Kathleen Bradean

What Are You So Afraid Of?

by
Kathleen Bradean

It seems like a simple thing. You make up a story. You write it. People read it.

Except that none of those are simple. Each is a painful task. We concentrate on the middle one here.

You Write It.

We talk about characters and technique and style, grammar, method, the senses. Each of these are important, but as Lucy Felthouse mentioned in her post, when you’re writing (first draft, I’ll assume she means), you have to let go of all that and just write. In the first draft, give your story good bones. Flesh it out from there. But even when you’ve written a technically fine piece, it may still lack that spark that makes a story live.

I’m rewriting the third book in a series. I thought I had it done, so I sent it out to beta readers. By a third novel, you’d think I’d be past the need for them, but I’m not. Two of my beta readers had some interesting things to say, things I needed to hear, things I already knew deep down but didn’t want to admit because I wanted to be done.  And while Nan and Ali didn’t say this in so many words, what I was hearing – through my special filter that lets me hear things people never intended to say – was ‘What are you afraid of?’ Because both called me out, in their very polite ways, for backing off writing two scenes I found difficult to write. My characters talked about those events happening, but I couldn’t bring myself to show it to the reader.  And here’s the part that makes me roll my eyes at myself – I knew that.

But enough about me. What about you?

Erotica is difficult to write. Everyone seems to think it’s so easy, but it’s incredibly hard (go ahead and giggle. I’ll wait). The first few times, you might be embarrassed to write those words, or to envision a sex scene in detail then rewind your mental movie of it and watch it all over again in slow motion many, many times until you’ve got every moment down. Having made that leap into the transgressive side of the street – as Remittance Girl might call it – you’d think we’d be able to boldly explore, to peel layers back and examine what lies beneath, to be frank and unapologetic. But I find it isn’t so. Nothing physical daunts me, but raw emotion is the stuff of my writing nightmares and I will perform all sorts of literary tricks to get around it.

What is the hardest thing for you to write? What would it take to make you face it? 

Heads. Heads. Heads. Heads. Heads.

by Kathleen Bradean

I was thinking about characters. In particular, secondary characters.
Someone, and I wish I could remember who, said that good secondary characters
have something else going on. Meaning that they don’t sacrifice their entire
lives to serve the plot. Maybe Samwise Gamgee did that for Bilbo Baggins in
Lord of the Rings, but your secondary characters are going to seem more
realistic if they know other people beside the main character, and have their
own goals and ambitions. If they have a name, they have a fate, and it shouldn’t
necessarily be tied to the main character’s fate. 

Tom Stoppard wrote an entire play around the problem of secondary
characters.  In Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern Are Dead*, Stoppard follows two secondary characters from William
Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The title comes from a throw-away line about their fates
near the end, the last they are heard about. From the beginning of Stoppard’s
play, the two are aware that they’re in an unnatural world. The one we think is Rosencrantz flips a
coin over and over and it always comes up heads. They vaguely remember being
summoned, but nothing before that. They know they are on their way somewhere
but aren’t sure why. They aren’t even sure which of them is Rosencrantz and who
is Guildenstern. This reflects the scene in Hamlet where the king and queen use
different names for them. It isn’t until much later, when Hamlet names them, that
they know for sure.

Because they have no agency outside serving the plot, they
are trapped by it. At the end, the one we think is Guildenstern comments that
there must have been a point where they might have said no, but they missed it.
He thinks it must have been near the beginning. Truthfully, it was before the
play began and they were brought into existence to fill a specific purpose.

Along their way, they fulfill one of their purposes in the
play Hamlet, and that is to meet the troupe of players who will help Hamlet
confront his uncle with the murder of this father. They run into this troupe
many times in RAGAD. They even watch them perform a mummer’s play version of
Hamlet, including their own deaths. The leader of the troupe offers many
cryptic warnings, but the two have no ability to flee Elsinore. They will play
out their parts.

This is the truly clever thing about this play (other than
the dialog, and the conceit, and everything, actually. When Hamlet says, “Words.
Words. Words,” he could have been praising Stoppard). When R&G are onstage
(in Hamlet), the scenes in RAGAD are the scenes from Hamlet. But when they leave
the stage in Hamlet, we follow them rather than the other characters. We get an
accounting of their time. The problem is, they have no idea what to do with
that time or even why they have been summoned to Elsinore by the king and queen
because they are, even in this play, mere secondary characters whose only
reason to exist is to serve the plot of Hamlet. Even their deaths have no
significance. Their deaths happen off stage and are merely noted by a line—in Hamlet.
For poor R&G, they must see it through to the end, because they are
offstage in Hamlet but always onstage for RAGAD, a play in which their deaths
are a scene.

I watched both a full production of Hamlet and Rosencrantz
and Guildenstern Are Dead for this article. (I suggest a full version of Hamlet
because, to misquote a line from Amadeus, ‘There are just as many words,
Majesty, as required. Neither more nor less.’ A truncated version of Hamlet is
a crime against art. This version with David Tennant is very good. If you only
know him as The Doctor from Doctor Who, you’re in for a treat.) If you have
time, I strongly suggest watching both within a short time frame to better appreciate how they
interlock. You can learn a lot about secondary characters, if only to realize
that when they walk offstage in your story, they should have a background,
memories, an identity—everything that makes them a whole person in their own
story. Imagine how dull it is for your secondaries to wait in suspension for
your MC to walk through the door. Or even to give them a name.

*If you have not seen it, please watch Rosencrantz and Guildenstern
Are Dead. Tom Stoppard is amazing. (You can view it in parts on YouTube as a last resort).

Please, Sir, Can You Spare An Ounce of Desire?

I haven’t written much erotica lately. I’m generally a private person, plus I was raised in an emotionally repressive family, so admitting publicly to any weakness is extremely difficult for me. But I’ll admit that personal stress is just about killing me. I know other writers who are going through much worse times now, so I feel a bit like a whiner even mentioning the death in the family, the company I worked at for so many years closing its doors, a bit of a health scare, and other family drama on top of all that.

Misery isn’t a contest. We’re all winners at this race to unhappiness, and at the same time, things could always be worse. That’s what keeps you up late at night, tossing and turning. It’s the great monster that eats up the hours of darkness and makes you watch them disappear with eyes wide open– that things could always be worse. And you have imagined every possible variation on worse, haven’t you?

Sometimes, don’t you wish you could hang a sign around your neck that says, “I’m really fragile right now. Please be gentle with me.” So that when you start daydreaming at a traffic light about the list of things you must do that you’ve never done before and start panicking a little about ‘how on earth am I going to take care of this’ and don’t see it turn green that the person right behind you wouldn’t sit on their horn. Or that you didn’t feel such crushing shame for breaking into tears because some little frustration like the market carts being stuck together overwhelmed you?And wouldn’t it be nice if the entire world would just pause while you deal with your troubles so that you don’t have to run to catch up later?

So many things can stop your ability to write. It doesn’t have to be extreme grief or one of you worst fears coming true. Things can be going great and you can still be blocked. The stories, they’re always with you. The technical skills, the craft of writing, that’s in your muscle memory now. But the desire to write? That’s the thing that eludes us when we’re blocked.

It may be worse for erotic writers because how do you write passion and desire when you don’t have any? My emotions have practically flatlined from the strain at this point. I cant summon it no matter how hard I try. So if your writing portfolio is fat and sassy right now, if seduction twinkles from your fingers like rubies from a maharajah’s rings, and you pass me on the street looking dispirited and unstoried, spare an ounce of desire for me, won’t you? Because I’m tapped out.

Saving P. L. Travers

One has to wonder what was going through the minds of the Disney company when they decided to make the movie Saving Mr Banks. Did they truly think that in the internet age they could control their image as the company has in the past? Did they think the real story wouldn’t come out? Or were they banking on the extreme likeability of Tom Hanks* and the immense talent of Emma Thompson** to overcome a story with no real tension, because we all know the movie got made? Let me be super cynical here and guess that they knew someone would cry foul over their rewrite of history and hoped the controversy would spark interest in what otherwise sounds like the sort of film I’d possibly watch on cable three years from now while working out when I couldn’t find anything else to watch. (That should be a new Oscar category)

But why bend history until it broke, unless Walt Disney went to hell and he’s coming before Satan’s parole board, so the company decided to make a PR film to bolster his plea for early release. I’m just guessing here. Really, why did this story NEED to be told this way? Why did it NEED to be such an unctuous lie? “See the Feel Bad Movie of the Year!” Is the company coming up on a special anniversary or something? Maybe the 100th year of all things Disney and they wanted remind everyone who built the empire? (It was actually Roy, the financial genius brother, but facts should never get in the way of a good story. Even original source material should never interfere with Disney’s version.)

The aims of the story told in this film seem to be twofold: make everyone believe that P.L. Travers was ultimately won over by the folksy charm of Walt Disney and she was happy with the movie he created; and convince us that she was a real cunt who deserved to be lied to anyway so it was okay that he did it, because his right to make the movie he wanted to trumped her right to protect her creation.

By every profile of her I’ve read, P.L. Travers did not suffer fools gladly. Amazing, talented, pioneering, intelligent, opinionated people often aren’t nice, except when you’re a woman because when you’re female, your personality will always be the main focus of criticism of your creative output. It’s unfair, but that’s how the game is played. Unless you’re P.L. Travers and you don’t give a damn, or perhaps you simply feel that strongly about some matters. Then you dig in your heels and say “No,” for personal reasons, for artistic reasons, for whatever reason you want to because it’s your art and you should have a right to protect it from the things you most despise. And what Ms Travers despised was animation, American film, and all things Disney.

If you squint hard enough at this movie, you see P.L. Travers fighting hard for artistic integrity. Those who don’t work to see her in a better light will only see an unreasonable woman being mean to America’s Uncle Walt. What a bitch! Amirite? But even that doesn’t bother me as much as the utter lack of honesty about what really happened. They didn’t show her crying in misery at the premier that she (allegedly) had to beg for an invitation to. Because Saving Mr Banks was made by the Disney Company, they decided to Mary Sue it rather than give an honest depiction of the rather callous way Walt Disney lied to her.*** Showing her being drastically unhappy with the finished product would
have made a much more interesting film. I wish they would have had the balls to reveal him as a ruthless bastard. Show him betraying his word, his honor, and not giving a damn because he got what he wanted. That would be braver. That would be a film worthy of critical acclaim.  Poor P.L. Travers was dead right all along to mistrust him. Alas, because the winner got to write the script, she will go down in cinematic history as the villain of the piece. So I’m here to say that it doesn’t matter if she was the bitterest pill ever, she still had the right to protect her work without being criticized as a person for doing it.
 

*  remember when he used to be allowed to play assholes in film? I miss that.

** Isn’t she the best? If I were ever to be stuck in a country house in England for a week, she’d be at the top of my list for people I’d like to hang out with, because, hey, writer and actor! And she’s funny. Plus she seems like the type who’d know how to play sardines. 

***I will not argue that he understood much better than she how to make a
hit movie.She wasn’t the intended audience for his film. And it’s possible that nothing he did would have ever made her happy. That still doesn’t make it all right to promise something knowing full well you aren’t going to keep your word.

Peep Show

by Kathleen Bradean

When I realized I had the Christmas Eve slot, I tried to think of a suitably festive entry that would, I don’t know, make writer’s hearts glow like twinkle lights on the tree in Rockefeller Plaza or something like that. I’d love to give every writer that rush of joy that comes when a story reveals itself. Maybe an hour of writing as gleeful as puddle-splashing used to be back when we weren’t stodgy enough to care about wet shoes.

Not going to happen.

I tried. I really did. I’m not cut out for O Henry’s Gift of the Magi style holiday stories. Or Dickens A Christmas Carol. Or Jean Shepherd’s A Christmas Story (you probably know the movie better than his books. May I suggest Wanda Hickey’s Night of Golden Memories, and Other Disasters). Or even David Sedaris’ SantaLand Diaries. Every thought turned from glowing, welcoming candles in windows to the Little Match Girl freezing to death while she hallucinates. Okay, not that big of a downer, but if I wrote a Christmas story, it would probably be as melancholy as Judy Garland singing Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas.

The problem is that writing that story would demand that I tap into a rather bleak moment in my life. You know how there are method actors? I’m a method writer. I cry my eyes out when I write sad scenes. (You have no idea how hard it is to admit that) A scene that takes a reader half an hour to go through may take my weeks to write, and during that time I stay immersed in the emotions I’m trying to capture so I can experience the physical part as well as the feelings, and it’s exhausting. It’s difficult enough to do for characters who exist only in my imagination, but at least I can walk away from it if I need to. If I’m pulled too deeply into it, I can shake it off. I’m not sure it would be that simple if I delved back into something that was very real.

Plus, oh lord, can you imagine the humiliation from pouring your soul out like that across the page? I’d be running an emotional peep show for voyeurs to examine like a frog opened on a dissection board. Would it be even worse if I exposed my guts like that and it bored readers? Oh my god. People walk past pain every day and ignore it. Would it be like being a little match girl, but striking my matches for the crowd while the indifferent world passes by?

Oh, now I’m just being histrionic.  But I think this is where we talk about fear. Writers who are fearless say things frightened writers don’t. They dare to dig deep into those things that make you squirm. They sit in the booth and bare their soul to anyone who plunks in a quarter. Writing erotica is a fearless thing, but it’s not nearly as hard as writing raw, naked truth about yourself. I’m not sure I’m that fearless. It hurts too much. Or maybe this is where we talk about suffering for art.

Maybe one day I’ll work up the courage to talk about how when I was three my parents begged me not to tell my older sisters there was no Santa because it would ruin their Christmas. I never believed in magic. I’m simply not wired that way. But then there was that year when I was in my twenties when we were so very, very poor. My daughter was three, and I wished so hard that Santa might be real, just for one night, so that when we woke Christmas morning, there might be a tree, lights, and a gift for my little girl. And how, for the first time in my life, I actually woke Christmas morning and peeked into the living room to see if Santa had visited, because I needed it that much. And of course I felt like an idiot for being disappointed, because I always knew there was no hope. Strike the match, and watch the flame die.

Great – now I’ve depressed the hell out of you. Merry Christmas indeed. I knew I should have trotted out a glowing tree in soft focus, with a fire crackling merrily across the room, and put a cup of wassail in your hand.

*Sotto Voce* White Elephants

by Kathleen Bradean

I’ve sold about seventy to a hundred short stories so far. I stopped keeping track several years ago, so I have no idea what the real number is. It doesn’t matter though because all that’s important here is that I’m somewhere between none and zillions and have some experience with the art form. Yes, experience, both as a reader and a writer, but I still think I barely know anything.

While reading an anthology last week, a short story that took place over a span of time– let’s say a week although I don’t remember– didn’t work for me. As I set the anthology aside, I decided the reason why was that short stories work best when confined to a short period of time, say over an hour or so.  Hills Like White Elephants, I thought. But that’s just stupid thinking because A Good Man is Hard to Find.

It isn’t just short stories that send me into long bouts of contemplation. I frequently muddle over the problem of the erotic novel. Many readers want sex in every chapter. Pages and pages of sex each chapter, with more and more partners thrown into the mix and some kink as well, and oh what the heck, lets fall on our swords with that old trope that sex equals love, shall we? The problem with erotic novels like that is that the sex scenes tend to become skimmable.  They’re wank fodder and while there’s nothing wrong with that, the characters in those sorts of stories tend to have as much depth as a hologram.The plot, what there is of one, is a thin excuse to string together sex scenes. To be mean about it, they simply aren’t good writing. Damn it people, erotica can be well written! We deserve better quality. 

I look for something more contemplative and literary in erotica than a wankfest. Although, of course, I love to be aroused by a story. But because most published erotica tends toward a standard ‘let’s go on a sexcapade’ escapist fantasy, I often think erotica is at its best in short form where, strangely enough, writers seem to do a better job of addressing deeper issues and building dimensional characters than in long form.

But then I think of Donna George Storey’s Amorous Woman and Remittance Girl’s Beautiful Losers and change my mind. And oh, I wish the incredibly talented Teresa Lamai’s (ERWA veterans will correct her name for me) story set in Venice with the Russian dancer and American painter was available to readers because it was such an amazing work. It is possible to produce an erotic novel that’s literary, that’s art, that transcends. It’s just that they’re rare and don’t tend to find publishers because they are sensualist fiction rather then sexual.

This isn’t a terribly coherent post because this is one of those hamster on a wheel debates I have with myself. My thoughts run and run but only end up going in circles. Are short stories best confined to a short time frame? My thinking now is that confined, rather than time, is the operative word. Everything in a short story must be confined to the pertinent data. The story may occur over a long period but we only get the glimpses of things that matter, delivered in tightly written paragraphs where every word pulls its weight. The same is true maybe of erotic fiction in the novel form. No matter how long the work is, there’s no room for gratuitous sex scenes.

But you know, I’m not set on that. I could be easily convinced that I’m concentrating on the wrong things, that confined writing is the opposite of what’s needed, and that erotic novels work on a literary level more often than I think. Convince me. Give me examples.

Meanwhile, I’ll be puttering around inside my brain muttering “Hills Like White Elephants” and wondering how much I can leave off the page, as if writers can adopt the zen philosophy of art where we could make as much use of white space between as we do with words. Which is a different topic. Maybe.

The More I Write, The Harder it Gets

Writing isn’t like driving or cooking. Not for me. It seems to only get harder as the years pass. I don’t mean making up stories to tell, I mean the craft side of it.

I’m trying to tell a story.

A story is a plot, a series of events.

It should be simple enough to write it, but it isn’t. Not anymore. Maybe the problem is having too many options, or perhaps it’s an excuse not to write. But what I’m learning is that there’s no such thing as simply telling a story. I have to know how to tell it.

My first mistake, it seems, was picking the wrong main character. Events are facts, but those facts are seen from a certain viewpoint.  Originally, my main character was the murderer, but how can the events be a murder mystery to the killer? They know who dun it. Not a lot of mystery there.

So I got a better main character. But I’m still working on their compelling reason to figure out who the real murderer is. I hope that will come out as I write and I can fix it in the rewrite. For now, it’s a bit nebulous and nebulous leads to weak writing, so I’m not happy with that.

My second mistake is my always mistake, meaning I make this same mistake every time so you’d think I’d know better by now but apparently I don’t. And that mistake is: I start way too far back and take a long lope toward the inciting incident. I’m trying to put that inciting incident closer to the beginning, like in the first chapter.

It used to be that I could just sit down and write. I miss those days, although I suspect I’m a much better writer now. But why is it that every other craft seems to get easier with practice while writing just gets more difficult? It’s my inner critic, I know. I want to write well. I can’t figure out how to balance that painstaking and time-consuming drive with the pressure to spin out work as fast as I can.

I have no answers here. What is like for you? Is it getting harder?

~~

LATE ADDITION that has nothing to do with my post, but have you seen this visual associative thesaurus? So cool!

What Is Allowed?

By Kathleen Bradean

Lately, I’ve had to rethink my relationship to the word
Artist. I never felt comfortable using it to describe myself, but now I’m using
it as a defense of my work.

Artist –

A person who
practices one of the creative arts.

A person who
is skilled at a task or occupation.

A habitual
practitioner of a reprehensible activity.*
                                                                                                                   

I don’t see the word “But” in those definitions. “Paint what
you want, but don’t offend anyone.” “Write what you feel, but not just for
shock value.” “Create what you want, but to be a true artist, it must be
aesthetically pleasing to the general public.”
 

As erotica writers, we’re aware of the big taboos. Many
writers see the taboos as a brick wall at the end of a path and aren’t ever
tempted to step toward it. Some writers climb the wall and precariously balance
on the edge. Others see the wall as the beginning of the frontier and
gleefully, or contemplatively, leap into the beyond.

I’m here to tell you that you can write the taboos. You may not ever get published,
but publication isn’t the be-all, end-all goal of writing. Being published is a
step down a well-trod path but it isn’t for everyone and it has nothing to do
with the creative process. If your first thoughts in creativity are
self-censoring (“I can’t write that because it won’t get published.”), you’re
limiting yourself. Yes, yes, yes, if you make a living off your writing, you
write with an eye to be published, but in reality, very few writers make a
living from their work, so for the majority of us, why not put artistic freedom
first in your hierarchy of needs and publish-ability further down? And even if
you do write primarily with the goal of being published, would it hurt from
time to time to let yourself run wild across the page?

As many of you are aware, I write a SFF series The Devil of
Ponong under a different pen name. While it takes place on a different planet,
readers tend to identify the main character and her people as Pacific Islanders
and the other main race as being from southeast Asia or China. I’m white. Some
people have asked me, ‘How dare you appropriate another race?’  That was when I had to admit I’m an artist.

An artist dares
anything. An artist creates. That is their sole responsibility.

However, no one has to like what I create.

The accusation I dislike the most is that I’ve somehow
stolen someone’s voice by writing this story. Stolen or silenced – both are
terrible things to say. Just because I wrote a story doesn’t mean I’ve stopped
someone else from writing theirs. Is it important to hear the voices of different
cultures? Absolutely. My world gets bigger and smaller at the same time when I
read a novel by someone with a different POV.  I want to read voices from other cultures. I’m
not the enemy here! I’m a potential reader.

Is it wrong to speak for someone else? Well, (tiny cough),
that’s been happening to women and minorities forever. Does it make it right?
In what sense? No one questioned Tolstoy’s right to create Anna Karenina.
Whether or not readers think he did a good job of depicting a realistic woman
is another matter. So I’d say, yes, an artist has the right to speak for the other,
just as readers have the right to say, ‘That’ isn’t like anyone I know from my
race/religion/neighborhood,’  ‘This is
racist or misogynistic,’ or ‘Yeah, this character is just like my aunt.’  And the thing is, none of us has to agree.
It’s art. It’s subjective.  

*Oprah voice* You get and opinion, and your get an opinion,
and everyone gets an opinion! Yay!

Bringing this back to erotica, from the practical side, you
can always point to the taboos and let them be your guide. But from the
artistic side, why not write what you want to? Create. Be a bit mad. Follow
your imagination down rabbit holes and into dark corners. Let it creep through
the gritty side of your fantasies and peek through the curtains into a parallel
universe. What will it cost you? Or better yet, stop thinking of writing in
terms of profit and loss and start letting yourself be an artist.

Are you an artist?

Yes.

What is allowed?

Anything you dare to create.

~~

*They meant ‘as in con artist,’ but I’m sure some people would include erotica writers in that category. Reprehensible. That word makes me think of prehensile, and suddenly I’m off in tentacle pornlandia.  <==This is why we can’t have nice things. But we can have naughty.

Finding Your Writer’s Voice

by Kathleen Bradean

I think I found my writer’s voice years ago when we were in Taccoa visiting relatives. Seeing relatives is real easy in Taccoa as I’m blood kin to at least twenty percent of the population. It’s a small town; my mother had sixty-four cousins; you do the math.

Oh, she didn’t have sixty-four living cousins. There were only about twenty-eight of them. Living cousins, that is. A few got killt off in road accidents and that type of stuff. Many of the sixty-four didn’t make it to their first birthday. Then there were the diphtheria and cholera years where whole branches of the family tree got pruned off in the course of a week, sort of like when a tornado goes through town and tears away tree limbs and sends them flying through your window or shattering your home and all you can do the next day is stare numbly at the damage until your eyes get itchy from tears. Then you drag the back of your hand across you runny nose and go on living because what else are you gonna do?

I only know about all the cousins that passed because there’s a book that lists everyone in the family since we came over from England. One time I was real bored because it was my turn to be the person my sisters hated and they’d sneaked off to the creek without me. I knew where they were but the rules of that particularly nasty game were that you had to suck it up and take it so I had to make do until they forgave me for whatever sin they’d decided I’d committed. Seeing as Toccoa is surrounded by the southernmost crest of the Smoky Mountains and this was years before satellite, Grandma’s TV only got snowy pictures and ghosts followed the actors. Besides, my grandparents belonged to the cult of ‘go play outside’ so after a long sigh and an eye roll that nearly got me in big trouble, I took the book out on the back steps and balanced it on my bony knees while I flipped to the page where my mother’s name was listed, and my sisters and me with her, and that’s how I found out about all those dead cousins. I counted them, even the babies who only lived a day. Then I crawled under the house to play with the barn cat’s kittens.

My elusive writer’s voice wasn’t under the house with them.

We were driving around town– We must have been on our way to church. Grandma was wearing those white cotton gloves and I had on a dress which was a miracle in and of itself– and Grandma said “Mister L” — isn’t it funny how they called each other Mister L and Missus L instead of using their first names? Maybe because they flat out hated each other. Anyway, Grandma said, “Stop the car. I want to show the children this house.” It was a big old dark green thing with a mansard roof that had seen better centuries. We said we could see the house fine from the car, but she insisted.

Grandpa didn’t need to stop really. He always drove so slow we could have popped open the doors and stepped out like it was one of those carnival rides on a continuous belt, but he pulled off the road, which probably brought considerable relief to that blue Chevy that had been dogging Grandpa’s back bumper since we passed the county high school.

The cicadas were buzzing like mad in towering, pale green trees behind the house. Gravel got in my shoe as we walked down the drive so I hopped on one foot while I dumped it out. Grandma stepped onto the porch and knocked on the door. When no one answered, my sisters and I shuffled toward the car, not in any hurry to get back in because Grandma and Grandpa had been bickering all morning about whether we’d go to the Methodist church (his) or the Baptist (hers) and we would have been glad to miss both. So when she called us over and tolt us to look through the windows so we could see the inside of the place, we climbed up on the porch with her. I cupped my hands around my eyes and looked into the parlor. Some guy was asleep on a couch in his t-shirt and I could hear a game on a television I couldn’t see. I tugged on Grandma’s sleeve and whispered frantically to her to move away from the window. Maybe I only thought I was was whispering because the man sat up suddenly. We yelped and lit out for Grandpa’s car, but Grandma just stood there on the porch peering in like she never heard of a shotgun before. The door yanked open and the guy’s hair, which was sticking up like he’d licked a light socket, I swear reached the top of the door frame. He stared at us sleep stupefied for a good moment. My sisters and I held hands and our breaths.

Turns out he was a cousin.

One of the living, of course. We may be southern but we aren’t gothic.

~~

Maybe you wonder how you develop your writers voice and maybe you don’t. I went looking for it but got sidetracked and haven’t bothered since. Supposedly, that’s what an MFA program does for you. But I’m convinced that focuses on the wrong thing. If the story is first person, it has to be written in the character’s voice, not the writer’s. Otherwise, the writer is intruding.

I didn’t find my writer’s voice in Toccoa, but I can make it sound as if this narrator is me. It’s channeling the way a story would be told by that narrator. It’s cadence and vocabulary. It’s judiciously ignoring grammar in favor of voice. I wouldn’t suggest writing dialectics as a rule since they are often annoying, but those three words inform the reader about the narrator in ways that the rest of the text can’t, so I did it anyway.

If you’re a writer, you may have voices in your head. Let them speak on the page. Don’t worry about your voice, because unless you consciously steer your writing to a different one, yours will shine through.

~~

The Devil of Ponong series

We Will Thwart You, and Then We Will Mock You

By Kathleen Bradean

Please read Remittance Girl’s excellent write-up on all things censorship in the UK. Then don’t get too cozy, my US friends, seeing as
we’re living in a pre-fascist society hurtling toward doom of our own making if
things don’t turn around fast. And Canadians, gosh, I hate to say it, seeing as
you’re usually the sensible neighbor compared to our ‘drunken frat boy passed
out on the lawn, ‘ but you’ve got some weird-assed reactionary crap going on
under your own roof lately too.
 

It seems the churches have about given up on controlling us.
I mean, they do try, but even the choir is sneaking out during the sermon to
play hide the communion wafer with each other. So here come our governments stepping
into the power void. Seems humans can’t survive without someone wagging a
finger in our faces. They learned from the churches that the best way to
control people is to thwart natural sexuality, but the government doesn’t want
to be obvious about it, so they’re trying to shut down the ability of UK citizens to search for
erotica and adult content.

Hmm. Amazon just won a HUGE contract to host government
stuff on their server farms. Perhaps the whole ‘hide the literary salami’ game where
they disappeared all erotica (except big seller FSOG from a big publisher got a
magical pass) was just a sales demonstration of their might with
index-obliteration. Hmmm.   Oh wait, that
sounds like a conspiracy theory. They probably just did it because… reasons.   “Oh,
we’re Amazon, and we’ve decided money is gross! Get away, evil sales.”  Yeah. I can totes see that.

This week, Tumblr sent multiple fandoms into vaporlock by
hiding all their slashy fanfic memes, as well as the sites that played by the
rules and admitted they had adult content or were NSFW. (and got shamed into sort of bringing them back)

And then there’s that whole thing with Blogger turning
uptight maiden auntie on anyone with links to ickle adult sites on their blogs.

This affects all of us, no matter where we are. Writers and
artists, our blogs and Tumblrs and books have been banished to limbo without
last rites. Not deleted, because oh no, that would be “bad” government
censorship. Just made invisible. Disappeared. It’s Turn of the
Screwed.

In the UK, Cameron can order Google to hide information on
breast cancer. Oh, that’s not what his censorship is supposed to do, but that’s
effectively what happens. We have seen it many times before. Cameron can also try to make it so consenting adults
can’t read perfectly legal stories — again collateral damage of poor policy. Or make it nearly impossible for rape
victims to find  support anonymously
online. And be sure that girls can never find information on their own bodies
because there’s something so terrible about female genitalia that no woman must
ever be allowed to see it. Do you think you can really protect people by denying
them access to information, Mr Cameron?  I don’t feel comfortable calling you a cynical, lying bastard without knowing for a fact that you are, so I’m going to assume that you’re so technologically illiterate
that you shouldn’t ever be allowed near a piece of legislation involving the
Internet, computers, surveillance, telecommunications, or any technology. Even if you are, you
should know this won’t work. Ask countries that tried to block off the entire internet
during revolutions and outright slaughter of their citizens. If they couldn’t
stop the Tweets from finding a way past electronic borders, what chance do you
think you have?

By the way, do you know which one of the examples above will find a way
to reach its audience no matter what you do?  Erotica. 

You, Amazon, Tumblr, Google– You’re  just the latest wrinkle in a war that’s been raging
since the first time someone picked up a stick to draw a cock in the sand and
someone else kicked dirt over it. 


And we’ve always won
this fight. From well-fondled copies of Lady Chatterley’s Lover to bawdy tales
around the campfire with Chaucer, we endure. 
We laugh at you, with your silly belief that you can kill an idea and
control people. Pandora’s Box, baby.  It’s
open, and if you try to put a lid on it, we will find another way. To reach our
readers, if we must, we will sell our novels and anthologies under the genre
title Romance (Let’s see you cut off 50% of your sales, Amazon). Or Westerns. Or
Mysteries. Or  Literature.  Or all the genres.  To hide in plain sight, we will use euphemisms
so obscure that readers will leave an Urban Dictionary tab open to figure out
what’s going on. Or we will go Shakespearean on their asses. We will change
faster than your filters can keep up.  We
will be agile. We will be goddamn Kaiser Soze—poof, and we’re gone, as far as you know. But not
really. We will always be here. Because we are writers. Because words are our
fucking tools, and we know how to use them.


~~

Here’s a petition you can sign (UK citizens, one supposes), but personally, I think respectful phone calls work much better. Also, VOTING.

Hot Chilli Erotica

Hot Chilli Erotica

Categories

Babysitting the Baumgartners - The Movie
From Adam & Eve - Based on the Book by New York Times Bestselling Authors Selena Kitt

Affiliate Disclosure

Disclosure: We use affiliate links on our site. What are affiliate links? Affiliate (or partnership) programs are created by businesses (like Amazon) that pay sites (like ERWA) for referring visitors to the business. Affiliate programs pay the referring site a percentage of products purchased via the affiliate link. You can help keep ERWA alive and kicking by doing your online shopping for books, movies, sex toys, etc., via ERWA affiliate links. Help support ERWA.

Categories

Archives

Pin It on Pinterest