The F Word

In my personal life as well as in my writing, if I had to put my finger to one truth, its that sex is absolutely vital, and one of the most telling aspects of personality and mental state. Sexuality is an essential thing, yet how we choose to act sexually is influenced so very much by our gender, our class, our education, our mood, our luck, our love. I love to think about it, especially in the context of my characters, because it helps me know them and helps me explore my own biases, feelings and desires. That being said, writing a good sex scene is really hard!

This morning, I read through the top ten entries on The Guardian's annual Literary Review Bad Sex in Fiction awards. I wanted to see "what not to do", and compare it to my own work, from my novel The Wide and Burning World, which is, in parts, a veritable treatise on writing about sex. Let's take a look, shall we?

The following article contains sexually explicit writing that's NSFW (no pictures, though) as well as triggering things like non-consensual sex, sexualized violence and rape. 

Are You Listening?

I've just finished an epically long chapter in a novel of epically long chapters, 18k+ words from one of my three main perspectives. And to celebrate, I've been watching the British drama Broadchurch. Why is a gritty stone-who-done-it a celebration? Why, because of David Tennant, of course.

Oh rilleh?

Inertia is a Property of Matter

After finishing my first book back in January, I had a disturbing thought that (naturally) turned into a burdensome worry: It had been more than a year since I'd started The Wide and Burning World, and I didn't remember how I'd done it! 138k words is the most I've ever written about any single thing, and while it flowed out fairly smoothly, I simply couldn't recall the way I'd actually set forth to make a story that long. What if I couldn't do it again? There are two books left in the trilogy, Salt Spray and Fine Things and Pulling Colors from the Sun. How would I write them, if I couldn't remember how I'd begun in the first place? Was this going to be like so many other projects, doomed to incompletion? It couldn't have just happened, with no method... or could it?

Recently, a feeling I know has started creeping in at the cracks. I'm starting to think plot again, to draft pages when inspiration comes, to repeat wording that I like to myself. This is it! A book is starting to happen. Which sounds dumb, I know, and which of course isn't all of it. I'm becoming increasingly practiced at crafting narrative, inventing characters, researching and editing, and without those skills, I wouldn't be writing. But the way it starts is in embracing the momentum. This book's like a boulder at the top of a hill: I could put my back into it and push it until it rolls or I can be glad the earth is shaking. Now what I've got to learn is to trust that it will happen when I need it to... and that I can put my shoulder to my project if I need to. Let's roll.

The Male POV

I used to worry a lot about writing things that I hadn't experienced. The "agony of release" that is the male orgasm, for example. That is until I received some mind-changing perspective on the matter (of writing, not orgasm): No one feels anything the exact same way. If a story/description/idea resonates with one person, it may not with another, no matter if I crib the whole thing word for word from life. This wisdom freed me to rethink the way I gauge my own inspiration, and I do a lot more work with my full conviction.

My fiction is my domain. If it resonates because I've managed to reveal and portray some sliver of genuine human experience, then it doesn't matter if I have a cock or not.

Cat Box

This morning, while making a dent in the post-holiday detritus, my husband discovered our cat, Lilu, hiding in a box. But, not just any box. It was a shoe box with an attached, hinged lid, lined with foam padding. The box says "ta-da!" on it, and was a snug fit for Lilu (a truly big-boned gal). This box was special. It's her box. She loved it to pieces when it was in the living room, got it so filthy with her fur-leavings that we tossed it in our recycling pile months ago. Now that we've collected enough other boxes to reach critical mass, it was one of many, at the bottom of a vast heap. She could have had any box she wanted. And, well, I guess this was the one.

This is a cat we're talking about, and this is more than the concept of territory or ownership. This is attachment, a deep and primal feeling. We long for what's absent, we hold on to what is dear, what we like, what makes us comfortable. There's nothing terribly extreme in it, no agressive defense. She just likes it best of all. Taking it away left her looking for it, and in the cat-to-human translation we didn't notice the signs. Talk about a priceless insight into character-building. So often, we focus on the key needs and objects that pertain to a character, Lasche's blades, for example. But it's equally important to comment on the fact that he's really attached to his boots, and for no better reason than that attachment is essential to the soul.

(We're letting Lilu keep her box, of course...)

Golden Beam from the Darkness

There's nothing like a sudden hit of inspiration. Usually mine comes from my drive to improve things, either my own work or the execution of others'. This time, the ball was in my court, deflated and moldy from being left in the rain too long. Time to pump it up with some perfect words in their perfect order!

The brunt of my classical training in creative writing is in poetry, and it just wouldn't due to publish (yes, someday, I'm getting to it, shut up) Orphans with a poem-fragment in it that wasn't, you know, good. The poem I refer to is one that must evoke a sense of worldliness and a distinctly masculine sexual viewpoint. My placeholder is:

Stretch’d before my eyes,

the radiant tie of your heart to mine.

In the palm of this hand

blood. In the other,

a puddle of pearls.

Tomorrow brings naught but crimson.

But tonight the moons are up

and you are beautiful.

Okay, yeah, there's the reference to the plural moons for an "it's not Earth" nod, and the goofy semen image. But "stretch'd?" Who talks like that? Stilted, randomly archaic and dumb.

Yesterday this occurred to me, instead: 

Launch a ship from my harbor heart
Fleet and fine.
Solid, sleek. Mast and plank
Drenched, adrip but never sinking
And all sails full beneath the sun
An arrow in the sea between us.

If that doesn't make you want to have passionate, urgent sex with the person who wrote it, I don't know how many moons orbit the planet you come from. Such yearning! Such lusty saltiness! And best of all, its author has never been to the ocean or seen a seafaring vessel (in the book, not yours truly, that would be silly).  Success!

The Merest

Today I wrote the phrase "the merest bite" in a piece of short [fan]fiction. Word underlined it in green as an "uncommonly used word, consider revising." I think I broke my index finger, I stabbed "ignore" so hard. Harrumph, is all I can say to those quashers of old, weird wording. Harrumph!

And Now For Something Completely the Same

Well... that was complainy. And it was almost a month ago. During that month, I moved on, almost made my original deadline, didn't, but didn't care. Now I'm here, and it's time to share.

And by share I mean give some huge spoilers for the next two books of... well, that's the thing...

Due to the sudden, recent death of a friend's father, I have once again had my little aminal brain collide with mortality and the concerns thereabouts. I suddenly realized as I thought about the death of a stranger that superficially touched my existence, that I am, once again, writing a story that heavily involves {spoilers coming}

Boo

Well...

It's not going well. Every time I realize how energetically I wrote the book (7 months start to final rough draft) and how much time has gone by without much change (4 months) I feel very sick and depressed about the whole thing.

I know I can't make it come. I know (now) that setting a bar like I did for this month was not conducive to my creative process. I know The Wide and Burning World is 90% there, and that most of the changes are just icing on the cake.

But I was quite proud of my progress until now and with my ego deflated, I'm reduced to a puddle. Lots of other stuff in the works, of course: New writing for TRO, especially, and I've been working harder at my job than ever before. The "it will happen when it happens" idea leaves me a bit hollow, knowing that once I am finally satisfied, the real work of finding a publisher begins. I toil on.

...but maybe not today.

The Curious Man/ Arlo's first three

Not much to add or change here, just packing in a little more description. First person creates some pitfalls in describing other characters. Normally people don't stare at and mentally describe the individuals they encounter. if this sort of description isn't handled with care, it can come off as a meet-cute, which gets awkward when it's guy on guy, or you're wrestling with not making "love at first sight" happen because it can seem like weak writing if not done purposefully (or, in this case, both). That being said, I love describing my characters, so perfecting this skill was a must.
--
In Arlo's first three chapters, by contrast, my conceited little hog farmer can go on at leisure about how he looks, which given the above-mentioned obstacles not only lets me avoid the usual problems, but comes as a characterful rarity (You wouldn't see Larkin standing around looking in the mirror). I keep referring to these chapters as a lump because I have lumped them. In total, they came to ~3600 words, and I think the simple change of grouping them together cuts down on the it's-another-Arlo-chapter phenomenon. They were written well after the rest of the book was (basically) set, since I decided to include Arlo in the first book only after I came up fairly short on my word count. I started writing them in little chunks to keep it modular enough to be placed in the already-arranged book, but they ended up all going in a row. No matter, the only real loss here are the original chapter titles, Cream, Trough and Axe. I decided to call them all Farm, the counterpoint to Home, his final chapter. Which no one will notice, but I don't care.

The Librarian

It's Larkin's first chapter, woo hoo! Yes! And, I know I didn't update yesterday. I'm okay with that, and I hope you are too.

This one was a snap. I had some world detail to sprinkle in, and while that took some careful crafting, it was quite rewarding. I made my first name change, as well. I tend to pick names out of the air as "placeholders." Sometimes I get attached (hence the similarity between Daniel Larkin and Davidson Lasche remains) and other times I thank my lucky stars for find-and-replace. Amusingly enough, this was supposed to be all of Larkin's POV in the book, but that was back when there was only going to be one book, Lasche was going to be the main character and well...admittedly, I didn't know what the hell I was doing.

A Red Road

I was not looking forward to working on this chapter. There's a lot of expositional prose in here and as with much of my early work, it is both a little weaker and a little less correct than the rest of the book. I thought I needed to explain more than I did. Sometimes I exposit in ass-covering fashion, so when people are like "When is that mentioned?" I can say well, Lasche referes to it briefly here. But putting in one sentence thousands of words earlier than ideas come into the story-proper really isn't useful to casual readers. Usually it represents insecurity in my storytelling, lack of faith in my readers or the desire to display that yes-I-had thought-of-that. I was envisioning lots of chopping of lots of writing that I was embarrassed to admit to having written. Dread!

It didn't go as badly as I expected. I was able to delete most of the patches that were awkward, even if it took me trying to rewrite a few of them before deciding they just couldn't be saved. Best of all, I decided to surrender a little on the issue of tense continuity. I'm getting TWaBW proofread professionally before I start shopping the manuscript around, so someone else can ref the "this versus that" battle royale. It was getting in the way of my creative process, and that's what professional helpers are for: Fixing what they are great at fixing, so you can do what you're supposed to be doing. I am the peanut butter, they are my jelly.

One dead darling: I can’t even recall if I was in my right mind or not on that given day; I was drunk a lot back then.

Man, I loved that sentence. What an achy little punch. But the person he's telling the story to doesn't need to hear it because, well, that's for Book 2. Out it goes.

And a chunk that's a little riskier to remove: There were four other places like it back in those days: the ones out east in Haman and Hoen, the one down the way in Suthy and the one up north in that armpit, Greengate. I’d been working out of the capital for seven or eight months, as it was the biggest. They knew me there, by then, which was the best way to get paid quick.

I like seeing Haman and Hoen set next to each other like this, but that's beside the point. This was in the description so that I could name all the major cities in the first chapter of the book. But, I really don't like how dispersed this makes the Talent collection program. I need it to be more localized and tighter; knowledge is power, and power is a big deal. Gone.

Tomorrow is Friday and I'm into Larkin's first chapter, much revised already. I've got targeting reticules locked on removing some bloated darlings (I'm looking at  you, descriptions of food) and smooth sailing the rest of the... oh, wait... there's my first-ever attempt at world-building in this chapter, isn't there? Damn. I might need to kick-and-punch this, now that I have some golden perspective on which details matter. Onward!

Sun and Clouds

Today is the first day of my month-long editing marathon. Woo! The compulsion to jump all over the book is fairly staggering, but I've resisted successfully, and begun with the Prologue.

The prologue is, rather uniquely, considering the non-linear way I tend to come up with stories, the true starting point of the book. It was a short story I wrote in reaction to some really obnoxiously predictable character/narrative development in (siiiiiigh) the Privateer Press fluff for Warmachine. I wanted to make it mo' bettah--and I wanted to make it have gay sex in it, because, hey, why not? (In all seriousness, erotic fiction is a standpoint from which a lot of my ideas come. I think sex is more key to understanding ourselves and our world than more literature is willing to display) I was also concepting an RPG setting at the time with the ludicrous working title of Special Forces. Then Sun and Clouds came out really good, and was the longest thing I'd ever really created. It was also a big enough departure (written intentionally with very few setting-specific details) that when I started building a larger story around it, I decided to "put my hands together" as it were. Soon, A Barber of Great Renown The Wide and Burning World was born.

All that was left to do here, editing-wise, was to remove a few niggling sentences and the very last vestiges of the original reason I wrote the story. There was nothing crucial to take out, the details being blown out enough that they were neither story-important nor not my own, but I knew there were a few word choices and phrases that I just didn't want as they were. All fixed. No major additions.

The best nugget to come out of the edit: When we were alone together, he shared his lore with me, taught me the ballads, the sagas and songs, and limned the necessity of quiet thought in the grim thrill of war.

I'm nervous about my next chapter, though. Find out why and what I do about it tomorrow!

The Plan

I've got a plan. I'm going to edit a chapter of The Wide and Burning World a day--no more no less-- for all of August. By the end of next month my book will be tied up with a neat little bow. Why not start now? Because not every plan has to be hatched as soon as possible. This is the August Plan: 31 chapters, 31 days...and 31 blog posts about the process. Wish me luck!