Genre Attack

It is strange when I suddenly realise that what I am writing fits within a genre I didn't expect. It happened with Steeplechase (Text Publishing due May 2013). I was writing this book and I thought it was just a straight literary fiction. It was only sometime in the second draft that I realised I was writing a ghost story of sorts, not actual ghosts but the ghosts of your past. I started to read gothic ghost stories and suddenly the whole book fell into place.

This next book, Abstinence had the same journey. I wrote the first draft referencing classic erotic texts and it was truly an erotic novel. That was it's genre. Facing the second draft I knew something was not quite right. It seems what I have written is a sexual superhero story. I blame my obsession with Wilhelm Reich, of course, but now that I come back to the book, the Orgone energy thread is the strongest trope in the book. My heroine is a sexual superhero. She is Barbarella, she is Batman with a cunt. I am learning to embrace this now. In my re-draft I am upping the superpowers. This is not a genre I am used to. The comics I enjoy are more Chris Ware than Marvel or DC. Perhaps I should introduce a costume for her at some point. Oh dear. What have I done?

Not the best

I hang on to the things that are worst. The criticisms, the negative comments the bad reviews. All the rest slides off me like water and only the gritty stuff is rescued like stones in a sieve. I delete the text, burn the letter, practice forgetting. Anything that will help me unwind this bitter ball of hate that I am gestating. Why is it that this self hate does not turn to cancer. It seems unfair that I go on when others fall. My grandmother who always told me that at second best I was not good enough, is still alive into her 90s. She is limping along on hate and anger I suspect. I lie in the bath and close my eyes and feel the same energetic throbbing behind my lids. I am held up by all the terrible things that have ever been aimed at me. I collect them like severed limbs kept in jars. I am nothing but a medical curiosity. Her words to me, his words to her, his words to me, my words to him, all of this niggling criticism fueling a life that has stomped off the rails and is rampaging out in a more self destructive direction.

remembering

I remember him eating pizza. The problem was the swallowing of it. By this time his muscles were not working in any kind of automatic way. He chewed, deliberately, but when it came to swallowing, the whole thing became a nightmare of muscles working against breath, breath working against saliva, Coordinating the march of food from lips to throat to stomach seemed to overwhelm him. He choked, coughed, the sound of vomiting but without vomit. Just chunks of pizza spilled in his lap and the look on his face, the shame, the sense of loss.

He apologised and I told him it was unnecessary. I looked at his lips all smeared with red sauce, those fat sensual lips that had been the first to touch my cunt. The twist of a tongue and what it felt to have that tongue inside me. He was the first and the last lover who actually enjoyed lapping at my clitoris. I wasn't to know this at the time. I thought that all men after him would go down joyfully without all the cajoling that one has to do. Now, here in the last years of his life, his chest heaves, his lips twitch.

'I am sorry' he says and he is almost crying. He is ashamed for me to see him because he still wants me to think of him there between my spread thighs. I am not embarrassed to see him like this because I have long since stopped thinking of him in this way. His eyes are welling with tears and for a moment I do remember. He was the first lover who liked giving head. I was not to know he would be the last.

Five years later he would be dead.

real things

that need to be dragged out from under the bed. Or from within it. Real things that frighten me. That won't be trapped on a page like the petals of a dead flower. That avoid words, hiding in dreams. All the play things on the page are too easy. Real things resist because I am frightened of them. But they are there. I hear them moving around down there like crabs. One day I will kneel down and lift the corner of the blanket.

voyeur

It is hard to watch you there without interacting.

Habit.

I would say hi or you would. A conversation, mostly ending in distress. Now I wear my cloak of invisibility like I did as a child playing role play games, like I did as a teenager hiding behind my hair. As I haven't for all the years we have been. I want to bound up to you and start a conversation but it all goes bad all the time and so I am learning to hide again. Under the bed. In the cupboard. Behind my work.

Veneer. I am putting on a thin crust but with time it will be less thin. It will look like skin, only thicker than my own. It will be falsely skin coloured and cold to the touch. You are there and it hurts my heart to see you. Sooner or later I will be in the habit of not looking at all.

Honesty

I don't know if I have talked about honesty. I have a terrible habit of opening my mouth and letting the truth spill out unchecked. It is how I wrote Affection, carelessly and with an open heart and open mouth. It is how I live my life in general. If you are secretive then you become vulnerable so I just try to be honest most of the time.

Lately I have been censoring myself. It is facebook that is the problem. I'll say my day is less than great and suddenly I will be buried under well wishes. I will admit that something I am working on is terrible and people will leap in to assure my it isn't so.  Well, actually, sometimes what I create is terrible. Most of what I write is unmemorable, some days are awful, almost all of the time I don't look beautiful and I am not just saying this to get a wash of positive affirmations back. I am being honest. These are the truths. I don't need people to reassure me otherwise.

If I am less than beautiful then that is ok. That is a good place to start creating art from. Who needs the beautiful amongst us to write all the stories. If some of my days are bleak then that is fine too. One day it will turn around and I will be content for a brief period.  Sometimes (often) my writing is less than poetic. That is as it should be. I should be strong enough to admit when something I have created has little worth. This is part of the practice.

I don't know what to do about this. I could leave facebook. It is a place that supports all my bad work and my ugliness and urges me to be a happy shiny person.

sadness

Maybe one day I will be ready to write a book about sadness. There will be some sex in it because even in the fog of it there is still a reaching out. Sarah Manguso in The Guardians writes "I've been insulated from my own death since I began taking this new medicine. I am no longer moved to write poetry, but I traded poetry for a longer life. I knew I was doing it."

This is the conundrum. If I go back on medication I will not be able to write the book on sadness. When I am sad I feel like my own sadness is big enough to be responsible for all the ills in the world. I am afloat right now but I am always aware of the drowning. Which time? Next time? The time after? Some time  I will sink down too far and the tiny fluttering bird of my breath will take in water before I have time to reach the line where the ocean meets the sky.