It’s rather a unique experience, having one’s mother read one’s erotic writing. Not quite like anything else I’ve experienced.

There’s background on this of course. Both on the story in question (I imagine everyone reading this has most likely already read the story, but if not, whatcha waiting for?) and background on my mother, and of course background on how I came to show the story to my mother.

So bear with me if I told you part of this already.

Ok, the story you maybe know about. “Wanton“. If I didn’t write about how it happened, it’s on my home page if you care.

I’m fairly new at this writing game. Oh, I’ve been writing for years, erotica to amuse myself and arouse my friends, technical manuals, an occasional travel journal (and if I could read my own handwriting I’d type that in, but hell if I know what most of it is. That’s what happens when you already have shitty hand-writing and then write in pubs while downing pint after pint of tanglefoot best bitter. And as it turns out, “best” doesn’t mean “more good”, it means “More strong”). But when it comes to the real writing with thought of publishing, that’s only happened recently. I am thus still seeking input (and yes, validation) from independent sources.

So one such was to send the story to my friend Lewis. Lewis is, in addition to being a pretty good writer, a writing teacher and a book reviewer for the SF Chronicle. After reading a particular story of his, “Scar”, I decided I might as well jump directly from a non-burning place on the stove directly to the fire, bypassing the frying pan stage completely (not one to do things in small ways, I guess one could say about me). This is a guy known for being a fairly harsh critic, and he’s a mainstream writer, so I figured I’d get a completely unvarnished review.

The topic of mainstream writing vs. erotica is a topic for another entry, one I keep trying to do an essay or blog entry on. But that’s for later. The relevant point is that I got the unvarnished feedback I wanted, and it was far, far better than ever I expected. There were minor technical issues, and discourse on mainstream vs. erotica which I expected given his point of view. But the core of the review was, as with those wonderful reviews that beautiful people like Circe and MP have given me, absolutely glowing to the point where I had to do the shuffle shuffle, “Ah, g’wan” thing and then say something self-deprecating, which is how I tend to deal with praise.

This leads me to the topic of My Mother. Which should be heard in a cartoon Freud voice as in Dolby’s “Blinded me with Science”.

The first point is that of connection and how these threads come together. Mom was a bookstore lady from the time she was a teenager until not many years ago. Lewis worked with her at various bookstores in the SF bay area from the time he was a teen until she and he both quit the bookstore biz a few years back. So they have a lifetime bond of absolute and utter book-geek status. So this is where things connect.

Mother is an interesting person. Born in the late 20’s, she was a little too young to be a beatnik, a little too old to be a hippy. She never went to college (which is a true shame), but she helped my father work through his master’s and Phd. in logic and communication, and in effect educated herself though at least two degrees worth of college. She and my father marched for peace and farm-workers rights, voted peace-and-freedom, campaigned for radical left candidates back when people believed that radical left candidates could actually win offices. She and my father smoked pot with college grad students and sent us kids to a hippy-dippy school where we majored in hiking and getting stoned and swimming naked with the teachers and high-school girls.

Mom’s a book geek. Mom should have been a writer; she’s a good poet though she is unaware of this, and could have written for a living easily. Mom knows writers and writing as much as any literature major I know, and can discourse on writing. She and I have only recently found common ground on this, because I grew up reading ONLY sci-fi, which was the one area she had trouble with (Lord of the Rings and Dune aside). So only in the last few years, as I started to read Bukowski and Fante and a lot of other more literary writers have we been able to truly discuss writing in technical terms.

This leads me to showing Mom my own writing.

Now it should be obvious Mom’s no prude. And I know she had “My Secret Garden” and Aniis Nin’s books and other erotica on her bookshelf, I know she’s read erotica. And I know she was – let’s say active – before she married my father. But there’s still a point where it seems weird to send your mother a story which includes phrases like “Come on my tits, Big Daddy” or “There was blood on my cock when I slipped out, drove into her cunt“.

But after showing her Lewis’ review of my story, it just seemed stupid to not show her the story. I eventually sent her a pointer, but half hoped she wouldn’t read it. Which was stupid of course.

It was a couple weeks before she brought it up. And when she did, I was ready for a weird conversation. Which wasn’t what I got.

What I got was a purity and intelligence of praise such as I’ve gotten from a couple of the editors who helped me with this story. The comments of a reader who really *got it*, who understood the characters, who understood the story, who understood why some of the details were left off-screen or left to the reader’s imagination. And I got a wash of parental pride such as I think I’ve never heard from either parent in my life. This is my mother suddenly realizing that her son has a reasonable level of talent at something she values above almost all else.

She said at one point – “I had to stop in several places and just think about, savor, your use of language. It was so good I had to just stop and consider it and hold off reading for a moment”.

I was speechless.

She finished this dialog by saying “That story is clearly done, and should not have been a page longer; but I really want to read another story about that same character. I want to hear more narration is his voice”.

I’m trying. I’m trying to find the thread of where his life goes. I have ideas and fragments of plot. But we’re back on the “why I can’t finish stories” thread. One of these days though, that will come to me. That character, Matteeo, he’s been in my head a while, and he’s got more stories to tell. And maybe some of them will actually have happy endings. Or maybe not. We shall see.

Read more “Mamma, just killed a man…”

She reached in her purse and she pulled out a gun and said,
“Now, just shut up and keep your hands on the wheel.
And just drive,” she said.
“Just drive,” she said.

My friend Circe, one again invoking my name in vain (It’s three times, like with beetlejuice), recently made mention of a question of focus as concerns blogging. More specifically, the fact that I said to her that I have not been focused enough to put up another entry.

She, of course, belittled me (lovingly). She scoffed at the notion that one would need focus to blog, and suggested that I should sit down and write without thought.

But that, baby, is not my bag.

It’s an interesting question though.

I have a friend, sometimes known as “Papa”, a musician and songwriter (and as good a bass player as I’ve ever know). But one of this guy’s gifts is the ability to do pure stream-of-consciousness writing that is pure brilliance.

Click here for examples. I’m still digging out more, there are dozens of them in archive somewhere.

The thing is, some people do this well. Just write. Just let brain fall to fingertips. Circe does this well. Some somgwriters do it well. Papa does it well.

I have gifts. But this sort of stream of consciousness writing is not naturally my forte. I’ve tried it, and can be funny, but I am aware of myself trying to be funny with it.

To write, I need to start with a thought, and refine it until I know if I have a valid point. Often this refinement is done as a write. I learned many years ago to compose email outside my mailer (Mutt, why would anyone use anything else? And it runs on the mac!). I learned that I was best off composing, thinking, reading, and then sending or discarding. A close friend keeps scolding me for this, for how many emails I have written to her and not sent, but she’ll see one day, when I let one out of the box that should have been drowned at birth, she’ll see why I keep the thought filter on tight.

Circe has a good point. One learns to write by writing. One does not learn by saying “I don’t have anything to write about”.

The question then is, do I want to use this forum to ramble (and god knows, rambling is not a bad thing, I generally encourage my friends to do it, and love it when they do), or do I want to only use it to post semi-clever essays?

Tune in next week…

Read more “Just Write, she said”

A common thread for me throughout my life as a writer (and I say that as if I had such a life, when in fact what I have is phases of intense creativity with long bleak (the word bleak is there for dramatic effect only, it’s a damned fine word) non-creaive stretches where inspiration left me, where the muse out to lunch and could not be summoned back) is the thread of begun but not completed.

There’s something so powerful about beginnings. So compelling. And things are so easy to start. A line, a scene, a bit of dialog. An encounter. The thrill of newness, the fresh taste of something you’ve never had before. A conversation between characters, thrust and parry. Chase and capture.

What, though, after that?

I prefer appetizers to desserts. I say that as a cook as much as I say it as diner. The prep work is more fun than the garnishing. Work with a knife, more satisfying the work with a squeeze bottle.

I wasn’t going to start talking about cooking yet in this blog. I think that veered away from a good metaphore.

I have at least 20 stories in a started or partially completed state. Another two or three (other than Wanton, the genesis of which I should cover in a later entry) finished, and those not really worthy of much because they were such early and immature efforts.

There are a couple, at least, that i think are worth completing. Another few in outline state that might be. I even have (started) a story about this theme – more or less – inspired by an American Music Club song called “At my Mercy”.

And of course, I started two more stories this week (In fact, between writing this and publishing it, I started a third).

Beginnings are so easy. A writer friend of mine told me I’m good at opening lines. And many of my stories start with that gem, a line of dialog or introduction, and I’m left to try building a story around that. I’d trade that particularly frustrating talent for being good at endings.

The question then is – how the hell do I go finish what I’ve started? How do I go back and pick up the threads of something I’ve lost touch with and find a way to complete it, ride it to it’s inevitable conclusion? Maybe it’s a factor of how I write; it’s not a cold and cerebral process for me, it’s a question of being in the place, the time, the head of the character. I have to be there, walk with those feet, touch with those hands, drink with that mouth. And then I write what the character feels. But once I’ve lost that place, I cannot, sometimes, find my way back. Maybe this is why I have trouble writing in third person, or from a female point of view; I start that exra step away from the character and thus have greater distance to get back.

There’s a thought to ponder.

Or maybe it’s simpler. newness implies infinite possibility. Completion is – I don’t know, the opposite. Possibilities fined down to the point where there’s only one, and that is complete and past.

Or some might say it’s simple procrastination and the rest of this is navel-gazing. But screw that, if there’s navel-gazing to be done, I’d rather I was looking at some of *your* navels. [wink wink]

Read more “Well Begun is Half Done”

I guess there’s this fundamental dilemma that the writer must face – and when I say The Writer I am of course speaking in the royal we sense, of Me the writer. But I universalize this experience since my sample size is one, and thus must be the constant for all that type of individual called writer.

But getting back to the dilemma; what to write about?

Sometimes this is simple. A topic, a subject, a tale, it jumps out at you and takes you by the throat (or begs you to take it by the throat, but that’s another story for a different entry). But sometimes, more times, it’s less pure and clean and simple.

This thread, this train of though, speaks both to writing here, and to writing in general, writing the fiction I am generally focused on. Because in both cases, there are long list of things to say, but so many reasons not to say one or the other.

In fiction, the first and most vital thing is this – tell a good story. And for all the thoughts, all the ideas, all the buds and stems of stories, how many bear fruit? How many are worth the telling, in the end? What is truly worth the saying? And when is the way of telling more important than the story told?

And then there is this – what should be said? What can be said? For the mind of the writer takes everything in as potential inspiration. Friends, enemies, events, interactions, disagreements, encounters. The pretty young barrista who made my espresso yesterday, she may, tomorrow, become a character n some seedy bar in some seedy tale. The geezer driving in the next car over, who cut me off merging in traffic? He may find himself dead on the written page, slain in some ugly, slow and painful way.

And you – you who are in my life in certain ways, secret or not, public or not; you are all characters in stories I tell in my head. Yet your secrets are not mine to tell, so what I may say is then changed by the the need to be fair an kind with you, to protect your privacy and guard your whispered confessions.

There’s a story I want to tell. I suppose this is what Bukowski, Fante, Kerouac, a thousand others, what they said to themselves. There’s a story I want to tell, and in a sense it’s my story, and in a sense it’s not, but somehow I am always the main character. Which makes my life the story, and those I know the characters. I wish I could ask those men, how did you manage, when your life is your story, and your private, suddenly public? How did your loved ones manage when their secrets became public, when their words come from the mouths of characters on the printed page? Yes, such things are often veiled, but sometimes the veil must be thin or the essence of the character, the event, the motivation is lost.

So there are stories I wish to tell. But which to tell? Which to write? The science fiction and fantasy I daydreamed as a child, still stored away with characters and universes, war and love and death? Tales of dark crime and tough heros? Or can one simply tell a story of a man and his struggles with ordinary life? Is the level of literary pretension too high?

For the central element of all these stories is love; pain and love and death and love and war and love. Crime and passion and desire, heroism, villainy, magic and evil. Love and pain, these are the threads that connect them all.

And I am back, with that, to threads from the lives of real people.

Is this a closed loop with no way out?

I start many stories. There is never a shortage, it seems, of ideas and images. It’s the finishing that seems to be my bane. And that, I suppose, is another entry for another time.

Read more “Horn of Dilemma”