Fuck Off, Ian

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Ironically my late brother was named Ian, and I imagine the title phrase has been said out loud, oh, a thousand times. But nevermind that, for now.

This is about the namesake hurricane.

This freaks me the fuck out: my best friend in the whole world, someone I have loved for decades, lives just about under where that cluster of rainbow spaghetti hits FLA, and I really, really do not like that.

I know there are a million people who may get clobbered if Ian hooks more north and west, and i’m sorry, but I don’t care. I can only care about the few people I truly love, and I need them to stay safe.

I know, no hope or thought or prayer will turn a hurricane; it’s all goddamn physics. But animal brain still says force of will can turn this thing, and if I have anything, it’s force of will.

Hurricane Ian

 

 

Shoelace moments

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Some days nothing seems to work out.

It’s not that anything is bad, relatively speaking, but it’s also nothing good, nothing going the way you want.

Shoelace moments, I call them, in reference my favorite Bukowski poem.

with each broken shoelace
out of one hundred broken shoelaces,
one man, one woman, one
thing
enters a
madhouse.

so be careful
when you
bend over.

It’s that shit, all day long. Nothing that means anything, really, but,

Just the fucking shoelace.

what we call stalling

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I”ve been trying to figure out ho wbest to create a ‘favorite posts’ menu.

I’m relatively sure this will be easy when I focus on it for more than five minutes at a time, but, I thought i’d start with the idea of what favorites are.

Most popular? I don’t even know what that means anymore, since it’s been a decade at least since I last had a lot of readers. Most popular now is whatever I last posted that got likes.

No, it has to be the best of what i’ve written, according to me. But that means I have to dig through 1300 goddamn posts (and try to resist deleting all the ones that seem stupid, now), to try to figure out what i’m actually proud of.

I don’t quite know if I want to do that, but, I guess somebody has to.

But anyway, what i’d rather be writing about is sex.

One of the tricky parts for some of us is, inspiration. What gets us writing.

I used  to write colossal rants, which was easy to get into. I used to write reviews of things, or at least my impressions of them (books, movies, etc), which as often as not took the form of a rant.

I don’t enjoy ranting the way I used to; I can’t quite work up the energy to be that angry about things that don’t matter so much.

But sex will always drive me. I am there pretty much 24×7 (well, I don’t sex dream like I used to, alas, since those kinds of dreams tend to produce great fiction, so let’s say, every waking hour, and some of the sleeping ones).

I’ve made a few attempts at short stories and at novels that were not primarily erotic, all of which got going but stalled for one reason or another (which doesn’t mean they’re done with, it just means I need to find time where work ins’t always in the back of my head, to try to mail down what exactly i’m writing, when passion isn’t my primary driver.)

So for now, as i’m getting back into writing, i’m going to be working with what I know I can do.

Why am I not doing that here, now? That’s really what we call stalling.

I need to focus myself on what I do, which has always begin with characters. Every piece of fiction i’ve ever succeeded with began with a person; sometimes real, sometimes dreamed, sometimes invented, but always a person. Character-driven, is what a writer would call it, rather than plot-driven. So I need to gather my thoughts to try to find who i’m writing about, first, and who i’m writing as, second (because I tend to find first person infinitely easier, and today, easy is the name of the game).

I have a few places to start – it’s easy to begin with a person I actually know, as a model, at least if I can picture them well. Real life helps, because I can model how they move, how they sound. In some cases I have reference for how they smell (which matters a huge mount to me), or even how they come. Knowing these things means I can more easily build my model.

From there crafting erotica is a simple matter of setting, mood, tone. Something like Long Dark Car, it was easy because person and setting came from a dream, so mood and tone was easy from there, once I had a song in my head to define mood and give the story a beat.

So I need to know who, and then where. The who needs to come to me, which i’m hoping will occur in a few minutes when I can close my eyes and imagine.

I have good candidates; some I know well, either in real life or, in some cases, crushes I could pull out of a movie or tv. Others, who I have not yet gotten enough feel for, to write convincingly, but may do yet.

The trick though with real people is, you have to be able to remain authentic and accurate, even if you are fictionalizing them.

I’ll have let someone volunteer, so to speak.

Finding what’s missing

Karl Elvis2 Comments

Ah, crap, I just realized that in conversion of my old site archive to this, I seem to have lost about half my total posts.

I have it all, in a temporary blog I set up while moronosphere.com was down, but now I have the hard process of figuring out what’s missing, entry by entry, and then figuring out how to export and import just the missing stuff.

Grumble.

It may not even be worth it. As much as I hate the thought, not every one of the 1300 posts from my original blog may be so suffused with brilliance I have to have it. And all the photo links are broken, since I lost all that when Brandon died and left me locked out of our machine.

But some of it – well, at least as memories of times long ago – matters.

 

 

EDIT:

ok, not difficult at all. WordPress importer is smart enough to know what’d been uploaded already and simply bypasses.

I’ve uploaded it all, and now see all 1271 published posts (plus a shit ton of drafts).

Your homework is to go read and digest Every. Single. One.

There may be a pop quiz later.

WTF is it with poetry

Karl Elvis3 Comments

what the fuck is it with poetry?

It’s a form I fundamentally don’t feel, as a writer.

Not that I don’t love it – lyrics of songs and bits of poetry are in my head all the time. Things from tolkien, from ogden nash, from james thurber, from andy partridge, steven wilson, lloyd cole, phil lynott. Words that move me and capture me.

But when I write – fiction at least – I hear narrator voice in my head, which is why I write the way I do, in character, with that characters voice ringing in my skull.

This isn’t something I learned in school. It’s something I do by instinct, like a musician playing by ear.

But verse – it escapes me. I can’t hear it, feel it, do it by instinct. It’s like an intuitive jazz player trying to play in a symphony, without being able to read the charts. They may find the notes that make sense, but they won’t grasp where they are supposed to fit with a hundred other instruments.

I look at work by poets I admire, and I see what they’re doing, how they’re doing it, and I react. But I don’t understand why they do what they do.

Why the line break here, and not there? Why this may beats on a line? Are they hearing some drumbeat, heartbeat, some rhythm i’m not party to? Is there an invisible template?

I need to talk to poets about poetry, which somehow sounds so beatnik I want to get out my beret and snap my fingers. I need to hear them read out loud, maybe, or to understand how they chose a form (or if the form choses them, perhaps, as a character speaking in my head; I just listen to them, they speak to and through me).

I read things that inspire, and I try to do what they do, and to date, my tries and lyrics and poetry always wind up awkward and unfinished.

I need the why.

 

 

 

Dreams to Stories

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As I re-explore the blogosphere (in an attempt to rebuild a network of connections and, of course, to re-acquire an audience of readers), i’ve been using WP reader to discover active bloggers.

I’ve been reading a number of blogs with some very good erotic content – mainly poetic but some otherwise. Not classic ‘here’s a sexy story that sounds like penthouse forum’ erotic, but more heartfelt, personal content; at least, that’s what’s reaching me currently.

It’s been quite a lot of years since i’ve written any fiction, erotic or otherwise, but these people – some of whom i’m linking to in my side-bar (or bottom of hime page if you’re on mobile) – are inspiring me to create.

Almost all the writing i’ve done in the last three months has been in the form of life stories for my friend Liz, who only recently discovered that i’m a writer. She was the person who got me to pull Wanton back out and share, then to start working on a revision. I credit her with re-awakening my need to write (as I have re-awakened hers).

But now i’m getting a desire to revisit my erotica skills. I have old (some extremely old) work in an archive I need to revisit, but that will happen later; now, I need to start.

My best writing writing all began as dreams; the vividness of a sexual dream stays with me on waking, and if I can capture the atmosphere of dream, I know the writing will work, because atmosphere is what I do.

I had such a dream last night – a young woman I know vaguely in real life, on a couch next to me, at a large social gathering. She begins to fall asleep, all her masses of long blond hair spilling onto my shoulder as she slumps into me; and I pick her up to carry her to bed, almost the way you’d carry a sleeping child. But as soon as we’re out of sight of the social gathering, she rouses, begins kissing me. I carry her to her bedroom, and – well, as soon as my fingers find my way inside her clothing, I wake. Frustratingly, the scene ends too soon, before I get enough to become a story.

But it may be sculpted into something, later, as I’ve done in the past. I have a character now, and a beginning, but from there I may be able to invent.

Either way, hopefully, i’ll begin something. I’m feeling inspired, but need to find both an image strong enough to move me, but also (and this is the much, much harder part), the time to work.

 

 

Anniversaries, so to speak

Karl Elvis3 Comments

I was trying to find dates for something nearly 20 years back. 

Anniversaries, so to speak – when I met certain people, when certain social things happened. 

I like to commemorate things like that, or al least acknowledge them. We met X years ago, that sort of thing. 

There’s a cluster of those dates coming up. When I wrote Wanton, for example, which is very much the beginning of a period of life for me (I tend to list that as Nov ’03 but it was probably more like spring of that year; I have no record of the actual writing, though, only mention of it in email archives when I first shared it, fall of ’03, and when I first published it, Nov ’03, so that’s where I put that date). 

Things happen after that writing only partly connected. I definitely found a number of kindred souls, who responded to it with the same intensity with which I wrote it. But also the making of it produced something in me, in terms of wanting to reach out and communicate differently. 

When I started blogging (encouraged by people I shared my novella with like Jen & Circe). When I first connected to people I got to be close to after they read my work (Doxy, a number of others). 

And then orkut – there are probably a bunch of things in my archives about orkut, and I should write a whole piece about it now, near 20 years later. But it was, for a while, the best social network that has ever or will ever be, until it collapsed under the weight of expansion too fast. But it was founded in ’04 and I joined not long after. So I met a lot of people who impacted my life in positive ways, may of which i’d still consider friends, even if we rarely talk (Gregg C and Andie being the most important, with a half dozen others I retain on facebook as friends).

Nearly 20 years ago, which in terms of the internet, is a geologic age. 

But I was trying to fix specific days, because once I started wondering, it mattered to be exact. If one is trying to commemorate an anniversary, saying ‘fall of that year’ doesn’t do it. 

I thought all my email from that era had been purged when I transitioned from an old-style mbox based, command line email (elm, and then mutt, for those geeky enough to care what I mean), and started using apple Mail.app (I will always prefer Mutt, but getting it to play nicely with modern email just started to seem like too much work).

I found it all the other day, though, archived at work, compressed and saved as an archive ‘just in case’. 

It took some digging to find the conversations I needed, but I got specific dates for when we started talking, for various people.

Wow, what a trip it was, reading conversations 20 years old. Seeing evolutions of friendship, seeing how much effort I put into dialog. My own flirting style from 20 years back. Hell, I’d fall for me, I was good. 

In some ways it was painful; in 20 years there have been a lot of ups and downs in my life (in everyone’s), so some conversational branches remain uncomfortable to think about overmuch (I compartmentalize extremely well, but some compartments, I just do not want to look into, yet).

But in others, the warm glow of nostalgia for good times suffused me; truly excellent memories, brought back my snippets of conversation with a number of people.

I have not yet gone through all the archives; there are hundreds of separate conversations, grouped by email addresses I sometimes don’t even recall without opening up files. So there’s more treasure yet to find. But the dates I was specifically looking for, I found. I now know which days I met certain people, and when to mentally celebrate them, or us, or at least when we met. Which matters to me a great deal.