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?

Crossroad Blues

It’s been a Purple Rain sort of day; I think I listened to that song like twenty eight times.+Drake released his Views from the 6 finally today; on Apple Music. I haven’t listened to it, but the lyrics landed in my inbox via Genius so I did read it. Wasn’t really telling me anything I didn’t know. Him and Riri have a friends with benefits thing going on…they sing about it on every record they do. She booty calls him late at night. He wants their relationship to be more than that. She doesn’t have time for a relationship. He’ll wait. It’s practically been a mantra since 2014.

What else?

Oh yeah, the judge sealed Prince’s autopsy investigation so they don’t have to tell us so people are making up their own shit as to why he died. It annoys me because Prince doesn’t deserve that shit. Let him die as he lived.

Meanwhile speculation on who Becky with the Good Hair is, is still in high gear. Does she exist? Is she just one girl? Are Jay and Bey getting divorced? Usual story that circulates about once every before album launch. I don’t care. Though Karrine Steffans did write a starkly vulnerable article about how she’s Becky and Beyonce which impressed me with its honesty. You don’t usually get that level of bare chested, unfiltered information these days. Also why did it make me think Jay-Z is selfish in bed. I don’t know. Maybe because people who’ve had sex with him are always talking/singing about giving him blowjobs. No mention of returning the favor. And he’s not even that cute…

Well anyway, why I was writing is because I’m listening to all my sad songs today; I haven’t been able to since my daddy shuffled off the mortal coil. It’s been too hard; see I’m one of those people who run away from pain? I’m a consummate coward about it. If I think it’ll be too hard I deflect, I distract, I prevaricate, I fill that space with other things, till I feel like the danger is passed. So apparently Prince dying and me listening to Purple Rain on a loop means the danger is passed. I can now sit down and listen to my sad songs play list and let myself feel it. Feel loss, feel pain, feel angry and sad and wistful and nostalgic. And feel like I’ll come out the other side without it killing me. I always feel like I might not survive emotional pain when it’s too fresh. But now, I can bask in it, while Purple Rain plays in the background and fully appreciate Prince’s prowess on a guitar, sing it out loud; and get through this valley of the shadow of death…

It feels very appropriate that it’s rainy as fuck.

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.