Remittance Girl's Blog, page 13

On Writing, Authorship and Sacred Words

[image error]Lisabet Sarai, a writer for whom I have deep admiration, just finished blogging at the ERWA Blog on her experience of revising her novel to suit a publisher’s imprint. ‘Negotiation‘ is a great post worth reading. Most especially if you want to see the process of writing oneself an absolution. I don’t say that cattily or in any derogatory way; I think writers are always in a process of a negotiation between what they perceive to be their authentic voice and what the marketplace demands.  Lisabet concludes by reminding herself, and us, that all the angst she experienced through the editorial process was for nothing. How silly to take one’s writing so seriously. “I don’t view my words as sacred.”

On the very same day, Big Ed posted a piece on self-censorship. He offers an examination of why writers do it and why he has done it and concludes, ultimately, that for him it is about the fear that he will not be able to communicate his ideas clearly enough to his readers. That he’s not a good enough writer to get the depth of what he’s trying to get across.

Both of these posts are really about what writers believe they ‘owe’ their readers.

I’d like to look at the mirror side of this and ask what a writer owes themselves.  Because I don’t believe, as Lisabet does, that I owe my reader the story they expect. If anything, I believe I owe them the opposite. I owe them what they don’t expect.  Nor to I agree with Ed that prowess in writing is the faithful transmission of the ideas in my brain to the readers. From what I understand of the reading process, I don’t think it’s possible and, if it were, I would not think it was desirable.

Lisabet’s statement about her words not be sacred forced me to ask the question: if your words aren’t sacred, then what is? Because -  and I know this will sound incredibly egotistical – I DO think my words are sacred. If anything about me is sacred, it’s my words. I don’t expect readers or publishers or editors to feel the same way, but I must.

I have no children. My words are all that will survive me. They are sacred to me. That doesn’t mean every word I write is inviolate, or that I couldn’t benefit from a good, stiff edit, but if my words are quotidian and profane, then why write them at all? If I don’t think they’re sacred, why would I ever strive to improve them?

It has become normative for us to consume writing like we consume everything else. It’s a product. You should get what you expect. You should be delivered what you want. You should and can return it if it doesn’t meet your expectations. We have turned fiction into just another consumer product, and because of that, our relationship with it has changed forever. This generation will never feel challenged or privileged or awed by what they read anymore than they will feel challenged or privileged or awed by a pair of sneakers or meal. And that is sad.

It’s a world I choose not to step into. It’s a game I will not play. It’s a reality I will ignore. Because I will not reduce my relationship with words and the stories they constitute – mine, or those of another – to a commodity.  My words are sacred to me. More times than I can count, I have felt that the words of other writers were sacred, too.

If I don’t believe my words are important, special, worthy…then how can I ever hope a reader will receive them that way and join in the pleasure of participating in the meaning-making process with me?

Jude

[image error]The garden party was hosted by the Dutch Consulate, to celebrate Queen Maxima of the Netherland’s birthday. I didn’t know Holland still had a monarchy, and Maxima? Really? Sure enough, the huge, lush garden was dotted around with kitschy plastic standees featuring a hefty girl in an orange dress doing that regal wave thing.  We were only there for the free booze.

It was getting dark, which promised to bring down the heat but also to ring the dinner bell for the evening mosquitoes, so I was thinking of leaving when I saw her come striding across the ridiculously manicured lawn. All I could think of was: how could I have been living in the humid hell-hole of Saigon and not have noticed this woman before? Not possible. Not possible.

She was at least six feet tall, lean and lithe as bamboo, with close-cropped hair bleached a dazzling white.  A cap of neat frost that gleamed against her dark, dark skin. Her face, her neck, her shoulders were carved from some secret, precious wood. The way her tendons stretched her skin, the way the lines formed at the corners of her wide mouth when she smiled. Her lips wet with plum lipstick the exact colour of her fluttering, oversized silk shirt. She was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen.

“Who is that?” I asked Nicolas. When he didn’t answer, I elbowed him. “Who the fuck is that?”

“I don’t know,” he said. He clucked his tongue and dabbed at the beer I’d jostled onto his evening jacket.

“Bullshit. You know everyone.” And it was true. Nicolas knew everyone. He was the Spanish economic attache and the biggest slut in the tiny expat community in Saigon.  That was saying something because, as diplomatic backwaters go, Saigon was the back of beyond. There was literally nothing to do but drink, play golf and fuck.

“I can’t remember her name. She’s the girlfriend of that English lady lawyer.” That explained much; Nicolas would never remember the name of a woman he didn’t think he could bed. “Es lesbiana.”

“Pues, mejor. Introduce me,” I demanded, dragging him by the arm across the grounds, close to where she stood, holding court and a flute of something in her hand.

“I didn’t know you liked girls,” he said, quietly. “We could have a threesome. I know this French chick who’d be up for that.”

“I’m never going to fuck you. You know that, right?”  I whispered.

He sighed theatrically. “You’re a user and a tease.”

“Exactly. Now introduce me.”

“How can I make an introduction when I don’t know her name?”

I stopped, feeling my kitten heels sink into the sodden grass. “You’re a bloody diplomat. Think of something.”

I smoked a cigarette and waited in the evening gloom while he traipsed off to ask around. Someone switched the hanging lanterns on and I watched her talk and laugh and sip her drink and use her broad, long-fingered hands to envelope her listeners in whatever spell she was weaving. I couldn’t stop watching her. I wanted to be in that circle, within reach of those hands, and the perfume I was so sure she wore.

Nicolas returned with another glass of beer. “Jude. Her name is Jude.”

“Alright, come on then,” I said, tugging his arm.

“Fuck that. I’m bored. I’m leaving with the Columbians. Come with us. It’ll be fun.”

The ‘Columbians’ were not a drug cartel.  The Restrepo family, a brother and two identical twin sisters, owned a vast coffee estate up in the highlands above Daklak.  They were rumoured to be unnaturally close, to put it politely. Having sat across a table from them for a whole evening at some over-priced Australian gala, I was fairly certain the rumours were true.

“You prick. Introduce me first.”

“Introduce yourself.”  And he was off.

I stood there in the dark garden, with the winking lantern lights, having my ankles ravaged by mosquitoes, watching her, listening to her talk and laugh. She had a laugh like spun sugar. Pulling off into sweet threads and then breaking abruptly when it got too thin.

The crush was paralyzing. I couldn’t find the courage to enter circle of light she gave off.

Not then.

Monster

[image error]

Photo: (c) Davin Andrie

There’s a special secret sin to desiring an ugly man. I don’t mean someone mediocre with a few too many pounds around the middle. I mean someone truly ugly. Bones that refuse the grace of symmetry. Skin ravaged by early acne or one of those fevers one hardly ever hears of any more. Or scars that pull unintentional expressions, cut through eyebrows, pucker muscles into novel crevices. Burns that leave their shiny, lacy traces. Ugliness beyond the reparation of make-up or surgery.

There was a curious thrill in the fact that this man would never be cast in a television show or a film. Not even in a reality TV show about ugly people. His ugliness was beyond the garnering of sympathy.  He’d never grace the page of a magazine or a website as an example of ‘everyman’ or even as marginally ‘unfortunate’ man. Although Dario Argento might have, at one time, hired him for the minor role of the nameless undertaker who’d fucked one too many corpses.

He was medievally ugly. As if that ancient belief that the sins of the soul really did reveal themselves on the body and this man had spent his entire life committing indescribable atrocities.

I wanted him instantly and beyond reason. I wanted to kiss that face so wrong that no sane person would kiss it. I wanted those wrecked hands on me. Each knuckle misshapen from too much work and too much breakage. The skin on their backs riddled with tendons and veins. I imagined them on my skin, on my hips, on my breasts. Gripping and tugging and clutching. Those crippled, bent fingers sunk into me.

I looked at him and immediately I was wet. And then, in a blink of an eye, he was gone.

“Never mind,” I thought. “I’ll find you again.”  There are so few of you left in this world.

On Love

There is a kind of love that drags itself, gut-shot and with two broken legs towards death.  It has no pride, or shame, or sense of self. It refuses all other loyalties, all other promises and obligations. There is nothing pretty about this kind of love. It turns those of us who have felt it into abominations. It only has one limitation and that is of reciprocation. Sometimes, not even that.

This is not the love of romance novels; there is no happy ending. Either you die still feeling it, or it kills you. Perhaps not physically, but for all practical purposes, it hollows you out like worm-infested fruit.  It leaves you an empty, paper-thin container of a human being.

But before it has the grace to leave you empty, you have to endure its hunger. It renders every philosophical discussion on the subject absurd. From Plato’s Symposium to Kant or Hegel, the attempt to harness reason to serve its exploration is just a laughable, pathetic deferral. It is beyond reason, beyond ethics. This love is not good or ethical. It exists in a place where those concepts are meaningless.

This is the kind of love that scares us, and so it should.  Neither altruistic nor selfish, neither harmonious nor nurturing, it will crawl blindly but inexorably across every line of civility ever drawn by any culture.

It doesn’t seek the perpetuation of the species. It is desire of flesh only because the sufferer is trapped in flesh. Mouths and hands, cocks and cunts are nothing more than the clumsy tools of the language it is forced to speak in the flesh. It is  of the mind only because it cannot integrate itself in the here and now without it.  Fantasies and imaginings are only the shadows on the Platonic cave.  This love knows it must manifest itself through shadows, but it also knows how false they are. It rails against the futility of its outlets and, because of that, it is insane and violent and at the same time utterly self-sacrificing.

This is a love that is out of fashion. It is metaphysical, uncommodifiable, unphotogenic. It tolerates no impermeable self, no measuredness, no recovery. It is a black hole. It eats worlds. And, if it doesn’t terrify you, you’ve never felt it.

Ceci n’est pas un Homme

[image error]I have long admired D’s writing over at “Written In Pencil,” and most especially his written portraits of people he has known. Usually, I try to incorporate the people I get to know into my fiction somehow, but I don’t know the man in the portrait I want to offer you. I’ve only ‘read’ him in a moment. I’ll never know him. Part of me doesn’t want to. But he deserves to be here and, for my part, I need to keep him…somewhere.

Phnom Penh, Cambodia, April, 2014

It’s two in the afternoon and the sun hammers down on the paved promenade that gracefully hugs the left bank of the Mekong River as it winds its way through Phnom Penh. A little man comes trundling towards me, following the flow of the outbound tide. He’s old – perhaps sixty or more – which is ancient here in the land where the bulk of the population is under 25. The short grey bristles that cap his skull glint in the oppressive light, his skin is stained mahogany and his face is a mass of wrinkles. Barefoot, he has a rolling gait and his legs are slightly bowed. The sign of a youthful encounter with rickets. He’s carrying a collapsed Fanta carton in one hand, and what looks like an unpotted plant in the other. The printing on the cardboard is impossibly orange, and the roots of the plant trail along the ground.

As he passes one of the decorative white lampposts, he stops, lopes towards it and aims a slow, ostentatious kick in its direction. His foot doesn’t quite connect with the post, but almost. Then he continues up the promenade. At the next lamppost, he makes the same puzzling gesture and, when he passes a small bed of low, dusty bushes, he doubles back and does the same thing before resuming his amble in my direction. Another lamppost, he repeats the gesture, then carries on. But after a few paces, something changes his mind. He walks back to the post and makes the gesture again, not once, but twice, from several angles.

It is then I notice his ragged dark trousers are completely split up the crotch. Every time he lifts his leg, I can see his dirty white boxers beneath them.

Further on, he stops and eyes the grass in the verge beside the paved walkway. Rather cautiously, he steps onto it, squats down and starts digging with both his hands. Clods of grass and then dirt fly up into the stale air. He’s making a hole. When it seems to be to his satisfaction, he stuffs the plant he’s been carrying into it, plunging it into the earth with brutality. As if, if he’s too gentle with it, the plant will escape. He gently pushes the Fanta carton into the earth around the plant like a wind-break, until it seems quite fixed. Standing up and surveying his work, he makes the same dramatic kicking gesture over and over.

I realize it’s not a kick at all. He’s cocking his leg and peeing. All the way down the length of the Sisowath Quay, he’s pissed on every upright thing, every planted area, marking his territory. He probably ran out out of urine a kilometer back, but it doesn’t really matter. This is an articulation, not of speech but of body, intentional, a proclamation. This abject, crooked, weather-worn creature is not a man; he’s a dog. A green-thumbed dog.

I’d like to talk to him, but I know, instinctively, that he can’t talk. Because dogs don’t talk. Dogs do doggy things and that is it. As we pass each other, I can smell him. The sweet, acrid stink of piss. I put my hand in my pocket, to give him some Riels, but although our eyes meet, I don’t register to him. His world is one of lampposts and walls and plants and scents.

I’ll never know this being’s story. The best I can do is create a possibly fictional narrative to build my mnemonic of him. These days, we seldom have time for stories anymore. We use words like schizophrenia and explain it all with neurochemistry. But I look his face, his toothless mouth, his scarred and dented skull, his ruined legs, calculate his age, and figure that he must have been in his early twenties when Pol Pot came to power and the Khmer Rouge purged this country of its Western decadence in a conflagration of blood and fear.

In those days, it would have been safer to be a dog than to be a man. And once you’ve gotten good at it, how do you stop?

And now I know Lacan was wrong. He said there was no experiencing the Real, but he is mistaken. I’ve seen a man who lives there. I think he traveled to the Real 30 years ago, and he’s been there ever since.

Fuck Decaf, or The Two Tribes of Perversion

[image error]There are two tribes of perverts. Those who believe and those who don’t; real perverts and fake perverts. I contend today that the world is dominated by the fake ones.

I’m not a wholehearted fan of the Yugoslavian philosopher, Slavoj Zizek, but he has proposed an interesting theory I embrace. He says that the world has become appallingly inauthentic and that this is the engine that powers an obscene system. It is the practice of perpetuating fantasies, which we know to be fantasies, in order to doggedly maintain the system. It is not necessary to actually believe in the ideology of the system. No one does. But it is necessary to pretend we do, in order for the wheels to keep turning. It is the reign of the wink and the nod.

He says, there is real fundamentalism, and pseudo-fundamentalism. The Amish, he says, are real fundamentalists. They really believe. They don’t want you to join them, or share their beliefs. They don’t have a problem with science. Science is simply on another plane of existence. They don’t debate its veracity. They dismiss it as irrelevant to their way of life. They let you get on with your life. Just keep your distance. Then there are the pseudo-fundamentalists who are manic proselytizers, who attempt to insinuate themselves into scientific debate by arguing that creationism is some scientifically acceptable alternative to Darwinism. They find a way to weave all their supposed transgressions into some narrative that fits with their dogma. But, most telling all, says Zizek, is that they have envy. They suffer tremendously from a fascination with the “jouissance of the other”. They constantly dehumanize and demonize other groups as a part of their doctrine. They hate homosexuals and imagine that gays have far better sex than they have. They demand that people envy them for their ‘born-againness’ and their personal relationship with god.

It’s very much like the myth of Santa Claus. A parent pretends to believe in Santa Claus for the sake of his or her children. The child pretends to believe in Santa Claus for the sake of the parent, and for the presents. No one actually believes in Santa Claus. He’s an agreed-upon fallacy.

I see a similar pattern in the majority of the people who make a pretence of perversion. I’m so filthy, I’m so dirty, I’m so naughty, so ba-aaaad, so perverse, they say. But if you really ask them whether they think they’re doing anything wrong, you get this incredible answer. Of course not! What I do is perfectly natural. As long as it’s all-consensual, there’s nothing wrong with it at all. It’s all about respect and ethical humanism. There’s no inherent disdain or humiliation about five guys coming all over a tied up girl. She’s up for it; they’re up for it. Where’s the ethical problem? Of course I have no shame in the fact that hurting someone and making them cry gives me a raging erection. I don’t do it to anyone who doesn’t want to be hurt. It’s just a natural variation on the long continuum of sexuality. So all that initial ‘I’m so naughty’ stuff is all… marketing hype. But for who?

I call bullshit. If you really believe that, you’re not a pervert. You’re a tourist.

Real perverts believe with deep sincerity in the rules they break. They have faith that what they are doing is wrong. They have a firm model in their heads of exactly what human dignity is and when they transgress it, either by what they do to themselves or what they do to others, regardless of consent, they know it’s unacceptable. It’s not right. Not natural. Not okay. It’s monstrous and ugly and perverse. Robert Stoller has called perversion ‘the erotic form of hatred.’ I agree with him unreservedly.

This strange and, in my mind, truly corrupt practice of perpetuating fallacies has poked its bony undead fingers into all parts of our society and, at the bottom of it, is a pure, unadulterated consumerism: “You can have whatever you want without consequence. You can have coffee without caffeine. Sugar doughnuts without sugar. Weight loss without calorie reduction or exercise.” And, my very favourite – and the one that squicks me beyond measure – BDSM without risk or even sex!

I’m here to tell you that coffee without caffeine isn’t coffee. Sugar doughnuts without sugar aren’t sugar doughnuts. You can’t loose weight without either exercise or cutting your calories. And no real BDSM is riskless or sexless. There is nothing remotely ethical about being aroused at someone else’s pain, or at suffering it yourself, pissing on someone, pushing needles into their flesh, using someone else’s body as a vat for your semen or, indeed, getting off on having yours used that way.

So, what has this to do with me as a writer of erotic fiction?

It occurs to me that I need to make it clear that I do not write the stories I write as how-to manuals for kinky couples. I do not make moral excuses for the rotten and perverse things my characters do. I do not give them nice happy endings because I do not want to send the message that there are no negative consequences to their behaviours.

I am a pervert. I believe that my sexual proclivities are deeply unethical and, in fact, a good deal of the jouissance I get from them comes from the fact that I know, in every fibre of my being, that they are wrong. Most of my characters are like me.

None of us need, or want, your absolution.

The Jouissance of the Other: Envy disguised as Prejudice.

[image error]This week, I changed browsers. Doesn’t sound like a big deal, but actually it was a chore. I’ve been a Firefox fan for a very long time. I love it for a lot of reasons. It’s an excellent browser and if they charged money to own it, I would have gladly paid.

Then Mozilla made Brendan Eich CEO, and I had to make a decision. A minor ethical one.

Eich is a brilliant man. He is an IT legend. He created Javascript. One of the most flexible scripting languages ever written. He helped found Mozilla in 1988 and, without a doubt, much of Firefox’s success is due to him. It must also, I surmise, be somewhat down to him that Mozilla maintained such a radically open source attitude to its products. The company has always believed in cooperation, openness, collaboration.

But Brendan Eich must also be, to some extent, a torn man. Because, with his public donation of $1000 to the campaign to pass California’s Proposition 8 which sought to prohibit same sex marriages in the state, he also showed that his understanding of openness and inclusiveness was limited to software. How can a man who sees the benefits of mutual respect and collaboration so clearly in the IT world, not see it in the real world?

Companies hire people who are right for the job they are expected to do. And clearly Eich was of great value to Mozilla as a programmer and a technologist, but when they made him CEO, they were saying that he was the right person to represent the company to the public. It was a bad, bad call.

I’m with Zizek and Badiou. I don’t believe you have to love thy neighbor. There are people I don’t love. There are whole groups of people I’d rather do without, but my obligation as a civilized person is to be polite and respectful and follow a live and let live policy wherever possible. I have my prejudices. I know what they are. I recognize them and I do my best not to act on them. I most certainly don’t seek to perpetuate them.

Mr. Eich has the right to be anti-gay. He has the right to feel however he wants to feel about gay marriage. He has the right to make that view public and donate to causes that support his views. But he does not, nor does anyone, have the right to do it without consequence. The paradox of free speech is that is it not free. In that we accept the consequences that may unfold because of what we choose to say publicly.

So when Mozilla decided to make Brendan Eich CEO of Mozilla, I decided that yes – it was their prerogative to do so, and it was his prerogative to be publicly anti-gay marriage, and it was my prerogative to change my browser and to say why I was doing it, publicly.

I have since received some rather nasty communications saying that I persecuted a man for his convictions. Persecution is not only a hyperbolic representation of what I did, but it is false. In the same way that Mr. Eich felt free to publicly support what I feel is an offensive piece of legislation (that didn’t pass, I’m happy to say), I felt free to say that I would not use the product of a company where he was CEO. A Chief Executive Officer is not just the most powerful position in a company, it is also very much a representative position. CEOs are the ultimate spokespersons for a company. If Mozilla was going to choose to let Eich represent them in that way, I was switching to Chrome.

But why am I bothered that some stranger, head of a company, doesn’t like gay marriage? Actually, it’s not specifically his anti-gay-marriage stance that bothered me. My concern stems from something Lacan called ‘the jouissance of Others.”

He attributed much of the world’s sexual, racial, religious and other prejudices to a subconscious envy that ate away at people. His believed that when people felt hatred or resentment, or sought to limit the opportunities of others, as a group, it was because they imagined that those ‘others’ had access to a more perfect form of pleasure. You see this especially in the kind of rhetoric that bigoted people spout. “Those lazy immigrants, they get all the good jobs and take all our welfare.” “Those faggots don’t have to take on the kind of family responsibilities I have to take on.” “Those sluts on birth control think they can fuck whoever they like.” There is, underlying this, a subtext that the speaker is victimized by and disadvantaged for his or her adherence to ‘normative’ rules. The irony about bigotry is that it so diminishes the bigot.

There is that seed of envy and resentment in each of us. It is irrational, it is unfounded, and it is one of the darker sides of our nature that any civilized person learns to repress. I expect anyone who is in a position of authority to tamp it the fuck down. I do.

People who are opposed to gay marriage, if you can get them past the irrational and inflexible cant of “marriage is a state between a man and a woman,” will tell you that gay marriage threatens the validity of THEIR marriage. How?

They can never tell you how. Because one person’s joy does not diminish another person’s joy in this case. Millions of gays and lesbians can get married and it won’t affect your heterosexual marriage one iota unless, of course, yours is so fragile, it needs to exist in a vacuum.

I am sorry for Mr. Eich. I’m sorry that his company put him in an unsuitable position and it resulted in a humiliating situation where he had to step down.

But more than that, I’m sorry that Mr. Eich believes, somewhere inside himself, that his conjugal happiness depends on some other couple’s misery.

But I am not sorry that the public airing of his prejudice had consequences for him.  That’s the price of free speech, especially when it’s hate speech.

Mozilla announced yesterday that Eich was stepping down as CEO. There’s an apologetic message from their executive chairwoman, Mitchell Baker, which reads, in my mind, rather self-servingly. Maybe I’m jaded. I’m not celebrating, and I won’t be moving back to Firefox. It was too much of a pain in the ass to shift over to Chrome.

When Men Write Erotic Fiction

When men write erotic fiction (as opposed to porn, where the piece is devoid of conflict and usually sequence of physical events interspersed with banal and cliché phrases that are the memes that stand-in, ineloquently. for someone getting pleasure) they often try to protect themselves. Even work by seasoned writers who should know better, I still often find a distance – a lack of explicitness of feeling that serves as a shield between the writer and the reader. Women do it, too. In characters who are just too physically perfect, social statuses that are just too enviable, happily ever after endings that feel good and say very little about the real impact the erotic experience has on our selves and our lives.

As much as we all pay lipservice to the avoidance of the dreaded Mary Sue, the truth is that all fiction carries the traces of its author. And the difference between really good writing and mediocre writing is not when the characters emerge changed, but when you know, as a reader, that the author has also emerged changed. I don’t believe that any excellent piece of writing leaves the writer unscathed. You can’t protect yourself or your psyche and write it. You either serve the story or you serve yourself; there’s no doing both. If you’ve written well, you should have that uncomfortable sense that you’ve come out of it looking like an asshole. Chances are, the reader is far too immersed in the fiction to ever notice, but that’s neither here nor there; you’ve exposed something true of yourself and that, if it really was true, is always a frightening thing.

Back to men and writing erotic fiction. I’d like you to jump over to Raziel Moore’s blog and read his latest story “Close Enough“. I have no idea how it reads to a man. All I know is that, as a woman, reading it, I think I may have found one of the best pieces of erotic writing I’ve ever read. I was afforded temporary entry into a true and very private place, and I appreciate it. It’s a rare thing.

It’s not about what happens physically –  although, what happens is undeniably hot. Here the physical and the psychological, emotional, self-identification takes the centre stage. Here the transgression is entirely inner. Not what an erotic act means to others, but its interior meaning, how it interrogates who the character is. How it scares him, how it leaves him unknowing, unsure of where his limits are, of where hers are, of everything. It gets about as close to the fracture of the hermetic seal of subject identity that I’ve ever read.

But I want to say that it may also be the best piece of romantic writing I’ve ever read, also. Because it is about love. Not comfortable love. Not orderly, socially applauded love. Or even fictionally transgressive love. It’s about being in love and how utterly and ruthlessly anti-social it is. It’s about the kind of love that either drags you to hell or takes you to heaven, and plonks you down in that place with no name, hanging by the very thin line of the human capacity to conceive of consequences and a tomorrow. It is the place where we destroy each other, and remake each other again. But not the same.

It’s a magnificent piece of writing. It should serve as a model to all the writers out there who say they write erotic fiction, but hide themselves behind a sequence of superficial, pornographic dioramas or slide over the real on a frame of mundane romantic construction.

Raziel Moore is a fucking brave writer. Give him your eye. Leave a comment. He likes them.

 

 

 

 

What the Bones Said

[image error]The tiny white pill tugs at my willpower. Knows the ripe and tender spot, the toothed indents where it has lodged so many times before.  Beneath the overhang of illusions, in the wet and reeking hollows, where the light of reason fears to go.

“Sleep,” it says.  “Sleep and ache no more.”

An irresistible invitation to a temporary reprieve from the mindless task of watching the sinkhole of want gape wider.

* * *

This little scar, here, above my eye, where my mother threw a silver-backed hairbrush at me.  Here, under my chin, where she lobbed the crystal ashtray. I can’t quit smoking, as if, after it bit into my skin and dropped into my lap, I was destined to have need of it forever. She threw it and it struck and stuck. A sickly gift. I’m an emphysemic optimist; for me, the ashtray’s always half full.

Here, on the bony ridge of my shin, is the faint puckered shine of where I fell through a rusted sewer grating on a humid summer afternoon. It bled so much. Turned my white sock and my canvas sneaker red.  My nanny and her cousin washed it off in a public toilet. The carmine spatters and the pink-lemonade tinged water against the gleaming white of the porcelain. As they rinsed the blood away, I caught a glimpse of the pale bone beneath. That’s when I knew that we are all Halloween skeletons, costumed in meat, masquerading as humans.  It’s been hard to take my flesh seriously ever since.

Oh, it calls. My flesh calls to me as yours does. I have eyes. I see, I hear, I smell, I touch and want. But maybe that early peek at what was inside cured me of a need to listen.  Maybe I learned too early how not to be a baby, how to identify sensation – pleasure or pain – and move on.

It only mattered it if had meaning. When the sun burned my skin, When I paddled frantically, unable to claw my way to the surface and I took that first big breath of salt water and it seared my lungs. When the doorjamb ate my fingers, when my skull met concrete, when the balled fist sank into my soft middle, when my jaw relinquished its spare teeth, when no one checked to see whether the anesthetic worked and they cut anyway.

I speak the language of my flesh fluently. But mostly, it just talks a lot of wordless shit. How ironic then, that I would stumble across the only man in the world who speaks, not to my flesh, but to my bones, and not be able to have him.

The one who would speak sense to every flash of pain, to every tremor of pleasure. To the breeze on my skin and the heat between my thighs. All those meanings. So many meanings.

* * *

No. That’s a lie. That’s a big fat lie.

I depend on him to stay always just beyond my reach. Safe and snug in the quantum spin of his permanent reluctance. I have found the perfect place to sit and smoke and wait for something that will never happen.

This is no mistake. This is, no matter how much I may bask in the poignant role of the exile, a deliberate choice.

If tomorrow the gates to all that I desire were flung open, I would not step through. If he relented and let me in, what would happen to my flesh, my bones, and me?

He knows too much of me. He knows the magic words.  He would mutter the incantation and I would shed my skin. My bones would turn to pale grit and crumble. I would cease to be.

Cease to be. There’s an allure to that.  Incineration.  True, I know that nothing ever truly ends, it only changes form. But what form would I be? I can’t contemplate the possible abominations I could be, with him.

* * *

Here, there is always the option of provisional peace. If some people measure their lives in steps, some in empty glasses, some in small victories, I can measure mine in the gaps between sleep.

The little white pill calls to my bones. “You are tired of wanting. Of rubbing together to make fire that gives no heat. Sick of the taste of your own marrow. Come, sleep.”

Outed in the Nicest Way

[image error]Some of you know my real name, some of you don’t. Today was a true milestone for me. One of my stories not only won an award, but has been published in a non-erotica anthology, and I appear there under my real name.

The Trouble With Parallel Universes is the first anthology published under the new, vibrant Fincham Press imprint. This collection features new writing from the University of Roehampton’s English and Creative Writing Department.

It is edited by the fabulous, witty, smart and very sexy Leone Ross.

She’s an amazing, sensitive and creative editor and if you’re looking for literary editing services; I believe she does some freelance work. Also, she writes horror, sci-fi and erotica herself, so if you’re an erotica writer in need of a UK editor,  drop her a line. She doesn’t flinch at the explicit passages.