If you're signed up for my newsletter, you should have received it already. If you didn't, it might be because I am a dork and messed up. The good news is that I've started using a mailing service, which should help avoid spam filters and bouncing and my errors. If you didn't get a newsletter and want one, you can download the current one here, and you can sign up for all future newsletters here.

There's a contest again in this one, for a free signed paperback of your choice. Anyone can enter.

And now back to writing.

I've been meaning to write this post for a few weeks now but wanted to get other posts out of the way first. I guess it's fitting that this has also become a birthday post.

People are always wandering in new to this blog because of the whole publishing thing, so for a quick recap: I deal with chronic pain. My condition is depressingly formless with no real name, just morphing symptoms that look like a lot of things and might be ten different things but in the end makes all medical professionals scratch their heads. For ease of use, say that I have fibromyalgia and hypermobility disorder. For translation, what I suffer is random, frequent, unpredictable and largely uncontrollable bursts of body pain. It's been in the joints, and it's been in the muscles. It's moved around. It comes and goes. With it comes a lot of body misalignment; for example, this morning I put out a rib getting dressed. Or I might have just been walking across the hall. I've put out my shoulder by nothing more than breathing. Sometimes the pain is minimal. Sometimes it's excruciating. This is something I've been dealing with for several years, and it's something I will deal with for the rest of my life. Some days I am better at dealing with it than others. That's the backstory.

A few weeks ago I became very, very bad at dealing with this pain. I have a battery of drugs, a TENS unit, PT tools and more pain creams than a drugstore, but during the first week in August a bad wave came, and I went under, big time. I had things I needed to do and things I wanted to do, and nothing was happening. I had a friend coming for an extended visit and I could not prepare. I could not sleep at night. I hurt all the time, and nothing I did or refrained from doing helped. The whole summer had been one long slow slide of pain, and that week, I broke. The night before my friend was due to come, I could not stop crying. For a few minutes it was cathartic, and after that it was a cycle I couldn't get out of. I wasn't even upset anymore, but I couldn't stop weeping. While I slept I had strange visions of a silver woman with long hair weeping silver tears that filled the room and emptied her until she was a shell. In the middle of the night I got up, wrote down what was hurting and how I felt mentally, and I handed it to my husband. He's a pharmacist and a longtime veteran of clinical depression, and he took one look at that list and said, "Heidi, you're depressed." And my butt was promptly hauled to the doctor, where I was put on the antidepressant Effexor.

This was something we'd been thinking about for a long time, because several antidepressants have been found to alleviate chronic pain, especially those that have to do with misfiring nervous systems. Several fellow pain sufferers who take these drugs have urged me to take this step for some time now, but I'd been holding off for fear that the side effects might cut into creativity, as can sometimes happen. Dan had pointed out I could always quit if that happened, but I feared having to make the call between pain and work. Also, I was simply afraid of what the drugs might do. It upset me, thinking about toying with my brain. It seemed to me that my brain operated the way it did for a reason. For all the drugs I take, I do prefer to let nature take its course when I can, and I held off as long as I could. But it was clear to me that week there was no more putting anything off. And so Effexor and I shook hands.

Quite simply, the decision has changed my life.

I say it's appropriate this is a birthday post because as I sit here getting ready for year thirty-seven, after battling this condition in all honesty since about 2003, I cannot look back and tell you a time when I have ever felt this good. I don't quite have the energy I had when I was twenty, but I'm amazing close, and I'm absolutely a lot happier. I still hurt, quite a bit—at this moment that rib is really driving me crazy, and I occasionally have to stop typing and shift—but as all my fellow sufferers promised me, on Effexor, the pain doesn't matter. I don't know how to describe that accurately. I keep trying, but I don't think there's any way to get it if you haven't had a lot of pain for years and then abruptly get the feel of dealing with that same pain on one of these drugs.

The best thing I can say is that Effexor has lifted me up. I didn't realize until the first few days of drugs how narrow my world had become, how thin my focus until abruptly the world expanded back to appropriate size. Long-term pain is like water over rock; you do your best to deal, but it wears you away bit by bit until suddenly you are underwater. By will you can raise up again, but it's very hard. And different pain in different places treats you differently. Pain in my legs, hips, or backside makes me restless. Pain in my shoulders makes me lose my focus. Pain in my neck or head cripples me and tends to make me cry, even when I don't feel sad. None of this changes on the drug, but with it I feel separated from the pain. I am more able to observe it and deal with it. Instead of living in that misaligned rib or being angry about all the work I now couldn't do, I took half an hour to lie on a heating pad to try and calm it. I tried to loosen the muscles using PT techniques. I carefully considered my pain pill options. And eventually I became accustomed to it enough that I could work anyway. When I hurt in the middle of the night it's the same sort of thing. I'm much less likely to get up and go to the computer, and if I do it's for a specific purpose. (I was on the computer last night, but mostly so I could email Dan a reminder to fill a scrip.)

But there's more. It's difficult to say at what point it was chicken or egg at this point, but I had a lot of life anxiety too, either independent of the pain or caused by a weariness that came from dealing with the pain. My therapist and I talk regularly about this part of me that worries, that tries to make things safe, so much that we've named it—if you've read my work, you know this part of my brain as Randy. The two are not entirely the same, but they're not alien to each other either; since the Effexor, the Randy in my head has spent several weeks sleeping on a sunny beach with a drink at his side and  beautiful naked men in his line of sight. My god, but it's well earned. I just don't worry about things like I did before. It's funny: I move more slowly, more languidly, judging my actions less and simply riding waves, but I feel acutely that I have more time. Frequently I look up and find myself surprised to see it's noon instead of despairing that it's 3PM. I think so far that's my favorite part.

And I can still write. I still see the stories in my head—three or four have wandered in since the drug, and I've actually done a better job of editing the current mess (Two to Tango) than I've yet been able to. I've done a little drafting of new material, but not much; right now, I'm resting. I will write, but I don't feel panicked about it. Oh, I'm still Virgo, looking ahead and watching currents, debating courses of action, hatching plans and attaching contingences and alternate routes. But I'm doing so with joy, with ease, and with determination, not out of panic or frustration or a sense of being behind.

I am not in nirvanna. I still hurt, and I'm still tired. But I hurt a lot less, the hurt bothers me less, and I have my focus back. The fog is gone. The weariness, not of body but of spirit that goes with dealing with chronic pain, is gone. In the past week I've had three alarming bouts with vertigo—one was while I was swimming laps, which let me tell you, was fun. Two of those episodes were crippling, and the pain that's come with them all has quite literally laid me flat. Even this isn't upsetting me. It concerns me, and I'm investigating things—but still, I'm separate from the pain. It is not me. It is part of me, it is part of my life, but it is not me. I cannot express to you how freeing this is.

Going on the drug was not easy, and I'm not talking about the decision. There were some funky side effects, including a bad drug trip for a few hours the first night. I had to wade up the dosage scale very slowly. I went through bouts of mania and sleepiness. And even with the drug, I still have to do mental work. I still have to be Heidi the Amazon, facing down the pain, the day, the work, the challenge. But what I love most is that I can. That's something I haven't known, not fully, for a long, long time.

Today is my birthday. I'm celebrating with a chiropractic appointment (to fix that rib and check on the vertigo), a massage, a parent-teacher conference, and a homemade cake I helped frost. I'm spending some time with myself enjoying the nice weather. But mostly, cheesy as it sounds, this birthday I am most grateful for the gift of myself. The gift of my mind, cleared, freed, and empowered. Yes, I have to take a pill every day to get it. I don't care. Every day I'm aware of the miracle that feeling this good in mind (and sometimes even body) is, becasue I know quite acutely how it feels to not have it. I am so grateful and so happy. And so very fortunate to have married who I did, because he made sure I got on the drug and acclimated to it intelligently.

Thank you to everyone who helped me with this. Thank you to those who encouraged me here. Thank you to those who quite literally have walked with me as I acclimated to it. Thank you to those of you who have received less of me than you deserved in the past because of the pain but have been patient with me anyway.

Thank you Effexor, for the best birthday I've had in a long, long time.

“You’re a straight, married woman. Why do you write about gay men?”

I suppose this question is inevitable, as is the small whirlwind generated by Out magazine’s interview of Alex Beecroft and Erastes and Lambda Literary’s article (and Victoria Brownworth's response). A gay man writing a gay story makes “sense.” A straight woman doing so needs a frame, unless she is Annie Proulx.

Why do I write about gay men? Because they are the characters who speak to me. Because once one gay man appeared as a secondary character in one story, he took over, and within a few years somehow everything I was writing featured LGBT characters. A character in a series became bisexual; I worried my beta readers would balk, but they said, universally (and with a shrug) that honestly they’d thought he was gay all along but hadn’t wanted to say. An opportunity to write short m/m fiction came up; I wrote one, then two, and now I have eight published works and counting to my name, all featuring gay men.

Why do these characters speak to me? This question is harder. I don’t generally psychoanalyze my characters or ask what part of my brain they come from. It feels like letting the magic out. Mostly I write about gay men because these are the stories I get. Because these are the stories which interest me.

Some of the draw, though, is because gay men are socially defined as such a stark Other. They are the ultimate sexual taboo. The sexual lines gay men blur upset people, and historically gay men simply by claiming their sexuality become men outside the lines. There is a freedom in that which draws me. I have never felt that I fit in socially or sexually, but because of my gender, my race, my orientation, and the position I drew in social roulette, I appear to fit. There are times as I listen to gay men speak, as I watch their sexual freedom, as I see the space they command that I yearn for, and writing it is a way to find some of that myself.

I can understand those who dislike straight women playing in this sandbox getting angry at reading what I just said, crying this is unfair abuse of privilege, etc. I don’t see it that way, but I understand. All I can offer to this is to say I don’t write blithely. I don’t look at gay men as my Barbie dolls I can prop up to suit my fantasies. I believe, with all my heart, that gay men and women have much to teach us all about identity, about sex, about roles, about society. I do not view this as playing in any way. I take my work seriously, and I love each one of my characters and my readers—many of whom, for the record, are gay men.

The controversy over m/m romances focuses on the straight women writing gay men, but it’s a very incomplete vision of the genre. I think this frame gets picked up because it is safe and easy to target. It’s easy to rail against straight women writing what they shouldn’t write, but it ignores so very much. It ignores the fact that Erastes, profiled as a straight woman in the Out article, is bisexual. It ignores the many gay men who write m/m romances. It ignores lesbians who write gay romance and the gender-queer authors and the bisexual and transgender authors. It ignores the men and women of any orientation who grew up outside the prescribed order of sexuality.

It ignores the straight women—writers and readers—who want, desperately, to be more sexualized than they are socially allowed, who want to be “sluts” but don’t want to be shamed. It ignores the gay men who don’t feel they fit in the roles either society, straight or queer, has given them. It ignores the men who read like gay stereotypes in every way socially but who still want only to sleep with women. It ignores the gay men who are nothing like a gay stereotype, who make the most macho of macho men look like a simpering wimp, and yet who still want cock.

Victoria Brownworth says m/m romances are “straight women fetishizing the lives of gay men.” She says also that “all these writers have either taken male pen names... or names that are... purposefully gender-vague—and write about gay male relationships.” Her entire article is woefully incorrect—she believes most m/m novels are historical, which any reader can tell you is not at all the case—and revealing. Brownworth had an idea of what these books were in her mind, did enough research to prove herself right, and damned a genre, its authors, and its readers. Out interviewed two authors, ignored much of the facts about them, and fixated on the straight women once again as the entirety of this genre, oversimplifying us and reducing us to voyeurs, to insipid, vapid intruders of privilege into a world we cannot hope to understand.

I am a straight woman. I write under a female name: my own name, Heidi Cullinan. I write romance. I don’t fetishize gay men or gay women or bisexual individuals. I don’t giggle under the covers as I read or masturbate as I write. I don’t include sex to titillate. I don’t write gay men to use, abuse, or confuse them.

I write gay men because I love them. I write gay men because they teach me. I write what I write because I like happy endings for queer characters, and I get tired of combing through stories to find them only to be disappointed—again.

I write stories with sex in because I like sex. I write sexual stories because I believe it is in sex that we are the most exposed, the most honest, even when we are trying to lie. I write sex because so much of society has told me sex is bad and dangerous. I write sex because sex can indeed be dangerous, and writing is a safer place to explore.

I write queer characters because I love my queer friends. I write queer romances because gay men write me to say they wish they could have been as open or free as my characters in their youth. I write because straight women write me to tell me how they cried when they read about my characters, because the story was a catharsis for something in their own life, usually about sex. I write because I want to portray queer characters as normal and healthy and happy and triumphant.

I write gay men because when I do, I feel free. I write gay men because I’m not writing for Lambda Literary or Victoria Brownworth or the New York Times or my college professors. I write for my gay male friend who suffered a life of abuse, who was told by his family and most of the world that he was wrong, that who he was was wrong, that how he wanted to fuck was wrong. I write for my lesbian friend who likes my imagination. I write for my straight husband who yearns for positive models of men like him in fiction. I write for my bisexual, polyamorous friend who has even less social models than gay men.

And yes. I write for a lot of straight women. And some of them might just be there for a fetish. But this isn’t the majority, and it absolutely isn’t “all.” To judge me and to judge my readers by that demographic only is to dismiss a rich host of other people. It’s the sort of myopia I’m accustomed to seeing in the extreme political and religious right. It saddens me to see it from the queer community.

I encourage anyone who sees m/m romances as nothing more than a straight girl fetish to read more of us before making claims. I encourage critics to check out m/m romance blogs and Yahoo groups and Goodreads communities. I encourage reporters to interview gay male authors and lesbian authors and gender-queer authors of m/m romance. I encourage the curious to get some actual facts about the demographics of the readers from publishers: several publishers. I encourage an honest and thorough investigation of our genre before proposing to know us.

I encourage the laying down of stereotypes and assumptions. I encourage reading a lot more of our works before dismissing and defining us. I encourage Brownworth and others to see us, to know us—just as they would wish others who judge them quickly, unfairly, and harshly to get to know them.

Here and there in recent blog posts I've tangentially mentioned Cate (rosemaryinwheat) as having been a visitor at my house. Here she gets her own post.

I met Cate years and years ago via star_tourmaline, who simply said to the two of us, "You need to meet." We began reading and of course then commenting on each other's journals, and eventually that led not just to conversation but to swapping manuscripts. Cate is featured frequently in the acknowledgment sections of my books, giving me some of the best critiques I get on my fiction. She even has a cameo in Double Blind as part of the fun of last year's NaNoWriMo—Canada Cate is real! The only part that's not true is she says she really doesn't do well at poker. 

Last year I made several nudges that Cate should come and visit, and low and behold, she took me up on it: on August 4 she came, and she stayed until the 15th. Our plans got befuddled a bit by weather, floods, and my usual body stuff, but we managed to take a trip, introduce her to the locals, go to the pool, see a few local sites, and watch a lot of The Daily Show, Colbert Report, and Rachel Maddow Show. We even got to do one "write-in" at my dining room table.

Cate is hands-down one of my favorite people. I was a bit off my game while she was here (more on that in the next post), but I adore her and absolutely loved having her here. Cate is one of those people who is quite simply beautiful. Photos don't quite do it justice, but she has this air about her that reminds me of Eleanor Roosevelt. Grace, beauty, intellegence, patience, quiet charm: being with Cate simply puts you at ease. God knows my daughter fell in love with her. Anna is STILL mourning the departure of Cate—well, we all are, but no one quite as acutely as Anna, who has declared her "my first adult best friend."

It was such a pleasure to have Cate here. I hope she had as good a time here as we had having her, and I hope, quite ferverently, that she comes again. She is and will always be an honorary Cullinan.



(Message from Anna: TANGLE KELP!)

A few weeks ago I went to The House on the Rock withrosemaryinwheat , who came from Canada to visit us. I tossed out several "would you like to see?" options for Iowa and the near midwest, and she leapt at the offer to drive her to southeastern Wisconsin and see The House on the Rock. And so we went.


The wikipedia entry gives good dirty dish. which is of course different than the party line at the main website, which speaks of Alex Jordan's vision. All I know is that I've been there four times now, and each time I'm bowled over by the damn thing all over again. It's almost impossible to describe and must be seen to be believed. Essentially it's a weird house connected to a bunch of warehouses, all of which are filled with nickelodeons and lots and lots of random collections of both antiques and utterly random crap. It takes all day to tour, and you ache when you're done. For both Cate and I the attraction this go-round was the immortalization of The House on the Rock by Neil Gaiman in American Gods. In that novel the characters visit it, an American roadside attraction and therefore place of great power, and after getting their fortunes read by Esmerelda in the Streets of Yesterday and viewing a few choice nickelodeons, they do the unthinkable and ride the World's Largest Carosel, full of animals but no horses, the carosel no one has ever ridden, and doing so takes them off to some sort of conference with the gods in the sky. It was a pilgrimage that could not be missed.



What struck me most this time was how much the tour had changed. We'd come through ten years ago and things had seemed very worn down; we arrived now at the onset of the fiftieth anniversary, and boy had they spiffed up the place. An entirely new entrance greeted us, and now the tour is broken into three parts which guests are free to take a year to complete. We did them in a day and had the tired feet to prove it.

The place was as tacky as ever, and as weird, and as wonderful. It's high kitch, no question, but at times it's beautiful. And at other times it's just so fucking weird you stand there amazed at how weird it is. I admit I miss the old school no-way-out-but-the-early-exit method, which I always toss out as a joke every time I'm in IKEA ("House on the Rock" by Swedes!), but it was a good time. We had as much fun driving there and doing the hotel pool thing in Dubuque as much as anything else. By the end I declared that since Cate had survived a vacation with us, she was truly family.

More of Cate's visit and other news soon.


More photos too, behind the cut.







      

Well hi there, blog.

I'm not even sure how to sum up the past two weeks. I feel like I've lived about six lives in fourteen days, and the idea of summing everything up in a single blog post is well beyond my ken. Rather, I could give a summation, but there are several things which won't be given justice if I don't do each in a post of its own. So I guess this one will be about the flood, and I'll do my best to cover the rest as I can this week.

I live in Ames, Iowa. You can Google if you want to see where that lies, but generally I'm just a bit north of center, thirty miles north of Des Moines. (That would be the capital.) But what you really need to get about Iowa is illustrated by this map.



 Every one of those veins across the state is a river, and this map doesn't even show you the creeks that run through us as well. I'm in Story County (yes, that's cute as hell, isn't it?), and my town sits alongside the Skunk River and Squaw Creek. The latter, in fact, is three blocks from my house, not even half a mile away.

The other thing you need to know is that from Sunday, August 8 to Tuesday, August 10 we got over ten inches of rain all along the Skunk River basin.

Iowa has been very wet for the past few years, and in the past twenty years we've had more 100 year and 500 year floods than I care to chronicle. Might be due to global warming, might be dumb luck, might be something else entirely. What it means, though, is that we flood a lot. This gets interesting as we've also gotten used to building in flood plains and counting on levies and flood walls to keep us okay. Normally they work, but not for the kind of rain we got.

On Tuesday evening we were at the Ames aquatic center, which is built along Squaw Creek. The pool itself is raised a good twenty feet or more above flood stage, but the parking lot is not. All summer the land between the parking lot and the creek has been a sort of marsh; Tuesday night the creek decided it wanted a little more room. While we were at the pool, they kept calling over the loudspeaker, asking people in the lower parking lot to move their cars as the ditch was spilling over. By the time we left, most of that section of the parking lot was underwater, as was the bike path across the street through the park. Brookside Park itself had been closed all week "due to flooding," though you couldn't see much of it from the road.

At ten PM that night, it started to rain. It rained five inches.

I had to go out at 11 and pick up Dan from work; usually he likes to walk, but it was a monsoon, and I told him I'd come and get him. rosemaryinwheat  was here and stayed with Anna, and I set out with the car. It's a mile's drive across flat streets, but I have never been more frightened driving in my life, and I've driven through some heinous snowstorms. The streets were all so flooded the car alternated between hydroplaning and threatening to stall because water kept splashing over the top of the engine. I had to turn around at one street because I could see the water had forced up the manhole cover, and I worried about how much water was there. By the time I got to Dan, I was a wreck. We made it home, but I count myself lucky the car stayed running the whole time. Once home, Dan checked the basement, where both sump pumps were working overtime. Water was seeping through cracks in the floors because the ground was so saturated it had nowhere to go. By some miracle our drains didn't back up. It would only have been floodwater, not sewage, but other houses were not so fortunate.

We figured this would mean a flood, and we joked about if we'd see "Lake Target" again. But when we woke up in the morning it turned out that we were actually in Lake Ames.



There should be no water visible in the photo above under normal circumstances. This is the west side of Ames, innudated by Squaw Creek. A CREEK. The normally docile stream gurgling along beside the park paths crossed the equivalent of three city blocks. Luckily on this side its greatest damage was to Hilton Colliseum. It's a big deal, as not just sports but cultural events are held there, but mostly this side of the creek took out parking lots. It managed to also spare the aquatic center too.

East side, unfortunately, was not as fortunate. Here they dealt with the eastward spill of Squaw Creek, but they also had to contend with the overflow of Skunk River as well. And the result was a disaster.

The east side of Ames saw several apartment buildings, mobile home parks, a nursing home, and many Duff Avenue businesses swamped with floodwater. Walmart and Target and other chains can recover quickly, but independent businesses aren't so lucky. Unfortunately too most of the residents affected likely didn't have insurance: lots of students and lower income people in this area. Add to this that the rain didn't even bring in a cold front—our temps were in the nineties with humidity indexes making us feel like it was 107—and this was real misery for many people.

Being careful to stay out of the way, we did what good Iowans do in this sort of thing: rubberneck and gossip. First on bike and then by car, we drove around Ames and took photos and learned the extent of the damage, which was extensive.
 

Because of the way our roads are set up, there was literally one way in and out of Ames, and for several hours on Wednesday morning it took a convoluted drive north to the next town to get from east to west Ames. It was both frightening and thrilling in the way natural disasters are. It was mind-blowing to see how powerful simple water could be, how it could cripple a town and do so much destruction. Sobering too, as we realized how many lives had been affected, both in living situations and jobs. Counting ourselves very lucky to have been spared except for being grounded on our new island city, we went home with Cate joking about how Ames wanted to keep her in Iowa.

Then at 2:30 the situation suddenly became very personal. Several water mains had broken and drained the water towers. City water was running out fast, and what we had was contaminated. We were not to use the water as much as possible, and any dishwashing, drinking or cooking water had to be boiled first for three to five minutes.

It took several hours for this to fully sink in. I ran out quickly and scored some water half an hour after the declaration came through on Twitter, but even then they were starting to run out. I went out later for paper plates and cups, but by six PM the whole town was cleared out of bottled water and all paper/disposable table service. All restaurants were also closed. And we were still a veritable island. Worst of all, there was rain forecast for Friday. It wasn't meant to be much, but at our water levels, they said even an inch could devastate us all over again. Eventually they got us potable water set up at several stations around town, but it took some time, and until Thursday afternoon, bottled water, free or paid for, was hard to find. We were supposed to flush as little as possible and weren't even allowed showers until Thursday afternoon, and even then they were under orders to be "short." At first people were bad at compliance, and they were talking about the emergency situation lasting until late the following week.

Eventually the roads opened one by one, and after some discussion, we decided to send Cate to carylerg , who lives in West Des Moines, not far from the airport. We left on Friday before any rain started, leaving Cate with Caryle and taking Anna to my mother's house in Ottumwa. We didn't want to take chances that we'd wake up on Saturday to find that I-35 between Des Moines and Minnesota looked like this again, or worse.

In the end, the rain passed us by, which is a blessing. By now Cate is winging her way back to Alberta, Anna is happily at Camp Grandma, and I am eagerly awaiting the announcement that maybe today we will get drinking water back again. We're already back at full capacity for use, and I recently enjoyed a possibly slightly contaminated shower. I still have many flats of water and gallons, purchased by me, donated by FEMA, and by family and friends. Cate got to cook for us (without having to boil her dishwater) at Caryle's house on Friday, and we took decadent showers before we watched 9 to 5. All roads are open, floodwaters have receeded, and cleanup is beginning. Today even the humidity is down.

So this is the story of the flood, one of the many reasons I've been lax in blogging, tweeting, and everything else Internet. There are many other stories to tell, of houseguests and vacations, of writing news, of new ways to battle chronic pain. But right now I'm going to make myself a little dinner and then, for the first time in forever, sit down and write. Blissfully. Joyfully. With my coffee made from bottled water and with one eye on the twitter feed, waiting for @cityofames to declare that my water is completely safe again.

To view more flood photos and stories, check the photo galleries and flood news sections at the Ames Tribune and Des Moines Register; for aerials, check this one.

More later when I have brain. Briefly:

1. We are fine.
2. We are not flooded at our house.
3. Yes, we have to boil the water.
4. Yes, it is going to run out.
5. Yes there is still one road out of town. One.
6. Yes, I will drive down and use your shower if I need to. Thank you very much for offering.
7. Photos
8. Story

I owe a million comments on posts; I apologize. Soon, I promise. Same for emails. Even Twitter languishes. This is because rosemaryinwheat  is here, and we are having too much fun. Also, I need to do laundry. Because I'm running out of clothes. Though sometime here I need to blog about The House on the Rock. Also, there's some personal news. There really is a newsletter coming as well, but it's delayed because I'm waiting on a few details to be final. And now most of the news I was going to post is so old that I have to make new news. Lots of stuff is happening, but it will all be revealed later. Essentially I'm calling August a wash and starting fresh in September.

In the meantime, here are two podcast interviews of me by The Daisy Chain. One is official and  one is bonus because I never shut up once you get me going.

Randy Jansen was sitting on the couch with his hands behind his head, caught in the hypnosis of the television when the front door opened. Sam Keller-Tedsoe burst in, a slightly-smaller-than-notebook sized black rectangle in his hand.

“Oh my God,” Sam said, coming at Randy with his hands up as if warding off any other potential speech. “Oh. My. God. You have to read this book.”

“Book?” Randy eyed the object in Sam’s hands critically. “That’s a weird-looking book.”

“It’s an iPad,” Sam said impatiently. “Randy, this book—”

Randy sat bolt upright on the couch and leveled a look at Sam. “Have you shown this to Ethan?”

Sam looked momentarily confused, then enlightened. “Oh—no, I haven’t, but I bet he’d like it too—”

“Don’t show it to him. Ever.” Randy glared at the electronic object in Sam’s hands. God, it even looked pretentious. “The man buys every damn gadget that walks in front of him.”

“It was my birthday present from Mitch. What, I don’t ever get to use it when he’s around? Come on. Play with it, and you’ll want one too.”

“That I sincerely doubt,” Randy said.

“Scoot over and I’ll show it to you.” Sam wedged himself between Randy and the corner cushion. As he sat, however, he caught a look at the television. He glanced back at Randy. “You’re watching Rachael Ray? Seriously?”

“Shut up.” He held up the remote and turned off the TV. “All right. Show me your iPad.”

“I’ll show you the iPad later. I want to show you this book.” Sam poked at the screen until a faux bookshelf appeared, filled with tiny covers face-front on the micro shelves.

“I’m not really much of a reader,” Randy said. Then he caught a better look at the images and took the device out of Sam’s hands and drew it closer to his face. “Are those naked—and some of them are in bondage gear! Shit, Peaches! You didn’t say it was porn!”


“It’s not porn,” Sam said, wrenching the iPad back. His cheeks were flushed. “They’re romances. Male/male romances.”

“Harlequins for homos? Thanks, hon, but I’ll pass.”

“Randy. Come on. It’s not like that. Well, not like the look on your face. It’s good. Come on.” He nudged Randy’s elbow. “It has sex in it.”

Randy perked up slightly. “So it is porn?”

Sam looked ready to beat Randy about the head with the iPad. “Will you just read it already?”

Randy laughed. “What, right now?”

“Yes!” Sam thrust the device back into his hands. “Read it, and you’ll see. Just a few pages.”

Sighing, but with feigned resignation, because he was curious now, Randy accepted the reader and let Sam show him how to turn the pages. He admitted, only to himself, that it was oddly fun to see the pretend pages curl across the screen. The copyright and dedication and acknowledgment pages flipped past, but when he saw the title page he gave Sam a dubious look.

“Strawberries for Dessert? Fucking hell, Sam.”

“Read the fucking story, Randy,” Sam shot back. So Randy did. Well, he tried. He got through the prologue, but when he got to the first chapter and started reading what looked like an email, Sam bounced on the couch a little and interrupted him.

“Oh! That’s Cole. That bottom one. You will totally love him. He’s just like you!”

Randy gave Sam a quelling look, but Sam was apparently serious. That only made it worse. “You think I would call people ‘Sweets’ and use words like ‘fabulous’?”

“No, not that. But he’s all manipulative like you, and he gives everybody nicknames.” Sam leaned on Randy’s shoulder and stared dreamily down at the LCD screen. “Oh God, Randy, I just love this story. It’s so romantic. And hot. It’s my favorite book ever.”

Randy skimmed a few pages forward, looking for sex, but none appeared. He did see “Phoenix,” though. Well, at least the author had the good taste to set the book in a desert. Which was interesting. Sam hated the desert, but this was his favorite book ever? Still. Randy handed the iPad back to Sam. “Make your husband read it.” God, he hoped he got to watch Sam try to get Mitch to read.

But Sam surprised him. “He already did. Well—I mean, I read it to him. While we drove the run to LA.” He paused, and his cheeks turned scarlet. “We—we acted out a few parts, after.”

Randy’s eyebrows rose, and he glanced at the reader again. “Oh? There are those kind of sex scenes?”

“Well, we had to improvise. Mitch doesn’t have a necktie in Old Blue. Actually, I don’t know where his ties went. And—” His blush deepened, but he had a wicked grin now too. “—we gave it our own little twist here and there. But it’s such a good book, Randy. It’s fun, and it’s sexy, and it’s so sweet.” He nudged Randy’s knee. “It’s like how you fell for Ethan. It’s true love.”

Randy tried to roll his eyes, but they landed back on the screen, which had gone black. “This Cole gets a marriage proposal at a craps table, does he?”

Sam shook his head. “I’m not giving you spoilers. You have to read it yourself.”

“You said he was like me, though. So he’s a mechanic? He plays poker?”

“Well, no. He’s independently wealthy. But he cooks,” Sam pressed on, before Randy could object. “And he likes shopping like you. He likes to travel, though, which I know you don’t. He actually can’t sit still. Has to keep moving. So he goes to Paris and Hawaii and New York.”

Randy wasn’t appeased. “Oh, so he’s me only better?”

“No!” Sam was growing impatient again. “Randy, come on.”

Randy sighed. “This is that important to you, is it Peaches?”

“Yes,” Sam said, looking excited again, probably because his victory was practically in the bag now. “Yes.”

“You going to act out scenes with me, baby?” Randy teased.

“Well, there aren’t any menage scenes at all,” Sam confessed.

“Disappointing.”

Sam shrugged. “We can improvise. It can be like fan fiction. Only in real life.”

“I take it I’ll be playing Cole?”

Sam frowned. “Oh. I hadn’t thought of that. No, I have to be Cole. He only bottoms. Well, and we have to find something for Ethan too. Oh! I know. You guys could be Zach and Angelo! From her other books! Except Mitch has to be Zach, because they both like to watch.”

Jesus, this had to be stopped. “You’re telling me I have to read two books before I get sex? No. I will play Randy. I will play Randy coming to seduce Cole. When I’m done, you can say, ‘Thanks, Sweets, that was fabulous’. Let’s practice right now.”

Sam laughed and passed the iPad back over one last time. “Read. I’ll get you something to drink.”

Oh, maid service? That was all right. Randy settled into the corner of the couch and propped the reader on his thighs. “There’s beer in the fridge.” But when Sam came back from the kitchen, he had a wineglass in his hand.

“It’s Arbor Mist,” Sam said, with a wicked grin.

“Okay,” Randy said carefully, sensing there was more coming, but Sam just shook his head.

“Keep reading,” he said. “You’ll find out why.”

Randy sipped at the wine, winced at the Kool-Aid sweet taste, and resumed reading.

An hour later, Sam brought him a sub sandwich and more Arbor Mist. Randy took them with a nod of thanks and kept reading.

Two hours later, Ethan came home. When he tried to take the iPad out of Randy’s hands, Randy got up, hurried down the hallway, and locked himself in the bathroom.

Another hour later he moved quietly into the bedroom and propped himself on pillows, still reading.

At ten-thirty he put the iPad down on his bedside table. He stared across the room, smiling softly to himself for several minutes. Eventually, though, he moved down the hall to the living room, where Mitch was reading the newspaper at the table while Ethan surfed on his laptop and Sam watched a Golden Girls episode on TV. But when Sam saw Randy, he grinned and pressed the mute button.

“Did you finish?” he asked eagerly.

Randy nodded, his gaze sliding to Ethan. “I did.”

“And you liked it?”

Randy watched Ethan’s lips move absently as he frowned at the screen. Randy smiled. “I did.”

Sam beamed. “I knew you would!” His grin widened. “So. You still want to play?”

At the table, Mitch looked up, suddenly interested.

Still watching Ethan, Randy shook his head. “Not just yet.”

Mitch went back to his newspaper.

But Sam rose, and when Randy dared a glance at him, he saw, with relief, that Sam understood. He also moved around the couch and went over to his husband. “Mitch?” he asked. “You want to go to bed?”

Mitch glanced up at Sam, confused, then looked at Randy. And then at Ethan. And then he stood. “Oh. Yeah. Sure.” He pushed back his chair and rose, letting Sam take his hand and lead him out of the room.

After he tidied up the paper and pushed Mitch’s chair back in, Randy went over to Ethan and pushed the laptop shut.

Ethan looked up at him in irritation. “So first you ignore me all evening, and now that I’m actually starting to make this balance sheet make sense—good lord. You’ve been crying. What’s wrong?”

“I want you to come to bed.” Randy took hold of Ethan’s tie and pulled him to his feet by it. “Bring this.”

“What? Randy—” But Randy interrupted him by leaning forward and whispering what he wanted in his ear. Ethan blinked and looked at him askance. “Really? That’s all you want?” When Randy just grinned, Ethan frowned. “But it’s so… vanilla.”

“I’ll have you read the book after, but I’m not in the mood to wait. Just play along, Slick.”

Ethan’s eyes widened. “You read a book? Wait—on the iPad? That’s what you were doing? How was it? I’ve been wanting to know how that worked—”

“I’ll show you,” Randy said, leading Ethan down the hall by his tie toward the bedroom. “After.”

“Randy, what the hell—”

“Ethan, I will buy you a fucking iPad. But not right now.”

“This must be some book,” Ethan remarked.

Randy closed the door. “Shut up, baby, and take off your tie.”

Ethan did.

After, Randy smiled up at the ceiling after, hands still bound by colorful silk ties, Ethan’s head resting on his sweaty chest. Okay, so they hadn’t stayed vanilla. Or even just strawberry.

But it was great dessert.


Strawberries for Dessert by Marie Sexton is available now in ebook and paperback formats from Dreamspinner Press.
 


Buy Strawberries for Dessert here
Tell Marie Sexton how awesome her books are here, here, here, here, or here.

Courage Campaign interviews Anna, Kyl and I:

Today Anna and I went down to Des Moines to join One Iowa in a rally in support of marriage equality. At 2PM the National Organization for Marriage held an anti-gay rally on the steps of our statehouse. Which to me is a bit rude, since it's MY statehouse, not theirs. Eighty-some people showed up in support of writing hate into the Iowa constitution.

An hour later and two miles down the road, just shy of three hundred of us had a party celebrating how awesome it is to have equality and reminding us to protect it. At our rally the governor's wife spoke as well as the Speaker of the Iowa House. We had balloons, disco music, and lotsa lotsa love.
   
Anna and I also got interviewed by the Courage Campaign as they chronicle NOM's hate tour across the United States. They also put a picture of us on the blog, so we're feeling very celebrity tonight. Though it cannot be clarified enough: the lovely man beside me is not my husband Dan. This is the fantastic and wonderful (and gay) Kyl, and he is AVAILABLE. Act now, guys.

Someone in the comment section of the CC site posted a link to this political cartoon, which really, I think sums up what NOM is trying to do very well. But they aren't going to succeed in Iowa.

I'm mapping out the Two To Tango plot on my whiteboard, trying to figure out where I went wrong. Very quickly I realized Laurie has been avoiding his conflict. Well, that's one thing down.

But I keep looking for the spine, the hard center that will keep the story from going off track. I really, really don't get to have an antagonist, not in body, so I'm trying to find the spine. It's long; it needs solid form. It needs a mainline, a center to keep it organized. It needs a central touchstone. Something for me to hang all the plot on and the reader to follow.

It needs a center. A CENTER.

The story is set, largely, at a community gym/meeting place/service organization. The plot wanders into other places, but one of the goals is to help save this place. Lots of characters are involved in it. Control/aid keeps moving back and forth between Ed and Laurie's hands. Want to know the name?

HALCYON CENTER.

CENTER.

Fucking hell. The center is the center.

I am still trying to get out of Two To Tango. It's still not happening.

It's so close that it's ridiculous. It's drafted, but it has issues still. What is making me crazy is that it's starting to feel like whack-a-mole. If I fix one problem, another part of the story unravels because of what I just did. If I can back up and be objective, overall I think I'm making progress, but it doesn't feel like it. This is because I'm tired of it.

Part of it is that I'm tired, but mostly it's that I'm tired of IT. I took two days off this week to do school/clothes/stuff shopping with Anna. I've taken days off to do scrapbooking stuff (more on that later). I've employed all manner of tricks to get myself into the story. But they aren't working, because I am by and large ready TO BE DONE.

I've contemplated several times just taking August off, period, at least until Anna goes back to school on the 19th, but all that will mean is that THIS will be waiting for me. I'd rather have this done by the time rosemaryinwheat  gets here next Wednesday and shove it off to beta readers, saying, "Go ahead. Take it until the 20th. Really." and then do one more quicky cleanup before sending it to Saritza. I still think this is the best plan. I just can't seem to get myself organized behind it.

It's hard because the draft did not organically set up some of the situations, which always ends badly. There's this project they engage on through the latter half of the story especially, and the project itself is just a device, but it needs to make logical sense and be somewhat believable. I suspect the answer is easier than I'm feeling like it is. I just can't feel it.

The problem is that every time I sit down, a part of me starts screaming, "I'M TIRED. I'M TIRED. I'M TIRED. I WANT TO DO SOMETHING ELSE." Like, right now this part of me wants to lie down on the bed with my feet against the wall and listen to Barrayar on Audible. It sounds awesome. But it doesn't get this writing done.

I think the way out of this is to make deals. I'm going to start setting the timer for thirty minutes. For every thirty minutes working, I get... well, I don't know how many minutes lying down. (That voice is suggesting THREE HOURS. Not likely.) Twenty, maybe? Thirty would be equal time, but that will never get this done, not with all the cleaning and other such things we need to do around here. There's also the problem that once I get out of my rhythm, it's hard to get back in. 

Honestly, I just want out.  I want to be done, I want to let it be what it will be, flaws and all. And I think there's something to that. It just can't quite be this out of alignment.

*Sigh.* All right. I have Kelly Howell on the headphones, and I'm going to go refill my coffee cup. Maybe 45 minutes and then Barrayar.

Want to be done, want to be done, want to be done....

Still editing Two to Tango. I think, perhaps, it's going well, though I hesitate to damn myself by positive thinking or tempt the fates. I'll do my best to diffuse things by saying I am well aware I could still fall down hard on my ass.

People often ask me what my writing influences are. The very largest is simply that I have read since before I can remember and have written things down since I was twelve. After awhile you start to get the hang of it. But there are two very important influences in my prose coming in the package of people. One of them is Jennifer Crusie, a longtime friend and writing mentor. The older, and because of the timing more significant, is Dr. Greg Scholtz, my undergraduate advisor and professor of British Literature. And through him I met my great personal hero, my lifelong influence of fiction and character: Henry Fielding's Tom Jones. And because of Scholtz and Fielding and Jones, I always know a novel is coming together when I get to the Inn at Upton.

Tom Jones is a perfect goalpost for me; in its day it was a scandal and roundly rejeted by Samuel Johnson, who happened to be the subject of Scholtz's dissertation. (If you're into this era's lit: Oh yes, I read Pamela and Shamela.) Tom Jones the character is pretty much always present in my heroes, I think. You have to love a loveable scoundrel. To be honest, Charles Perry is proabably unconscious Tom Jones fanfic. But even in a story where the charcter links to Tom are weak, I always feel good when I can find the inn.

I read Tom Jones first as part of a British novel survey course, and when we discussed the work, we spent a full class period talking about the scenes which take place at the inn at the village at Upton. Tom is a foundling, raised by the noble Squire Allworthy in his country estate; he's the menace of Allworthy's nephew, Blifil, and the object of virginial desire from Sophia Weston, a beautiful neighbor girl. Tom, however loveable and charming, is a conssumate scoundrel, especially with women. Eventually he gets sent from home and makes his way in the world, on the way having many adventures. His journey ends in London, where the adventures come to a climax and he has his revelation, resolution, and happily ever after, where we the audience are gratified to discover that yes, the people we like best ARE the good people, that we were even mistaken as to their social standing, and yes, the bad people really are scoundrels. The guy gets the girl, families are reunited, and everyone gets exactly what they deserve.

But all this is set up at the center of the book, at the inn at Upton. It's a nexus point for all points of plot and character, and very nearly every major player in the book is present (comically so in most cases) at the inn. They come together, they run into each other, they escape each other. All desires and resolutions are firmed up or discarded here; all masks are torn down. Those who pursue Tom no longer pretend they are doing so for any reason but that they hate him; Sophie, even after finding ANOTHER of Tom's indiscretions (this time possibly with his mother, though that works out in the end too), still wants to chase him down. Even Tom comes to some sort of understanding of his own nature. All enter Upton with a bit of rough, but all exit fully gilded to see their way to the end.

Best part? You only notice this if you pick the thing apart in a British survey course.

The Inn at Upton in Special Delivery is the crossing of Wolf Creek Pass. Sam is anxious about going over, but once he does so, there's no turning back. It's tidy that the mountain range is also a physical divide, but I loved that this was there to give him the jostling only a narrow squeeze can do. I think in Double Blind it's the limo confession, though it's less tidy there. In Hero it's the Bollywood movie, maybe, though I'm really strecthing it now. For Miles I think I didn't quite get one, which is sad. Sweet Son, obviously, is the night in the woods. I don't plan to have these centers where transformation happens, but I do love them when they happen, and I absolutely love it when I know it's coming. It feels like touching hands with my most ultimate mentor.

In Two To Tango the inn at upton is the Nutcracker performance. Plotwise it marks a growth point for both heroes; emotionally, it's where they both commit and where everything which happens after becomes cemented. Once again, all players come to the inn; in fact, I think I'm going to edit it a little to make them all literally there, if it works. It's tidier and might lend something I'm missing. For me as an author trying to revise a story that went flat after the center, this is my point to see where and what I lost. To note themes and plot lines--and to begin ruthlessly organizing and even culling them. They've had ten chapters to get themselves in order. If they haven't laid down veins now, they were ideas that didn't pan out. This isn't the climax, but for me from a story point, it's downhill to London from here, and I will be proceeding with a sharp eye and a mind for order. 120k is no length to be mucking about.

So that is where I am today: the Inn at Upton, shaking hands with my personal hero again. I can't say that Henry Fielding would necessrily like what I do with my novels. But I can hope. At any rate, he's certainly in no position to object or tear me down with satire.

On to the inn.

I sat down this morning to start work, glanced at my twitter feed and saw this



Well trained by my spouse to always leap to the worst conclusion, I immediately thought, "Oh god, don't tell me one of them died." (Them being Frantz and Helmut, the two brothers that make up the group ES Posthumus.) I clicked the link. Unfortunately this time Dan's turn of mind was correct. Apparently Frantz of E.S. Posthumus passed away in May.

I'm pretty much processing the real impact of this as I write, so pardon the babble. If you've been on the blog here a long time you know that I absolutely love this group. For those who don't know, THIS IS MY FAVORITE GROUP. This is the music that cuts right into my soul and makes it stand up and scream OH MY GOD YES. This is the music I pull out when I'm really, really stuck, or when the world cuts too close to the bone and I need to fill with light. This music above all makes me see color and light and opens doors to new worlds. Above all, this is the music of the Etsey series, which most of you are saying, "What???" because it's not published yet.

The fact that I've now seen the whole of ESP makes me feel like someone just removed the floor. I'm sure I've got nothing on Helmut, but goddamn, I feel so CHEATED. By the universe, I guess, so nothing like railing against a monolith. I just... fuck. I mean, the first album is good. The second is great. The third felt like a group just starting to soar up and out over the terrestrial plane. And now I feel like some random muzzle from the cosmos shot it down. And that's it.

I hope it's not. I hope Helmut, like all artists, is able to use great pain and loss to make more art. Not just because I want to hear it, but because I don't know many places where I saw the kind of beauty and craft I get from ESP. I hope Frantz, from his more celestial place now, still gets his hand in. I hope this year is the dark curve which marks the ascendance of something eventually even greater.

If not, or at least for now—Helmut, Frantz, your work is profound. You fuel my imagination like nothing else. Whole scenes from novels appear by listening to you. Plots are unraveled. New horizons appear. When I'm down, when the clouds get too low, your music is the sun. You are a vital part of my creative life. Thank you so much for the music, which even if they took away all my CDs and hard drive and ipods, would still sing on in my soul.

At the end of every manuscript, every time I finish anything, I play this song. It seems appropriate to play it now.

Just finished DW Season 5 finale (big kisses to slavetopassion !!!!) and loooooved it! We are officially Team Pond in the Cullinan household.


Will post more tomorrow and answer emails and comments and babble about other things not quite as interesting as the finale of Season 5!


(Psst! Bow ties are cool! And so are fez.)

(Fezzes? Fezi? Feezum? Fezzee?)

(So time for bed. So well past time.)

This is another one of those writer navel-gazing posts about process. If you don't want to play with these balls of yarn, feel free to walk on by.

I have had two stories so far spring out of my head like Venus from the sea: Double Blind and Nowhere Ranch. Every other story has taken me through at least mild hell, and some of them have seriously taken me to the edges of my sanity. Two to Tango, while not quite the latter, didn't spring forth fully-formed, either. It is currently a finished draft, but it is also a mess.

What do I mean by mess? I mean that it doesn't quite work, but the fix is not obvious. It's one of those Escher drawings where the stairs lead nowhere or invert themselves. Except with Escher it works as art. I suppose fiction could work like that in theory, but this isn't that. This is just a mess. It contradicts itself in places, and the bones aren't right. I could polish up the outside, but it would still hunch and wiggle in places that I don't care for it to. To fix it, I have to get down to the bones.

This is where I think a lot of writers freak out, and to be honest, the few days before approach I'm not exactly joyous either. It's hard enough to hold a whole story in your head; to pull it apart and analyze it means you might find out there's nothing there. Or you might know something is there but still not know how to fix it. Scariest for me is knowing that there is only so much managing you can do, that eventually the story has to just be. Oh, you can always go back and rewrite it, but in my experience the bad bones stay in place. The cosmetics just change. This isn't surgery. This isn't radical restructuring. This is boiling down and finding the stock and making minor (or major) adjustments to the broth. Every writer, I'm sure, has her own process. This is mine.

First, I read through it. I give it a few days to cook, and then I read through the whole thing again. Often I find that it's held together better than I think, but if there are problems, I start to feel them. I do some tweaks as I see them, but mostly I just get a feel. I note the issues on my markerboard: themes that fizzle and die, arcs that flatten or vanish, repetitions, etc. I note soft spots and try to diagnose the overall problem. Sometimes I see it right away. Sometimes I don't.  I just keep reading and keep writing things down.

This sounds so calm, doesn't it. Well, I'm not when I do it. Usually I'm very nervous, and I leave this process very agitated and sometimes depressed. Sometimes I still don't know what's wrong. Sometimes I know but don't know how to fix it. Sometimes I know how to fix it in theory but not practice. It's a very hard moment, because this is where the glow and high of drafting is gone and now I have to face reality. Very often the story I wanted isn't there, and now I have to face the story that is.

Though sometimes I find out I wrote the wrong one in a few places, that I got led down the wrong road. That happened this time. There are whole arcs that I bailed on, whole sections that when I wrote them they felt great, but when I reread it, they feel flat. I have to decide if I cut or revise or move things around or expand. This one is feeling a lot like Special Delivery did on the end of the first draft, which was, to be blunt, a big fucking mess. It had no antagonist, no central question. Neither does TTT. Kicker is, this time I don't know that it's going to have an antagoinst. The central question is also very, very vague. All the usual tricks won't apply to this, not without radical rewriting.

You can knot your brain over this stuff. It's very easy to turn to the bottle of self-doubt and get drunk: the reason this isn't working is because I'm a fraud, because I've finally lost it, because this is a crap story, [insert self-depreciation here]. This is why between finishing the draft and editing I painted a room and cleaned the house. This is why I keep playing Plants vs. Zombies. I have been quietly having my OH SHIT over the task, but now I'm going to work. Because that's all you can do with this: you have to work. I haven't lost anything. This is just a snarl. I will sit with it, patiently, until I get it.

Which is why we start with the frame.

By frame I mean, what is the structure of the story? What is it about? This is where the reader comes in. What will a reader engage in with this story? What will they sit down to see? I can say all I want about how this is Laurie's mental monolith and Ed needs to come to terms with his injury, but nobody's picking up the story because of that. So that was this morning's markerboard, writing things down, organizing, peeking under flaps. And in the end I found the frame, and it's weird, and a little scary, but I think it could be fun, if I can figure out how to make it work.

The frame is that this story is about Laurie and Ed's dance.

The whole story is about dance, about steps and leading and following and arc and tease and build and resolution. It's a romance, so it's about two people dancing together, literally and metaphorically. It's about the pairing, the conflict, and the communion. The central question is: How do a professional dancer with stage fright and a permanenetly benched football player dance together? What happens when they do? That's it.

That's hard.

It's hard because it's vague. It's hard because there's no bad guy to defeat, no organization to defeat. It's hard because the tension could pancake at any moment because every move must remake it again. There's nothing to create or destroy, just something to watch, and it has to hold attention. Each move must be precise, but look natural. It must be rehearsed and orchestrated but must look as if it flowed like water. It must be breathtaking and difficult but look easy.

If you want to know why I've been drinking wine on twitter a lot lately, this is why.

But I know the way out. And because this is a navel-gazing post, I'll tell you what I think that way is right now.

• CHARACTER. I always want character-driven stories, but Laurie and Ed need to have their glitter on. The draw will be the boys. They need to bring it from the word go. 
• PACING. With no natural push from an antagonist, the pacing cannot lag at all. The subplots will need to move like tiny machines in the background, but I need to keep the throughline moving.
• DANCING. That's the theme all around. I need to be careful of resolving anything too quickly. It's tied with pacing, but this is more than just a natural arc. This needs to be a new arc, something unusual but engaging. Something that makes people forget this is a dance. It needs to be choreographed.
• JOY. This is the most dangerous one. If I drop joy, it could be technically perfect but not engage.

I'm well aware that this as a battle plan is still pretty vague. It's going to be bad enough that I'm saving a new Scrivener document so that I have an easily accessible copy of the old version so I can mess around. This will be the time for killing darlings and making hard calls, about checking ego at the door and finding story and story alone. It's about sacrificing perfection for beauty and meaning. It's about listening and moving and... well, about dancing. This is so about dancing that I now have a sticky on my monitor that says DANCE.
 
I know there are writers who read this and that they struggle too. I know that in those dark moments it's easy to say it's impossible, to feel inadequate. To feel overwhelmed by the mess. I hear you. That's me too. Sometimes I get lucky, but mostly I get a mess. And how I get out of it is that I just keep working at it. How? I show up, I sit down, and I work at the snarl until it's done or at least useable. And I drink a little wine and kill a few zombies when the occasion calls for it.

I start with a mess, and I make it a manuscript. One word, one arc, one dance step at a time, until it's done. And now that I've given myself this little pep talk, I'm going to go do it.

Right after I swim a few laps and get the last of the jitters out.

If you aren't reading Marie Sexton, you need to start, and in happy coincidence, today she has a brand new story for you to read.

All right, if you read this too early it will be "available soon," but soon is really, really soon. And it's already on Kindle.

I loved this story. It made me think of Raymond Carver and that close narration, sparse and only essential prose and vivid imagery. I still have the sun-bleached swimming pool painted starkly across my brain. Sexton is passionate about character-driven story, and One More Soldier is no exception. And if you love a throwback, you will love the late sixties vibe.

Yes, Marie is a friend, but I'm pimping her book because I also love her work. And if you think I'm gushing now, you wait until August 6 when Strawberries for Dessert is released.

One More Solider. Buy now and be happy.

I just dropped my daughter off at a friend's house for an hour, and because of a schedule snafu, I'm not going to a PT appointment but am hanging out before I have to take Anna to clean a horse instead. Dan, meanwhile, is at work. I am home alone. The fact that I did NOT go to Tobacco Outlet and buy a pack of Dunhills* is a sign of my personal and moral development. Honestly? I'd rather have the Dunhills.

Lutin, as per usual, has this all summarized nicely (and as usual, with some spelling errors) on the Daily Fix.

You have to kind of split your head
hopefully not open
but you have to divide mentally your attention now
between looking ahead to the future
with enthusiasm and courage
while dealing with some very present realities
that will of course lead you directly TO that future
if you don't let the current situations
drag you down.
Something about Saturn leaving Virgo for the last time (BITCH, GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY HOUSE) and Jupiter and Uranus and the moon. Stuff. Things in the sky. Whatever it is, I feel it. And I would like a Dunhill.

It's not easy being Virgo, and it's no more fun being Virgo with Scorpio rising and a Cancer moon. The drama, it bleeds, and it makes a mess on the floor, which is so unpleasant and must be cleaned. Plus, there's nothing a Virgo loves more than to insist, thin-lipped, "I'm fine," and this drama stuff makes it difficult. It's especially annoying when the Virgo part knows its all really manufactured bullshit anyway. But the crack cocaine is that this is drama about PLANNING. Planning, now. That's very different. Planning is very important. And so here I am, sweet corn season in Iowa, and I'm not licking butter off my fingers after I devour another ear. I'm eating my own arm. Where should this manuscript go? What should I ask for? How can I make this a solid career? Am I doing it right? Is there something I'm not paying enough attention to? Does that social networking thing really matter? Does anybody actually USE LinkedIn beyond accepting connection requests from people? Aren't I supposed to actually write occasionally instead of worry about all this horseshit? How can any of this be validated? Should it be? Seriously, aren't I supposed to be writing right now?

As Annie Lennox would say, these are the contents of my head. Which is why, thank you Jesus, I am signing with an agent.

You will now have questions. They will be one or all of the following:

1. Why do you have an agent? You're writing m/m, a niche genre. Have you not read your royalty statements? You want to share THAT?
2. HOW DID YOU GET AN AGENT, HOLY SHIT!!!! They don't even answer my queries!
3. Who is your agent?
4. Um... what's an agent?


Questions answered, in reverse order:

An agent in this instance is a literary agent. Essentially, she will be my gatekeeper. It is her job to sell my books. She will receive my manuscripts, tell me "good job" or "fix this please" or "tweak that, I have an idea," and then she will sally forth and sell my ass to the highest bidder. And she will go for the highest bidder. The best deal, both monetarily and contractually. She will look not just to the now but to the future. Because this is about career and money for both of us. We would both like some of each. And by signing with her, we each get linked to the other. My success is hers. She gets 15% of everything I make that she sells. So she will try to make that sale higher and higher. Not with promotion, really, but with placement. It's her job to know where to sell me and what to get away with. It is her job to argue over contracts. I have input here, but whereas talking about contracts make me skip right over Dunhills and go to vomit-territory, she thinks they're fun. They are something to be conquered and mastered, god bless her soul. It is her job to be networked and savvy and a killer salesperson. It is my job to write, consider her reports, make some decisions, and sign things. And not smoke Dunhills.

My agent is Saritza Hernandez. She is the "epub agent" at the L. Perkins Agency, which is a New York agency, for those of you raising your eyebrows, though in the epub world I'm not entirely sure location matters anymore. I'm connected to them, and should the opportunity arise to get in on the more traditional NY scene, there they are. But also, this means Saritza is privy to their knowledge and their experience and their contacts, and as the divide between epublishing and traditional publishing further blurs, this is going to be pretty damn important.

How did I get an agent? Jesus. You really don't want to know. Frustration, poor impulse control, and Twitter. And dumb luck. You know when you hear the best way to do well is write a really good book? Yeah. That. She liked Special Delivery. No letter, no query, no nothing. Just, "Um, so, can I ask you a question?" And she said yes, what is it, and I started blurting out how much I hate trying to sell shit and she started selling herself and my potential future, and I thought, "Wow. This is intense. I want this working for me. Yes, please." So here we are.

And now you want to know why.

The answer is that cryptic opening about astrology and the Dunhill reference now so recurrent four of you are now smoking even though you never smoked before in your life and six former addicts are gnawing their fingernails and mentally mapping the distance between them and the nearest store. Do I need an agent in this small genre with very, very small profits? Do I need an agent when I already have contacts with publishers and credits enough to submit on my own and be heard? Do I need one when I already take the time to read contracts carefully and WILL argue points that upset me?

The answer to all these questions and the others I just couldn't think of is YES. FUCK. YES.

ME, I need one. Oh, some of you, no. A lot of people are smarter than me and less neurotic and many other superlatives, and those people are fine. Me, I'm a mess. I have Randy Jansen in my head. I calcuate odds without realizing I'm doing it, analyzing outcomes, examining futures, making myself crazy until even though I'm very, very smart, it is so much easier to just play prop poker and work as a mechanic and take life as it comes. But unlike Randy, I do have a bit of ambition. Largely I'd like to contribute financially to my household and pay for Anna's college and take trips to spawn more plot bunnies. Beyond that is gravy, but my ambitions and my current reality are not quite lining up. And yes, sorting out the business stuff is work. Lots of work. The promo I don't know about. I think most of it is masturbation, really. I think mostly I try to be accessible and out there and myself, and if people like that and decide to click on my website to see what the crazy person is all about and end up buying a book, well, so much the better. Mostly I'd like to write really good books and have them sell because they're really good books and those are always popular. But I can't write at the pace you need to write to make enough money and be competitive AND sort the business stuff and still be good. Not without substance abuse.

So this is why an agent. Yes. Right now she is sharing the crusts of my peanut butter sandwich. But the idea is that she'd like to be shaving off the heel of my porterhouse steak, so she'll be looking to get us both a better meal. My job is now to write good books. Really good books. Her job is to find the place for them to go and make us money. Yes, at first this will be a bit of a cut, but I'm hoping not for long.

I'm still having a hard time putting this worry doll down. And yes, there are moments where Randy is still whispering odds into my ear. But I try to send him off with slavetopassion and Mitch for more porn and quality time, and I try to say things like, "That's for Saritza to worry about now." It will still take a few days for that to sink in. And it doesn't make everything go away. I still have to unsnarl Two To Tango, a task which is the other half of the Dunhill obsession. And yes, as I write it and it gets longer, not shorter, and I wonder where this should go and what I should do and whether or not I should just kill myself, I say, once again, "That is for Saritza to worry about. Just unsnarl the fucking plot," and back we go.

Of course, I still have to unsnarl the fucking plot. And for this God made coffee, whiteboards, and Jameson's whiskey. Or, sometimes, Arbor Mist.

I swear, soon I will actually blog fun and random things like the murals I'm painting on Anna's windows and sunsets and bunnies and other such things. As soon as I get a life, I will blog about it.

Back to work. Which will not involve worrying about contracts, odds, or cigarettes.






*Dunhills are cigarettes. Fantastically wonderful yummy British cigarettes. I got re-addicted when I visited michaelwebster  in 2007. Do you know what he smoked, in the land of Dunhills? MARLBORO LIGHTS. The pain. The pain.

Pride and desire send prosperous merchant Eryn on a personal quest to find the perfect man to share his life. Eryn has heard of a mythical land beyond the mountains, where it is rumored that a benevolent, magical prince rules a kingdom of equality and harmony, and so he sets out, alone and determined... but even the most focused of determination will only take Eryn so far.

A destined true love does wait for Eryn, but the path to his future is rife with risk, and he will face not only his deepest fears, but also pain, torture, and bone-deep desolation as he struggles to reach Wyn, a sweet, beautiful, and fragile man trapped in an enchantment. If Eryn is to have any chance at a happily ever after, he will have to conquer the illusions that have always consumed him, even if it means sacrificing life and limb for love.

[Buy now/also see excerpt]


This is a kinky little fairytale. It's somewhere between Snow White and The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty, and honestly, there's some Baba Yaga and Maiden King in there too. Quite kinky. Quite dark. I walk right up to the edge of non-con and shake its hand in a few places. I figure telling this either spares you some discomfort or makes you go "Ooh!" and run to buy it faster.

This novella was written of course to sell, but the whole time I wrote it for my darling, beloved slavetopassion. Jason has wanted "something about pain," and between the education of porn he's given me and the nudge to read Bloodraven, mixed up with the fact that I adore him and wanted to please him, this is the book that resulted.

So there you have it. Sweet Son, ebook novella, available now.