by Annabeth Leong
There are things I'm proud to understand about romance, won by hard experience. I know now that relationships shouldn't be judged by longevity. If I eventually leave my lover, or my lover leaves me, it doesn't negate what passed between us. I no longer feel foolish about the nakedness, the moments of vulnerability. They remain beautiful in retrospect, even if they are tinged by bitterness or regret.
When I meet a potential lover, I go forward knowing I may be in for a searing experience. My heart will be marked forever by this person, no matter what, because I don't know how to do these things without caring. I will, perhaps, be beautifully changed, and maybe I will do the same to them. Maybe forty years from now, she will be putting marmalade on rye toast because I liked it and I'll be taking my coffee with extra cream and sugar because of him. Maybe we will be sitting together, or maybe we won't. And maybe six months from now, I'll be sobbing my guts out because I'm longing for a touch that won't belong to me anymore, or maybe I'll be awkwardly watching while someone else reacts to a denial that comes from me.
Those things are the price of admission to romance, and I know and accept them.
With friendship, though, I'm so much less circumspect. I take the idea of Best Friends Forever to heart. I want a friend who is a life partner. When things come to an end, I am inconsolable, sometimes for years.
***
As an elementary school kid, I remember getting assigned exercises and writing prompts that asked for me to make lists of superlatives. What was my favorite color? Favorite book? Who was my best friend?
These lists confused me. I am enthusiastic by nature, and I love easily. Lots of colors are beautiful to me, and every friend is precious. Choosing favorites was an alien concept, something I had to be taught.
At the same time, I have walls up that even I don't know how to breach, and always did. People slip through them, finding various secret passageways in ancient brickwork, but that's a magical, accidental process. As an elementary school kid, I didn't know how to have a best friend, didn't know how to feel that close to anyone. I never really had the experience until I was an adult.
***
I had a best friend once who would invite me to go with her to the grocery store, or to stand and talk with her while she folded her laundry. I could tell she felt embarrassed about it, as if she was taking advantage of me, and I didn't know how to communicate how much I loved being part of that dailiness. I felt stitched into her life, and so safe within it.
I remember that she was nice to me when we first met, and at that time in my life I reacted to her kindness by wondering what the hell she wanted from me. As it gradually dawned on me that she wanted me, my company, my friendship, that dizzying star of awareness produced a complete and helpless sort of love that has become the way I always feel for a best friend.
I can't drop the walls easily, but when they fall, they come down completely. I'm not sure people know how bare I am before them, but when I have a best friend, I am skinless.
***
Sex will ruin the friendship. I believed that, and I think it became a twisted talisman, a way of trying to ward off endings that always seem to come. I accept that romances can end, and when I am blessed with a particularly dear friendship, I am desperate to prevent it from becoming a romance. Without sex, perhaps it can last forever.
This morning, I began to wonder about that. I think it's a vestige of my conservative upbringing to believe that sex destroys connections, or dooms them. Certainly, the times I've lost close friends have ripped me apart so completely that I can't believe things would have been any worse or better if we'd had sex.
That's not to say that I always want to sleep with my friends. But there have been times I wanted to, and I did not out of fear of losing the friend. The irony is that none of those friends are close to me anymore, none of the ones I wanted that way.
***
I want a best friend for life, a friend with whom I outlast marriages and weather changes of all kinds, a friend I can establish unbreakable rituals with. I fantasize about making tea for this friend in forty years, just the way we did last week. At some point, I realized that other girls fantasize about weddings.
I worried that my desire for a best friend was some sort of sublimation of my feelings for women. I think it sometimes has been. But I've also had male best friends, so that's not the only explanation.
***
There are friends I'm thinking of, losses it seemed I could not survive. But it feels like a final betrayal to talk specifically about them now. There is one in particular—I know she wouldn't like to be written about, so I can't do that to her, not even now. I feel like she would be entirely lost to me if I put her on the page, and I need to hang onto that last little shred of what we used to have.
But I'll say this. I can lose a romance. I believe in clarity and clean breaks and the knowledge that I'll obviously survive once I get through a couple of weeks of sadness. I believe that it's a favor I can do for a person to really know that to my bones. When I told my ex-husband I wanted a divorce, I did it just like that. Calm, decisive, with no room for hope or further torture. Then I walked away and never looked back. I missed my spice rack, and I missed our home, but I knew the romance was finished and I never let myself doubt it.
A friend, though… I suddenly become a font of impossible hopes. Maybe it's only an accident that they haven't called in six months. I lie to myself. I lie to people around me, telling stories about things I did with my "best friend" eight months ago, then nine months ago, trying to act nonchalant, as if those adventures happened just last week. I call long past the point I should stop calling. I cry when I mention their name. I cry when I hear songs on the radio that remind me of them. I wouldn't understand heartbreak if not for those experiences with friends.
***
I don't have a neat ending for this. My heart is still broken. But what I figured out while I was writing this is that I don't want to feel embarrassed of the past confidences. It's an amazing, addictive feeling to feel loved for who I am, and to love another with my whole heart. When I lose a friend I've loved that way, and who I thought loved me that way in return, it doesn't have to mean that the love was always false, just as I don't think it does for a romance.
I am terribly embarrassed in retrospect by the revelations that can come at the end of a friendship, ashamed to think of myself so open and trusting when things were going wrong around me and I wasn't even aware of them. But I don't want to be. I'd like to be as brave as I can be with romance. I would like to open my heart again in the future, knowing full well that if I wind up broken again, it will be because it was all worth it.
(I apologize for the lateness of this post. I didn't have the heart to write it any earlier. I've lost a few friends recently that I'm still torn up about. They were all that came to mind when I thought about the topic. It took me a while to work around to a more general treatment that didn't feel distanced and dishonest.)
Showing posts with label heartbreak. Show all posts
Showing posts with label heartbreak. Show all posts
Thursday, April 9, 2015
Thursday, September 25, 2014
The Great (Erotic) Conversation
by Annabeth Leong
I'm wary about our current topic because I think it invites a false dichotomy. There are all sorts of writerly arguments that can so easily become limiting traps. Is genre writing of literary value? Are you a sellout if you sell your work? What's the difference between erotica and porn? And the list goes on.
Do I write for the market or for myself?
Hell yeah, I write for the market. I write to spec all the time. I can't remember the last time I started a story without knowing where I wanted to send it when it was finished. As I said in the comments to someone else's post, I find writing to spec inspiring. I see it as a sort of poetic form, a set of constraints that set me free even as they limit me.
I write for the market because I want to sell my work, I want it to be read, and I value the contributions of others. I want to hear what the editor has to say, what the publisher has to say, and what the readers have to say.
I write for the market because I am the market. I spend almost all my disposable income on books. I spend it on books I want to read because they sound fun, and on books that seem important, and on books I feel I must read so I can understand the currents of the mainstream, and on books written by my friends, and on books that contain subjects or characters I want to see more of. Erotica makes up a huge part of what I read. I know what's going on in the field, and I'm writing from that context, to a readership that must look at least something like me, at least some of the time.
I write for the market because I have things to say to the market, in conversation with what else is in the market. I believe the market can be better than it seems and deserves better than it sometimes gets. When I write about a hero who is shorter than the heroine, I do that because I've got something to show people, if they can hear me. I recently heard a writer talk about the things her major publisher believed her hero had to be: tall, white, circumcised, wealthy. I am always writing to the market, a long letter of many thousands of words that say that's not what a hero has to be, that's not what a heroine has to be. Sex is bigger than all of that.
But I'm not so condescending as to believe I'm the only one saying this to the market, or that I'm the only part of the market that wants this. I think this is a movement. I see what's happening in science fiction and fantasy and I feel excited. There is a battle going on, but there is a market demanding diversity and a variety of experiences and perspectives. There are calcified parts of our market, too, but there are parts that are moving, liquefying, swelling with a need I'm very interested in.
Last night, a friend said to me that she is amazed how often she hears that people read erotica because they need it. She said she rarely hears that about other genres. That's how I got into this market, too. I needed erotica, and I still need it. I'm writing for that market. Hell yeah, I am.
And for myself? You'd better believe I'm writing for myself. I've got continents of shame and desire that I'm trying to map, and often I feel I've only covered the shoreline. I'm writing because I have to understand these things, and the fact that I'm also writing for the market does absolutely nothing to dilute that.
Writing to spec helps me keep my head above the water in the mess of feelings I dive into when I'm dredging up my work. It keeps me from losing my way. Losing my way often feels like a danger. I am not the same person I was when I started writing erotica, and I don't want the same things. Honestly, the things I want and think about now would have shocked me when I started—and not because they're a trip to ever greater depravity but because they're strange and delightful and scary and not at all what I expected.
My writing is out ahead of me, as I've said many times. I think I'm inventing a character based on intellectual processes—Celia from Untouched, say, who fucks herself relentlessly but can't so much as hold hands with another person—only to find a message for myself once I dive into the story. I am writing for myself because I am my own undiscovered country.
I am writing for myself because I'm sort of coy with myself and my friends. There are things I need to say, but I can't just come out and say them. Instead, I make those things into stories, and I read them slowly once they are finished and try to come to terms with myself.
I write for myself because I turn myself on. I've never written an erotic story that didn't make me squirm. God, I love the warm sensation that floods my body when I think about these dirty things. I started renting space in an office, and one of the women there often comments on how absorbing my work seems. I love the naughty, inappropriate knowledge of what's got me so caught up. I love fantasizing about excusing myself to the bathroom. I love the breathlessness that comes over me as I get really excited, and I love the way the words begin to fly onto the screen. I don't know who's fucking who anymore. Maybe my characters are fucking each other, and maybe I'm fucking the reader, but probably I've reverted to one of my favorite things—fucking myself, until it hurts.
Fuck yeah, I write for myself. I've become my own lover, and it's only in doing so that I've learned what I can truly give to a real-life lover, and what I truly need to receive.
I'm making this sound beautiful, but I get my heart broken all the time. I break my own heart, and then the market breaks me, too.
Right now, I am heartbroken because I don't know what's going on with Ellora's Cave. They've published four of my books, and I love them all, and now I don't know what will become of them. I have another book, Turn Back Time, that's supposed to come out from EC around Christmas, and it's a story of reconciliation and radical acceptance that I care about a great deal. I have another story on submission to them, titled Challenge Accepted, a simple femdom love story, which I had to write despite having lost my editor. I didn't have enough cynicism in me to do a bad job, and it was bittersweet and heartbreaking to begin to love things about the story even when I didn't know if anyone would care about it once I got it to EC.
I break my own heart, too. I wrote down things in Untouched that make me feel terribly vulnerable. The story of one of my biggest regrets is hidden in there. I've uncovered my secret anger, and desires I can't quite admit to out loud. I cringe when I think about someone reading this book. I ache when I think about no one reading this book. I only managed to write it because I was willing to break my own heart to see what would come out. Then one recent day the Kindle edition went live on Amazon, a representation of my wide-open chest, carrying the weight of hopes and fears I never seem to be able to keep away from a book.
I haven't been participating in real time in the conversations here over the past couple weeks because I couldn't bear to. All this heartbreak is making me feel low, and I wasn't ready to talk about it yet. I spent a couple weeks resting, planning my next move, and I came up with a new project that's more personal and daunting still. I am leading with the chin. I don't know if I can pull it off, and I don't know what will happen if I put it out in the market. I can't keep myself from doing this, though—writing for the market, writing for myself.
I want you all to know that I always read your posts, whether I comment right away or not. The vast majority of the time, I comment eventually. Writing is a conversation, and I can't turn away from it, though sometimes I take long, silent walks in between sentences. I am in conversation with myself. I am in conversation with the market. I am in conversation with you.
I'm wary about our current topic because I think it invites a false dichotomy. There are all sorts of writerly arguments that can so easily become limiting traps. Is genre writing of literary value? Are you a sellout if you sell your work? What's the difference between erotica and porn? And the list goes on.
Do I write for the market or for myself?
Hell yeah, I write for the market. I write to spec all the time. I can't remember the last time I started a story without knowing where I wanted to send it when it was finished. As I said in the comments to someone else's post, I find writing to spec inspiring. I see it as a sort of poetic form, a set of constraints that set me free even as they limit me.
I write for the market because I want to sell my work, I want it to be read, and I value the contributions of others. I want to hear what the editor has to say, what the publisher has to say, and what the readers have to say.
I write for the market because I am the market. I spend almost all my disposable income on books. I spend it on books I want to read because they sound fun, and on books that seem important, and on books I feel I must read so I can understand the currents of the mainstream, and on books written by my friends, and on books that contain subjects or characters I want to see more of. Erotica makes up a huge part of what I read. I know what's going on in the field, and I'm writing from that context, to a readership that must look at least something like me, at least some of the time.
I write for the market because I have things to say to the market, in conversation with what else is in the market. I believe the market can be better than it seems and deserves better than it sometimes gets. When I write about a hero who is shorter than the heroine, I do that because I've got something to show people, if they can hear me. I recently heard a writer talk about the things her major publisher believed her hero had to be: tall, white, circumcised, wealthy. I am always writing to the market, a long letter of many thousands of words that say that's not what a hero has to be, that's not what a heroine has to be. Sex is bigger than all of that.
But I'm not so condescending as to believe I'm the only one saying this to the market, or that I'm the only part of the market that wants this. I think this is a movement. I see what's happening in science fiction and fantasy and I feel excited. There is a battle going on, but there is a market demanding diversity and a variety of experiences and perspectives. There are calcified parts of our market, too, but there are parts that are moving, liquefying, swelling with a need I'm very interested in.
Last night, a friend said to me that she is amazed how often she hears that people read erotica because they need it. She said she rarely hears that about other genres. That's how I got into this market, too. I needed erotica, and I still need it. I'm writing for that market. Hell yeah, I am.
And for myself? You'd better believe I'm writing for myself. I've got continents of shame and desire that I'm trying to map, and often I feel I've only covered the shoreline. I'm writing because I have to understand these things, and the fact that I'm also writing for the market does absolutely nothing to dilute that.
Writing to spec helps me keep my head above the water in the mess of feelings I dive into when I'm dredging up my work. It keeps me from losing my way. Losing my way often feels like a danger. I am not the same person I was when I started writing erotica, and I don't want the same things. Honestly, the things I want and think about now would have shocked me when I started—and not because they're a trip to ever greater depravity but because they're strange and delightful and scary and not at all what I expected.
My writing is out ahead of me, as I've said many times. I think I'm inventing a character based on intellectual processes—Celia from Untouched, say, who fucks herself relentlessly but can't so much as hold hands with another person—only to find a message for myself once I dive into the story. I am writing for myself because I am my own undiscovered country.
I am writing for myself because I'm sort of coy with myself and my friends. There are things I need to say, but I can't just come out and say them. Instead, I make those things into stories, and I read them slowly once they are finished and try to come to terms with myself.
I write for myself because I turn myself on. I've never written an erotic story that didn't make me squirm. God, I love the warm sensation that floods my body when I think about these dirty things. I started renting space in an office, and one of the women there often comments on how absorbing my work seems. I love the naughty, inappropriate knowledge of what's got me so caught up. I love fantasizing about excusing myself to the bathroom. I love the breathlessness that comes over me as I get really excited, and I love the way the words begin to fly onto the screen. I don't know who's fucking who anymore. Maybe my characters are fucking each other, and maybe I'm fucking the reader, but probably I've reverted to one of my favorite things—fucking myself, until it hurts.
Fuck yeah, I write for myself. I've become my own lover, and it's only in doing so that I've learned what I can truly give to a real-life lover, and what I truly need to receive.
I'm making this sound beautiful, but I get my heart broken all the time. I break my own heart, and then the market breaks me, too.
Right now, I am heartbroken because I don't know what's going on with Ellora's Cave. They've published four of my books, and I love them all, and now I don't know what will become of them. I have another book, Turn Back Time, that's supposed to come out from EC around Christmas, and it's a story of reconciliation and radical acceptance that I care about a great deal. I have another story on submission to them, titled Challenge Accepted, a simple femdom love story, which I had to write despite having lost my editor. I didn't have enough cynicism in me to do a bad job, and it was bittersweet and heartbreaking to begin to love things about the story even when I didn't know if anyone would care about it once I got it to EC.
I break my own heart, too. I wrote down things in Untouched that make me feel terribly vulnerable. The story of one of my biggest regrets is hidden in there. I've uncovered my secret anger, and desires I can't quite admit to out loud. I cringe when I think about someone reading this book. I ache when I think about no one reading this book. I only managed to write it because I was willing to break my own heart to see what would come out. Then one recent day the Kindle edition went live on Amazon, a representation of my wide-open chest, carrying the weight of hopes and fears I never seem to be able to keep away from a book.
I haven't been participating in real time in the conversations here over the past couple weeks because I couldn't bear to. All this heartbreak is making me feel low, and I wasn't ready to talk about it yet. I spent a couple weeks resting, planning my next move, and I came up with a new project that's more personal and daunting still. I am leading with the chin. I don't know if I can pull it off, and I don't know what will happen if I put it out in the market. I can't keep myself from doing this, though—writing for the market, writing for myself.
I want you all to know that I always read your posts, whether I comment right away or not. The vast majority of the time, I comment eventually. Writing is a conversation, and I can't turn away from it, though sometimes I take long, silent walks in between sentences. I am in conversation with myself. I am in conversation with the market. I am in conversation with you.
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