Big Ed's Place

Okay, A Mall Tale has echoes of A Good Christmas. Sometimes the theme is just irresistable. At least this one is for me.

Nick Scipio forwarded me a Call for Submissions for an anthology on exhibitionism. This story popped into my mind and I loved the fact that the narrator was not your typical “young stud.” When I finished it, I realized it wasn’t suitable for the original Call, and so submitted it to Ruthie’s Club, where it was published in March 2009. With Ruthie’s closing, I thought I should republish it here.

I like the surprise in this story, and the audacity of the unnamed female lead. It also contributes to my hope that some day, if I’m really lucky, I too can see unexpected things at the mall…

I’ve always been skeptical about personality profiles. It doesn’t matter if it’s Myers-Briggs or any of the variety of typing that gets done in business seminars, or something simple like horoscopes. My skepticism largely stems from three things.

First, I am aware of how personality profiles can be created so that people easily say “this is me!” There’s a famous psychology experiment where the entire undergraduate lecture class took a personality typing test and then had to say how well it matched their personalities. They all agreed that the resulting descriptions fit their personalities pretty accurately. Except they’d all been given the identical result and it was taken from a horoscope. Phrases like “You’re outgoing but occasionally shy” get lauded even though they’re meaningless.

Second, I believe people have a tendency to live up to their self labels. If I think of myself as outgoing, I’m more likely to act outgoing. Again, this has been backed up by experiment–tell people they are stupid before taking a test, and they do worse. So how does a personality profile help, other than reinforce behavior that one may not want reinforced? Am I really an introvert, or am I just making myself an introvert because of my self-label?

True story–my father is incapable of knowing when he’s hungry. If a meal is late, he gets irritable and grouchy and snappish and lacks the self-awareness to understand why. His solution is to maintain a rigid schedule for meal times. Well, I had the same behavior until I was in college. Then I discovered that it was learned behavior. I’d spent years telling myself I was ‘just like dad’ when I could easily say, “okay, I’m hungry, but let’s not let that affect my mood.”

Third and finally, I don’t think people are static. Sure, someone might be an introvert today, but that doesn’t mean they’ll be an introvert in five years. Yes, it might be hard for them to make that change, but personality typing assumes they won’t change. Strength changes (with weight training). IQ can change (seriously–the tests are normalized for age). Why not other aspects of who we are?

But where personality profiles come in handy, in my opinion, is actually in fiction. An author can make a character fit a profile and, if they do it realistically, the character will feel real to most readers. My Shakespeare Professor used to point out how the Bard did it with characters such as those in Romeo and Juliet. And who am I to say that it’s not good enough for me if it was good enough for Shakespeare?

Which brings me to my favorite personality profile: think-feel-act. When something happens, people respond at three levels: intellectual, emotional, physical. However, most people don’t react to them at the same speed. When told of a death in the family, one person may immediately break down crying (feel first), while their sibling immediately starts making funeral plans (think first) and the third sibling may immediately jump in the car to head to the scene of the accident (act first). Action heroes tend to be “act first.” Hamlet was the archetypical “think first” (and think and think and think). There’s basically a pattern or habit that a given person or character will follow. They may be ‘think-act-feel’ or ‘feel-act-think’ and that response pattern will be at the ‘habit’ level of behavior–almost automatic.

So it’s something I consider when I’m creating a character. I can use it to help with realism and consistency, but I can also use it as a path for growth, like Joe in Friends and Benefits. And even if I don’t establish a hard pattern, it’s worth thinking through. How will this character respond to events? What mix of thinking, feeling, and action will they tend to respond with?

It’s a case where personality profiles actually do serve me well.

It was a good week for writing. I figured out how to solve my reality-check problem and I managed 1273 new words on Love’s Labor Found, bringing me to 5667 total. What’s particularly impressive is I did all that while at my in-laws.

Ya see, I like my in-laws. They’re good people. They’re also pretty traditional. They were unhappy that my wife moved in with me before we got married, despite the fact that we were a) engaged, and b) in our 30′s. When we visited them, we had separate bedrooms up until the wedding was complete. Now that’s fine–that’s who they are, and it’s not worth making a stink about. On either side–while they weren’t happy with us cohabitating, they were smart enough to not say anything other than “don’t tell your Grandmother.”

Needless, to say, we haven’t bothered to inform them that I write. Which is what makes writing at their house a bit of a challenge. I can’t set up anywhere that someone could look over my shoulder. I also have to have an answer to “what are you doing?” if someone walks into the room. Finally–this is “family time.” Slinking off to the guest room for hours at a time is just not acceptable behavior.

But I managed. Stolen moments in the morning and evenings worked, along with the occasional furtive sneak away when people were out of the house. In many ways it reminded me of being a teenager again and trying to find those moments I could look at porn. Except now I’m generating it instead of merely consuming it.

It also reminded me of a discussion I once had with another author about writing. His best times were on the subway, as he had a long commute. But that only worked if no one could see over his shoulder. He got too self-conscious about the naughtiness of what he was writing to continue if someone was right there.

I nodded in agreement, because I have the same problem on airplanes. While my seatmate will certainly never see me again, it doesn’t seem right to subject them to porn on the screen. I have managed to write a few times in near-empty airplanes, but those are rare these days. It just doesn’t seem to work to have an audience while I write.

A fellow author recently teased me that it wasn’t fair that I’d had so many more [erotic] experiences that I could write about than he. Well, to a certain extent, he’s right–I have had a wider variety of experiences than what seems to be the norm (something I wrote about here). But he’s also overestimating my experience because some of the stories that I take and twist and expand aren’t originally mine. I got them by listening.

Ya see, I’ve found that if I listen, truly listen, nonjudgmentally, people will tell me all sorts of things. Now by truly listen, I mean that I am intentionally not thinking ahead to what I’m going to say or mentally dissecting their words or engaged in any of the other monkey mind chatter that too often prevents us from actually hearing what others are saying. And by making it clear that I won’t pass judgment on their stories, people are willing to open up more. It doesn’t take too many open-ended questions, such as “what do you mean?” to hear fascinating stories.

For example, I was once talking with a woman about parties of the past and she joked about how much coke she’d done at a party in LA. I said, “Really? Why were you doing so much coke?” Her flippant response was “it was part of the scene,” but instead of me replying by telling her about my own party past, I asked her about the scene. As she realized I wasn’t going to look down on her, she slowly grew more serious and eventually told me her story about how the coke had been provided to her by a customer… and that she’d been working as a call girl. Needless to say, once it became clear that I didn’t consider that to be a stigma, she started telling me many other stories that have found their way into the Compassionate Courtesan Universe.

Aside and trivia: There’s a scene, for those who can find it, in F&B where Sherri describes being paid to masturbate in front of a client while his wife was sitting next to him also masturbating. Absolute true story, told to me by a stripper. It was too amusing to not include, even if it was just a single line.

However, my stories aside, I think the best one on the power of listening comes from Michael Korda, published in the March 1985 issue of Penthouse. He tells of an early assignment where he was sent off to England to negotiate the selling of a “hot” book his firm had acquired. His bosses had told him to ask for $100,000, but made it clear that was a minimum. So when it finally came time to discuss the price, he asked the publisher how much he’d be willing to pay.

He sighed heavily. “I’d go to a hundred thousand,” he said at last. “Certainly not a penny more.”

Rather than responding immediately, Korda fell silent, thinking hard about the offer. Then the host repeated it:

“One hundred thousand pounds, dear boy! That’s a lot of money.”

Astute readers may have just noticed–by not talking, by not saying ‘One hundred thousand dollars it is.”, Korda made a ton of money. At the time the pound to dollar exchange was 3:1, so he basically tripled the price by not saying a thing.

And the story has stuck with me. Keep your mouth shut, pay attention to what the other person is saying, and listen, and you might come out much further ahead.

Well, it wasn’t a bad week for writing, but then I banged into reality.

I managed 507 words on Love’s Labor Lost. That two lunch hours, which is far more than I’ve managed recently, but still short of the pace I’d ultimately like to be at. When I was writing Friends and Benefits, I managed 3-4 times that in a given week. Of course, I didn’t have a toddler or other evening distractions, but it’s still a nice goal.

What slowed me down this week is I got to the point in the Crappy First Draft where I was going to have the characters go to a real place that had a real feature. The near-term plot relied on that feature. So as I was writing, I went, “hmmm… better make sure it’s still there.”

Well, it’s not. In the six years since I’d been there, the place has new owners who changed things. So my writing ground to a halt.

The choices for moving forward are pretty obvious. I can move the scene to a fictional locale, a different locale, or I can rework the plot. None of them immediately appeals to me, so I’m mulling my choices. In the meantime, I’m stalled. Kind of just rubbing the bump on my head that banging into reality caused.

The Price was a queue jumper that I just couldn’t resist. The central quote about how death is the price of sex is one that a friend told me over fifteen years ago and has stuck with me since. I imagined Sherri saying it and realized there had to be a story there.

Of course, there’s a little bit more than that. I wanted a story set slightly before The Ugly One with Sherri in it, as a bit of a link between it and Friends and Benefits. I also loved the idea of writing something “tight” that showed a battle of wits. I also enjoyed seeing what stories Sherri could tell that would sound outrageous and plausible at the same time.

This one took a long time to write. It was originally published at Ruthie’s Club in late May 2009 and is here now for your enjoyment.

With the Grand Opening now over, it definitely feels like a new chapter in my writing and online life has started. So, catching my breath in the evening, I took some time for reflection.

It’s almost six years ago that I delurked and posted my first story (A Good Christmas). Now that’s not literally true, because I’d posted a story to alt.sex.stories.moderated back in 1992. But I received such negative comments that I basically quit writing for a decade and so doing it again in 2003 felt “new.” At some point, I’ll do a post on how Frank Downey and Girl Friday created an environment I felt safe enough to delurk into, but for now I want to tell the pre-story.

For long before I started writing, I espoused the philosophy that The Meaning of Life was Art. We were each given a canvas called a lifetime and the Divine wanted to see what we would do with it. It made for great philosophical conversations, particularly late at night when we were well into our second or third bottle of wine, but it also had some truth in how I sensed things worked.

So one night I shared this with some other men, and one of the men challenged me to stop spouting it and actually engage in an actual art of some kind. Well, given my general lack of skills in the visual arts, music, or dance, the art form was kind of obvious. Besides, I’d always written a little here or there.

So the men backed it up with a challenge. They challenged me to write a poem a day for three weeks, and then go read one of them at an open mike night at one of the local cafe’s. My penalty for not doing it was $100. I accepted the challenge and wrote the poems.

And then chickened out. There was no way I wanted anyone to hear my stuff. I paid the $100 into our running booze fund.

But the guys weren’t satisfied. They could see how much I was terrified and they were sure I’d be a better man if I could face that fear and push through it. Yeah, they said my poems were fine, but that wasn’t the same as putting them out in front of strangers. They wanted me to put my work in front of people who had no incentive to say “Nice job Ed” so as to not hurt my feelings.

I agreed, but was clearly still nervous. So they upped the penalty. $1000 if I didn’t do the reading. That was too much money for me to easily concede. They’d all show up to support me, but I had to make the arrangements and actually get up at the microphone and do it.

Well, I did it. I read two poems that night, in the Mercury Cafe in Denver (which shows up in Friday the 13th). I even invited my new girlfriend (now wife) and read a love poem I’d written to her (which by the way, I highly recommend, given the way she thanked me later).

And the guys were right. It was good for me. Yeah, I could almost feel my knees knocking as I walked to the microphone, and I almost collapsed in relief when it was over, but later that night and the next day, I was invigorated.

So when Frank sponsored a StoryFest, and I had the idea for A Good Christmas, I was faced with a question: How could posting to a friendly audience in a yahoo newsgroup be worse than an open mike night?

The answer was and is blatantly obvious. So six years ago, I became an erotica author. And now, I have this new sparkling home.

Wow. Having the Grand Opening certainly helped free up my muse, or my time, or both. I knocked out 694 words on Love’s Labor Found, bringing it to 3687 words. Now that’s still not a lot, but it’s certainly better than I’ve been managing in a week for a while.

In many ways, it’s because I’m not editing. I’ve spent most of the last few months furiously stealing every second to edit my older stories so I could have the Grand Opening. It actually felt strange to sit down for lunch recently and not have two chapters I needed to go through. So two of those lunch hours, I actually wrote. The evenings will probably not be great reading time for a while–I need to catch up on household chores as well. But if I can still bang out a few hundred words a week or more, I ought to be in good shape for having a new story ready to post not long after the current “Grand Opening” run.

I also had a queue jumper this week. I managed to beat it back into the regular line after it gave me a decent first paragraph, and I think it’ll be happy to remain there for a while. It’s working title is “Deep Dish” and it takes place in Nick Scipio’s Summer Camp Universe. I don’t think I can finish it until Nick releases a few more chapters of Summer Camp, which is probably what will keep it docile in the pen for a while.

I have a weakness for tall tales. I love their conspiratorial nature–the implicit agreement between storyteller and audience to stretch the bounds of willing suspension of disbelief far beyond the norm. I also love the way they wink at outrageous exaggerations and bad puns.

This story was inspired by a discussion of tall tales in a writer’s group. I came up with the title first, and let that kick around in my brain until I had the final pun. Then, as I thought about the spring, I realized that it was a great opportunity to turn a Greek Myth on its head in an erotic and fun fashion. I find the result to be whimsical and silly and all around fun. I hope you did too.

Welcome!

After much preparation, I’m proud to announce that Big Ed’s Place is ready for business. Feel free to look around or stay awhile! To celebrate this ‘Grand Opening,’ I’ll be releasing four stories over the next few weeks. Their descriptions are:

One-Eyed Dick, Nellie the Whore, and the Spring of Perpetual Wood
This here’s a story about One-Eyed Dick, the legend of the Mountain West. What, ya never heard of One-Eyed Dick? Why, you’ve heard of Paul Bunyan and Pecos Bill, haven’t ya? But I’m not surprised ya haven’t heard of Dick, not really. His stories are not the ones ya tell to children, if ya get my drift.
MF, FF, group, humor ~7400 words.
To be published November 12, 2009.

The Price
A Compassionate Courtesan Universe Story. It was a gamble, meeting my boss’s hooker. But if she’d tell me what I wanted to know, my political career could take off… Originally published at Ruthie’s Club.
MF caution ~6200 words.
To be published November 20, 2009.

A Mall Tale
Who says there aren’t surprising things to see at the mall? Originally published at Ruthie’s Club.
MF voy ~3600 words
To be published December 4, 2009.

Bent
A story in Nick Scipio’s Summer Camp Universe.
New Year’s was a traditional time for the Hughes and Coulters to bend the rules. But this time, would they go too far?
M+F+f+ oral group inc ~7400 words
To be published December 11, 2009.