Tag Archives: Diary

book reviews, Verses Nature, Writer's Kitchen

Getting your foot in the door with WHISKEY, NOT WATER: Verses Nature

Leave a comment

Simon_VERSES NATURE_IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE HEATVerses Nature Vol.1: In The Beginning Was The Heat

 

Now that my latest book is out and there’s a free sample to get you started, I have more time to check out the market. Just reading the opening passages of a few samples of erotic fiction. Let’s call this: homework.

Sample 1:

There’s screaming. There’s a gun. There are the obligatory expletives. She is tied to an over-sized table. Of course. I can anticipate the rape scene and all the rest, depicted by an author I assume (and I hope I’m right!) has never been raped. He did this. She did that. More screaming. More expletives. I give up after the opening paragraph, already cringing at both the female protagonist’s name and that of the author. If that were my real name, I’d consider treating myself to a pseudonym.

Sample 2:

Only two paragraphs on display and already one typo: should that be long blond hair?

Sample 3:

Six paragraphs for our delight. Ah, there’s literary merit for a change. No typos, though a number of grammatical issues (a self-published book?) and the direct speech is as stiff as hell. Nothing erotic has happened so far. It’ll come later. No pun intended.

Sample 4:

A bestseller this time and a huge chunk for us to enjoy, which I do, I must confess, for it is well written. Nothing new, plot-wize or stylistically, but at least it’s well written. Still wouldn’t buy it, though.

Sample 5:

No erotic scenes in this opening but I can smell one around the corner! The sample steers clear of kitsch and even has enough humour to draw a smile from me. The author, it seems, is not content to have the characters play cat and mouse, but she will play cat and mouse with us, the reader, too. I think I know how this will end, though I wouldn’t say no to reading a bit further.

Conclusion:

All these samples are typical of the genre. I’m not sure I can find my place here. I’ve been saying it for a while: I don’t think what I do is erotica. The fit is too loose for my liking. Adult fiction? Or maybe erotic fiction after all. Intellectual erotica; what I’ve elsewhere described as high-brow rumpy-dumpy.

 

Many have confessed to me that although they love reading what I write, they don’t feel comfortable talking about it to others. Ah, so that’s why when I invite readers to share what I post on Facebook, very little happens.

fingerwhip (ripped jeans)

Turn it down a bit?

beyond her comfort zone

Still no one sharing. I can’t twist anyone’s arm, but maybe I can use this knowledge anyway:

 

9 out of 10

 

 

 

I like the one above as it makes clear that the book isn’t only for women and I like the one below for its international flair.

 

around the globe (III)

 

 

Doing my very best to steer clear of the word ‘erotic’, but noting that some people are left puzzled by the term ‘adult’ fiction. To say ‘romance’ would be to say too little. Would be to make it all too soft. I need to draw attention to the style as much as to the content. The novel, VERSES NATURE, is experimental:

‘cubist characterizations, full of violence and scorn’ (Purple Starsky)

‘Primal, deep, complex, secretive, honest, spacious. Grabs you.’ (Robert Hall)

Experimental romance? Experimental adult fiction? I can use these terms to describe my book, but it still makes sense to also refer to my work as erotic.  Doesn’t need to be the same type of erotic as everyone else, does it? So ok, I’ll join the club; bring in some fresh blood. Change the genre from the inside.

 

 

Verses Nature

More than death, sex or me: Carmina

Leave a comment

In my forthcoming novel, Verses Nature, I’m still grappling with the imbalance between my protagonists, Carmina and Tatar. Tatar’s lines are still the juiciest – and often a touch too hot for this blog (can’t risk having my site closed down!) – but Carmina’s catching up, have no fear. I’ll share the best/hotter bits as bonus material to those who sign up (will get all that installed and running on my website soon, I promise).

Someone once accused me of only writing about sex. I (like to think I) do far more than that. The body features as both a playground and a battlefield in my fiction. It is one means among many via which the characters explore their identities. In Verses Nature, vicious, passionate, funny, and yes, degrading acts of intimacy are punctuated by the protagonists’ tales of the everyday; Tatar’s tales taking on epic, hagiographic dimensions, Carmina’s shreds of thought, anguish and fancy, as documented in her diary, letting us in on her family life, on its imminent disintegration, although she implores:

‘Don’t relegate me to a mother. Don’t.’

Lovers and philosophers the two of them, whether in the bedroom or beyond, each is on a quest for the higher purposes of life. As in the following passage, inspired by something I found whilst on a walk the other day:

 

dead mouse
copyright © Joan Barbara Simon, 2015

 

I remember that forest walk where they encountered death in the form of a field mouse. Look, I said, and they looked at the crescent of a field mouse that refused to budge or return their gaze. It’s dead, I said. Dead was a new word that needed more words to make it come alive. It’s dead, I said. Its heart’s not beating any more. Yours is. I pressed the hand of each child to her heart so their fingers could listen. They were not impressed. Can you hear the b-boom-b-boom. Somehow I wasn’t doing it right,  wasn’t getting the reaction I wanted. Never mind, they’d work it out sooner or later. The youngest one was still in nappies so what did she care. The older one’s eyes sank out of reach, finding their own pathways to the new phenomenon, then they resurfaced, seeking mine. Dead, she said, in a pitch suspended between statement and question. We walked on. She looked back every now and then. Dead, she said in a new pitch every time. And I said to myself, Why on earth did you even think it fitting to teach a toddler such a word in the first place, there’s more to life than your heartbeat, you of all people. Best take a different route back home.

People never stop asking if my fiction is autobiographical. Am I Virginia Mendes in Mut@us? Am I Carmina in Verses Nature? The answer is no, although of course I’m in there somewhere, using, sometimes, seemingly unimportant incidents from my own life to add colour to my plots. Thank you, mouse. Oh, sorry, I guess you can’t hear me.

 

(from Verses Nature, forthcoming)

Verses Nature, Writer's Kitchen

After Paris

Leave a comment
OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA
copyright © Martin Gunther

Take the time to see my juice? In Paris? Just spit on me then barge right in.

The Authoritative One.

As in: sit there in an L shaped of tensed muscles, misunderstanding. Stutter several times something about the impossibility of knowing I would feel that way about it he could only say he was sorry

but his voice is bitter and he makes no attempt to cover it up

As in: reach under the bed for the coloured hankies, take a couple, double them over. Wedge them between the legs to soak up
i) his ejectamenta: hurry-came
ii) pubic whimpers unstoppable, body-fated, pointless ovarian holler
iii) echo wakes up, lonely:

this is the closest I can get

***

“Either all around or in its wake the explicit requires the implicit; for in order to say anything, there are other things which must not be said.” (Macherey, 2004)


After Paris: from my novel-in-progress, Verses Nature. Context of excerpt: He took her to the City of Love. It was supposed to be a dirty weekend to pep up their marriage, backbroken by years of Catholic sex. Of patriarchal righteousness. Her explanation, not his. His’d be that she wasn’t making an effort, he’d show her how.

So many on the erotica bandwagon, out-trumping each other with steamy love scenes. What about when it’s just a lousy experience you’d rather forget? If you know what I mean, say: Aye! Me louder than the rest: AYE!!!

This is an entry in her diary. The diary comes in handy after her nervous breakdown. Helps her to retrace developments she will have to analyse with her therapist.  I like diaries. Emails. Letters. Like the idea, as a reader, of peeping through the keyhole whilst keeping an ear open for footsteps approaching. Also: the diary, here, hovering between documentary and fiction, between the literary styles associated with each. Diaries have me scooping up stylistic liberties by the armful that’s why I love this form as much as I do direct speech. Documentaries are more prescriptive though their (apparent) neutrality (can we ever stand outside of ourselves?) allows a certain detachment I have come to value when off again scrutinizing.

The challenge for me, in this scene and elsewhere, is to offer a different picture of relationships, of sex, to the one portrayed by my (irresistible) male protagonist, Tatar. Cue card: to which extent do genre, gender and voice overlap? Polarization factor: high. Wo/men speaking a different language (and all that). Need to keep an eye on this so I don’t write my way into any camps I’m none too keen on being/becoming a member of.

Writer's Kitchen

iDoll

Leave a comment
BLUEBERRY BLOG hole in the head
Photo, courtesy of Blueberry © copyright 2015

Tomi Ungerer’s description of Barbie dolls as ambiguous sexless brainless machines, without nipples or apertures: the American ideal.

and I think: iDoll???

Back firmly, formally, in the trap of naming, of bringing to life, and as such I may play God for a while. This is the place that itches, that refuses not to itch. The naming game: It is we who set the picket fences. We who move them at will. I catch myself thinking it would be a shame if God really were so arbitrary. And I scratch this itch in so many ways, as recently with my supervisor:

how to class the literary opinions of people like Toni Morrison, Salman Rushdie and others (e.g. Brossard) who not only write literature but about literature? Are they scholars? May I put them on that pedestal, or are they ‘only’ writers? I guess my question is: who is a member of the club?

I keep setting up these borders, keep being told to:

we need them for conceptual clarity

but somehow their contents won’t stay put. That’s worth remembering…

Verses Nature, Writer's Kitchen

on the art of meaning

Leave a comment

JBS meditating in garden 12-07-20(2)

words might have a beginning in sound but not in meaning. I can understand you

like t h i s
but maybe you mean
t
h
i
s

?

Art is therapy. Eventually. (F. Bianco)

*

The three of us slept in the same room last night: First-born, Second-born and I. We tend only to do this when we need extra emotional security, like in the worst phases of my separation. First-born is glad to be home. She is not happy at her father’s.

Their breathing in the dark was like the call of the sea beyond the horizon. I hardly slept at all. I just listened. Feeling guilty for what they have had to suffer because of my drive for freedom, knowing I would do it all again, for I cannot be other than myself…

in the end, I couldn’t bear it. Got up, went outside. Waited for the dawn.

Hmm… GUILT… what “they had to suffer”… Had you not broken free– what would all three of you feel now? just some first thoughts to keep you warm…

You say we do our best to block or enhance our doubt zones. i still stumble over the idea of enhancing one’s doubt zone. can you explain that to me? Maybe we are simply using our tools – language – in the wrong way; must use it to go beyond language, to tap into the affective plane that is crucial to understanding (hard-core psychologists now up in arms!) tho it still cannot guarantee that we really understand what is going on in another´s mind. You say I`m too ‘soft’. Well, I say I don`t belong to the fornicators, and I have never been keen on the clergy, either.

Re: that other comment: How does your wife feel? Do you humour her desires, too, or is she also a workaholic and you both spend your days buried in paper? I suppose, like most, she has bowed to your wish. I really would make a ghastly wife…

Most of the time I can handle the guilt. Banish it. I’m fine just the way I am, doing what I do, thinking what I think, wanting what I want, growing my own way, but the children’s quiet, faithful trusting breathing was too much for me last night and counter-rhythm to my impatient hunger.

I cannot sleep. I go outside. Let my dressing gown fall in two velvet folds as I bare my breasts, my sex, to the night, inhaling deeply as they howl at my lack of means to pacify them. I am so hungry, I could kill.

… and there will be the moment of delicious pacification…feeling your body embraced gently, the warmth of the other… and feeling the other deep in you… the forest will listen to the audible silence… the birds will be gossiping later on…

what is your ultimate intention behind the expression of your ideas… the expression of ideas You will have to explain the correlation between closeness and evasiveness because I don’t get it.

LACK OF WORDS IS NOT EVASIVENESS

if there is one thing you are not lacking in, then it is words…

i prefer silence at times… and much of my writing is intensely compressed into tough idea complexes hard to understand

I think I know why you feel close to me.

DO I?

if you don’t, why do you say that you do? obviously here we differ in meanings–

i never shared your “promiscuity clause”  HOW DID YOU GUESS? WHAT DOES IT MEAN? FROM YOUR END  Because I let you. SO DO I, I think not… this is why you keep negotiating the immediacy, turning it to its opposite SO DO WE we???  is there anyone else involved here that I have failed to take into account? we= you + i + your doubts = 3 in total

I don’t want to be embraced

really?

i want to see who you are…

setting yourself tough goals… i am in movement

trust means acknowledging vulnerability

not my idea of trust… vulnerability is not a concept there

you seemed surprised, if not offended, that I challenge you. Is there a patriarch slumbering in your breast? the spring of the patriarch? a nice title for a short story… NEVER MIND WHAT YOU COME ACROSS HERE IN MY “CASE”, THIS VERY SAME “DEMANDFUL GIVING” WOULD MAKE IT VERY DIFFICULT TO ACHIEVE YOUR GOAL OF SHARING AND BEING WITH I think you made the crucial mistake of a) presuming to know where ‘this’ was going  b) presuming to control where ‘this’ was going. Sharing involves a degree of negotiation. I’m negotiating. I’m saying, Hey, you alone don’t call the shots.

fighting, fighting… but there is no battle

Maybe I should have said this much, much earlier

and what would have been different?

(fieldnotes)

Writer's Kitchen

Trans-it

Leave a comment

pia Ines WALKER

in bed with a thermometer in my mouth and a bowl of home-made pumpkin soup. Haven’t been this ill since…???

Lenny’s here to keep me company. No, not Kravitz. Laptop.
I’ve decided to follow up that trans-thing we should be getting into, so I’ll put aside educational and/or literary concerns for the moment and venture into:
– International Journal of Biometrics and Bioinformatics
– International Journal of Image Processing

Let’s see if I last 30min. Or end up somewhat wiser.
None?

Apparently you have to: repeat a new word/idea at least 60 times for it to stick.

Maybe one reading will do. One juicy bit of info that I can embed into a novel to make one of my characters sound smart but without showing off unlike certain authors who will remain nameless, certain authors who cram their plots with so much extraneous info, you ask yourself this was supposed to be a novel, right? a good, swift read, a plot that pulls me in… but complaints are swallowed cos who wants to be outed as a philistine (1)?

I will mention one: W. G. Sebald. He’s dead. He’ll forgive me.

Peter Nadas. Still alive to the best of my knowledge. I doubt he’ll care what I think. Have you read Parallel Stories? If it takes ten pages to get the character down the stairs and out the door… Apparently there’s a sex scene in this book which lasts 100 pages. I didn’t get that far and for the life of me, I can’t imagine such a scene doing it for me, you know: one hand on the page, the other…

100pp???? Can only be art, can’t it? I wonder how much remembering needs to go into writing/editing a sex-scene one hundred pages long? How many acts have been spliced together to make your fellows feel totally inadequate? I’ll give the book another try when:

– there’s nothing else on my shelf
– the golf(2) season’s over

 Maybe. But for now:

Biometrics. I smell potential. Image processing. Need not be a waste of time…

Then I’ll trawl a few back issues of Men’s Health – got to find out (more) about how you guys tick. It’s research! Let me see…;
– libido tips
– sex timing
– secret sex tips about women
Yeah, real secret. How many million copies does this mag sell per issue? But I’m not feeling well and I can do with a laugh. I can feel the colour coming back to my cheeks already. Be back on my feet in no time.

*

Pssssst! Urban definition:

(1) philistine:

‘A person who is obsessed with sports(2), sex and Motor vehicles.’

(2) e.g. golf:

‘More than a game, it is a habitual endeavor that takes precedence over work and friends. A perpetual quest for improvement. A sport for athletes as they get older and realize their limitations. A pleasure beyond definition. Played by yourself, with a partner or in a group. Worse than drugs and better than a first time fuck.
Golf is the game of intergalactic champions. Surpassed by nothing. Takes priority over all, except being naked with the wife. She loves golf too.’
Verses Nature

(until proven) Innocent

Leave a comment

binary semantic poster 3

Pastor: How long were Adam & Eve in paradise?
Child: Till autumn
Pastor: …?…
Child: When the apple is ripe

binary semantic poster 3
I like the inevitability of nature here; the apple will fall. Must fall. Mitigating circumstances for our female evil-doer?

I could formulate it another way, bowing to our friends across the pond. I could make the whole idea more compact:

Pastor: How long were Adam & Eve in paradise?
Child: Till the fall.

Warming up to the spiritual-theological-erotic aspects of my novel Verses Nature, and yet, somehow, still shying away:


Away in a manger
no crib for a bed
she eased back his swaddling
so she could give head

binary semantic poster 3

Someone told me (hand on heart) that he remembered his very first fellatio. He was a baby. It was his mother. He’s been partial to soft fellatios ever since. No erection. Nothing to do with sex. Much more: the performance of an act of worship. Like drying His feet with her hair. There are those who will insist on downplaying that scene but the bigots’ve got hold of the wrong end of the stick. Again. It’s worship. Like the fellatio on the son. Worship. I’m not the mother of sons, so I guess I’ll never know…  but I LIKE the idea – its tenderness rings true –  and I’m going to use it. (practise first???)

No longer have the time to be afraid of my own ideas. Want to complete this novel within two years. Time’s running out in other ways too. So just do it.

Letters & Interviews, Writer's Kitchen

Hard Core: Min(e/d)

Leave a comment

BROSNAN Forming Trust

Chains, now, there’s a topic for a prolonged conversation…

Yes, I’m into chains – more mental ones than real – and you are wrong to think that writing fiction does not enslave, does not shackle. It most certainly does, in no less a pleasurable/excruciating way. The one freedom it accords us is the liberty not to set our thoughts within the comparative contexts of other thinkers/scholars with a view to elaborating an argument. Writing fiction is my ‘self-inflicted pleasure’. You know of the risk/rupture/latent stress entailed in the move from one developmental stage to another, and echoed in the notion of growing pains. I find this risk, this danger, this pain, exhilarating, and yes, erotic, so that I must return to it again and again. It is a form of bondage…

I cannot tell you how hard it is to write the things I write. The battle as I wrench myself from my old developmental level; from received social, sexual, linguistic codes, propounding, instead, forging, instead, a new order; the move to Level 2. (…) but I shall have to ruminate further about the nature and purpose of the chains involved in both my writing activities. Right now, I’m just putting my nose to the idea. The few pages which comprise Papermate , for example, exacted as much discipline from me as any chapter in my doctoral thesis, that much is sure. My fiction is crafted, and crafts must bow to rules of harmony, stability; they should delight with a surprise, with insight, taking you further, as much as any (good) scientific paper. The melody, however, is another.
(…)
No idea of a title yet, but something will come to me. Now the fun and turmoil starts. I can already feel the clay under my nails, the spattered thoughts which must be tamed and brought into unison. I can feel this thing growing in me, compelling my thoughts back to it, and I anticipate with relish the ecstatic pain that is the price I must pay for daring to bring something beautiful to life.

 

(from my private correspondence with one of the few men who have had a brief impact on me. Illustration: Forming Trust, reproduced with the kind permission of Naomi Brosnan )

 

Uncategorized

Inna my heart

Leave a comment

‘There was a negro murderer in the jail, who had killed his wife; slashed her throat with a razor so that, her whole head tossing further and further backward from the bloody regurgitation of her bubbling throat, she ran out the cabin door and for six or seven steps up the quiet moonlit lane. He would lean in the moonlit window in the evening and sing. After supper a few negroes gathered along the fence below – natty, shoddy suits and sweat-stained overalls shoulder-to-shoulder – and in chorus with the murderer, they sang spirituals while the white people slowed and stopped in the leafed darkness that was almost summer, to listen to those who were sure to die and him who was already dead singing about heaven and being tired.’ (W. Faulkner, The Sanctuary)

 *

The more I read this passage, the more I fall in love with the beautiful brutality of it and the way all these folks succumb to their fate (as they see it); propping themselves up on its flaking, painted spokes. Can’t help but wonder, tho: how come so much spirituality can’t stop that hand from slitting that throat? Sing. Prop yourself up, best you can; sing the pain away. And I think of a song I repeatedly catch myself singing:  Lord I want to be like Jesus (and the next line goes:)  inna my heart.

In heart but not in deed? Oh well, I guess it’s the thought that counts?