“Here.  Here.  Here.  Here.”

The cricket under my bed is keeping time with my
heartbeat.  Laying on my back in the darkness, alone, looking up, little
warm flashes of heat lightning in the clouds light up the ceiling overhead
through the opened window. I wonder if my heart is beating too hard and if I’m
about to have another panic attack at two in the morning for no goddamn reason
at all.  It’s hard getting by on two or three hours of sleep every night.

“Late.  Late.  Late.  Late.”

I have never been alone in my life.

Because of my odd religious background, as a young man I
grew up communally, always surrounded by people.  I lived communally with
men and women from all over the world, sharing various houses and various
responsibilities together as a group, as a tribe.  Afterwards I was married
and had a family.  There was never a break in between where there was no
one around me.

Laying still; hoping for sleep or less woeful dreams, and
watching the little puffs of light come and go against the white ceiling. 
Thunder would be comforting.  Or maybe a train going by, that high
lonesome sound, followed by that hysterical shriek of power. 

An interviewer asked Keith Richard what went wrong with the
Rolling Stones first lead guitar, Brian Jones.  Why did he come to such a
bad end?  Richard said “His problem was he loved being a rock star
more than he loved being a musician.”

“There.  There.  There.  There.”

Something happened to me that made me love being a writer
more than I loved writing.  I’ve been blocked since. The cellar door I open
to go down where the stories come from, I can’t get to it.  The story
fairy locked it.

Things seemed to converge all at the same conjuncture. 
My mother in law in Panama needed eye surgery.  She had health problems
that threatened to end her at any moment.  But her strong heart drove on
heedlessly like an engine even as she dwindled.  My wife, close to her
mother, has gone to Panama on an open ended visit that will certainly cause her
to lose her job as well as maybe changing her as a person.  My son has
just moved out to embark on life on his own as a young man must.  And I am
alone.

But there was another thing as well.  I had been
discovered.

For many years I had no friends and didn’t actually know how
to make friends because, living communally, I had never needed to learn. 
I was a mentally solitary person, living high in my head where the stories and
the fantasies and the voices were and happy to go on living in that world,
though I felt my loneliness always.  I think this is a common thing for
writers and poets.  I was adapted to an interior solitude while still
being a person who needed people.  Writing was my way out of that
solitude.  Black ink looping from my fountain pen like dark silk spinning
webs of fantasy and desire.

I discovered and joined the Unitarian Universalist church in
my town and the effect was life changing.  I had found my natural tribe,
my natural beliefs and with it a ravenous desire for friendship and
people.  Gradually I began to come out of my shell.  I didn’t keep my
writing life hidden because these were also creative people, many of them far
more accomplished than me. 

A small group of strong natured, well educated women
discovered my writing and loved it.  And loved me.  It was as though
a unicorn had wandered into their midst.  We loved each other’s company
and for a time I was a phenomenon.  And then my star fell.  There was
no reason and no explanation.  But the damage had been done.  I had
briefly been a rock star instead of a musician.  And how I loved it. 
And how I longed to get it back.

The panic attacks began first in church.  Panic attacks
are the evil cousins of religious ecstasy.  They boil up from inside and
take you in their undertow and you wave your hands for help and people think
you’re just being friendly.

With these experiences I began to discover my own
insecurities, my insatiable addiction for approval, adoration if
possible.  When my play “Fidelis” debuted in the Le Chat Noir
theater downtown I walked into the theater bar on opening night and someone
said “That’s the writer! Sanchez-Garcia! He’s the one who wrote that
play!”   Everyone in the bar turned to me and applauded – me –
the solitary one, who had never been applauded for anything in his life. 
There he is!  There goes the writer.  Everyone smiled filling the
bar’s dimness with Cheshire teeth.  Oh, how I smiled back in my little
moment in the sun.

Understand, my loving tribe was unchanged.  Most people
who knew me and had made up their minds about me liked me fine, except those
who had dumped me altogether.  But my vanity had been awakened and with it
a terrible neediness that plagued me like a drug. 

Then came the masks.

In the novel Moby Dick, there is a scene in which Ahab has a
huge argument with his first mate Starbuck.  Starbuck is worried that they
are committing blasphemy in Ahab’s monomaniacal pursuit of the white whale
(“It’s just a whale!”, but Ahab cuts him off saying –

“ . . . All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard
masks.

But in each event in the living act, the undoubted deed
there, unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings

of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man

will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner

reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To

me, the White Whale is that wall, shoved near to me. He
tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable
malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the
White Whale agent, or be the White Whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon
him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me. .
. ”

 Moby Dick is God almighty wearing the mask of a whale,
the world is a facade of paste board masks and, Ahab, that embittered mystic,
will penetrate this mask and strike at God by killing His whale.  In
Freudian psychology this is called “transference” when a neurosis is
projected from the patient onto another person, often the therapist, as a way
of avoiding confronting their issues. My experience is that this can occur in a
kind of interior mythology, where an actual person can become associated in
your thoughts obsessively with a specific fear inside of you, even though that
person has nothing actually to do with that fear.  But in your mind, in
your emotions, that person acquires the representative mask of that fear. 
Some of the women who had been my admirers and then pushed me away acquired this
mask in my thoughts until I could hardly think of them without fear.  One,
a fear of disapproval.  Another, a fear that I would never have social
standing or acceptance.  That I would always be kind of poor and beat
down, a nobody in the eyes of sophisticated people, the people I longed to be
most accepted by.  I became afraid of these women who had once been
admirers.  These masks stayed with me constantly and with the falling of
my star my emotional turmoil boiled into panic.

As my vanity fermented to sourness I alienated the one
goddess left in my life – the muse.  She ultimately fled from me and I
couldn’t write anymore.  The magic was just gone.  That was when I
bailed out on OGG.  I think this is the kind of thing that gets famous
people killed.  I was never famous, but I had a taste of what it would
feel like to have fans.  It wrecked me. 

A writer writes.  That’s what makes a writer.  Not
publication, nice if you can get it, not money, nice if you can get it, not
even readers, nice if you can get them.  A writer writes.  That’s the
part you get to keep. You can’t be a rock star.  You have to be a
musician.  The act of creation never ends.  Everything else is
extra.

NUTS AND BOLTS: Writing in the First Person Present, how and whyThere is an early problem with choosing to write a story in first person present – nobody wants to hear it.

Most erotica readers are women, they just are, and hearing the word “I” over and over reminds a woman too much of a really bad date.  It can raise the specter of a self absorbed person boasting and bragging to impress you.  Unless of
course that is the tone you want which is a rare thing but not impossible.  “Slowly I raised my right hand and I placed the cigarette between my pouting but not unmanly lips as I was thinking of Ashley’s outrageous nipples and I shifted nervously from my left foot to my right foot and I arched my chiseled, masculine brows as I felt the squeeze of my legendary spam spear swell in my virile and aching loins.  I groaned.”

So help me Jesus.

Nevertheless, writing in the first person present is the most commonly chosen form for popular erotic short fiction and there are good reasons for it.  The first person present potentially at least, conveys authority and authenticity.  It conveys immediate character and personality and can, potentially at least, convey the most intimate experience of that most intimate of human acts.  Like the ghost of Christmas Present it invites the reader to get to know you better.

First person present, done well has the quality of afterglow pillow talk.  Of late night confessions over a kitchen table.  The pot of tea gone cold, the radio whispering as your mother reaches her fingers across the toast and jelly to touch your hand.  “There’s something you’re old enough now to know.  Your father, well he’s not your father.  Not your real father.  Well.  There.”

So your challenge will always be how to win your reader over to what your character is offering. So much of writing is about seducing your reader and a person knows when they’re being seduced.  How will you seduce?

One of the early creative decisions you’ll have to make is if the first person narrator is also the Deciding Character or telling the story of the deciding character from memory, something called “Apostolic Fiction”.  (RE: Jesus never told his autobiography, it was told by his followers about him after the event.)  Examples of apostolic fiction could be “Shane” or “The Great Gatsby” in which Nick narrates the past story of his friend Jay Gatsby.  The Deciding Character is Jay Gatsby, but the story is told by someone else.  In apostolic fiction an unreliable narrator can twist and bend the story to protect himself or to glorify his hero or to lie outright.  It can also be a way of telling a story from another viewpoint, say a white settler telling the story of an Indian he knew personally.

One of the greatest war novels in modern literature is “The Boat” (“Das Boot”) authored by Lothar Gunther-Buckheim, a German journalist who was assigned by Josef Goebbels to go on two U Boat patrols to provide material for propaganda articles.  After the fall of Nazi Germany Buckheim wrote the novel Das Boot in first person present, which seems to be a common standard in German fiction.  Although the Deciding Character is “The Old Man”, the U Boat’s Captain, the story is told by the journalist assigned to the crew to write about the U Boat experience.  Apostalic fiction. As a device it gives a sense of intimacy and immediacy while at the same time allowing a view from all over the boat without being limited only to where the Captain is at any moment. The narrator can move freely with a journalist’s sharp eye for detail and still paint realistic scenes of great tension, such as the sounds of a British merchant ship sinking followed by a depth charge attack by a destroyer:

“Damned slow running time.  I’d already given up.” The Commander’s voice is back to its usual dark growl.  The breaking and cracking, roaring and tearing show no sign of coming to an end.

“Now there’s a couple of boats you can write off for good.”

Then a shattering blow knocks me off my feet.  In the nick of time I catch hold of a pipe to break my fall.  There’s a crash of breaking glass.

I pull myself upright, automatically stagger forward a couple of steps, jostle against someone, collide with a hard corner and collapse into the hatch frame.

This is it!  The reckoning!  Mustn’t let yourself go!  

The hatch frame almost bucks me out.  An enormous detonation tries to shatter my eardrums. Then blow after blow, as if the sea were a mass of huge powder kegs being set off in quick succession.

The narrator’s authority comes from the war experience Buckheim’s had of actually being in a U Boat during a depth charge attack.  That authenticity is how he overcomes the problem of listening to that “I” over and over and earning the attention of the reader with his knowledge of the experience he’s writing about.  The word “I” is used only twice, only when it can’t be avoided or replaced. Everything else is about the scene and the emotional experience around him.

In the opening paragraphs of your story you can choose to establish your narrator’s authority with the reader either by appealing to the insider’s knowledge your character has of the experience he’s describing, or appeal to the heart by presenting a character with a certain self deprecating honesty.  Again, think of it as a date.  You might warm up to a date who is capable of laughing at himself and seems to speak openly and honestly regarding his hopes and faults. This is especially important if you are presenting a narrator who is dislikeable.  The reader doesn’t have to like your narrator.  But they should be curious about them.  They should want to care about what is about to happen to them.

Think carefully of that last sentence.  It’s the soul of short fiction.  The secret of horror fiction, erotic or romantic fiction, any fiction that attempts to create a visceral experience is that we must care about the Deciding Character. We don’t have to like them.  Truly.  But we have to care about them.

From my own poor stuff, I can offer two stories told in first person present by dislikeable narrators.  Here is the voice of Nixie, a vampire girl originally from Bavaria, who as the story opens is on her way to retrieve her mortal lover who has abandoned and fled from her.  She is tracking him by scent in this opening paragraph from “The Lady and the Unicorn”

Blood has a range of taste, as scent has a range of aromas.  Blood has a high level taste and an under taste.  It is a blending of elements like music.  This is also the way of scent.  The under aroma tells you there is a trail and betrays to you the direction.  If the scent becomes fresher you are following the creature that produced it, so you must use the under scent to know which direction is older and which is newer.  It is as though the air were filled with singing voices and you are picking out from the choir the sound of a single voice. The high scent will tell you the individual, the condition of the individual, if it is injured or sick, horny or filled with fear.  It will tell you how to catch him, where he is likely to run to.  To acquire the high scent the animal, or myself, must pause to commune with the air and pay attention.  Close the eyes. Hold the nose still and just so.  Let the night air speak. It is the same with the deep taste of blood, except that scent is on the move, and if you are tasting the blood—well.  It is no longer on the move. 

https://erotica-readers.com/GD/TC-EF/The_Lady_and_The_Unicorn.htm

This is attempting authority with the reader through the character’s knowledge.  Nixie sounds like she knows what she’s talking about. She doesn’t brag.  She hardly refers to herself at all. She never tries to convince you how dangerous she is, but by the end of the paragraph she doesn’t have to.

Here is another very dislikeable narrator, Mack Daddy, a professional sex gladiator in “The Peanut Butter Shot” published in “Mammoth Book of Erotica VOL 11”:

They used to wrap tape around your hands to keep you from busting your knuckles up against the bones of somebody’s face. Me, it’s the opposite. I have to wear special gloves when I’m not in the ring. These gloves, they go for about $12,300, something like that, dermatologically custom made. The insurance pays for them, so like I give a shit, but that’s what they go for. I’ve got real warm soft hands. Women tell me they’re softer than a baby’s hands. My champion hands are insured by management for about $567,000. My tongue’s insured too, definitely, so I can’t drink anything hot or cold or eat spicy, which sucks but it’s the job.  My tongue and hands are my weapons.

The old prize fighters would bust your nose or your ribs.  A punch to the kidney that would make you piss blood for a couple days.  We sex fighters, we bust your will to live.  We take away your will to be free.  People look naked to us.  We see inside your mind.    You just think you know what you want, bitch.  I know what you really want, because that’s how I get you.  That’s how I take you down.  I look at you bitch – I know what you want way better than you do.  I know it even before you know it. That’s because I see you.  I see you like God sees you.

His voice is the opposite of Nixie.  Aggressive, violent, expressing himself in short punchy sentences like jabs to the face; bragging like a young athlete full of himself.

As a general thing establishing your character by knowledge is easier than by heart.  But heart is better if you can manage it.

The other thing that is quickly brought out in their voices is their Governing Characteristic. Listening to Nixie or Mack Daddy you get a sense of what drives them and of what makes them peculiar.  Writing in first person, give your narrator a distinctive voice, not by speech dialects (“Aw shuckin’  lil’ lady yawl sure do got some kinda helluva bodacious tits on ya’, yessiree.”) but by attitude.  If you want them to sound like they come from somewhere, or as in Nixie’s case if they speak English as a foreign language, don’t do it so much in goofy spelling but in syntax and sound, establishing personality by the words you choose and how you arrange them.  Listen to the well-spelled parlor room formality and 19th century syntax in the narrator’s voice in Charles Portis’ “True Grit”:

““People do not give it credence that a fourteen-year-old girl could leave home and go off in the wintertime to avenge her father’s blood but it did not seem so strange then, although I will say it did not happen every day. I was just fourteen years of age when a coward going by the name Tom Chaney shot my father down in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and robbed him of his life and his horse and $150 in cash money plus two California gold pieces that he carried in his trouser band.”

That’s an amazing opening paragraph.  You have the Deciding Character.  You have the inciting event.  You have the time and the place, the desire and the problem.  There is great personality in that voice.  If you read only that paragraph, you’d have a sense of a brave, righteous girl with a problem to solve and the ferocious tenacity to do it and you’d be about right.  This is also a perfect example of establishing authority by heart, listening to the quirky and engaging sound of the woman’s voice as she recalls the events of her childhood invites you to care about her story.

What about a character who is insane?  You can introduce the character’s Governing Characteristic by an obsession he repeatedly returns to, a kind of chorus that sounds several times.  In Brett Easton Ellis’ novel “American Psycho”, Patrick Bateman is a yuppie Wall Street investment broker during the Reagan era, and incidentally a vicious homicidal maniac who is obsessed with his social status at all times. He shows his Governing Characteristic to us by the way he obsessively lists what every person he meets is wearing or carrying and often even how much money it costs:

It’s cold for April and Price walks briskly down the street towards Evelyn’s brownstone whistling “If I Were a Rich Man” and swinging his Tumi leather attaché case. A figure with slicked back hair and horn rimmed Peeples glasses approaches in the distance, wearing a beige double-breasted wool-gabardine Cerruti 1881 suit and carrying the same Tumi leather attaché case from D. F., Sanders that Price has, and Timothy wonders aloud, “Is it Victor Powell? It can’t be.”

Bateman does this over and over with each person he meets until it almost drives you crazy and then you begin to understand – he’s crazy.

So that exhausts my thoughts for what they’re worth on first person present.  Until next time, do well.

For the Oh Get a Grip blog, for which I’ve been writing for years along with Lisabet Sarai and others, I tried an experiment, a writing exercise I would recommend.

This Friday I’ll be attending a play I wrote, being performed downtown and the experience of writing a play and how it differs structurally from narrative fiction is profound and its worth your time to explore.  Essentially you’re telling a story in pure dialogue.

Dramatic – that is theater – dialogue is of a very specific nature in sound and voice because it written for the human voice, not the mind’s voice.  In real life, people speak a certain way, in short punchy sentences very often with phrases repeated over and over.  Its worth learning to tune your ear to this.  I studied by standing in grocery lines and coffee shops, noting the cadence with which people naturally speak to each other and writing it down verbatimn to examine.  I listened to plays and movie dialogue to get a sense of how the pros do it.

Then, for practice, below, I wrote a story roughly 90% in dialogue with only minimal narration.  Try it.

                   “Enter the Angler”

“Pick your era,” he says.  “We
have flagellation brothels, sword and sandal, Roman slave girls.
 Gladiators.”

“What era did Dracula live in?”

“What, when he was alive, like Vlad the Impaler
alive, or when he was a vampire?”

“The book,” she says, “that was
Victorian right?”

“You feel like Victorian tonight?  We’ve
got Victorian.  And Roman slave girls. 

“‘Hold high your succulent quim, he
ejaculated,’.”

“We’ve got this roman slave girl thing,”
he says.  “I can read that to you.”

“You have such an un-liberal thing for slave
girls,” she says, “You scare me.  What is it about slave girls?

“I think slave girl stories are sexy.”

“Why?  Because they can’t say no to you?
Right?  You just switch it on and off you go.”

“Maybe.  A little.”

“You’re very passive, you know that?”

“Oh stop.  Not that again.”

“No, you are.  You want a woman who can’t
say no to you.  That’s your passive fantasy.”

“No, it’s not.”

“Yes!  It really is.  That’s the very
description of a passive male.  You either want women to do you, or you
want a woman who can’t say no to you.”

“Is that supposed to be getting me hot?”

“I don’t know.”  She waved her
hands.  “Hold the slave girl stuff for a while.  Hey – did you
know there’s this story in the Bible where these two daughters commit incest
with their father?”

“That’s seriously fucked up.”

“Oh, the Bible, its amazing what’s in
there.  Pass it to me.  I know where it is, somewhere around Sodom
and Gomorrah.”

“Oh, I’ll bet.”

“No – these were the good guys.  The ones
who got away.”

“God spared them and they fucked their
father?”

“Absolutely.”

He reached down to the bottom shelf where the larger
books were kept.  He lifted out a heavy white leather bound Bible and
tossed it to her.  She caught it in her arms.  “Show
me.” 

She checked the concordance in the back, caressing
the pages thoughtfully with her fingertips, as he watched, suddenly admiring
her.  She still had her girlish habits from her school days.  He
waited wondering if she would still do it – was she – yes – there it was. 
The pink tip of her tongue, touching the doorstep of her lower lip as she
concentrated, the way she did when they met in study hall half a lifetime
ago. 

She flipped through the Bible with scholarly
authority, ran her finger down a column.  “Here.  Genesis
19:30.”

“Tell it sister.”

“The Bible sez – ‘Now Lot went out of Zoar and
dwelt in the hills with his two daughters for he was afraid to dwell in Zoar so
he dwelt in a cave with his two daughters.  And the first born said to the
younger ‘Our father is old and there is not a man to come into us after the
manner of all the Earth.  Come let us make our father drink wine and we
will lie with him so that we may preserve offspring through our father.’ “

“Whoa!  They fucked him?”  He
gasped, thought.  “That is kind of hot.”

“Oh my god you’re gross.”

“No,” he says, “you’ve got these two horny
women living in a cave.  They don’t want to fuck their father but what if
a guy came along, say, me, came along, ‘hey there you girls in the cave all
alone’.  I just killed this deer.  Let’s cook it up and spend the
night.  Want to have some kids?’ “

“That’s passive!”

“What’s passive?”

“You know these girls are going to come after
you with all they got.”

“That’s sexy as hell.”

“That’s passive male behavior.  You’re not
working for it.”

“I’m bringing them dinner.  Why they want
to fuck their old man anyway?  What’s that?”

“It’s about lineage.  The old tribal
people were serious about preserving lineage.  They were trying to do
their father a favor by not letting his blood line die out.”

“Yeah, but its nasty.”

“You didn’t think so a minute ago.”

“And passive.”

“If you read Matthew these people were part of
Jesus’ blood line.  Really.”

“Jesus was descended from these father-fucking
people?”

“Kind of.  Yeah.”

“God is good.  I guess.  So does that
get the machinery humming for you?  It kind of does me.”

“The machinery isn’t humming yet.”

“You’re a tough sell tonight.” 

“What else?”

“Chinese.”

“Oh – pass the soy sauce.  What is
it?”

He went to the middle book shelf, ran his hands
along the spine and drew out a thin book “Ten Questions on Joining Yin and
Yang”.

“To master the Eight Pluses, rise at dawn,
lengthen your spine, flex and relax your buttocks.  During the joining of
yin and yang through intercourse let your spine be loose, contract your
perineal muscles and conduct the seven energies to your sexual organs below the
Tan Tien. Exert pressure downward.  This is called Accumulating
Energy.  Do not go in and out too rapidly or with too high frequency. 
Thrust in and out gently and gliding and with control.  This is called
Gentle Moistening.  When finished, withdraw the Jade Stalk erect. 
This is called Stabilizing the Erection.  These are called the Eight
pluses.”

She was sitting with her mouth open.  “Oh
my gawd . . . “

“Yeah?”

“That is the most unsexy thing I’ve ever
heard.  I feel like doing the laundry now.”

“Its actually good advice.  Just a little
clinical is all.”

“That is the most mechanical shit.  It’s
all about number.  The eight what?  Why eight?  Why not twelve
or fourteen? Its like that thing you read in the Kama Sutra that’s supposed to
make the woman bark like a dog when she comes.”

“You scream for Jesus when you come.  You could
bark like a dog.”

“You don’t even vocalize.  I wish you would
sometimes, just let it out and yell like Tarzan.”

“I can yell like Tarzan.”

“Hey – want to hear the first horny thing I ever
read, ever?  Pass me that Desmond Morris book.”

“This?”

“The little green paperback with the naked
guy.  Yeah.”

He hands it to her.  She flips through
it.  “When I was in junior high?” she says, “Someone passed
this around.  It was the first time I ever read what happens when people
fuck.  ‘In this particular instance we know that the female of the species
has developed a particular susceptibility to the sexual stimulation of the
clitoris.  When we remember that this organ is the female homologue of the
male penis this does seem to point to the fact that in origin at any rate, the
female orgasm is a borrowed male pattern.’ “

“That’s not true!” he says. 
“Its the other way around.  All embryos start female.  They
become male in the womb.  Fetuses start with a clitoris and testosterone
turns it into a dick.  He’s got it backasswards.”

” ‘ This also explains why the male has the
largest penis of any primate.’ “

“Now I like him.”

” ‘Copulation starts with the insertion of the
male’s penis into the females vagina.  The male then begins a series of
rhythmic pelvic thrusts.’ Really.  You can’t beat that.”

“Like Hemingway.  Like Updike and
Hemingway together.”

” ‘The copulatory phase is typically much
briefer than the pre copulatory phase.’  Yeah, especially with you. ‘The
male reaches the con. . . conson . . . con-sum-ma-tory act of sperm ejaculation
in most cases unless deliberate delaying tactics are employed.’ “

“Consummatory.  Wow.  I wanna
consummate your ass.”

“Wait for the copulatory phase to begin
first.”

“When?”

“Soon.  After the precopulatory phase is
over.”

“How will I know that?”

“Sometime after the commencement phase of nipple
erection as a variation of sexual signaling.  I’ll make sure you
know.”

“If you say so.”

“Actually I really like this,” she says
“It still gets me.  I wanked off with it when I was a kid.”

“So it’s about muscle memory.  I really
like slave girls.”

“There’s something creepy about you.
Really.”

“Okay, now that we agree.”  He pulls
a paperback with a girl on the cover in a torn Roman tunic, climbs onto the
bed, leans back and rests his head in the valley between her breasts, snuggling
side to side close.  He feels her chin touching the top of his head as her
hand strokes his hair.  “Page 57,” he says,  “‘You are
my property girl, know you that, he said, smiling cruelly.’  How do you
smile cruelly?  Is it like this?”

“Please don’t do that again.”

“The weeping girls face flushed crimson as his eyes
bored into her- “

“Ouch,” she says.

” – bored into her – “

“Like with a power drill?  From Home
Depot?”

“Shut up.  Bored into her. His eyes bored
into her with a Black and Decker drill and a 35mm auger bit –

“Baby you’re so big – “

“So his eyeballs, they do this boring and he
says ‘turn around and lean against the table. If you move or cry out I’ll flog
you.”

“Flog me.  Copulate me.”

“Yes,” he says.  “Slap slap,
spanky spanky.  Now – ‘ slowly she turned, blushing with a hint of hidden
desires and the possibility of secret delights.  Grasping her tunic,
Lucretius wrenched it away in a single swipe of his powerful masculine hand and
exposed his throbbing member. Roughly he parted her knees and with a groan he
entered her.”

“No!”  she says 
“Stop.  Stop, just stop, now you’ve blown it.”

“I didn’t write it, what have I blown?”

“Entered?  Really?  With his
member?  Member of what?  Club Med?  Does your member ever
throb?”

“No, but I –“

“Do I make you throb?  Do I make your member
throb?”

“Not exactly.”

“Christ.  Why does he – “

“She.  It’s a she wrote this.”

“Why the fuck does she or he or it always have
to say ‘enter’?  How do you enter someone?”

“You just enter them.  Maybe groaning
helps.”

“I mean, even Lot’s daughters, they let their
dad ‘come in to’ them at least, ‘like all manner of the Earth’, whatever that
is.  That’s nice.  Poetic.  They didn’t make him enter
them.”

“Like entering a hotel lobby?”

“Enter me!  Enter me, baby, enter me
now.”

“Hold still while I insert myself.”

“Yes!  Insert yourself!  Enter
me!  Insert me!  Now!  Now!”

“Shall I insert your bags upstairs after I
enter you?”

“I hope you’re not expecting a tip after you
enter me, I don’t carry cash.”

“What if,” he said, “what if a guy
could enter you and then, like, move in?”

“What?”

“Live there right inside your pussy.”

“Just enter me and set up housekeeping in
there?”

“Like being born but in reverse.  I enter
you, warm up my dinner, maybe room service down in there, snug at home inside
your pussy.  After I enter you, that is.”

“Take your shoes off after you’ve moved into my
pussy and close the door when you poop.  Don’t leave your hairs in the
sink.”

“Turn on the TV, looking for HBO after I’ve
entered your pussy and unpacked, catch up on Game of Thrones and take a nice
hot shower inside your pussy.  Or the adult channels.”

“So you’ve entered my pussy and unpacked your
stuff and you’re eating Chinese food in your underwear living inside my pussy,
all tucked away and watching porn? And whacking off?  In my pussy? 
Shouldn’t you eating my pussy instead of Chinese food?  Passive!”

“No, wait, let me check the air conditioning,
its humid here inside your pussy.  Maybe I should call the desk.”

“Hey!” she says, seriously. “Isn’t
there a fish?”

“A fish?  In your pussy? 
Kinky.”

“No.  Is it there?”  She points
up at the bookcase.  “There was this fish you showed me.  Black,
really ugly black fish with glass pointy teeth.”

His eyes glazed over for a moment thinking. 

“With this thing on his head,” she says,
“Looks like his dick is hanging off his forehead.”

“Angler fish!”

“Yes!”

He goes back to the bookcase, runs his finger over
the spines.  “Here,” and pulls out a large flat science textbook
of marine life.  “And actually it’s the lady angler fish that looks
like she has a big prick growing out of her forehead. A long one that
glows.”

“That’s very handy having a dick where you can
reach it.  I could go for that.”

“As long as she doesn’t try to give herself a
blow job.  Ow.”

He passes her the book, open to the page on the
anger fish and she looks.

“ , , , When ceratioid males are ready for
reproductive activity, with their extraordinary olfactory sense they follow a
dedicated pheromone to a female, who will often aid their search further by
flashing her bioluminescent lure. Once the male finds the female, he bites into
her belly and drools a chemical that dissolves skin effectively fusing his jaws
in the area of her ovaries within. Their skin joins together as do their blood
vessels, which allows the male to take all the nutrients he needs from his host/mate’s
blood while exchanging a perpetual ejaculation of sperm to her ovaries whenever
she ready for spawning. The two fish essentially become one body until death. .
. “

She looks at him hard.  “I just think
that’s so fucking hot.  Just think – he fucks her forever. 
Forever!  Without ever stopping.  That’s all he does ever.  And
not just one – more than one.  A whole Fire Station battalion of
them.”

“God is good,” he says.

“Come here,” she says, holding out her
arms.  He lays down beside her, his hand slipping inside her nightgown,
finding her breast.  “Angle me,” she says.

I’m trying, at this moment, to imagine myself as a
woman.

 

Not as a transgender, no, not as a
female character in a story, no. I’m trying to imagine how life would be
different if I were to wake up one morning and find that, without explanation,
I had changed overnight into a natural woman. What would my body feel like
compared to the way it feels at this moment?

 How does my male body feel as I write
this?

 I am sitting in my favorite coffee
shop, with a cold cup of coffee, sitting on a beach towel folded under my tiny
ass, placed on a hard chair with my legs crossed. I look down, I see the
keyboard, there are no breasts in the way of my view. Sitting with crossed
knees, if I flex my thighs a little I can feel the bulge of my balls down
there, my friendly and familiar dick which would like to be scratched a little.
My clothes which are manly clothes, my wristwatch, metal, big, self consciously
masculine in its brusque design. My full beard, which I have to frequently
color, itches; I reach up and scratch it a little, run my fingers through its manly
hairiness. The side burns reaching from my ears to my lips are of a different
quality from the hair of my chin, a trait which varies from man to man. My sideburn
hair is soft and of the same material as what hair survives on the top of my
head. The mustache and beard is thicker, like the beard of a schnauzer dog,
made of pubic hair, which feels thick, wiry, curly and coarse, and conjures up
images of back seat fumbling trysts as a kid. I have an unconscious habit of
twining my fingers in my public hair beard and twisting it in a Gandalfesque
manner when I am reading or sincerely lost in thought. Women slap my hand away
when I do that. It sheds too. I am conscious of having a beard from male vanity
because I have a weak chin like a frog and a beard gives me some jaw definition.
I am conscious of my belly and when I stand naked in the shower I look down to
make sure I can still see my dick. That’s the standard.  I say if a man can’t see his dick, he needs
to lose weight.

 What if I were a woman sitting here?

Typing this, would I have to see
over my breasts? I suppose although women don’t seem to have any problem
there.  Would I feel vain about my
breasts, would I wonder how they look to other men? Would I look around the
room to see if any men are gazing at my breasts?  If I had a husband and dressed in the morning
or came nude from the shower and yet never caught him sneaking a glance at them
anymore, would it hurt me? When was the last time he wanted to fuck me? Days?
Weeks? Did he spend some time on it or just quickies now?  Maybe I should get one of those little yappy
dogs who goes loony with affection whenever I come home, and I would be one of
those ladies?

If I flex my thighs as a woman, so,
what would I feel differently? Some women can cross their legs as I am now,
flex their thighs, flex their thighs, flex their thighs and stealthily make
themselves come, even in the midst of a crowd. Girls love horses; they love to
straddle their thighs across all that living muscle, to feel it pumping at
their groin, moving steadily in rhythm, up and down, galloping with the wind in
their hair, this beast, this throbbing mountain of strength and potency between
their legs carrying them along? Unicorns, perfect and longed for in the dreams
of women and girls, these creatures a girl opens her legs to straddle and be
carried by, with that single, enormous, phallic horn, that beast for which
virgins were used as bait to capture.

 

I know how vanity feels as a man.
How does vanity feel as a woman? How does the world treat you when you move
through it as a woman? How does it feel when a man looks at you?  Or doesn’t? 
In so many countries the world is closed and narrow to you when you’re a
woman.  Though you bring life into the
world, you’re barely considered human, or shallowly revered and kept prisoner
on a narrow pedestal of men’s fantasies. In so many places, women have only
other women to open their hearts to, as men can so often be such dull company
and who can share their deepest feelings with an oppressor? There are places
inside a woman only another woman can go.

 And what is Eros for a woman compared
to a man?

 It must be different, it cannot be
the same.  A man makes love and walks
away clean, swinging his dick, moving on with his life.  He doesn’t even have to see the woman again;
nothing in his life has to change.

A woman can die.

A woman can die a terrible
death.  A woman risks her life bringing
life into this world.  A man does
not.  Eros has to be different when the
stakes are so different.

I know how a man experiences orgasm.
There is first the process of erection. As you get older this process becomes
more unpredictable and fearful. As a young man it was merely unpredictable.
What women don’t know about a man’s erection is that he has no more control
over it than a sneeze. It is something the body does, almost magically, not on
command but in response to a thought or a sight, or a touch. When a woman is
with her man and he is becoming erect, his body, not his intellect, is making a
statement about how he feels in this moment. Emphatic as an exclamation point,
urgent as a knife, he watches and feels it bloom and grow large beneath him as
if it were a separate thing with a life of its own. If I were to stop typing
and bring my imagination into the right place, it might bloom for me down there
below the table, but it would never be a willful decision like making a fist or
throwing a ball.

What does an erection feel like?

As it rises and swells, there is a
sense of pressure, a feeling of pleasure when the pressure is touched or
stroked, capable of being kindled into a kind of urgent flame that persuades. Persuades
and seduces a man that this feeling is more important than being on time for
work, or cutting the grass, or going to sleep, or getting out of bed, of if he’s
with the wrong woman, maybe worth throwing away his peace of mind for. 

 When touched, it wants to be touched
more, but whereas women prefer a gentle touch, a man’s phallus longs for
pressure. Pressure wants pressure. It wants to be in motion, to be active, a
hunting hound dog, a pressurized steam engine of thrust and action. This rapid ascent
towards something through pressure and motion persuades a man that this is what
he wants, the sweet, sweet, sweet pressure which wants release and relief and
there is something else, this experience which is closed off to women. The
experience of penetrating the offered body of another human being, to cross the
abyss of the senses, to satisfy and consummate the urge to penetration.

 There is something about the act of
sex which on the surface is so primitive, so undignified in its animal
naturalness, so wonderful and so different from everything else that a man’s
life is forever divided between life lived before that moment he experiences his
first act of insertion and all of his life after. There is also this other
moment, if you are a man of some experience and not a boy, when you are about
to insert yourself, it is a feeling of the most exquisite anticipation, you
wait and linger to keep that moment for yourself, hovering before the gates of
paradise.  Then beginning the act – the
tip touches, maybe in the wrong place and if the woman is kind she will take
that sweet high pressure pole in hand and guide it in like a ship to port. And
then you find the offered spot down there where you can’t see in the light of
the nightstand lamp or candle, or dashboard, or the moon, that spot which is
the black hole at the center of your male universe, wet, snug, but offered to
you.

 

A little press and the sensitive tip goes in. You might hold it there,
feeling it in that wet snug space, feeling the sense of openness and waiting
and welcome. Examining yourself in the posture of the male with a woman, feeling
the moment in the act of beginning. To see the woman’s breasts, to feel her
belly touching yours, her eyes half closed, languidly if it’s that kind of a
night. And as you press in, feeling the warm and easeful, endless deepness, slicking
its way up the stiffened length of your shaft, not feeling the tip so much like
the prow of a ship cutting the waves, as this snug embracing welcome taking you
in and in and into that sweet mystery until your hairs meet and you come up
pressing into the flesh and can go no deeper, and that moment to me always
seems like a miracle. If God almighty were to ask me what the greatest thing in
all the world is, I would answer it is to experience union with woman.  It is that moment.  To press yourself so deeply inside another,
and she maybe puts her arms around you, presses her hands against your ass to
get that last inch nice and snug, all the way in, wanting all of it, enjoying
you, and there is the greatest feeling of being tender and the thrill of being
enjoyed by a woman, the thrill of being, in that moment, a man.

 But how is it for a woman? I’ve
asked women, read articles, trying to get a feel for what a woman feels. How
must it be to have a man with a part of his body inserted in your own? How can
that possibly feel good? Is it vulnerable? Does it require a certain state of
mind first, a great trust of the man or is it a let down?

 What a woman risks to have that
little moment. A man passes a disease so much easier than a woman can give
disease to him. A male of any species walks away freely, can move on with his
life with having to change anything. A woman risks her life, her freedom, her
health, her independence, her definition of who she is. Sex and death are bound
in a way for a woman that does not exist for a man at all. A man walks away,
swinging his dick. A woman can get pregnant. If it’s a healthy pregnancy, in
nine months her life, her emotions, her understanding of herself, will be profoundly
changed in ways she will never get back. The person she is at the beginning
will change over time. If all goes well, she’ll give birth, experience pain,
blood, messiness, occasionally terror and then there will be this life which
came from her, this entity which has experienced life only through her for
almost a year, every moment of every hour, through every activity, kicking,
turning over in its sleep, frighteningly still, annoyingly active, and now
revealed as a separate thing. Introduced forever. And if it goes badly, death.
This was a very common way for women to die, a bad birth, your loins exploding
inside of you like a bomb. Risking not only your life for love, but even a
grisly death. There is no experience like this in nature for a man except war.

 The orgasm for a man, is of rising,
building up, creating a scaffold of aggressive sensation, the monkey awareness
of reaching that moment of no return when your head feels light and the
explosion is rippling up the length of your shaft like a great wave rushing to
crash into the rocks and now this wave is pulsing forward and out, pulsing and
pulsing and holding you for the moment in the grip of that pulsing feeling of
release. That explosion obliterates you for an instant, you can’t push it out
hard enough, you can never explode violently enough, there is always a huge
feeling of relief and an insatiable greed to make it more and more intense. For
a male the orgasm is assertion, insertion, exertion and finally that cannon
shot of release and relief. And then you feel like doing something else.

For a woman the urge to orgasm most
often doesn’t begin in bed. That’s my understanding, your mileage may
vary.  It begins long before then, before
the notion of sex is even explored, during the day, or even the day before,
with considerations of courtliness and respect. There are goddesses and
feminists among us, yes, but a man loves a woman who makes him aware he’s a
man, and a woman loves a man who makes her aware she’s a woman. An intimate
conversation. A light touch. The little offerings building towards a single,
explicit gesture. Woman is after all, a being that risks her very life for Eros.

A dear friend and I were talking over coffee about “Fifty Shades of
Grey” now that the movie has come out. She has read all three books, a very
respectable climb, something like reading “War and Peace” front to back, or
maybe reading the first five books of the Old Testament without stopping. To
achieve something like that, I suspect she has an unexplored kinky streak
inside her but so far I haven’t asked. But she got me re-thinking the world of
BDSM (Bondage Domination Submission Masochism) and how all that works. I myself
am not kinky as far as I can know, which I kind of regret. I think I’m missing
out on something. I might be a more interesting, or relatively less boring
person, if I had a kinky streak. 

I think that Dominance and Submission are to sex what espresso is to
ordinary coffee. They are extreme expressions, concentrated to their essence,
of what has always existed in a latent form in all eroticism – the dynamic of
power.

I want to make a distinction here between eroticism and sex. To my way of
thinking they are not the same, just as creativity and, say, writing poetry is
not the same. Eroticism is your nature, your wiring, how you relate to the
world and to the experience of union, and most especially the frustrated desire
for union. Sex is a media for expressing eroticism but its not the only media
of expression. Sex is an act that you do, just as writing a poem is an act.
Fucking is an act. Eroticism is who you are.

The forces of nature work off a fundamental state of existence, which
is the dynamic state of latent, unmanifested energy. This restless energy
acquires a direction and then takes on a form that expresses it’s unique nature
for that brief moment. This is the heart of the mystical experience with the
spiritual. This is also the heart of eroticism, which further convinces me that
spirituality, creativity and eroticism are three faces of the same god. It is
the same quality of energy in three distinct, but related forms of expression.
It explains to me the competitive dynamic that has always existed between
religion and sex. These are sister forces vying for dominance in our psyche.

In erotic relationships, and in the act of sex, there is a dynamic of
dominance and submission even among the unkinky. Its the nature of the desire
manifesting itself into the motion of the act. My criticism of some of the limp
wristed attempts at BDSM fiction I’ve read here and there is that this dynamic
is not being understood by the authors. There’s too much spanky-spanky and
mustache twirling, without any actual eroticism happening. Too much What, not
enough Why.

Four skillful writers in this genre form have always stood out to me
regarding this power dynamic – Lisabet Sarai, Remittance Girl, M. Christian and
in the past Mike Kimera. These are good writers for the ambitious BDSM author
to study because in their best stories they have never been about the What,
they have been about the Why. Eroticism in it’s mysteries is what we’re talking
about. I think this is partly because at least two of them have had intimate
personal experience with being submissives or dominants in reality. They know
the emotional territory first hand. I also recommend people who need a clue to
study the autobiographies, and there are plenty out there, of professional
dominatrices such as ”Whip Smart” by Melissa Febos. They tell similar tales.
What does a submissive do? Allow herself to be handcuffed and spanked? No! That
is incidental. Who gives a shit what she does – WHY does she do it? What need
does it serve, rather than, say knitting baby booties instead? What is
“subspace”? What does it feel like, how do you get there? Why is it so
addictive that you crave to go back? If you don’t know what “subspace” is, you
need to stop writing and start studying.

Think about this for a moment – what is naked?  There are many levels
of naked, more than we usually think of associated with that word.  There
is the basic nudity of the body, right before love making.  But there are
deeper, non-physical levels of exposure as well.  The nudity of the raw
emotions exposed in those moments we let our inner guard down.  Think of a
woman in the throes of orgasm, racked with the wildest pleasure, longing to
experience more and deeper, and yet fighting the feeling of emotional rawness
that is tearing her open.  Imagine looking in that woman’s eyes in the
instant of her perfect rawness, her perfect, ecstatic vulnerability.  The
mind in conflict with the body, the mind fearing to let go completely, the body
demanding everything.  We long to let go.  The more in control we
are, the more we long to let go of the rope for just a while.  Its what we
experience dancing, that Dionysian letting go of control, or voodoo trances in
which some allow themselves to be possessed, or evangelicals allowing
themselves to be taken by the Holy Spirit and babble in strange tongues. 
It’s what we experience in mediation when the mind finally, at long last, falls
silent for a moment. 

There is within us, a tender, wounded emotional core.  The core no one
sees, no one touches, too often not even touched by ourselves.  Yet I
think every soul longs to be touched there by a worthy person, someone they can
trust their soul to, their ultimate nakedness to.  Maybe that’s why people
follow charismatic gurus, or fall in love over and over without success. 
I think, in some ways, that is what subspace is.  I would like to
understand that better, that soul nakedness, which is maybe achieved when you
allow a person, within specific boundaries, an absolute trust and power over
you, even the power to inflict pain so that for a while you are no longer
afraid of pain, because in giving a person that permission  you have given
yourself permission too.  Maybe subspace is when you also allow that
tenderest place to be touched deeply by another, even a stranger.  In
fact, maybe a stranger is best, someone whose power is ultimately
disposable.

 Some are born kinky. Some have kinky thrust upon them. Some of us are
forever kinky-challenged. And then there is the seduction of the innocent.
Finding a girl, like Ana in the Fifty Shades novel, who has a kinky side she
doesn’t even know exists and bringing it out and making it bloom like a dark
rose. BDSM classics such as “The Story of O” and the “Sleeping Beauty” trilogy
of Anne Roquelaure (Anne Rice discreetly disguised)are all about this dark
blooming, as well as Lisabet Sarai’s early novels such as “Raw Silk” and
Remittance Girl’s savage novel “Gaijin”. These are not about the old
spanky-spanky, but about the unfolding of something hidden in response to a
power dynamic that is bitter and delicious and sometimes terrifying.

Every act of social intercourse has power dynamics. Having a cup of coffee
with a friend has unspoken power dynamics. The act of sex, as well as the act
of courtship, is the constant shifting of unmanifested power dynamics coming
into manifestation. Pick up a copy of Anne Hooper’s “Kama Sutra” coffee table
book and look at the color photos explicitly illustrating heterosexual sex
positions. Each position of man and woman joined in the act expresses a power
dynamic which you can viscerally feel, either when you’re engaged in the act of
copulating with a partner or fantasizing about it. And you need to be aware of
the physical and emotional feel of this dynamic if you ever hope to write
effectively about it. It isn’t just that a man assumes the missionary position
above a woman. A manly man, a man with some big balls hanging down MOUNTS a
woman in that position. Mounts her like a fucking stud horse. He takes her,
dominates her gently or strongly with his rising tension of male assertiveness
and sweet Jesus he mounts her and fucks her silly. Make no doubt about it. It
may be rough or it may be gentle, it may be slow, tender and loving or rough
and crazy but there’s no question who’s riding on top and who’s getting ridden.
What if the woman is on top? If the man asks her to be on top, that’s a reduced
but balanced dynamic. Partners as equals. The woman is receiving and expressing
power because he wants her to. But if the woman rolls him on his back,
you-come-here-to-mama-you-sexy-sonuvabitch, climbs on top and she mounts him,
puts her man inside herself and works that thing good, that’s her goddess
coming out. She’s taking him, and I think that is the very sexiest thing a man
can pray for, being screwed brainless and fuckless by a goddess. Doggy style?
Male assertive. Standing up? Could be either or. Ankles over her head? Male
assertive almost to the edge of rape. Each position, and the act performed in that
position, expresses a dynamic of who is asserting and who is submitting – but
only in that moment. Enthusiastic and adventurous lovers might switch positions
and acts several times in the moment of passion with the power of dominance and
submission switching back and forth like alternating current. Rarely is it in
balance for long, not if they’re having fun.

And then there’s what the dominatrices call “Topping from the Bottom”.

Think about oral sex. There’s an act which is fraught with power. In a scene
in my story “The Lady and the Unicorn”, my vampire girl Nixie assertively
seduces and dominates her mortal male lover by suddenly opening his pants,
going down on him and taking his phallus in her mouth. This is an act, not of
female submission, but of strong female dominance. She has never done this for
him before, only thought of it on the spur of the moment, and at first he’s
startled and then thrilled. On her part, this is a calculated and even
predatory act of initiating fellatio on him in order to thoroughly cast her
spell over him. As long as she has those lips around his dick, he is helpless
man jelly in her hands. Experienced women know this power very well. A good
lover will generously and lovingly perform oral sex on a woman, but this
is a subtle act. The power dynamics in giving cunnilingus are not well defined
in the moment of the act. It is more of a giving and savoring experience than a
dominance. Giving oral sex to a woman in hopes of bringing her to orgasm is
more of a eliciting act as if you were leading her on a dance floor, drawing
something out of her carefully and patiently. When a woman is giving oral sex
to a man in reality, the man clearly feels his male energy rising inside of him
as though it were being honored in some way. It is a thrilling experience to
see another human being on their knees in front of you giving you pleasure. You
feel so powerful and men love to feel powerful and are easily seduced by this
feelng. But power is an illusion we bestow. Sometimes bestowing power, as in
Nixie’s impulsive act of seduction, can be an illusion, the woman giving the
man the feeling of dominance when in fact she has brought him exactly to the
emotional place where she wants him to be. That’s Topping from the Bottom.

In another story of mine, “You Belong to Me”, Frankenstein’s creature is
having a passionate love affair with a blind woman in the mountains, which is
fated to end badly. They live together, absolutely adore each other and hump
like bunnies. She has carefully and meticulously trained him how to make love
to her. In a scene of love making he pleads, demands, over and over for her to
say to him “I’m your woman”, and she refuses because this is the power dynamic
of that scene. He needs to hear those words and she teasingly dangles the words
just out of his reach every time, making him more and more fiercely passionate
as he tries to excite her into saying them. That’s a power dynamic.

 That scene is not about sexual expertise, although she has made him an
expert. It’s about power between two people who love and understand eachother
and know how to play off eachother’s hunger, working it up into a frenzy. They
don’t just fuck, they make love, with knowledge. The sexual tension in the
scene doesn’t come from what they do. It’s from why they do it.

 I think so many of the sex scenes I see these days fail to reach me
emotionally, because that is the missing element. The dynamic of power. I don’t
want to know what they’re doing, I want to know why. How did they get there?
What do they see in eachother that makes them different? Why don’t they play
miniature golf instead? It’s not always the guy doing the mounting, who maybe
just thinks he’s on top when he’s actually being played by his lover; “topped
from the bottom” in the dominatrix parlance, like an expert fisherman with a
lure.

 

I’ve never had a chance to go to college so everything I’ve learned I’ve had to teach myself as best I can. Most of what I’ve been able to grasp about the art of narrative fiction I’ve learned from studying books on craft. One of the best books, maybe the best book, on writing erotic fiction I’ve ever read is “How to Tell a Dirty Story” by Suzie Bright.

This book is especially good for people who are coming to the craft new and want to learn how to tell erotic stories with humanity and compassion.  This book is filled with discussions and specific writing exercises that are practically therapeutic. The exercises themselves, whether you ever publish a word or not are priceless journeys of self-exploration.

One of the really outstanding exercises in this book is one I want to share here and how it works. It’s simple, straight forward and in its way – universal.  It is offered in the context of erotic fiction but it could just as well be about any topic you want to explore.

There are three topics. With a paper and pen, reluctantly a keyboard, write for about five minutes without stopping on these three topics. Write close to your unconscious and let your mind travel.  Here are the three topics, and you can learn a lot about yourself from them:

1. Spend five minutes or so writing about an erotic act, that, if you had a chance to do this, actually do this in real life – you would jump on it.  Without hesitation, oh mama, I would definitely do this thing and it’s a thing I could do.

2. Spend five minutes or so writing about an erotic act that if you had a chance to do this you’d, well, whoa, maybe, yeah but I – uh – maybe under the right circumstances. But if those right circumstances could be realistically met, yeah, I’d take a deep breath and definitely do this. Then.  If then.  If the right circumstances were met.

3. Spend five minutes writing about something impossible.  Something you would never do but it’s hot to think about.  Either its something too balls-nasty to do in real life, or maybe its something that can’t be done in real life.

I won’t tell you what number 1 and 2 are for me – but I will tell you about my number 3.

My highest spiritual value is compassion.  Compassion in the Buddhist sense of empathy, not pity.  Connectedness with the people of the world, especially the people in your world.  Acting and fiction writing are unique art forms in that they require you to inhabit other people.  Either the characters that you are creating or the character that someone has created that you are playing.  How does it feel to be that person.

My number three?

I would like to be a woman.

Just for a while.

A few hours.  A day maybe.

I don’t mean transgender. I’m perfectly happy being a man, I don’t have any issues with that.  What I mean is, I’ve experienced myself and the world I live in as a male being.  I’m a male persona inhabiting a male body.  I pee standing up.  I’ve experienced pleasure and release with a woman from the experience of being a man.  But what does it feel like to be a woman if you;ve never had that experience?  To have a woman’s original persona, inhabiting a woman’s original body?  What’s it like to have a period?  What’s it like for a young girl when she has her first period?  Is it scarey?  How does it feel to move through the world as a woman?  How does the world respond to you as a female?  It must be different in many ways from being a man.  How does a woman’s body experience erotic pleasure and release?  It must feel different in so many ways.

A woman has to experience her own vulnerability, to open herself and receive.  Receiving the thrust of the phallus, then if she’s pregnant a life inhabits her within.   Up until recently it was very common for women to die a gruesome screaming bloody death in childbirth.  Up until the turn of the century a woman becoming pregnant after 30 was regarded as a death sentence.  What would it have been like to live two hundred years ago and be thirty years old and discover you’re pregnant?

That’s compassion. That’s empathy.  That’s spiritual.  What’s it feel like to be that guy over there?  How does it feel to be that guy with the funny accent and funny clothes? How does he feel to be an immigrant, a stranger in a strange land?

To me that’s spiritual.

And by the way, when I wondered what it was like to be a woman – I asked people.  I did my home work, wrote a story about it and sold it.

What would your third wish be?

Twas the night before Christmas and all through the brothel
All the women complained that their tips had been awful.

The johns were all hung, but with a casual air.
When it came down to cold cash, they just wouldn’t share.

Mistresses had been fucked, smiling smug in their beds
As visions of sugar daddies danced in their heads.

Mistress Domina Gretchen, my jack booted Hessian
Had me trussed nice and tight for a long dungeon session.

When over her cussing, as she paddled my rear
There outside in the dark, I heard something draw near.

Then fell from the sky with a flirt and a flitter
A tiny red sleigh drawn by eight elfin strippers.

As naked as jaybirds his tanned Valkyries came;
He whipped them; he spanked them as he called them by name:

“Now Nixie! Now Trixie! Now Nikki! Now Vixen!
Come Dixie! Come Candy! Come Bunny! Come
Bitchin!

“Mount up to the rooftop! Show them tease and pizzazz –
then let’s all party down cause I’m freezing my ass!”

Down the chimney he came, with a bounce and a bound,
He tossed down his big bag and he looked all around.

Then Saint Nick threw off his clothes, that randy old kook
And bellowed “Out of my way, you tight fisted mooks!

“I’m Santa, I’m hot, I’m hard and I’m horny –
I’ve brought my elf girls, now let’s have an orgy!”

Johns hid their faces, girls cried “I’m naughty! Do me!”
Cause that Santa Claus, man, he was hung to his knee.

Then from out of the wind, from the snow and the cold
The girls dropped down the chimney and set up their poles.

How their nipples were perky – their butt cheeks how merry!
Sixteen titties a-jiggle like bowls full of jelly.

How they lap-danced! How they dazzled! Johns emptied their pockets.
Santa ploughed through the women like a love hungry rocket.

The women squealed when they came, came hard and came thrice,
While the girls showed the men unknown levels of vice.

And when all was over, the sated saint satyr
Looked deep in his bag and ho hoed as he scattered

Loving gifts to this crowd as they gathered and grew.
“I just know that God loves you, so I love you too!”

There were dildoes for ladies, and cock rings for men.
Fur lined handcuffs for me, a bull whip for Gretchen.

Then punching my shoulder, he smiled and he winked
Said “Those ought to hold you till next year, I think.”

He put on his clothes, then to his girls gave a whistle,
Up the chimney they flew like the down of a thistle.

I heard him exclaim as he took off towards Niagara
–
“Good lovin’ to you all, and thank God for Viagra!”

C. Sanchez-Garcia 

I’m not a poet and I don’t even see myself that way, but I
have the fundamental key I think to a poets nature.  I love words and
language.  This applies to point of view. 

I’ve been studying a couple of craft books by Mary Oliver, a
pulitzer prise winning poet.  She has several chapters which I need to
read several times on the subject of voice.  In poetry it’s called
“diction”, voice and tone.  Diction refers to your choice of words. 
The overall effect of this choice of words is called “tone”.  The diction
and tone together give rise to the “persona” of the person telling the poem or
story.  In my opinion this “persona” is the key to your choice of point of
view, and most especially if it’s the first person point of view.

Erotica more than other forms of genre fiction, except maybe
horror, is a very physical and personal form of expression. I’m talking about
literary erotica in particular.  I believe it should be written with some
immediacy from the senses from the dark waters of the unconscious.  Some
writers like Anais Nin can get cerebral about it and still make it work, but
she’s an exception because of her ability to color it with the mysteries of a
character’s inner quirks.  People should be able to feel what you’re
describing physically and emotionally.  You do this partly by letting them
fill in the blanks in your description, but also very often by speaking in the
voice of experience of the deciding character.  The most common mistake I
see in erotic writing, or at least the method I take issue with, is
speaking  from the main character without giving them a specific
personality in that voice.  That voice, when you get it right, can be the
most fun part of reading the story.  A reader will forgive you for a lot
if you can get that voice right.  And giving that voice a persona can
really drive the story forward for you as a writer.  But it has to be a
voice that matches the character.

In poetry, and I’d say also just as much in prose, the sound
of the word, its accuracy and its meaning creates the atmosphere of a
poem.  In old school horror writing like Lovecraft or Poe it seems like
the story is 70 percent about atmosphere.  The author is making a slow
hand build up to a final effect that rises from the gathered gloom.  In
“Masque of the Red Death” the first half of the story is dedicated entirely to
the description of the rooms in Prince Prospero’s castle, with almost no
character description except to let you know he’s a selfish guy.  “The
Cask of Amontillado” is a short expository blast about Montressor’s unexplained
hatred of Fortunato and then therest of the story is his first person
description of the cellar they’re going down too.  “The Tell Tale Heart”
told from the first person is the obtuse and obsessive voice of a dangerous
loon.  What is interesting about that voice is the immediate lack of self
awareness in the speaker, his capacity for self delusion:

“ . . . TRUE! –nervous –very, very dreadfully nervous I
had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened
my senses –not destroyed –not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing
acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things
in hell. How, then, am I mad? Hearken! and observe how healthily –how calmly I
can tell you the whole story. . . .”

Poe was actually onto a great spiritual truth here about the
nature of evil.  Evil does not know itself.  Evil is ego gone wild
and refusing to see itself.  But what is also special about this voice is
– it is a voice.  A distinct voice.  The voice of a dangerous
loon.  You know this guys personality.  You know who he would vote
for for president and why.   This is the carefully thought out effect
of Diction + Tone = Voice.  You feel this man, wide eyed and self absorbed
grab you by the collar, like The Ancient Mariner or a wino in an alley, and
haul you away from what you were doing to make you listen to his story from
beginning to end no matter what.  He’s your crazy Uncle at Thanksgiving
dinner except this guy kills people and cuts out their heart.  This is ego
gone boundless and is at the heart of true evil, the absence of empathy.

Here’s the First Person Present Tense voice of another evil
maniac, very different from Poe’s:

“  . . . At the brownstone next to Evelyns a woman –
high heels, great ass – leaves without locking her door.  Price follows
her with his gaze and when he hears footsteps coming down the hallway toward us
he turns around straightens his Versace tie ready to face whatever. 
Courtney opens the door and she’s wearing a Krizia cream silk blouse, a Krizia
rust tweed skirt and silk satin d’Orsay pumps from Manolo Blahnik. . . “

               
        “American Psycho”  Brett Easton
Ellis

Now wait – read that again.  He doesn’t just describe
her clothes, he knows their brand, how much they cost probably and even what
store they come from.  Throughout the book wall street master of the
universe and human monster Patrick Bateman will do this with every person he
meets, it will become his signature and an expression of his governing
characteristic, a manic obsession with social status.  He kills a male
friend with a fashionably expensive stainless steel ax  possibly for
simply having a nicer business card than his.  This a great device.
 The first time you read him doing that, you think its annoying.  The
third time its really annoying.  After reading him do that every single
time it begins to sink in for you – this guy is dangerously nuts.

And how about this distinctive voice, the narrator Mattie
Ross from Charles Portis’ great book “True Grit”:

”  . . . People do not give it credence that a
fourteen year old girl could leave home and go off in the wintertime to avenge
her father’s blood but it did not seem so strange then, although I will say it
did not happen everyday. . . .”

The use of the outmoded word “credence” as a noun
and the lack of contractions (did not) give it the 19th century parlor room
formality of a daguerreotype.

Here are two of my voices, from stories (published) told
from first person voices:

“ . . . The old prize fighters would bust your nose or your
ribs.  A punch to the kidney that would make you piss blood for a couple
days.  We sex fighters, we bust your will to live.  We take away your
will to be free.  People look naked to us.  We see inside your
mind.    You just think you know what you want, bitch.  I
know what you really want, because that’s how I get you.  That’s how I
take you down.  I look at you bitch – I know what you want way better than
you do.  I know it even before you know it.  That’s because I see
you.  I see you like God sees you. . . .”       
     

               
            from “The Peanut Butter Shot”

Crude language.  Short punchy sentences like jabs to
the face.  You don’t like this guy.  But you’re curious to find out
what’s going to happen to him because you get a sense of what kind of a person
he is.  Yeah, reader, that’s how I get you.  That’s how I take you
down.

And then there is this paragraph (Sorry Lisabet, I know
you’ve seen this paragraph about fifty times at least  by now, I just
really like it) which begins one of my vampire stories

“ . . . . Blood has a range of taste, as scent has a range
of aroma. Blood has a high level taste and an under taste. It is a blending of
elements like music. This is also the way of scent. The under aroma will show
you there is a trail and betrays to you the direction. If the scent becomes
fresher you are following the creature that produced it, so you must use the
under scent to know which direction is older and which is newer. It is as
though the  air is filled with singing
voices and you are picking out a single voice. The high scent

will tell you about the individual, the condition of the individual,
if it is injured or sick, horny or filled with fear. It will tell you how to catch
him, where he is likely to run to. To acquire the high scent the animal, or myself, must pause to
commune with the air and pay attention. Close the eyes. Hold the nose still and
just so. Let the night air speak. It is the same with the deep taste of blood,
except that scent is on the move, and if you are tasting the blood – well. It
is no longer on the move. . . . .” 

               
         (Opening Paragraph “The Lady and the
Unicorn”)

There is a lot going on in this paragraph.  There is a
deliberate styling of Diction + Tone = Voice.  This is the voice of a
sensitive young woman while at the same time being the voice of a practiced
predator and hunter of humans.  An affection for the night, an ironic
humor.  An absence of empathy.  She never says she’s dangerous, she
never boasts, but by the end of the paragraph she doesn’t have to.

People write things their own way.  But in my case what
I love is language and the sound of language.  Its why I want to see
characters get a voice.  It’s how I love them.

I’m standing in front of the shredder in the
place where I work. I’m staring at the whirling blades the way a man might
stare at a lawn mower after realizing some of his toes have disappeared.

Yesterday I had been going for a walk around
a two mile track across the street from where I work. I had taken off my shoes
and walked around the track barefoot carrying my shoes in my hands, enjoying
the sand between my toes. I was thinking of the archaeological site of a Mayan
ruin I had visited a long time ago. A poem came to me, the way a headache might
come to me and I wrote most of it in my head as I walked. When I got back to
the car, I didn’t even take time to put my shoes on before grabbing a some scraps
of typing paper and scribbling it all out with a pencil. I looked it over. I
liked it. I liked it very much.

I’m not a poet. But I liked this poem enough
to want to be a poet, to take the notion seriously like child discovering
crayons for the first time. I could do this. I had read once about how poets
like T S Eliot kept works in progress handy in their pockets or desk drawers to
work on them when stuff came floating by in the air that was worth snatching
down and noodling over. I brought the poem to my desk. The desk became
cluttered over the progress of the day. In a fit of indignation over my natural
sloppiness I gathered up the papers.

And so now I’m staring at the shredder,
realizing.

Hemingway once had a briefcase of short
stories he’d written during his Paris days. His first and favorite wife had
determined to bring it to him in a taxi cab. That turned out badly. He might
have named his next novel “A Farewell to Briefcases”. A young Garrison Keillor
left his fateful briefcase of manuscripts in a men’s bathroom when he was
considering the idea of starting a variety radio show. He forgot the briefcase
in the toilet but he stuck with the radio show.

At least you can’t stick a briefcase in a
shredder.

Stephen King was luckier, he threw the rough
draft of his first novel “Carrie” in the trash because he thought it was crap
and that he was crap as a novice writer and should give up. But it was his wife
who fished it out and talked him into giving it another shot, so maybe that
doesn’t count. And don’t we all wish we had a wife like that.

But I still had this poem to rebuild.

In the afternoon I put my notebook in my
pocket. Took off my shoes. And walked the track again in exactly the same way.
I met the poem again along the way, gave it a hug and rebuilt it. As I was sure
I would.

It wasn’t the poem I needed – it was the walk
around the track. That very track. After all, you have to know where to look.

I write from the unconscious. The unconscious
writes for me. We are a team when we’re working well and when we’re working
well it shows.

I think what writers live for is being in
“The Zone”. The Zone is that place where the machinery is humming, where the
world recedes and you’re down in the story with the characters and on a good
day the characters speak and you shut up and take dictation. Its the best place
to be. Its the place to aspire to be. It’s the place I love.

There are as many schools of writing, as
there are schools of painting. I come what might be the Zen school of writing,
those who write best when they write from the unconscious. One of my literary
heroes, Ray Bradbury, wrote distinctly from this school and had habits and
rituals distinctive to that way of writing. This particular style of writing is
well suited for erotica, because it emphasizes writing primitively from the
senses alone. It is much like the act of love itself.

There are books that teach the craft of
cultivating that relationship with the deeper depths and writing from them.
Among these craft books you’d find Bradbury’s own book of aphorisms “Zen and
the Art of Writing”, also Robert Olen Butler’s boot camp craft book “From Where
You Dream”. The book that Ray Bradbury personally trained from, the book that
inspired him to develop his unique style has been out of print for way too long
but is still available on the Internet or Amazon if you look hard – “Becoming a
Writer” by Dorothea Brande.

In the end you have to find where you write
from. They say write from you know. That’s great, what if you don’t know much?
I say write where you’re from. If you’re a cerebral person you might write from
there. But don’t think about about writing erotica that way. Erotica is as
primal as the turbulent Jungian waters of the unconscious and is best written
from there.

Here’s how.

Although I’ve been doing this for awhile, I
still consider myself an apprentice writer. This is a good place to keep
yourself, because you are best served by what the Buddhist’s call a “Beginner’s
Mind”. I’m always hungry to learn how other writers, especially the ones I
admire do things. Ray Bradbury learned his apprenticeship by studying Dorothea
Brande’s book as a young writer and following it seriously. He sometimes
mentions her book in interviews. One of the things he adapted from her craft
lessons is the habit of writing by appointment. Brande states that you should
assign yourself a place to write and a specific time to write and promise
yourself mentally that at this time and this place you will show up and write
and do no other thing. If you’re with friends, you’ll excuse yourself. This
time is for your muse and yourself. If you stick faithfully to this the day
will come and days will follow when your unconscious will be waiting for you
like a writing partner with something special to surprise you with.

Another thing Bradbury learned from Brande
was what is sometimes called “free writing”. I still do this as a warm up. It’s
very simple. You’re trying to experience and become practiced at being in The
Zone. A pencil, a notebook. A timer. You decide that you will write for, say,
ten minutes without stopping. It doesn’t have to be about anything, it can be
pure babble, but you have to hunker down and write and not stop for so much as
a sip of coffee. Ten minutes of constant word loading. Let the intuition speak.
You’re not trying to be profound although something profound may emerge. You’re
trying to let the unconscious speak and teach yourself to listen.

Bradbury also experimented with playing with
words and the unconscious. His first published short story was a kind of ghost
story about two kids called “The Lake”. Where did he get the idea for this
story? He sat down at his typewriter, put in a clean piece of paper and typed
the words “The Lake” at the top and began free writing about whatever the two
words suggested to him. He didn’t stop. He let the image carry him. The
unconscious doesn’t deal in language. It deals in images, like dreams. If you
can find yourself a powerful image to deal with, one that speaks to you, you
begin. The novella I’m working on “The Tortoise and the Eagle” began with a
simple image. I was watching a German movie called “The White Ribbon” and there
was a scene of a young boy doing a high wire act on the railing of a wooden
bridge over some dangerous water. Later when someone demanded what in the hell
he was thinking of he said “I wanted to give God a chance to kill me.” Now,
that’s an image to conjure with.

Like courting a girl (do kids still do that?)
to court the unconscious you have to first pay attention. One of the most basic
ways to pay attention is keep a notebook by your bed and write down your
dreams. Try to do this consistently. Your unconscious has its own vocabulary,
its own language of images that will be unique to you. If it sees you trying,
if it sees you paying attention, it definitely will speak to you over time. It
will speak to you in images and images are always more compelling than cerebral
ideas. Mary Shelley invented her novel “Frankenstein” over an image she
received in a nightmare. We get images like this all the time. The difference
is you have to be ready. Like a little kid on the field with the big kids, if
somebody throws you ball you have to be ready to run with it when it finally
happens. You have to prove your attitude.

The last thing I recommend, although I could
go on, is to set a goal for yourself. In one of the rooms where he wrote,
Hemingway wrote on the wall with a pencil how many words he wrote each day so
“you don’t kid yourself.” I use a calender. If you do this, you’ll be amazed at
how little writing you actually do compared to how much you think you do.

When I get writer’s block it doesn’t
intimidate me. I know the cause is a weak imagination, caused by too little
exercise, caused by not keeping my end of the deal. The unconscious has gone
under ground and must be romanced back by paying attention.

1) Make a appointment for each day, a time
and a place – and be there.

2) Free write for 10 minutes to warm up.

3) Make a goal, how many words you will bench
press for that day – and do it. It doesn’t matter if the words are any good.
The point is to show up and write them, practice your instrument. Musicians
practice. Painters practice. Writers should practice too. If you keep your end
of the deal the good words will come.

You have dozens, maybe hundreds of excellent
compelling stories inside your head. Your problem is not that you don’t have
any good stories in you. Your problem is that your hundreds of good stories are
buried under thousands of bad ones. The only way to get under the pile of bad
stories is to pay your dues. You have to shovel shit with a keyboard until you
tunnel your way down to the gold. You have to have faith in the beginning.
There is no other way.