Writer's Love

How do you write love?  Do you need to have a firm 'definition'?  By definition, I mean a concept bound within clearly defined lines.

Love is a relationship.

If I must have a definition, this seems as good a place to start as any.  This definition is loose, the lines are in pencil and an unsharpened, soft lead pencil at that.

There are many kinds of relationships which allow considerable scope for writers to write love.  Love, by this very pencilled in definition can mean anything from pornography to God is love. [My apologies for mentioning anything so crass as faith - but see my History of Religion blog].

A 'Giver' and a 'Taker.'  This can be love.  One submits and one takes that submission.  Most often used in pornography I would say, but toying with it can make erotica play with the line between porn and erotica and be quite effective in taking a reader [not to mention the writer!] into the alternate reality of anything written [both fiction and non-fiction present alternate realities].  It can also figure in deep character studies.

Pure Joy.  This is the rarest I would say and in today's cynical and jaded world, the most difficult to make palatable to readers. Here two souls, two hearts, two bodies take joy in each other, in a dance that mimics ideas of eternal bliss.

Impure Joy. Two real people with real character flaws and real strengths bonding firstly as friends - friends being those who stay together while recognizing differences and irritations - and then as lovers, both in spirit and sexually.  The most fun and satisfying to write, I would say, as it allows for sparks to fly as well as happiness to settle in to both writer and reader.

There are probably others, well certainly there are many, but off I go to my day job!

Back at it

Well, my funk didn't last - whether it was long or too long is impossible to say.  Yesterday I began reading Catullus again.  In a long ago blog post in a blog I deleted during a previous Grand Funk, I noted that Catullus and Cohen were the two influences on my own work.  I listen now to Leonard Cohen's dark words in song, but Catullus!  I have not read Catullus since I found an unexpurgated copy in my High School library back in the late 1960s. I have always imagined (with no evidence whatsoever) that it was placed there by my Latin teacher, Mr. Whealen (called oh so wittily by my friends and I, Gaius). School officials in those repressed days probably thought it boring old Latin.

Here is one example:

I’ll fuck you and bugger you,

Aurelius the pathic, and sodomite Furius,

who thought you knew me from my verses,

since they’re erotic, not modest enough.

It suits the poet himself to be dutifully chaste,

his verses not necessarily so at all:

which, in short then, have wit and good taste

even if they’re erotic, not modest enough,

and as for that can incite to lust,

I don’t speak to boys, but to hairy ones

who can’t move their stiff loins.

You, who read all these thousand kisses,

you think I’m less of a man?

I’ll fuck you, and I’ll bugger you.

What to do? Decisions, Decisions, Decisions

Well..... Over the past few months I have begun [it's about time!] to think seriously about writing.  I have written hundreds of poems - published four short collections of them in POD on lulu.com and one that I am proud of in the iBookstore [multimedia].  They don't sell, of course, but there they are. Prior to these I had a half dozen books in print - five of them commissioned by local historical groups, and one by a traditional publishing house [James Lorimer & Co.].    I had two academic books planned - one a study of religion and society in the Atlantic world, which engages my deepest intellectual interests, and another a series of iBooks on World Religions. In my first phase of rethinking my writing I abandoned both of these - well... perhaps in some future perfect time, assuming I live to be a thousand, I will get back to them.  But in that first phase of my reality check, I knew I would never have time to write these.  So they are consigned to the cluttered attic of my mind.

The second phase of my reality check came last night.  My passion is poetry and a form I choose to call prose poetry.  I have only one project that I am desperate to complete:  The Man who fell from the Sky.  A truly multimedia [not enhanced!] eBook prose poem - something actually new and different and the product of my imagination.



The problem is, I do not know if I will have the time left even for this one passion.  So... to make the odds slightly better I 'hid' my two Facebook pages dealing with writing - Experimental Writing and Books Published, in order to remove the temptation to play by putting poems and excerpts in those places.  I was going to abandon this blog, and may still... but I seem to need a place to rant, think things out in words, .... whatever.

Some might say, make time.  Hmmm... well 75% of my day is spent caring for my invalid wife, and most of the other 25% in my day job, teaching online courses part time at two universities, and publishing some things for others under my hesitant almost publishing company, WordDancer Pubications.  I am a little nervous about no longer having several writing projects possible, as they are cutting me back due to financial constraints in the Humanities and Arts [I teach History].  I might keep a Romantic bit of erotica that is a spin off from Sky Man.... probably I can justify it that way and one who knows told me I write erotica reasonably well.... and there is money there....

So.....I will keep my WordDancer Publications project going, and focus on the erotica spin off from Sky Man and then Sky Man.  Everything else to do with writing will have to be subdued or vanish.

Hmmmm

Two years ago I had a rambling blog that had only one attribute in common with this one - no one read it either.  Both also were predicated on the fiction that I was a writer.  I trashed that one and I think now the time has come to end this one too.  

Perhaps I might pick it up in a year or two, though I am getting rather old to keep looking ahead when mostly I have past not future.

So goodbye... He said to the deafening dark silence...

Twisting turning sleepless he lay

Dreams are nightmares in night or day

No land could he find nor stars to guide his way

No horizons stretched before his gaze

Only a grey and endless haze

Would sleep ever come and end it all

Or would he stay eternally covered 

in his blackest 

Pall

4:25 a.m.

I have revived my ancient rule that I must write something on The Man who fell from the Sky each day, so here is today's effort.

4:25 a.m. 

Is a time when the spirit is low and dark thoughts reign. This is the time when I want to sleep but lie awake, reality staring at me naked there.  Later in the day I can put on my false clothes and pretend. But at 4:25 a.m. I am bare and defenceless against truth.  I wrote one poem about an hour later which allowed sleep, but knew the poem for the crap it was - now that I am up and clothed in dishonesty I will probably find it to be good.  

The Man who fell from the Sky.... is falling to earth

The Man who fell from the Sky will appear this year.... my multimedia fantasy, romantic erotica, poetry, fiction tale has begun...... I will publish it is bits and pieces, letting it grow in the best organic fashion over the next 12 months.  Mostly it will appear in the iBookstore as that is the only place that can handle multimedia eBooks so far - well there are a few that would charge me more money than I have to do the  job for me.  So, I will use Apple's handy program iBook Author to produce my own multimedia madness.  I doubt it will sell, but I am having fun writing/building/producing this tale.

5:19 a.m.

5:19 a.m. and I am dead tired but cannot sleep. I know most people do not need sleep in the way I do - I crawled into bed at 1:30 a.m.  What shall I say?  The poems seem dead in me now - yesterday I wrote a crappy one in the laundromat which was so bad it embarrassed me. I wrote it out of desperation to write poetry, not any need as in the past. 

 I woke up with ashes in my mouth because i realized I am too tired and weary to write and I doubt I have the talent or will anyway.  Maybe by writing this my black mood will pass.   Wild thoughts go through my head about cobbling together menial jobs to pay bills as clearly I will not have time or energy to write.  Yet here I am writing.  I guess I will have to write, but without hope or expectation, no big plans, no vision, just words spinning out of control in my mind and spilling onto this screen.

What a sorry, miserable way to live.  I wish I were an accountant, with my life arranged in neat rows and balanced spread sheets.

Hmmm.  This is the first decent thing I have written in aeons.