This posting has nothing to do with cars. Instead your faithful correspondent will goes into many digressions before getting to the embarrassing personal revelations. Also, a rant.
As some of you know, I'm writing my first novel. I started writing with an issue I wanted to explore: in general terms, relations between men and women, their emotional relations and psychic* transactions. I also had a starting image. The night before, as I was falling asleep, I had a brief vision of a man rummaging around someone else's darkened room. I tried see what the man looked like, but his face was indistinct and blurry. There was one distinctive thing about him and that was his antler. Not a rack, but a single very long antler coming from the side of his head. There were several very short points emerging from the antlers length like flower buds.
The man with the antler was looking for something. I asked him what he was looking for, and he apparently had no idea. The vision faded, not quite making it to dream status. I awakened slightly, then drifted off, finally, into full slumber.
So, that's what I started writing, not knowing what it had to do with the issues I wanted to explore. As I wrote this first scene, other ideas more in line with those issues started to take form. Characters I wanted to write we're introduced to my mind. I took notes, and following Hemingway's advice, I left it for the next day, knowing that that was what I was going to write next. And so on.
A minor character turned out to be a playwright. I started writing about his world, a tangent to the main plot, getting into issues of creativity and originality. I introduced a rival, who appears in the form of fictional interviews in The Paris Review. This rival's method is what we call the Mash Up, taking material from two sources and mashing them together. It's a genre of music, but I had also seen it done with film when the production of Apocalypse Oz was shot on a soundstage I was managing. In the novel, I'm actually using the title and concept as the rival playwrights first work, with the original writer/director's permission.
I had (or felt I had) to come up with some other examples of the rivals work, so they could be discussed in the interview. I hit upon a mash up of the Sound of Music and Cabaret, which sets out to answer the question, "What if the Von Trapp family had failed to escape and been caught by the Nazis? What if the Von Trapp children were forced to seek refuge in the decadent world of Cabaret?"
As the rival playwright and the interviewer began discussing specific scenes in the play, scenes of degradation, drug abuse, suicide, incest, teen prostitution (you know, the usual), I felt the urge to write these scenes. I made notes as I wrote the interview for the future scenes I was going to write.
Then I wrote one. It is the scene in The Sound of Cabaret, possibly familiar to some of you (if you live in my fictional world) where Cliff has hired Liesl and Louisa to perform for him and with him. By this point in the story, Liesl has experience as a prostitute, but Louisa is still a virgin. In the part were they are to perform for Cliff, Liesl must seduce her sister. She tells Louisa to think of boys she has kissed, then leans into her and they start . . . .
It is hot stuff, or at least I think so. As I was writing, I became so turned on that I had to take little breaks from the writing to fully imagine the scene, and, well, jerk off. I have pretty high standards for written porn (less so for the visual forms, but still I have some standards, I hope), and I think the scene is pretty good. It compares very well with most of the schlock in Amazon's erotic section of the Kindle Store. (Rant: Seriously, some of that stuff appears to be written by people who never graduated the sixth grade. One wonders who in their families has to turn the computer on for them, the intelligence level is so low and the writing so lacking. I find myself losing the mood and my erection whenever there are inexplicable shifts from present to past tense and back within a single sex scene, or when a writer uses words that exceed their vocabulary. Please, terrible porn writer, buy a dictionary AND USE IT!)
I doubt that I'm objective about my own work, so maybe mine own isn't much better. It's quite possible that my entire novel thus far is crap. I don't know, I only know I need to write it.
I really don't know if I will keep this scene (or others I've planned) in the novel. I wonder, without thinking about it too much, if they will survive the second draft. I think, maybe, I could publish them separately in Amazon's erotica section. I do need the money, after all! Why let the writing go to waste?
The playwright tangent has found its way back to the main story, thankfully, so that will probably survive (though who knows?). The writer (not the rival) turns out to be an important supporting player after all.
I think its also a good thing that I am not self-censoring as I write this first draft. The writing is really flowing, the whole is taking shape. I've got a very good idea of where it ends, where I want the characters to go. I'm writing four hours everyday, producing on average 6.18 pages a day. I spend time after that, making notes, recording ideas, going to Internet cafes to do research. It feels good and I feel confident for a change. It's like a full time job, but a good one, the type where you wake up and can't wait to get to work. Even better than that, because I've never had a job were I could take masturbation breaks.
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