NC-17

How do you find books? Personally once +Stephen King's Dark Tower Series let me down and +Anne Rice dashed my hopes that she'd write a good book again where Louis and Lestat resolve their issues finally and live happily ever after...well; I just usually read the first three lines and see if the book will snag me and make me want to read more. Three lines. It's not much to go on but it works for me. It's how I found +Maria Doria Russell's Children of God, and then The Sparrow. I read them backwards because the Sparrow is the first book but hey...excellent pieces of work. Made me want to become a jesuit.

And now, in this time of grief when I'm grappling with how God works, it's also a source of great comfort. If Emilio Sandoz could finally find some answers, well maybe so will I. And if I don't, well, there's always someone to blame.
It's the first anniversary of my father's death in two months. I don't know where the time went.I haven't even really started grieving yet. Still very much dealing with anger. The advantage of being angry I find, is that one cannot hold anger and sadness in one's breast. It's one or the other. And it's so much easier to sleep at night with anger as your bed mate. Sadness blows.
This wasn't meant to be a maudlin post.

Promise.
I was actually going to tell you about this girl I met online. She's English, lives in England; and we got to talking because of our mutual +Supernatural obsession. She was very intelligent, articulate and mature and I figured she was some late twenties chick with minimal responsibilities judging by the fact that I could find her online any time my day or night. Well anyway, quite by accident I discovered she was actually sixteen....
Lucky for her I'm not some fat, sleazy paedo looking for sex online.
I'm sure she'd have stopped talking to me if I was.
I hope.

So I tell my (then) fifteen year old son that I'm friends with this sixteen year old and would he like an introduction. He turned me down. Quite unequivocally. I don't know why. Maybe coz she was my friend. Or her blog was a bit too intelligent for him. I don't know.
So anyway, she writes fanfic.
And I'm reading this fanfic and it's tagged NC-17..
So by rights, the writer of the fanfic is not old enough to even read the fanfic.
And it was explicit.
And hot.
And explored aspects of BDSM that seventeen year olds really shouldn't know about.
At least, that's what I tell myself.
Of course this chick is a year older than my son.
So probably he has intricate knowledge of sex acts I haven't even heard about too.
It's very stressful for a mother to think such things about her child.
I'd rather stick this in the 'ain't broke' column and 'don't go looking for trouble' philosophy.
Of course it made me think about all the other fanfic out there.
And the average age of writers.
Yeah I remember making up "love stories" in my head when I was young. They were also loosely based on television shows; but most TV shows I saw at the time tended to show kissing which gently faded to black as the couple slid down away from the camera. It didn't give too much away in terms of What Really Happens.  but now teenagers are writing gay sex and BDSM and alpha/omega/beta dynamics and hooker!fic...and the more explicit and the more humiliating, the better.

I don't know what to think about all this.
When I was writing Child of Destiny, my editor was aghast at the amount of sex I was writing about. But it's soo tame compared to what I've seen on live journal. I feel I should be worried but I don't know about what. Do "young people" have too much knowledge or do I have too little?
Most importantly what the fuck happened to sex being about connection? communion? love?

Guide to Dealing with 'The Bereaved'/ or Rant

Emily Post neglected to write this so I thought I'd give her a hand.
Disclaimer: I have no filter when someone close to me dies; it's all shoot from the hip.
So having lost my cousin and my dad within two weeks or something of each other, I've received a lot of condolences and commiserations and people telling me how I should feel or what I should do. People I don't normally speak to are calling me, not introducing themselves, and then telling me to be strong or whatever. Like, if we don't speak in real life, why are you calling to give me condolences? I don't know you so I'll never know if you don't bother to call me. You're just wasting my phone battery which is having its ass kicked by all the legitimate phone calls I do have to make; like calling the newspaper and trying to make sure they don't make my dad look like an orc in his obituary pic.
So here is a small guide to the do's and don't's of dealing with the bereaved...or maybe its just how to deal with me when I'm bereaved;

- Do not platitudinise. Is that a word? It should be. It covers stuff like "Our thoughts and prayers are with you", quite frankly my dear, I don't give a damn where your thoughts are. I'm too busy trying to handle a LOT OF SHIT RIGHT NOW.
- Don't go on and on about how I'm feeling or not feeling. What does it help? Much more appreciated is BEING THERE. This is something I've learned in the last month and I plan to implement in my own life. Either show up or shut up. In between is just making yourself feel better rather than really supporting the person you claim to be supporting.
- We do notice if you are there. If you help out, or just sit quietly next to us saying nothing especially not saying platitudes or psychoanalysing...making us laugh is even better. Having genuine interaction instead of platitudes is the best.
- We're still basically the same people so no need to treat us like fragile eggs that you're just waiting to break.
- Please don't bring any negativity into an already fraught situation.
- Remember that tempers are short, sensitivity is high, and we're probably tired from not sleeping too well. Cut us some slack.
p.s.
My cousin told me a story about how when she told her small child about her brother's death, the child was very sad and she said
 "tell me a story so I can be distracted and feel better."
It struck me because I just wrote an article about escaping life through stories not too long ago. It filled me with renewed zeal. If someone's story can make me feel better than I do now, hell, I will sooo take it. And if I can write stories that take people away from the shit in their lives...mission accomplished.

Angst

Its been a very crazy week. I have a book to finish, in the middle of trying to be there for the family in this difficult time and dealing with a new thing I'm calling feelings for lack of a better word. I had my weekend really well planned; close the door, sit at my laptop and write. Finish this new story in record time; make a list of people who'd bought Between Death and Heaven that I knew of so I could gift them The Swamp is Full of Mystery. It was a very full, well planned schedule.

Then shit happened and the rug was literally pulled out from under me. I didn't know what to think, what to feel or what to do. Its like whoa, here's a bomb, catch; as its lobbed into your hand. You know its about to go off but you don't really know if you should put it down slowly or throw it far away or even if you're just not going to have enough time and its going to explode in your hand. You're just in this place of suspended belief, offline, without frame of reference or protocol as to suitable response to this.

I lost my mother fourteen (FOURTEEN??? Feels like last week sometimes) years ago but it was different for her. There were just so many things that had to be taken care of; lives were changed; there was almost no time to wallow in emotion. I remember doing a lot of running away from feelings; not so much wallowing in them.

But this time, there was really nowhere to hide; although I have observed his family doing its best to do just that. I don't blame them. My cousin was just thirty four. THIRTY FOUR. He has a one and a half year old daughter and his marriage is just seven months old. Its a suckfest any way you look at it. We tell ourselves that its not the days in our lives but the lives in our days...and we tell ourselves that he was remarkable already, and he has a huge legacy and he'll never be forgotten. But the truth is that those things just make the loss bigger, not more bearable.

So I'm sitting here, trying to write and I'm restless and annoyed and unsettled. I can't really settle to anything, my limbs hurt, my head aches; its cold, its hot. I don't like it at all; I'm confused.. I want to escape from my body but more importantly from my mind. I'm thinking that this would be a good time to start smoking weed but I don't want to be arrested. Supernatural, my go to escape doesn't work. Neither do the fan fictions I like to get lost in. But then I start to pay attention to a word I'd previously dismissed because I never really understood what it meant; Angst.

Supernatural fan fiction writers like to write about it a lot; which makes me assume that they're all a bunch of teenage goth girls. They love to wallow in it - I never understood the attraction. Still don't. But I understand the word now; I understand what it means. I can at last label this mass of unsettling...stuff that's been happening in my head. I am filled with angst.

Strangely enough, it makes me feel better to put a name to the emotion.

Escaping Real Life Through Stories

The day before yesterday, I was sitting in my living room, trying to gain traction on the story I was writing and watching CNN. The whole 'Kenya is so excited about Obama coming to Kenya' thing was being nicely contrasted with the inconveniences people were going to go through. On my whatsapp timeline and facebook page, people were either talking about their disappointment that it wasn't a public holiday, excitement at half work days or how they won't be able to go somewhere because roads were closed. You know; just basically life being lived.

Then at six am in the morning just as I'm thinking that I should go to bed, I get a text from my sister saying that my cousin is dead...just like that. Over. Done. The fat lady sang. Its not a mistake; this has really happened. Road Traffic Accident and words like 'body' and 'mortuary' being thrown about. And suddenly the world went left and the little every day and not so every day things people were worried about faded into insignificance.

Some things are too heavy to process all at once and sometimes you just need to take a moment and find something happy to think about or do. For some people, they use drugs or alcohol for this escape. For me and many others, its a good story. You find some stories where the hero or heroes go through a lot of shit, sometimes they emerge from it unscathed other times they're bruised and battered; but not broken. Harry Potter, Jamie and Claire, Father Emilio Sandoz, Sam and Dean Winchester, Scott and Stiles...they're beaten down, they get up, they keep fighting.They lose some, hopefully they win more.

So you emerge from that alternate universe with the renewed sense that being beaten down is not the end; its the middle of the story. And even if you don't know how you'll get up again, doesn't mean that you won't. I used to think that escapism was an unhealthy concept in general; maybe because some methods of escaping can be downright dangerous.

 But now, I consider it in the same light as the effects of sleep to the body. Inadequate sleep means that the body fails to repair itself. Fixing those little tears and shoring up whatever needs to be replenished. I consider that escapism does the same for the emotions.

When you've been hit hard by something that has happened to you, and you turn your back on it and dive into some alternate universe consisting of Diagon Alley or Lallybroch, The Men of Letters bunker or Beacon Hills...or all of the above; it gives your emotions a chance to fix those tears, and shore up strength for the battles ahead.

That's why I read. And that's why I write. Hopefully my stories can do for others, what these stories have done for me.