Category: Writing

“He can compress the most words into the smallest ideas of any man I ever met.”
— Abraham Lincoln
So: finished up my meager contribution to April’s Storyball last night. A very fun project I’ll eventually link to, but which I’ll sum up by saying “10 Authors, working in six rounds over the month, writing the stories that go with someone else’s keen title ideas, and tied into the stories that have already been written, using nifty hyperlinks and stuff.”
It’s cooler than it sounds, so if it sounds cool, it’s even cooler than that.
This time we set the tales in the Midway Truckers Paradise, and … I dunno yet, cuz it’s not quite done, but I think we destroyed the world.
Well… someone did, anyway.
It was fun. Different than the first Storyball, which had more short-story-type entries — this one tended toward entries that felt more like chapters in a book — less self-contained, I guess.
Very cool. Very different this time around, and cool for that reason as well.

So awhile ago, we had a discussion about the difference between pornography and erotica.
Notably, Ted commented:

If the recipient views the materials and thinks about sex, it is porn. If the recipient views the materials and thinks about both sex and the love that inspires that sex, then it is erotica.

Why do I bring it up? Was reading an article about Alan Moore’s “Lost Girls” project, which he pitches as straight pornography.

Set in the period leading up to the outbreak of World War I, Lost Girls centers on three women who meet at a European hotel: an aristocratic British lesbian in her late 50s; a middle-aged, middle-class, unhappily married English woman; and a 19-year-old farm girl from the American Midwest. Amid increasingly heated bouts of debauchery, they tell each other the stories of the early sexual experiences that formed their fantasy lives and worldviews. Oh, yes: the three women are, respectively, Alice from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Wendy from Peter Pan and Dorothy from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

Of note: the reason he opts to call it pornography instead of erotica:

“I didn’t want to call this ‘erotica’ because, for one thing, erotica is material relating to love. What we wanted to talk about was sex.”

Which of course put me back in mind of the whole discussion we’d had here.
Dunno if any of this makes Ted’s point more valid, but at least he’s got an anarchist, occultist Brit on his side.

“Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something.” — Plato
We are on the subway. It is crowded, and late afternoon. Standing room only, which we’re claiming in the center of the car, both length- and width-wise.
Near one of the doors, there is a man.
He’s huge. My eyes come up to his Adam’s apple, probably, and he’s not skinny. He’s wearing a new, bright yellow, leather jacket that sets him out from the browns and blacks and grays of New York like a sign.
He’s preaching. It takes me awhile to see it through the crowd, but he’s got a bible in his left hand — the one he’s not using to steady himself on a rail. It, like he, is enormous and striking. He gestures with it, he balances himself with its weight, but he does not read from it; in this case, it’s his anchor, not his ship.
Everyone is listening.
Not… hearing the words. I don’t mean that. Even though his voice is strong and deep like a river, it cannot be made out at the other end of the car. They are listening to him speak — simply to the fact that he is making words, not what they are — at the same time, everyone is trying to act like they are not listening.
When the train comes to a station, the doors open and the conductor announces service changes for the weekend schedule. The preacher pauses, politely giving everyone time to hear.
The doors close, the train moves again, and he resumes (with a change in subject – I can hear that much); for the conductor he will pause, but he’ll willingly compete with the train and the white-noise roar of the tracks.
Dedicated? Crazy? Both? Unrelenting, certainly, even in the face of the concentrated not-listening of his standing-room-only audience.
There is another station. Another pause. He resumes, his subject changing again.
This time, it’s love.
This message, it gets through the not-listening.
He’s still a (possibly crazy) preacher, and still unstoppable in his delivery, and you can still only barely make out the words from less than ten feet away.
But you can hear him say ‘love’.
He says love like it’s his favorite word in the whole of Creation. He says love like it’s a secret cookie recipe. He says love like Barry White says love. He means it, even more than he means everything else.
As one person, the audience in the car smirks. A few crack a head-shaking smile. Two of us chuckle a bit and grin.
Then it’s business as usual, and the next stop is ours. We leave the preacher behind.
But the way he says ‘love’ stays with me.

Started another Storyball project this month.
Got the first story done. (Sort of; it’s really just the beginning of one. I might go back and add some more when I’ve more time — it should be a bit longer.)
Holly Black wrote in a recent essay/blog post about tapping into something inside yourself — “find your inner rage or your inner perv.”
Think I did both.