The Elephant in the Room Doesn't Move

Rest, peace, tranquillity – all appealing concepts. Inertia sounds less inviting, but what else is rest?

Then there is the elephant in the room: death.

Sooner or later, all of us will be unable to move. We will be inert. If the soul, spirit or life-essence can survive on its own (as I suspect it can), it will leave the limp flesh behind. The greatest athletes, those who have physical abilities I could probably never attain, even with training, will eventually find that nothing works. The body will have run its course and be ready for retirement.

We don’t like to believe this. We also don’t like to admit that death has ever tempted us. In Western culture, there is a widespread belief that suicide is always a symptom of mental illness, and that a truly sane person would want to live forever, even in a deteriorating body. In Christian terms (specifically according to Catholic rules), suicide is a great sin, parallel to murder. It is a violation of God’s will.

Then there is the difficulty of reaching a state of eternal rest. As Dorothy Parker put it:
"Razors pain you,/Rivers are damp,/Acids stain you,/And drugs cause cramp./Guns aren’t lawful,*/Nooses give./Gas smells awful./You might as well live.”

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*apparently less legal in Canada than in the U.S.
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There you have it: a neat explanation for why I am still here – and why many other people are still alive, even though they have been told in various ways that they are using up too much air to which they are not entitled.

When I reached puberty, and my body developed into the shape, more-or-less, that it still has, I was told by everyone around me that women’s bodies (va-va-voom!) are beautiful, fascinating, an endless inspiration to artists, rapists, and serial killers. I was supposed to feel blessed. I was also supposed to be filled with shame, according to all the followers of Saint Paul.

For the rest of my life, as far as I could see, everyone around me would be so distracted by the appearance of my body (which would always be breathtakingly glamorous or breathtakingly hideous – there was no middle ground) that I could hardly expect them to notice any part of me that wasn’t physical.

There were “women’s magazines” to help me define my “figure problems” and try to fix them. There were numerous products to help me look my best. I was supposed to feel grateful for all the help.

When guys noticed me in public places, and yelled out comments about my body and what they wanted to do to it, I was supposed to figure out what I had done to attract the wrong kind of attention, and resolve to stop doing that to myself.

There seemed to be only one way out of the giant fishnet of double-binds. If I were not living in my body, no one could mistake it for me. Anyone could do whatever they wanted to the empty shell, and I wouldn’t care. I would not be living there.

There are various ways to go partway there. One can “disassociate,” as psychologists put it, by choosing not to be fully present in one’s body in the moment. One can try hard to live somewhere else. One can develop an “eating disorder,” which tends to shrink the body, possibly to the point at which it can no longer survive.

One can boldly go where many have gone before: swallow something that seems likely to cause death. In my case, they were sleeping pills, available without a prescription, because I wanted to avoid excruciating pain, if possible (I had read about the results of swallowing caustic household products) and I didn’t know where to get something powerful and illegal, such as heroin. I’ve always wondered if the pills would have worked, if I hadn’t been found in time.

I only tried it once. Failing at suicide seemed even more pitiful than continuing to live in a body that would always be vulnerable to attack.

So I am still “ert,” if that is the alternative to being inert. I wake up every morning, wash, dress, make myself as presentable as possible, go here and go there.

I assume I am much closer to eternal rest from “natural causes,” however those are defined, than I was at age nineteen. Maybe that’s why suicide no longer feels tempting.

I’m willing to ease into long-term inertia little by little. I’m sure I’ll get there soon enough.

The Illusion of the Never-Changing

by Annabeth Leong

In times of deep grief, I fear that if I begin crying I will drown in an ocean of tears. I will lie on my couch forever and never get up again to go out to the park or to the mall or to wash my dishes. If I so much as whisper the names of those I have lost, the howling will tear me apart on its way out. I must fight the wall of sorrow that threatens to close me off from the rest of the world forever.

In times of deep joy, I fear that the slightest motion of my pinky finger might destroy the thing that is growing between us. With my head on your shoulder, I want to stop walking or even breathing. In this moment, I have all I want—I'm not even worried about the sweaty acrobatics we could get up to naked. I want to rest here forever.

A person is not an object at rest.

And so a moment comes when I can no longer hold back my grief and the tears begin, rolling in and out of me like a tide. I find I am not in the middle of the ocean. I am on the shore, buffeted but still standing with toes sunk into the sand. I get up and go to the park, sit on a sticky, rickety set of bleachers, and cry while the sun strokes my face dry.

And so I get a crick in my neck and have to lift my head to check the expression on your face. I learn all your names and meet your parents and engage in tortured descriptions of what I actually want from you, only to change my mind six months later and try again. We fuck, sometimes giggling, sometimes sobbing. Sometimes I can't come and other times I can't stop coming. Each time I return to you, I find somewhere to rest my head. Tonight, I turn my cheek to fit it on your thigh. It feels different every time. In the back of my mouth, I taste the way it used to feel.

I don't think a person can stay at rest.

Sometimes, I think I have the answer. I've got my work flow figured out. The words will run out of me like water from a carefully calibrated faucet. They aren't flooding me, and they aren't trickling. Now that I know how to do this, I will never have to struggle again. If I stay in motion just like this, I can write perfectly forever.

Sometimes, I think I'm going to get trapped. When you get on the marriage train, it's an express, not a local. A ring is on my finger and people have been invited. I look back toward the depot where I began the journey—in a state of love and naivete, I believed I wanted to take this ride all the way to its conventional end. But now here I am, and I am going to wear white and my stomach will swell and I will have babies and I will be safe and secure except for all the silent hate that people seem to grow. If I stay in motion just like this, I'm going to wind up thwarted and bitter forever.

A person is not an object in motion.

And so I discover that sometimes the words do flood. Sometimes, they come so fast I choke on them. They tell me things I'm not ready to hear and they keep me up all night, drugged and confused by unrelenting revelation. And sometimes, my heart is empty and barren, and I sit and very carefully type the word "the" and then very carefully erase it. Every law I thought I'd learned has been repealed. In both cases, I am eventually reduced to starting over, reinventing who I am and coming up with something new to say.

And so I discover that as relentless as the marriage train seems to be, there are a thousand decisions along the way. I can go to the doctor and have my IUD taken out, and then panic and start researching sterilization. I can discover that I don't want to be hit anymore, not even if it makes me come. I can discover that I want to be touched, even if it makes me cry. I can care for another person in intimate ways that I never thought I would be willing to care for someone. I can be cared for, so much that it becomes okay for me to walk down the street holding another person's hand. Every word is reinvented.

I don't think a person can stay in motion.

The concept of inertia as applied to people contains so much implied helplessness. The reason an object at rest will stay at rest, or that an object in motion will stay in motion, is that the objects in question don't have internal motivation. Inertia is a natural law of resistance to change, a requirement that force must be applied from the outside. But my self is full of struggle. My limbs will not be still. And when the journey becomes long and hard, I must rest my head.

Inertia

Spencer Dryden

I never was very good at Physics. My undergrad advisor told me 'physics is something you should have had to have known.'  Newton told us that a body at rest tends to remain at rest. Newton didn't have to observe the motion of the planets to discover the principal. All he had to do was become an author. Wait, he was, and in fact he sold pretty well. Okay, a fiction author in the 21st century.

Is there anything out there with  that requires overcoming more inertia than trying to move a book? Newton provides us with an answer.  Newton's formula reduced to algebra is P= M x V, where P is momentum, M is mass of the object and V, its velocity. Once again, employing Spencer's wacky science if we solve for M where V (rate of sales) is nearly zero the equation is M=P/V. Mass approaches infinity when there are no sales (V). The book therefore is too heavy to move. The key is raising sales velocity (V) but we all know that. (And you're wondering why I didn't do to well in Physics?)

I have been in several careers where overcoming inertia is a big struggle. I was miscast as a salesman for many years. In my last sales job I went from zero to over $100,000 in annualized commissions in slightly more than a year's time-during a time when commercial insurance rates were falling and commissions were being cut. (Sound familiar?)

Then there was my foray personal services.  I became a handyman for hire. I started with widowed friends of my mother-in-law. I never advertised. All my business came by referral. I have more work now than I want. I am trying to ease my way down to a few hours per week so I'll have more time for writing. It's been a great gig. People don't know how to fix things anymore. As long as I can fix toilets I'll never starve.

Then there was my long time interest in TV/video. I started making little  'how to' videos of fixes I encountered on the job. I used  a little video camera and a PC compatible consumer version of a commercial editing  suite. Frankly my videos were terrible next to the slick productions done by manufacturers and other HGTV wannabees. The difference was that I showed things as they actually looked in real life because it was real life repairs. With only few tags I put my videos out in the ocean of alternatives. Not much happened at first but several of my videos have crossed the magic 100,000 view threshold. People had to be looking hard to find my stuff. Many have raved in the comments about how helpful my video was to their quest.  I even have a motto for DIYers, "If you do it yourself, the tools are free." There was no way to 'monetize' my efforts so I quit producing videos a few years ago.

Thankfully I don't need the revenue from writing. It's an inexpensive, entertaining and engaging past time to take into retirement. I never imagined it would be as difficult to get  traction as it has proved to be. I have spent the last year flapping my arms as hard as I can trying to get this thing to lift off. My fifth book will be released later year. Aside from purchases by few friends I have barely registered any sales. Yet I have put far more marketing effort into the venture than anything I have done in my life. There's always another angle that someone is pitching—mostly things that worked ten years ago— but frankly most of our efforts only fall into the field of vision of other writers. And for me, it reduces the creative energy I need to write.

I realize time was a factor in my other 'successes' and in time my efforts may prove successful. On the other hand, guys my age have this nasty habit of waking up in the morning feeling fine and by five o'clock they're on a slab at the funeral home or in a wheel chair with a drool cup at the nursing home. I only have today and I cherish it.

I like the flip side of Newton's observation much better, that bodies in motion tend to stay in motion. Sir Isaac, can you give a bro a little push here?

Set in Stone

By Lisabet Sarai

Treatises for authors often recommend against editing as you write. Get the story down first, they advise, no matter how rough it might be. You can go back and refine it later. Write quickly, from instinct, without introspection. Analyze and revise after you’ve captured the flush of inspiration.

I recognize the wisdom of this proposal for some authors, but usually it doesn’t work for me. I have to make plot decisions, finalize my characterization and massage my prose while I’m creating my first draft. Over the years I’ve discovered that my writing has incredible inertia. Once I’ve finished a story, it’s set in stone, or something close.

Over the years, I’ve had many editors comment on how few modifications they needed to make to my manuscripts. That’s one external consequence of my writing method. I’m very grateful that most of my submissions have sailed through the editing process with only minor revisions. Because making larger changes turns out to be ridiculously difficult for me.

This fact became painfully clear last year, after I submitted my erotic romance novel The Ingredients of Bliss to Totally Bound. The book was part of a multi-author series that had some specific requirements. The first manuscript I turned in apparently did not meet those requirements. I realize now that, influenced by my erotica roots, the book veered too far from the canons of romance. Not only did my heroine Emily have two lovers (Harry and Etienne), but she was sexually attracted to the villain Jean as well. There were good reasons – Jean was almost the perfect double of Etienne, right down to the way he smelled, and she was trying to seduce him in order to rescue Harry and Etienne after they’d been kidnapped. Nevertheless, this sort of dalliance is verboten in romance, as it smacks of infidelity. Then there were strong hints of Emily’s attraction to the kick-ass lady cop who joins her in the quest to free Harry and Etienne. F/F eroticism in a straight erotic romance is the kiss of death from a marketing perspective. Finally, the tone of the book was far darker than the publisher really wanted.

I’d already committed to provide this book to the publisher. Indeed, it was a sequel to a short piece (Her Secret Ingredient) that I’d written for the same series. Hence, I was strongly motivated to address the editor’s concerns. I didn’t fully understand the discomfort I was about to endure.

Over the course of the next three months, I revised the entire book four times. I rewrote the scene in which Jean is coming on to Emily to make her disgusted and frightened rather than aroused. I cut all references to F/F attraction. I softened the language in the attempted rape scene. I completely excised Emily’s dramatic, bloody nightmare, in an effort to lighten things up.

At one point, deeply frustrated, I considered pulling the book and publishing it elsewhere. Unfortunately, for that to make sense, I’d have to reclaim the rights for the short piece as well. That would have been awkward and expensive. So I tried to twist the story into the form the publisher wanted.

The book resisted me, every step of the way.

The final result satisfied the publisher. However, after all that effort, sales have been miserable. Is this because The Ingredients of Bliss still doesn’t match the expectations of erotic romance readers? Or is it because readers can sense that the story isn’t wholly mine, that I compromised my vision to bring it into print? Or perhaps the edits did violence to the narrative integrity of the story. Maybe there’s a problem with continuity, or with consistency of my characters.

I’ll never know. All I know is that I don’t want to go through that again.

Although this is the most egregious example of inertia in my writing, it’s by no means the only one. A number of years ago I decided to rework a 5K short story, “Detente”, into a 15K erotic romance novella (Truce of Trust). The publisher wanted third rather than first person narrative. In addition, they suggested I remove the M/m interaction at the conclusion of the short story, making the book a straight M/F/M ménage.

I had a lot of trouble at first. I kept slipping back into first person, because that was the way I’d heard the original story in my head. Gradually I realized that I had to think of Truce of Trust as a different story entirely. Once I’d made that decision, the process became easier. I changed the names of the characters and moved the action from the west to the east coast. I added new scenes and modified some of the ones from “Detente” to fit my new vision. The final result shares some text with the source, but not much.

One sort of change that doesn’t give me too much trouble is simple expansion. I have several books that began as short stories and then grew. My erotic thriller Exposure began as a theme story (erotic noir) written for the Erotica Readers & Writers Association Storytime list. That story, “Private Dance”, became the first chapter of the novel. I hardly changed it at all. In fact, I had to work out the plot so that the later chapters fit with the first chapter, because when I wrote the story, I had no idea about the cause or motivation for the events that occur. I never really considered revising that first chapter, though.

In response to a request from a special reader, I also expanded Bangkok Noir, turning it from an 8K short to a 30K novella. Once again, I didn’t alter the original, aside from a word here and there. Instead, I shaped the latter events to fit the former.

I view the inertia of my writing as a weakness. A real professional should be more flexible. After all, words are infinitely malleable. Aside from being willing to try revising, though, I’m not sure what I can do.

In any case, it’s often hard to summon that fundamental willingness. By this time, I know better than to try to radically work something I view as finished. It’s rarely worth the pain.

Narrative Inertia

By Lisabet Sarai

I love tackling Chris Garcia-Sanchez' topics. They invite multiple interpretations. The subject he proposed for this week is “Killing Your Darlings”. I wondered for a while whether he was talking about doing in one's characters, and I was going to write about Exposure, in which the hunkiest guy in the book gets murdered in the first chapter. Then I realized that he probably meant something quite different, the anguish involved in taking the editorial knife to one's own writing, cutting out the passages, the ideas, even the characters that you feel are not working.

I suspect that this is what he intends because we're crit partners and I know something about his writing process. It involves multiple revisions, each one often a radical change from the last. I've also counseled him fairly frequently that his early drafts are too long. But it's often tough for me to suggest what he should excise, because it's all so good.

Anyway, this is my post and so I should be talking about my own editorial anguish. I'll be honest, though. Rarely do I even attempt the type of wholesale revisions that other authors describe. I find that my work has enormous narrative inertia. Once I have a first draft, it's rare and exceptionally difficult for me to make significant structural or thematic changes. I'll tweak, I'll polish—I may eliminate paragraphs or even a scene—I may add sentences or paragraphs to heighten an effect or clarify an ambiguity. But there's no murder in my editing, no more than minor plastic surgery.

Sometimes I worry about this. Do I really believe that my first draft is so close to being “right” that I don't need to slash it apart to make it better? No, not really. If I wanted to work harder, spend more time, submit my stories for multiple crits, I'm sure that they could be significantly improved. But it would be really hard. Once I have a story out on the electronic page, it seems to acquire a concreteness that makes it highly resistant to change. It's not because the story is “my darling”, my words so precious that I can't bear to alter or eliminate them. Rather, it's the fact that, once a story's born, I can't imagine how it could be different. It takes on a life of it's own.

I work as a software engineer. I love writing programs. I always marvel that something that begins as a disembodied idea ultimately becomes an artifact capable of influencing real world phenomena. The air traffic control system, your local ATM, the business behemoth that is Amazon.com—all these things are mostly software, abstract concepts made manifest in the physical realm.

Writing stories, for me, is somewhat similar. First there are the ideas. Then by some miraculous process, the notions kicking around in my mind are transformed into a book that someone can read in bed, a book that may entertain or arouse dozens (or in my dreams, thousands!) of other people. Once the book is written, it is no longer as malleable as the ideas that inspired it

It helps that my second, lightly edited draft, even if far from absolute perfection, is likely to be good enough to get published. I'm not being conceited here. I don't think I'm a wonderful writer, but I'm a fairly competent hack. My ratio of acceptances to rejections is pretty high. (I only wish my royalty statistics were comparable!) I'd rather spend my time working on a new story than polish my current one into a glittering diamond of a tale that will astonish everyone with its brilliance. Especially in the fast-paced world of e-publishing, I feel that I can't afford to spend months editing and revising a single title.

I am learning, though—partly through working with Chris, in fact. I'm trying to force my way through the brittle shell that seems to surround my stories and rework them in fundamental ways, if that seems necessary.

I had an interesting and revealing experience a few months ago, when I was working on Truce of Trust. This 16K story grew out of a shorter tale called “Detente”, which was included in my Fire anthology. “Detente” is told in the first person present, and it ends with a M/M/F ménage. Claire, my editor at Total-E-Bound, liked the overall concept but asked me to change the POV, the tense and the sexual orientation (she was looking for M/F/M submissions), as well as to make the story substantially longer.

I knew that this would be rough, but agreed to give it a try. When I began, I found the process extremely difficult. Gradually, however, I gained confidence. The characters changed. The story changed. The initial premise was the same, but the final result was quite different. I hadn't revised an old story, I realized. I had written a new one.

Like all authors, I have discarded fragments on my hard drive. These chapters and scenes are more orphans than darlings, though. I'll work on something for a while and then lose the spark. If I'm bored, I reason, my readers will be, too. Or else I'll start something and then not have a clue as to how to develop it. Without the ideas to feed them, my stories wither and die. But I don't deliberately kill them.

I'll tell you a secret. Authors like Chris, who agonize over their work, cutting and rearranging, feeling the pain of wielding the editing scalpel, make me feel embarrassed and guilty. Embarrassed because I feel that I somehow should be doing the same, that I'm lazy and insincere and complacent. Guilty because I do manage to get published, even if my sales aren't what I'd like, while many true artists have a far more difficult time.

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This week at the Grip, we welcome our new member Ashley Lister. Ashley will be posting on Thursdays, in the slot previously handled by Kim Dare. I'll let Ashley introduce himself. I'm sure that you'll enjoy him.