"french-kiss life"*

I’ve been reading a lot—well, I always am, but a lot of what could be called self-help, even though some of it is about writing. I read a lot of sites that talk about your message, your following, building those to drive a career, a following. The thing I’ve struggled with, over and over, is how to write honestly about my life on this blog when that message is not always, or even often, a fit in terms of promoting my books. Nor is this blog title. The last thing I am these days is “lusty.” I feel like sex, or rather, the idea of it, is all about other people’s desires and I misplaced mine in my travels, perhaps, left them on an airplane.

I know they’ll be back, but right now my desire is for so many other things that feel more pressing than sex. I’m speaking just for and as myself, obviously, but I think part of what feels like reclaiming control of my life, because it certainly has felt out of control, is figuring out how to put sex in its proper place. Sex (by which I mean both sex and relationships and other people in general) is not going to fix all the things I don't like about myself. It has its uses and value, of course, I'd be the last one to deny that, but it is not some panacea and I have treated it like one for way too long and that concerns me. I'm willing to take a break from it so that I can properly appreciate sex with myself or others in a way that's healthy, not escapist.

I seem to take one step forward and then at least a few back. Like last week, when I finally got up the courage to call a psychiatrist. I was so proud of myself, but then discovered the one I want to see doesn’t take my insurance, and the only one who seems to is a proponent of Wealth Therapy and while that might be something to pursue someday, I want to go with the first pick. And then I bounced a check...to my accountant. Someone sent me this Hyperbole and a Half comic, "This is Why I'll Never be an Adult," and I so relate. Adulthood is a pain in the ass. I feel so bad at it and yet I know I have to just do it, trial and error, even things that most people maybe do in their twenties and I'm just now tackling. That instinct to run away and stop when it gets hard is how I've landed in so many of my big and little dramas.

Anyway, then some other drama went down and I kindof lost my shit. And while I was losing it, I didn’t have any sense of perspective. I cried into my pillow, I cried into my clothes, I cried into a ton of napkins and I cried into my dinner and I had to try to unpack exactly why I was crying, and I’m still sorting that out. I know what triggered it, but there are so many deeper questions I have to confront and ask myself, and those aren’t going to be solved in the span of a night or a week. They’re a lifelong project.

I’ve always shied away from anything hard. If I couldn’t foresee the finish line, if my mind had to have faith and trust that there was a finish line, I pretended it didn’t exist, or made it such that it didn’t exist. I wanted to know exactly how things were going to go, whether I'd win or lose, succeed or fail, I wanted everything mapped out and clear and I was so afraid to trust myself that I wound up lashing out, in a way, against those who trusted me. "I'll show you not to have faith in me, not to believe in me." Yet there are still more doors opening, more opportunities, and I am slowly learning that being grateful is also part of adulthood. Closing doors gently instead of slamming them, and opening them gently too, instead of flinging them so firmly they hit me on the way in.

And now I feel like I’m at a place where I am actually a little closer to being open, like my tattoo says, to both those opportunities and to the awareness that I do have to treat this whole adulthood thing like I'm starting from the beginning. Maybe it took a total meltdown to get to a place where I had to admit that I don’t know much of anything, where I had to accept that the progress I thought I’d made over a certain situation was an illusion, maybe a necessary illusion, but an illusion nonetheless. I’m tired of living behind so many illusions and shame and secrets. I decided to stop saying “yes” if people asked if I’m okay if the real answer is no. I decided to just own that I cry and I can’t predict how long it’ll last or where it’ll erupt.

And of course, because that’s how these things go, as soon as I told one person I was on the brink of tears, one person who’d seen me but didn’t know, she admitted that she was too, and so was someone else, and I had no idea, and wouldn’t have known. None of us were trying to tell each other how to feel or “cheer each other up” or pretend that there’s something wrong with being sad. That was so beautiful to me, to just acknowledge it and live it and let it sit and simmer instead of rushing in to eradicate it with food or drugs or sex or whatever your coping mechanism of choice is.

*And then I discovered Danielle LaPorte, whose tagline for her site White Hot Truth is "Because Self Actualization Rocks," and was really blown away. I just ordered her 10-card set, and one of them says this:



I plan to keep that card all for myself, as a reminder of how I want to approach each day, not with the dread or guilt or fear I seem to approach most of them with, but with the idea that this is a chance to start over, always, and that I have the power to steer the course of my days. I don’t think LaPorte means that every day will be free of tears or badness/sadness. That’s unrealistic. But I want to learn to find the moments of growth and strength even when I’m, like Justin Bartha’s character in All New People (which is a comedy and has its flaws but of course I related to this part) when he simply asks G-d for help. Which I did, but I also asked myself for help, even though I don't purport to have any divine or even undivine answers. At the end of the day, my answers will have to be enough, as flawed and human and stumbling and maybe sometimes brilliant as they are.

Quote-Me Monday

"No one can do everything, but everyone can do something."

--Gil Scott-Heron

Via Piccsy. Smart one, that John Green.

"Writer's porn"

I've ordered this book because I'm at this point with my YA novel where...well, frankly, I'm not actively writing it, but I'm ready to. I'm excited about the story and wishing i hadn't gone to California in January so I could take a week and go to some magical place and write. That I might do next year, but this year, I am stuck with the constraints of real life, which means fitting writing in to a full-time job, part-time blogging, freelancing, dating, family, social life, etc. Not easy when you're a natural procrastinator. But I could and do come up with zillions of excuses not to work and none of them are good ones. Ultimately, if you want to do something, you will do it. I know that very, very well.

I read novelist Justine Musk's blog Tribal Writer for inspiration to work, and she writes of Alan Watts' The 90-Day Novel:

I like to think of writing fiction as a difficult and intricate kind of magic.
Magic = skills + art.

You need to learn a rather stunning array of skills, whether it’s the rules of decent grammar or the principles of storytelling, and then you need to transform them into something your own. The dancer becomes the dance. You don’t see the plot points, you only experience story.

So I love to read books and articles about how to write fiction. I think of it as writer’s porn.

So I guess we'll see. My goal is to be done with my novel by Labor Day. I hope this book can guide me in the right direction of how to pull off these characters who are less than half my age and live in an age of technology I couldn't have imaged as a teenager, and barely can now (it's a contemporary, but technology plays a huge role).

You can also check out the90daynovel.com

I wish there were more long-term relationship erotic stories like Christen Clifford's "After Ten Years"

Christen Clifford

I wasn’t really in the mood for a reading last night, and I was running really late. As I walked fast from SoHo to the Lower East Side, I got a voicemail from D.L. King that Bluestockings was packed. We had a good crowd, despite the umpteen other events, and as I listened to Christen Clifford read her story “After Ten Years” from Gotta Have It, I was struck by how rare it is that I get a perfect story like that about a long-term relationship. It was tender and sexy and real; it wasn’t trying to pretty sex up, make it funny or perfect. There are moments of friction between the characters, ways they don’t get along, aren’t quite in sync in bed, and yet the narrator isn’t looking elsewhere. She wants what she wants from the same person after ten years.

I’ve known Christen a long time; I once did an event she organized at Makor, along with Julie Atlas Muz and I can’t remember who else. I’ve seen her perform her one-woman show 17 Guys I Fucked while I think 7 or 8 months pregnant. Hearing and watching her read, seeing her blush or squirm, was so moving. I wish I could do readings with all the authors (66, since 3 of them are me), and hear what they bring to their work. I hope more people will send me stories like that, especially for my next erotic romance anthology, but even for the “erotica.” It was perfect and moving and in 1,200 words or less, she captured sex in a long-term relationship. THAT is what I look for when I edit an anthology, that mix that doesn’t shield sex from the rest of the world, or use sex to shield characters from the rest of the world. It mixes them together, and she brought all the italics in the story to life as she read. I wish I had a recording of it, but maybe part of me doesn’t; maybe you had to be there, and maybe that’s as it should be.

I wanted to select a short segment of the story for you, one that captures what I’m talking about, but you know what? You have to read it. I’m not even asking you to buy it (and, shhhh….I’ll give you a copy if you ask nicely and promise to write a review for me on Amazon, until I run out), but go to your local bookstore. Look at page 173 and take five minutes and tell me if that doesn’t move you. Or, yes, you could buy the book (see below for options). But really, I'm sick of the relentless selling, the postcard mailing, the posting in a bazillion places, the utter uncreativity of book promotion. Who knows if I'm good at it? Who knows when those statements arrive whether anything I've done has made a difference? Right now, I just am moved by a story...the whole reason I got into this crazy thing called erotica editing.

There’s love and hurt and lust and pain and desire and raw need. There’s so much in that short short story and I listened, me, someone who is likely never to be in a relationship for ten years, someone for whom that seems inconceivable. There is a line in the story that is not at the end, but near it, that is, I think, the backbone of it, what makes all the surrounding words so meaningful: “I want him to fuck me forever.” So yeah, that reading reminded me why I say yes to these things even when they’re often the last thing I want to do. I was in a sports bra and t-shirt and ratty sweater, no time to change. I was ratty and wheezing and didn’t really care, and I read some other people’s stories and my own. I knew I’d be reminded of D.L. King’s librarian late fee punishment story “Punishment Befitting the Crime” every time I pay the New York Public Library for my overdue fees. I remembered that way back when, in, 2001, I think, I organized my very first reading, and it was at Bluestockings. It was a nice way to end a long day, to sign off from doing readings and focus on words on the page, on the screen, words in ways that don’t involve quite as much relentless ubiquity and self-promotion and stress, words that have room to breathe and give the reader a chance to read them alone, in private, not be blasted with them live. That is not really my thing anymore, and the freedom of not having to corral people anywhere every month is one I feel immensely. I’m grateful every time anyone shows up, and was pleasantly surprised at the crowd last night, at the readers, and at myself. So thank you for that, for a last hurrah (though I will be asking questions about art, morals, death [her book opens with a suicide], love, sex, pornography and more of Pleasure Bound author Deborah Lutz Thursday night at 7 at McNally Jackson, which will also have copies of my books ,but interviewing, where the burden is on someone else to talk, I’m happy to keep doing).

Order Gotta Have It from:



Amazon.com



Kindle edition (coming soon)



Bn.com (Barnes & Noble)



Books-a-Million



Borders



Powell's



IndieBound (find your local independent bookstore)



Cleis Press

The White Stripes: Inspiration

It was just announced that Jack White's first band, the White Stripes, have officially broken up. The first concert I ever when to with my husband was a White Stripes show in Coney Island. I am a huge Jack White fan, and as much as I love his other bands, I am really bummed that I won't ever see or hear the White Stripes play again. 

Although it was a classic blues song recorded by Son House, the White Stripes' version of "Death Letter" was the first I had heard. It inspired me to make a comic during a really difficult time in my life: my mother's final months fighting cancer. I think creating that comic helped me more than I realized at the time, even though it's a small thing, and I have the White Stripe's music to thank for it. So, for anyone that hasn't seen the comic before here it is, and the song is below.