Some Serious Books

And we're back after a little unscheduled outage from Blogger. I don't think we've suffered any loss here, but if you run across anything that seems to be missing, please drop me a quick email.

Meanwhile, I've been working hard on a section in an upcoming episode of The Adjusters that explains a bit more about Cindy's backstory, and it looks like that episode is going to cap the 12K words, with no obvious place to split it in two. I'm just hoping I'll be able to whittle it down some during editing.

I've gotten a question or two by email about my process for writing. It's pretty simple, really. My goal is to put down 400 words a day -- usually first thing in the morning. Much less than that and nothing gets written, and much more than that and I burn out on the story. (Unless it's a one-shot short story.) I know, 400 sounds like a weird number. It just happens to be exactly two pages in my working notebook, given the size at which I write. Yes, I write The Adjusters longhand, in a notebook. It's the only way I can write smut, with a (good) pen. There's something physical about writing smut for me, and that requires contact of pen to paper, and the gentle flow of the pen moving along. Which does mean that at some point I need to type up what I've written into a word processor -- that's the long and boring bit. Of course, I do some editing on the fly while typing, so the time's not completely wasted, and it forces me to read every single word back. At least I've learned to edit my prose on the computer itself, as opposed to printing out reams of text. I'm thinking though that it might be time for me to try again to see if I can't write directly on the machine. Maybe I'll try to write the next episode that way, see what happens.

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At the end of last week I finished reading T. J. Parsell's book Fish: A Memoir of a Boy in a Man's Prison, wherein he recounts how, when he was seventeen, he was sent to state prison in Michigan for robbing a photomat and on the first day was raped and then given to one inmate as the result of a coin toss. An arresting memoir, and fairly well written at that, but most importantly a fascinating look into a completely different world for me.

People I know that have seen me read this book have asked me why I picked it up. A good question. I could not, for many of them that do not know of my alternate life, give them the real answer, which is that I wanted to make sure that I was still human. Let me explain that bit. I write smut as a way to wind down, and also to explore some of my more twisted fantasies. And a lot of that involves callous mind control of people, something that doesn't rate very high on the consent scale, especially in the cases where the victims are aware of what's going on but cannot do anything to help it (for instance, Trish in The Adjusters #9). That's all fantasy, of course. But I feel I need to check, once in a while, that real accounts of rape and sexual exploitation still touch me, move me, disturb me. I'm happy to report, they do.

What I find intriguing, though, from a purely psychological perspective, and up to a point literary perspective, is how a text such a Parsell's can be completely unarousing, while at the same time something like Property of Devil's Outlaws by Just2twisted or even better Madame Justine by Karel can be considered arousing. (I'm venturing on thin ice here -- I do like those stories, but I realize they are somewhat extreme, and definitely not to everyone's taste.)

There is something different between stories written to arouse and those that do not, even when they focus on the same idea -- the tone of voice, the details to which the writers decide to pay attention, the perspective. I'd love to see an analysis of what makes a piece of fiction arousing and what makes it not so. Certainly, the expectation that the reader brings to the piece has got to enter the picture somewhere, lending some credence to post-modernist analysis. The only thing I remember reading about this is an old essay by Umberto Eco on what differentiates pornography from more literary endeavors, and one of his comments was that pornography often focused on 'the instants between', the parts that are often skipped in normal stories such as moving from one scene to another. I should read it again. If any of you folks can point me to some discussion along those lines, feel free to post a link or a reference in the comments. Fascinating stuff.

The book that I started since finishing the one above is Sheherazade Goes West: Different Cultures, Different Harems by Fatima Mernissi. If you remember your classics, Sheherazade is of course the storyteller in One Thousand and One Nights, the wife of King Shahryar, who forestalls her execution by telling the king a tale every night that would end on a cliffhanger, forcing the king to let her live one more day to hear the end of the tale. Mernissi, who is a Moroccan feminist writer and sociologist, uses the astonishingly different perspective on Sheherazade that the East -- the arab world -- and the West share to give a highly personal and somewhat meandering discussion of the relationship between men and women in the Judeo-Christian tradition and the Muslim tradition. For all their differences, there is a similarity: men are afraid of women, in the sense that The Other is frightening, a fairly innocuous psychological statement. But the two traditions have approached the problem of how to deal with that fear differently. Haven't finished the book yet, and I'll need to digest it some before being able to talk about it further.

To end with a note of levity, any talk of Sheherazade on this blog will invariably lead to a pointer to the story Chicago Sheherazade by Pamela, in which protagonist Nina needs to prevent mob boss Dino Farelli from killing her by -- you guessed it -- telling him tales to satiate his need for rough and perverted sex. An extremely well-crafted story. (As you all know by now, I'm a big fan of Pamela.)