Shhhhh! It's a secret!

This topic was really hard for me - not because I didn't have forbidden knowledge at a young age, but because I can't remember a time when I didn't.

It really sucked having to do the whole "Great, Santa is coming" line of crap on Christmas morning at 7, 8, 9, 10, and a few years thereafter, when I knew my folks were lying to me. How? Um, because I was a KID. I had to get something out of my parents bedroom, even though I knew I wasn't supposed to go in there, and I should wait until they got home to get it for me, a few daysbefore Christmas and stumbled upon the stash of Christmas presents sitting under blankets, etc in their bedroom.

Fast forward a few years, and we see me at 11, knowing my parents are freaks! Why? Because they - gasp - have sex! How did I know this? Did I walk in on them? Um, sad to say that wasn't what damaged my fragile psyche. Nope, it was worse, I was in my parents room getting something (again - I was a KID!) and it couldn't wait until they got home to get it for me. I found a dog-eared (the horror of that alone - WTF dog-ears a book?) copy of the Kama Sutra, and some really interesting novelty rings with couples having weird sex on them. Yea know what I am talking about - 69 and woman on top stuff. LOL

The best memory for me though, is at 13 we were visiting my grandparents. And I had started reading romances. And my grandmother would go to the used bookstore and load up on them - the old Harlequin Presents ones and some Silhouette ones as well. She'd get the value boxes, where the store owner just tossed in 10-12 dozens of books and sold them for $2-5.00 or so. And often times, she wouldn't even check them out, just bring the box home and sort through them later.

So we went visiting, and I got to go through her newest 2 boxes. And I read those things like they were candy. The best one though was a secret - no one could know about it. Because somewhere, a goof had been made, and poor grandma wound up with a lesbian romance in her box. And oh what a romance it was. The characters got sexy-nasty with each other. The best scene involved a candle being used in place of a dildo - a term I didn't know at the time.

Keep in mind - at 13, I was naive. I had only kissed one person - a girl (because we were both curious). I only knew about sex from romance novels, and not always was it nice sex. So that book was an eye-opening experience. It also started the faint knowledge that something about the book was captivating to me. Something about two girls caused a curious melting inside of me. The same kind of curious sensation I got when I read about a man and a woman.

While reading this forbidden book of two girls, I had my eyes opened to a new world of possibilities. And got my ass grounded when my mom found the book days later when she was packing my suitcase to head home. Oh the shitstorm that created.

To this day, I have tried to find that book again. But without knowing the author or title, it is hard as hell. So if anyone reading this knows of an old lesbian romance which involves the characters using a candle to have sex, let me know.

Falls The Shadow

For this weeks "Forbidden Knowledge" theme, Garce invited us to "Write about a time you discovered something you weren't supposed to know."

I decided to take myself out of the equation and retreated into fiction.

I hope what follows is neither too dark nor too obscure for this blog.

If it needs to be explained then I didn't do it right.

Normal service will be resumed next week



"Falls The Shadow"
(c) Mike Kimera 2011


Knowledge has a name.

Speaking the name makes the knowledge real and grants it power over your life.

The name cannot be unsaid. The knowledge cannot be un-known.

Knowledge is irrevocable.

Knowledge is dangerous.

My family understood that.

Knowledge makes you culpable.

Knowledge makes you choose.

Knowledge is the source of all guilt.

In my family, we chose not to know; we refused to name the things that were most important to us.

We were masters of inference, innuendo and unnoticed silences. If those failed us we fell back upon evasion, deflection and denial.

By this means we remained a happy family.

We did not know that my father's fits of impotent anger would be followed by long silent drinking sessions that must never be interuppted.

We did not know that the bruises on my mother's thighs were made by my father's belt.

We did not know that my older sister was afraid not of the dark but of the deeds that darkness cloaked and which could not be named in the daylight.

We were a happy family. Happy families are all the same. Aren't they?

I knew my father taught English at the Grammar School.

I knew he was a kind and gentle man, much loved by his students. You could ask anybody. They would all tell you that.

I knew that his favorite poet was Eliot. I even knew his favorite verses from "The Hollow Men".

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow

And.

This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

I knew that my mother was beautiful and that my sister was brave.

I knew that one day soon I would be as tall as my father

I knew where my father kept his gun.

My father's suicide opened a sluice-gate that brought knowledge flooding into our family with such force that it was all we could do to avoid drowning in it

The police knew that my father and I were alone in the house because my sister had broken her arm in a clumsy fall and my mother had taken her to the hospital.

Our family Doctor knew that I had been so distraught at finding my father dead in his study, his gun still in his hand, a half-empty bottle of whiskey on his desk and a blood-spattered copy of "The Hollow Men" open in front of him, that I had had to be sedated.

The Coroner knew that my father was being treated for depression and should not have mixed whisky, Temazepam and a loaded gun.

My mother, my sister and I knew that things would never be the same.

I knew that sometimes knowledge falls like a shadow and fills the world with darkness.

I knew that a world can end with a bang that starts with a young girl's whimper.

Shadow and Rose

The outboard engine of the old pontoon boat catches and rumbles, a couple of chuffs of black smoke, and then it settles down. My Dad, the old fisherman and master of boat craft throws off the ropes that hold us to the dock and gives it a minute to smooth out. He puts it in reverse and we drift slowly out onto Eagle Lake #3. I sit morosely looking down at the deck and off at the trees moving away from us. Up in the lake cabin my step mother is getting lunch ready for when we get back. We don’t expect this to take long.

Dad is sitting in the little captain’s chair in front of the wheel and changes gears and gives the wheel a spin. We begin moving stately and slowly away into the deeper water, and no one is speaking. On a little rock island further out, a bald eagle the size of a small dog, is sitting in the top of a dead tree, watching us with that permanent scowl.

Next to Dad’s rudder wheel is a red and yellow Big Gulp paper cup with a single red rose we bought in Bemidji on the way up.

I look down at the old deck carpet and see deer moss taking over the edges of it. Dried brown pine needles. I notice these blemishes more today, because I’m moody, feeling the whispers of old ghosts inside my head. I think about her and the old fear stirs in me. Will I go mad someday too?

My kid is fiddling with the video camera, testing it and making adjustments. He wants to capture the ceremony exactly right. He’s young but already he has a sense of mortality and time passing and knows that soon all of us will be slipping off into his wooly past when he out grows us someday, which he will.

Dad says he knows a little spot under some trees past the Anderson’s place. It would be peaceful and private. We’ll go there, alright? Alright.

He glances down at the little silver digital camera lolling in my fingers. We’re both thinking of her.

When I was a boy in Gilbert, and dad was probably the only Hispanic man in Story County Iowa, he fed his family with the boxy black camera that now sits in state on my bookshelf. It was his pride and joy, the only possession of his that I truly coveted after he passed away later, because it was a symbol of that hungry time, my time, back when we were the only family he knew. It’s a Zeiss-Ikon twin lens reflex, made in Germany with owlish, deep Carl Zeiss lenses. In photographer’s parlance it is a medium format, “shooting two and a quarter” film. He put food on our table with the basketball games, gruesome car pile ups and weddings that passed through its glass, freezing time.

Whenever Dad was off somewhere doing something I crept into the bedroom he shared with mom, sniffing for secrets like a furtive rodent, my nose twitching. Looking under the bed. Looking in his drawers. The junk drawers were most interesting, but one time in his underwear drawer I found a little silver box with a Roman soldier on the cover filled with strange smelling balloons. I unwrapped one of the tough little balloons and tried to blow it up and it tasted bitter against my lips. They looked a little like the ones carnival clowns used to twist into animal shapes for a dime.

On a warm summer afternoon, when Dad was out doing the lawn, I took a chair and put it up against the closet, standing inside the rack of clothes that smelled warmly of my mother and him, because there was a crowded shelf high up above I wanted to get to. Standing on toes, reaching up, I felt around with my little hands, guessing at objects by feeling their shapes until, there, pushed back in the shelf I lit on what felt like a box. I took it down, thinking it might have more balloons, but it was different. A little red and orange Kodak box with a flip top lid. Inside were a pair of colored lens filters in flat velvet padded boxes and neat rows of gray, translucent glassine envelopes. I got down off my chair and sat on the floor with the little box, pausing to listen if Dad had come in yet from mowing the lawn.

When I was a little kid, I was plagued with nightmares as most little kids are. I had this one recurring nightmare, always exactly the same. In the nightmare I enter a very small room. The room is dark except for a greenish, ghoulish light spotlighting a small table with a chair. On the table is a little cardboard box with a flip top lid. I sit in the chair. I look at the box, trying to decide. When I do decide, and I always decide, I reach to the box, my fingertips touching the lid. But then I’m outside myself looking. The little boy at the table, seeing him sitting there, opening the little box. What the little boy doesn’t see, but I do, is Frankenstein’s monster looming behind him, his huge stitched together hands reaching down to clutch the little boy’s throat.

Sitting on the floor, I flipped open the lid and took out an envelope and saw there long wide strips of black and white film, with images in neat little squares. They were dark and hard to see and I had to hold them up to the window light. In the images I saw the same window in the bedroom, except my mother was sitting in the window, all in shadows and outlines. The clean sharp lines of her bare, thin form contrasted with the bright white light, blotting out any detail. Sweeping feminine lines and curves. I put down the film and took another. This time my mother was standing in dark silhouette against the window, stretching, hands and arms high above her head like a dancer, bending backwards, her sharp breasts pointing. The bright lines of her bare body suggesting but not showing. Only skillfully hinting. Another envelope, another shadow dance. Hips and thighs and stippled bumps. My mother nude, but not revealed. And then another. And another, each a little more daring. A little more light and a little less shadow.

How long had my dad been standing in the doorway?

When we reach the spot he cuts the engine and lets the boat drift a little. Some willow branches pass low over head. We gather at the stern. My son says a prayer. I say a prayer for my mother. My dad says a prayer. He prays for her soul, asks her ghost why she cut us all off, drove us all away and drifted alone at the end. He prays that she is at peace, and at last tosses the rose into the water. My kid films it as it floats and we stand there looking it.

Okay? Okay.

We put the cameras away and he starts the engine again. He takes us for a little tour of the shore and the bald eagle flies past us at eye level which is a treat. Then we start back to the dock. My stepmother should have the sandwiches and chips ready by now. As we pass the spot I look to see the rose, but it’s gone.

The Parliament of Important Secret Knowledge

Ah, good old forbidden knowledge. It's seen my books through some good times. And it's seen my brain through some good times, too, when my brain says "hey, I'd really like to get down to some dirty fantasising. Vagina called me yesterday, and she says she's just not getting the attention she needs so you know. Let's get on that, ok, Charlotte?"

I honestly have no idea why my brain and my vagina talk. And really, vagina has absolutely no reason to feel neglected because I feed her Alex O'Loughlin all the time and he is HOMG to an insane degree.

But anyway, I digress. About vaginas.

Let's get back to why my vagina likes forbidden knowledge so much, shall we?

I think it likes it due to the book Dreamers In Time, by Sarah Copeland. I've talked about this book before, but I'm going to talk about it again because it's orsum and set in the future where everyone's forgotten about sex, and there's something about that...something about the idea of sexual knowledge being forbidden or forgotten that really gets my vagina by the throat.

I mean, just imagine that. Imagine not knowing about sex. Imagine that there's a big book somewhere and it contains all the knowledge of indecent, lurid, physically impossible sex acts - sex acts that no-one knows about because we just go about our day drinking tea and looking blankly at each other - and then one day you sneak into the Parliament of Important Secret Knowledge and oh God it's getting me hot just thinking about it.

I totally want my characters to sneak into the Parliament of Important Secret Knowledge. I want to write a book in which such a place exists, just so I can have them break all the locks and bust down the doors and run away in the dead of night with this mammoth dirty book under their coats.

Because seriously, there's nothing hotter than breaking down walls and busting taboos and bursting out into sexual freedom. In fact, one of the things I always find difficult about writing contemporaries is that there's so little that is forbidden, now, and I heart the forbidden. I want my characters to explore new territory and be breathless about it, be nervous, be terrified.

And I mean, sometimes you can get away with that with a contemporary female character. But it's tough to do with a contemporary male character and even if you do pull it off (which I hope I did with Gabriel, in Control), there are plenty of people who don't want to read about it. Contemporary men usually have to be tough and gruff and manly to reach a wide audience.

But I'm not sure futuristic or fantasy world men necessarily have to be. I think you can get away with a bit more, when you've set your novel in a world where sex doesn't exist, or where it once existed but has now vanished, or where sex exists but not with women because women are extinct (yep, that's the entire reason I wrote Past Pleasures- because of my love of the forbidden and the forgotten).

And I love all of that. For me, forbidden knowledge is not about closing doors. It's about flinging them wide open.

For Our Own Good

Once upon a time, I read that unmarried women were encouraged to attend the ancient Olympics, which were conducted nude, so that they could get a good gander at what they'd be up against in the marital bed. Married women, though, were forbidden to watch. I guess their husbands didn't like the competition - not the sport, but their wives comparing those buff, rippling muscles and freely swinging cocks to their husband's shortcomings.

Once upon a time, a grade school friend and I followed the alleyways behind houses and apartment buildings as a shortcut to the convenience store. Cunning plan, except that at the end of the alleyway, there was a tall cinderblock wall. It was either double back, or scale the wall. Even though I wasn't much of a climber, I managed to get over it. She was much more fit, so she got over it long before I did. When I finally slid down the other side, the rough blocks pushing my shirt up and scraping my belly as my feet sought terra firma, she stood in the vacant lot on the other side with something in her hands that had her full attention. I scrambled over to see.

As with Garce's blog entry last week, my first sight of a nude, adult woman was courtesy of Playboy Magazine. Emily and I were fascinated by the pictures. Was that what we'd turn into? It seemed impossible. (Given my body, it was, but Emily was graced by far kinder nature.) Then we got to the crotch shot. She said "gross," and flipped the page, but I flipped it back. Guys can see their cocks. They can look down, or into a mirror. They play with them, befriend them, are tormented and pleasured by them. Girls are denied much of that. In that picture, I finally got to see what was down there. Sure, I'd felt it, but that wasn't the same. I wanted to keep that picture and study it, since Emily kept trying to turn the page, but there was no way that I could tear it out and take it with me. She'd think that I was a freak, and my parents would have made my life unbearable if they caught me with it. It was strictly forbidden knowledge.

Once upon a d time, and even now, girls are forbidden to know about their bodies because any picture of a vulva is "filthy porn." Even researching breast cancer on the internet is forbidden because the search term includes the word breast. There's no such thing as a purely educational picture that's okay for a girl to look at. It has to be a drawing. But even then, it's suspect. It's subjecting children to evil influences - because knowledge is the ultimate evil.

The United States is a weird place. A small but influential portion of the population has decided that ignorance is our children's best defense in a war against deadly STDs and teen pregnancy. Why we let them force their religion on us is a mystery, but that's the way things go here. There are other weird anomalies here that make no sense. It's okay to show naked women in R-rated movies, but a penis is an automatic X rating. So it's okay for boys to see girls, but not for girl to see boys. (Shades of the Olympics, except that now we're treated as married women from birth).Girls can't even look at pictures of the most intimate parts of their bodies. 

The forbidden, close enough to touch late at night under our blankets, and yet forever held beyond our sight - for our own good.

Catechism

By Lisabet Sarai



“In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost, amen.”

“That's good, but fold your hands at the end. It's a prayer, after all.”

“Yes, I know...In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, amen.”

“Perfect. Now the Hail Mary...”

“Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with Thee. Blessed art Thou among women and blessed is the fruit of Thy womb Jesus... What does 'fruit of Thy womb' mean?”

“Her child, silly. 'Womb' is a fancy word for stomach.”

“Oh. Thanks.”

“I think you're ready. We'll do it tomorrow. But you can't tell anyone. If you do, you'll go to Hell.”

I was born into a Jewish family, so you might be surprised by how much I know about Roman Catholic ritual. I can recite the Hail Mary and the Lord's Prayer. I know the sacraments and the difference between a mortal and a venal sin. Given a bit of time to search my memory, I can probably tell you the names of many of the more important Catholic saints and explain why they were canonized.

The story behind all this knowledge? I was baptized a Catholic by my best friend when I was eight.

Bridget McNulty (not her real name) lived down the street from us with her parents and a constantly growing assortment of siblings. Her family were not fundamentalists, particularly by today's standards, but Bridget, the first born, was especially devout. She dreamed of becoming a missionary nun. And for some reason she decided that I should be her first convert.

Not that I put up any sort of fight. My religious upbringing was lackadaisical at best. We only went to synagogue (at my grandparents') on Rosh Hashonah and Yom Kippur. Hanukah meant gifts, potato pancakes and gambling with the little tops called dreidels. Passover was a chance to taste the wine and to look for the afikomen, the special piece of matzoh secreted away by the leader of the seder. The child who discovered its hiding place received a shiny quarter. I had little sense of the theological basis of my religion. Yet I think I must have harbored some sort of yearning for spiritual knowledge. When Bridget proposed that she tutor me in the details of her faith, I agreed with enthusiasm. Furthermore, I took my new knowledge seriously – far more seriously than the faith of my fathers.

Every day after school, I'd go over to her house to “play”. We'd crawl into our private place, a hollow inside her hedge, and she'd teach me about original sin and immaculate conception, communion and extreme unction. She set up an altar there, with a crucifix, and taught me to pray. Finally, when she decided that I had assimilated all the requisite information, she blessed some tap water and christened me with a new name.

The funny thing is, I remember much of this quite clearly, but I can't recall what we decided I should be called. Maybe Mary? Or Christine? Of course no one ever called me by that name – not even Bridget. In fact, after my baptism, she seemed to lose interest in our joint rituals to some extent.

A year or so later, Bridget's family moved to another town. My conversion stuck, however. I considered myself Catholic, although I scarcely knew what that meant. I worried about the end of the world. During the New England summer, you sometimes get this atmospheric phenomenon, where thunder clouds will be heaped up on the horizon but a few rays of sun slant through to reach the ground. The sharply defined beams of light look like paths upon which the angels would dance, coming down to announce the Apocalypse. On afternoons like these, I wondered if the prophesies were at last coming true.

(Of course, this was during the Cold War, when we all were sure that the Russians would drop the bomb any day. I figured that was the most likely way that the world would end.)

My secret conversion was responsible for engendering a sense of sexual sin. I didn't exactly know what the mortal sin of “adultery” meant, but I gathered it was something dirty. I started to feel guilty when I stuck my pillow between my legs and rocked back and forth until the good feelings came. I was uncomfortably certain that I was committing adultery, and that I was bound for eternal torment, or at least Purgatory.

It took quite a few years for me to get over the effects of Bridget's catechism. However, becoming a teenager brought so many more immediate problems than whether I'd go to hell that I forgot to worry about it. Still, I think the experience of conversion and the times I accompanied Bridget to Mass (my mother didn't care), listening to the Latin chants, breathing in the incense, inculcated a sense of reverence that I still feel today.

Bridget would probably be shocked if she knew how my life turned out: BDSM, bisexuality, ménages, swinging, and lots and lots of smut. The ultimate sin in her eyes would most likely be the fact that I've used Catholic rituals and beliefs in some of my stories, most notably “Communion” and “Higher Power”. I have to smile, wondering how I got from there to here.

At the same time, that experience touched something in me, wakened a hunger for spiritual experience that still gnaws me. Now, strangely enough, I feed that hunger by writing erotica. I find a connection to the Infinite in the connection with a lover. And I still pray, though I long ago abandoned the formulas Bridget taught.

The conversion is still a secret, too. I've never told anyone who's part of my “real life” that I've been baptized. (And I don't question whether the baptism was legitimate. Somehow I feel that if Bridget and I both believed it, then it was.) Only you, my readers and colleagues, who know my alter ego, are party to this forbidden knowledge.

Keep it quiet, okay? I don't want to go to Hell.

A submissions editor's perspective

Hello! I am Kathryn Lively and I am an editor for Phaze Books - I have also worked as an editor for Echelon Press, Whiskey Creek Press, and for other publishers. I have been asked by the good people at Oh, Get a Grip! to blog a bit on this week's topic of cliches. Since part of my duties at Phaze involve monitoring incoming submissions (and we are looking for titles for summer and fall, BTW), this seemed like the perfect opportunity to cover the pros and pitfalls of stories that dance across these lines.

When we think of cliches specifically in romance and erotic stories, what comes most often to mind are specific characterizations and circumstances that we may believe have been done to death. We all know about the "Too Stupid To Live" heroine (even hero, in some cases) who either is too dim to see how poorly she is treated - or perhaps she chooses to turn a blind eye to her lover's unbelievable imperfections for the sake of moving the plot forward. As an editor, it is challenging to evaluate some submissions where the cliches are apparent, particularly when the editor has a good idea of how well certain stories sell.

For example, let's say an editor reads for a house where four of the top ten best-selling books for the year featured a similar plot device. It could be anything - a certain kind of meet-cute, a widow getting a second chance at love only to discover her first husband didn't die, or a main character humiliated to the point where she moves home and reconnects with an old flame. You study this house because it's your goal to place a book there, so you read these books. As a writer, you're concerned about falling into cliche traps, so you may wonder if you are risking a rejection by offering this house a work set outside this "comfort zone."

I can't speak for all editors, but I do admit that sometimes as I read I look for two things: a quality story and sales potential. Publishing is a business, and if the books don't sell there is no business. Does this mean I'm not willing to take chances? I don't think so - in the five years I have acquired works I've thrown the dice more than once. I've scored a few naturals, and hit a few snake eyes, but I don't regret the choices made. A writer should not feel as though he/she should submit a cliche that sells as opposed to something unique.

~ * ~

Kathryn Lively is an award-winning writer and editor, and executive editor of Phaze Books. She is an EPIC Award nominee and has edited EPIC Award nominated titles for Phaze Books, Whiskey Creek Press, and FrancisIsidore ePress. She also maintains a pen name, L.K. Ellwood, for other mysteries.

Kathryn's latest book is Dead Barchetta, available through most online retailers.

http://www.kathrynlively.com/
http://www.deadbarchetta.com/
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