Time to write

Well, hasn't this been sitting around gathering dust for a while... For shame! So then. It's 2008, almost 2009. It's November. I've got a half a pack of cigarettes and I'm wearing sunglasses. No, wait...

It's NaNoWriMo time again, which seems to be about the only thing that reminds me that this blog exists and indeed, that it has a purpose. So let's see if I can use this for good again this year, by declaring, yes, this shall be my repository of progress reports and the like for the month.

Right now, after Day One, I'm at 1829 words and about to go in for Day Two's session.

Doom, death and navelgazing

If you think of me as that semi-annoying friend who never quite grew up, who needs a wholehearted "Yay!" whenever she's made something (however minor) and a pat on the back whenever she's accomplished something she considers personally difficult, then we'll get along just fine. I'm the one who won't stop talking about the movie after it's over, who gets excited about something and blurts it out with no context, expecting everyone else to keep up. I need pillow talk after sex too, but at this age I've largely given up on that one. Not that we need to go there at the moment. But anyway, if you can't stand the "look at me, I did something special!" nature of some of my posts, this one you're reading is probably not for you.

I managed to worm my way into a (largely private, I think) writing worshop-like community on LJ, last week. I (and they) say it's only marginally like a workshop because it consists merely of posted stories on a weekly theme, and (optional) subsequent comments. I suspect that a full-blown workshop might need a few more things than that, but for my purposes this suits just fine. The weekly themes will help to focus my energies, and the weekly deadlines will help me actually finish things, something with which I usually have a great deal of trouble.

That is, if they'll keep me in the long run. This is far from a given. The community tends to work in genre fiction, which works for me more than any other kind, but which still isn't quite what I do. What I do is complicated and mildly interstitial (to drop a label). What I tend to write, also, is personal in that odd way that makes people think I may be drawing on real life, maybe uncomfortably so. Maybe.

See... I've yet to meet a single person who didn't have childhood fantasies of being adopted, and long, intricate sessions of imagining another set of parents somewhere, another life potentially. For most people, that sort of thing tends to remain the domain of childhood, when it's still fun and freeing to play with the possible ramifications of changes in one's own life. I've met a few others who take this sort of thing into adulthood, but to a point - they may go on flights of fancy regarding some new person in their life, or some doom that's about to befall them, but they tend to recover and move on.

I understand some people do this regarding sex. I know some who are capable of building an entire internal fantasy life based on nothing more than the smile of a pretty supermarket checkout clerk. I'm not really wired that way. Me, I tend to dream up horrors.

There exists in my mind a monologue of stories and sussurations that never really stops, morning, noon and night. A child's stumble on the playground works itself out in my head as a quick succession of scenes involving broken bones, hospital visits, phone calls to relatives and much fretting. Each time a loved one leaves the house, I imagine the possibility that they'll never come back, with attendant details and heartache, some of which affects me in my "real life" mood quite immediately and intensely. Each time I get on a plane, I visualize all the possible ways in which everything could go wrong, in an instant. I've learned to deal with this internal state by mostly ignoring it. I thought once that it may color various decisions involving risk-taking, but actually the opposite is true. By thinking "what's the worst that could happen" about every possible split in my timeline, I end up somewhat fearless about the here and now. Not to say that I've viewed it as an advantage. Over a lifetime, the best I've come up with is to dismiss it as merely the necessary byproduct of a vivid imagination. At my worst, I treat it as a general nuisance.

Or so I did. Last week's story assignment, and my subsequent push to finish it in time, taught me something slightly different.

I began by trying to write a straight fantasy story about dreams. This is the kind of thing that ought to be easy enough for me. I dream vividly and often, and can tell you a lot about those dreams' effect on my day life in some instances. The story I'd set up was fairly tame, regarding a widow and her former husband, and her inability to get him out of her dreams. There was some conflict, some loose ends I hadn't tied yet in my head, regarding her move to a new house after the death and her inability to get along with the nosy neighbors. But all in all I thought I knew the story fairly well and was prepared to write it. I started writing it, in fact, but was immediately blocked by another, much more intense idea that happened to hit very close to home and that I kept trying to shoo away. This didn't work.

I'm no stranger to writing about my personal life, mind you. I don't mind certain details being available out there for the world to see. But over the last few years, as I've surrounded myself with more and more things, people, relationships that I can't stand to lose or mess up, I've grown more private about the inner workings of my life. I'm keenly aware of how certain comments will be interpreted, what this would mean for the reputation of those closest to me, and so on. I've become accustomed to posting things that are personal but cute, happy and safe. I don't have problems I'm willing to share with the web at large anymore.

So when something happens in my personal life that gives me a great idea for a story, a story not just with a good protagonist but maybe a truly evil antagonist and some conflicts and scenes that are of... let's just say an adult nature, I have to stop and think. Do I write this thing? If I do, who will see it? Where will they think this came from? Can I show it to my spouse? Will he (shudder) worry that I'm talking about him, because he recognizes one object in one scene? Will he take it the wrong way? Will he question my state of mind? Should I question my state of mind? Would it be better to just not write it? These and many others are the questions that usually hold me back from writing down the stories I'm tempted to write. Essentially, I'm usually frozen by the fear that someone who knows me will read too much into something I've written. It's a very uncomfortable place to be.

Yesterday's story, the one I ended up writing, was born from a single sentence uttered by Patrick at some point the morning before. It wasn't even a good sentence, and I'd long since rewritten it to something much stronger. My mind had done its usual idle story-building starting with that sentence, something akin to taking a hold of a thread in a piece of knitting and tugging on it until it comes loose. I worked the sentence out of the initial context, shifted the context to something far more horrific than the mundane ambience of the initial statement, and built an entire scene to go with it, complete (of course, because this is what it's always about) with my own subjective reactions, recriminations, silent fears and so on. After I happened to page past the "Twelve Dancing Princesses" later in the evening, on my way to reading "Thumbelina" to Maxine, and having that added to the mix of what was still brewing in my head, I suddenly had a story that was far better and more powerful than the initial dream story I was going to write. I slept on it Saturday night. Sunday morning, I decided to go for it, just as an exercise.

It was horrifically painful, writing it down. One sentence, one sentence was all Patrick had uttered, an entirely innocent thought that had no impact on our previous morning whatsoever. Yet here I was, using a piece of our dialogue, and mining it and the subsequent story I'd built felt exactly like a kind of weird betrayal. I kept touching base with him throughout the afternoon, trying to placate some worry he didn't even have, and I'm surprised he didn't just start laughing. This can't be fiction, I kept thinking, this is something more like exploitation. But I kept going.

A funny thing happens when you keep your ass in that chair, though, and just keep on writing. Whatever the seed was with which you began, it eventually works itself into full bloom, and sometimes disappears altogether in the details of the new and larger picture. The story takes on a life of its own. Regardless of who the initial players were, the characters you end up with take on their own personalities, their own cadences of speech, their own phobias and complications. If you stick with it, regardless of what got you started, what you end up with really can be fiction. I wasn't expecting that to work out this way.

I've always been afraid of what would happen, of what it would say about me or my skills, if I were to access my own experience for nuggets of story. Consequently, I've spent much, much time over the years trying to write characters and storylines that are as far from me and my life as possible, to not much success. Invariably, I've written a scene or two and stopped, not knowing where to go from there because the there is so far from anything I know or care about. I have dozens of story fragments left in just such an unfinished state for precisely that reason. They never go anywhere.

This, however - this worked. It worked, and regardless of the quality of the result, I loved doing it. It wasn't overwhelming or obtuse - the writing of it felt familiar and right, and after my initial discomfort all I can say is that the process of writing it was pleasurable, even akin to orgasmic. If I were being facetious, I'd ask well, where'd that come from? But I know, I know what got me started, I know how I got through it, and I know what I ended up with. And I liked it.

I'm totally up for doing it again.

Story / "Twelve"

Finished: short story, contemporary with some fantastical elements (I hesitate to call it "fantasy" - the fantastical here is fairly light). It's somewhat horrific, but I wouldn't necessarily call it horror, either. It was written specifically for a private group of readers, although it has good bones and it makes a satisfying read, at least for me. I'm currently waiting to see how it reads - it may be that it only makes sense to me and not to others. If it survives its first few days, I may revise it and send it off someplace. If so, I'll update the notes here.

History:

Title:			"Twelve"
Date:			21 Aug 2006
Status:			First Draft / 2806 words
Location:			Posted for comment to private community

Even this, now

On a chase around the web for Rebecca Brown tonight - Ms. Brown being the closest I've ever had to an idol - I found an online interview with her from the Centrum in Port Townsend, WA, where she is currently serving as Creative Director of the Port Townsend Writers' Conference. In it sparkled the following gem:

"The work I do is really rhythmic. I do syllable counts for most of my sentences. I'll beat out the rhythm while I write. There's ways that my writing is less like prose writing and more like a poet in terms of rhythm. Music is important to my writing in that way."

It continues to shock me, every single time, when I find out that another mind out there in the universe thinks the same thoughts I do, or attempts the same motions, feels the same stings or scratches or smiles at the same scents. This one I thought mine alone. I am not a poet, I do not write poetry, I do not appreciate poetry in the way others do, and that's all right. Nevertheless, I do syllable counts, I drum out my rhythm, I sound out every word I write.

Hope and the published word

When I was younger, I used to tell people that I loved gay porn. In truth, this isn't entirely so. I don't so much love it as I appreciate it for being the expression of something that is entirely foreign to me and fascinates me. The original statement actually originated with a summer weekend in 1992 when my (male) significant other and I, freshly moved to Los Angeles, decided to go out and have some fun. On that night, we stopped at the nearest cool-looking place we could find, went in for a drink and ended up at the back bar surrounded by video monitors broadcasting, well, gay porn. My companion wasn't as fascinated as I was, especially after a flustering trip to the restroom (I didn't ask), but I was interested enough in what I was seeing to draw looks from the patrons.

The place turned out to be if not Micky's then at least another bar on the same block of Santa Monica Blvd. in West Hollywood, an area I revisited every chance I had over the next decade or so. It's not so much the porn or the venue that's the issue here, however: it was the realization over the years that I feel not only comfortable in that world of gay relationships and boyish crushes, but I enjoy it on an almost subliminal level, as an expression of pure love, desire, connection in which I can never be invested personally and thus is nothing but pure vicariousness. I can separate myself from the storylines of gay culture and enjoy the atmosphere without internalizing anything and that pleases me to no end.

Later, as I grew and changed and came face-to-face with my own problematic sexuality, the nature of which I've never fully resolved other than to call it queer and leave it be, I got more and more involved in that world. In Chicago, I dated mostly women, I built web sites for local organizations, I helped pull together the GLBT Chamber of Commerce, and spent myriad weekends drinking with the boys and dancing with drag queens. It suited my basically introverted nature to be surrounded by others who were different in some way regardless of mechanics and since then, whenever I've had the chance, I've always opted for those neighborhoods and places with the most socioeconomic variety per square inch, and have chaffed painfully at living in places with any trace of uniformity. Because I'm recovering from one such stretch of uniformity now, and feeling the blossoming of creativity that comes from being closer to "among my people" again, a number of different themes in my head are finally taking shape and translating to writing I'm now actually doing.

My reading has a lot to do with this. I may be speaking out of turn, but my impression has always been that the SF&F genre confluence I favor has been the one least likely to shy away from difficult sexual themes. Certainly, interspecies relations have been examined since time immemorial in SF&F, and even form the romantic basis of two of my favorite genre novels out there (Sheri Tepper's Grass and China Mieville's Perdido Street Station). But even on a human level, I know there's a great deal of truth to this in the margins of the genre - there's an active market for gay and lesbian science fiction and fantasy that I know has existed for more than a decade, and fiction that questions gender, gender roles and relations has its own niche, and even its own well-earned gold stars.

But the margins aren't necessarily what's interesting to me. I don't want to go to the gay ghetto just to pick up unabashed reading, or scour academe for suggestions, or even learn how to creatively use Amazon's catalog. I want my kind of stuff on the shelves of my local B&N, in the airport bookstore, I want its themes accepted and pervasive - not necessarily dominant mind you, I understand demographics, but represented without fear by mainstream booksellers.

I blanched for a while at the ever-shrinking "Gay & Lesbian" section at those mainstream stores. I thought it might have been political, this marginalization of GLBT themes, a response to prevailing winds like the ever-expanding Christianity section. But it occurred to me a few days ago, as I ran through my favorite reading of the past 2-3 years, that homosexual relationships, queer relationships have been showing up in every book of import that I've enjoyed lately, even when I had no idea they would be represented. That every good book I've picked up for the past 2-3 years has contained a fully formed and undeniably gay character in it is something I find fascinating.

In talking about this with friends, I've yet to draw a useful conclusion as to the cause. Do I naturally gravitate toward books with difficult themes, and so I'm more likely to encounter this one as well? This may be so, but as mentioned, I tend to shop at B&N, and I tend to pick my purchases from among what's nearest to hand and therefore has the most shelf space (a peril of shopping with small children in tow). Further, these aren't books about homosexuality as a political theme. By and large it's the assumption that all your characters will be straight that seems to have dissipated from mainstream SF. So is it the authors? The editors?

This is especially true with my current read, Hal Duncan's Vellum, a challenging book if I ever read one, and such a satisfying read. I read its beginning parts a bit defensively, I admit, because Duncan interweaves so expertly a number of themes I was hoping to approach myself in my one book. Everyone has in them that one book they say, and I certainly hope I do. But I have to admit I was almost beside myself when the unabashedly, unafraidly gay character emerged, and while the nature of the book is to move on, constantly, I took notice. I marked Thomas Messenger in my book, as it were.

What pleases me the most is that Vellum isn't a Night Shade book, or a Golden Gryphon book, or even a Small Beer Press book. No, this diamond was spat out by Del Rey (they don't need my link) of all machines, and while I side with small presses every time I can, and have friends who would have a lot more to say on the matter than I certainly do, I still appreciate the message, and I'm certain Del Rey knows what it's doing.

Now to get my own unclassifiable stuff onto paper. No problem, nothing doing, judging by the fullness of my to-do list this ought to happen any hour now. Frustratingly, I always get my best ideas and my strongest itches to write precisely when it's the most inconvenient to sit down and do so.

And so it goes, again

[Edited 04 AUG 2006]

Hello there, you three or four people who occasionally come by to check up on this blog! I'm starting over with this one, again, keeping it around purely as a writing, publishing and criticism blog. I'll try to keep up with it more often. If you're interested in daily bloggish stuff, check in on my Vox (link above). Otherwise... stay tuned! I'll be back :-)

--M