Free fiction: The Beautiful Marks

This was written as a quick exercise in tattooing kink and posted in another, more personal writing blog that I have, but I figured it could go here as well. At 723 words it’s quite short, but I think it’s a nice little taste of something and it was fun to write.

It’s m/f, femdom, and probably not safe for work, though there’s nothing particularly raunchy in it.

Fall through the screen

Something in one of the writing communities I follow caught my eye and I felt like saying a little something about it, because in a small way, it’s been life-changing.

Don’t wait until you “feel inspired,” because most of the time, you won’t.

A couple of years ago, I went through horrible writer’s block. Or at least, I thought that’s what it was. I now think that not understanding the above was my problem. Some of it was energy–or rather, a lack of it–because I was in college and a lot of the time I was busy. But I’m in grad school now and I’m still managing at least 500 words a day, and most of the time I’m doing two or three times that much. 500 is my hard minimum (unless I grant myself a rare day off) because I know that even at my most exhausted and cranky, I can do that much. But I’ve also discovered that most of the time, I can do a lot more. But the thing about this is that I rarely ever feel like I can. It’s not a flash of inspiration and a thrilling sense of drive. It’s sitting down with a blank space in front of me and filling it with something, even if I think that something is utter shit.

And the thing is, that also rarely happens now. Lots of times I’m not overjoyed by it, but I can tell that I have something that can at least be worked with. Minimum daily wordcounts are something I have fresh appreciation for, and editing is something else, though when I write I’m lucky enough to still usually get things that are at least two thirds complete on the first pass.

But yes, no more of waiting for inspiration. Because even if it comes initially, it often doesn’t stick around, and then the only thing to keep me going on is sheer bloody-minded determination. Stubbornness, even. This fucking thing is not going to beat me.

And something else I’ve discovered: I used to think that inspiration led to writing, but in the past year or so, I’ve discovered to my joy that writing usually leads to inspiration. I’m hammering away at the keyboard and then suddenly everything is wonderfully clear and I know what I have to do. Even if it’s just a second, a second is usually all it takes, and I’m set for the day. Sometimes, on very good days, what happens is enough to get me through a week.

I’m sure that for a number of you out there this is something you picked up early on, but for me it’s a relatively recent discovery, especially considering how long I’ve been writing, and the process of learning it and incorporating it into my daily life has been deeply satisfying. I don’t know to what degree I’ll do this professionally–academic writing, sure, but while I’ve been paid for creative stuff, I still don’t feel like I can call myself at all a pro–and in fact it may never be more than a hobby. But it’s something that’s been great fun to discover, and to rediscover.

I said above that even when I’m exhausted and cranky, I can still do 500 words; in truth, those are some of the times where I find my wind and can just keep going and going. Because maybe the most important thing I’ve discovered is that no matter how miserable I am about shit, writing usually has a funny way of making me feel okay again.

Tweaks/excerpt

Changed the look of the blog around a little. There was something claustrophobic about the old theme that just wasn’t quite working for me. This one also has a header image provided by my wonderful fiance and general appendage, and I like it.

But that’s not why I’m posting. I know a lot of writers are a little reluctant to share pieces of things before the piece as a whole is done, but I’m too careless for that kind of restraint. I just toss stuff out there. So I want to share an excerpt of a novella that I’m working on and that I’m pretty excited by.

It’s untitled as yet, but its fantasy setting concerns a village in a valley bordered by two mountains, mountains that, to the people of the village, are also gods. Every year there is a festival that culminates in a ritual intended to appease the gods, but the exact nature of the ritual is a mystery to all but the priests–and the two villagers who are chosen to participate. The young man Jaith wonders about the ritual, but his wondering becomes more than idle when he and his lifelong friend Shoa are chosen to take part in it.  As they quickly discover, the ritual has the potential to draw them together with an unbreakable bond–or destroy their friendship completely.

Excerpt after the cut.

Sale

“Neither Bird Nor Tree”, to Circlet Press’s Like a Long Road Home anthology, release date to be announced. Post-apocalyptic m/m journey story, with Cormac McCarthy influences that I’m not even going to try to deny. I was deeply in love with this piece when I was writing it and I’m glad the good people at Circlet seem to have thought as much of it as I do.

Review!

The lovely Jenre has (positively) reviewed the Torquere Taste Test that I have a story in (along with two really great stories by JL Merrow and Mercy Loomis). The review is here.

I’ve also added a sidebar for reviews, since Like a Thorn has also gotten a couple.

On Writing

Now and then I get a little depressed about the beautiful black Takamine Jasmine that’s sitting in my closet. It’s been sitting in there for a while, and it’s been coming out at longer and longer intervals, especially since Rob and I moved in together and school began to take up more and more of my time. It’s at least partly that a good guitar is kind of going to waste, though I can’t bear to part with it–it was a gift from my mother and it has a lot of sentimental value aside from its value as an instrument. But I also get depressed about the fact that I never did anything with those lessons I took, I never practiced like I should have, I never really learned to play at all. And at one point I really wanted to.

Then the other night I picked up Stephen King’s On Writing, just to have something to look over in bed while I waited to get sleepy, and I happened across this passage:

When my son Owen was seven or so, he fell in love with Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band, particularly with Clarence Clemons, the band’s burly sax player. Owen decided he wanted to learn to play like Clarence.  My wife and I were amused and delighted by this ambition. We were also hopeful, as any parent would be, that our kid would turn out to be talented, perhaps even some sort of prodigy. We got Owen a tenor saxophone for Christmas and lessons with Gordon Bowie, one of the local music men. Then we crossed our fingers and hoped for the best.

Seven months later I suggested to my wife that it was time to discontinue the sax lessons, if Owen concurred. Owen did, and with palpable relief–he hadn’t wanted to say it himself, especially not after asking for the sax in the first place, but seven months had been long enough for him to realize that, while he might love Clarence Clemons’ big sound, the saxophone was simply not for him–God had not given him that particular talent.

I knew, not because Owen stopped practicing, but because he was practicing only during the periods Mr. Bowie had set for him: Half an hour after school four days a week, plus an hour on the weekends. Owen mastered the scales and the notes–nothing wrong with his memory, his lungs, or his hand-eye coordination–but we never heard him taking off, blissing himself out. As soon as his practice time was over, it was back into the case with the horn, and there it stayed until the next lesson or practice-time. What this suggested to me was that when it comes to the sax and my son, there was never going to be any real play-time; it was all going to be rehearsal. That’s no good. If there’s no joy in it, it’s just no good. It’s best to go on to some other area, where the deposits of talent may be richer and the fun quotient higher.

My God, I thought, that’s me. That’s the thing: with me and the guitar, there was rarely any joy to carry me through the wilderness of Sucking At It, the thing that everyone has to go through when learning to do something new. I got through that with writing, and I got through that with academics, because I love those things. I love them regardless of how good I am at them. In fact, it might be fair to say that I need to do them; in the downtime between college and graduate school I found myself reading academic texts and writing papers when I didn’t have to, and for a long time I was writing things that no one was reading at all, writing simply because not writing felt too wrong.

I don’t feel that with the guitar, so it may simply be that while I love music and I love to sing, playing an instrument isn’t something that my brain is set up to do. Not like it’s set up to do other things. So I shouldn’t waste my time feeling bad about it. For now I’m keeping the guitar, because as I said, it’s important to me for a whole host of other reasons. And also, things change. I may wake up some morning and discover that that urge, that need and that love, they’re there. And I hate giving up on things for good. That, too, is not really in my nature.

But I feel better. Thanks, Steve.

Book launch

Taste Test: Scared Stiff is now on sale at Torquere Books, featuring “Summer in Canaan” by me, as well as two other stories that I’m sure are awesome, though I haven’t managed to sit my ass down and read them yet.

Three works of supernatural hotness, just in time for Halloween. Go pick it up!

Author chat: Torquere

On the 22nd, I’ll be co-chatting with JL Merrow and Mercy Loomis at Torquere’s Livejournal community. We’ll be talking about ghosts and spooks and things that go bump in the night, as well as posting excerpts from the anthology, so it should be a good time.

Hey, there.

So this used to be kind of an academic blog, but at least for now it’s going to be mostly a place to talk about current and upcoming fiction projects.

Next up on the ledger: “Summer in Canaan” in Taste Test: Scared Stiff, coming on Oct. 21st from Torquere Press.

Jacob, a schoolteacher and writer in New York City, feels a certain malaise one summer and heads upstate to a remote cabin in the hopes of reigniting his creativity. Once there, he meets Aaron, a local young man with a mysterious air about him. As they slowly begin to form a friendship–and Jacob feels a potential spark of something else–it becomes clear that Aaron is more than he seems.

Have a taste under the cut.