Category: writing

What she looks like

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When I wrote Wanton, the character was vividly imagined, created by my subconscious, in a dream.

I describe her in the text:

 

Blood-red hair cut just past her jaw line, brushing her long, slender neck. Big eyes some strange color I could never put a name to. Full lips in a perpetual sneer. Her teeth were a little bit crooked (most of these things I noticed only later). Early 20s, probably ten years my junior, but with something in the eyes that seemed much older. 

Later I add that she’s tall (half a head shorter than our narrator, who described himself as a big man so he’s something north of six foot.  Hey arms are sleeved with tattoos, as well tattooed flowering vines covering hips and sides. 

Several years after I wrote it, I bought a book called Naughty and Nice: The Good Girl Art of Bruce Timm (an incredible book by the way, by one of my favorite comic artists of all time; out of print now, but I’ve heard a re-release is coming — EDIT: here is the re-print

 

In any case, when I first opened said book, there was Wanton looking at me, straight out of my mind’s eye. 

the tattoos are not there, of course, and hair color; but imagine before she was heavily covered. Wanton’s blond, naturally, hair a honey color. But we know she dyes it, red in the story. So imagine this is a black hair phase, pre-tattoos. The pubic hair would be blond, of course, but again, easily imagined. 

I’ve actually tried to get my Timm to draw my version of this girl (it’s been impossible to reach him thus far). At some point I hope to find someone who can transform this for me, digitally, or even re-draw it in something like Timm’s style. 

Alas I no longer have the book, for some reason, so can’t get a higher resolution image. Until the book is reprinted, this will have to do. As best I can present it, this is her. 

 

 

 

Bruce Timm Naught and Nice page 87

Trying to Start

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I’m trying to start writing something. 

I’ve edited a lot over the last month, even re-wrote bits of things. 

It’s been cathartic to feel it coming back, to hear narration in my head again, to refresh memory of how to create. 

I’ve even got a friend asking me to write her something. 

How did I used to start a piece of fiction? I frankly can’t recall. I can’t recall how to get from blank page to — that thing that happens after a blank page. That thing where words go, with purpose and meaning and intent. 

I was good at this, a while ago, until I stopped being able to do it at all. 

I’m doing this instead of that, an avoidant technique. 

Stop stalling I say to myself. Type. 

In a minute. 

Meanwhile, I was successful in getting a number of friends interested in my novella,  Wanton. One or two via Facebook, but maybe 20 via a post on Instagram. 

The two on Facebook actually read, loved, responded. But the mass of people from Instagram, not one went beyond thanks after asking for the link. 

It’s the age old creator’s problem, isn’t it. Create something for yourself, first, because audiences don’t really want to venture forth to new things, even if they ask. 

Ah well. Three or four new readers is something, particularly after a decade of not having anything posted. It’s a start. 

But as a reminder to myself, go listen more to friends music. Go read their books. TELL THEM you’re reading, listening. Creators need it. 

 

Everything that’s old is slightly less old

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I pulled out all the old stories that were once up in a writing blog off of an old archive disk, and am gradually going through them.

It’s a mixed bag. There’s nothing anywhere as good (he says, full of humility) Wanton, of which i’me very proud, particularly after a revision.

But there’s some treasure.

Long Dark Car (a story based on a long ago sex dream about – well, some minor TV star) is actually pretty good, and required no editing to speak of (aside from cleaning up typos).

The Man with the Bag is better than I remembered it being; it’s actually a lot of fun. It was written for a long-ago contest for long-gone erotica site Satin Slippers; we were asked to write ‘Bad Santa’ erotic stories. Mine won. Note that it’s password protected right now, because it needs a disclaimer (the site it was written for hosted a lot of non-consent type stories, so it was written with that in mind – yes, he’s a very bad santa). It needed a little revision, but not much. If you want to read it, you’ve been warned – the password is mister Claus’ first name, all lower case.

Aside from that, I have a half dozen short pieces (some erotic, some not) which I have to go through to see if they should be fixed and posted, or if they should just stay in the archive permanently. We’ll see.

An admission of guilt, or at least, of writing

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Well, today I more or less announced myself as a writer in Facebook.

which won’t be big news for the people who used to  read this space, or for the very few who have read my fiction, but in the modern, post blogosphereera world of social networks, I don’t think many of the people I interact with know me as such, despite this site having been linked from FB and Instagram for years.

but after completing a marathon revision session on my novella Wanton, I both needed acknowledge my own progress, fighting back from years of feeling unable, as well as, I’ll admit it, hoping somebody would go read it. I don’t work in a vacuum well; I’ve always needed an audience to write for, or at least hoped my work would find one. So while I did t link direst to this site or to the novella in question (yet), I am hoping I get a hit or two and somebody says, I’d like to read that.

One thing that’s changed since I wrote this is the need to trigger warning it; I never before felt I needed to label my work, despite it being largely erotic, because I consider Wanton, at least, to be fiction, a love story, rather than a wank-piece. It may get you aroused, and I hope it does, but the intent is to tell a story about two characters in an obsessive, destructive relationship. It’s about the people, not about what they may do.

but, the story is filled with blood, pain, come, drugs and both physical and emotional harm. The last  two people I shared it with pre-edit, I didn’t warn, and I think it gut-punched them in different ways.

going forward, then, it has warnings.

 

Old words, new friends.

Karl ElvisLeave a comment

I suppose every writer understands the awkward, uncomfortable experience of trying to re-read or edit something they wrote a very long time ago. 

For me, at least, that experience tends to begin with cringing, and then moves on to a desire to we-write from scratch, just to avoid any more uncomfortable re-reading. 

At that point I usually just close the editing tool I have open and walk away. 

I used to write all them time. I was once a reasonably accomplished tech writer. In  early 2004 I started blogging, writing almost daily. Writing short essays several times per week is great practice for a writer. 

I’ve written a number of short stories, started a novel at least three times, actually finished a novella. 

It all stopped a few years ago. Social media rose and blogs stopped being a thing, and then the friend who hosted my web sites died suddenly, leaning me locked out our server for good (I was able to export most of the writing, fortunately, and have since at least gotten the blog back up, if not kept it up to date).  

In any case, I just stopped writing, for a very long time. 

Recently, however, a friend of mine asked to read something of mine, so I fished a piece of fiction out of archives and shared it, getting positive feedback; this got me stated writing a few things, just descriptions of events or experiences. Nothing ambitious, but vastly more than I’ve written in a decade. 

Then a second friend made a similar request to read something. That friend then recorded herself recording a piece of  my writing, is planning to do a more complete recorded reading in future.

Hearing it out loud, hearing the story, and hearing all the little things I needed to fix somehow gave me the kick in the ass I needed to actually complete a long-avoided re-edit. A task I’ve been avoiding for literally a decade, if not more. 

It’s been cathartic, and I am thankful for the friend who got me started on this, as well as the one who liked my work enough to try reading it out loud. 

Wanton is back on line.

Karl Elvis2 Comments

After losing my blog hosting a few years ago, non of my other writing (erotica, etc) has been on this site.

I finally got it back up, thanks to some inspiration from my friend Elizabeth.

find it under Writing or directly here Here.

 

please drop a comment if you visit, it’s lonely out here in the Moronosphere.

All hat, no story

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I have this dream of writing a western.

Not really – you know, a whole novel (because hell if I can finsih anything anymore). BUt at least a short story.

In concept, it makes complete sense. My fiction is all tough-guy, man of action, violence, loneliness, and heartbreak. Bikers, cowboiys, private eyes; noir of the old west.

I have it in me, because – well, I can fucking write.

The trouble I’m having though – aside from the never having a fucking minute to myself problem – is that I just can’t find the form. I can’t quite internalize what a western really is, what it should be. I’ve attempted Loius L’amour, larry McMurtry, Zane Gray, Jack Schaefer, Cormac McCarthy. It’s not that I don’t like them – some, anyway. But it’s that I can’t find that onw voice that resonates enough to do it myself.

With Noir and hard-boiled crime fiction, i have it; I’ve read enough Dashiell Hammett, enough Raymon Chandler, enough Ross Macdonald and Dennis Lehane and John MAcDonald, enough James M. Cain and Elmore Leonard. I get it; I speak it. I can write it.

But the western isn’t resonating with me yet; I’m not hearing it in my head.

I’m currently reading Hondo by Loius L’amour. I have a real weakness for Loius L’amour, because my grandfather used to read him, and I’d find the paperbacks around our house, and pick ’em up and read. I like L’amour’s masculine, strong prose. But I struggle with the cliches, the tendancy to tell us over and over, that Our Hero is A Hero; repeated referneces to strength, hardness, squinty eyes.

It’s not my prose, as a reader, or as a writer.

Maybe it’s the mode problem; I am always most comfortable working in first person, and I’ve yet to read a western that’s not third-person. Maybe I can’t find the voice to narrate in the voice of an 1870’s westerner. Sure, I can get around it; I could narrate as the side-kick, or push myself to write third person; but perhaps I just can’t hear the narrative because I have yet to read any in that mode.

I tought myself to write by reading; I have an ear for narrative and dialog, and know when something sounds right; when it’s clean and sharp, when it’s awkward. I know it by feel, not because I learned the rules and follow them. Rules and I have an uneasy relationship. So I need a model, a sound, a structure. Not to follow, but to measure against – Does This Sound Wrong.

So my search continues. Maybe the form is more appealing in concept than in fact; maybe, really, I just do not love the western. But in my head there’s a rough, damaged man in faded denim and worn-down boots; a man who’s fraught and lost, who’s running from his past, or himself. A man who’s got a last battle to fight, before he goes down and dies in the dust, or finds himself in the wild lands and the struggle for some greater good.

I have a character, I can see him. I just have to find a story and a voice.

 

 

That’s how it starts.

Karl ElvisLeave a comment

It’s been a long time wince I’ve really WRITTEN something.

 

Not some cute pics of my kids, or pix of how sexy I am with muscles and scary facial hair, or arty photos of some rock or rusty tractor.

 

I mean actually write.

 

I used to write about politics – about how much I fucking hate our system, and the people in it; about how I wind up having to vote for a guy I think is a wimp, becauise my other option is a member of the freakiest cult in the world, untel scientology showed up, and a man utterly without moral compass or any sense of personal honor. I just to make that sort of a screed entertaining. And sometimes good. Now, I don’t even make it.

I also used to write stories –  some true, some false, most someplace in between; ambiguity leads to better fioction. I used to fucking teach people how to write, because dammit, I was good.

Now? It’s not that I’m not good ; it’s that I’m just not. This shit here isn’t writing, it’s ambien-fueled thrashing, posing in the vague forms, assuming the shapes, but not actually producing anything.

As I type this, small, hairy spiders bigin to creep over my keyboard. I like ambien.

What I mean to say isn’t just to bitch about my failures; they’re not real failures. They’re failures to start, rather, not failures to do what I do.

“I know I have a novel in me,” my friend Myles said the other day. And yeah, he does; I can smell it on him like scotch and success. And god dammit, I sure as fuck have a novel – not a; several. But let’s sart one before we visualize the second. I have ideas for a half dozen books, easily; my problem isn’t ideas, or narrative; it’s simple attention span. It’s also simple being awake long enough.

I have to write, to get this going. And the brilliant thing is, no one reads anymore, so I might as well start here.

 

It was a dark and stormy Night…

 

Wait that isn’t right. Maybe something in a wilder vein.

 

We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like, “I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive . . .”And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about 100 miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming: “Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?”

 

Um, wait. That might have been done.

 

I guess I need to do this in my own words.And to be honest, this work is old, but I have not pulled it out and worked on it in years.

Here goes.

 

====

Tires on the highway. The wind in the old tin box of a van I drive. Blood in my veins. Whiskey in my skull. 

Motörhead – Lemmy doing something you might call singing, the crank-drain making his voice just right to tell me about life on the road and jailbait and dirty love and the ace of spades. A story I pretend the tattoos on my arms would also tell you, but it’s the ones on my back that really have a story. 

Roaring. All of it. And I was roaring back.

I was leaving some trouble behind me I guess. Or so I like to think. Really the trouble was over, a thing with a girl, and some tattoos, and some booze and some drugs. And then the girl was gone and I wasn’t, which was the wrong way for it to have ended.

I roared back at Lemmy.

——

Wait there’s more. Lets skip a bit, til after the cops stop him.

——

“Son, I’m startin’ to think you got some problems,” the sherif said. 

I turned my head and looked at him. Wished I still had some sunglasses. “Well. Yeah. You could say that.”

“So I tell you what. You quit dicking me around and tell me something true,  and I won’t haul you off to my jail unless you’re doing something to deserve it.”

I sighed. Told him my name. Told him I was just passing through. He wanted to know where I was headed.

“Fuck if I know. Maybe I’m just – easy rider, y’know?”

He chuckled. “You know how that movie ends, right? Damn though, I liked those choppers.”

I decided right there I wasn’t going to have to kill the sheriff. So that was good.

“So you’re running away then, yeah? So just tell me something. Because I will check on it. Tell me if that thing you’re running away has a cop’s name connected to it, or a warrant.”

It didn’t. The only name I was running away from was tattooed on my back. So that’s what I told him.

“Girl?” he asked.

“Dead girl.” I answered.

 

 

========

 

 

That’s how it starts. And I know how it finishes. And I know there’s a girl – another girl, because this guy, like me, will always, always have another girl. But unlike me, death tends to hover near him, not so you can see, but so, if your nose is sharp, you can maybe smell it a little, after he leaves the bar.

The middle is there the issue is; and not so much because I don’t know what it is, but because I can’t seem to make it exist. Yet.

I will start again. Now. I will write something. Doggeral or drivel, but I’ll write some words, about something that matters. And when I have ten, or twenty, or a thousand words, somehow, I may be writing again.

 

Because my soul dies when I hear others discuss writing like it’s something than can do, just because they go to school. Writing – my writing  – rips itslf of of the fucking soul, because it has to. You don’t teach that, unless you’re some sadistic bastard; you don’t learn it on purpose. You don’t have it at all; you simply ARE that; the question is only, does it go to paper, or is it taken out on flesh.

 

 

 

 

better sir?

Karl ElvisLeave a comment

I’m trying to recall the last time i wrote anything.

Wow, I can’t.

I sort of want to blame facebook. Just because I hate facebook so much that it seems like a good thing to blame.

My updates are all there, I want to say. And on twitter.

Only it’s not true. I don’t update on facebook, and a barely tweet.

Is it any wonder then, that my friends keep asking me if i’m ok?

My answer: I don’t know.

My yardstick for ‘ok’ is so askew these days, I can only answer in relation to how I was.

Than last week? Yes, much better (I had a cold).

Than last weekend? Yes, a bit, the cortisone shot helped the pain in my shoulder.

Than last month? I can’t fucking remember.

Than six months ago? Yeah, i think so. I think, just maybe, yes.

Than a year ago? Than two, or three?

I can’t remember when I was just ok, with no caveats. Or to be more specific, I remember the times – the short, sweet, perfect moments are crystal clear in my memory, with flavors and scents and sound.

I just can’t remember how long ago that was; it’s too much of a fucking blur.

So I have to reel it in, measure on a closer scale. And that gets really, really hard. Because the context, the perspective, the range and distance are all missing. Dead-reckoning by instinct in the dark, the way you walk through your bedroom in pitch black and know where the door and the bed are, unless you stop and think.

But today? Yeah, ok.

I keep trying to get a breath, though. To get that little bit of distance ahead to start thinking, what do I need to actually be good again? And I can’t see it. Too close in; I’m in the thick of battle, fighting so many small and large fights all the time that I can’t see a battle, let alone know how to win it.

I’m wearing down; I can feel it. I can feel my body aging, and my mind with it. Some tide of battle surges up against me every time I think I’ve almost a some skirmish.

This would be easier if my battle-field metaphor were more true; brute force solves some problems so elegantly.

This is the battle on inches though; of minutes. And I’m losing it in tiny, almost immeasurably small increments. Like when something moves so slow you can’t only see it if you sit utterly still.

I can’t sit still; I can’t see the tiny progress forward or back.

So I need to do something to change the scale. I just don’t know what.

I remember when I used to be a blogger

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I remember when I used to be a blogger, rather than a guy who occasionally updates web pages. It was a long time ago, wasn’t it? I can’t even find a good way to graph my blogging frequency anymore. I know it used to be daily, and then several weekly, and then once in a […]

I remember when I used to be a blogger, rather than a guy who occasionally updates web pages.

It was a long time ago, wasn’t it?

I can’t even find a good way to graph my blogging frequency anymore. I know it used to be daily, and then several weekly, and then once in a while. Lately, it’s more like almost never.

Sometime in 08, I think it was, than the slide started; from there, it just seems like little by little I’ve given up.

I don’t mean on blogging – whatever. I mean on writing.

The last think I wrote that wasn’t just about an experience was two, maybe three years ago, aside from a couple of abortive tries and collaboration on erotica. The last thing I finished was a year or more before that.

I’m so rusty, my fingers don’t even remember how to type anymore (it took me three tries to get the work ‘type’ correct). My hands ache when I try, more from disuse than from anything else. The muscles have forgotten what its’ like to type more than the hundred or so lines I need to update a wiki page or type out a report.

I don’t even remember how I used to do this; I try to remember writing Wanton, and while I remember the feeling, I can’t figure out how I actually did it.

I started this blog – back in the dim, distant past in blog-years – with the express intent of using it to improve my writing. That never worked; or to be more specific, it got me writing something i hadn’t before (introspective essays), but didn’t help me with fiction – because it was a distraction.

Now, though? now, I’m lucky if I manage enough attention span to tweet one thing or to update my facebook status.

I was going to say I don’t know what it is, but that’s not true. I know what it is, I just don’t know what to do about it.

I’ve been in a sate of have to do something for so long now, I can’t quite my brain long enough to put words together with anything like flow.

This was bad enough, just with the ordinary stuff. Work – making the Greatest Smart Phone Ever (and the best tablet you’ve ever seen and didn’t even know you needed) isn’t just a full time job; it’s a lifestyle. We’re a seven day a week shop, and my area is to be the glue that keeps the 24 hrs per day stuff (the compute farm) going. So I’m working even when I’m not working, always aware that nothing holds this together but me. I dream compute farms and CAD tool licenses at night. And then, there’s the part about being the father of two teenager girls, which isn’t ever an easy job, even for very low needs children. Then there’s the rental house, my own house, and all the rest. Life has caught up with me in ways I didn’t quite anticipate; being The Dad to not just two, but four women (including my mother in law) takes it’s toll.

But now – well, that’s a whole ‘nother entry about Mental Health Issues. But that’s another entry, if I ever get to it.

But the bottom line is, finding even half an hour to gather myself and write, these days, is more than I can manage.

I need it. I need to put words to my feelings, to tell stories. And I fucking can’t.

I don’t see an end to this, I truly don’t. I know it has one – I just can’t imagine how or where or when.

And my best tool has deserted me again.