Big Ed's Place

Recently, I’ve been thinking about some old, lost, intimate friendships.

Now I should be clear that I use the term “intimate” to be emotional rather than physical. I can have sex with someone without an emotional connection. That’s not to say there isn’t an intimacy there, but it’s rather different. The parts of my soul that I bare, if I do bare them, are rather different than what I share with emotionally intimate friends and partners. For me, the most intimate activities involve conversation. I bare my soul through words–not what I do in the bedroom (though I must admit, cuddling can be awfully intimate).

This should be no surprise to readers here. I often write about my life, and I try to bare my soul, sometimes hiding it behind a veneer of fiction, sometimes not. I believe that’s how we connect, and why not be the one to start? I think it strengthens my fiction and makes it more authentic and it certainly gives my other work here more style.

Given what I share here, it should be no surprise that I share pretty openly in my daily life. The people who reciprocate often become friends, if there’s enough of a connection or other relevant circumstances. It provides a deeper support community for me, and it allows me to be truly supportive of others.

The hard part, though, is that often life circumstances change and so must the nature of the friendship. I noticed this first when friends started getting married. Certain conversational topics, like sex, dried up. While they might have been willing to talk about what they did with their boyfriends/girlfriends, they wouldn’t bring up anything about life with their spouse. I “got it” when I got married myself (there’s a reason there are no stories about sex with my wife on this site).

However, it’s not just the development of new intimate relationships which can crowd out the intimate friendship. I’ve had several die because the awkwardness of sustaining it was too much to bear. We discovered some serious barrier, like politics, that made it difficult to maintain respect for each other and thus be able to share openly. Others saw the onslaught of life changes, such as kids or relocation take their toll.

But sometimes, a relationship will hit a level where there’s nowhere else for it to go. This has been most often occurred to me in friendships with women. We reach a point where greater intimacy would require sex, and that’s not going to happen, so we back off. Then we discover that it’s damn difficult to sustain a friendship at a lower level.

In some ways, that’s what happened with the friendship that was the inspiration behind Friends and Benefits. The actual relationship went differently than that in the story, but still ended with a dispute about the nature of the friendship itself. She didn’t want to date me, and called me “ugly” on more than one occasion. I was tired of the sex play that wasn’t escalating or being either physically or emotionally fulfilling.

Yet recently I realized that, at its peak, that friendship was more intimate than relationships I had with some former lovers who remain in my life. With the former lovers, there was a clear post-intimacy path. We kept some parts of our connection and let others go because they were clearly no longer appropriate. Some of those relationships have then faded, like all friendships do, until we just exchange Christmas cards. Others maintain smiles and wistful unspoken memories. At least one had a “whoa! Is she attractive! Wait a minute, I used to date her.” moment.

So, with my old friend, I can’t help wondering if we’d have stayed in better touch if we’d actually become lovers, and then ex-lovers. It’s an experiment that can’t be tested, of course. Nor would I want to if it meant missing out on meeting my wife.

There are other memories of past relationships that have flitted through, recently. There’s also some realization that some of those types of emotionally intimate relationships aren’t appropriate anymore. I kind of miss them, even though I wouldn’t trade what I have now for them at all.

So I guess it’s just nostalgia of the rose-colored glasses kind. Maybe that’s just a sign that I’m getting old.

With the release of the illustrated ebook version of Friends and Benefits, I thought y’all might like a fun preview. In Chapter 18, Joe gives Sharon a Steve Hanks poster of a woman in a shower and then Sharon poses for Joe’s camera in an attempt to mimic the poster. Well, the original poster, and Tzratzk’s rendering of Sharon’s posing are below. Enjoy.

So this is one of my “light” posts in between the deeper ones. I’m in the middle of getting Friends and Benefits formatted for ebook release with some new illustrations, and realized that y’all might like knowing why certain models in my gallery were chosen to represent the characters they do.

So I figured I’d start with Sherri, from the Compassionate Courtesan Universe stories (gallery here). The model Nella seemed to fit her quite well. Nella appears on many sites (images from Met-Art and Craig Morey are below) and is a popular internet model. She’s Czech, speaks good English, is in her thirties, even though some sites claim she’s younger, and a lesbian. I’ve found several girl-girl photo shoots of her and even one hardcore scene with a guy. But that’s irrelevant when it comes to a visual image–what makes her fit?

Primarily, it’s Nella’s smile. The way her eyebrows peak up makes her look amused. It’s like she’s having fun. A good example is below.

It’s a grin that says, “I’m not taking this too seriously. Why should you?” Given how Sherri is often teasing in her stories, the grin fits. Sherri is brassy and bold, and Nella’s smile fits that mold.

That’s not to say it can’t be a little sweet too. I imagine the smile below comes when her partner’s done something particularly nice. I think of Sherri after John’s helped her out.

This picture also gives us the mid-back length black hair, which fits Sherri perfectly. However, when she turns, below, we get more of alluring smile. It’s an inviting tease.

We also see her breasts in this shot. They’re well shaped but not too large. But Nella, like Sherri, can also turn that smile to pure invitation, as in the picture below.

For me, if this was a real life instead of a picture, I’d find it all but impossible to avoid moving in to touch, or do more than touch.

So those are some examples of why I picked Nella as the model for Sherri.

The Morey Galleries these are from can be found here and here. The Met-Art Gallery is here.

To the best of my knowledge, I’m one of only a few to have written an erotic story set at Easter (Dawn on the Third Day,the fourth Holiday Series story). Now I’m sure it’s been done by others, and I’m sure that if I could probably find a few stories with some judicious googling on the various erotic story sites. However, I’m pretty confident it’s not a regular topic.

This is largely, in my opinion, because Easter has resisted secularization. Easter Bunny aside, it hasn’t been converted like Christmas and so many other holidays into a non-religious excuse for celebration. It’s kind of hard to overlook the centrality of torture and death to the holiday too. As a rule, those don’t go well with erotica.

This is partially surprising to me, because the other theme of Easter is renewal. Hitting bottom and coming back stronger than ever. And surely renewal is a decent theme for fiction of all sorts including erotica.

I certainly hit a local bottom last week. It wasn’t sustained and it wasn’t as deep as some episodes in the past. But I just couldn’t bring myself to write. The headache from the previous week didn’t go away. There were several real life stresses to address. And I just couldn’t get through the scene in Unmasked.

So the doubts rolled in. I didn’t write for a handful of days. I blamed it on the headache, which lasted until Thursday morning, but it was as much my emotional dread of writing as anything else.

But then on Friday I turned the corner and started the upswing. I finally figured out how I wanted to do the sex scene in Unmasked, and managed to knock out 567 words, bringing it to 6,485. It’ll top out at 8-9kwords. Then on Saturday, I received a call for submissions in my in-box and it actually fit my style and preferred subject material. Since 80% of the calls out there don’t, it was a bit of a shocker. I also had an idea in the back of my head and at lunch the words just started tumbling out. I managed 773 before real life forced me to walk away from the computer.

So right now, I’m feeling revived. And perhaps a bit renewed. It’s all good.

One of the challenges of creative enterprises, I believe, for many artists and writers is the gap between vision and execution. We can see (or hear) what it should look like. We just don’t necessarily have the ability to pull it off. And so the world gets stories of painters destroying canvases they’ve worked months or years on, or writers burning completed manuscripts. I really don’t think those cases are egotistical–”this isn’t up to my standard”–so much as they are “this isn’t what I want it to be” and the destruction is frustration incarnate.

So how do we cope?

In some cases, the answer is obvious–give up. For example, I really appreciate fine art nude photography. I even went so far as to sign up for a general photography class in my mid-twenties at a local community college. My thinking was that I’d get some experience and practice and I could have some female friends pose for me (hence, the source of the photography scenes in Friends and Benefits).

The problem was–I just wasn’t good enough. I could visualize a great pose or shot, but I’d burn a roll of film and still not have the results even qualify as mediocre. Given how expensive film was, it only made sense to continue if I was interested in photography overall and was willing to be the guy who carried the camera everywhere and was always taking shots of families and vacation scenes. I.e., I’d have to learn photography in general in order to get good enough to do nudes.

That was too big of a jump, so I hung up the camera.

Writing, however, offers some different options. There’s no sunk money–just time–in improving one’s skills. For several stories, I know my current ability isn’t up to my vision, so I’m waiting on those projects while I practice with others. Specifically, I want to write some more female POV stories before I tackle The Boys of Summer. There are other examples, which tend to hang around the middle of my queue.

But that leads to the other dilemma of the gap–if it doesn’t meet the artist’s vision, is it still good?

Recently that debate came to the fore in the literary world. Nabokov had requested that his manuscript for Laura be burned if he died before finishing it, which he did. But his son and those who read it thought it was very good. They had to choose whether to follow his wishes and destroy it, because it didn’t measure up to his vision, or publish it, because it was still better than most of the books out there today.

In Nabokov’s case, the decision rested solely in his son’s hands. But for more general cases–who’s to judge? I’ve had more than one author tell me that “oh, that was a piece of fluff that I didn’t think was very good. But it’s my most popular story.”

So writing, especially in the internet era, offers the option of publishing a work that might not quite meet the artist’s vision and seeing if readers appreciate it anyway.

But that doesn’t end the frustration, I’m finding. I want it to be right and sometimes I just can’t find the turn of the phrase that correctly evokes what I see in my mind. So I stall. Or I rewrite and rewrite. Or I start bitching about some constraint (like maximum length) that I think is hampering me. Or maybe I give up and the story goes into the inactive file.

It’s particularly challenging for me because I’m more visual that auditory, and writing is more sound-based. I struggle with translating what my eyes can see into lyrical phrases that do the imagery justice. That’s part of why I’m exploring a graphic novel as one of my current projects. It’s easier to say, “no, that’s not quite right” when I see a scene, even if it was created by another.

Aside–it’s also one of the things that makes me a decent first reader. I just reviewed another first draft this weekend which only suffered from one major flaw–the physical angles for the sex were prohibitive. The words were smoking hot, but I had to say, “ummm, you do realize how hard it is to slide two fingers into a woman when she’s bent over at that angle, right?” I’m seeing the movie play out in my head when I read, and that tends to include where the odd limbs and other body parts have to be to make the scene work…

Second aside–which is something we’re explicitly breaking in Deep Dish. I told Tzratzk that a POV he’d drawn was impossible unless the stage was too low for an upcoming scene. He told me to ‘learn to cope.’ The artistry was better than it’d be if he raised the stage and no one would notice but me anyway. Since he was right on both accounts, I decided to shut up.

So I struggle with this gap between vision and execution regularly. I’m not sure it ever goes away, either, because vision can expand just like talent advances. How common is this struggle? I wish I knew. I do know other artists and authors who face it, but it’s so rarely admitted to, that it’s hard to tell.

I realized that my recent posts imply a lot of sexual experience may create a different mental image for readers than that created by The Ugly One. Am I the playboy with lots of sexual experience or the unattractive guy who has trouble getting a date?

The truth is, of course, I’ve been both. At different times in my life.

I grew up as a pretty normal kid, albeit with a strong interest in sex. I was busted for stealing my dad’s Playboys to look at when I was 7. The major turning point in my young life was junior high, when I became the target of three bullies and faced social ostracism for a variety of reasons (that part of The Ugly One was true). Nonetheless, I survived, had my first sexual experience with a partner at 17, and lost my virginity at 18.

In doing so, I came of age in the middle of the AIDS hysteria. My peer group engaged in serial monogamy and I spent my entire college career (undergrad and grad) in one of three long term relationships. The middle of these was with a woman I was madly in love with and thought I’d marry, but it didn’t happen. The third of these was with a woman who was in love with me, but I was too busy chasing a ‘friend’ to be emotionally available. Friends and Benefits is loosely based on this period.

Then I entered a dating and sexual desert. My ‘friend’ had made it clear that the only reason she wasn’t sleeping with me is that I was physically unattractive to her (though the “to her” part was hard to remember). Meanwhile the woman I’d wanted to marry in college informed me that, even though she’d loved me, she hadn’t particularly been attracted to me physically or sexually. On top of that, my dating attempts were disastrous. On two occasions, I had women laugh in my face when I asked them out.

I was never particularly handsome. But I felt truly ugly then. I based The Ugly One on my emotional experiences during this time of my life.

That period ended when I turned 30 and two women independently said they wanted to have sex with me. Just for the sex. It took a few years for me to stop calling myself ugly and to truly believe that it was my energy and attitude that mattered more than my actual physical appearance.

During that time, my early 30′s, I ended up going on a tear, like most people tend to do in their early 20′s. I had many partners and explored both tantra and bdsm. That period ended when I met my wife when I was 35. I knew on the first date she was The One(tm) and we’ve been together for seven years now. I started writing again the first year we were together and am obviously still doing so today.

So I know both the pain of loneliness and the heady excitement of sexual experimentation. I know open relationships and deep monogamy. That breadth gives me a lot to draw from for my stories. All I have to do is pick a point in my life and put myself mentally and emotionally there, before I begin to put the words down on the page.

Remittance Girl recently posted about disclosure, and mused about her own need for emotional privacy, even in blogging and writing. I was touched. As writers, and online bloggers, we tread a fine line between revealing all and maintaining that private space which sustains us and often serves as the wellspring of our best work.

I’ve wondered about it myself quite a bit. Where exactly is the line?

Now many of us maintain online personas that are separate from our daily lives. I try to, though it’s not easy. There are perhaps 20 or 30 people from my daily life who know about this site because I’ve told them. There’s at least one person who found my site first and figured out who I was. Most people I don’t tell, but wouldn’t be too put out if they connected my identities. However, there are probably another dozen people who I absolutely don’t want to connect the two.

That latter list is why I recently did all the legal paperwork so I can do finances and contracts as “Ed Magusson.” It cost me a fair amount of money, but makes me feel a little more secure. I don’t have to worry about someone making a tip jar donation and then realizing that we work together or live in the same neighborhood in exchange.

But that just makes it harder to connect my online persona with the one that drops my son off at daycare, not impossible. A serious investigator could go through my posts and my stories and do a pretty good job of triangulating who I am (that is not a challenge, btw).

So I sometimes wonder what details I should obfuscate and which are okay (note: some are intentionally incorrect specifically to make it difficult for any determined investigators). It’s not always an easy call. Admitting I live in Colorado narrows me down to one of five million people. That’s probably not an issue. Besides, it doesn’t take too many of my stories to figure it out anyway. But my career field? My views on local politics?

The thing is… some of these details are important for stories that contain emotional honesty. I really can’t blog about some of my frustrations in writing without mentioning I have a toddler. It’s just too key–he’s frustrating, wonderful, and exhausting. It drives me nuts that taking care of him cuts into my writing, but there’s absolutely no way I’d want it the other way around, where my writing cut into taking care of him. So if I want to share the part of my soul that’s writhing into knots about not writing–well, I have to share that detail.

Similarly, there’s an emotional honesty in my fiction that can only come from having been there, done that. Now I haven’t done everything I write about–then this would be memoir instead of fiction. But I cull enough real situations to infuse them with honest emotion, as best as my wordsmithing allows.

The Ugly One wouldn’t be the same if I had been born beautiful (as my son seems to have done, but as his Dad, I might not be objective here). Friends and Benefits wouldn’t be the same if I hadn’t had a relationship like the one Joe had with Sharon. My shorter stories have pieces of me in them as well, to varying degrees of depth. I don’t always plumb the emotional depths, after all Dr. Seuss Provides the Girls isn’t exactly Shakespeare or even Theodor Geisel. But there are still pieces of my mind emotional state in even it. Three women at once? Hey, I understand that temptation. It’s real even if it’s light.

But there’s a level of privacy there still. I don’t have to admit which parts are drawn from the depths and which are solely figments of my imagination. I don’t have to even put it there in the first place. But obviously I do put it there, and even admit to it later.

So where’s the line? I think it’s different for every author, so that question is… where is it for me?

I’m still pondering that with just about every story or “my history” post.

I’m feeling a bit of deadline pressure these days. I posted the teaser picture for Love’s Labor Found and said it would be available in February 2010. Well, February’s two thirds over, and it’s not through my editing team yet. There’s still time, but I’m now questioning the tease. It’d be much more comfortable without the deadline.

Simultaneously, I’m getting nervous about Kaiju Irie. I managed ~600 words this past week, bringing me to 1924 total for the Crappy First Draft. That puts me at the 40-50% point, with about six weeks to go. At the current rate, I’ll spend another four weeks writing the CFD, leaving me very little time to edit or send it through my team of early readers and my proofreader. I’ll have to pick up the pace and I’m confident I can make it, but again, I’d be more comfortable without the deadline.

That said, deadlines certainly have their place. They have a way of focusing one’s efforts quite well. My day job would fall apart without them, even when they’re missed. I also found when I was writing Friends and Benefits that self-imposed deadlines often helped motivate me to push through the lulls.

So we’ll see how the next month goes. Lots to do. Lots I want to do. The usual lack of time.

Recently I finished reading a fantasy novel that I have mixed feelings about. On the one hand, it was very well written and I could barely set it down. On the other, it violated some of the conventions of escapist fantasy novels and that left me unsettled. I didn’t have as nice an aftertaste as I’m used to getting from great fiction. That got me wondering…

The issue with the fantasy novel was/is pretty straightforward. The author created a complex realistic world, established four “heroes”, and alternated chapters following them (3rd person omniscient POV). The plot was pretty straightforward and followed the conventions–the heroes started as kids, went into exile, grew and returned to claim their kingdom. Except… in the final big battle, the author killed one of the four characters. He also revealed a second of the four to be corrupted into evil.

Now, I admire an author who writes skillfully enough to make me upset at the death of a character. I also admire an author who’s willing to mix it up. One of my favorite movies kills a main character just before the Big Battle, which when I saw it, threw me into a tizzy. I spent the entire Big Battle sweating, because I knew that if he killed one, he could kill a lot more.

But with this fantasy story… while I admired it, I was unsettled and unhappy when it was over. Since it’s the first book in a series, there’s time for it to come to a emotionally satisfying conclusion. When the author finishes it, unfortunately. In the meantime, it got me thinking about story conventions.

We have them in all genres, but I’ll concentrate on erotica. A lot of the conventions, like “how good the first time is” are bendable without much impact. Others, I think are harder to walk away with. For example in romantic erotica, the happy ending is a given. As is great sex between the romantic leads.

So at what price do we violate them, as writers? Sure, the story might be more realistic. Sure, the less formulaic it is (which is rote convention), the more gripping. But do we dare walk away from convention entirely?

I found myself in that type of a dilemma with Friends and Benefits. As it wound down, I seriously considered a happier but less realistic ending. In the end, I stayed true to my original vision. Would it have been more popular? Hard to say. I don’t think it would have been better.

And I think it’s easier to violate the conventions in short stories than novels. The reader isn’t as invested, which makes the possible dissatisfaction less. Plus, at least to me, short stories seem to have greater possibility for artistic experimentation. The form can succeed with conceptual stories rather than convention driven stories.

So… where’s the balance point between convention and realism? Between following what readers expect and keeping them engaged with the twists? It’s something for me to ponder…

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.