I dreamed I was at a big dinner with Guy Gavriel Kay. We were meeting L.M. Montgomery later. (Why those two together? I think they may both be Canadian...ask my subconscious). I was so tongue-tied.
I'm sorry, I'm babbling. Woke up rather mopey around 5ish, talked to Roshani for a while which didn't help, though it should have, and then finished this round of revisions on "Johnny's Story" and "Minh-Ha's Story", which did help some. I still have about an hour and a half of work time, and I'd really like to write something new, but feeling a bit uninspired. Maybe I'll go back to reading _Macho Sluts_.
That's by Pat Califia. She's amazing, though rather hard-core, I warn you. Lesbian (primarily) S/M erotica. One of the stories frustrated me, in a way that I don't know what to do about. It's called "Surprise Party", I think. Not to tell you the story, but basic premise is that woman gets abducted by cops who can tell that she's into S/M and submissive and one of them plays head games with her. All this very engaging, non-consensual material, and of course it comes out at the end that this was a friend of hers and it was all a scene. Which frustrates me, because we're in her head all the way through, and she's scared, and we're being asked to buy that this is real tension. I did something like that in "Chantal", but I did have the situation actually get out of control before the protagonist got scared. I guess I'm a little tired of the whole series of nonconsensual stories in which it turns out to be a set-up. In our current atmosphere of not producing any material that looks like it could even a little be like rape, or advocating rape, that's inevitable, but it takes some of the challenge out of a story. I think the emotional dynamics in a real rape situation are fascinating. I think stories are one of the places to examine evil and its effects. Somehow when we link it to eroticism, that makes it non-PC and no one will publish it. I wonder what Pat would do if she didn't have publishing constraints to worry about. If I wrote a kidnap/ransom story, and wrote about the sympathy that a victim grew to feel for her kidnappers, even the love she felt, I could probably get away with it. That happens, and it's interesting. If it were a mainstream story, I could perhaps even get away with having a sexual component, and it might be regarded as a ground-breaking, frightening story. Yet if it's explicitly labelled erotica, that sort of exploration is automatically taboo, because suddenly I'm the wicked proponent of rape. Argh! It's fiction. FICTION! It does not cause rape. Does Friday the Thirteenth cause serial killers?
Okay, off my soapbox. This whole issue just frustrates the heck out of me. I'm going to try to go back to work.
8:15. Wrote a new piece, "Steve's Story". (I know, the titles lately have been dull, but in the context of the book, I think they'll work better that way.) Sent off to first readers list. Happy with it (even though I stole the idea of it from someone else (whose story I hadn't read). Ah well -- nothing new under the sun, right?
I'm feeling *much* more cheerful. :-)