Big Ed's Place

In typical May fashion, my day job threw some nasty unexpected curveballs this week. Like just about every job, it’s not the work itself but the people that make it difficult and unpleasant. In this particular case, the week culminated with one of my coworkers requesting that I remove one of my staff from the project. I’m not going to, but as you can imagine, it meant a lot of tense, emotional discussions. Compounding it, I was on travel and 2000 miles and 2 time zones away, making it even more of a challenge.

Needless to say, I found myself generally too busy to write. I had exactly one free lunch hour and no evenings this week where I could kick back and concentrate on pushing words out. During that one lunch hour, I managed an editing pass and 45 new words on Unmasked, bringing it to 2,686. At least it’s something. A crawl is better than a dead stop.

I did manage to complete my arc outlines for Deep Dish, revise my descriptions file, and get the first page script out to the artist. We’ll see how this works. I think the story is much much longer than I can tell in a graphic novel, but I need to spend some more time on it to be sure. I also need the first page drawn up so I can see if I’m putting too many or not enough panels on a page. So it’s moving, but also at a crawl.

Maybe this coming week will be better. Hard to say–personnel conflicts don’t fade away simply because everyone got a talking to and a holiday weekend.

Recently, an Italian documentary attacked Italian TV for dumbing down the women it displayed, turning them all into near-parodies of womanhood. Remittance Girl had a very nice post discussing how statistics, marketing, and aiming for the low common mean is likely the cause of this, more than any conspiracies. There’s also a great discussion in the comments section of that post.

But I want to extend RG’s thesis that statistical marketing is driving the homogenization of desire by addressing one key question–why go along with it?

This is not an ‘other’ question in which we discuss how ‘other’ people behave. I’m going to make it personal and say, “why do I go along with such marketing–be it watching the TV shows that dumb down social interactions, buying Playboy and other airbrushed porn, and reading books so full of tropes as to be ridiculous? I do this because I think it’s unfair to talk about how ‘other people’ are stupid, or sheep, or whatever. Aren’t we all guilty of going along from time to time? Foisting it on ‘others’ not only creates a distance between ‘us’ and ‘them’ with the associated snobbish air of superiority, but it also eliminates the ability to change things. I have damn little influence on how ‘other’ people live. I can influence the world through what I do, and perhaps therein make a difference.

So why do I go along with the dumbing down? Sometimes it’s simply laziness. It’s much easier to turn the TV on and accept what’s there than to spend the time looking for something good. Particularly when I’m tired or feeling low. Sometimes I want lowbrow. This is true, for better or worse, in my own porn consumption. Yeah, I like great production values, but sometimes all I want is Penthouse Letters. I’m not sure there’s any way to explain it, other than, even though I’m a foodie, sometimes I want McDonald’s. Maybe it’s the Thanatos impulse at play.

But… if I’m honest with myself, there’s another emotion at play besides laziness, and that is fear. It’s hard to buck the trends when ‘they’ are telling you what’s good and what you want. Popular culture peer pressure is in many ways just two steps away from junior high. I say two steps, because one’s adult peer group (however that is self-defined) is more influential than ‘they’ (one step) and it’s easier to deal with peer pressure as an adult than as a teen (second step).

Am I ‘as good’ or ‘as worthy’ as my peers if I don’t have a hot woman hanging off my arm? Am I a ‘real man’ if I don’t get all hot and bothered when looking at the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue? Am I ‘weird’ or ‘queer’ if I think big breasts are overrated? There’s all sorts of self-esteem issues that swirl around and can be abated by conforming to the peer-pressured norm.

Now of course it is possible to resist that peer pressure. One could disengage and try to escape pop culture. One’s personal peers could provide a countervailing pressure to the dumbing down of ‘they.’ Or one could be extremely secure in one’s person.

I’m not. Or at least, I’m not all the time. Sometimes, I’m quite capable of stepping away from the pressure to have my desires conform and sometimes… it’s hard.

But what helps, for me, is to reframe the personal question not in terms of peer pressure, but in terms of alpha and beta males. When I remember to be an alpha male (or Dom, if you want those terms), the temptation to conform is laughable. I am the one setting the standard.

But I don’t always feel like the alpha male. And… dirty little secret, the beta male in me (and in men I know) is less envious of the alpha male than scared to death of being the omega male. If I conform to the pressure, make the innuendo laced comments about the Hooters girl and laud the airheaded newscaster with the deep cleavage, then I know that I’m just like the other beta males. I’m not the omega.

Buying into the homogenization and the dumbing down provides a secret emotional boost that I, beta male, am just a member of the great average crowd. Not the best, but thankfully not the worst.

There’s emotional security in being just a part of the herd.

Getting men to step up into healthy alpha male energy is hard. It’s hard for me, and I’m more conscious of it than most, and even know some tricks to help (it’s amazing how putting on a suit helps me slide into that headspace).

But honestly, I think that’s what it takes, on an individual level. A greater sense that the mean is just that–the mean. And believing that being part of the mean carries no judgment on whether I’m (or any man) an alpha or an omega.

I’d like to think there’s hope in that, for both myself and us as a society. Because the only way I know how to shift the mean is for all of us individual data points to start heading our own direction instead of trying to squeeze toward the security of the middle. We’ll just have to see.

The saying is that March comes in like a lion, but in my experience, it’s always May that’s wild and chaotic. This last week just proved it, to the detriment of my writing.

For me, May has always been chaotic. When I was younger, of course, part of this was tied to the end of the school year. Yet somehow even these days, major work deadlines seem to fall in May or early June disproportionately. I’m not sure if it’s because there’s still a residual tie to the school year (people anticipating their vacations or their own kids being out of school) or just because it’s a good time of the year (it’s a decent work interval after the holidays) or if I’m just imagining patterns in the noise. I do know that this May, I’ve had two long business trips and have yet to work as few as 40 hours/week at my job.

Of course, it helps feed the chaos that we have Mother’s Day and several family birthdays in May. Also, my wife’s work schedule is tied to the school year, except this year she’s not getting any downtime between spring semester and summer (so my toddler care time goes up). Add in the increased yard chores and, well, there just isn’t a lot of free time to do things I enjoy.

So writing suffered. I made some progress on the Deep Dish outline, and also wrote 181 words on Unmasked, bringing it to 2641. That’s pretty light. This next week doesn’t promise to be much better, but we’ll see.

In 1992, Patrick Buchanan gave a speech at the Republican National Convention, in which he said:

There is a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we will one day be as was the Cold War itself.

Now I consider this a Kinsley gaffe, which is a politician telling the truth when it’s not in their interest to do so. For I think Buchanan was right–we are in a war. And by declaring it the way he did, he put me on the other side. Up until 1992, I had been a moderate Republican. From the 1992 election on, I have not voted for Republicans. He declared war on me and the party followed suit, which forced me into the opposition. For as I’ve previously blogged, I believe that freedom begins in the bedroom and if you’re going to attack my right to have my own sexuality–well, welcome to the battle.

So why is this today’s topic? Thank Steve Jobs. He recently committed a similar gaffe and said that he wants us all to have “freedom from porn.” It’s been obvious that he didn’t want adult apps in the iPhone store, but now he’s told us why–it’s not a business decision for him, but a moral one.

Okay. One of the dominant technology makers wants to tell me what I can and cannot see, read, or listen to. Jobs is admitting what many of us suspected–he’s a moralistic technology totalitarian. His way, his morality, or you don’t get to play with his devices.

I appreciate the clarity. A friend almost talked me into an Apple laptop the last time my windows based machine crashed. I also admit to being intrigued by the iPhone and iPad. But having declared war on me, saying he wants to give me freedom from what I myself write, he’s made it clear that he doesn’t want me in his world.

I can live with that. In just about all areas, there are Apple competitors that are more willing to take my business and my labor if/when I start doing apps. Admittedly, iTunes will be a bit of a personal loss, but that’s because I’m also not happy with Amazon and I haven’t found a third mp3 source I like. But that’s okay–I’m sure they’re out there and, worst case, a bully is better than a dictator.

Thanks, Steve, for making it clear which side of the technology wars I’m on.

So, this past week, I added a whopping 29 words to Unmasked, bringing it to 2460. Bad week for writing, right?

Well, that depends on what constitutes ‘writing’. In terms of pure words on the page–yeah, it was a weak week. But is that the only measure?

For I wasn’t idle. I worked on my arc outlines for Deep Dish and am almost finished. I’ve got maybe an hour left to do, though it’ll be a scattered hour as I muse a bit, write a bit, and muse a bit more.

Does that musing count as ‘writing’? What about the outlining?

I have four arcs for Deep Dish. Each arc outline is 2 or more pages single spaced. The total file size is ~3600 words. That’s larger than many professionally published short stories.

Now admittedly, it’s also longer than my usual outlines. The reason is simple–since I’m trying to turn this into a graphic novel, the key metric is page count. I need to get that established before I work too hard on the actual script. I figure that it’ll take one good evening to turn the arc outlines into a single outline that lets me estimate the total page count of the graphic novel. Once I know that, I can approach publishers or have an artist do a couple of the pages.

In many ways, the need for a detailed outline is a side effect of engaging in such a collaborative effort. If it was just me doing both the art and writing, I might be more willing to just begin and see where I ended up. But I’m not willing to jerk another person around because my plan was vague at the beginning which resulted in many changes of mind.

But back to the question–does all the work on outlining count as writing?

I think it has to. Editing counts, after all, and what is outlining but the pre-first draft equivalent of editing, which is done post-first draft?

I’m not sure that doing the mental planning counts, though. It’s an admittedly grey area. If I spend time solving problems for my day job between 9 and 5, it’s considered work I get paid for. If I figure it out in the shower, it’s on “my time” and isn’t considered work. The delineation is somewhat capricious in that it depends on where I’m sitting at the time. I suspect the same issue applies to full-pro writers. Does that time recharging the creative juices count as ‘work’? It most certainly might.

But it does leave me musing–how do other authors define what constitutes ‘writing’?

I was going to riff on ‘lessons learned from being a Dom’ that applied to my real life, but what I first wrote was crap. The fact is, there’s no amount of pithy sayings that will accomplish much beyond possibly making you, the reader, nod your head. I mean, the first rule of being a good Dom is paying attention. But is that really a ‘lesson’ to be applied to life at large? Honestly, there are a large number of places one can get that lesson preached.

And I don’t feel like preaching. Not only because it’s preaching but because it’s not all that effective. There’s really no true lesson like the doing. I’d read plenty, and talked plenty, but it was still an ‘oh my god’ moment when my first true submissive laid herself across my lap for her spanking. And it was still an ‘oh wow’ moment when I realized that the difference in her writhing in pleasure and her jumping in pain was about a centimeter different in where I struck her. Distilling that ‘a ha’ out of the scene and reducing it to ‘pay attention’ doesn’t really convey it in a meaningful way. Or do it justice. I had to experience it to know it. And I think that’s true of you, the reader, as well.

Does that mean I think y’all should go off and find the local bdsm club, nose around until you find some Doms that’ll show you a few tricks, play with a few subs, and see what comes out of it? Well… if you’re into it, sure. But most of you won’t.

For I’m not a natural for bdsm. I was the bullied and the overthinker. I was the one who missed out on the girl because I was too busy wondering if I should kiss her to actually do it. Pain seemed antithetical to pleasure, unless one was truly warped, and I knew I wasn’t.

But I was also hungry. I yearned for greater control over my sexuality–for a way to put a heartbeat pause between my desires and my taking of them. But not a dozen heartbeats. A good Dom knows that balance.

I also knew I needed the edge. Yes, lovemaking and ‘worshipping the Goddess’ (tantric phrase), and all of the ‘drawing us together as a couple’ has its place. But sex also encompasses the howl and the messy ragged passion in the mud. Making love is fine, but I knew I also wanted to fuck.

And I found that a good Dom walks the edge. They carry that fuck like balled lightning in a bell jar. They’re in control, but they also crackle with possibility.

I don’t always do it, but it was good to learn how. And as a result, I discovered everywhere else where walking in with that stare and that body language can make all the difference. I may not walk into a staff meeting literally carrying a whip, but if it’s important, the energy is all the same.

Amusingly, when I got into writing I learned about the Alpha concept in Romance novels. I couldn’t help chuckling. The Alpha’s a Dom without the riding crop. You don’t need the leather outside if you’ve got the bell jar inside.

Which is why I think where telling the stories has to happen. I don’t think there is much I can say in a blog post that won’t come off as flippantly trite. But maybe, maybe, readers can catch at least a taste of my experience and what I learned.

Maybe not, since there’s no guarantee that I’m a good enough wordsmith to put the tang in a reader’s mouth that I felt when I walked into the bdsm club as a regular, knowing that there were people present who wanted to play. But there’s only one way to find out. And that’s to write.

I wish I had something profound to say–some bon mot about the human condition, or at least about my condition, that reflected greater truths or insights.

I don’t. I’ve been hammered this week at my day job. Adding insult to injury, most of the work I’ve been doing has not be, shall we say, ‘value added.’ At least not meaningful value. It’s been customer handholding and making powerpoint presentations. The former is exhausting in many the same ways that taking care of my toddler is. It’s saying “no, we’re not going to do that” in ways that don’t lead to unbearable temper tantrums. The latter is tediously annoying. I happen to be good at putting on dog and pony shows, but I’ve long since passed the point where I mistake a good show for actual progress on the project. Writing erotica is at least more honest entertainment.

So with longer hours, shortened lunches, and greater exhaustion, I still managed 292 words on Unmasked, bringing me to 2431. I also managed to submit a mainstream short story to a publisher, though I’m not optimistic about its chances. I happen to think it’s well written, but it’s a queer little piece that’s going to have trouble finding a home. Honestly, it’s one of those pieces that would go best in an anthology, but I haven’t gotten a spark to write anything that would complement it.

And that’s kind of it. More slogging through work in the near future, with a hope that the habit of writing will carry me forward. And probably nothing more profound than the observations from the grindstone.

My friend Strickland is a near-obsessive researcher. He easily cold calls up folks around the country to ask details about their particular nook in the world so that he might get the details right in his stories. He considers the highest compliment to be when a reader remarks that he must live where the story was set because he got the details nailed so accurately.

Now I’m not so obsessed. I’m willing to let my bars in Vermont go unnamed and my dance clubs in Breckenridge be blandly described. This is in part because I’m a little lazier than Strickland and I don’t like making cold calls. It’s also because I’m less likely to get a detail just slightly wrong.

For I’ve had experiences reading stories set in Colorado, or other locales I know well, where the author tries to put in some details and mucks it up. It pulls me out of the story immediately.

One favorite author of mine wrote a modern day story in which the main character lived in the mountains southwest of Denver and then rode his horse to Estes Park for his job each morning. Err… that’s about 70 miles through heavily developed neighborhoods. Yes, there are parts of the mountains that don’t have the population, but any path a horse could ride has either been paved, fenced, or both.

Another author wrote a thriller based outside of Boulder. The International Cabal(TM) snuck into town pretending to be tourists at a number of festivals in towns nearby. The author then listed them, causing me to go into spasms of “You’ve got to be kidding!” The festivals were so small they wouldn’t even draw people from Boulder, much less international visitors. Furthermore, the towns here deliberately keep their festivals on different weekends so they don’t compete with each other. There’s no way that the entire list of festivals would have been in the same month, much less the same weekend. I might rethink that the first time I run into mysterious Japanese businessmen at Frozen Dead Guy Days, but that’s not likely to happen soon.

Of course, the thriller continued with a car chase down a mountain road with the baddies also chasing them in a helicopter. Uhh… I’ve driven down that named road. Like most mountain roads in Colorado, there’s no overhead cover. It hugs the mountainside instead of running through the trees. Gunmen in a helicopter would find a car to be an unmissable target. Of course, like most Hollywood movies, the novel would have come to a screeching halt if the bad guys could actually aim their machine guns.

The real kicker to both this novels? They were deadtree professional mainstream books. They weren’t internet stories or self-published stuff, but stories where the editor and publisher had to have blown off the fact checking as well as the author.

Now I would have been happy if the locations had been a bit more vague. I would have believed a horse ride through the mountains near Estes Park from an unnamed place or no mention of a day job (it wouldn’t have made a difference in that novel). For the second novel, just putting all the international visitors in the nearby big city (Denver) would have worked without question. Picking a generic mountain road would have let me suppose the characters were fleeing down one I didn’t know. It was the fact that the details were wrong that mattered.

In contrast, a novel that blew me away was one that got them right. Dan Simmons’ novel Phases of Gravity isn’t his best work, but it did strike me as true. Part of that is there’s a scene where the main characters go down to the Pearl Street Mall in Boulder in 1988 and watch the buskers. Simmons got it exactly right–from the descriptions of the buskers to what corner they worked. In reading it, I could have sworn we must have been in the crowd on the same day. Maybe we were. But the result is that I have a greater fondness for that book than his other, better works.

Get the details right and you’re a hero. Get the details almost right, and you’ve lost a reader. So it’s going to be specific, it matters that it be exactly right.

It’s been a rough week, timewise and workwise. Too much of my day-job has been devoted to writing emails that say “Go to hell” in language polite enough to not offend. It’s been very close to diplomacy (the art of telling someone to go to hell in such a way that they look forward to the trip). It takes a lot of time to craft even a short email like that and worse, it consumes a lot of emotional energy.

As a result, I’ve been more drained during the day, and just not been in the mood to write. Fortunately, habit powered me through another 500 words, bringing me to 2143 on Unmasked. I completed the first (long) scene, and so it looks like this one’s going to come in close to 15kwords. There’s a fair amount of writing ahead.