Remittance Girl's Blog, page 16

Monster Porn: And the Sublime Attractions of Orientalism

Jean-Léon Gérôme, The Harem Bath, 1889

I’d like to introduce you to the critical concept of ‘Orientalism.’ The word stems from a book, with the same title, written in 1978 by Edward Said. It is one of the foundational texts of the Post-Colonial criticism movement. You’re wondering how it relates to Monster Porn – I can tell -  but it can relate to all sort of erotica involving non-humans, including mythical creatures, the undead and the post-human.

To explain it in a very short, shabby fashion, Orientalism concerns the West’s imperial conquest and colonization of other parts of the world, especially Asia and Africa, between the 18th and 20th Centuries. Europe in particular, but North America later, gave themselves permission to act brutally and oppressively by reasoning that these peoples were inferiors: ignorant, superstitious, uncivilized, bestial. But at the same time, they used that alienness, that otherness, as a site on which to project their own baser, socially unacceptable desires.  Especially in the area of sexuality, these others, these ‘natives of far off lands’ and ‘strange cultures with strange customs’ were freer in their sexualities, more libidinous and less inhibited in their erotic indulgences than we, controlled and civilized, Westerners were. Jacques Lacan, the French psychoanalyst, would go on to theorize that this was an interesting aspect of ‘the jouissance of the Other’ always being more perfect than our own. That this projection of desires set up a hate/lust relationship. Despising the other for their lack of civility while envying them and fantasizing about their erotic freedoms.

In the 19th Century, a slew of semi-pornographic works were produced, both visual and textual, romanticizing the rapacious habits of Arab Sheiks, the sexual excess of the dark markets of the Casbah, the insatiable lust of African tribal chieftains and the lack of modesty and shocking promiscuity of Fijian women. Although presented as anthropological evidence, they were, it is argued, projections of our own repressed sexual desires. Moreover, it often gave colonizers the excuse to behave in ways they wouldn’t behave at home. In my part of the world, early French writers on the peoples of Indochina remarked how difficult it was to tell apart the men from the women. How easy it was to end up in a homosexual embrace by mistake(!), since they all looked the same. You’d think the penis might give it away, but apparently not.

What woman in their right mind doesn’t want this?

It seems to me that the allure, in fiction, of vampires, were-lovers, Bigfoot, mermen and Cthulu-style characters is basically serving the same function. They are all ‘others.’ Because they don’t belong to our species, they serve as a site of projected fantasy for the excesses we don’t allow ourselves to consider with lovers of our own species. It is well-known that the undead can fuck you eight ways to Friday without getting tired, or getting you pregnant. You just know anything with fur, either chimera or evolutionary throwback, is going to be hung like a horse and animalistically horny. Their passion, to put it purply, has no bounds. And then there is the fantasy-species to beat them all – tentacle-sporting seafood. A woman might have moral problems fantasizing about taking three different human cocks at the same time and might be too politically correct to fantasize about a gang bang rape but, goodness, all those tentacles are simply genetically programmed to quest for orifices! And there’s nothing you can do about it!

Now, post 9/11, when it seems unpatriotic to fantasize about being ravished by Arabian princes (plus it turns out that their harems are more a hotbed of political intrigue rather than the setting for massive fuck fests); now that we are know ‘better’ than to fantasize about being kidnapped and sexually degraded by Thai pirates (because it’s so unfeminist and insulting to the victims of actual rape); now that we are repeatedly told that our fantasies are dangerous and will send messages to real men that we actually like being raped; we’ve had to resort to projecting our sexual fantasies onto cryptozoological beings.

And anyway, they love each other. What apparently makes all this lust permissible is the unavoidable presence of a love story as part of the plot. For some reason, readers will give themselves permission to find their erotic stimulation in all sorts of hairy, bestial, undead or multi-phallused couplings as long as there’s a romance to enclose the whole sticky shebang in an altruistic envelope of love. The truth is, I’d probably be an avid consumer of this sort of erotic material if it wasn’t for the pernicious and ubiquitous romance element. But apparently it is impossible for a lot of women to freely indulge in their sexual fantasies without it.

Unfortunately for me, both as a reader and a writer of erotic material, I can’t sustain the appropriate suspension of disbelief when the heroine is actually forced to fall in love with the object of her sexual desire. I love the idea of tentacle sex. I’ve even written some. But I have no particular problem with taking my pleasure, offering a polite thanks, and leaving satisfied and slightly bow-legged. For me, the prospect of the romantic element turns it from transgressive eroticism and deep into horror territory. Fucking Cthulu is hot. Marrying Cthulu puts me right off.

Another aspect of this brand of erotica that I think is worth mentioning is that, unlike Christian Grey (although I have some pretty good arguments for why FSOG actually qualifies as monster porn, i.e. Twenty something billionaires are about as thin on the ground as sexually rampant octipi) Bigfoot isn’t going to make any judgements about your looks. Like Chthulu, and a pride of werelions, no one in these stories gives a damn what your ass looks like in those jeans. They just want to fuck. They like you fat, thin, tall, short, flat-chested or busty, blonde or brunette. It’s all the same to them. As long as you have body with orifices they can plunder, you’re not going to get judged for your conformity to some ramp-model ideal. After all, who are they to judge? They’ve got hairy ears or tentacles.

So, what’s my point? Well, I think the rise in ‘Monster Porn’ is an interesting thing. I think it says a lot about women’s erotic desires. It tells me that we feel the need to project our desires onto the ‘other’ because we judge our own to be unworthy, unseemly, perverse. And there’s no point in mourning that. It’s a reality. Society drowns us in sexual imagery for the purpose of marketing, but slaps down Miley Cyrus. We live in an intensely hypocritical society. These are mixed messages that women are, historically, very adept at reading. So we find our perversions where and in whatever form we can.

Ruin

Ruin me before time

has its ugly way now

it grows short and counted.

Between lines in my laugh

purity has weathered

cyclical storms. I would

have it wiped away

in a blast of bad judgement.

Stain me with peaches

sticky-fingered love smeared

at the corner of your mouth

kissed to bursting grimaces

in the chaos of ambiguous

silences. There is so long

to be still yet.

I will not keep track

of the fumbles, if you

promise to look past the light

on the cave wall and squint

against the sun of me.

 

…

 

 

Editing Yourself: Over-writing and what to do about it

I have a confession to make: I’m a chronic over-writer. In fact, unless you are one of those very few people who do almost all your editing while you are writing the first draft, you do too. There isn’t anything wrong with over-writing. It’s a mistake to think that you can leave it as is. And this is a sin I do find a lot of new writers (and many old ones, too) commit.

To put it simply, over-writing is using too many words, and not the right ones. Or it is mistrusting language not to do its job or mistrusting your own use of words. Sometimes you’re too damn anxious to get your point across. Sometimes over-writing happens because you’re attempting to describe something complex and nuanced and you take a number of runs at it. So over-writing is very much part of the process of writing: it’s fertile, it allows you to play with the way you get things across, but it’s not okay to dump that onto a reader. This is where thinking poetically is very helpful. Poets often aren’t good at constructing a plot, or characters, but they are excellent at using language carefully and strategically, and we can learn a lot from them. I will get to an example of this in a minute, but first I want identify some of the common places where overwriting happens. I want to make it clear that this isn’t something you should ever be thinking about in your first draft. This is the test to which you should put a piece of writing once the first draft is written.

Adjectives:

To be pedantic, let’s define what they are. Adjectives are words used to modify nouns. I’m not saying they’re bad. We need them often, to be precise about what qualities the noun has. ‘A soft bed’ informs the reader that the bed has the quality of being soft, not hard. But before you settle on the phrase, consider if there is a noun that will allow you to dispense with the adjective. Could you use nest, or cocoon? Could you use a noun that implies both bed and soft? Or could you use an adjective that did more work for you? Something that added more meaning to the phrase? A cosy bed? Cosy is an adjective that is going to imply soft, if we’re talking about beds, because hard ones aren’t cosy at all but, more than that, it’s also going to add a sense of rightness and belongingness to the phrase. Or what about ‘hard edge of the table’? Have you ever met a soft one? The hard here is simply not needed. Same with ‘a big gulp of coffee’ or ‘a big gulp of air’? A gulp IS a large amount of liquid or air taken down at once. You don’t need the ‘big’.

Adverbs:

I’m pretty sure I’ve blogged on this one before, but I’m going to do it again because I read far, far too many erotic stories where someone ‘lightly brushes his fingers over her skin’. For some reason, I really overreact when I hit phrases like this. ‘Brushes’ implies light, soft strokes. You don’t need the lightly. Same with ‘whispered softly.’ A whisper is soft. You only need to use an adverb when you want to use the verb in an unexpected way, i.e. ‘he whispered viciously (hoarsely, harshly, gratingly).

Redundancies:

The room was empty. There was no one there.

Yeah, don’t laugh. I’ve read this. And we all do this sort of thing while we’re writing a first draft. It’s the ‘circling around’ I spoke of earlier.

She screamed and screamed until her throat was raw.

I think I may have actually written this one. What’s with the ‘and screamed‘? I guess I wanted you to know she really did do a lot of screaming, but the modifying phrase ‘until her throat was raw‘ does the job.

He wept. The tears rolled down his cheeks.

I’m absolutely certain I’ve written this. It’s stupid. And either sentence is so much more powerful on its own than the two combined. More isn’t better. More gums up the writing for the reader.

Erotic description:

One of the acknowledged problems for anyone writing erotica is that, although English offers us a wealth of options when it comes to many nouns and verbs, it isn’t particularly generous when it comes to sexual vocabulary. There is no other word for a kiss. Consequently, we do need adjectives and adverbs to fine tune the meaning. What kind of a kiss was it? Languid, intense, rough, studied, thoughtless, hungry? Sometimes, I try to do without it. She pressed her closed lips to his navel, his hip, his thigh. All the while watching his cock creep to life.

Repetition:

As much as the ‘again and again’ problem is giggle-worthy, it’s also important to recognize that repetition is a powerful form of rhetoric. Where would Churchill or Martin Luther King Jr. have been without it? We’re back at poetics: not what the words mean, but what impact may be had from they way they are used. Repetition can reveal character, it can deepen the immersive experience of a written description. And, as speakers, we repeat ourselves when we talk. It can signal indecision, insecurity, anxiety, desperation. It can alert us to a character at the edge of language, where it fails to be enough. Here repetition informs us, not of the meaning in the words, but of their inadequacy. This becomes an issue of a writer’s honour. Are you being lazy or are you making a conscious choice?

Evil words:

I call them evil, because they sneak into my writing all the time and I don’t notice I’m doing it. Some are common to many writers and some are highly individual. My evil words are just, really and even: I’ve (just) right this minute done a word search through this post and found five instances of ‘just’ that didn’t need to be there at all. WriteDivas has a lovely list of over-used and unnecessary words, as well as some examples of cliches and pat phrases. A good way to brutally edit your work is to take each of those words and phrases, and do a search for them in your document. You’re not going to want to delete every instance of the word ‘really,’ but at least 80% of them go. The 20% that you make a conscious choice to keep is the birth of your style as a writer.

Style:

Style is really one of the hardest things to define in writing. It is a combination of so many aspects of writing that, like porn, it comes under the ‘I know it when I see it’ headings. But what it isn’t is accidental. It might start off as accident, but by the time you get to call it style, you’ve recognized what you’re doing and made a conscious decision to keep on doing it. This is why it usually takes writers many years and a good deal of experimentation to acquire a ‘style’ of their own.

I bring this up because there are excellent reasons to completely disregard everything I’ve said above, in the right circumstances. When you, as a writer, judge the circumstance to be right to consciously over-write, then you are making a stylistic decision. That’s fine. Just don’t over-write because you were too lazy to edit.

Poetry as an aspirational exemplar for prose writers:

I’m going to offer you the second stanza of the poem “Men” by Maya Angelou. Her language is gorgeous and fierce. There is repetition, there are adjectives and adverbs, but they are all used consciously, to produce a powerful effect.

One day they hold you in the

Palms of their hands, gentle, as if you

Were the last raw egg in the world. Then

They tighten up. Just a little. The

First squeeze is nice. A quick hug.

Soft into your defenselessness. A little

More. The hurt begins. Wrench out a

Smile that slides around the fear. When the

Air disappears,

Your mind pops, exploding fiercely, briefly,

Like the head of a kitchen match. Shattered.

It is your juice

That runs down their legs. Staining their shoes.

When the earth rights itself again,

And taste tries to return to the tongue,

Your body has slammed shut. Forever.

No keys exist.

Metaphor and simile:

The last thing I’d like to point out is that sometimes correcting your over-writing means writing more, not less. Notice in the stanza of the poem above, Angelou is opting to use similes and metaphors instead of resorting to adjectives or adverbs to deepen meaning. And it is so much more vivid.

One day they hold you in the

Palms of their hands, gentle, as if you

Were the last raw egg in the world.

The simile of the ‘last raw egg in the world’ is just so much more powerful than writing ‘he held me gently.’ True, she’s using more words, but she forces you to imagine exactly how precious, how breakable the last raw egg in the world might be.

Your mind pops, exploding fiercely, briefly,

Like the head of a kitchen match. Shattered.

Here we have adverbs galore, but it resolves into the simile of ‘the head of a kitchen match’ bursting into flame. It is a brilliant and terrible piece of imagery. Erotic, incandescent and also destructive.

It is your juice

That runs down their legs. Staining their shoes.

And here is the metaphor to end all metaphors. It’s just so fucking clever and so fertile. You probably recognize the allusion to Led Zeppelin’s ‘Lemon Song’ but they stole it from Robert Johnson and Arthur McKay. She’s appropriating the phallocentric metaphor of ‘squeezing lemons’ and juxtaposing it. Your juice, in this poem, is more than sexual body fluid: it is hurt and pride and hope and wasted love. And those stained shoes, in the next stanza, just keep on walking by.

My point in deconstructing that last piece of poetry is to remind you that even in prose, if getting rid of your adjectives and adverbs and redundant words is frustrating you, try building a metaphor or simile to get the meaning across instead. It’s almost always stronger writing.

Process:

Over-writing is only a problem when you don’t recognize it as an early stage of the writing process. Think of writing as trowing pottery on a wheel or sculpting. The first task is to shape it roughly and explore the possibilities that material has to offer. At this point, it’s important to have too much of whatever it is. You want enough to be able to go to the next stage, which is to judiciously refine it into a final version.

I meet so many first time writers that believe they can sit down and write something brilliant in a single sitting. It’s certainly possible to do it, but very unlikely. Be prepared to approach your work in three stages. Write it out in as full a way as you can and let it sit for a while. Go back with an eye to purging it of over-writing – get rid of all the repetitions, redundancies, cliches, memes, etc. Then let it sit a while longer. Finally, revisit it for a final proof reading and an eye to adding back the things that will make up your unique style.

Question from one of my students: “Isn’t there a quicker way to do this?”

My answer: “No.”

Unpacking The Baggage of History: Sex Work and the Myth of Protecting Women

I recently had an interesting twitter interchange with Mistress Matisse on the subject of sex work. On December 4th, the National Assembly in France passed a bill criminalizing the purchase of sexual services. It is a move overwhelmingly supported by feminists around the world.

I wanted to express my opinion on this matter and my rationale. I am against the criminalization of sex work. I believe that legalizing sex work affords sex workers the rights that all other workers have to demand protection under the law against violence, theft, pandering, etc. I am aware that there has been a study showing that, in countries where sex work is legal, there has been a rise in organized criminal involvement in the sex industry and a rise in the child sex trade. This is awful news, but it doesn’t change my position on the issue. It just makes it patently clear that police have a history of shirking their duties when it comes to sex workers and nothing has changed.

I want to attempt to unpack the issue of why sex work is viewed differently than other forms of labour. We are certainly acculturated to view it differently, but why? Why is working with your mouth or your hands or your cunt somehow criminal, while working with other physical body parts is not? All over the world, women labour in physical drudgery. They do work that damages their backs, their hearing, their lungs, their eyes – and most of all, their minds. Where is the feminist hue and cry against this? Why is the focus on the particular kind of work being done rather than on the conditions under which is it done?

The response from feminists who support the criminalization of sex work is that their main goal is to stop ‘sex trafficing.’ I’d like to point you over to Mistress Matisse’s blog for her fine dissection of the wordplay underlying this issue. The phrase ‘sex trafficking’ is being used to encompass all sex work – including sex work by consenting adults with agency. It masks a very disturbing form of ‘gaslighting’ which argues that no ‘sane’ woman would agree to sex work. So all adult women who consentingly perform sex work are too brainwashed and victimized to know what they are consenting to. They have been, in fact, culturally relegated to the position of women who require the state to make decisions on their behalf because they can’t possible be freely making this decision on their own. This is as offensive and repressive as the laws and attitudes of the past in which women were thought intellectually incapable of voting or having say over their own reproductive functions.

***I am in no way denying that sex trafficking exists. It does and it is already criminal. Kidnapping and forced labour (or slavery) ARE illegal in almost every country on the planet. The fact that the forced labour in question involves working with one’s genitals is, from a purely factual perspective, irrelevant. Similarly sex with individuals under the age of majority IS already illegal and one of the main reasons for this is because it is believed that children cannot know what they are consenting to, so it is statutory rape, whether money changes hands or not. There are laws with teeth to protect both adults and children from being detained and put to work against their will, and when those laws are broken, the breakers should feel the full force of the law.

I am speaking here of adults with agency who wish to provide sexual services for money. Admittedly, it is not my choice as way to make money. I would find working in that kind of physical proximity disturbing. But I wouldn’t want to work as a masseuse, a wrestler or a proctologist either – but no one would have a problem with me doing that. Because it’s not about sex. It’s not about my vagina. It’s not about vaginal penetration. And I would suggest that this is what the history of all the anti-sex work prohibitions have been about. Whose cunt is it really?

What offends me is that we, as women, have somehow gone from religious power structures who sought to tell us what we could and couldn’t do with our cunts for the sake of our souls, or masculinist power structures who sought to dominate our wombs for the purpose of controlling heredity, to feminists who want to do the exact same thing for ideological reasons.

I am no more inclined to let a group of ideologically motivated women tell me what I can and can’t do with my cunt any more than I would let a priest or a medical institution do so. And I would like to challenge that there is anything even remotely feminist about women who seek to take public ownership of my body and legislate what I can do with it.

It seems to me that feminists are guilty of doing the very same thing that the church did, and that male-dominated institutions have done in the past. They are preferencing women’s reproductive organs above other parts of a woman’s body just like those who came before them did. They are seeking to exert control over them in exactly the same way – while telling us it is for our own good. At what point does an adult woman get to determine what her own good is for good and all?

Moreover, I find it deeply disingenuous that these ‘feminists’ are spending so much time obsessing about what sex workers in first world countries are doing with their bodies economically when there is a world full of women living in appalling poverty, working is dangerous and health-threatening labour environments. Why is the waste of someone’s hands, or back or brain less worthy of their concern than my cunt or my mouth? And if it is the risk of sexually transmitted diseases that concern them, then please, let them point their concern towards the millions of young people having unpaid and unprotected sex. Condom use is far more prevalent among sex workers than in the general population.

I don’t see a lot of daylight between the way that some feminists are using the excuse that these laws are to protect society from  ‘sex trafficking’ and the way the NSA uses the excuse that they need to spy on us all to stop ‘terrorism.’ This is not about our protection, it’s about our domination. It’s about power -  particularly the power to control sexuality.

On a side note, I’d like to say that I don’t have any more time for the 343 French Intellectual Boy’s club who man the ‘Hands Off My Whore’ movement than for the feminist pressing for criminalization. These aren’t THEIR whores. They aren’t the whores of feminists or the whores of French men. They are women who have self-determination and a right to agency over their own bodies.

For anyone who is just itching to comment with… ‘but some of these women don’t have agency and are forced or coerced,’ READ WHERE I HAVE STARRED, I did that specially for you. It is already illegal to force a person to perform ANY labour they do not wish to perform. It is illegal to hold them against their will. There is no need for more legislation. There is need for the enforcement of the legislation that already exists.

Truth in Fiction: Wealth is not an adequate plot device.

Let me offer you a common premise: ingenue meets twenty-something billionaire and, after a stormy romantic voyage, accessorized with luxury brand-name products and services, and pitted with weak-premised misunderstandings, missed opportunities, ecstatically successful sex – even when it’s entirely non-consensual – and totally groundless jealousies, ends in a happily ever after moment.

Last week, I wrote what must be the most scathing review I have ever offered a book. I don’t write many reviews and, when I do, it’s usually motivated by frustration. I’ve read a lot of bad erotica and written a lot about it, but I seldom encounter things I feel are evil. Yes, evil.

We, all of us, constantly live with the din of a fictional narrative that bombards us from every media platform. It’s not presented to us as fiction, but as marketing. If you buy this product, get this service, own this thing, you will be more attractive, your life will be happier, and you will be the envy of your peers. This message, in all its many forms, is so ubiquitous, so pervasive, that we cease to recognize it as a narrative. It slips into the brain unnoticed, adding to the mountains of previous fictional messages that are already filling it up.

I stand in the shower and read the label on my shower gel. It tells me – because I live in Asia, where, sadly, people want to hear these things -  that it will make my skin whiter and softer and more supple. I’ve been using it for 3 months and my skin (thank god) isn’t any whiter, or more supple. All that is total fiction. It just gets me a little cleaner. Strangely enough, nowhere on the bottle does it actually say it does the one thing it ACTUALLY does, and does perfectly well. Nowhere on the container does it promise to make my skin cleaner.

I really recommend you do this: just read the label of your shampoo. Does it do the things it says it does? No, of course it doesn’t. It just gets the dirt and oil off your hair. Period. And why should we demand or be promised that it will do more?

Yes, you say, but that’s marketing. Just shut up and live with it. It’s everywhere.

Fine. I do. Because I don’t produce shampoo or shower gel. I write stories. And yes, of course, I write fictional stories. So, since I already admit to selling ‘lies,’ I should be able to write as many lies as I like, right? After all, what harm is a little escapism?

Yet, I believe, ironically that I have an obligation to my readers to do as Hemingway advises: to write the truest sentence you know. This isn’t a matter of writing style, but a level of writing ethos. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t set your stories in fictional places or create fictional characters. It doesn’t mean you can’t write impossible things, like a woman having sex with an octopus (yes, I did write about that). In fact, impossible things are often the site of the truest of metaphors.

What I think he meant was to write to the basic realities of our perceptions and emotions as humans. So please feel free to write about impossibly young billionaires, if you’ve done your research and you know any. I’ve met two. One had inherited the money from a tremendously corrupt father and was an immature, narcissistic freak who didn’t actually believe anyone else’s experience of reality was real. The other was self-made, by a fluke of the marketplace, and spent most of his time obsessing about losing it. Of course, he did end up losing most of it. There was nothing sexy about either of these men. In truth, neither of them were fully mature men at all. I slept with both of them and, I can assure you, there is nothing sexy about men who spend their life purchasing over-priced crap as a way of constructing their personalities. They were pitiable. Their wealth made them spoiled, immature adolescents. It blinkered their understanding of the world. They were surrounded by people who affirmed their uninformed, ignorant opinions. But, most importantly, their real moments of joy were few and far between, their unhappinesses many, and they were both lousy, selfish lovers. I don’t write about people like them – mostly because they’re boring.

In fact, the vast majority of wealthy men and women I have met have one thing in common: they’re all incredibly boring. Probably because their wealth has inured them to the sort of experiences in life that make a person interesting.

So, what has this to do with the fiction on my shower gel bottle?

In the same way my shower gel hype is lying, so does the mountain of brand-porn masquerading as steamy romance. And yes, you say, what is wrong with a little escapism? Well, I reply… the problem is that it isn’t a ‘little.’ It’s a lot. It’s fricking ubiquitous. It perpetuates unthruths about the world over and over again, so often that it becomes accepted as fact by dint of repetition. And it begins to breed a sort of aspirational envy, a sense of baseline dissatisfaction with any sort of a real life. Subtly, it repeats, over and over again, that real men who work hard and just about manage to feed their families are somehow ordinary, uninteresting, unsexy.

The world is mostly populated by non-rich people who struggle, and whose struggles are just as worth examining in fiction. And what’s more, the outcomes of their struggles affect their lives to a much greater degree, because they aren’t insulated from their failures with vast amounts of wealth. When normal people fail… they feel it. They can’t buy another car that would feed a whole village for a year as a distraction from their woes. They have to sigh and open a beer.

I’m not saying don’t ever write about rich people. Just keep it representative. There are about 1% of them.

The Good Shepherd – Part 3

“They’re such fucking sods,” said Melissa, the admin for Room 237. “Such fucking, fucking sods.”

Tanya hadn’t really been listening. They were walking up Oxford Street, apparently against a tide of oncoming foot traffic. Tanya loved the flow of crowds. People moved differently in crowds. Like flocks of birds, heaving and streaming, then scattering and coming back together. Each slightly unique and erratic, but still a tribe, a flock, a herd until they encountered something that would force that uniqueness to the surface – a bench or a rubbish bin – and then their right or left-handedness would reveal itself in the way they moved around the obstacle.  There was always a higher percentage of people wearing something red on a Friday. Fourteen percent.  The rest of the week it hovered at around eleven. “Who?”

“You’re not listening.”

“I am. They’re sods.”

“Kevin and Michael and that lot. Sociopathic ubergeeks.”

“We’re all geeks, love.”

“They talk about women like there’s a queue of ramp models waiting to suck their knobs.”

“True.”

“They’re all porn-watching losers.”

“We’re all porn-watching losers, Mel.”

“I don’t.”

Tanya stopped, tugged Melissa’s jacket sleeve and cocked an eyebrow at her. “Yes you do.”

“I…” Melissa pursed her lips and glared at Tanya. “How the fuck would you know?”

Tanya shrugged and smiled. “Come on. I want to get this over with.”

“You haven’t! You bitch. You haven’t!”

“Haven’t what?”

“Have you put something on my computer? Cos if you have, I’m going to be fucking pissed.”

Tanya laughed aloud, her breath misted around her in the chill of the early evening. “I don’t do that sort of thing.”

“Yes you do.”

“Not personally.”

“Well have you?”

“No. Of course not.”

“Then how do you know I watch porn?”

“Because we all do, Mel.”

“Do you?”

“Yep.”

They’d reached the big H&Ms at the corner of Regent’s Street and pushed through the clots of browsing shoppers. Tanya found the shirt she was looking for. Black, thin cotton, long-sleeved.

“What kind?” asked Mel from the other side of the clothes rack.

“Long-sleeved.”

“No, you silly cow. What kind of porn do you like?”

“Oh. The close-up kind,” said Tanya, sifting through the hangers, looking for another shirt in her size.

“No threesomes or bondage or spanking? Just the seafood?”

Tanya added two more of the black, long-sleeved cotton shirts to the pile on her shoulder. “Just the seafood. Are there any more of these on your side in a 12?”

“Why?”

“I don’t like looking at their faces. It’s distracting.”

“Why do you want another black one? You’ve already got five there. What about another style? Another colour?”

“No.”

“What about the blue?” said Melissa, holding the shirt up for Tanya to see.

She shook her head. “Don’t do blue.”

Melissa drew it to her ample chest.  “Ooh, I like this.”

“Suits you. Get it.”  Tanya looked around. “Where are the bras? I need bras.”

* * *

“You’re odd, you know that?” said Melissa. “You’re really, really odd.”

They were standing in the queue for the tills.  “I’m not odd. I’m just practical.”

“Five shirts, five bras, five pairs of knickers, five of socks. All black.”

“So?”

“It’s fucking mad. Why don’t you mix it up a bit?”

“I’m shit at combining colours. This way, nothing clashes and I don’t have to think about what to wear in the morning.”

“But why five?” asked Melissa.

“So I don’t have to come back for another year.”

“Freak.”

They shuffled forward in the line. “Hey, I’m not the one who gets off on gay gang-bang extravaganzas.”

“I do NOT!”

Tanya kept her eyes straight ahead and grinned. “Just a wild guess.”

“Well, just a few times.”

“Gotcha.”

“Want to go for a drink?”

“Absofuckinglutely.”

Pipe of Thorns

This isn’t a new story. In fact, it’s the first story I wrote that was ever published. But since the delicious Vanessa Wu remarked specifically on it in her review of my anthology, I thought it was time to repost it.

Once upon a time there was a young man who was handsome and charming and engaged the imagination of all those around him. Like many young men, he was fickle and faithless and bestowed his attentions liberally. He would regularly tempt young ladies of quality into indiscretions, always whispering promises of undying devotion as he relieved them of their clothes, their shame, and then their virtue.

No one blamed the young man for this, for it is the nature of youth to spread its seed as far and wide as the landscape will allow. Although his mother berated him with accusations of heartlessness and threatened him with the specter of social scandal, his father quietly winked at his lusty son and daydreamed nostalgically of his own fancy-free youth.

The truth was, no one blamed Gerald. He was young and rich, with a golden-tipped tongue. Even the young women who fell beneath his spell and were left adrift and weeping in his wake could not really stay angry at him for long. For, it had to be admitted, he gave as much pleasure as he took.

As the years went by and Gerald grew older, many women set their caps for him in the most serious efforts to ensnare him. Ladies feigned that they were with child, or truly believed themselves to be. Others cried that their health could not bear the strain of his departure. Still others thought themselves driven mad for want of his affections.

And through those years, Gerald did become very fond of some of the women he dallied with. There was Lucretia with her fine black hair and laughing eyes, who rode him for sport like a stallion, and Bettina, rounded and luxurious, whose gorgeous mouth felt at once like a deep feather bed and a hot pool of molten rock. There were many, many ladies whom he cared for. And as he matured, he began to feel the burden of the call that pulled him from one pair of arms and into the embrace of another.

One day, while taking his morning ride in the park, Gerald fell into conversation with Bertram, a friend with whom he sometimes played at cards. Bertram was himself something of a self-confessed philander, and the two had enjoyed many evenings out on the town, wooing ladies of stature at supper parties or descending into the darker, more forbidden places, where women were to be had for two shillings an hour.

“Gerald, old chap! If your evening is free, why don’t you come along with me to Limehouse? I’ve heard there are places in that neighborhood where a man can lose more than just his money,” Bertram said with a lascivious grin.

“I don’t know,” Gerald sighed. “Those poor Chinese women look so glum and bedraggled. And they have lice! No, I think perhaps I’ll give it a miss, old chum.”

“You mistake my meaning, dear boy! We won’t be going for the women. It’s the opium that is the true entertainment.”

Gerald had heard about opium, the blood of the weeping poppy, said to bring marvelous dreams and visions as a man lay smoking and at his ease. This, far more than the brothels, piqued his interest and he arranged to meet Bertram at eight thirty after a light supper.

The evening was cold and foggy. Gerald met Bertram at the club and from there they proceeded eastwards by hackney cab. After a lengthy drive, the carriage drew up in front of St. Anne’s church on the Commercial Road not far from Regent’s Basin. Across the street stood a decrepit warehouse. The stench of the river was almost insufferable. Gaslight bathed the filthy street and turned the fog luminous in the most sinister ways. Gerald shivered and pulled his collar up around his neck, but Bertram tipped his hat and set upon the door of the building, hammering at it with the head of his walking stick. At first there was no sign of life inside, and two slatterns ambled by offering their wares and giggling.

The eldest and the uglier of the two spoke. “Ya won’t be wantin’ whot they’ve got on offer there, gentlemen. That stuff’ll make you useless to any woman. The bane of our trade, that stuff is!”

Before either Gerald or Bertram could respond, the door of the warehouse creaked open. Heavy smoke, sickly sweet and acrid, billowed out to join the fog in the street and through it stepped a small, meaty-looking Chinese, who glanced up and down the street and then gestured for them to step through into the building.

What seemed at first to be a warehouse was instead a doss house. Row upon row of wooden bunks held the dark nestled lumps of human forms. As they followed the doorkeeper down a mazelike path, here and there a prone shape would groan or cough or rise from its pallet like some dead creature coming back to life. If the smell on the street had been foul, it was beyond description in the overcrowded press of the room. They were led through a door and Gerald was shocked to find he had stepped, not into some lower level of hell, but into the confines of a very pleasantly appointed sitting room.

A well-dressed woman of some thirty years rose from her place by a cozy fire and approached them graciously. She was the most exotic looking creature Gerald had ever seen. Coils of coal-black hair looped intricately about her head and cascaded down a creamy neck, settling prettily on a generous and smooth-skinned bosom. From her eyes, Gerald could see that there was oriental blood in her veins, but it was the color that was astonishing. She had irises as blue as cornflowers and the largest pupils he’d ever seen.

“Welcome, gentlemen. Such an unpleasant night to be out and about. I hope that we can afford you some amusement here and make your journey worthwhile.”

Both men stepped forward to take her hand and introduce themselves. The delicate hand that Gerald took and held as he spoke felt like something made of fine, unglazed porcelain. “And to whom do I owe this very great pleasure?”

“We use no names here, Sir. For the adventures we begin from here might take us anywhere, and make us anyone. But for the sake of expediency, you may call me Mai.”

“You are most charming, Mai. I do hope you will be patient with us.” Gerald smiled his most seductive smile at the stunning woman before him. “We are uninitiated to adventures you refer to.”

Mai returned his smile, her lips turning upward with good humor. “I see. Well, gentlemen. Please follow me. I shall act as your guide, if you will allow me, on this first journey.”

She led them through a set of carved doors and into a dimly lit room beyond. This room was far more oriental in decoration. Low, velvet couches lined walls hung with silk tapestries. Upon them scenes of craggy mountain peaks and rampant dragons, mists and lonely trees, long lianas gathered beneath peaked gables, all set tinder to Gerald’s imagination. Above them hung lanterns with etched and painted glass windows, splaying soft and varicolored lights about the room.

Mai clapped her hands softly and, from behind a tapestry on the far wall, two silk-sheathed eastern nymphs minced forth on tiny feet and led each man to his own couch, urging them to lie upon them.

“Li and Ping, prepare the pipes, please.”

Gerald stretched out on the divan, feeling awkward to be recumbent in the presence of a lady standing. For, although their hostess was certainly no gentleman’s daughter, still he felt himself to be in the presence of someone who deserved his politeness and respect.

Mai seemed to be very much at home. She stepped delicately to a low table supporting two bronze lions in the Chinese style and put the flame from a small oil burner to three slender sticks of what Gerald learned later to be incense. Then, when the sticks were sending up hair-like tendrils of sweet-smelling smoke, she took up a small metal rod and struck it against the body of one of the lions. It chimed sweetly.

Gerald watched all this with fascination. He was beginning to think that this was by far the most amusing evening he and Bertram had ever shared. He noticed his friend was distracted watching the two imps in the corner as they gathered sundry objects onto raised trays and came back bearing them with grace.

“If you please, sir, I would ask you to allow Ping and Li to prepare your pipe for you and attend to your needs,” Mai said to Bertram, who was trailing an idle finger down Ping’s silken thigh.

Gerald could tell from his friend’s visage that the proposal pleased him very much indeed. Even more gratifying still, he understood that this meant he would have Mai’s attentions all to himself. He watched Mai bend to pick up the second tray and bring it over to him. He could not see the feet beneath her evening dress and it seemed to him that she did not walk, but floated towards him instead.

Before his divan, she lowered herself onto a rich oriental rug and set the implements beside her kneeling form. Now he had occasion to look at the objects on the tray, the most remarkable of which was a long, slender bamboo pipe with round, covered bowl at one end. Also on the tray was a shallow black dish containing what looked like black marbles, a tiny, lit burner, and a thin metal needle of some length.

“Now sir, shall I amuse you by telling you your future while I prepare your pipe?” she asked slyly. She took the needle and pierced one of the black spheres and began to play it back and forth over the flame of the burner.

“Oh, by all means,” replied Gerald, amused.

“You will take a long journey…”

A thick pungent smoke began to rise from the skewered sphere. Mai transferred it to the pipe and held it out for Gerald to take. He made to rise from his recumbent position to receive it, but she indicated that he should remain lying down. He guided the pipe’s mouthpiece to his lips.

“And you will meet a mysterious raven-haired woman…”

She guided her end of the long pipe so that it sat above the flame of the burner and inhaled deeply, her breasts rising most attractively in her elegant bodice, encouraging him to follow her example. He sucked deeply on the pipe.

“And your life will be changed forever.”

Thick, choking smoke billowed down into the depth of his lungs causing him to pull the pipe from his lips and expel it in a fit of coughing.

“Yes, the first inhalation is something of a shock. The next will be easier to take. Pull the smoke down into your chest and hold it inside for as long as you can.” She smiled, assuring him. Her eyes fluttered and slid half-shut. “Be assured, once you have the knack of it, you will not remember how you ever found it unpleasant.”

Gerald nodded and took another deep pull from the pipe. She was not lying. This time, the smoke slid velvet-like down into the depths of his lungs and, although he had the desire to cough again, he fought it and held the vapor in. It seemed the smoke lay in his chest for a while and then floated upwards within his body until it filled his eyes with tears. He expelled it in a sinuous stream.

“Again,” Mai urged. And again he took in the poppy vapors. A feeling of utter warmth and peace drew itself around his body like the softest blanket. He gazed heavy-lidded at the woman in front of him as she turned the pipe around and took a deep draw on it herself. After several bowls of opium, Gerald closed his eyes.

Time drifted sideways like an overladen vessel floating downstream. The sound of his own breathing; the hissing of the opium resin as it bubbled, viscose in the pipe; a slow, low drum beating inexorably in his ears. Everything was before him; everything was within his grasp. All the joys and travails of the world seemed as nothing now, inconsequential in the landscape of his existence.

Images, memories, songs came whirling up, lending each other meaning. The faces of women he’d been with, the taste of them, the timbre of voices raised in laughter or hoarse with ecstasy, the warm wealth of their bodies and the redolent scents of their pleasure. It made him sad, not in a painful way, but the memories of each of them filled him with pathos. The arch of one’s back, the tender shudder of another’s coming, and hunger. What boundless hunger for something more than what they had made together…

In the midst of these dreams, Gerald felt warmth against his cheek and reluctantly opened his leaden eyelids. Mai’s face rested near his, perched beautifully upon a white arm. Her face was in repose and yet somehow still imbued with energy. Gerald perceived a distinct glow about her head, deep gold like a halo. Suddenly it seemed very important to enter that light. He reached out lazily and pulled her head close to his, until their lips met, and he felt a molten river flow between them where their skin touched.

The gesture roused her. Her eyelids fluttered half-open and he felt her smile against him. Without breaking contact, she moved onto the divan beside him and stretched out along his body. At every point they touched, even through the damnable layers of her gown, Gerald felt a storm of passion, as if every inch of his skin had an appetite of its own. It was a strange hunger that built, as he kissed her lips somnolently, tasting the bitter taint of opium on them and idly he regretted that, between his legs, his cock had not stirred at all.

They kissed for what seemed like hours. Gerald tasted every part of her face, her neck, the broad expanse of her chest. He longed to taste the rest of her, but somehow, he could not summon the energy to undress her. And she responded in a similar fashion, plucking motes of his skin between her moist lips, nuzzling his cheek and neck, threading and rethreading her fingers through his hair.

Then, by stages, oblivion. When he awoke, only Li and Ping were there. They offered him tea and informed him that Miss Mai had retired, and his friend had left.

* * *

Gerald returned again and again to the opium den in Limehouse. Each time, Mai was gracious and each time she saw to his pipe personally. But every time he awoke, she was gone. One night, just as he was about to smoke the pipe, he changed his mind and refused it.

“I want to lay with you. Awake. Without the opium,” he said.

Mai settled the rejected pipe back onto the tray and looked at him impassively.

“Please,” Gerald pleaded. “I will pay you–whatever you ask.”

She cocked her head and smiled. “I am not a prostitute; I do not require remuneration for my intimacies.”

“I must have you–all of you. Just for one night.”

It seemed to Gerald that Mai considered his request for a moment. Finally she rose and held out her hand. “Very well, if it means so much to you,” she said laughingly, as if he was asking for something of no value or of lesser value than what she had already given him.

Never had a woman agreed to his attentions so lightly. It shocked him, and yet it stopped him not a moment. He rose of the divan and, taking her hand, allowed her to lead him past the tapestry that covered a passageway at the end of the room.

The bedroom she took him to was not as luxurious as the den. Neither was it oriental in any way. It was a plain, clean room with a bed, a wash basin and an oil lamp that gave off a soft glow. She bade him sit on the bed and stood before him undressing. The layers of clothing fell away into multi-colored puddles at her feet. He watched entranced and mute as she disposed of her dress, her petticoats, her corset, and beneath it, a thin cotton shift which she pulled over her head.

There was no shame in her and no guile either. She allowed him to take in her nakedness, from the plump globes of her breasts, the dusty nipples, the long slender line of her belly to the dark nest of hair at the top of her thighs. Then slowly she turned, and he sighed at the glorious bow of her back. At the base of her spine, just above her buttocks, Gerald saw a dark stain like a birthmark. He reached out to touch it and heard her laugh. She stepped backwards, towards him and into the light. It was a black dragon, a tattoo.

Gerald slid his hands over the softness of her bottom, pulling her closer to him by the hips. He lowered his head and pressed his lips to the dark, tangled picture etched into her skin. She moaned then and arched her back, and suddenly she was in motion.

Mai turned to face him, pushing him backwards onto the bed. She crawled over him like a child, tugging off his jacket, fumbling with the buttons on his vest. Clawing and ripping at his shirt and his trousers, she was frenzied in her movements, as if now her life depended on reducing him to the same state of nakedness that she herself was in.

She was like no other woman he had ever been with. She didn’t simper or giggle or blush and, although he would have liked to believe it was he who seduced her, it would have been untrue. Her desire matched his in every way. Once he was fully unclothed she set upon him like a beast. He reached out for handfuls of her as she moved over him, kissing him here and there and everywhere. When she reached his cock, blood-engorged and pointing towards the heavens, she took it into her mouth, laving it with her tongue, sucking and stroking it.

Gerald thought he’d died. For a moment he lay upon his back, paralyzed with the pleasures offered by her attentions. Then, hungrily, he pulled her body around until she loomed above him, the wet hairs of her cunt glinting in the lamplight. At first he planted delicate kisses upwards, hesitant to offend her. Few women, in his experience, were amenable to this sort of activity. But Mai was different. His first hesitant forays were encouraged as she lowered herself onto his mouth, shuddering as he stroked her inner lips with his tongue.

Taking hold of her hips, he pulled her down onto him firmly and pressed his tongue up into her passage. She stopped her energetic attentions to his cock and groaned. Her hips rolled, her thighs shivered and after her initial need for pause, she once again took his cock deep into her hungry mouth and fed. Then, several minutes later, she rose up off him and held herself stiff for a moment before letting out a plaintive cry and collapsing onto him in a series of beautiful convulsions. Her liquids spilled out of her, covering his face. She tasted like opium: sweet and dark.

Now Gerald could no longer hold himself back. He turned her onto her stomach, and lifted her hips to meet his throbbing, weeping cock. Entering her was exquisite, her passage fiery hot around him as he forged into her. It was then she turned her head to look back at him. He saw her parted lips, wet and red, her eyes cerulean and dilated, and such hunger…such terrible hunger.

She met him thrust for thrust as he fucked her, spreading her legs wide to take him in as deep as he would go. Gerald slowed his pace, to bring her to peak again before he finished, and she made a low, rumbling noise that came from deep in her throat. She was his animal or perhaps he was hers. For within a few strokes, she wriggled away from him and turned around, pressing him back onto the mattress and climbing astride his hips.

As she lowered herself to engulf him, Gerald realized that he had dreamed this many times while drifting on clouds of opium: the vision of her taking him in like this, impaling herself upon his cock over and over, the sweetest of self-made wounds. He pushed his hips up to meet her, and each time, it set her breasts trembling. He reached out to touch them as she rode him. He squeezed and rolled them, finally taking her nipples between his fingers and pinching them hard. She whimpered and rode his cock harder still. Finally, he could not wait any longer. He sat up, buried his head between her breasts and grabbed her hips, goring into the depths of her body as he erupted. Mai wailed and wrapped her arms about his head. The hot flush of his come had brought her to her own little death.

For a long while afterwards, she did not move and did not release him, as if she could not bear to feel herself emptied. Then they lay side by side and, as drowsy as Gerald was, he could not stop touching her in all the places he’d dreamed so long of touching.

Suddenly a terrifying thought came over him. He could not imagine himself with anyone but her, he didn’t want to be without her, and yet he knew himself too well. His own hunger would lie dormant for perhaps a week or two and then it would begin to gnaw at him. He would proclaim his love to her and, at that moment, he would mean it with all his heart. But slowly the bit would chafe, and as much as he cared for her, he’d be off looking for someone new.

Not this time–not this time, he swore to himself. His muscles seized with his own resolve.

“What is it that worries you?” Mai asked, her voice drunk with sleep.

Gerald considered lying, like he always had. But this time it would be different, he insisted to himself. He stiffened his spine and began to tell her everything. His faithlessness, his inability to be happy with one woman, his insatiable drive to delve into new flesh–just the telling of it made him miserable.

“I don’t want to be like that anymore,” he said. “I don’t want to be with another woman, ever again and yet I don’t know how to stop myself.” As he said the words, he knew just how deeply he meant them. The knot in his throat grew, making his voice tremble. Tears pricked at the corner of his eyes. “I never want to do this, ever again, with anyone else,” he sobbed. “Only you. Only you Mai.” He reached for her and pulled her snug against him and buried his face in her silken black hair. Then he cried like a baby. For shame, for want, for all the things he could not have.

“Is this truly what you want?” She pulled her face towards his and looked at him with great concern. “Truly? Will it make you happy?”

“Yes. It’s truly what I want. The only thing I desire.”

Gerald fell asleep, Mai’s head on his chest, his arms around her warm form.

When he awoke, it was to the sound of a door creaking open. He looked up drowsily and saw Mai, clutching a robe around her body. She smiled and walked towards him. It was only then that he saw she was not alone. The short, stocky coolie followed her into the room and stood at the foot of the bed. Gerald had never noticed before how old the man was. His thick, solid body belied his age, but looking into his face by the light of the lamp, Gerald could see that he was quite ancient. In his hands he carried a covered cup.

“Gerald,” said Mai, sitting on the bed next to his prone body. “Are you sure that what you told me is what you really desire?”

Gerald sat up and took her hand in his. “Of course it’s what I want. More than anything.”

She looked at him again, her eyes demanding the truth. “You are absolutely certain?”

“Completely.”

Mai turned and took the little covered cup from the old coolie. She spoke to him in a respectful tone and he answered her, not as a servant, but with authority. Gerald could not understand what was said. They were speaking in what he assumed was Chinese.

She turned back to Gerald and offered him the cup. “Then drink this and you will have what you want.” For a moment, he hesitated. Not because he wasn’t speaking the truth, but because suddenly he wondered whether this wasn’t some kind of foreign poison. He lifted the little lid and inhaled the steam rising from the liquid in the cup. It smelled sweet and green, like flowers.

“What is it?”

Mai smiled at him and his heart flushed with emotion. “It’s tea. A very special tea. An ancient recipe.”

“What is it made of?” asked Gerald.

“Roses. A rare and special rose.”

Gerald raised the cup to his lips and let a little of the warm liquid trickle over his tongue. Rose–that was exactly what it tasted like. Rose petals. He tilted the cup up and drank the tea down in one draft. He waited to see if he felt anything, any dizziness or unsettledness, but he felt nothing at all. Just sleepy and warm.

Mai returned the empty cup to the coolie and accompanied him to the door, listening and nodding to the old man’s unintelligible words. Then she closed the door, and came back to the bed, allowing the silk robe to slide off her bare skin. She climbed into bed, nestling against him. Gerald sighed contentedly and slipped into a deep and dreamless sleep.

In the morning, he awoke to her movement in the bed next to him. He smiled to himself and pulled her tight against him. Gerald felt the first stirrings of lust as he pressed against the warmth of her bare skin. Brushing her hair off her sleeping face, he kissed her cheek, and then her nose, and then her lips. They moved into a smile, returning his affection.

His fingers traced a line along her body, from her smooth shoulder, over her arm, the concave sweep of her waist and the peak of her hip. She stirred and mewed drowsily, pressing back against his cupped body. Gerald gazed a path to the silken triangle between her legs and gently eased his fingers through the curls, feeling the wonder promise of her moistness as he parted her nether lips. Mai moaned, and opened her thighs to his touch and he obliged her by sliding his fingers into her cleft. She was so wet…so utterly ready for him.

Between his own legs, he felt his cock wake and become turgid against his thigh and, for a few moments, he applied himself to stroking the wet folds of her cunt. But gradually he began to feel a distinct itching in his own groin. Yes, his lust was pricking at his loins, but it felt, somehow different. In fact, the itching became quite maddening and he left off his attentions to Mai and pushed his hand between his own legs, intent on quieting the discomfort he felt there.

As his hand closed around his cock, he felt a cruel, sharp pain in the palm of his hand, as if he’d been cut or bitten. Immediately he drew his hand from under the covers and looked at it. There was a small, deep cut in the centre of his palm. A droplet of blood welled and ran down the line of his palm and onto his wrist. Fear seized him and he frantically pushed back at the bedclothes and stared down at his own naked form.

Nestled between his thighs lay his softening manhood, studded with sharp, dark thorns. At first he thought they had pieced him, and he gingerly fingered each node. But the thorns weren’t angled inward. They weren’t piercing his skin. All along the shaft of his penis, they grew outwards.

Mai stretched and rolled over to look at him. “Let’s smoke,” she whispered.

The Good Shepherd – Part 2

Tuesdays were known as ‘Cluster Fuck Tuesdays:’ dedicated to assessing system-identified data clusters and strategizing changes to the algorithms when the system spit out nonsensical results. For Tanya, the morning started at five with a run around Regent’s Park. When she was satisfied that her blood was pumping, she purposefully tainted it with three espressos downed in quick succession.  It wasn’t clear whether this helped her with the results analysis, but it had become a ritual she clung to superstitiously.

It wasn’t that her employers didn’t value her. Her intuitive talents at identifying causal and counterfactual inferences were invaluable to them at the present time. But Tanya was not stupid. There would come a day, she was sure, when the processors would get fast enough and the heuristics would get accurate enough to render her redundant.  As a child, she’d been a frightening party trick. As an adult, she had a narrow set of skills that, at present were highly sought after. At present, lateral data evaluation required people exactly like Tanya, but it wouldn’t last.

By one in the afternoon, the team in the creche had identified five major classification errors, mostly as a result of overfitting. It was part of the job to compile a set of looser ranges for each, but Tanya saw two of them needed additional conditional parameters, and that one should’ve been trashed outright because it would never come to anything. Naturally, this last started the big argument of the day, which everybody hated. And loved because it was the crucible that made the team’s results so fucking good every time. And, most of the time, Tanya prevailed. Even more of the time, she was right.

With very little blood on the floor and no ego too heavily bruised, they sent the results downstream to the real geeks in Room 237, which wasn’t a room at all. In the open plan office two floors above them, everyone sported the screensaver ‘All Work And No Play Make Jack A Dull Boy.’ By four, they had flagged another dozen association rules that might, pending a larger implementation, prove to be productive.

After the depressing evening she’d had the night before, Tanya was hesitant to even glance at the latest product from her more private and completely unsanctioned side project. Not because it hadn’t been successful. It had. There had been nothing at all wrong with Jeremy. That was the real issue.  The system didn’t require tweaking; it was perfect. She was, she suspected, the unstable variable.

Stochastic variation. Probabilities were always going to be just that, she reminded herself.  So, when she sat back down at her desk with her congealed, half-eaten panini and logged in to look at the results of her latest searches, she was gratified to see one result with a 79% rating.  41, heterosexual, graduate education – didn’t say in what, but a doddle to find out.  She never paid attention to height and weight. Everyone lied. Subtract three inches and add 10 kilos and you got something approximating the truth. Tanya preferred them married rather than divorced and there was no mention of his status at all. But she liked the photograph. It was of a man with a handsome, quirky face. A sharp chin and saturnine brows. There was grey coming in at his temples and deep creases at the corners of his mouth even though he wasn’t exactly smiling in the picture. Adventurously kinky. Well, well. That might be fun for a change.

The first little frisson came from his account password. It was good and hard. Numbers, letters, symbols. She spent a while simply contemplating the apparent randomness of it. Perhaps he’d used a password generator. But few people did.  She smiled to herself.  Perhaps as she acquired more data on the target, the puzzle of the password would solve itself.  There was nothing much behind the profile except for his credit card and banking details but with that, his postcode and his access logs, she had everything needed to unpack AStine1972. Tanya bit into the soggy remnant of her lunch and brought up his ISP’s records.

There was a cute little routine she’d written herself that looked at correlates between television licenses, pet ownership and frequency of international travel.

The Good Shepherd – Part 1

On her knees, face buried in her folded hands, Tanya waited for the flip of the switch that would shut off her brain and engage her body. But, no matter how hard the burly stranger fucked her, it just wouldn’t come.  It was a measure of her desperation to be anywhere other than in her own head that she didn’t tell him to stop and leave. Just a couple more thrusts, just a few more and it would happen.

Soon.

Almost there.

Any minute now.

It wasn’t that she felt nothing. There was the meaty thud of his hips against her buttocks. The curious sense of being filled and emptied. The jolt of her body. His ragged, spiraling exhalations, sounds of a body labouring towards its pleasure.  The scent of sweat and musk and the acrid tang of latex. The hotel detergent used to launder the bedspread. Its weave was harsh beneath her knees, and prickly against her cheek. Its cherry redness bled out to the edges of her vision.

It had always worked before.

Now the weave of the fabric was just another data set with a million minute inconsistencies.  A tug here, a pulled thread there, a curve in the weft: each imperfection irrefutable evidence of all the people who’d ever fucked on this bed, or thrashed in their sleep, trapped in troubled dreams in this airless, soulless, moderately priced hotel.

The reception desk knew her.  Each time she checked in, they handed over her key card with a bland, seemingly impenetrable smile before she left to wait in the bar. Tanya knew what lay beneath it, because she knew people. She knew their obediences, their complicities, their betrayals, their grand weaknesses and their little quandaries. The small battles and the large compromises of the common man.  Data could tell you everything if you looked close enough and long enough.

And she had looked too close. Too long.

Jeremy, the man who, at this very moment, had his sheathed cock firmly rooted in her cunt, was married with two children. He worked for a public surveyors office as an inspector of commercial properties and took the occasional under the table payment, not to fudge his reports but to expedite them. The money funded his hobby restoring vintage boats sourced on eBay.  He didn’t fuck around much. Not a bad man really, just weak. A man who had something to lose. That’s why she’d chosen him, the product of a carefully filtered search algorithm.

Now he was standing at the foot of the bed, plowing into her, in a faithful reenactment of his preferred porn, which he usually accessed between 11 PM and 1 AM, presumably after his wife had already gone to sleep.

When Tanya had consciously stepped into the flow of his life, she had found him affable, good-humoured, and a little self-effacing. He’d been a little heavier than she expected, but she liked that.  The tattoo on his shoulder had been a surprise.  Not mentioned in his medical records, it proved to be a small delight. She enjoyed it when reality revealed something not there in the data.  A tiny rebellion, a free radical, a flaw in the system.

She turned her head and stared at the dressing table mirror by the side of the bed, watched the muscle beneath that little rebellion flex as he took a better grasp of her hip. He was looking down at her ass as he fucked her. It wasn’t, she had to admit, a spectacular ass. Age and hours of sitting in front of monitors hadn’t been kind to it. Normally, she didn’t care, but right at this moment she suspected it was why he was taking so long to come.

“Okay,” she said, and let her knees fold and rolled sideways onto the bed. “Enough.”

Jeremy was quiet for a moment, then turned and sat near her. “Is there something I’m not doing right?”

Tanya fished around in the swaddle of bedclothes for her knickers and pulled them on. “What?”

“You don’t seem like you’re into it.”

“Neither do you.”

“I was. I am. You just seem…” he searched for the words. Tanya felt sorry for him. “You’re not horny at all, are you?”

She gave him a sympathetic smile. “I thought I was. I guess I’m not.”

He reached for her bare shoulder and caressed it. “If there’s something special you’d like me to do? Because I’m up for – you know…” The words trailed off and his hand cupped the back of her neck, his fingers kneading into the muscle.

Nothing could have made her feel worse.  Self-disgust bubbled up her throat.  She almost said it – those vapid words: it isn’t you, it’s me. But she caught herself in time.

Suddenly she wanted to tell this intimately mapped stranger everything. All of it. She wanted to come clean and let him know everything she knew about him, his wife, his mortgage, his job, his coworkers, his car, the location data he had enabled on his smart phone, the amount of his last gas bill. But most of all, she wanted to tell him just how easy it was to crack his password on the internet dating site, how static IP addresses were the devil, and how it had taken her all of 2 hours to crack him open and know more about him than his mother knew, even now that she was dead.

But she didn’t because, for all her sins, she wasn’t evil. Not really, truly evil.

* * *

In the taxi on the way back to her flat, Tanya tried to hold on to the only thing the evening had provided. A brief moment of sincere regret. The warmth of his palm on her shoulder and the way the truth piled up behind her tongue, and her decision not to turn his life to shit by swallowing it back down. There was a sweetness to that moment. A single, honourable gesture in the midst of all the crap.

But it ebbed away, diluted into nothingness in the onslaught of data. Beyond the taxi’s window, Tanya was counting blue cars and memorizing number plates.

TBC

Collaborative Writing of a Story Cycle: Salome Jones on Red Phone Box

Red Phone Box: A Darkly Magical Story Cycle published by Ghostwood Books.

Almost two years ago now, I was very honoured to be invited to contribute to a wonderful project called Red Phone Box. It is a collected, interwoven set of writings by Warren Ellis, Robert Bal, Chris Bissette, Joff Brown, Francesca Burgon, David Church Rodríguez, Gábor Csigás, Peter Dawes, Tim Dedopulos, James ‘Grim’ Desborough, Hollis Dorian, erisreg, Lacie Grayson, Kate Harrad, Salome Jones, Tamsyn Kennedy, Sezin Koehler, Uri Kurlianchik, J.F. Lawrence, Gethin A. Lynes,  Steven Sautter, Matthew Scoppetta, Joe Silber, Thadeus E. Suggs, Chuck Walker, Dan Wickline, Cvetomir Yonchev and, I’m happy to say, me. It’s not a themed anthology. In fact, it’s unlike anything you’ve ever read before.  What made it possible was the single-minded dedication of its two editors, James Desborough and Salome Jones.

I invited Salome to answer some questions on how the project came about, and how the process of creating this wonderful  ‘dark story cycle.’

* * *

RG is me and SJ is Salome Jones

RG: I’d like to ask you about how the conception of Red Phone Box came about? When you started, did you have an idea of the structure, or did the submissions play a part in how the structure came to be?

SJ: The structure evolved from what people wrote. There were obvious junctions and threads of plot. You could see where writers got their ideas from other stories. I used the existing pieces to form what structure we could first, and then, with Tim Dedopulos’s help, looked at what supports needed to be added to make it function as a completed work. But the other writers really determined much of what we ended up with.

RG: Traditionally, writing has been seen as a very solitary pursuit, do you think a work like Red Phone Box challenges that notion?

SJ: I think writing has been solitary because it has mostly had to be, although collaborations have been happening for a long time. But I think the internet has made larger scale, long distance collaborations possible. It’s certainly easier to write alone. But if you’re very social, it can be really fun and also mind expanding to start writing where someone else left off. The way we all started to think, the way different team members would separately introduce similar ideas, shows me that we must be naturally able to create as members of a collaborative.

RG: Could you talk a little bit about the process of prompting writers to cooperate in this way?

SJ: Originally, I wrote a story that was very open-ended. I left some mysterious aspects to it so others would have things to explore. Then I asked  everyone to write a story that connected by at least two points, besides the phone box. They could use that first story or any of the ones produced as we went along. Borrow characters, settings, events. If I got a story that didn’t feel very connected, I’d ask the writer to add points of connection to it. That was it until we hit the midpoint. By then patterns were emerging. Some were good, but some were unworkable if we wanted to make a longer story arc out of it. At some point, there weren’t very many female characters, so I asked for more female characters.  At first they were afraid to write each other’s characters. Everyone seemed to want to invent a character. So I asked them to focus on the characters we had.  It was a bit like directing any kind of improvisation if you don’t want it to be completely random.

RG: What were the themes that you kept in mind as you began to weave these disparate pieces into a cohesive whole?

SJ: Loneliness and isolation are things I felt were depicted strongly in quite a few of the individual pieces. It seems to reflect a quality of life in London, because it’s so big and so hard to get across, and, especially now, economics aren’t much in favour of going out to socialize. It also struck me how in a way the book reflected the occasional conflict between religions and cultures in London and the UK more generally without taking any sides, except against conflict. Even though these themes came about organically, I was aware of them in filling in the gaps with additional material.

RG: Were there other unifying strategies that you were applying to create something more than just a loosely themed anthology?

SJ: Well, the main unifying ingredient was that we located the clear story threads and made sure they continued. Once we had about 35 stories, where a plot line dropped off, I would ask a writer to write the next story. I’d say, ‘solve these problems but otherwise it can be whatever you want.’ Which in hindsight seems a little cavalier, but it mostly worked.

There were a  couple of stories that were written in the first person. Because they were both good stories, I needed to find a way to make them fit into a third person narrative. So in the end, I made them objects. One is a woman’s journal left in a cafe. The other is an academic journal article. Basically, I asked myself: What can I do with this story? What other information is needed to make it fit? Then I either wrote another story that would connect it, or I asked someone else to write one that would.

Basically, we made it a goal that it would be a story cycle. So we looked at what we had, and thought forward. What could happen here that would lead to a conclusion? What’s the natural progression of events after this? How do these different characters relate to each other? You ask those questions enough and you get people to move those plot threads forward, and eventually you get something like a collective novel. Or you get a lot of stories, which when you pull back and look at the bigger picture, make a broader story.

RG: Clearly this is an example of editing as a tremendously creative act.  Can you speak a little about that?

SJ: The best analogy I can come up with is that it’s like making a quilt. You have all these pieces of fabric — stories. They have colors and patterns — characters and plots. But what you want to do with them is cut them into shapes and, making use of their existing properties, connect them together so that you see something new in the end product. It’s that sort of piecing together, along with making the writing stronger where necessary, buffing out inconsistencies. Adding in the right pieces.

RG: What were some of the practices, assumptions, modes of production that you had to overcome to act as an editor for this?

SJ: I edit novels for a living. Usually there’s one author. They give me work, I read and make notes on it, we go back and forth and it’s done. I rarely change anything major in someone else’s work. It’s more like I suggest revisions and they make them, or not if they disagree. But for this complicated piece to work, I had to give up my usual reluctance to make changes to other people’s work. Part of my job on this book, was to make sure that the whole book worked as one thing. And sometimes that meant rewriting bits of other people’s stories. I tried as hard as I could to respect the integrity of their work. Some pieces required very few changes. Some required a lot of changes. In the end, the editor’s job on something as complicated as this is not to let writers be embarrassed by the end product. No one writer will have the perspective to resolve inconsistencies between their own stories and the rest of the collection. So I had to stop holding back at some point.

I also had to get over the idea that a book could be perfect. You lose so much of your perspective every time you reread a passage that eventually you just cannot see it clearly without a long break, or you might never see it clearly again. I found myself scrambling near the end because I would read a chapter deep in the middle of the book and it would look so weird to me. I would start to think, oh my god, this might be complete nonsense. I had to learn to just ignore those impulses and trust my earlier readings of the text.

RG: What were some of the most challenging aspects of the project?

SJ: The hardest thing was the amount of time and attention it took. It was grueling at times. Which sounds ridiculous, because how hard could reading some words and marking them up be? But in a book that’s 110,000 words long, where 28 people have written bits of it and you have to keep the whole thing in your head while you try to make sure that everything one author made a character do fits with what every other author made her do, and then multiply that by 20  characters and 28 writers… um. You see the difficulty. Also, many of the writers were relatively inexperienced and some were brand new. I wanted them for their imaginations, though, so this didn’t matter too much to me. But it did increase the amount of work necessary to make the book professional grade.

RG: This was a project over two years in the making. How do you feel now that you have finally got the printed results of your labours in your hand? Would you consider doing this again?

SJ: I love the book. I loved working on it. I’m ecstatic and really… tired! I’d like it to be read by a lot of people, because: So. Much. Work. But I also understand that it requires a bit of work from the reader. Because it is separate pieces, like a mosaic. You have to look for the patterns. Even though they’re pretty clearly there, it’s not a book you can just speed read through or you’ll miss a lot. And people aren’t necessarily willing to give it the time it needs. But I think those who do will enjoy it.  And yes, I totally would do it again. We’re planning a second book, hoping to take what we’ve learned and make an even better second volume.

* * *

If the book and the process intrigues you, consider purchasing the book. All links to buy it in different formats are over at the Ghostwood Books site. They’ve produced a lovely, limited edition hardcover version.