Why I am writing this

I just read one of my vagina posts and I was scandalised. How could I write that? How could I let strangers know all this messy, ugly intimate detail? Why would I expose myself as the awkward, self-deprecating, indiscriminate bundle of pathologies that I am?

I got a little lurch of terror over what I had written. I felt as if I had been caught doing something I shouldn't have been doing, like some late-night graffiti artist suddenly trapped in the lights of a police vehicle. That tiny rush of adrenaline is enough to ensure that there is a Furious Vagina posting tomorrow and the day after tomorrow.

For months my partner has been complaining that I seem to write without any kind of joy. I sit down in front of yet another incomplete work of literary fiction, struggling over every sentence, witness my terrible lack on every page - my awkwardness with structure, the way each scene struggles to differentiate itself from the scene before. I look back on those completed manuscripts papered with their confetti of rejection slips and I am torn between my tenderness for them and my embarrassment over their inadequacies. On good days I flick through them and I am pleasantly surprised at how they have turned out. On bad days I have been known to take a pen and visit the virgin pages with hand-scrawled expletives. I cannot seem to settle with one kind of relationship to my unpublished novels.

The rejections, my badges of honour are also my hair-shirts that I pull out and try on to punish myself for refusing to budge from my vision. If I had found a more likable main character then perhaps that publisher would have accepted me into her stable. If I had vilified that older woman who slept with so young a man, perhaps my novel of doomed love would have beaten Tim Winton's 'Breath' onto the shelves. Why must I always choose the difficult solution, the less palatable one. Why do teeth click when my characters kiss? Why does their breath smell of stale food rather than vanilla?

'Vaginas' has freed me from all this creative self doubt for a moment. I find myself wondering throughout the day what my post will be in the evening. If a stray thought scares me I will fashion some moment of sexual embarrassment from my past out of it. I enjoy pressing the 'publish post' button before I have had a chance to weigh up the full implications of what I have said. I like the little flutter of fear as I read back on a post and know that I should have kept that thought to myself. I like the freedom that complete honesty brings to me. As long as it is true I will post it.

I remember, in my wild days when I would look back on an evening romp with the same kind of flutter of insecurity. Am I truly horrible for having done this? Does this make me a bad person? A fallen woman? A slut? Even back then I would tell people that this was all research. I would write about it one day, one way or another.

I am enjoying 'Vaginas'. I am stimulated by it. I have re-discovered that very childlike joy of writing curled up under the covers with a torch, writing all night when I should have been sleeping.

I hope this literary masturbation is equally enjoyable for you the reader. I know you are out there, because I watch the little counter at the bottom of my blog tick up incrementally. And I thank you for joining me in my daily practice. These post are for my pleasure, but they are also for you.