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.

In today’s modern world, it’s too often to take the dominance of Western culture and economies as normal. Yet for much of history, it was actually the East that was the pinnacle. While Europe wrestled with Dark Ages and Middle Ages and more, both the Near East and the Far East flourished. So why, with a head start, did China not end up dominating the world instead of the Europeans?

They had a chance, even as late as the 1400′s. Sixty years before Vasco da Gama sailed around the Cape of Good Hope into the Indian Ocean, the Chinese Explorer Zheng He arrived at the Cape of Good Hope from the other direction. His fleet was significantly larger and the Chinese Empire much more powerful. Yet Portugal, later supplanted by other European powers, ended up owning the trade routes. Europe surged economically and culturally and surpassed China so that a few hundred years later, they were carving it up as part of their own empires.

So what happened?

In a word: bureaucracy.

The Chinese bureaucrats, who ran the country regarded the explorations as a waste of money and resources. China already was the Center of the Universe. Why spend any effort on barbarians? To add to the problems, they passed laws that restricted foreign travel and made it a capital crime to build big ocean going ships. The laws therefore made it impossible for any enterprising individuals to engage in exploration or trade outside of the bureaucrats’ control. There was no way an explorer could fund himself (or get another nation to fund him, as the Italian Columbus managed with Spain). The bureaucrats ruled.

Laws and bureaucracy killed the creative, explorative efforts of the Chinese people and eventually led to their destruction as a nation.

Now as much as we all tend to snarl about bureaucracy, it exists for some understandable reasons. Bureaucracies are put in place to manage and govern things on large scales. However, it doesn’t take long for them to do what they are really good at, which is maintain the status quo.

Deficit hawks in the US Government have known this for some time. It’s damn near impossible to kill a program once it’s established. No matter how outdated the agency or department, it can survive because the defenders of the status quo will fight harder and dirtier than those trying to end the program. After all, it’s the defender’s jobs and livelihood at stake. Most of us would fight hard ourselves.

And if we’re honest, most of us like the status quo. Not only is change scary, but chaos is usually downright frightening, if not hazardous. There have been studies that show that corrupt economies can succeed–if the corruption is stable. As long as someone knows what bribes they have to pay who, they can survive and even thrive. People can be creative because they know the rules. It’s when there are no rules that growth and creativity become impossible.

The major advantage of democracy, as practiced in the West with various checks against mob rule, is that it allows small slow change. The status quo is largely preserved without being stifling. Similarly, regulated capitalism allows ‘creative destruction’ where inefficient firms fail and new companies rise up, but chaos is still averted. The marketplace has rules and does not descend into “he with the biggest weapons makes all the rules.”

Which brings us to SOPA. By now, if you’re reading this, you’ve certainly heard about the Stop Online Piracy Act that magically appeared in the US Congress a few months ago and, if passed, would allow the Government to shut down IP addresses if any users of those IP addresses posted pirated content. This would allow them to de facto censor any cite that the bureaucrats chose, anywhere in the world (since the US controls IP assignments). It’s bad law and I strongly suspect it will be defeated in it’s current form (too much publicity), probably to rise up again more quietly in a different form later.

Why will it rise up again? Because SOPA is a perfect example of law and bureaucracy preserving the status quo. In this case, preserving the status quo of the media conglomerates, from music to movies to books.

A prime example of the media conglomerates getting the law changed is the Copyright Term Extension Act. In this law, pushed through with substantial lobbying by the Disney Corporation, the duration of copyright protection was extended by twenty years. The proponents at the time were attempting to get copyrights extended in perpetuity, so that creative works would never enter the public domain.

Spider Robinson addressed this in his Hugo winning story, Melancholy Elephants. His point is simple; a perpetual copyright will stifle creativity.

This isn’t hard to understand. While there are allowances for ‘fair use’ and ‘inspired by’ uses of copyrighted material, those allowances are only as good as one’s lawyers. If Disney decides to go after a writer or film maker that borrowed from them, however distantly and indirectly, do you think that person has a chance against their army of lawyers? Even if they’re right? The legal fees would crush them. The current legal system is designed not to reward those who are right, but those who can outlast the others. Big corporations with deep pockets have a serious edge. The filthy rich executives at Disney cannot afford to let The Mouse enter the public domain in any way, shape, or form, if they want to stay rich doing what they do now.

SOPA is the same gut reaction. Digital piracy undercuts the status quo. The media conglomerates can no longer get away with charging high rates for content, like they could when you had to buy a CD or a book or go to a theater to get their content. They can no longer control when and how consumers get the content–by restricting their film from appearing in foreign countries for example (aside: one acquaintance of mine points out that she’d pay for legal copies of ebooks if she could get them, but she can’t in her country. Amazon et al won’t sell them there. So what choice does she have?)

So SOPA is an attempt to use the law and bureaucracy to preserve the status quo. The eventual SOPA successor will attempt to do the same thing. If they succeed, we’re likely to end up like the 16th century Chinese, with a lack of creative improvement or true innovation (why produce something new if The Mouse lawyers can say a ‘oops, you borrowed from us, give us all the money you made or we’ll sue’?).

Except the true kicker is, the only way to preserve the status quo is to destroy the internet, much like the Chinese destroyed their ocean going fleets, because piracy isn’t the real problem, it’s the shift to a digital economy.

The status quo cannot survive when it costs nothing to make copies of content. The entire structure of the media conglomerates is based on the fact that it does cost something; that’s how they contribute value, or used to contribute value. People paid them for the distribution of the content via records, books, CD’s, and newspapers. That distribution required physical objects (an “atom” economy) that meant there was a cost to making copies and the conglomerates could do it better than individuals could. After all, if you want a book, you can always copy it by hand, but wouldn’t it just be cheaper to buy one at the store?

Apple and Amazon have figured this out. Apple isn’t charging 99 cents for a song. They’re charging 99 cents for the ease of finding the song you want, the knowledge that it’ll be of good quality and virus free, the security that it’s ‘legal’, and the awareness that you’re actually helping the creator of the content. Apple doesn’t spend its own money on the content. It spends it on making it easier to deliver the consumers the content they want. Amazon is as much of a master of this, if not more.

Now I’m not a fan of pirates. As a content creator, it chafes me when someone else makes money off of a story I wrote and I get nothing (and yes, it’s happened). I do consider that stealing. But going after the pirates is like trying to go after slave traders. They’re clever, ruthless, and there’s always more ready to replace the ones you destroy, as long as there’s profit in it.

Which is the key. As long as there’s profit in it.

The way to stop digital piracy is economically. The slave trade didn’t end because slave traders were destroyed. It ended because people stopped buying slaves (via cultural and legal shifts in much of the world and war in the US). Similarly, the mobsters of the twenties weren’t put out of business by law enforcement nearly as much as they were by the end of Prohibition.

iTunes and Amazon are the way to defeat piracy. People will pay for reputable distribution and ease of access. That’s just not the business model the media conglomerates have been following for the past century.

The new business models require creativity in business. They can support creativity in content creation. Laws and bureaucracy can’t. It’s as simple as that. SOPA’s a mistake, as its successor will be, but we can’t expect much else from those who need the stability over the creativity to remain rich.

On my drive to and from work, I listen to the radio, often flipping stations to avoid the commercials or to look for a weather report. This past week, I caught a Katy Perry Song, Last Friday Night that’s inspired this post.

Now I’m a lyrics guy. Good lyrics grab me, be they country, pop, blues, rock, or Broadway musicals. I’m not a big Rob Thomas fan, but his line, “I’ve got a scar I can talk about” in the Matchbox 20 song Bright Lights nails the emotion and introspection at the same time. Similarly, the lines from the Citizen King song, I’ve Seen Better Days, which go “I’ve seen better days, I’ve been the star of many plays” is just fricking inane (and it’s in the chorus!). So when the Katy Perry song came on the pop song, I listened for the words.

The song’s celebrating a drunken debauchery night that the singer can’t really remember. It has lines about ‘a stranger in my bed’ and not being able to remember if she kissed someone, as well as “It’s a blacked out blur but I’m pretty sure it ruled.” Then it has a repeated refrain:

Last Friday night
We went streaking in the park
Skinny dipping in the dark
Then had a ménage à trois

Last Friday night
Yeah I think we broke the law
Always say we’re gonna stop
Oh-whoa-oh
This Friday night
Do it all again

And this is where I went, “whoa!”

I’m not used to mainstream pop songs played openly on the radio talking about ménage à trois. It definitely makes me wonder what the younger generation is up to. Has group sex become casual enough to toss off as a line about a wild evening? Is it what the ‘cool kids’ are doing? I suspect it’s a standard “Katy Perry being mildly provocative” since she is the one who burst into fame with “I Kissed a Girl.” However, I’m still struck by how casual of a reference it was. I certainly can’t recall any pop songs from the 70′s or 80′s that referred to group sex. Plenty that referred to sex, but not group sex.

But then I realized that the song also implied that they had to be drunk to have the ménage à trois. That implies there are still inhibitions around group sex. Which leaves me wondering… hmmm. Is this as big of a step in mainstreaming non-traditional sexual practices as I thought?

In her post on EAACon, Remittance Girl (RG) said, “Porn is about sex. Erotica is about desire.” I’ve been thinking about that and I think it’s too restrictive.

Now I really don’t want to wade into the semantics and definitions of erotica and porn. There are plenty floating around, including my own non-definition. Basically, they boil down to porn has a pejorative definition and erotica doesn’t. However, for genre purposes, I like a marketing definition I’ve heard (sorry, can’t find the link). Porn’s goal is to get its consumer off. Pure and simple–it’s designed for orgasm assistance.

One of the reasons I like this definition of porn is that it allows the fetishes to be captured. Women in high heels stomping on bugs can qualify as porn, even though with the lack of nudity, it doesn’t fit most laws governing obscenity. The goal is arousal and then orgasm. It’s pretty simple.

Of course, the subtlety of that definition is that, traditionally what we call porn is oriented toward getting men off. This is, of course, sexism at its finest since much of our world’s culture, historically and in many parts of the world today, doesn’t want to acknowledge that women want to get off. But the definition allows for “porn for women” to exist. I leave it as an exercise to the reader to come up with examples.

So, then what is erotica, besides “not-porn”?

If it’s “not-porn” it has to be about more than getting the consumer off. It could of course include getting the consumer off, but that can’t be all it is.

The obvious “more” is desire. Erotic romance is as much about the craving for the partner as it is about the sex. Literary erotica often addresses the conflict between what the protagonist wants, and what they believe they should have. It’s connected to our base. We know when we’re aroused that we are feeling desire and that desire can be the basis for art and literature and much of our common culture. Even if it’s not explicit sexually, there are plenty of examples in art of the conflicts that arise from desire. Heck, take Romeo and Juliet, or Othello, or Anthony and Cleopatra, just to name three Shakespearean works where desire plays a central role.

But I think there are other “mores.” After all, sex is Big. Every person on the planet has to deal with it, even if they do so by cloistering themselves away from it.

A “more” I’m particularly fond of is “curiosity.” I did a lot of my sexual exploration not out of desire but out of “hmmm, I’ve never heard about that. I wonder what it’s like?”

The twin to the “more” of curiosity is “wonder.” I’ve tried to capture this is some of my voyeurism tales. A Mall Tale is about surprise and wonder far more than it’s about sex, because, well, read it to see.

I also happen to like “thrill.” It’s pretty clear that sex is often a significant part of the traditional thrillers. “Bond Girls” exist for a reason. That said, I haven’t read many ‘erotic thrillers’ to know how that subgenre would stand.

Finally, the last one off the top of the head is “bawdy.” I’ve tried to capture this from time to time, most notably in my One-Eyed Dick story.

Is there room for all of these in erotica? Are there more?

I hope so, but as I wrote last week, I think the genre is still expanding and sorting out its sub-genres.

Remittance Girl (RG) wrote a nice piece on the the recent Erotica Authors Conference and the future of the erotica genre here. It’s inspired today’s post.

RG starts her riff on the difference between erotic romance and erotica and porn. While I happen to agree that they’re different markets, I must admit I have some up front issues with labels. I’ve come to believe that, in general, labels do as much or more harm than good. The real world doesn’t put things neatly into categories–we can say, “male and female” but then what about those born with XXY chromosones? Even “alive” and “dead” become fuzzy at the microscopic level, like with viruses, and at points near the end and beginning of life. A story I write is what it is. Adding a label of one kind or another doesn’t change the story itself.

The problem is, labels are extremely useful on the consumer’s end. There’s really not much difference, musically, between pop rock and heavy metal. Same beat, same tempo, and in many cases the lyrics would be indistinguishable on the written page. But by adding the accoutrements of one or the other, it helps the consumer say, “oh, Judas Priest is in the same category as Metallica and I like Metallica, so maybe I’ll like Judas Priest.” When we lack the sophisticated algorithms now coming online for things like Pandora radio, the categories are one of the few tools a consumer has to help them find new stuff they might like.

In fiction, this can be most strongly seen in author loyalty. I like what Dan Simmons writes. I’m therefore very likely to buy his next book, even though he hops genres a lot. I’ll at least look it over in the bookstore instead of picking up an “unknown to me” author next to them.

The interesting challenge with labels, though, is when a category grows. Back in the 20′s, readers had Weird Tales. Horror, fantasy, and science fiction were all rolled into one. As those genres grew in popularity, they split. We’ve then seen refinement of labels within those categories. We have “urban fantasy” and “steampunk” and “hard science fiction” and “space opera.”

In my opinion, erotica is at a similar threshold. In the fifties, Lawrence Block the mystery writer used to keep himself afloat by writing “sex books.” They were all nudge nudge wink wink to the point where they couldn’t quite be classified as pornographic. At the same time, there were a few classics floating around, hard to get of course, that defined ‘erotica’ simply because they were all there were. The Victorian Era novel “Autobiography of a Flea” plotwise isn’t much different than a lot of porn today. It’s about the sex. Anais Nin’s stories are pretty, but to me they’re little more than naughty sexy dreams. I can find hundreds of equivalents online today that would be classified as anything from mainstream fiction to hard core porn.

The genre has grown enough that the overarching label is not sufficient.

The fact that it’s grown should be obvious. Heck, erotica is finally big enough to have a conference. It’s certainly more accessible and widely available in the internet era than before. More small presses are flourishing and more authors are sticking with it instead of just using ‘sex books’ as a stepping stone to a ‘more respectable’ genre.

So we’ve got erotic romance, erotic horror, erotic fantasy, and other hybrids where erotica grafts its explicitness onto another genres conventions. I think that’s good for the genre overall, because there will be some crossover in readers and writers. Even if the crossover is minimal, there’s at least a greater acceptance that explicit fiction is okay.

However, it leaves a gap that is what Remittance Girl is complaining about, in my opinion (I’m putting words and motives in her mouth which I’m sure she’ll jump all over me on, but allow me the presumption for a moment). We don’t have have a “hard erotica” subcategory like “hard science fiction.” As the hybrids have gelled, the middle core doesn’t have its own distinguishing terms. This is important, because otherwise the stuff that’s not erotic romance or erotic horror etc. is just the mush between. Instead of taking the big box of erotica and divvying it up into subcompartments that can appreciate and recognize and respect each other, we’ve got “erotic romance” and “porn” and “all that gunk that no one can sell.”

“That gunk” needs to be marketable on its own. I’m honestly not sure how to do that. As RG points out, erotic romance can borrow the marketing approaches of romance, which has already wrung out what works and what doesn’t. For better or worse, porn has similarly completed that wring out (though the resurgence of amateurs and more artistic European porn gives me hope that we’re not doomed to Southern California sameness, even if it’s that sameness that defines profits). What’s the approach for the yet-to-have-a-good label erotica that’s not either of those?

Unfortunately, I think figuring out how to do that is not something that even a small group of people can force into being. It’s going to take some trial and error and some evolving general consensus. It’s going to require readers, and more importantly buyers, as much or more than writers and publisers. For example, if the stuff that’s left gets called “literary erotica” or “sexual fiction” (my personal choice), it’s got to show that the label attracts buyers. We have to get to the point where they say, “oh, I liked this story by Nobilis Reed, and he calls it XXX, so I’ll look at books by Big Ed Magusson that are also called XXXX.” But, like belling the cat, it’s not obvious how to get there from here.

I think if we can solve that, though, we’ll help writers and artisans in much the way Remittance Girl wants.

This past week, I realized that three publishers are overdue on getting back to me. As a result, I get to write the “did you get it” queries. One of them I won’t write. It was a snail mail submission and their website explicitly says, “don’t stalk us.” Okay, I can do that.

The thing that irritates me is that not replying to someone is fundamentally rude. They’re saying that I’m not worth their time. If I’d been obnoxious or a stalker, that might be true. But polite communication on my part doesn’t deserve being blown off.

This is one area where I do my damnedest to practice what I preach. I’ve had an occasional email or phone call slip through the cracks, and there have been some that I’ve had huge emotional barriers to overcome in order to reply (a couple of calls with ex-girlfriends come to mind). But I do my best not to be rude.

True, politeness has social benefits. It’s also true that in some cultures politeness is more of a lubricant than others. But for me, this is about more than manners.

For me, it’s a matter of honor. Now I don’t mean reputation, which is what others think of you, but honor, which is what you know to be true of yourself. Honor is personal integrity, pure and simple.

For me, honor means striving to keep my word. I’m not perfect, but I’ve become very good at only promising what I know I can deliver. And then delivering it.

It’s actually gotten me quite far in my career. I’m not the smartest guy in my field. I’m not the best talker or schmoozer (actually I rather suck at the latter). But I deliver what I promise with a much higher percentage than the average guy in my field.

But I don’t pursue honor for the career benefits, nor the relationship ones (deeper, albeit fewer, friendships and romantic relationships). I pursue it for the sense of self and the way it makes me feel.

It honestly hurts when I’m dishonorable. My gut wrenches and I tend to obsess about what I did. Stuff I did decades ago can still haunt me on lonely dark evenings. I can usually find my way to self-forgiveness, but it’s a bumpy road and so it’s much better to not have to take that journey.

That’s not to say that honor and lying are incompatible. Sometimes lying is very honorable. And sometimes even rudeness is honorable. I can think of a number of people where I’d be more honorable to refuse to shake their hands than to pretend that nothing’s amiss between us.

But rudeness as an extension of sloppiness? Of considering others to not be worthy of simple courtesies? That’s not honorable. And I certainly would like to see more of that from publishers. An autoreply “we got your submission” is cheap. Learn to use it, and then actually reply to authors in the timeframe you put on your website. It’s not hard, and it’s both honorable and polite.

This past week I rambled across another protest about the objectification of women. We all know that’s bad, right? No one should be stripped of their personhood and reduced to an object in the eyes or behavior of others. Every person, male or female, should be honored for their individuality and their soul and treated with respect. We agree, right?

And now that we agree, can we get back to the real world?

We all reduce other people to objects all the time. To the CEO, the factory worker is an objective set of numbers–cost, productivity, risk. The soldier’s the same to the general. The survey participant to the social scientist. Even the rape victim to the rape advocate arguing for increased police presence. People are reduced to utilitarian numbers to advance a cause, argument, or business objective.

Ah, but statistics are a special case, right? I think not. Is the grocery store clerk more to you than someone to take your money and bag your groceries? Are the other drivers on the road anything more than objects to avoid? We all reduce people to a role all the time. We turn them into titles that we read about in kid’s books. Fire fighter. Police Officer. These are the people in your neighborhood, to quote Mr. Rogers. How many of them do you even know their name?

So perhaps we’re talking about inappropriate reduction. We agree that treating a saleswoman as if she was nothing more than tits and ass is wrong. We’ve objectified her for things that have nothing to do with her role, right?

But that logic says that objectifying a stripper would be perfectly okay. Or a runway model. Or anyone who trades on those items being objectified to make a living and define who they are.

Like perhaps that saleswoman? If she dresses sexily to try to make the sale, is it still wrong to objectify her as a sex object?

And for fun, let’s step into some other areas where we as a society objectify all the time, and somehow think it’s a good thing. Sex offender. Addict. Adulterer. Cheater. Pervert. As the joke goes, “fuck one goat and that’s what you’re known for for the rest of your life.”

I’m always amused when I hear the same people decrying sexual objectification and then turning around and doing the same for sexualities they decry. “I don’t want you looking at me as if I was just a body (despite how I might dress or act), but I will look down on you for being a perverted voyeur in turn.”

Because isn’t that what it’s really about? There are times we want to be objectified. We want people to look at us and reduce us to the desirable trait of our choice. We don’t want the boss to know the whole person–if she did, she might be disgusted! Instead, we want her to reduce us to just those traits that show how great of an employee we are. Heck, if someone were denied employment because “we think you’d be a great worker, but when we look at you as a whole person, we’re not interested” the lawsuit would be instantaneous.

Sometimes that’s even sexually. I know many women that want Guy X to push aside all their traits except for how hot and desirable they are. Maybe not all the time, but at least once in a while. At the same time, they don’t want Guy Y to do the same thing.

To me, the problem of ‘sexual objectification’ is mostly one of education. Not enough “Guy Y”‘s know how to transform themselves into “Guy X.” They don’t know how to recognize “this is the time and place” and “this is not.” Strip club objectification–okay. Workplace–no. Saleswoman–it can vary moment to moment even with the same woman. A mature man can navigate those waters. A boy in a man’s body, not so much.

Objectification is something we all do, and often very appropriately. Sometimes it’s even desired. Decrying it is simplistic or naive. Instead, how about if we focus on getting more maturity in the world?

I recently read an erotica story that hit home a bit more than I expected. No link, because it’s unpublished, but the theme was on the crisis of middle age. Two couples, long time friends, recalled a time twenty-five years ago when they’d swapped partners. Now well into their forties, one of the men struggled with his life and kept wondering if that had been the era when things had been really good for them all.

It hit home in part because this is my birthday week. I’m 43 now, which is right in that midlife crisis sweet spot. On the one hand, life is good. On the other… I can definitely feel the tug and the swirl of the age.

Now I’m not likely to go through the standard trope crises. I already have the trophy wife, thank you very much. I bought the sports car eight years ago. I’m already going through life changes as kid #2 will be born this coming summer. It’s a little disconcerting to realize I’ll be eligible for my pension just as she’s graduating from college, but that’s what happens when you get a late start.

But I still wonder what I’ve done with my life at times. I still wonder, like the characters in the story, if I let the best times slide by.

Mostly these days, those questions are career oriented. I’ve already done the “maybe I should have fucked more women when I was younger” pining that so many seem to do. I know a wilder sex life won’t bring back my youth, or relieve the angst that sometimes shows up at bedtime on Sunday nights when I wonder where my weekend went.

Instead, I think back to my pre-teen years, and the stories I wrote then. I think back to the books I wanted to create, and my desires to be a reporter because that’s what writing seemed to be.

Of course in high school I discovered how little reporters make and how much of their job is pure scut work and went into a better field. I had an amazing science teacher which helped nudge the switch. Well, it’s been 25 years since I graduated from high school. The cynicism has set in and the utter frustrations at the mundane aspects of the day job overwhelm the pleasures.

And instead, I daydream about writing. I wonder what would have happened if I’d stuck with fiction from those early days. Would I have been happier? Would I have been more fulfilled? Or would I have been just as cynical and just as unhappy with the 9 to 5?

I’m all too cognizant of the difficulties in switching careers at midlife. The handcuffs around my wrists are pretty gold, after all. As long as I wear them, I can support a family of four. Following my heart and daydreams has a cost beyond forcing me to eat a lot of Ramen. It’s not a cost I’m willing to pay. So the writing has to be a ‘lunchtime and late nights’ activity until… when? Until at least a day that is not today.

Meanwhile, there’s all that time I can’t write when I can wonder. Getting dressed. Sitting in the back of yet another boring meeting. Sometimes story ideas float through my mind. And sometimes… sometimes I just wonder about the choice of career I made.

Recently, erotica author Mike Kimera hung up his pen. More precisely, he hung up his erotica pen, as he plans to fiction in other genres under another name.

Now Mike’s been around and is pretty popular at the Erotica Readers and Writers Association (ERWA). I happen to consider his story, The Last Taboo, to be a masterpiece. He’s written many others–some very dark, some completely ridiculous (The King’s Cocksucker is ridiculously silly). As a rule, they’re very good. And I add that qualifier “as a rule” simply because I haven’t read them all.

Now Mike’s stated reason (and I’m paraphrasing here) for retiring his erotica persona is that he awoke to how much separation it was creating between him and his wife. She wasn’t comfortable with the fact that he wrote erotica and he “came to realise that the more time I spend being Mike Kimera, the less time I spend being someone that she feels close to.”

Sadly, I understand. “Mike Kimera” was just as real a “self” for him as his given name. For me, “Big Ed” is just as real as the name on my driver’s license (the DMV won’t put “Big” on it for some reason). It’s hard to say it’s a persona when it’s really just another facet of myself. Not separate per se, but not the sides that shine in polite company.

Which is where the challenge of being an erotica author comes in. I get the separation. Not because of any separation with my wife (she reads most of my stories anyway) but because of the societal one. I can’t tell my Born Again boss why I’m taking longer lunch hours these days. I can’t share my triumphs with some of my friends. And I certainly can’t whip out the laptop and write when we’re visiting my in-laws. The fact that I write about sex forces a separation between the self they see and the one y’all here do.

Now I know there are some who believe the maxim of being true to yourself and being “out” no matter what. I can appreciate the philosophy, but like most pure points of view, practicalities too often interfere. I mean, it’s easy to be “out” when your livelihood and peace in your family relations doesn’t depend on it. It’s even easy to say that being out helps to educate, which is clearly the case with homosexuality. The prejudices started to lift over the past two decades in part because so many people realized that they knew gays and that the people they knew were normal and wonderful people.

But, honestly, do I want my son to endure a frosty atmosphere when we visit my in-laws? Because even if they could accept my writing in toto, there would be no way to avoid an adaptation period where they assimilated the new facets with what they’ve already seen. Similarly, do I really want to trust that the guy who determines whether I get laid off or not won’t take into consideration that my, ahem, personal values are rather different than his?

The separation exists because the alternative is worse.

Obviously, one could argue that in a marriage, it’s different. I don’t know Mike nor his wife and I don’t know if there was any attempt to bridge the gap. I do know that giving up parts of ourselves is the process of being in love. We say, “this person is more important than this aspect of myself, and so I will change.” If we don’t, we’re not building a “we”. (and, as an aside, one of the hardest challenges is figuring out when “I will change” is the right answer and when it’s the worst possible answer. It’s never obvious). I had to give up much of my neatnik ways to make things work with my wife. We both had to give up the concept of sleep when we had a child. It was worth it.

But even if Mike’s wife hadn’t had a distaste for his writing, there likely would’ve been some separation. It’s simply from the time and energy to maintain the persona. Every minute I spend at my computer, be it writing or musing or doing website maintenance or participating in chatroom discussions, is a minute I’m not spending elsewhere. There’s a strong argument that that time could be spent increasing the closeness with my wife. That’s part of the choice Mike’s made, I’m sure.

For me, though, that’s not as clear of a trade. I need a lot of alone time to stay sane. I can steal “Big Ed” time from that, and from lunch hours, and from a variety of windows where time with my wife is not an option. I also draw a lot of personal emotional sustenance from my “Big Ed” time. My wife has noticed I’m more pleasant to be around if I’ve been writing recently, so in some ways it actually helps.

Furthermore, I truly believe in the his-hers-ours relationship model (insert gender pronouns of your choice here). Relationships thrive when each person has some aspects of their lives that are separate from the other. It gives them something to bring to the table when they’re together. I allows them to be full independent individuals. It results in a partnership, rather than a single entity with two heads. Watch any cop show to see how partnership trumps a single entity every time.

I realize not everyone will share this philosophy. My response is, “that’s fine. But show me what you really do in your life–not what you say you do or what you believe you do. The philosophy is fine, but what’s the reality?” I’ve had some interesting conversations as a result.

And in the end, there may be some folks for whom it is truly different. Mike’s clearly different than me and I wish him luck. At the same time, I can only say, I’m glad I’m me and not him. The separation of selves serves me well.

One of the challenges the arts, be they visual, performing, musical, or literary, regularly face is “how the heck to we pay for it?” Good art requires time to develop talent, time to produce, and time to perform or otherwise get in front of an audience.

Now I don’t know much about the history of art, but I suspect that over most of human history, “paying for it” was done by patrons. The poor were too busy scrambling for survival. The rich, on the other hand, could afford to spend money on aesthetic pleasures. Similarly, ruling bodies such as governments and churches could commission work to glorify their chosen objectives, using the wealth extracted from their citizens.

I also suspect “paying for it” became easier with the rise of the middle class. Instead of one patron paying for the entire cost, it could be spread among multiple individuals. Obviously, this is less true for some art forms, such as sculpture, where it’s hard for multiple individuals to share a single work of art. However, a good theater run spreads the cost of a play among many non-rich individuals. So does a long concert series. A musician can make a living if enough people pay to see them every night and they don’t have to be the same people every night.

It also became easier for those art forms that worked well with commerce. Notably, anything that could be copied and distributed to “the masses” could have the entire “paying for it” cost spread out among the entire audience. If it cost X to make a record album, and it could be sold at Y, then obviously X/Y determined the number of copies that had to be sold. True, there was often a cash flow issue still since the cost had to be paid before the sales were complete. But there was little need for a true patron.

Enter the digital age. It’s become much harder to predict how many copies of a digital art form could sell. Most of this is simply the newness of the process. There are substantial debates on how much ebooks should cost. The only answer seems to be “less than print books.” Well, that leaves a wide range.

We’ve already seen this impact of uncertainty in the recording, movie, and publishing industries. The big industry giants are largely chasing the blockbusters these days and letting the midlist and minor talent wither. I believe the major reason is simple–they can predict the blockbuster payoffs better. Is another James Patterson novel going to sell? Yep. Is this unknown author writing a fantasy young adult series going to sell? That’s a gamble (which they’ve lost more than once).

However, we shouldn’t entirely discount the problems of digital transmission. The artist can’t control what happens with copies of their work or how many copies get made by others. The copies are de facto free.

Which means that the cost for these art forms is more reflective of the cost of sculpture and much of history. The true costs all reside in the first production. How does that get funded?

I can’t help wondering if we’re headed to a realm with more traditional patrons. I’ve recently participated in a Kickstarter campaign (for Nobilis Reed, here) and I may end up going that route for Deep Dish, if I can’t get a publisher interested.

I also wouldn’t be surprised at more ‘garage shop’ operations where artists bootstrap their way into sustainability. It’s a harder, longer road, but it might end up being just as valid.

No answers–just musings.