Big Ed's Place

Okay, I’m not a Swedish movie star, but that doesn’t prevent the line from being true.

The thing is, writing is not a social hobby. Oh sure, there can be social circles around writing, of various types. But the act of writing itself is a solo enterprise. Even with brainstorming and possible collaboration beforehand, at some point one person has to sit down, by him or herself, and block out the rest of the world so the words can flow.

Now that’s not to say I can’t write around other people. I’ve certainly done it, and even had “writing dates” with a sculptor friend of mine. I’d bring the laptop to his studio and sit at his desk and write while he worked in clay. It was great motivation to create, but it was also more silent than conversational.

But what this build up to is, I just haven’t had enough alone time this past week. Work’s been hell, with our customer in-house all week. As a result, I managed only a single lunch by myself, and lunch is one of my prime writing times. Additionally, my in-laws are visiting. They’re great people, but they’re on the list of folks we don’t tell about this part of my life. I think they’d still love their son-in-law, but why take chances with “I think?” So no writing in the evenings either.

As a result, I barely made progress on anything. I managed one editing pass through Love’s Labor Found, cutting 308 words out, for a nice round 11,000 words. I’ll take another two passes before I send it to my team. Kaiju Irie (formerly Kaiju Cove) is up to 811 words, but I had most of those written before this week.

But there’s hope. Next week promises to be easier, and I’ll actually have some free time alone. Maybe I’ll even have a chance to write.

One of the most profound things I got out of my time in the bdsm community was the concept of “core fetishes.” I was at a bdsm club party one Saturday night, in that transition between the demonstration part of the meeting and the open play part. I don’t remember what sparked the conversation, but I ended up talking to a much more experienced gentleman as we stood off to the side of the crowd. I asked him about fetishes and what the scene was like (I was still a newbie, after all) and he made a comment that stuck with me.

He said that he believed there were “core fetishes” and that part of the key to sexual happiness was finding out what they were for you. These were things that always turned you on–they were core. Often, something was a turn on because it was new, but when it lost its newness, it stopped being arousing. But a core fetish never did.

This struck me as very true. I’ve known “players” and swingers who were always looking for new partners. They got bored with sex with the same person after a while and the “new” was how they got the rush. Similarly, I’ve known people who’ve burned through all sort of sexual variations, constantly trying new ones out just to see what they’re like. In fact, that seems to be a rite of passage for many people.

At the same time, even after 20+ years of being sexually active, there are things that always turn me on. Women in stockings, for example. It hasn’t gotten old for me, and when I discuss sex with other people, I often find that there’s something that’s ‘never gotten old’ for them.

Obviously, the self-knowledge helps in my sex life, but I’ve also found that it helps in my writing. What’s a character’s core fetish? With that mindset, I can add a touch of realism in a genre that so often lacks it.

I’m catching my breath today, because I just finished the Crappy First Draft of Love’s Labor Found. Final word count: 11,308, which means a little less than a thousand words this last week. Now, the editing. I figure I’ll probably tighten a few hundred words out of it by the time I’m done, but I’m going to give myself a few days off before I start. That won’t be hard, because real life is going to be rather full for the next week.

I also managed to get a little writing in on Kaiju Cove, one lunch when I didn’t have the LLF draft with me. I’m probably going to have to change the title on that–the mix of English and Japanese doesn’t work quite right. It’s at 347 words.

But is it next in the queue? I kind of think so. Here’s what it currently feels liked

-Babe in the Night (to be published in Clean Sheets soon)
-Love’s Labor Found (editing trumps new writing)

-Kaiju Cove (tentacle sex for Remittance Girl’s call)
-One of the following:
Caught Online
Naked Twister
Mexican Standoff
All of these would be for a call for submissions on the theme of Indecent Proposals. I’m only going to let one jump this far up in the queue and I’ll shove the other two back down for a while.
-Following Rodin (for another Call for submissions–flash length story)
-Unmasked (Eighth Holiday Series story)

Then it’s hard to tell what will be next. The following are definitely in the queue still:
-Giving Thanks (Ninth and final Holiday Series story)
-The Devil in the Details (SC story)
-Boys of Summer (novel length Compassionate Courtesan story)
-Mainstream novel project

The following are likely to be done, but I don’t know when:
-The Devil’s Due (SC story)
-The Size of their Toys (SC story)
-Deep Dish (SC story)

Son of a Bitch, which I actually put a fair amount of time into, seems to be sliding toward the ‘inactive and incomplete’ folder. I’m just not happy with it, nor with any of the immediate ideas to fix it. I’d probably salvage it if I didn’t have so many other ideas these days. And so little time.

I may have spent my twenties thinking I was ugly (see my post here), but life changed in my thirties. Not my appearance so much as my attitude. And the defining moment was a conversation with an acquaintance who became a friend.

In my early 30′s, I started exploring tantra and bdsm. I also studied David Deida’s work, though these days I do not have the unbridled enthusiasm for his work that I did then. I wasn’t completely celibate during that time, though I didn’t have any regular lovers either. It was one of those occasional ‘friends with benefits’ that suggested I spend some time with “William.”

William and I met for an early dinner at a neighborhood Italian restaurant not too far from my house. We talked about a variety of things, but eventually the conversation circled around to my frustrations in dating, and in my self-perceived unattractiveness. We kept our voices low because, while the restaurant was not full, we were the only men in the place, including the visible staff.

William noted this and circled his finger to indicate the room. “The reality is,” he said, “you can have any woman in this room. Even the married ones. The question is–which one and why?”

I was gobsmacked. On the surface, that statement seemed ludicrous, but deep down, I knew it was more true than false.

That truth hit me on many levels. First, it attacks the concept that sex was ‘scarce.’ That’s a cultural construct that seems less true with every passing generation these days, but the truth is that it’s a lie. Any guy–and any gal–can get laid if they truly want to. It’s just a matter of what constraints they put on the act. For example, a woman, no matter how ugly or fat, could walk down to a bar and offer sex to anyone who wants it, and it’d happen. Similarly, a man can get laid in most cities for a few hundred dollars and a phone call. The constraints of “have to like the guy” or “not gonna pay for it” are what make sex more scarce.

So, what made it scarce in the restaurant? Mostly the constraints I was placing on myself. “It wasn’t right to try to pick up a stranger.” “I shouldn’t flirt with waitresses.” “Ooh, she’s not gonna be interested, I shouldn’t even try.”

That last one is a killer. It brought back memories of high school when all my friends were lusting after a cheerleader “Karen.” Toward the end of our senior year, “Karen” revealed that the only reason she’d ever gone out with her boyfriend was because he had been the only guy to ever ask her out. She would have loved to have gone on dates with my friends, but their own “I’m not good enough for her” is what prevented them from getting a date with her.

This is not a problem that pickup artists have. A true pickup artist knows that it’s really not about him–it’s about the image of him in the woman’s mind (and vice versa when the genders are reversed). If she sees him as exciting, or mysterious, or funny, or whatever it is that turns her on, she’ll overlook the receding hairline and the asymmetrical ears. A true pickup artist plays to his target’s fantasies and desires and lets it roll from there.

Which was part of William’s point. It wasn’t the scarcity of sex that was holding me back, but my own efforts or lack thereof. Furthermore, I wasn’t a fumbling teenager with no skills around women. I knew enough about paying attention, projecting strong masculine energy, being present, etc. to be capable of being a pickup artist. That was the second truth that whapped me upside the head. Maybe seducing a woman would have been a problem when I was 18, but I wasn’t 18 anymore. It was time to treat women, be it during sex and seduction or simple interactions, by being a man instead of a boy.

Now, of course, that doesn’t mean that I could automatically persuade any of the women in the restaurant to have a quickie in the bathroom. What a given woman finds seductive is very personal. It might be a zipless fuck with a man she just met, but it might be roses and love poems and a long slow seduction with hints of marriage, like in many romance novels. The latter takes a lot more time to build and develop, but is still possible for a pickup artist.

Which is why the second part of the sentence also hit my profoundly. “Which one and why?” There’s a huge difference between picking the woman just looking for a quickie good time and picking the married woman who’s unhappy because her husband’s neglecting her and who might be intrigued by a prospective husband #2. To an amoral pickup artist, the distinction might not matter, but to me, it did. My “why” had to be more than “because I thought she’d be a good fuck.”

There are ways, of course, to be an ethical slut, to have an honorable one night stand, and to serve another person sexually without any intent of becoming husband #2. I don’t need to review them here, but simply state that all of them require considering the other person as a person, and not just a target or a score.

Of course, that conversation with William didn’t turn my life around immediately. I still made mistakes in life and in dating, and struggled to accept what I’d realized was true. I had many days where I slid back into old mental patterns instead of sticking with the new ones–that it wasn’t the women, and it wasn’t my looks that mattered. It was my energy and my actions. But, eventually, it sunk in.

By the time I was 34, my life was full of playmates and lovers, all of whom I dealt with in high integrity. Then, at 35, I met the woman who became my wife. The ‘why’ was different, and that made all the difference in how I approached her and what happened after.

As a coda, my wife rolled her eyes when she read The Ugly One, written well after we were engaged. She’d never noticed my ‘deformities’ at all–to her I was, and am, simply handsome.

There’s a story in Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series in which a writer imprisons one of the Greek muses. When Dream frees her, he punishes the writer by giving him too many ideas. They’re coming faster than he can write them down and it drives him crazy.

I have a small inkling what that’s like. This past week, my brain feels like it’s exploded, and given how little time I have to write, it’s been frustrating.

Now I have new ideas all the time, but often they don’t make the queue. However, this week, several of the ideas have been inspired by Calls for Submission. Those are worth considering rather than just daydreaming the story into oblivion. Unfortunately, serious daydreaming takes time.

So… the new ones: Kaiju Cove, which will almost certainly get written for a call for tentacle sex stories; Naked Twister, a story that needs to be written as soon as I can decide if I want a storybook ending or to use the true ending (yes, it’s based on a true story) for an Indecent Proposals call; and Following Rodin, an artistic flash for another call.

For all of these, I did write a few words, but it’s less than 100 total, so I’m not quite ready to count it in my queue or my writing totals. Maybe next week, or when the queue formalizes. I realize that a lot of this is because I really want to get LLF finished first; I’ve already ordered the Trzatzk illo for it, and I’m so close I can taste it.

For LLF, I managed another 480 words this week (not bad considering I had a sick kid), bringing me to 10,353 on the Crappy First Draft. I’ve only got a few hundred words left–I figured out how I want to finish the final two scenes, so it’s just a matter of getting the time to let the actual words form in my brain. I’d hoped to make it further, but I had too many ideas on how to finish the penultimate scene and narrowing it to the right one took a bit of effort.

So… I’ll give it another push this coming week. Hopefully I can finish the first draft of LLF so I can get serious about which of the others go into the queue.

The folks over at Oh, Get a Grip! have been blogging about beauty recently, and much of what they’ve written has amused and touched me. Like many mature souls, they understand the difference between superficial beauty designed to sell products by making all the rest of us feel bad, and true beauty, that comes from inside and radiates out. I’m glad, because there was a long period where I didn’t.

That fact should be no surprise to any regular reader here. I did write The Ugly One, after all. In that Author’s Note, I describe how John’s journey is modeled on my own. What I didn’t discuss was how close his physical description matched my own. Basically, I took each of my features and exaggerated them a little. But often, it was just a very little.

In my 30′s, I discovered that my looks really didn’t matter that much. My attitude mattered far more, and that’s what I wrote about in The Ugly One. There’s a future blog post sometime about “you can have any woman” which was a shocking revelation in my life and as much of a turning point as anything that John went through.

But my teens and twenties were a different matter. The bullies that started in on my in seventh grade targeted my appearance, of course. And my lack of fashion sense. And my awkwardness. And all the other usual targets of bullies. It didn’t help that I grew 6.5 inches in eighth grade. At a half an inch a month, my clothes never fit and I was horribly awkward. I’d trip over my own feet walking down the hall sometimes because the coordination just didn’t keep up with the growth.

And then in my twenties… wham. After grad school, my social and sexual life completely dried up. I managed a whopping three dates a year for several years, and none of those were second dates. When I complained about them to my best friend, “Sharon,” she’d cluck sympathetically without making suggestions that really helped.

And yes, the quotes there mean I’m talking about the woman who formed the basis for Sharon in Friends and Benefits. We had a friendship that included “benefits” similar to those in the story, but with the same limitations. We never sexually touched. Despite me wanting to, she said that I “wasn’t physically attractive enough” for her. There were times I was flat out in love with her, but it didn’t matter. I didn’t make her physical appearance grade and so I was not an eligible romantic or sexual partner.

Needless to say, we are no longer friends.

But, as I said, I got wise. I learned how much confidence and attitude really mattered. That’s not to say that grooming and style don’t have a place, but those were skills to be learned. But beauty was truly in the eye of the beholder, and what mattered was not beating myself up to change my appearance, but finding more mature ‘beholders’ to be with. And that has made all the difference.

It’s been a rough first work week of the new year. Nothing horrible happened; just the usual crunch of people waking up with a bunch of energy and tasks they want to tackle immediately. Me among them. Mostly, my goal for 2010 is to “not be lazy.” Since Lazy is a state of mind (vs. Tired which is a state of the body), this is mostly a challenge in discipline.

To that end, I started looking for a new market for Babe in the Night. It’s been four months since I submitted it for professional publication, and I haven’t even received an acknowledgment of receipt. My follow up queries have been ignored so I only see one solution left, which is to withdraw the submittal and look elsewhere. Unfortunately, that’s harder than I’d like. There just isn’t a big paying market for non-romance erotica. Still, I’d like to try a little more before declaring defeat yet again.

And in the process, I spotted a call for submissions that looked interesting, and immediately thought of a story idea. “Naked Twister” would be another queue jumper, if I decide to write it. I’m not entirely sure if I will… it’s a case of so many ideas, so little time. Although if I could get this story right, it’d be fun. Ya see, it actually happened to a friend of mine. He made a joking suggestion of playing Naked Twister once and actually got taken up on it. The big problem is, it’s one of those stories where truth is stranger than fiction and I’m not sure anyone would believe it if I told it straight. We’ll see…

In the meantime, I continued to work on Love’s Labor Found. I had three working lunches this week, which really hurt my available writing time. Fortunately, I’m past the hard part and so I’m not getting stuck mentally as much. I managed 1107 words, bringing me to 9873 for the Crappy First Draft. If I can pull that off again next week, I should be able to get the story up by the end of the month. Or Valentine’s Day. We’ll see. It’s mostly a matter of not being lazy.

The movie Nine entranced me, even though I found the main character completely unsympathetic. Since it contained some sexy dance numbers and some musings on the creative process, I figured it was fair game for a review here.

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So… if you were going to see a doctor, would you want one that had done the procedure many times, or a doctor who had never done it before?

How about a more personal service? If you were getting a haircut or a massage, would you want someone straight out of school, or someone who’d had several years of experience?

Perhaps something more intimate? Instead of pouring your problems to a licensed psychiatrist or counselor, how about grabbing someone off the street to listen to you bare your soul?

By now you’ve seen where I’m going–why would someone want a virgin over a more experienced partner?

It’s the part of current Muslim matyrdom that makes no meaningful sense to me–virgins as a reward. But the fetish is not confined to them–the West reveres Mary the Virgin and not Mary the Magdalene after all. Furthermore, it shows up a *lot* in porn. Often it’s the reverential way that the protagonist feels about losing their own virginity. Sometimes it’s the person doing the deflowering, making a big deal about how great this ‘honor’ is.

I dunno. When I lost my own virginity, it was nothing to write a story about. It wasn’t particularly good sex and was most notable for me getting scared out of my mind about a possible pregnancy. I’ve only slept with one ‘virgin’ and while that was a lot better, for her and for me, the sex itself wasn’t as good as sex we’d have later on. What made that evening notable more than anything else was that we made an effort for it to be romantic and enjoyable for her, which it was. But in the end, it was no more notable than a dozen other times we had sex later on, when she had more experience, and we knew each other’s bodies better.

Furthermore, I find that I actually am repelled by the fetish for virgins. There often seems to be either a depraved undercurrent, or a strong sense of insecurity. In the former, sleeping with a virgin is an act of despoilment, of depravity, of maliciousness, and the story is reveling in that. Yeah, it can be fun to play at being gleefully evil sometimes, and even to read it, but only if there’s a real character involved. A cardboard villain, which most ‘despoilers’ are, is a waste of my time.

As for the latter, I sometimes sense an underlying insecurity in the protagonist, particularly when told in first person. It’s like, “I want to be with a virgin because then they can’t compare me to anyone.” If you’re the only one, you’re automatically the best. This often shows up in teen coming-of-age stories where the male protagonist accumulates a harem of women who sleep only with him.

So I don’t like a virgin, for that quality. Not in my erotica. Instead, it’s the experienced women that draw my attention and interest. Who know what they want and are going after it. They’re not necessarily sluts, but they aren’t innocent either. That’s what I like. And fortunately, that’s the character I get to write.

It’s been a decent week for writing; in large part due to being on semi-vacation and having a lot of the holiday stress behind us. I managed 1108 words on Love’s Labor Found, bringing it to 8766. I’m most of the way through my penultimate scene, so this one will coast in pretty close to 10kwords. I think.

This is often the stage in writing a story when I’ve cleared Mile 22 and the writing pace picks up. Home stretch writing is always faster and in many ways more fun than a lot of the rest of it, particularly if I’m in the middle of the big payoff scene that I’ve had in my mind all along.

Except this time… the characters have hijacked my story again. It’s slowing me down because I’m spending a lot of time going “huh–so what are they going to do now?”

This happens to me sometimes and I know it happens to other authors and creative types all the time. I caught an Oprah interview with Taylor Swift this week (side effect of being home in the afternoon when Wife has the TV on) and Taylor said that she generally felt like she was transcribing her songs rather than truly writing them. I really do get that. There’s a zone when I’m writing sometimes that feels like I’m just an instrument for my muse or some higher power–and the best thing I can do is get my own ego and ideas out of the way.

And there’s also a zone when I’m writing and the characters themselves seem to have free will and decide to go somewhere different than I’d planned all along. The first time this happened was in Dawn on the Third Day. I was writing what I thought was the final scene and looked down and realized that Jennifer had just suggested inviting the other couple into the bedroom. That wasn’t at all how I intended to end the story, but I couldn’t see any reason not to go with it, so I did. It happened again in The Ugly One when Billy hauled John onto the ice skating rink and it’s happened a dozen other times in other stories as well.

So Jennifer–my quiet one, my ‘go along’ one, my ‘make Dave happy’ one–has once again stepped up with some boldness I hadn’t anticipated. So I find myself, like the other characters, trying not to let my chin drop as I wait to see what she’ll do. Note that it’s not like she doesn’t have that streak of boldness in her–just see what she did in A Good Christmas or A Valentine’s Surprise. It just wasn’t a direction I was expecting the story to take.

So it promises to be an interesting wind up for the story. I look forward to seeing how it plays out myself.