and it was shoving me onwards
blindly I went
with my head covered
signs lined the road
the look of the letters
like bullet holes in tin
the untended fields are green
bees swarm the fallen fruit
drunk on rot
liquid vines of snakes curve along the hedgerows
this is not the tale I meant to tell
I cannot tell it otherwise
this is how they all begin
with the road and the fields
with rot and green
with drunken honey
(2022)
it was always an experiment. for the first time it wasn’t a journal, and that had always been the problem. too much churning, mucky pointlessness in those, a daily spilling of mud on a porcelain floor that had to be mopped up again and again.
this was to be a handprint in wet concrete, a tiny, temporary thing that never went away, disrupting an impervious façade, a reminder of the beauty in incompleteness. Humans disrupt. We are hardwired to want.
Writing erotica is not like writing romance. When sex is at the core of the writing, the rest of the plot serves mainly to create situations where people will want to have it. The sex becomes the plot, and the way it unfolds creates the narrative. Are the characters happy? Guilty? Excited? Fearful? Do they feel good about it at the start then realize as soon as fur hits fur that, oh shit, this is a very bad idea? Or the opposite, warming to the notion the further they pursue it?
While it is popular to add an erotic gloss to another genre (Erotic Thriller, Erotic Horror) this is sometimes like adding sprinkles to ice cream: delicious, but it could have been great without it. In pure erotica, in which sex is the main thrust (hur hur) of the plot, who is the villain? More to the point, who is even a plausible antagonist in an erotica narrative? The protagonist’s parents? Their social circle? Ex-lovers? These are certainly options, and in a romance-first erotic story, one expects the hero to fight-for-the-right-to-love with another well-defined character.
Love, romance, sexual desire: do we need an external antagonist to narrate these facets of our lives, when the villain of our own sexual stories is so rarely external? The struggle is most often within your own mind, between your consciously constructed desire and your history, beliefs, triggers, and unstated, unconscious, icky longings that you ought not to share but can never deny. So few of us feel perfectly safe in our sexual selves. Always we doubt, whether our own ability to give and receive pleasure, or to withstand humiliation after the fact. When we struggle with our feelings about sex, more often than no, we fight ourselves.
This is the nature of erotica. External threats only matter if they change the protagonist’s understanding of themselves and their approach to sex. The villain doesn’t need to be embodied as a person. It can be whatever it is that keeps the erotic hero from fulfilling their sexual destiny. We don’t need to see the betrayal to feel the agony of the struggle.
Indeed, to put the villain in the story can rob it of its sexual pleasure. To frame an abuser, even an absent one, as the antagonist can rob an erotic story of its liberating influence, by making it more about the hurt than the recovery. At its heart, erotic literature is about freedom, about expressing parts of the self not ordinarily permitted. The process of denial is not always important to the plot. We all know that story. What we want from erotica is the getting free.
love everything with me
we hold hands
fingers interlaced
let us go together
and be loved
be loving
carry nothing
our hands empty with purpose
the knee bends just so
every step
framing the horizon
come, here is the spring
and here, the cup
its edge thin between your lips
the green leaves and the gold
and the shadows on the water
here, the cup
and there, the stone
stained by offerings
see, here
this crack
this was how the god escaped
now flowers grow
(2022)
In March of 2020 I started reading this book.
At 777 sizeable pages, it took what felt like all pandemic (ha hahahhhahha, but anyway) to finish. A good eight or nine months at least, in which time I became absolutely convinced that what we call cognition is merely sophistication.
Stack enough layers of iterative analysis on top of one another and the system behaves as if it were intelligent. That’s what our brains are. The cerebral cortex is literally the icing on a cake whose foundation is cellular away/towards membrane awareness. Maybe it’s my own of confirmation bias, but it made some damn sense.
While reading this tome (if ever a book deserved the word) I also wrote some 350,000 words of fiction, most of which I’ve published. My own afflictions and ideas like the preceding have made it very easy to feel the characters are real people who exist independent of my imagination. This is obviously false. However…
Even though there isn’t a thinking mind, stack enough data in a single system, connect the points, allow for feedback, and one begins to observe something like intelligence. Fictional characters do not have minds, but as they say, if it quacks like a duck…
Many writers find a strong character will “come alive” and present them with ideas they might not have come up with before the character was given form. One “gets to know” the characters, even though it is the author who adds the information layer by layer, getting closer to the point where that concretion of one’s own thoughts begins to resemble something that thinks.
This is when characters can “take over” and tell the writer how to change their stories to suit. Who the fuck is doing this? You, but also The-You-That-Is-Not-You. It’s the old witnessing-the-witness epiphenomenon. Which part of you is aware of your awareness? This has yet to be satisfactorily determined by science, and may be, like the sight of the back of one’s own head, not possible for us to fully know.
A fictional character certainly does not have consciousness as we know it. It is, in a sense, an AI script being run by the computer of your brain. However this makes it able to manifest behaviour which seems so much like consciousness that we pragmatically can treat it as such.
Let your characters tell you what to do. It’s just you telling yourself, but these backdoor shenanigans are where the interesting things happen.
once upon a time
things stayed as they were
when you made a thing
it stayed that way forever
once there were things
and they stayed as they were
we have gone from that time
how young we were
which face is yours
it’s an old photograph
and I can’t tell now
it doesn’t matter
here my face is here
and here is yours
I forgot who stood between us
(2022)
I went
the dark was absolute
I did not eat
not one seed
my mouth was empty
that is not my throne
pacing, waiting
she is there still
yes, the sun sets very late this
time of year
yes, I spoke to her yesterday
and she was happy
enough
what more does a woman want?
(2022)
thefixer.home.blog 