. As I get older, I find that my daily schedule is mostly at the mercy of those around me: work, children, spouse. I have to fit in the grocery shopping and the Christmas shopping, paying the bills and ordering the photo greeting cards. I forget about the things I need until it's late and I'm tired, too tired to do anything about it.

The most important way I've indulged myself this fall is to make time for my own needs. I wanted to commit more time to my writing, so I gave up the weekly coffee with my friends, rescheduled the exercise classes and gave myself a stern talking to about facebook and boingboing. I told everyone I was going to keep office hours. 9-12, M-F. And for the most part, I've managed to do so. It felt strange at first, to realize that people were holding off calling me or expecting me to do things in the morning, because I'd declared I was busy. That in itself was empowering and I got a great deal of writing done. Two thousand words a day on average. Faster than Nanowrimo pace and while I wasn't working on just one piece, it was exciting to be cranking out the words.

Another need that I had been neglecting was my own desire. I'd boxed it up and put it in a closet, waiting for a day when I had more time. That was a mistake. Despite my obligations and my age, I still have strong sexual desire and when I started making time for it, I found it blossomed in ways I never expected. My body is different now, older and wiser, perhaps. The rush I feel isn't the quick lust of youth, something that once built to enormous circuit-blowing fireworks. Now, it's slower to enflame, but it burns longer. I have discovered a plateau of pleasure that is altogether more satisfying than jumping off the cliff of my youthful orgasms. Now, the orgasms are many and varied, more subtle but also more frequent. And while they take more attention to begin burning, I can stay on the plateau once I get there. This is a change that was definitely worth waiting for and worth paying attention to.

Age and experience have shown me that there are many more things that arouse me, many more ways in which that arousal is expressed. Happily, however briefly, I found it to be an easily renewable resource. So, I indulge myself by writing and by looking to my own pleasure, and hopefully, it will outlast the holiday season and become a habit.

Indulge? Maybe in 2012

2011-12-16T00:01:00.005-05:00

I don't have much time for indulgences anymore. I'm not sure when that happened. After the first baby, certainly. But even then I found time to curl up on the couch for a few hours and read a book or watch a movie or both. But then the contracts started coming in (no complaints here!) and hours spent reading for pleasure suddenly became hours spent reading for anthologies or promoting forthcoming books or writing stories and introductions and blog posts.

Somewhere between the first and second baby and fourth and fifth anthology contracts, I ran out of time for most indulgences. I know this to be true because this morning I attempted to schedule a massage. I honestly believe a massage should be considered medicinal and therefore necessary (like the cardiology appointment I have yet to schedule), but I still lump it in the indulgence category. However, the only reason I was attempting to schedule a massage was because I have a gift certificate. The gift certificate expires at the end of December. I have had this gift certificate for almost an entire year and have not made the time to indulge myself. Making the appointment felt like something I needed to do, not something I wanted to do. But I got off the phone without having scheduled the massage because they didn't have an appointment available at a time that was convenient for me. The woman was very understanding and said they would still honor the gift certificate in January if I can't get in before the end of the month.

How sad is that? Twelve months and I haven't had time to get a massage. Disclaimer: I did get one massage over the summer, courtesy of a friend who took me out and pampered me. That was certainly an indulgent day, but they have been few and far between the past two years and usually involved me leaving town or someone else pushing, prodding or abducting me. My definition of indulgences has become limited to getting pedicures during the months I wear sandals, going to the movies (though I can't remember the last movie I saw, it's been a couple of months) and getting a second coffee on days when I am really, really dragging.

What's sadder is that I don't think January will be any better for scheduling a massage. Surely there is something wrong with me when my thought process goes, "I don't want to waste this gift certificate, so I should just go ahead and schedule the massage and get it over with." When did that happen? When did planning a fun vacation turn into an adventure in scheduling readings or networking opportunities so the trip isn't a frivolous waste of time? (I actually said that the other day.) When did the holiday rituals of shopping and wrapping and card writing become chores instead of indulgences, taking precious time away from the hundred other things I need to do? The list is endless and includes things like sorting the baby's clothes and cleaning out closets and donating items to charity and scheduling doctor's appointments and sending thank you cards for Patrick's birthday and food shopping and doing a spreadsheet for my anthology royalty statements and overhauling my blog and updating my recent sales and getting new author photos taken and cleaning out the pantry... it goes on and on, my to do list.

I do indulge myself at times. I'm not a martyr, I swear. I have my wildly indulgent moments. (Stop laughing.) When a friend comes to town and I declare a temporary moratorium on all but the absolute necessities of writing/editing and housework (which is still a substantial list) so we can spend a few hours talking and drinking coffee. When I'm sick and I know the illness will linger for weeks if I don't get some much needed rest and I take to my bed for as long as I can. When I'm feeding my baby or playing cars with my toddler and time stops because the voice in my head says I need to hold onto these moments because they are fleeting and precious. But always, always, in these moments of indulgence (which I know are really just moments of a well-rounded life), there is a feeling of guilt that I should be doing more, multi-tasking better or squeezing in an extra chore. And so I find myself staying up until 2 AM on Thanksgiving to finish some stories I promised to an editor or emailing my publisher while the baby nestles sleepily in the crook of my arm or wiping off the layer of dust on the dresser when I am getting ready for bed or paying bills while I'm fast forwarding through the slow parts of a month's old episode of "Grey's Anatomy." There is always something to do and not enough time to do it and something must give. And it is the indulgences.

I'm working on it. I recognize that I'm my own worst enemy. I know there is no shame in taking an hour or afternoon or even day for myself. I realize it's important to have fun, to have adventures, to laugh, to relax, to recharge, to do nothing for a little while.

I haven't read Eat, Pray, Love or seen the movie, but this clip hits a little too close to home for me right now. I need to learn (or relearn?) "dolce far niente." The sweetness of doing nothing.

It seems frivolous (there's that word again) to be thinking about indulgences in this economy. To be thinking about indulgences when I have two babies and deadlines and a house that hasn't had a good cleaning since before baby #2 was born. To be thinking of indulgences when I know people who are doing a hell of a lot more than me. I promise myself rewards for doing X, Y or Z and often never find time to actually collect my reward. From myself. Oh good grief, what is wrong with me?

I was told recently that part of my "brand" is that I am a superwoman who does it all. First of all, I didn't think I had a brand at all. Second of all, I don't know if that's the brand I want. It doesn't feel accurate, if nothing else. I'm not doing it all. I wish I was. It is an illusion that I am superwoman. What I really am is a crazy person running from one thing to the next, never satisfied with my efforts and always trying to do more than I really have time for in any give day. Is there a brand for that?

I'm going to start indulging myself more. Really. I am. I am going to make it a priority to do silly, frivolous things for absolutely no reason other than they make me deliriously happy. I will do things I enjoy with no hidden agenda and without multi-tasking. I will be happier in my indulgence. That is reason enough to indulge, right?

And I will start with a massage.

A Little of What You Fancy

2011-12-15T01:00:00.009-05:00

by Jean Roberta

Here is a little snippet from my story, "A Dowager's Hump," which was published in Ripe Fruit: Well-Seasoned Erotica, an anthology featuring women aged 50 and over, edited by Marcy Sheiner (Cleis Press, 2002).

The narrator is a kind of Mary Sue character: a menopausal (or post-menopausal) woman who is not afraid of time because she doesn't believe in depriving herself of anything she really wants. She is bisexual, for lack of a clearer term. And in this case, she wants to show her distraught sister-in-law the pleasures of self-indulgence.

--------------------------------------------------------

I came home from work on a day cold enough to freeze a witch’s tits, to use a vulgar expression. As I walked into my welcoming house, its warmth hit me like a burst of hormones. The phone was ringing.

“Margaret?” begged the voice on the other end. “I kicked him out. I hope you can forgive me.”

This melodrama from my ex-sister-in-law seemed to match the extremes of temperature in a Canadian winter. “Pfft,” I told her. “It was overdue. You’d better come over. Otherwise you won’t eat -- or you’ll binge.”

Sarah was pitifully grateful, and she arrived at my door before I had had enough time to confer with myself. Emerging from her parka, she looked sodden. She shook her brown hair like a cocker spaniel.

“Have a drink to warm up,” I told her, “then we’ll go out for dinner.”

She seemed childlike as she sat on my sofa, sipping a scotch-and-seven as though it could restore lost hope. I had catered to her taste: old scotch ruined by the adolescent fizz of Seven-Up. A good hostess, like a cruel
ancient god, gives her supplicants what they think they want.

I noted that Sarah’s breasts were fuller than they had been; she must have gained weight. I knew that she must consider this a disaster. We both sighed.

“I mean,” she was complaining, “I can see why he fools around. Men have this biological need to find younger women as long as they can. It’s just in them, no matter what they promise. But what’s left for us?” I glanced ironically at the framed print hanging next to my bookcase. It is a sepia-toned photo of Emmaline Pankhurst giving a speech on women’s rights, watched admiringly by her grown daughters. Sarah missed the reference.

“I’m thirty-five,” she complained. “I have to face it.”

“So you do,” I agreed. She remembered that the digits in my age were hers in reverse. She was embarrassed.

“Not that we’re too old for some things,” she assured me, politely ignoring the near-generation gap between us, “but we can’t pick up guys the way we used to.”

I was wearing my favorite royal blue knit dress with the pantihose that are supposed to stimulate my legs. I considered whether most male patrons of meat-market bars would like the way the dress skimmed my breasts and hips.

I asked myself whether Sarah would sputter with envy if I explained that I stay slim enough by eating only when hungry and by traveling on foot whenever possible. I realized that better food for thought was on the table.

“Do you want another man so soon, girl?” I asked her. Better to wallow in scotch-and-seven, I thought.

Now she looked deeply distressed. “I don’t want to end up like –“ she blurted. “You haven’t been with a man since David died, have you?” Cancer, my only successful rival, had taken my husband ten years before.

“Not often,” I agreed. “The ones I meet usually lack depth, so I don’t keep them long. They’re appetizers. But I wouldn’t underestimate the value of a good fuck.” Sarah stared, obviously wondering whether the combination of
alcohol and gassy bubbles had affected her hearing. I smiled. “I don’t need their money any more,” I explained. “Sometimes they need mine. I believe in noblesse oblige, of course, and I don’t mind helping them, but when they
assume I’m a fool, the romance is over.”

I could see that my thinly-veiled advice was whizzing past Sarah’s ears like pub darts missing their target. I reached for her empty glass, took it to the kitchen and refilled it.

-------------

Spirit Voices

2011-12-14T00:13:00.001-05:00

“The world breaks everyone and you become stronger in the broken places."

Ernest Hemingway

“But what is a good English tea, something I could find around here?”

“Ty-phoo tea is pretty good. I like to have it afternoons with digestive biscuits. But you call them cookies here.”

“Digestive biscuits, what an awful name for a cookie.”

“Isn’t it, though?”

“Sounds like medicine, like Alka Seltzer. Like you have to eat it. Be a good boy and eat your digestive biscuit.”

Voices.Voices. Voices.

“But certainly loose leaf tea is the best.”

“They call it the 'agony of the leaves'.”

“Mexicans have this expression ‘like water for chocolate’, it’s about making a cup of cocoa but it also means a sexually excited woman. I don’t know why.”

Voices. Voices. Hands reach out and shake mine.

“Those were very kind words you said up there at the service.”

“I meant them too. Every word.”

I retreat back to the coffee pot and draw off half a cup. A woman offers me a hug which I accept eagerly. I’m a junkie for hugs. Hugs turn me on. I’m chronically starved for touch and squeeze her a little harder than maybe I should. She doesn’t seem to mind. “I’m very glad I stayed,” I say to her. "You all saved me from going crazy.” I reach across the woman to the folding table and glom some toothpicks with little pieces of sausage and cheese.

“A good English beer? Let’s see. Theakston’s Old Peculiar is terribly good. But the best beer is hand drawn in a pub.”

“I’m brewing mead at home. In my garage.”

“The oldest booze there is."

"I always think of Vikings drinking mead from cow horns."

"If you’re ever about in Yorkshire and want a pub, look for the church steeples. The pub is always next door to the church.”

“Why?” I offer my friend Graham a toothpick with a piece of sausage.

“Go on, what do you suppose then? They own all the bloody booze is why! Always ‘ave!”

Campfires, copulation and conversation are Paleolithic pleasures passed down to us unchanged and primitive. They have the power to heal the soul because the soul is passed down through these ancient acts.

I’m sitting in the church pew on the second row, left, close to the center aisle. The theme of the service is “Blue Christmas”. One of the worship associates lights a chalice candle, a Unitarian Universalist tradition, and a bohemian middle aged blond woman with a terrific pair of tits in a tight pink sweater, new jeans and big fur Eskimo boots that come to her knees stands in front and sings a Joni Mitchell song. God, she’s got a helluva torch singer voice, Grace Slick and Billy Holiday together and really works that thing. I can’t take my eyes off her. She feels my eyes and looks at me.

Pat, who sometimes works with me in the soup kitchen downtown, takes a microphone and the pastor lights a small votive candle. “This is the part of our service where we invite those of you to come up and share your joys and sorrows.”

It hits me suddenly, its been a year almost to the day. A year since I first wandered into a Sunday service here like a feral cat. And I'm still here, and so much better. I stand up.

As I reach the mike, other people are lining up behind me to speak a little. I’m holding the mike a little awkwardly and I don’t know what I’m going to say except that I should speak. I want to offer these people my words. They may be good for somebody, my words. They must be good for somebody. Its that way with writing. I don’t write because I want to be a writer. I write because I need to speak. Like the messenger in the Book of Job. I alone have lived to tell you.

Voices. Voices. Voices. I sink under them like a hot bath, losing myself in the intensity of conversation. I need this. I need them all so badly.

“I didn’t realize it until just now while I was sitting here, but this is the one year anniversary of my knowing all of you.” I look out over the sea of faces and squeeze the mike tightly. I want to look them in the eye. “I used to hate Christmas, I absolutely hated it, because it seemed like the time of year that embodied all the things that were wrong with my life. But now I don’t, because of all of you. I grew up in a spiritual community, that’s the life that I come from. Things happened and I lost that community and it left a huge wound in my life. And then I found that community with all of you and I’m so very glad that I get to be here. Thank you.” I hand the mike back and go sit down wondering if everybody thinks I'm weird.

“Physicists are saying that time doesn’t flow forward the way it seems. That past and present and future are all existing together at the same time.”

“But isn’t that what the Buddhists have always said?”

“Everything that has happened to you is still happening somewhere, and there’s now and everything that will happen to you is already happening somewhere right at this moment. Time isn’t an arrow; it’s a loaf of bread.”

“Have you read Deepak Chopra?”

I’m glancing over at the folding table to see if there’s any cheese cubes left. This is the hardest part of the Unitarian church service, and its an official part of the tradition. You have the church service, hymns and all just like regular churches. And after that everybody goes to the coffee room and drinks coffee and tea and snacks and just hangs out – talking. Marvelous, marvelous talking. For a shy person, and there are many shy people here besides me, it’s a kind of torture, like exercise. Its much easier to just run away and retreat into my head. For the first ten minutes I have to force myself to stay, to wait, fighting my wallflowerness, trying to engage the eye and hope someone will talk to me. The healing talk.

That first day I ever came here, I sat down next to a tall, thin professorly woman with cheerful turtleshell spectacles and waited for someone to say hello to me. Another woman addressed her and said “So, Sandy. How was Borneo?”

Borneo?? I knew I'd found my people.

From a young age I lived communally and that was my way of life for many, many years, living in various houses filled with idealistic young people like me, I swam in a sea of conversation and intense prayer and was no more aware of how lucky I was than a fish is aware of the existence of water. I never had privacy and didn’t miss it. I didn’t have any personal money, and very few personal things, but I never felt poor. I felt free then, the way a monk is free. All that I owned I could pack up and carry on my back. I was celibate, but instead of feeling lonely felt liberated from the need to prove myself to women and to compete with men. My home was the wide wide world and my family was everyone. They were my tribe. Then I lost them. When God drives you out from the Garden, its very hard to go back.

If God gives a shit at all, He wouldn’t want you to go back. A person can become more interesting by staying out of the Garden and letting life come at you. Like Adam you have to earn your bread by the sweat of your brow, and its meant to be a curse, but over time you learn it isn’t. Eve was cursed to yearn physically and emotionally for a man, and give birth in mortal pain and danger as a result but Eden’s curse turns out to define so much of what is magnificent in woman. The suffering shapes and bends you. Breaks and refracts the light through you. Suffering is only a dark energy. It’s something that just is. You have to suffer well.

Kids are running around dressed as shepards. The Christmas pagent is next week. Randy, a professional stage actor married to a Wiccan pagan prietess named Jezebel (really) comes by with a staff and a robe.

"Are you a wise man now?" I shout after him.

"No! I'm a wise guy!"

A little girl runs by dressed like a sheep. A little boy carrying a sugar donut runs after her, dressed as a big gold star. “Hey,” I call to him. “Are you a rock and roll star or a regular star?”

“But I think now that consciousness underlies everything like a great energy. I’m convinced that it exists independently of us and when we die we return to it, we’re all part of this great web, this great conversation that never stops. You want some more coffee? I’m going over there, give me your cup.”

Voices. Voices. Voices. When I die will there be voices?

“I love museums,” I say to my friend Mary Ann. She showed up on the same day I did a year ago and she still comes around. She's deep. “I was at the Smithsonian in Washington and saw the Wright Brother’s first airplane. The uber airplane.”

“Did you see the Viet Nam memorial there?” says Mary Ann.

“No, I missed it.”

“Oh, it’s amazing,” she says. “There’s this little museum nearby of all the stuff people brought to the memorial. It just makes you want to cry. There’s a beer glass and a note that says ‘I promised we’d have a beer together when we got back home.’ And a Brownie Scout sash with little merit badges and a note that says ‘I wanted to show you my badges when you got home, Dad’. It just breaks your heart.”

“People have the wrong idea,” I say, “About what sacred is. Like its supposed to be only about religion. But sacred is anything. An old teddy bear. Your grandma’s cookies. It can be a glass of beer. Or a Girl Scout sash. If you give it soul, if it means something it becomes sacred. It has power because you give it power. That’s how magic works. Its imbuing something with emotional power; with soul.”

When I say that to Mary Ann it reminds me of Nixie talking to the reader about why some vampires fear the cross and others don’t. Some vampires are afraid of a cup of tea, Nixie said. It’s a matter of soul. It’s a matter of what you loved before you went all wrong inside.

C. Sanchez-Garcia

Subtle Indulgences

2011-12-12T05:57:00.000-05:00

By Kathleen Bradean

Chocolate truffle.

My teeth push down, gently cracking the outer layer then slide through the interior. My tongue feels the smooth texture fractions of a second before the flavor blooms along with the scent. I sigh with satisfaction as the intense, rich, decadent indulgence lingers on my palate.

Blue cheese. Wood fire grilled oysters. Samsuta tangerines.

I'm an oral sensualist, which is hell on the diet, but a little can go a long way even when you're talking about moments of bliss.

Basmati rice. Comice pears. Squid.

While I'm attracted to the extremes of espresso, straight vodka, and freshly cracked black pepper, subtle definitely has a place in the world of sublime flavors. In fact, I'm quite a fan of subtle things. Even the most ardent fan of BDSM isn't going to use rope, or spank, or clamp, wax, or whip their sex partner every time they get together. Only acting your most extreme sexual fantasies would probably get dull after a while. Can you imagine knife play or suspension being same old, same old? Ugh. And every time I read about a mishap with auto-erotica where someone winds up dead, I always wonder why go to that extreme to get off. If you're that bored with sex, maybe it's time to abstain from any sex for a while. Trust me, if you haven't even allowed yourself to masturbate for a year, oral sex is going to feel wonderful and new and exciting all over again.

So I've recommitted to exploring the wonderful world of slow, sensual, subtle sex. I need almost zero foreplay, but that doesn't mean I shouldn't do it. There's something so exquisite about touch. The slow glide of a hand over bare skin builds anticipation. Almost touching a known sensitive spot and then backing away from it is the right kind of tease. Imagine your lover a little frustrated and amused as his/her/hir nerves try to figure out where your touch will land next. How about the warmth of your breath? Concentrate it on sensitive flesh like a nipple until your lover is used to the sensation then stop. In these chilly winter months, the surrounding air will feel even colder once you take it away. All of this takes time, but show me a lover who doesn't occasionally like to be the center of loving, caressing, subtle attention as if there's nothing you'd rather do than spend all eternity focusing on them, and I'll show you... hmmm. I can't think of anyone who wouldn't like that.

Bribing Heaven

2011-12-11T00:54:00.004-05:00

By Lisabet Sarai

Selling indulgences - Woodcut circa 1500

What does it say about me, that when I learned this week's topic, “Indulgence”, I thought not about chocolate, sex, or tropical vacations, but of ecclesiastical indulgences?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indulgences

I'm not going to even speculate about the way my mind works. Once I'd fastened on this interpretation, though, I decided to stick with it, since I suspect my worthy colleagues will provide more than adequate explorations the alternative meaning, namely, immersing oneself in extravagant pleasures.

For those of you who don't have time to flip over to Wikipedia, I'll summarize. The Roman Catholic doctrine of indulgence allows the temporal punishment for sins (that is, the amount of time the sinner will be required to spend in hell or purgatory) to be reduced if the sinner performs certain types of activities: prayers, pilgrimages, acts of charity or acts of renunciation. These acts do not forgive the sin itself – that requires the sacrament of confession, and subsequent absolution – but address the issue of punishment after death, which remains due even after the sin has been forgiven.

Indulgences became infamous during the Middle Ages, when various individuals handed them out wholesale in return for money – often very large sums. The cash received for indulgences financed lavish (indeed, “indulgent”) lifestyles for bishops and other powerful clergy, the building of grand cathedrals (not to mention palaces) and the expenses of the Crusades. The abuse of indulgences was one motivation for the Protestant Reformation.

It's clear that these abuses weren't sanctioned by official doctrine. However, it seems to me that even the orthodox view of indulgences, as I understand it, smacks of bribery.

Please note, I have no interest in getting involved in theological disputes. The opinions expressed in this blog are my own possibly benighted views, and it may well be that I'm destined to burn in hell. (Certainly, my mother, having seen the portfolio from my nude photo shoot, thought so – and she never even read any of my books.)

Consider the basic idea, though: do something “virtuous” or “holy”, and your punishment will reduced by a certain amount, the degree of reduction determined by the Church-assessed value of your actions. Sounds like bribery to me. The economic, tit-for-tat nature of the doctrine becomes even clearer when money, such as a donation to charity, is involved.

Although I'm not conventionally religious, I do consider myself a spiritual person. The doctrine of indulgences doesn't fit at all with my concept of the Divine. For one thing, if you've been forgiven, why should you still require punishment? I'm not talking about making amends; I think if you've harmed someone, it's only just to try setting things right. Punishment doesn't address the issue of damages. It's sole purpose is to make the sinner miserable and aware of his or her guilt.

I can't believe in a God so petty that He'd want His creations to suffer after He'd pardoned them. On the other hand, my vision of God (to use the conventional term) is not as an entity or Supreme Being (even though I may sometimes use that shorthand mode of expression). My God doesn't have opinions or desires. My God is the pure creative energy at the heart of the universe, the Infinite Intelligence underlying the astounding diversity of the external world, the awesome power of imagination, the Spirit that infuses us all.

I know that traditional Christianity disagrees, but I find it difficult to accept that our sins “hurt” God. I definitely do think that certain actions normally categorized as sins hurt the sinner. In a similar fashion, in my view at least, mindful prayer or meditation, acts of generosity, spiritual voyages, don't change God – they change us, making us (hopefully) more compassionate, more careful in our choices, and perhaps, more at peace with ourselves.

In all fairness, religions other than Christianity (at least as practiced by ordinary people) embody similar economic concepts. Theravada Buddhists in Southeast Asia (Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Myanmar) “make merit” to improve the quality of their next life. Making merit includes everything from giving beggars alms to building new temples. I remember years ago our Thai teacher told us she donated to buy coffins for the indigent as a way of making merit. Hindus, I believe, bring offerings to the altars of their gods and make pilgrimages to sacred sites, and expect favorable rebirth or even enlightenment in return.

I suppose it's not surprising that people think of salvation as something with a price tag. Humans have been engaged in commerce since the earliest tribal societies – and we have always tended to create gods in our own image. It's much easier to understand a deity who thinks like we do.

Nevertheless, I still find the literalism of indulgences surprising. Even today, a plenary indulgence can be granted on any day (but only once per day) for, specifically, piously reading or listening to Sacred Scripture for at least half an hour or adoration of Jesus in the Eucharist for at least half an hour.

If I only read the Bible for 25 minutes, that's not enough for God? If God is eternal, why should He care about clock time?

Just doesn't make sense to me. On the other hand, maybe the mysteries of the Spirit are not supposed to make sense.

And maybe I should have written about chocolate and sex after all.