Bridge Songs

by Jean Roberta



Here is my favourite poem about living in the moment, written in the dawn of a day just after the dawn of the nineteenth century:

Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802

By William Wordsworth

Earth has not anything to show more fair:/ Dull would he be of soul who could pass by/ A sight so touching in its majesty:/ This City now doth, like a garment, wear/ The beauty of the morning; silent, bare/ Ships, towers, domes, theatres and temples lie/ Open unto the fields, and to the sky;/ All bright and glittering in the smokeless air./ Never did sun more beautifully steep/ In his first splendour valley, rock, or hill;/ Ne’er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!/ The river glideth at his own sweet will:/ Dear God! The very houses seem asleep;/ And all that mighty heart is lying still!

According to the poet, he and his sister Dorothy were in a carriage, leaving London, which then had a population of approximately 200K, which is the current size of the town where I live on the Canadian prairie. Wordsworth took a kind of mental snapshot of what he saw, before the invention of the camera. “Majesty” is the word he chose to describe the sight of such a huge metropolis.

According to some critics, the “sleeping” city seems dead, but this interpretation seems to me to miss the point. “All that mighty heart” is about to kick into life when horse-drawn vehicles and pedestrians begin going about their business, and smoke pours into the sky. (None of it will come from locomotives, which are still in the drawing stage.) Maidservants will shout “Gardez l’eau!” before pouring the contents of chamber-pots out of windows. Passers-by will move out of the way and hope nothing splashes onto their hats. City life simply requires a certain tolerance.

Street vendors will begin crying their wares, and the resulting symphony of sound will include (according to another English poet of the time, William Blake) “the harlot’s cry from street to street.”

I’ve always wondered what that “cry” sounded like – “fresh cunt, tuppence for a taste, a shilling a feel?” A modern reader can only imagine.

In any case, no one is crying anything in the moment when Wordsworth is bidding farewell to London. The City seems to be holding its breath.

The fact that the view is described from a bridge is not a coincidence. While on a bridge, you are not on one side or the other – you are literally suspended over a body of water, and it’s like being suspended in time. It’s also not a coincidence that this poem is a sonnet, traditionally a serenade to a loved one. Instead of being addressed to a person, this sonnet is addressed to a city in a moment that will never be repeated.

Living for the moment is an essential element in the philosophy known as Romanticism, which Wordsworth adopted when it was new. Many years later, (1966, to be exact), the American troubadours Simon and Garfunkel honoured another city bridge and the spirit of the Now which was then associated with a generation of Romantics known as hippies.

You can hear and see this serenade to the 59th Street Bridge in New York City on youtube. Unfortunately, I couldn't upload the video here, so here is an image of the bridge itself, built in 1909 to connect Manhattan (an island) to the borough of Queens:

The 59th Street Bridge Song

By Simon and Garfunkel

Slow down, you move too fast.
You got to make the morning last.
Just kicking down the cobble stones.
Looking for fun and feelin' groovy.

Ba da, Ba da, Ba da, Ba da...Feelin' Groovy.

Hello lamp-post,
What cha knowin'?
I've come to watch your flowers growin'.
Ain't cha got no rhymes for me?
Doot-in' doo-doo,
Feelin' groovy.

I've got no deeds to do,
No promises to keep.
I'm dappled and drowsy and ready to sleep.
Let the morning time drop all its petals on me.
Life, I love you,
All is groovy.

If William and Dorothy Wordsworth had had access to a recording device, who knows what a sweet duet they might have passed down to us? But all artists record the flavour of their lives as best they can at the time.

And we’re free to relive those moments in our own time. That’s the magic of art.

The Abandoned Train Car

by Annabeth Leong

In the town where I lived when I was younger, there's a stretch of abandoned train track that leads to a line of graffiti-covered cars. I used to sneak out of the house to walk on the tracks at night, enjoying the game of spacing my steps to line up with the cross slats, and the train, coming at the end of this walk like a divine surprise, was the most special, most sacred place in town to me.

On this particular night, she came to my house, and we were pretending to everyone that it was a friendly sleepover thing, but both of us knew what we were actually going to do. We were having a snack together late that night, and I offered her my drink apologetically, not sure if she wanted to share a cup with me. "If I'm worried about your saliva," she said, "I need to stop right now." And we laughed because that was the closest we'd come to saying any of this out loud.

After that, I took her on this walk with me, down the train tracks, to the train. We climbed up the ladder on the side of one of the train cars and sat on the top together. The night might have been a little chilly, but I was shaking for a different reason. I remember stars. We had a package of Skittles and a bottle of Coca-Cola, and I think we had talked on the way there but once we got to the top of the train we fell silent because it was obviously time.

We shared the soda, and then we played a game arranging the Skittles on each other's forearms, and then I got bold and ate one of the Skittles off her arm. We were still too afraid to kiss, so she lay on her back on the cold metal roof and I placed Skittles carefully around her belly button. I don't think I had the guts to try to eat those off, though.

Then she turned to me, and we were kissing. I remember her thick, curly hair in my hands, and the taste of the soda and candy in her mouth. It was tentative at first—we had an awkward discussion of whose lips were supposed to be on the outside of the kiss, the man role—but then it was so obviously right that we stopped hesitating.

I had heard so many warnings from adults about boys and how they wanted sex so badly, how they would go half-insane from hormones and I should never trust them and always be sure to guard myself whenever I was alone with a boy. I'd always thought that was bullshit, some sort of racket, that surely no one was actually losing their mind over sex. Despite the experiences I'd had with boys pushing and cajoling me, I felt that this raging hormones thing was a convenient lie.

Then I kissed her, and I went half-insane, and I understood what those people had been trying to describe except that I wasn't a boy. I didn't really know how to think about what I was doing with her. It felt like there wasn't a rational thought left in my body.

I wasn't a virgin in the technical sense. I'd been with a number of boys by then. But recently, I've been thinking that night was my real first time because it was the first time I wasn't performing a role. Until then, I was always acquiescing to various coercions, making deals, feeling charged with being either the sexual gatekeeper or the automatic dispenser of magical sex favors. With her, we were both doing what we truly wanted to do. We were both excited but awkward but sweet but scared. Sex had never felt so mutual to me before.

I went to visit that town just recently, and I made my pilgrimage. It was eighty-five degrees, which shocked me since I'm used to New England now. I surprised a black snake sunning itself beside the tracks and it rushed away through dead leaves, into the overgrown swamp trees that line the space that was once cleared for the railroad. Its motion was so loud that I cringed, and the sky was bright and wide and watchful above me. I didn't know how I'd once had the courage to come to that place at night.

My mother had told me the old train was gone, but she was wrong. It was still there. I wandered along it, wishing I could recall which car we actually climbed. There was fresh graffiti—new tags, badges of pride for kids I'm way too old to recognize. My husband was with me, and I sort of regretted taking him there because I wanted that place for her.

I've been thinking about that moment a lot lately. That started long before this topic came up here at this blog. I try to write about it in my journal, and I wind up circling it instead, leading up to it and giving endless back story, or analyzing all the things that happened afterward. I write her name and I start to cry, and then I ask myself what I'm crying about. Surely something about the moment, not about her—it seems too naive to be crying about her.

But I think I'm crying about all of it. All the things we didn't know, the things I never had the courage to say or do. There were notes scrawled instead of paying attention in class, boyfriends, all sorts of messes. There were the nights she came to my house and made me feel that wild need no matter how much I wanted to resist her, and there's the fact that I no long have any idea why the hell I was trying to resist her. There were the nights she got me drunk in desperation, and always, always there was my lack of courage, my fear of being seen with her in school. Then there was her conversion and the letters she sent me detailing passages from Leviticus. Years later, there was the time she came to visit me but insisted we stand outside, as if crossing the threshold of a doorway would take us back to that same old feeling. And the last time I spoke to her, she kept a table between us, as if, without the object, we would fly together again.

In a Moment

by Daddy X

Art scholars tell us an impressionistic painting represents a specific instant in time, all the glare, shadow and shimmer of movement, imminent, suggested or apparent in the scene. Beyond that, the best works enable us to anticipate what may occur in the next instant.

There are several vivid images of individual moments in the past, that now, with hindsight, I can say really did stick with me. Not only in their intensity, but as formative turning points associated with the times. Moments, though only moments, can alter our trajectories forever.

I can remember my mother asking my aunt for a safety pin for my diaper. Even as a child, I considered the incident an early memory. I can still picture my aunt’s dingy living room in detail; it must have happened at night or in poor weather. Not to say that it was a particularly formative incident, but just the thought of recalling detail at such a young age does carry a certain poignancy regarding a growing awareness.

It was my senior year of high school. Going up the stairs between classes. Wow, that funny-looking new chick sure has some dark eyebrows, I thought. Kinda cute, too, her hair in that goofy little flip. Doesn’t even cover her ears... Snicker... Within two months, she’d be my girlfriend. My prom. Her prom. Within two years, she’d be my wife. Momma X and I are still together and will celebrate our fiftieth anniversary later this year.

November 20, 1963. I was working as a foreign car salesman, one of my first jobs after overcutting every class (in under a month) at Pierce Business School in center city Philadelphia. Seems the pool halls on South Street had more draw as an education than the school halls. In those days, South Street wasn’t yet the yupped-up scene it became. It was mostly Jewish rag trade warehouses where the salesmen stood out front, barked at you, collared your sorry ass, just itching to fix you up with a new suit. And then there were the African-American pool rooms, some featuring as little as three or four ragged tables and illegal beer sales. 

But I’m getting off-track.

“The president’s been shot,” cried the slick Texan used car salesman, my immediate boss. I can still feel the white flash of shock, as I’m sure many do regarding the tragic news on that day.  I’d just turned nineteen and would be married the next year. Plenty of new things were happening. I’d just left home and had gone out on my own, working two jobs, days selling cars, nights in a drug store. Life was constantly in flux. But that shock still reverberates, marking a time when my intellectual travels would begin the circuitous paths that have led to where I am now.

Except for a few eccentrics buying them, foreign sports cars had yet to make a big mark here in the states. The owner of the dealership was a known ‘kook’ in Trenton, New Jersey. He drove racecars on the competitive track, had a gorgeous wife who wore black leather chaps and rode a big Triumph motorcycle. Joanna was just a year or two older than I.

They had parties in their Bucks County farmhouse featuring a rare covered bridge on the driveway. Wild parties. They were ‘hipsters’. Free love. Weed. I had sex with an older woman I met through that job.

Seems I’d found a direction in life as well.

Wheeee!

But then there are those other moments, moments that not only stand out for their shock and atrocity, but for the direction a nation takes in the aftermath.  I didn’t begin my post planning to write about this huge wound in our country, but a small notation in the paper this morning drove the message home yet again. Of course, I’m talking about the wake of 9/11.

The news article talked about an American rock star, James Kotak of the Scorpions who apparently had a few too many, and gave a security guard the proverbial finger at the Dubai airport. He was charged, among other things, for drinking alcohol and insulting Islam.

Now, insulting Islam could cover lots of ground. Sure, the question arises as to why such an asshole would choose to be in such a hate-filled part of the world. It truly eludes me. Why go somewhere people aren't kind to those other than they? Of course, there are cultural differences within certain societies that a visitor should conform to as a matter of courtesy. But in some places, just professing to be who you are, wearing what you may, or not believing in certain fairy tales, is enough to bring negative attention.

The real question is: what are our armed services doing in those parts of the world? Objective (or not) issues that are most important to extremists don’t even even come up on our radar. Something that happened to a village elder five centuries ago is enough to keep people at each other’s throats today. They couldn’t care less about what matters to us.

So why did this happen? How did this happen? Why are we spending the wealth of a nation to engage in wars that will not end ethnic warfare in those parts of the world? The battles in Afghanistan exist on many levels, from a local village’s animosity for the town upstream pissing into their water supply, to the choice of the second Kalif in the seventh century. The Sunni/Shiite dilemma is far more important to any of them than instituting a vague system called democracy.

Of course, I’m doing a lot of generalizing here, implying ‘all’, ‘every’ or ‘any’. It’s not everyone. There are people with common sense among the masses, both here and over there. But that common sense has not the appeal of the stuff of hate— animosity, ethnic superiority—those things that make shit happen. Why is hatred so more seductive than tolerance? Why is it that the powers that be in this country would pump hard-earned resources into such a fray? Retribution because a bunch of nuts with allegiance to no borders attacked us? Fear that if we do nothing, the scary bad guys come back? Why indeed wage a war that distracted from finding the culprits, by overwhelming the once-secular Iraq, a nation that never lifted a finger against us? Instead, the so-called mastermind of the attack stayed safe for years, and Iraq has now reverted to ethnic chaos.

What about the generations of grudges we continue to advance with our tantrums? What about forthcoming retribution? Considering all the internecine warfare in the places we choose to fight, it should be obvious that these people don’t forget.

No, I’m afraid the wars are strictly economic, as is our thirst for oil. But the powers that be want us to believe we wage destruction for higher altruistic goals.

We threaten one nation after another to keep our weapons turning over, needing to use the stores of weaponry, then re-up just to keep the capitalist economy afloat. Can you imagine what would happen if we shut down the Pentagon? We currently spend more on defense than the next eight countries combined. Defense spending accounts for about 20% of ALL federal spending. One dollar for defense, four dollars left for everything else, including healthcare, maintenance of highways and bridges, politics, welfare, real estate,  federal wages, federal buildings and everything else that needs funding.  Everything else.

But if we quit the war business, resulting unemployed soldiers would overflow our job supply. We’re running a dangerous addiction that’s nearly impossible to kick because of the inertia of the beast within the power-monger’s soul. Or lack of that soul.

Yet we choose to play the game, blindly bolstering elements that come back to bite us, as the mujahedeen already have in Afghanistan, after we supplied them with weapons against the Soviet Union back in the 80’s. Reagan called them “Freedom Fighters”.

At that time, the Soviets were our enemy, so we supplied our future enemies.  China became the bad guys. Then The Soviet Union crashed. Now China’s a so-called friend. Russia’s back on the shit list. Iran is getting close to being attacked by somebody. Will we do it now? or wait to rescue Israel, when they commit an atrocity or announce intentions to do so that require their big brother’s intervention? Is this beginning to sound like Orwell?

Of course, we could always use those resources, both labor and financial, doing much-needed upgrades on our crumbling infrastructure. Something akin to  Franklin Roosevelt’s  Work Products Administration would absorb those military jobs for years, improving every American’s way of life, the results making everybody far safer in the long run than making enemies. But that smells too much like Socialism (read: common sense) to go over in any US election.

We keep pitching bombs into fright zones, always eager to jump into any conflict we see on the whole of the globe. WTF? Was that one moment in 2001 the catalyst that put the wheels in motion? A finishing touch to our country’s economy, along with its sense of right and wrong.

One good moment for you, al Qaeda.

A moment.

An indefinitely short period of time.

An instant.

The blink of an eye.

So much can happen in that instance. Lives are lost, babies are born.

You can win the lottery! (Yes, please.)

I’ve had a lot of moments in my life. The one where I met my late husband and magic happened. He was everything to me, the ultimate hero, the man who enriched my life. And I knew in that one moment this was it for me.

The moments when each of my children were born. They have grown up to be such amazing human beings. I love them more each day.

The moment I stepped into my new house for the first time. My breath caught to see the home we’d planned for two years come to life with a magic that was beyond anything we hoped.

The moment we decided to take home three kittens from the shelter instead of one.

The moment I realized I could write erotic romance and someone would actually publish it. And better yet, that readers would actually buy it!

The moment in my latest release, Ride the Mustang, when Fletcher "Mustang" Call meets April and their destiny is sealed.

Fletcher "Mustang" Call is a dedicated SEAL and a committed Dom. The one thing he isn't is relationship material. A tragedy in his past killed his desire for more than a good time on leave and a little D/s play. Until April Coe walked into his life, a woman unlike any he’s known. Problem is, she’s as vanilla as they come.

April was warned about Mustang, a man as wild and free as his call sign, so she doesn’t expect him to stick around for long. That’s okay, she'll enjoy the great sex while she can. At least, she thought it was great. When she senses her sexy bronco is holding back, she has to decide whether to ride the mustang a little harder or set him free.

I could go on and on but I think the words to the Whitney Houston song, One Moment in time, say it the best.

Each day I live, I want to be
A day to give the best of me
I'm only one, but not alone
My finest day is yet unknown

I broke my heart for every gain
To taste the sweet, I faced the pain
I rise and fall, yet through it all
This much remains

I want one moment in time
When I'm more than I thought I could be
When all of my dreams are a heartbeat away
And the answers are all up to me

Give me one moment in time
When I'm racing with destiny
Then in that one moment of time
I will feel, I will feel eternity

I've lived to be the very best
I want it all, no time for less
I've laid the plans, now lay the chance
Here in my hands

Give me one moment in time
When I'm more than I thought I could be
When all of my dreams are a heartbeat away
And the answers are all up to me

Give me one moment in time
When I'm racing with destiny
Then in that one moment of time
I will feel, I will feel eternity

You're a winner for a lifetime
If you seize that one moment in time, make it shine

Give me one moment in time
When I'm more than I thought I could be
When all of my dreams are a heartbeat away
And the answers are all up to me

Give me one moment in time
When I'm racing with destiny
Then in that one moment of time

I will be, I will be, I will be free, I will be, I will be free

So take a deep breath, look around and enjoy your moment in time. 

Just a Moment

Sacchi Green

Just one moment? Out of all the uncountable moments that have piled up through my life? I can’t choose, even among the ones I remember, and most of those have not been happy ones. It’s not that my life hasn’t had, and still has, at least my fair share of happiness, but somehow the startling ones that stick in my mind are the ones connected with grief, or sorrow, or, at the least, intimations of mortality.

Some of them were really quite foolish. I remember, when I was about twenty-five, hearing or reading in the news that the population of the USA had just crossed the line where half of the people were under twenty-five. That meant that I had been dragged kicking and screaming “over the hill.” There must have been other factors involved in the depression I felt, such as being a relatively new mother far from most of my family and in unfamiliar territory both geographically and emotionally, but I’d begun to adjust to all that until the “under twenty-five” news came along. Now, of course, we’re well on the way to half the population being over fifty or maybe sixty—I ‘m just punting here instead of researching the numbers, but that’s the general trend. And now I have real rather than imaginary cause to feel over the hill, and I look back on who and where I was at twenty-five with nostalgia, but not very often, because I’m too busy keeping on with the things I still hope to get done.

So that particular moment turns out to be largely irrelevant. Let’s switch to moments in my writing life, since writing is what binds our group here together. My moment, or maybe it was more a flurry of moments, came when I first noticed that somehow the age of fifty-two had crept up on me while I wasn’t looking, and the “someday” when I intended to write had better get started pronto. Oh, there’d been one story in a romance magazine years before, and a poetry prize in college, and a bit of fanfiction before there was anything actually called fanfiction, but nothing like what I’d once thought I’d be doing by then. So I wrote a science fictionish story for a competition connected with an sf/f convention, won second prize (just an award document in fancy script,) sent out the story to a major magazine, got a nice rejection, sold it to a new and very minor magazine, and went on from there. Just that little bit of success made me think that I could actually do more science fiction and fantasy, so I did. Not ever on the scale I’d once hoped for, but with enough positive reinforcement to keep me at it and give me comfort during some rather hard times in “real life.”

But what about writing erotica? There must have been an “aha!” moment there, but I don’t remember it. Or maybe I do! I only just remembered that my best friend in college and I decided we’d try writing for the “men’s” magazines of the times. We figured we needed to check out the mags first, so we took the bus to the nearby small city and braved the gauntlet of old guys (old to us, at least) in a hole-in-the-wall tobacco and news store, and picked out a few of the tackiest-looking publications. Yes, we got odd looks, and my friend couldn’t keep from blurting out that we were just doing research for writing, and somebody, maybe the store’s clerk, started in about often wondering just what went on at that all-girls college, anyway. We fled, but not without our “research” material. (She never got up the nerve to send off a story. I did, and it was, of course, rejected, with the comment that the male protagonist seemed like too much of an insensitive brute, which I’d thought was just what they’d want, but apparently not. Who knew.)

Actually, even when I was writing my G-rated sf/f stories, in my mind there were undercurrents of erotica in them. And some fantasy markets would take more overt sexuality. But the real moment of discovery came after I saw guidelines for, I think, the fourth issue of the Best Lesbian Erotica series from Cleis Press. I say “after” because it wasn’t until I had an idea, a setting, a pair of characters, and got well into the swing of things that I had The Moment, the one that says yes, you CAN do this, the words will come, the images will work, the sex can be explicit and intense and fit seamlessly into a real story. (Okay, there may have been a few special moments of another kind, too. It seemed to me to be a very sexy story indeed.) And it was accepted! The editor asked for a lot changes, but she also commented on how refreshingly different it was from what she usually saw. Wow! I got that same reaction from other editors a time or two, as well, which convinced me that starting out writing in a tradition with structure like science fiction/fantasy was good training. Things are different these days, with more good venues for erotica and many writers far better than I could ever be bringing creativity and literary excellence to the genre, but experience in other kinds of writing is still valuable.

I don’t know whether I ever had a Moment that led to getting into the editing side of erotica (or, as I occasionally say when I’m being especially obnoxious, wielding the editorial whip.) At a certain point it seemed like the natural thing to try. When I was a kid I hated the way other kids would assume that I’d be a teacher when I grew up, just because I got good grades and wore glasses and was far from being the cheerleader type. I was determined never to be a teacher. Maybe editing satisfies a repressed need to correct term papers after all, as long as they’re sexy term papers.

When I started on this post, I was afraid I had nothing to share but moment after moment of gloom, which of course made me feel all the gloomier. Saved again by writing! I didn’t even have to resort to describing my first orgasm, which took place on top of a dam holding back the waters of a substantial reservoir, way back before fear of terrorism made the barriers to getting out onto dams much more efficient than those we climbed over that night.

So right now, I’m having a moment of intense relief.

Momentous Moments

Post by Lily Harlem

There are many moments in my life that I consider to be momentous, some are good and some are not so good, but they are all important and all shape the person that I am today. From first memories, to childhood achievements and disappointments to meeting the man who I'm happily spending my life with I cherish them all.

But there are a few 'moments' that are perhaps not so conventional, and by that I mean I really do believe I've seen into my future on a few occasions. I don't think I'm psychic and I'm not a believer in supernatural, but on occasion I've been struck with something that I'm absolutely convinced is going to happen even though I couldn't possibly know for sure.

The majority of these things are very personal and I wouldn't share them online, but what I will say is that the feeling of knowledge, a flash of insight, has given me comfort, almost like having a caring arm wrapped around my shoulder. It's taken away a worry or an uncertainty and helped me carry on when the going was tough. Perhaps it's a form of self-belief, or determination, I'm not sure, but it felt like an external force at play in my mind.

I guess what I'd like to do now is be convinced that I'm going to win the lottery, or jet off to a luxury hotel in the sun for a few months, or perhaps just have all the things that pull me out of the 'moment' when I'm writing - the telephone, the doorbell, real life duties - be suspended for a little while. 

Lily x

The Moment I Quit Writing Forever

by Giselle Renarde

I started writing erotica on a dare. That was in 2006.  I'd been downsized from my job in the business world, so I told myself this: I would send out three submissions. If one of them was accepted for publication, I'd go at writing full-tilt. If none were accepted for publication, I'd pack it in.

(I'd just watched a documentary about Mavis Gallant, and apparently that's what she'd told herself when she moved to Paris to be a writer.)

So I sent out my three submissions. I'm trying to remember where... hmmm... One was an audiobook company in Australia. I don't think they exist anymore. The other two... might have been Ruthie's Club, might have been a Cleis anthology, might have been For the Girls or Three Pillows.  I'm trying to remember who was on the scene back then.

I don't remember who the rejections were from, but my one acceptance letter came courtesy of the Australian audiobook people. I found the piece recently. It's terrible. But that's beside the point.

I kept writing. I kept submitting my work. I wrote a novella called Ondine, which was passed over by... gosh, I don't even know. A lot of publishers. Who the hell wants a book about a bisexual ballerina?  I wrote short stories that were bought by Ruthie's Clue and Cleis anthologies and For the Girls and Hustler Fantasies and Oysters and Chocolate.

I'm queer.  I wrote about queer chicks. I figured readers would like what I liked.

Nope.

I started hearing that readers wanted MMF menage.  Okay, well... didn't appeal much to me, but whatevs.  I came close and wrote an MMFF menage story called The Birthday Gift.  It was snapped up by a new ebook publisher called Dark Eden Press.

Yaaay!

And then my edits came in.

When I read the editor's first comment, I could hear her sighing with exasperation all the way up in Alaska. "This manuscript requires a complete overhaul."  A million things were wrong with it. At the time, it seemed like EVERYTHING was wrong with it. The voice was too passive. That was the biggie.

In that moment, I vowed never to write anything ever again. I felt like my brain was being devoured by fire ants. My ego was damaged. I was so hurt. I was TOO hurt.  I would go through with the edits because I had a contract to fulfill, but after that? Never again.

It was hard work.  I learned a lot.  My editor sent me resources.  At the time, I didn't I didn't really know what POV was, let alone deep third and all that. I rewrote The Birthday Gift, and when my editor sent back the next draft it was every bit as marked up as the first.  At least I didn't have to re-write the whole thing again.

The Birthday Gift went through three solid rounds of edits before it went to the proofreader. By the time it got to market, I think I'd forgotten about quitting the profession. People actually bought it... and LIKED it. Wow.

So I didn't quit after all. That wasn't exactly a decision.  It just sort of happened. I kept writing. I didn't stop. Some days I think perhaps I should have, but other days I consider how fortunate I am to work from home doing something I enjoy.

By the way, I wrote another MMFF erotic romance much more recently. This one's a novel called Bali Nights, published by Xcite Books.  It's available for a really great price, so you should probably grab it. Click here for Bali Nights!