Larry Benjamin's Blog: Larry Benjamin's blog - This Writer's Life - Posts Tagged "writing"
Defining Marriage
What can I say at this moment? I love you? Thank you?
―those are but pauper words forming an impoverished language,
making it impossible to tell you what is in my heart.
Because of you, I am better than I was, more than I am.
Because of you, who I am now, is who I wanted to be.
Because of you, I am stronger than I used to be.
If I could, I would pull the moon from the sky and lay it at your feet.
If I could, I would give you a lifetime of sunny days and dreams that come true.
None of these are mine to give.
Instead I ask you to accept this ring―this endless circle of gold―which, like my love for you, knows neither beginning nor end.
With this ring, I promise to be your lover, your best friend, your life’s companion.
With this ring, I promise to walk by your side all the days of my life, bound and freed by our love.
Accept this ring, then kiss me and free me.
Last week the Mister and I celebrated our 15th anniversary. For fifteen years without fail, the Mister’s mother has sent us an anniversary card; she is only person who does so. As I read her card, I thought about how much this simple gesture of support means to us. That got me thinking about marriage.
We’ve been together fifteen years. Already we have outlasted 50% of all first heterosexual marriages and 25% of all second marriages. Yet our marriage isn’t recognized, is in Pennsylvania, where we live, and most states, not legal, is perceived by some as a threat to the sacred union between one woman and one man. I don’t intend to argue that point here but instead want to focus on what marriage—any marriage—is.
Mrs. Moon, Daphne’s mother on Frasier, once said famously, “You young modern people think marriage is some sort of promenade through paradise, when it's more like a march through Hell with a man strapped to your back and a litter of nasty babies swinging from your teats!” I love that particular rant of hers, though I think marriage is neither. So what is it? It’s his cold feet pressed against your warm ones on a winter’s night and you not pulling away even though you want to. It’s gently telling him, “No honey, you’re not dying; you’re hung over. Remember last night?” It’s having sex in the morning when you’d rather do it at night so you can fall asleep afterwards. In short, it’s gentleness, it’s compromise. It’s a willingness to commit to each other even though no societal pressure comes to bare. It’s a willingness to commit even though no law in the land supports or recognizes that commitment. It’s a promise between two people and only those two people.
As with Matthew and Thomas, the main characters in my novel, What Binds Us, the idea to get married sprang up organically. Though I’d written What Binds Us before the Mister and I started dating, it hadn’t occurred to me that we would get married. One night over dinner, he mentioned he thought we should get rings. I asked how he imagined us exchanging rings as I didn’t see us simply handing them to each other across the counter of Tiffany. He raised an eyebrow at the mention of “Tiffany.” “Okay so I only intend to do this once; I want a ‘good’ ring,” I told him. As a result I would only consider purchasing a ring from Caldwell’s, Bailey Banks & Biddle or Tiffany.
Ours was a simple ceremony—at home before less than two dozen friends and family—a far cry from the fairy tale wedding of Thomas and Matthew:
“Dondi had had the interior of the ruined church whitewashed and as the building filled with dusk, two hundred beeswax candles were lit, giving off a delicate peach glow. Two dozen delicate gilt chairs with red velvet cushions were lined up in neat rows. A neat, highly polished parquet floor had been laid over the dirt. A woman in frothy lace sat holding an oboe. Behind her were four tuxedoed men with violins. Ten thousand pale pink roses—an entire crop from Holland flown in that morning—gave the stark whitewashed space an air of magnificent opulence.”
In an example of art imitating life, the vows they exchange are the vows I wrote for my own commitment. One real couple, one fictional couple, one couple with great wealth, one couple saving to buy a house. Life and fiction were vastly different save for one detail common to both: “He slipped the narrow gold band on my finger as I looked at his beloved face, the contours and textures of which I knew as well as those of my own. I looked into his shining silver eyes and knew absolutely that I was loved.”
Yet to say that marriage is about commitment tells only half the story. Traditional marriage also carries with it certain rights and protections, which as gay men, we do not have access to no matter how committed we are, no matter how long we’ve been together. My mother does not speak to my brother’s wife. Yet my brother’s wife does not have to worry that if something happens to Michael, she will be denied her place at his bedside; she will not have to battle our parents for his remains, for the house they own together. My mother does not speak to the Mister. Why does he not deserve the same peace of mind my sister-in-law does?
―those are but pauper words forming an impoverished language,
making it impossible to tell you what is in my heart.
Because of you, I am better than I was, more than I am.
Because of you, who I am now, is who I wanted to be.
Because of you, I am stronger than I used to be.
If I could, I would pull the moon from the sky and lay it at your feet.
If I could, I would give you a lifetime of sunny days and dreams that come true.
None of these are mine to give.
Instead I ask you to accept this ring―this endless circle of gold―which, like my love for you, knows neither beginning nor end.
With this ring, I promise to be your lover, your best friend, your life’s companion.
With this ring, I promise to walk by your side all the days of my life, bound and freed by our love.
Accept this ring, then kiss me and free me.
Last week the Mister and I celebrated our 15th anniversary. For fifteen years without fail, the Mister’s mother has sent us an anniversary card; she is only person who does so. As I read her card, I thought about how much this simple gesture of support means to us. That got me thinking about marriage.
We’ve been together fifteen years. Already we have outlasted 50% of all first heterosexual marriages and 25% of all second marriages. Yet our marriage isn’t recognized, is in Pennsylvania, where we live, and most states, not legal, is perceived by some as a threat to the sacred union between one woman and one man. I don’t intend to argue that point here but instead want to focus on what marriage—any marriage—is.
Mrs. Moon, Daphne’s mother on Frasier, once said famously, “You young modern people think marriage is some sort of promenade through paradise, when it's more like a march through Hell with a man strapped to your back and a litter of nasty babies swinging from your teats!” I love that particular rant of hers, though I think marriage is neither. So what is it? It’s his cold feet pressed against your warm ones on a winter’s night and you not pulling away even though you want to. It’s gently telling him, “No honey, you’re not dying; you’re hung over. Remember last night?” It’s having sex in the morning when you’d rather do it at night so you can fall asleep afterwards. In short, it’s gentleness, it’s compromise. It’s a willingness to commit to each other even though no societal pressure comes to bare. It’s a willingness to commit even though no law in the land supports or recognizes that commitment. It’s a promise between two people and only those two people.
As with Matthew and Thomas, the main characters in my novel, What Binds Us, the idea to get married sprang up organically. Though I’d written What Binds Us before the Mister and I started dating, it hadn’t occurred to me that we would get married. One night over dinner, he mentioned he thought we should get rings. I asked how he imagined us exchanging rings as I didn’t see us simply handing them to each other across the counter of Tiffany. He raised an eyebrow at the mention of “Tiffany.” “Okay so I only intend to do this once; I want a ‘good’ ring,” I told him. As a result I would only consider purchasing a ring from Caldwell’s, Bailey Banks & Biddle or Tiffany.
Ours was a simple ceremony—at home before less than two dozen friends and family—a far cry from the fairy tale wedding of Thomas and Matthew:
“Dondi had had the interior of the ruined church whitewashed and as the building filled with dusk, two hundred beeswax candles were lit, giving off a delicate peach glow. Two dozen delicate gilt chairs with red velvet cushions were lined up in neat rows. A neat, highly polished parquet floor had been laid over the dirt. A woman in frothy lace sat holding an oboe. Behind her were four tuxedoed men with violins. Ten thousand pale pink roses—an entire crop from Holland flown in that morning—gave the stark whitewashed space an air of magnificent opulence.”
In an example of art imitating life, the vows they exchange are the vows I wrote for my own commitment. One real couple, one fictional couple, one couple with great wealth, one couple saving to buy a house. Life and fiction were vastly different save for one detail common to both: “He slipped the narrow gold band on my finger as I looked at his beloved face, the contours and textures of which I knew as well as those of my own. I looked into his shining silver eyes and knew absolutely that I was loved.”
Yet to say that marriage is about commitment tells only half the story. Traditional marriage also carries with it certain rights and protections, which as gay men, we do not have access to no matter how committed we are, no matter how long we’ve been together. My mother does not speak to my brother’s wife. Yet my brother’s wife does not have to worry that if something happens to Michael, she will be denied her place at his bedside; she will not have to battle our parents for his remains, for the house they own together. My mother does not speak to the Mister. Why does he not deserve the same peace of mind my sister-in-law does?
What does writing GLBTQ literature mean to me?
To celebrate their new book review site Rainbow Book Reviews invited GLBTQ authors to blog on the subject of “What does writing GLBTQ literature mean to me?” for their “Follow the Rainbow Blog Hop.” The following post is part of that Hop.
I write because I want to tell stories but I also want to be read (let’s face it, what writer doesn’t?). But I have no interest in writing common denominator fiction—that is, fiction that becomes popular by appealing to the broadest possible audience. There’s nothing wrong with writing popular fiction that appeals to a broad audience but I want to tell my stories, share my truths—these truths that are borne of who I am, what I have experienced. Writing GLBTQ stories from my perspective as a gay black man, allows me to raise a voice for those of us outside the white heteronormative narrative. That is what writing GLBTQ literature means to me.
There is such a rich tapestry of GLBTQ experience from which to draw, that I feel no need to switch to mainstream fiction. My generation alone has seen so much—Stonewall, the birth of the gay rights movement, the declassification of homosexuality as a mental disorder by the American Psychiatric Association, AIDS, gay marriage, "Will & Grace," the beginning of a national conversation about GLBTQ people.
I believe writing of the GLBTQ experience from the GLBTQ perspective is important because studies show that people exposed to other races, sexualities, are more likely to support equal rights for these groups. I hope by opening a window onto the GLBTQ world, I can educate, open some minds, change some opinions. The chance to educate, to change minds—that is what writing GLBTQ literature means to me.
I think that people are open, now more than ever, to sharing experiences different from their own even if they don’t necessarily wish those experiences for themselves. This willingness to experience another’s worldview is, I believe, in part responsible for the success of books such as “The Help” and “Fifty Shades of Gray.”
GLBTQ literature could well be the next door to be opened by an insatiably curious, questing, reading public. Thus the time is now. Words have the power to make you feel, to make you see but they also have the power to change. So, I must use my gay voice to speak up, speak out for in silence lies death. Just as you can’t lead change from the back of the bus, you can’t change minds if your story is untold; if you remain silent, you remain invisible. (Read my July 25 blog post about “silence” here: http://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_...)
What does writing GLBTQ literature mean to me? It means I’ve only just begun. There are so many stories to be shared, so many minds to open. With two GLBTQ books already written, I know I must keep writing because, as one of the characters in my current work in progress, says “When I was done fighting the idea that I love you, that I was gay, I thought I was done fighting but, the fighting had only just begun.”
This post is part of the “Follow the Rainbow Blog Hop." Check out why other writers write LGBTQ literature at http://rainbowbookreviews.wordpress.com/
Check out my GLBTQ fiction at http://www.larrybenjamin.com/
I write because I want to tell stories but I also want to be read (let’s face it, what writer doesn’t?). But I have no interest in writing common denominator fiction—that is, fiction that becomes popular by appealing to the broadest possible audience. There’s nothing wrong with writing popular fiction that appeals to a broad audience but I want to tell my stories, share my truths—these truths that are borne of who I am, what I have experienced. Writing GLBTQ stories from my perspective as a gay black man, allows me to raise a voice for those of us outside the white heteronormative narrative. That is what writing GLBTQ literature means to me.
There is such a rich tapestry of GLBTQ experience from which to draw, that I feel no need to switch to mainstream fiction. My generation alone has seen so much—Stonewall, the birth of the gay rights movement, the declassification of homosexuality as a mental disorder by the American Psychiatric Association, AIDS, gay marriage, "Will & Grace," the beginning of a national conversation about GLBTQ people.
I believe writing of the GLBTQ experience from the GLBTQ perspective is important because studies show that people exposed to other races, sexualities, are more likely to support equal rights for these groups. I hope by opening a window onto the GLBTQ world, I can educate, open some minds, change some opinions. The chance to educate, to change minds—that is what writing GLBTQ literature means to me.
I think that people are open, now more than ever, to sharing experiences different from their own even if they don’t necessarily wish those experiences for themselves. This willingness to experience another’s worldview is, I believe, in part responsible for the success of books such as “The Help” and “Fifty Shades of Gray.”
GLBTQ literature could well be the next door to be opened by an insatiably curious, questing, reading public. Thus the time is now. Words have the power to make you feel, to make you see but they also have the power to change. So, I must use my gay voice to speak up, speak out for in silence lies death. Just as you can’t lead change from the back of the bus, you can’t change minds if your story is untold; if you remain silent, you remain invisible. (Read my July 25 blog post about “silence” here: http://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_...)
What does writing GLBTQ literature mean to me? It means I’ve only just begun. There are so many stories to be shared, so many minds to open. With two GLBTQ books already written, I know I must keep writing because, as one of the characters in my current work in progress, says “When I was done fighting the idea that I love you, that I was gay, I thought I was done fighting but, the fighting had only just begun.”
This post is part of the “Follow the Rainbow Blog Hop." Check out why other writers write LGBTQ literature at http://rainbowbookreviews.wordpress.com/
Check out my GLBTQ fiction at http://www.larrybenjamin.com/
Ten Things I’ve Learned from Being Published
Tomorrow (9/19) mark six months since Carina Press released my debut novel, What Binds Us. In honor of the occasion I thought I’d share 10 things I learned from this amazing journey. And with my follow up, Damaged Angels, being released from Bold Strokes Books on October 1, I thought now would also be a good time to remind myself what I’ve learned.
1. The greatest words you’ll ever hear from a reader are: “I can’t wait to read your next book.” Which brings us to lesson 2.
2. You have to write another book. Basking in the afterglow of publication is all well and good and yeah I know you’re exhausted but, unless you’re Harper Lee and have a Pulitzer sitting on your mantel, you’d better get back to writing.
3. Start writing your next book. Now. The best thing you can do while waiting to go to publication is start writing your next book. Angela James at Carina Press was the first person I’d heard advise this and I thought she was crazy. Who could concentrate while waiting for release? But the truth is outside of edits there isn’t a whole hell of a lot you can do for your book in production so you might as well get to work on your next.
4. Not everyone is going to love what you’ve written. Bask in the good reviews and try to learn from the bad ones.
5. Not everyone is going to read your book. No one in my family has read it. Not even the Mister has read it. Suck it up—it’s their time, they can use it to read your work or not read your work. Move on. Focus on the people who actually read it.
6. People will get it wrong. Most famously, a reviewer quoted a line from What Binds Us, "Dondi became my guide, my Virgil, on my personal odyssey of self-discovery.” In a parenthetical aside she wrote: “It was Homer, by the way…who wrote the Odyssey. Virgil wrote the Aeneid.” She is correct. However, I was referring to Dante’s Inferno in which the poet Virgil acts as Dante’s guide through Hell. Yep, sometimes readers misunderstand you. As a writer you do not own the reader’s experience.
7. Talking about writing doesn’t make you a writer. Planning to write doesn't make you a writer. Having a book in production or published doesn't make you a writer. Only writing makes you a writer.
8. Writing is fun, cathartic, empowering. Promoting your book and your brand, not so much. Don’t publish if you don’t want to do the follow on work—promoting your book, connecting with readers.
9. Listen to your editor. Like your mother, she probably knows best. Remember she’s on your side—she wants your book to be the best it can be.
10. Your book is not you. Don’t hide behind your book. Readers love a good story. Tell them yours—let them see the person behind the book.
11. Being published doesn’t make you special. You’ll still have to brush the dogs’ teeth and scrub the toilets.
1. The greatest words you’ll ever hear from a reader are: “I can’t wait to read your next book.” Which brings us to lesson 2.
2. You have to write another book. Basking in the afterglow of publication is all well and good and yeah I know you’re exhausted but, unless you’re Harper Lee and have a Pulitzer sitting on your mantel, you’d better get back to writing.
3. Start writing your next book. Now. The best thing you can do while waiting to go to publication is start writing your next book. Angela James at Carina Press was the first person I’d heard advise this and I thought she was crazy. Who could concentrate while waiting for release? But the truth is outside of edits there isn’t a whole hell of a lot you can do for your book in production so you might as well get to work on your next.
4. Not everyone is going to love what you’ve written. Bask in the good reviews and try to learn from the bad ones.
5. Not everyone is going to read your book. No one in my family has read it. Not even the Mister has read it. Suck it up—it’s their time, they can use it to read your work or not read your work. Move on. Focus on the people who actually read it.
6. People will get it wrong. Most famously, a reviewer quoted a line from What Binds Us, "Dondi became my guide, my Virgil, on my personal odyssey of self-discovery.” In a parenthetical aside she wrote: “It was Homer, by the way…who wrote the Odyssey. Virgil wrote the Aeneid.” She is correct. However, I was referring to Dante’s Inferno in which the poet Virgil acts as Dante’s guide through Hell. Yep, sometimes readers misunderstand you. As a writer you do not own the reader’s experience.
7. Talking about writing doesn’t make you a writer. Planning to write doesn't make you a writer. Having a book in production or published doesn't make you a writer. Only writing makes you a writer.
8. Writing is fun, cathartic, empowering. Promoting your book and your brand, not so much. Don’t publish if you don’t want to do the follow on work—promoting your book, connecting with readers.
9. Listen to your editor. Like your mother, she probably knows best. Remember she’s on your side—she wants your book to be the best it can be.
10. Your book is not you. Don’t hide behind your book. Readers love a good story. Tell them yours—let them see the person behind the book.
11. Being published doesn’t make you special. You’ll still have to brush the dogs’ teeth and scrub the toilets.
You Deserve Better
The other day, my latest release, Damaged Angels, received a 5 star review from Debbie McGowan, owner of independent publisher, Beaten Track. (Read that review here: http://ow.ly/ejKk4)
In the review, McGowan says “…the author's extensive research and meticulous attention to detail pays real dividends.” That made me chuckle. I immediately sent her a note explaining that my “extensive research” was actually a three year relationship with a drug addicted hustler, who I'll call "Tomas." In essence I researched the book by living the stories in it. Certainly I didn’t get involved with him because I thought I would one day write of the experience. I got involved with him because I fell in love with him. And I thought I could save him.
I wrote the stories to purge myself of the experience and maybe to warn others. I don’t know. I just know I had to write it all down. He inspired four of the stories in the collection. Though no one story is about us, about him, specifically; I abstracted actual events and tried to reduce them to their core actions then recast them.
This book made me nervous. In part because it was so different from my first, What Binds Us. I worried about what readers of that book would think of this one. And in part because this was in a very real way, my story. Readers always ask which characters are most like you. In this case the main characters in all thirteen stories are hauntingly similar to me. To read this collection, if you read it closely enough, is to get inside my head. And that scares me: do I want anyone to know me that well?
My partner and I recently saw “Keep the Lights On” and that movie, about a documentary filmmaker and a crack-addicted lawyer, really resonated with me because I’d lived that story. I admit it was a hard film to watch for that reason—I know what it’s like to watch someone you care about disappear at the end of a crack pipe. The scene that rang truest was when Erik’s sister tries to get him to eat but he can’t eat because Paul is missing and then he dissolves into tears. Yep, been there. A similar scene appears in “The Seduction of the Angel Gabriel.”
“Let me make breakfast,” Gabriel tells him, pulling away and wiping his nose with his sleeve.
“Okay.”
“You want some?”
“Yes. Please.”
Gabriel turns around, eggs in hand. “I thought you told me you don’t eat breakfast.”
“I don’t usually.”
Gabriel is at once suspicious. “Did you eat dinner last night?”
“No.”
“You know, as skinny as you are, you don’t need to be missing any meals.”
“I couldn’t eat,” he blurts. “Not knowing whether or not you were hungry somewhere.”
Returning from one such bender, “Tomas” confessed to me that he always thought about me when he heard Anita Baker’s I Love You Just Because. And I understood that because I loved him just because. Everyone I knew looked at him and saw someone wholly unsuitable; I looked at him and saw…something…else. A woman I worked with, a Jehovah’s Witness, asked me once why I loved him and I answered “because he looks at me and I feel like a hero.” That line actually appears in the story “2 Rivers” because it is the only way Seth can explain his relationship with the hustler Jordan to Luke, the story’s narrator.
“Tomas” tried to kill himself one night by taking an overdose of prescription medication. I discovered him in a coma lying in bed beside me when I got up to go to work. That experience became “17 Days.”
When his best friend chastised him for taking a deliberate overdose, pointing out he could have died. His response chilled me: “Larry wouldn’t let me die.”
The relationship thrived—for a while. In my care, he got “clean,” learned how to drive, earned his GED, reunited with his family. His transformation was miraculous. He introduced me to his family, he held my hand in public, he made me dinner.
Then one day he hit me.
I threw him out. The next morning I found him on my doorstep. He cried. He swore he would never hit me again. He begged me to forgive him, to take him back. I did. After all we’d both been drunk and I’d made him mad. Since then I have learned:
1. If he does not care about you enough in a moment of anger to not hit you, he does care about you enough. Period.
2. If he hit you once, he will hit you again. And again. Until you put a stop to it.
The second time he hit me, I told his psychiatrist, who diagnosed Episodic Dyscontrol Syndrome. He was medicated. The third and final time he hit me, I went after him with a kitchen knife. That scared us both. That experience became a single incident of domestic violence in “2 Rivers”:
The storm clouds gathered at the edges of his consciousness. They occasionally skittered across the sky, blocking out the sun, leaving him to stumble in the sudden dark, getting bumped and bruised. Eventually, an eclipse of the sun will blacken his universe. When the moon has completed its turn around the sun, the light will reveal blood and his own hand clenched in a fist, raw and throbbing.
In that brief description I tried to capture that feeling of bewilderment that follows being hit by someone you love. What happened? How could he hurt me?
Unwilling to throw him out, unable to trust him, I, at knifepoint, made him take a double dose of medicine and watched him fall asleep. As luck would have it, we had an appointment with his psychiatrist the following morning. I remember I had to wear my glasses because my eyes were too swollen to get my contact lenses in.
Looking at my bruised, swollen face, his psychiatrist asked, “Did he do that?” He admitted him to their psychiatric ward. “You need to get away from him,” he told me. “You deserve better.”
If you’re in that situation, you shouldn’t need someone else to tell you you deserve better. You should know that, you should feel that in your bones: I do not deserve to be hit. Or yelled at or belittled. You should know that. I don’t know why I didn’t, why it took me so long to walk away. Why it took someone else telling me to walk away.
Once years ago, while crossing a water fall over a small creek, my dog slipped and fell in the creek. I reached down and caught his harness. Then I fell in. I sank like a rock. I can’t swim. I remember it was dark and bottle green beneath the surface. The current caught and pulled him from me but I hung on to his harness as tightly as I could. I remember thinking I couldn’t swim but I would do my best to save him. In that instant I made the decision: we would both survive or we would both drown or I would drown and he would survive but there was no way I would survive and let him drown. We both survived—a passing young man dove in and dragged us to safety. But with Tomas the current became too strong and I had to let him go. Or risk us both drowning.
In the acknowledgements in "Damaged Angels," I wrote “It takes a village to raise a child…and write a book”. I thanked several people, ending with: “And finally to all the men and boys who inspired these stories—you gave your all. I hope I gave as much.”
I realize now, in the retelling, I gave as much.
Read the first story from Damaged Angels: http://ow.ly/ejMfL
In the review, McGowan says “…the author's extensive research and meticulous attention to detail pays real dividends.” That made me chuckle. I immediately sent her a note explaining that my “extensive research” was actually a three year relationship with a drug addicted hustler, who I'll call "Tomas." In essence I researched the book by living the stories in it. Certainly I didn’t get involved with him because I thought I would one day write of the experience. I got involved with him because I fell in love with him. And I thought I could save him.
I wrote the stories to purge myself of the experience and maybe to warn others. I don’t know. I just know I had to write it all down. He inspired four of the stories in the collection. Though no one story is about us, about him, specifically; I abstracted actual events and tried to reduce them to their core actions then recast them.
This book made me nervous. In part because it was so different from my first, What Binds Us. I worried about what readers of that book would think of this one. And in part because this was in a very real way, my story. Readers always ask which characters are most like you. In this case the main characters in all thirteen stories are hauntingly similar to me. To read this collection, if you read it closely enough, is to get inside my head. And that scares me: do I want anyone to know me that well?
My partner and I recently saw “Keep the Lights On” and that movie, about a documentary filmmaker and a crack-addicted lawyer, really resonated with me because I’d lived that story. I admit it was a hard film to watch for that reason—I know what it’s like to watch someone you care about disappear at the end of a crack pipe. The scene that rang truest was when Erik’s sister tries to get him to eat but he can’t eat because Paul is missing and then he dissolves into tears. Yep, been there. A similar scene appears in “The Seduction of the Angel Gabriel.”
“Let me make breakfast,” Gabriel tells him, pulling away and wiping his nose with his sleeve.
“Okay.”
“You want some?”
“Yes. Please.”
Gabriel turns around, eggs in hand. “I thought you told me you don’t eat breakfast.”
“I don’t usually.”
Gabriel is at once suspicious. “Did you eat dinner last night?”
“No.”
“You know, as skinny as you are, you don’t need to be missing any meals.”
“I couldn’t eat,” he blurts. “Not knowing whether or not you were hungry somewhere.”
Returning from one such bender, “Tomas” confessed to me that he always thought about me when he heard Anita Baker’s I Love You Just Because. And I understood that because I loved him just because. Everyone I knew looked at him and saw someone wholly unsuitable; I looked at him and saw…something…else. A woman I worked with, a Jehovah’s Witness, asked me once why I loved him and I answered “because he looks at me and I feel like a hero.” That line actually appears in the story “2 Rivers” because it is the only way Seth can explain his relationship with the hustler Jordan to Luke, the story’s narrator.
“Tomas” tried to kill himself one night by taking an overdose of prescription medication. I discovered him in a coma lying in bed beside me when I got up to go to work. That experience became “17 Days.”
When his best friend chastised him for taking a deliberate overdose, pointing out he could have died. His response chilled me: “Larry wouldn’t let me die.”
The relationship thrived—for a while. In my care, he got “clean,” learned how to drive, earned his GED, reunited with his family. His transformation was miraculous. He introduced me to his family, he held my hand in public, he made me dinner.
Then one day he hit me.
I threw him out. The next morning I found him on my doorstep. He cried. He swore he would never hit me again. He begged me to forgive him, to take him back. I did. After all we’d both been drunk and I’d made him mad. Since then I have learned:
1. If he does not care about you enough in a moment of anger to not hit you, he does care about you enough. Period.
2. If he hit you once, he will hit you again. And again. Until you put a stop to it.
The second time he hit me, I told his psychiatrist, who diagnosed Episodic Dyscontrol Syndrome. He was medicated. The third and final time he hit me, I went after him with a kitchen knife. That scared us both. That experience became a single incident of domestic violence in “2 Rivers”:
The storm clouds gathered at the edges of his consciousness. They occasionally skittered across the sky, blocking out the sun, leaving him to stumble in the sudden dark, getting bumped and bruised. Eventually, an eclipse of the sun will blacken his universe. When the moon has completed its turn around the sun, the light will reveal blood and his own hand clenched in a fist, raw and throbbing.
In that brief description I tried to capture that feeling of bewilderment that follows being hit by someone you love. What happened? How could he hurt me?
Unwilling to throw him out, unable to trust him, I, at knifepoint, made him take a double dose of medicine and watched him fall asleep. As luck would have it, we had an appointment with his psychiatrist the following morning. I remember I had to wear my glasses because my eyes were too swollen to get my contact lenses in.
Looking at my bruised, swollen face, his psychiatrist asked, “Did he do that?” He admitted him to their psychiatric ward. “You need to get away from him,” he told me. “You deserve better.”
If you’re in that situation, you shouldn’t need someone else to tell you you deserve better. You should know that, you should feel that in your bones: I do not deserve to be hit. Or yelled at or belittled. You should know that. I don’t know why I didn’t, why it took me so long to walk away. Why it took someone else telling me to walk away.
Once years ago, while crossing a water fall over a small creek, my dog slipped and fell in the creek. I reached down and caught his harness. Then I fell in. I sank like a rock. I can’t swim. I remember it was dark and bottle green beneath the surface. The current caught and pulled him from me but I hung on to his harness as tightly as I could. I remember thinking I couldn’t swim but I would do my best to save him. In that instant I made the decision: we would both survive or we would both drown or I would drown and he would survive but there was no way I would survive and let him drown. We both survived—a passing young man dove in and dragged us to safety. But with Tomas the current became too strong and I had to let him go. Or risk us both drowning.
In the acknowledgements in "Damaged Angels," I wrote “It takes a village to raise a child…and write a book”. I thanked several people, ending with: “And finally to all the men and boys who inspired these stories—you gave your all. I hope I gave as much.”
I realize now, in the retelling, I gave as much.
Read the first story from Damaged Angels: http://ow.ly/ejMfL
On Gay Sons, Mothers & Fiction
My mother and I share a difficult, strained relationship. Lately, she has taken to ending our rare conversations with “I love you.” I dutifully respond, “I love you, too,” when in fact I want to ask: Do you? Do you love me? Do you even know who I am?
One Christmas a few years ago—one of the last we spent together as a family—my mother suddenly blurted, “You know I’ve only ever told one person you were gay.” Her words, like a sniper’s bullet tore a hole in my heart, all feeling draining away. That she said this without apparent malice did not lessen the hurt.
I know from my own experience, the relationship between mothers and their gay sons can be tricky, and painful. I’ve mentioned before that my experiences, emotions, and relationships often form the basis for my fiction. So, I thought I’d look at how my own mother has influenced my work and the way I portray mothers. Not surprisingly, the mothers in my writing all contain an element of my mother’s personality.
There are two different mothers in What Binds Us . Thomas’s mother is loving, and supportive, and means everything to Thomas, while Mrs. Whyte is so distant and formidable even her husband and sons call her Mrs. Whyte. Thomas’ mother becomes by default a surrogate mother to Dondi and Matthew in much the same way my own mother used to mother whoever we hauled home as she mothered us.
“In what alternate universe?” my friend, having met my mother, asked when I mentioned that Thomas’ mother was based on my own mother. “Thomas’ mother was not at all like your mother,” she insisted.
I was confused because Thomas’ mother was loving and supportive, just like my own mother. And then I realized, my friend only knew this newer, other mother, this changeling who’d replaced the mother of my youth.
The mothers in Damaged Angels cover a broader spectrum of motherhood and mothering styles, from the indifferent, absent mother of the hustler Jordan in “2 Rivers”―
It was as if his pregnant mother, feeling the pains of labor while out for an afternoon stroll, had simply squatted behind a bush, pulled up her dress, and birthed him. Then, the delivery made, had stood up, smoothed her hair, straightened her dress, and continued her walk, leaving the infant Jordan where he lay.
―to the domineering, overprotective mother in “Spam,” who, when her adolescent son attempts to escape her influence by descending into madness, simply follows him.
“Spam” was based on an incident involving my older brother and his best friend at the time, a boy named Angel. The incident has always intrigued me. I simply exaggerated it and took it to an outrageous conclusion. What I wanted most with writing “Spam” was to capture the insularity of Billy’s experience. He eats cereal with boiled milk and thinks nothing of it. My mother always boiled milk for our cereal; I was a freshman in college before I learned that cereal was meant to be eaten with cold milk.
The mother in “Chance’s Hand” is actually an amalgamation of main character Chas’ mother and father, merged into a single nagging, disappointed voice at the other end of the phone. Chas, slowly collapsing under the weight of his mother’s demands and expectations, describes his childhood:
Growing up seemed less a preparation for adulthood than a slow chafing away of childish desires (I want to be an astronaut, a painter), a flaying of the ego…a learning to do what was expected, be who you were expected to be.
Most telling of Chas’ relationship with his mother is a scene in which she questions whether or not he intends to leave his fiancé:
“Well, you can’t mean to abandon her. You gave her your grandmother’s ring!”
“No, Mother. You gave her my grandmother’s ring.”
In “The Seduction of the Angel Gabriel,” Gabriel frames his childhood for Malcolm by telling him the story of his mother’s attempted suicide.
Malcolm can see it now: a mother’s desperation; a child’s fear; and everywhere red blood, the color of loss. Although it was a man that he held in his arms, it was a child whose tears he wiped away.
Here, too, like Alfred Hitchcock, my mother makes an appearance in the form of her prom picture, which sits on a shelf in my office and which, in the story, Gabriel finds in Malcolm’s pristine white apartment:
He is holding an old black-and-white photograph of a slender young girl in a strapless gown with voluminous skirts leaning against a stone wall. Both girl and wall are drowned in moonlight.
In rereading these stories I can pinpoint the exact nature of my relationship with my mother at the time the story was written. Perhaps through writing mother-son relationships, I hope to understand my own relationship with my mother. Or maybe I just find mothers interesting characters because they are different, other, unknowable. Child birth seems to change women. In the farcical, “Howdy Billy, Cabbage Ma’am,” Billy writes:
“I once met a woman who had three sons, all of whom she named Pablo―Pablo Jose, Juan Pablo, and finally Pablo Pablo. Something must happen to women when they are carrying children.”
“Howdy Billy, Cabbage Ma’am,” was inspired by a single extraordinary sentence my mother once spoke. In fact that exact sentence appears in the book and baffles protagonist Billy as much as it baffled me:
“The Jews,” my mother announced, “love hard-boiled eggs.”
Later when Billy’s mother’s secret is revealed in a semi dark room, he says:
I confronted both my mothers at once.
Quite often in speaking to my mother I feel as if I am trying to reach two different women―the changeling and the original woman she was. I long, most, for the mother she was.
As I was working on this post, my mother called, unexpectedly, from Maryland, where they’d gone to spend Thanksgiving with my cousin. “Good morning,” she trilled, “I just called to check on you and see how your morning was going?”
What? Huh? Who are you? I wanted to ask. Then I realized it was simply my mother, the changeling.
Buy What Binds Us http://www.amazon.com/What-Binds-Us-e...
Read the first story from Damaged Angels : http://www.amazon.com/Damaged-Angels-...
Buy Damaged Angels : http://www.amazon.com/Damaged-Angels-...
One Christmas a few years ago—one of the last we spent together as a family—my mother suddenly blurted, “You know I’ve only ever told one person you were gay.” Her words, like a sniper’s bullet tore a hole in my heart, all feeling draining away. That she said this without apparent malice did not lessen the hurt.
I know from my own experience, the relationship between mothers and their gay sons can be tricky, and painful. I’ve mentioned before that my experiences, emotions, and relationships often form the basis for my fiction. So, I thought I’d look at how my own mother has influenced my work and the way I portray mothers. Not surprisingly, the mothers in my writing all contain an element of my mother’s personality.
There are two different mothers in What Binds Us . Thomas’s mother is loving, and supportive, and means everything to Thomas, while Mrs. Whyte is so distant and formidable even her husband and sons call her Mrs. Whyte. Thomas’ mother becomes by default a surrogate mother to Dondi and Matthew in much the same way my own mother used to mother whoever we hauled home as she mothered us.
“In what alternate universe?” my friend, having met my mother, asked when I mentioned that Thomas’ mother was based on my own mother. “Thomas’ mother was not at all like your mother,” she insisted.
I was confused because Thomas’ mother was loving and supportive, just like my own mother. And then I realized, my friend only knew this newer, other mother, this changeling who’d replaced the mother of my youth.
The mothers in Damaged Angels cover a broader spectrum of motherhood and mothering styles, from the indifferent, absent mother of the hustler Jordan in “2 Rivers”―
It was as if his pregnant mother, feeling the pains of labor while out for an afternoon stroll, had simply squatted behind a bush, pulled up her dress, and birthed him. Then, the delivery made, had stood up, smoothed her hair, straightened her dress, and continued her walk, leaving the infant Jordan where he lay.
―to the domineering, overprotective mother in “Spam,” who, when her adolescent son attempts to escape her influence by descending into madness, simply follows him.
“Spam” was based on an incident involving my older brother and his best friend at the time, a boy named Angel. The incident has always intrigued me. I simply exaggerated it and took it to an outrageous conclusion. What I wanted most with writing “Spam” was to capture the insularity of Billy’s experience. He eats cereal with boiled milk and thinks nothing of it. My mother always boiled milk for our cereal; I was a freshman in college before I learned that cereal was meant to be eaten with cold milk.
The mother in “Chance’s Hand” is actually an amalgamation of main character Chas’ mother and father, merged into a single nagging, disappointed voice at the other end of the phone. Chas, slowly collapsing under the weight of his mother’s demands and expectations, describes his childhood:
Growing up seemed less a preparation for adulthood than a slow chafing away of childish desires (I want to be an astronaut, a painter), a flaying of the ego…a learning to do what was expected, be who you were expected to be.
Most telling of Chas’ relationship with his mother is a scene in which she questions whether or not he intends to leave his fiancé:
“Well, you can’t mean to abandon her. You gave her your grandmother’s ring!”
“No, Mother. You gave her my grandmother’s ring.”
In “The Seduction of the Angel Gabriel,” Gabriel frames his childhood for Malcolm by telling him the story of his mother’s attempted suicide.
Malcolm can see it now: a mother’s desperation; a child’s fear; and everywhere red blood, the color of loss. Although it was a man that he held in his arms, it was a child whose tears he wiped away.
Here, too, like Alfred Hitchcock, my mother makes an appearance in the form of her prom picture, which sits on a shelf in my office and which, in the story, Gabriel finds in Malcolm’s pristine white apartment:
He is holding an old black-and-white photograph of a slender young girl in a strapless gown with voluminous skirts leaning against a stone wall. Both girl and wall are drowned in moonlight.
In rereading these stories I can pinpoint the exact nature of my relationship with my mother at the time the story was written. Perhaps through writing mother-son relationships, I hope to understand my own relationship with my mother. Or maybe I just find mothers interesting characters because they are different, other, unknowable. Child birth seems to change women. In the farcical, “Howdy Billy, Cabbage Ma’am,” Billy writes:
“I once met a woman who had three sons, all of whom she named Pablo―Pablo Jose, Juan Pablo, and finally Pablo Pablo. Something must happen to women when they are carrying children.”
“Howdy Billy, Cabbage Ma’am,” was inspired by a single extraordinary sentence my mother once spoke. In fact that exact sentence appears in the book and baffles protagonist Billy as much as it baffled me:
“The Jews,” my mother announced, “love hard-boiled eggs.”
Later when Billy’s mother’s secret is revealed in a semi dark room, he says:
I confronted both my mothers at once.
Quite often in speaking to my mother I feel as if I am trying to reach two different women―the changeling and the original woman she was. I long, most, for the mother she was.
As I was working on this post, my mother called, unexpectedly, from Maryland, where they’d gone to spend Thanksgiving with my cousin. “Good morning,” she trilled, “I just called to check on you and see how your morning was going?”
What? Huh? Who are you? I wanted to ask. Then I realized it was simply my mother, the changeling.
Buy What Binds Us http://www.amazon.com/What-Binds-Us-e...
Read the first story from Damaged Angels : http://www.amazon.com/Damaged-Angels-...
Buy Damaged Angels : http://www.amazon.com/Damaged-Angels-...
Writing About Sex
I didn’t sleep around much when I was young and single and this puzzled my friends. We were young and gay, after all, during a time when the prevailing wisdom suggested that once one had slept with all the available men on the East Coast, one simply moved to the West coast and started over.
For me desire has always come about as a result of something else; desire, for me, was an outgrowth of emotional attachment or personal attraction. Some friends pitied me for I clearly wasn’t good looking enough to join the party. Others, kinder perhaps, saw my refusal to join the fun as a confirmation of the fact that I did not understand the point of being gay. It was an unmooring from society, a freeing from responsibility, a denial of obligation, of fidelity to anyone or anything beyond the moment, beyond desire; it was a celebration of the absence of the need to build a lasting relationship, of the absence of the desire to commit.
I dared not tell them that I believed love and sex required us to be accountable—to ourselves, to those we loved and those who loved us. I dared not tell them that I had always dreamed of settling down with one person, that I had always dreamed of getting married, that when, at age twelve, I realized I was gay, that dream did not die.
Instead, I waited and I dreamed. And I read. A lot. Mostly the classics: The Brontes, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Dickens. When I got to college, I discovered the gay writers: Edmund White, Felice Picano, Gore Vidal.
I still read a lot of gay fiction. One thing that burns me about a lot of gay contemporary fiction is the amount of sex they include. I tend to get bored with prolonged sex scenes; unless a sex scene is short, I skip over it. I recently finished reading a book which left me disappointed because while it had a promising premise it became quickly apparent that the “plot” was merely a device to weave a series of sex acts into a book.
When I read a book whose characters have lots of non-stop sex, I’m left wondering do these people ever sleep? go to work? do laundry? Most galling is descriptions of anonymous sex and numerous hook ups with virtual strangers. More than forty years into the LGBT battle for equality, more than twenty-five years into the AIDS epidemic, I’m left to wonder: have we come no further than this? Do people still believe being gay is only about sex?
This got me thinking about how I approach sex in my writing. I tend to write about romantic love which presents a challenge. I mean how do you write about two people in love and without writing about their sex life? When I write about sex, I try hard not to trivialize it. I try hard not to reduce it to some simple biological imperative requiring no more thought―and carrying no more meaning― than blowing one’s nose or scratching one’s ass.
In my first book, What Binds Us, I struggled with the problem of sex because it was important as it allowed the characters to connect with each other on a physical level which was a connection they craved.
In the book, it takes a long time for Thomas-Edward and Matthew to connect which irritated some readers and a few reviewers but I got an email from one reader who described herself as “a straight, white woman;” she wrote, in part, “By reading your story, I learned that real love does not have to be physical to be real…Reading this earlier could have changed everything for me…”
The first time Thomas sees Matthew naked he is stunned by how beautiful he is. He can’t help remembering how, longing for Matthew who slept in an adjoining room, he had been compelled to masturbate. He writes:
He did not possess the savage musculature of Michelangelo’s David, was more the David of Donatello’s imagination: slim, narrow-hipped, almost girlish. He was a beautiful white cat, lean and graceful. He had hair on his legs, long silky strands like climbing vines that only accentuated his nakedness. I thought of all those nights at Aurora when he’d lain on the other side of a door and might as well have been on the other side of the world. I thought of all those orgasms puddled on my stomach, damning as spilled milk, induced by just this image.
The story or Thomas-Edward and Matthew is mostly about the surprise they feel in discovering each other. When they finally come together, each is sure there is no one in the universe as magical and wondrous as the other. I imagined their sex would be romantic, almost poetic. I thought detailing the mechanics of their sex (i.e. who did what to whom) would interrupt the magic, so I wrote:
Flesh touched flesh. Limbs entwined: black, white, black; lips and tongue and teeth tasted flesh too long hungered for. We did everything. Nothing about either of us was forbidden the other. “No” was not in the vocabulary of our sex. I looked at his face through the V of my legs. I looked at his face above me and below me. I found I liked saying his name, said it over and over again. He said nothing, only smiled in the light and held me close.
Always before, sex had been a negating experience. With ejaculation came an end to desire, to intimacy. With Matthew, sex was an affirmation, a shouted yes. Afterwards, we stood on the threshold of something. Always before, the threshold had been behind me. And I’d stood alone.
Avoiding the description of sex in Damaged Angels, my collection of short stories, was considerably more difficult as several of the stories were about young men who worked in the sex industry. One story, “A Working Boy,” is told from the point of view of Pitch, a rent boy who takes us on a journey through a regular “work day.” He is on the cusp of committing to his quasi boyfriend, an older man he refers to as Loverman. While working one day he has an epiphany:
“I start thinking about quitting again. I guess I first started thinking about quitting after I met Loverman. Once, in bed with him, it occurred to me that we weren’t having sex, which is what I have all the time. It was something else. I mean, the moves were the same, but there was all this feeling. I remember thinking that maybe what we were doing was making love…
He goes on to explain:
When I first met him, I sold him my body, which didn’t surprise him. What I did that night was make him a present of my heart. Which surprised us both.”
In “Precious Cargo,” one of my favorite stories in the collection, the protagonist, yearning for his absent lover masturbates in the shower. I wanted to capture not so much the act of self-pleasure but the emotional vaunt of his need, the emptiness he feels in his lover’s absence:
“…I feel it pucker against my intruding finger. Open. Sucking. Greedy. Full of need. Quicksilver seed scatters. Sown on white tile. Fruitless. Sliding down the drain.”
Later when he and his lover come together briefly:
“He steps forward. Holds my head between his thighs. A pulse beats against my temple. The masculine scent of him fills my nostrils. My open mouth. Welcoming. The triumvirate of his manhood.”
For me, Damaged Angels was in many ways experimental—in use of language, subject matter and sexual portrayal. Coming between What Binds Us and the forthcoming Unbroken, both romances, with Damaged Angels, I wanted to step away and stretch myself in a different direction as a writer. I wanted to tell a grittier story to explore “dirtier” sex.
In Unbroken the sex is more complex because I needed to render a few different kinds of sex—first time sex, sex-for-its-own-sake, make up sex, sex within the context of a deep and abiding love and rougher sex within the context of that same love. The sex scenes were harder here because they needed to be described in detail but also needed to describe more than the mechanical aspect of sex, each act needed to reveal something about the characters’ emotions and state of mind. As a result, much of the sex in Unbroken left me breathless. I can only hope it does it same for my readers.
While all the stories I’ve written so far are about love and desire, not all explore the sex act. And that I think is as it should be. For me it’s always about the love, the characters and the nature and context of desire.
www.larrybenjamin.com
For me desire has always come about as a result of something else; desire, for me, was an outgrowth of emotional attachment or personal attraction. Some friends pitied me for I clearly wasn’t good looking enough to join the party. Others, kinder perhaps, saw my refusal to join the fun as a confirmation of the fact that I did not understand the point of being gay. It was an unmooring from society, a freeing from responsibility, a denial of obligation, of fidelity to anyone or anything beyond the moment, beyond desire; it was a celebration of the absence of the need to build a lasting relationship, of the absence of the desire to commit.
I dared not tell them that I believed love and sex required us to be accountable—to ourselves, to those we loved and those who loved us. I dared not tell them that I had always dreamed of settling down with one person, that I had always dreamed of getting married, that when, at age twelve, I realized I was gay, that dream did not die.
Instead, I waited and I dreamed. And I read. A lot. Mostly the classics: The Brontes, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Dickens. When I got to college, I discovered the gay writers: Edmund White, Felice Picano, Gore Vidal.
I still read a lot of gay fiction. One thing that burns me about a lot of gay contemporary fiction is the amount of sex they include. I tend to get bored with prolonged sex scenes; unless a sex scene is short, I skip over it. I recently finished reading a book which left me disappointed because while it had a promising premise it became quickly apparent that the “plot” was merely a device to weave a series of sex acts into a book.
When I read a book whose characters have lots of non-stop sex, I’m left wondering do these people ever sleep? go to work? do laundry? Most galling is descriptions of anonymous sex and numerous hook ups with virtual strangers. More than forty years into the LGBT battle for equality, more than twenty-five years into the AIDS epidemic, I’m left to wonder: have we come no further than this? Do people still believe being gay is only about sex?
This got me thinking about how I approach sex in my writing. I tend to write about romantic love which presents a challenge. I mean how do you write about two people in love and without writing about their sex life? When I write about sex, I try hard not to trivialize it. I try hard not to reduce it to some simple biological imperative requiring no more thought―and carrying no more meaning― than blowing one’s nose or scratching one’s ass.
In my first book, What Binds Us, I struggled with the problem of sex because it was important as it allowed the characters to connect with each other on a physical level which was a connection they craved.
In the book, it takes a long time for Thomas-Edward and Matthew to connect which irritated some readers and a few reviewers but I got an email from one reader who described herself as “a straight, white woman;” she wrote, in part, “By reading your story, I learned that real love does not have to be physical to be real…Reading this earlier could have changed everything for me…”
The first time Thomas sees Matthew naked he is stunned by how beautiful he is. He can’t help remembering how, longing for Matthew who slept in an adjoining room, he had been compelled to masturbate. He writes:
He did not possess the savage musculature of Michelangelo’s David, was more the David of Donatello’s imagination: slim, narrow-hipped, almost girlish. He was a beautiful white cat, lean and graceful. He had hair on his legs, long silky strands like climbing vines that only accentuated his nakedness. I thought of all those nights at Aurora when he’d lain on the other side of a door and might as well have been on the other side of the world. I thought of all those orgasms puddled on my stomach, damning as spilled milk, induced by just this image.
The story or Thomas-Edward and Matthew is mostly about the surprise they feel in discovering each other. When they finally come together, each is sure there is no one in the universe as magical and wondrous as the other. I imagined their sex would be romantic, almost poetic. I thought detailing the mechanics of their sex (i.e. who did what to whom) would interrupt the magic, so I wrote:
Flesh touched flesh. Limbs entwined: black, white, black; lips and tongue and teeth tasted flesh too long hungered for. We did everything. Nothing about either of us was forbidden the other. “No” was not in the vocabulary of our sex. I looked at his face through the V of my legs. I looked at his face above me and below me. I found I liked saying his name, said it over and over again. He said nothing, only smiled in the light and held me close.
Always before, sex had been a negating experience. With ejaculation came an end to desire, to intimacy. With Matthew, sex was an affirmation, a shouted yes. Afterwards, we stood on the threshold of something. Always before, the threshold had been behind me. And I’d stood alone.
Avoiding the description of sex in Damaged Angels, my collection of short stories, was considerably more difficult as several of the stories were about young men who worked in the sex industry. One story, “A Working Boy,” is told from the point of view of Pitch, a rent boy who takes us on a journey through a regular “work day.” He is on the cusp of committing to his quasi boyfriend, an older man he refers to as Loverman. While working one day he has an epiphany:
“I start thinking about quitting again. I guess I first started thinking about quitting after I met Loverman. Once, in bed with him, it occurred to me that we weren’t having sex, which is what I have all the time. It was something else. I mean, the moves were the same, but there was all this feeling. I remember thinking that maybe what we were doing was making love…
He goes on to explain:
When I first met him, I sold him my body, which didn’t surprise him. What I did that night was make him a present of my heart. Which surprised us both.”
In “Precious Cargo,” one of my favorite stories in the collection, the protagonist, yearning for his absent lover masturbates in the shower. I wanted to capture not so much the act of self-pleasure but the emotional vaunt of his need, the emptiness he feels in his lover’s absence:
“…I feel it pucker against my intruding finger. Open. Sucking. Greedy. Full of need. Quicksilver seed scatters. Sown on white tile. Fruitless. Sliding down the drain.”
Later when he and his lover come together briefly:
“He steps forward. Holds my head between his thighs. A pulse beats against my temple. The masculine scent of him fills my nostrils. My open mouth. Welcoming. The triumvirate of his manhood.”
For me, Damaged Angels was in many ways experimental—in use of language, subject matter and sexual portrayal. Coming between What Binds Us and the forthcoming Unbroken, both romances, with Damaged Angels, I wanted to step away and stretch myself in a different direction as a writer. I wanted to tell a grittier story to explore “dirtier” sex.
In Unbroken the sex is more complex because I needed to render a few different kinds of sex—first time sex, sex-for-its-own-sake, make up sex, sex within the context of a deep and abiding love and rougher sex within the context of that same love. The sex scenes were harder here because they needed to be described in detail but also needed to describe more than the mechanical aspect of sex, each act needed to reveal something about the characters’ emotions and state of mind. As a result, much of the sex in Unbroken left me breathless. I can only hope it does it same for my readers.
While all the stories I’ve written so far are about love and desire, not all explore the sex act. And that I think is as it should be. For me it’s always about the love, the characters and the nature and context of desire.
www.larrybenjamin.com
In Praise of Editors – Part 1
It seems like I’ve been reading a lot of posts about editors and the editing process lately. Having just wrapped up edits on my new book, Unbroken, I thought I’d share my thoughts on the editorial process and share some of my more memorable exchanges with my editors. To date I’ve worked with three, make of that what you will.
I don’t submit a book until it is complete and as good as I can make it. Once I finish a book I go back and read it though twice to check for consistency, sequencing, character development, etc. then I do a final read through for proofing purposes. This is the part I hate the most, mostly because I’m not a very good proofreader and I’m not a detail person. Still it must be done. Because I don’t use a beta reader, my editor is the first person to read the book and my first opportunity to hear feedback.
I particularly value an editor’s input and expertise because I’ve read affair amount of self-published books and I can generally tell when a professional editor wasn’t involved. A good editor can make a great book sparkle. I try, always to listen to mine—which doesn’t mean I will agree with everything said, but I do listen—because unlike a reviewer, an editor has no axe to grind; he or she is simply there to make sure your book is professionally written and is the best it can be. Your editor is your book’s advocate if not necessarily your best friend and most adoring fan.
That said, let me share with you some actual exchanges with my editors.
What Binds Us
I was lucky enough to work with the stellar Rhonda Helms as my editor for my first book. I was terrified because I’d never worked with an editor. She was knowledgeable and patient but firm.
[RH]: Watch overuse of “look” and its forms. Go through and change at least half.
[RH]: You say “would” a lot. Watch overuse.
[RH]: Watch overuse of exclamation points. I’ve removed some. Recommend you do the same.
[RH]: Watch for this. If you’re continuing dialogue that has an interjected dialogue tag, use a comma and keep the first word in lower case. If you’re starting new dialogue, use a period and cap the first word.
[Me]: An interjected dialogue tag? You see why I need you?
“Mrs. Whyte was…different, a riddle without an answer. We didn’t see much of her. She appeared everyday at four o’clock, like a miracle. And at every meal, like an overly busy choreographer, to orchestrate our elaborate repasts. She seemed distracted, one casual eye on us, the other, more scrupulous, on other things.”
[RH]: This doesn’t quite work for me, actually…I tried tweaking it, but you can’t literally have your eyes on two different things. I’d reword. Maybe say attention half on them, half on…what else?
[Me]: I love that sentence but I’ve rewritten but I warn you, one day, somewhere, this sentence will reappear.
"Mrs. Whyte was…different, a riddle without an answer. We didn’t see much of her. She appeared everyday at four o’clock, like a miracle. And at every meal to orchestrate our elaborate repasts, like an overly busy choreographer. She always seemed distracted, as if whatever the three of us were up to didn’t warrant her full attention."
“Around his mother, Dondi was different. His voice grew deep. His manner of speech changed, was completely without artifice. If he spoke in italics to his friends, to his mother, he spoke lower case Times New Roman.”
[RH]: Italics isn’t a font, to be technical. It’s a tweaking of a font…change this to match up. Also, you can’t speak a font type.
[Me]: I tried & tried to rewrite this but couldn’t make it work so I just deleted.
“We got bikes out of the garage and rode them into the quaint Victorian village that was a gingerbread fantasy. We stopped at the old-fashioned ice-cream parlor, where we’d taken Geo and shared a banana split. After, pushing the bikes ahead of us, we walked along the wharf. His father’s mental illness and Dondi’s whoring seemed very far away.”
[RH]: Show a little more connection between the two of them here. A sentence or two about how they didn’t speak much, but they didn’t need to. They took comfort in each other’s presence. Or something like that. Let these little moments of them finding comfort and solace in each other show through in your prose.
[Me]: I added the following sentence.
“Matt didn’t say much, and neither did I. We didn’t need words; we had each other.”
“He did not possess the savage musculature of Michelangelo’s David, was more the David of Donatello’s imagination: slim, narrow-hipped, almost girlish. He was a beautiful white cat, lean and graceful. He had hair on his legs, long silky strands like climbing vines that only accentuated his nakedness. I thought of all those nights at Aurora when he’d lain on the other side of a door and might as well have been on the other side of the world. I thought of all those orgasms puddled on my stomach, damning as spilled milk, induced by just this image.”
[RH]: GREAT paragraph. This is so well done.
One of the best unexpected bonuses to working with an editor: actual praise and validation.
Damaged Angels
Damaged Angels didn’t require much in the way of developmental edits, but it did reveal apparent weakness in my grasp on correct grammar. Editor Cindy C. was firm and crisp and never having met her, I imagined her poring over my manuscript by candlelight, while wearing a starched black habit and slapping a rule r against her palm in dismay at the discovery of yet another present participle phrase.
[CC]: I noticed you have a tendency to use what are called present participle phrases. They are usually found at the beginning of a sentence with a word that ends in -ing. Many of them are grammatically incorrect. But even when they aren’t grammatically incorrect, you should minimize the usage. I’ve marked them and have inserted a comment explaining the issue. It’s not a huge problem, but it shows up enough times that I felt it would be easier to include these longer notes to explain the issue.
“I try to focus swollen, red eyes on the bedside clock.”
[CC]: This violates your POV. Your narrator has no way of knowing his eyes are red, only that they are swollen or tired or scratchy, etc.
“Eventually, the expensive booze silences my body’s screaming need for him. I plunge headlong into sleep, while he cries helplessly into the soft suede of the sofa.”
[CC]: This violates your POV. Aaron is narrating this story, so we can only know what he knows. If he’s asleep, then how does he know his lover is crying helplessly into the sofa?
[Me]:Good point. I rewrote.
I listen to him crying softly in the next room before I plunge headlong into sleep.
“Eddying at his feet is a sea of broken, blackened glass like shattered dreams. A thousand thousand jigsaw pieces reflecting the hopelessness and despair of a city lost.”
[CC]: Query: intentional repeat of thousand?
[Me]: Yes; that’s a deliberate repetition; it’s a stylistic thing for me.
“As he lay on the sandy beach, his paprika skin darkening to cinnamon, surreptitiously eyeing the half-naked native boys frolicking at the water’s edge, restless with a vague, nascent longing, his mother would accuse him of not concentrating, or worse, of not trying, as he gave wrong answer after wrong answer.”
[CC]: You want to be very careful about adding multiple phrases on top of each other as you do here. They can create unclear modifiers, as you’ve done twice. When you add multiple modifying descriptions offset by commas, you create confusing modifiers. We don’t know whether the phrase after the comma is supposed to modify the noun that immediately precedes it, or the one before that (or the one before that one)
[Me]: (wondering) Is she still speaking English?
“It’s not crooked,” she bristled. “It’s European!”
[CC]: Bristled isn’t a dialogue tag – it’s not a way of speaking. She can bristle without it being a tag, but not as a tag.
[Me]: I rewrote. Better? If not feel free to delete “She bristled” and leave as straight dialogue.
She bristled. “It’s not crooked. It’s European!”
“Then, refilling his glass from a pitcher on the counter, he wandered off in search of less alarming sights.”
[CC]: Improper participle here. He’s not simultaneously refilling his glass and wandering off.
[Me]: (thinking) present participle phrases? Confusing modifiers? Improper participles? Yikes! Maybe I should become a painter…
[Me]: Okay I think I corrected all of these.
"He refilled his glass from a pitcher on the counter, before wandering off in search of less alarming sights."
“Billy! William Thurston Howell! You come back here! Right! Now!”
[CC]: Is this an unintentional reference to the Gilligan’s Island character?
[Me]: Yikes! Thanks for catching that. I’ve renamed him.
Each of my editors has taught me a lot and helped me become a better writer. I try to use everything I learn in the next book I write so hopefully each editor has made the job of her successor easier.
Next week I’ll blog about edits to my newest book, Unbroken, scheduled for a Summer 2013 release from Beaten Track Publishing. You won’t want to miss the details on a conversation with my editor about how to refer to...ummm…male ejaculate. In the meantime, leave a comment telling me about your experiences working with an editor.
www.larrybenjamin.com
Don’t forget to like my Facebook page and connect with me on Twitter, too.
I don’t submit a book until it is complete and as good as I can make it. Once I finish a book I go back and read it though twice to check for consistency, sequencing, character development, etc. then I do a final read through for proofing purposes. This is the part I hate the most, mostly because I’m not a very good proofreader and I’m not a detail person. Still it must be done. Because I don’t use a beta reader, my editor is the first person to read the book and my first opportunity to hear feedback.
I particularly value an editor’s input and expertise because I’ve read affair amount of self-published books and I can generally tell when a professional editor wasn’t involved. A good editor can make a great book sparkle. I try, always to listen to mine—which doesn’t mean I will agree with everything said, but I do listen—because unlike a reviewer, an editor has no axe to grind; he or she is simply there to make sure your book is professionally written and is the best it can be. Your editor is your book’s advocate if not necessarily your best friend and most adoring fan.
That said, let me share with you some actual exchanges with my editors.
What Binds Us
I was lucky enough to work with the stellar Rhonda Helms as my editor for my first book. I was terrified because I’d never worked with an editor. She was knowledgeable and patient but firm.
[RH]: Watch overuse of “look” and its forms. Go through and change at least half.
[RH]: You say “would” a lot. Watch overuse.
[RH]: Watch overuse of exclamation points. I’ve removed some. Recommend you do the same.
[RH]: Watch for this. If you’re continuing dialogue that has an interjected dialogue tag, use a comma and keep the first word in lower case. If you’re starting new dialogue, use a period and cap the first word.
[Me]: An interjected dialogue tag? You see why I need you?
“Mrs. Whyte was…different, a riddle without an answer. We didn’t see much of her. She appeared everyday at four o’clock, like a miracle. And at every meal, like an overly busy choreographer, to orchestrate our elaborate repasts. She seemed distracted, one casual eye on us, the other, more scrupulous, on other things.”
[RH]: This doesn’t quite work for me, actually…I tried tweaking it, but you can’t literally have your eyes on two different things. I’d reword. Maybe say attention half on them, half on…what else?
[Me]: I love that sentence but I’ve rewritten but I warn you, one day, somewhere, this sentence will reappear.
"Mrs. Whyte was…different, a riddle without an answer. We didn’t see much of her. She appeared everyday at four o’clock, like a miracle. And at every meal to orchestrate our elaborate repasts, like an overly busy choreographer. She always seemed distracted, as if whatever the three of us were up to didn’t warrant her full attention."
“Around his mother, Dondi was different. His voice grew deep. His manner of speech changed, was completely without artifice. If he spoke in italics to his friends, to his mother, he spoke lower case Times New Roman.”
[RH]: Italics isn’t a font, to be technical. It’s a tweaking of a font…change this to match up. Also, you can’t speak a font type.
[Me]: I tried & tried to rewrite this but couldn’t make it work so I just deleted.
“We got bikes out of the garage and rode them into the quaint Victorian village that was a gingerbread fantasy. We stopped at the old-fashioned ice-cream parlor, where we’d taken Geo and shared a banana split. After, pushing the bikes ahead of us, we walked along the wharf. His father’s mental illness and Dondi’s whoring seemed very far away.”
[RH]: Show a little more connection between the two of them here. A sentence or two about how they didn’t speak much, but they didn’t need to. They took comfort in each other’s presence. Or something like that. Let these little moments of them finding comfort and solace in each other show through in your prose.
[Me]: I added the following sentence.
“Matt didn’t say much, and neither did I. We didn’t need words; we had each other.”
“He did not possess the savage musculature of Michelangelo’s David, was more the David of Donatello’s imagination: slim, narrow-hipped, almost girlish. He was a beautiful white cat, lean and graceful. He had hair on his legs, long silky strands like climbing vines that only accentuated his nakedness. I thought of all those nights at Aurora when he’d lain on the other side of a door and might as well have been on the other side of the world. I thought of all those orgasms puddled on my stomach, damning as spilled milk, induced by just this image.”
[RH]: GREAT paragraph. This is so well done.
One of the best unexpected bonuses to working with an editor: actual praise and validation.
Damaged Angels
Damaged Angels didn’t require much in the way of developmental edits, but it did reveal apparent weakness in my grasp on correct grammar. Editor Cindy C. was firm and crisp and never having met her, I imagined her poring over my manuscript by candlelight, while wearing a starched black habit and slapping a rule r against her palm in dismay at the discovery of yet another present participle phrase.
[CC]: I noticed you have a tendency to use what are called present participle phrases. They are usually found at the beginning of a sentence with a word that ends in -ing. Many of them are grammatically incorrect. But even when they aren’t grammatically incorrect, you should minimize the usage. I’ve marked them and have inserted a comment explaining the issue. It’s not a huge problem, but it shows up enough times that I felt it would be easier to include these longer notes to explain the issue.
“I try to focus swollen, red eyes on the bedside clock.”
[CC]: This violates your POV. Your narrator has no way of knowing his eyes are red, only that they are swollen or tired or scratchy, etc.
“Eventually, the expensive booze silences my body’s screaming need for him. I plunge headlong into sleep, while he cries helplessly into the soft suede of the sofa.”
[CC]: This violates your POV. Aaron is narrating this story, so we can only know what he knows. If he’s asleep, then how does he know his lover is crying helplessly into the sofa?
[Me]:Good point. I rewrote.
I listen to him crying softly in the next room before I plunge headlong into sleep.
“Eddying at his feet is a sea of broken, blackened glass like shattered dreams. A thousand thousand jigsaw pieces reflecting the hopelessness and despair of a city lost.”
[CC]: Query: intentional repeat of thousand?
[Me]: Yes; that’s a deliberate repetition; it’s a stylistic thing for me.
“As he lay on the sandy beach, his paprika skin darkening to cinnamon, surreptitiously eyeing the half-naked native boys frolicking at the water’s edge, restless with a vague, nascent longing, his mother would accuse him of not concentrating, or worse, of not trying, as he gave wrong answer after wrong answer.”
[CC]: You want to be very careful about adding multiple phrases on top of each other as you do here. They can create unclear modifiers, as you’ve done twice. When you add multiple modifying descriptions offset by commas, you create confusing modifiers. We don’t know whether the phrase after the comma is supposed to modify the noun that immediately precedes it, or the one before that (or the one before that one)
[Me]: (wondering) Is she still speaking English?
“It’s not crooked,” she bristled. “It’s European!”
[CC]: Bristled isn’t a dialogue tag – it’s not a way of speaking. She can bristle without it being a tag, but not as a tag.
[Me]: I rewrote. Better? If not feel free to delete “She bristled” and leave as straight dialogue.
She bristled. “It’s not crooked. It’s European!”
“Then, refilling his glass from a pitcher on the counter, he wandered off in search of less alarming sights.”
[CC]: Improper participle here. He’s not simultaneously refilling his glass and wandering off.
[Me]: (thinking) present participle phrases? Confusing modifiers? Improper participles? Yikes! Maybe I should become a painter…
[Me]: Okay I think I corrected all of these.
"He refilled his glass from a pitcher on the counter, before wandering off in search of less alarming sights."
“Billy! William Thurston Howell! You come back here! Right! Now!”
[CC]: Is this an unintentional reference to the Gilligan’s Island character?
[Me]: Yikes! Thanks for catching that. I’ve renamed him.
Each of my editors has taught me a lot and helped me become a better writer. I try to use everything I learn in the next book I write so hopefully each editor has made the job of her successor easier.
Next week I’ll blog about edits to my newest book, Unbroken, scheduled for a Summer 2013 release from Beaten Track Publishing. You won’t want to miss the details on a conversation with my editor about how to refer to...ummm…male ejaculate. In the meantime, leave a comment telling me about your experiences working with an editor.
www.larrybenjamin.com
Don’t forget to like my Facebook page and connect with me on Twitter, too.
In Praise of Editors—Part 2
Last week, in Part 1 of this blog post, I covered my introduction to working with an editor and the edit process with the publication of my first two books.
This week, as promised, I take a look at the process for the forthcoming Unbroken. This particular venture into editing was both whimsical and edifying—I’d known the brilliant and sarcastic Debbie McGowan as a friend before she became my editor. This post details some of our most entertaining exchanges.
Our first editor/writer exchange occurred when Beaten Track acquired the print rights to my short story collection, Damaged Angels. One story, “A Working Boy,” is the tale of a hustler who falls in love with a former trick. He comes to understand the difference between sex for cash and sex as an expression of love. In error I had used both “cum” and “come” when describing male ejaculation which prompted the following comment:
[DMG]: There is a hysterical conversation taking place about this and the distinction of 'to ejaculate' and 'to arrive' …Anyway, I digress... OK - a couple of thoughts on this. Given the character AND the change from working sex to making love, we could make the shift from cum (porny - suits a hustler) to come (still slang, obviously, but more literary) in the last part. This is an issue we will return to in Unbroken!
[LB]: Okay, I like your approach of using the two spelling.
Then we moved onto Unbroken, which Beaten Track will publish this summer.
“He squinted in the watery blue light, laughed. “
[DMG]: You do this quite often - grammatically it requires an ‘and’.
[LB]: I Inserted and; we can look at case by case but the absence of “and” is a stylistic thing for me.
“Being reminded of Tony, of his absence, hearing him referred to in that way, caused something inside me to tear; fear, reason, unmoored, Miss Doolollie uncaged: I told you one day we would strike back. Today is that day.”
[DMG]: Writing in prose? Assuming you are, this is beautiful and it stays - this stylistic issue also relates back to prior comments regarding ‘lack of and’ - we just really need to make a decision one way or the other.
[LB]: Thank you and per my previous comment I’d rather not use “and” in these instances. Think of it this way, in 20 years when college students are writing papers on my works, this will give them a point to ponder…I shall be sure to mention “any missing “ands” are wholly the fault of the author” in my Acknowledgements.
[DMG]: Going to watching out for overuse of ‘serious’ - could be your ‘word of the novel’!
[DMG]: OXFORD COMMA ALERT (consistency check)
[LB]: What the hay is an OXFORD COMMA? But okay
[DMG]: Used in lists before an 'and'.
“He kissed me; I tasted the iron taste of blood, the salt of tears, though whether mine or his, I could not say.”
[DMG]: Could probably lose this (second “taste”)
[LB]: Good point. Okay.
"She chattered the whole way about Madame Billaud and her flight to Germany where she would change to a flight bound for Paris."
[DMG]: Why on to Germany to go to Paris. when Germany is past France when travelling from the US? It should be a city anyway - would imagine Dublin, but might be London or Manchester.
[LB]: Good catch. Geography is so not my thing; also except for Canada, I haven’t been out of US. London sounds good. Changed
“His fingers parted the tangle of curls that covered my head, and he pressed his lips against the spot he’d cleared. I fell asleep with his lips pressed against my skull like the promise of a new day.”
[DMG]: No edit - just WOW! Felt it needed to be said.
[LB]: Thanks. I love this scene.
“Upstairs, Thibodeaux pushed Jose to the front of the crowd directly in front of the stage. The go-go boy dancing center stage noticed him, flashed a smile, and shimmied over. He stepped to the edge of the stage and started to gyrate.”
[DMG]: Too many mentions of stage. Maybe try “The go-go boy dancing center stage notice him, flashed a smile and shimmied over, gyrating right in front of him. “
[LB]: Ok changed
Walking away from his mother and catching my hand in his, he said, “Come on. Let’s go.” His anger seemed to squeeze all the breathable air out of the room.
[DMG]: You use this structure quite a lot and it’s fine, but sometimes I think a change of order would be refreshing. Try instead (maybe): He walked away from his mother and caught my hand in his. “Come on. Let’s go,” he said. His anger seemed to squeeze all the breathable air out of the room.
[LB]: Let’s not change.
“When my mother came in with the turkey, she stopped short seeing Jose sitting next to me.”
[DMG]: Suggest rewrite: My mother came in with the turkey and stopped short when she saw Jose sitting next to me.
[LB]: Ok, change made. I actually lie your rewrite better than original.
“His mother, Marisol, and his nieces gathered and packed clothes, a box of Pampers, milk and whatever else they had on hand.”
[DMG]: Do you need to name-brand this? Would diapers not suffice?
[LB]: Changed. I used Pampers her as many people use “Kleenex” when they mean “tissue;” so the brand name comes to refer to the item itself, an advertisers dream.
[DMG]: NOTE: I will tackle the layout once we’re done editing - no point worrying about overflowing singular lines at this point! Thought I’d mention it now, as this is the one ‘chapter’ where it particularly stands out.
[LB]: Overflowing singular lines? Um yeah okay whatever you say.
“Good that’s settled, then,” Robert said, slapping his hand on the table, which seemed to be his wont.”
[DMG]: I know you acknowledge the repeat of this with ‘seemed to be his wont’, but I’m still not sure.
[LB]: Be sure. It stays. It will play nicely in the movie version ;-)
[DMG]: Blond or blonde? Which would you like? I think prior to this you’ve only used blond.
[LB]: I don’t care as long as it’s consistent.
[DMG]: Emdashes vs ellispes. It’s up to you, but I use emdashes for change of direction or where brackets could be used, and ellipses for thought processes and interruptions. I’m not bothered especially, so whichever you want to do (beauty of independence – we can cater for author preference in most cases), but you are a bit emdash-happy!
[LB]: Note please, I am taking the high road and ignoring you calling me emdash happy!
[DMG]: I know you think I'm obsessed, but do you realise you use 'invited' 4 times in this paragraph?
[LB]: *(massive) sigh* I rewrote. Can you live with the word used twice?
[DMG]: Dairy Queen and ice cream (scene)...letting it go...
[LB]: That sound you hear? The train leaving the station…
“Jose turned to the boys and Sam who stood just behind us and a little to the side.”
[DMG]: Do you need to give exact coordinates for Sam’s location?
[LB]: Fine. I rewrote--“Jose turned to the boys and Sam.”-- but when the movie director places them in the wrong spot for this scene it will be your fault!
[DMG]: I'll be sure to be getting in his/her face and DEMANDING that Sam is precisely 45.2 degrees NNW of Lincoln!
Once edits were completed, I mentioned her in the book's Acknowledgements:
Debbie McGowan, my friend, my editor―You believed in me from the beginning: You’re brilliant and exasperating. Your exacting standards and persistence were essential in making this book the best it could be.
Debbie wrote back “…and I’m sorry that I am exasperating, well, sort of sorry. If it pushes you to keep polishing, then it’s worth it.”
And that, my friends, I believe, sums up the best writer/editor relationship.
www.larrybenjamin.com
Don’t forget to like my Facebook page and connect with me on Twitter, too.
This week, as promised, I take a look at the process for the forthcoming Unbroken. This particular venture into editing was both whimsical and edifying—I’d known the brilliant and sarcastic Debbie McGowan as a friend before she became my editor. This post details some of our most entertaining exchanges.
Our first editor/writer exchange occurred when Beaten Track acquired the print rights to my short story collection, Damaged Angels. One story, “A Working Boy,” is the tale of a hustler who falls in love with a former trick. He comes to understand the difference between sex for cash and sex as an expression of love. In error I had used both “cum” and “come” when describing male ejaculation which prompted the following comment:
[DMG]: There is a hysterical conversation taking place about this and the distinction of 'to ejaculate' and 'to arrive' …Anyway, I digress... OK - a couple of thoughts on this. Given the character AND the change from working sex to making love, we could make the shift from cum (porny - suits a hustler) to come (still slang, obviously, but more literary) in the last part. This is an issue we will return to in Unbroken!
[LB]: Okay, I like your approach of using the two spelling.
Then we moved onto Unbroken, which Beaten Track will publish this summer.
“He squinted in the watery blue light, laughed. “
[DMG]: You do this quite often - grammatically it requires an ‘and’.
[LB]: I Inserted and; we can look at case by case but the absence of “and” is a stylistic thing for me.
“Being reminded of Tony, of his absence, hearing him referred to in that way, caused something inside me to tear; fear, reason, unmoored, Miss Doolollie uncaged: I told you one day we would strike back. Today is that day.”
[DMG]: Writing in prose? Assuming you are, this is beautiful and it stays - this stylistic issue also relates back to prior comments regarding ‘lack of and’ - we just really need to make a decision one way or the other.
[LB]: Thank you and per my previous comment I’d rather not use “and” in these instances. Think of it this way, in 20 years when college students are writing papers on my works, this will give them a point to ponder…I shall be sure to mention “any missing “ands” are wholly the fault of the author” in my Acknowledgements.
[DMG]: Going to watching out for overuse of ‘serious’ - could be your ‘word of the novel’!
[DMG]: OXFORD COMMA ALERT (consistency check)
[LB]: What the hay is an OXFORD COMMA? But okay
[DMG]: Used in lists before an 'and'.
“He kissed me; I tasted the iron taste of blood, the salt of tears, though whether mine or his, I could not say.”
[DMG]: Could probably lose this (second “taste”)
[LB]: Good point. Okay.
"She chattered the whole way about Madame Billaud and her flight to Germany where she would change to a flight bound for Paris."
[DMG]: Why on to Germany to go to Paris. when Germany is past France when travelling from the US? It should be a city anyway - would imagine Dublin, but might be London or Manchester.
[LB]: Good catch. Geography is so not my thing; also except for Canada, I haven’t been out of US. London sounds good. Changed
“His fingers parted the tangle of curls that covered my head, and he pressed his lips against the spot he’d cleared. I fell asleep with his lips pressed against my skull like the promise of a new day.”
[DMG]: No edit - just WOW! Felt it needed to be said.
[LB]: Thanks. I love this scene.
“Upstairs, Thibodeaux pushed Jose to the front of the crowd directly in front of the stage. The go-go boy dancing center stage noticed him, flashed a smile, and shimmied over. He stepped to the edge of the stage and started to gyrate.”
[DMG]: Too many mentions of stage. Maybe try “The go-go boy dancing center stage notice him, flashed a smile and shimmied over, gyrating right in front of him. “
[LB]: Ok changed
Walking away from his mother and catching my hand in his, he said, “Come on. Let’s go.” His anger seemed to squeeze all the breathable air out of the room.
[DMG]: You use this structure quite a lot and it’s fine, but sometimes I think a change of order would be refreshing. Try instead (maybe): He walked away from his mother and caught my hand in his. “Come on. Let’s go,” he said. His anger seemed to squeeze all the breathable air out of the room.
[LB]: Let’s not change.
“When my mother came in with the turkey, she stopped short seeing Jose sitting next to me.”
[DMG]: Suggest rewrite: My mother came in with the turkey and stopped short when she saw Jose sitting next to me.
[LB]: Ok, change made. I actually lie your rewrite better than original.
“His mother, Marisol, and his nieces gathered and packed clothes, a box of Pampers, milk and whatever else they had on hand.”
[DMG]: Do you need to name-brand this? Would diapers not suffice?
[LB]: Changed. I used Pampers her as many people use “Kleenex” when they mean “tissue;” so the brand name comes to refer to the item itself, an advertisers dream.
[DMG]: NOTE: I will tackle the layout once we’re done editing - no point worrying about overflowing singular lines at this point! Thought I’d mention it now, as this is the one ‘chapter’ where it particularly stands out.
[LB]: Overflowing singular lines? Um yeah okay whatever you say.
“Good that’s settled, then,” Robert said, slapping his hand on the table, which seemed to be his wont.”
[DMG]: I know you acknowledge the repeat of this with ‘seemed to be his wont’, but I’m still not sure.
[LB]: Be sure. It stays. It will play nicely in the movie version ;-)
[DMG]: Blond or blonde? Which would you like? I think prior to this you’ve only used blond.
[LB]: I don’t care as long as it’s consistent.
[DMG]: Emdashes vs ellispes. It’s up to you, but I use emdashes for change of direction or where brackets could be used, and ellipses for thought processes and interruptions. I’m not bothered especially, so whichever you want to do (beauty of independence – we can cater for author preference in most cases), but you are a bit emdash-happy!
[LB]: Note please, I am taking the high road and ignoring you calling me emdash happy!
[DMG]: I know you think I'm obsessed, but do you realise you use 'invited' 4 times in this paragraph?
[LB]: *(massive) sigh* I rewrote. Can you live with the word used twice?
[DMG]: Dairy Queen and ice cream (scene)...letting it go...
[LB]: That sound you hear? The train leaving the station…
“Jose turned to the boys and Sam who stood just behind us and a little to the side.”
[DMG]: Do you need to give exact coordinates for Sam’s location?
[LB]: Fine. I rewrote--“Jose turned to the boys and Sam.”-- but when the movie director places them in the wrong spot for this scene it will be your fault!
[DMG]: I'll be sure to be getting in his/her face and DEMANDING that Sam is precisely 45.2 degrees NNW of Lincoln!
Once edits were completed, I mentioned her in the book's Acknowledgements:
Debbie McGowan, my friend, my editor―You believed in me from the beginning: You’re brilliant and exasperating. Your exacting standards and persistence were essential in making this book the best it could be.
Debbie wrote back “…and I’m sorry that I am exasperating, well, sort of sorry. If it pushes you to keep polishing, then it’s worth it.”
And that, my friends, I believe, sums up the best writer/editor relationship.
www.larrybenjamin.com
Don’t forget to like my Facebook page and connect with me on Twitter, too.
Unbroken: The Courage to Write, The Courage to Remember
My newest book, Unbroken will be released on the last day of summer, September 20, 2013. I am excited. I am terrified. I am excited to share a story of one courageous boy and the boy he loved.
And I am terrified. I am terrified the book is terrible. I am terrified the book is brilliant. I am terrified that no one will read it. And also that everyone will read it and…see…me. Unbroken is my most personal work to date. In the story, which is fictional, as well as in life, the line between the real and the imagined often blurs. I am terrified the boy I fell in love with at twelve, a man now, will read it and know finally that I loved him at twelve, that, at twelve, I dreamed of a life with him.
Read the rest.
And I am terrified. I am terrified the book is terrible. I am terrified the book is brilliant. I am terrified that no one will read it. And also that everyone will read it and…see…me. Unbroken is my most personal work to date. In the story, which is fictional, as well as in life, the line between the real and the imagined often blurs. I am terrified the boy I fell in love with at twelve, a man now, will read it and know finally that I loved him at twelve, that, at twelve, I dreamed of a life with him.
Read the rest.
Houston, We Have a Cover
With just a month to go until the release of Unbroken, we have a cover.
After a few versions and much discussion we think this really captures the spirit of the book. I love it. What about you?
Leave a comment telling me what you think, and you’ll automatically be entered into a drawing to win one of three copies of Unbroken (either eBook or autographed paperback, your choice). The drawing will be open now through Sunday at Midnight. Winners will be announced next Tuesday, August 26.
Review the cover and cover blurb here.
After a few versions and much discussion we think this really captures the spirit of the book. I love it. What about you?
Leave a comment telling me what you think, and you’ll automatically be entered into a drawing to win one of three copies of Unbroken (either eBook or autographed paperback, your choice). The drawing will be open now through Sunday at Midnight. Winners will be announced next Tuesday, August 26.
Review the cover and cover blurb here.
Larry Benjamin's blog - This Writer's Life
The writer's life is as individual and strange as each writer. I'll document my journey as a writer here.
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