The Gold Rush

By Lisabet Sarai

In January 1848, James W. Marshall discovered gold at Sutter's Mill, in what is now El Dorado County, California. That event kicked off the now-fabled California Gold Rush and changed the country forever. Between 1848 and 1855, by which time most of the readily available gold had been exhausted, some 300,000 people arrived in California, from across the United States as well as from many other countries. In seven short years, San Francisco grew from a small settlement of 200 people to a city of over 35,000. It took only two years for the United States to decide it wanted California as a state and to pry the land away from Mexico, to whom the territory belonged at the start of the Gold Rush.

An estimated 100,000 native Americans died from disease or aggression as the avaricious newcomers pushed them out of their traditional hunting and fishing grounds. Many of the prospectors met equally dire fates at the hands of the Indians, the elements or their fellow gold-seekers.

New wealth fueled new technologies and new growth. At the same time, the Gold Rush destroyed much of value, damaging ecosystems, ruining families, tearing society apart. The boom town mentality rewarded short term greed and discouraged long term planning. It left the mountains of the Sierra Nevada littered with ghost towns. These days, a drive through the old gold country is a meditation on the nature of transience.

Publishing, especially epublishing of romance and erotica, seems to be experiencing its own gold rush. Book sales have surged by several hundred percent annually since the introduction of Amazon's Kindle in 2007. The number of publishers of ebooks has grown in proportion. Pretty much every week, I see a new digital imprint announced on the Erotica Readers & Writers Association list. Meanwhile, established print publishers, from Harlequin to Constable & Robinson, have rushed to cash in on the boom by developing their own lines of e-books.

On the plus side, this means more publishing opportunities for authors. Unfortunately, the boom has also made it possible for any individual who ever fantasized about publishing a book to do so. As a result, the slush pile has exploded by several orders of magnitude. For every work that I'd label as quality fiction, there are now hundreds, even thousands of competing titles that are, to be blunt, total crap.

It's true that it's easier to get published now than every before. Desperate for profits, some companies will accept anything that even remotely resembles a book. Plus there is always the self-publishing alternative. In fact, the burgeoning slush pile isn't the most serious problem. One of the worst aspects of the boom is the fact that it has become impossible for quality fiction to get noticed. You could write a Pulitzer-Prize-worthy novel these days and not sell more than a handful of copies.

One can understand the aspirations of would-be authors – no matter how lacking in competence they might be. After all, who made me the gatekeeper? So what if I believe that my erotica is better than 90% of what is available on Amazon today. Most writers probably feel the same way. Maybe one really should let the market decide. And indeed, with a sigh, I must admit I don't know what else we poor authors can do.

What frustrates me more than anything else, though, is the get-rich-quick attitude of the publishers – including some with long-standing reputations, who should know better. In the past few months I've reviewed ebooks from several well-known publishing companies that were close to unreadable due to editing and formatting errors. If I had purchased these books as opposed to having received free reviewer copies, I would have demanded my money back.

In one case, the book was a reprint of a classic erotic novel from before the ebook revolution. I believe that the original print book must have been scanned and subjected to optical character recognition (OCR) in order to create the electronic form. Anyone who's used OCR will know the process is rife with errors. Careful editing is required to correct the guesses made by the OCR software. As far as I can tell, the editor (if there was one) did no more than give a quick glance to this book. It was full of garbled text that seriously disrupted the reading experience. In their haste to get some income from this novel, this company apparently rushed it into “e-print” with zero quality control.

Does this company realize that, in my eyes at least, they've completely destroyed their credibility? I've actually had stories published by this company, but I'll think twice about that in the future.

If I were the author of this book, I'd sue the company for breach of contract. And then I'd make sure to spread the news far and wide via social media. As a reader, I'll certainly steer clear of any other titles in this series.

I wish I could tell you this was an isolated case. It's not. On the contrary, it's an illustration of the same sort of orientation toward short-term profits that made the Gold Rush so destructive, and I see it in many places in the publishing industry.

The Gold Rush reached its peak and then faded away in a mere seven years. It has been just about that long since the birth of the Kindle. What literary ghost towns will be left behind when the e-reading boom subsides – or changes to something unrecognizable? The rate at which technology and society change these days is dizzying. Anyone who imagines that the ebook boom is here to stay is as much a dreamer as the farmer from Pennsylvania who sold his farm and traveled half a year across mountain and desert, believing he'd make his fortune in the California hills.

I've been in this business since the end of the twentieth century. I've seen the eclipse of print and the rise of the ebook. I've done what I could to adapt, but I know tomorrow will be different from today. I plan to be here long after the get-rich-quick types have given up. Because ultimately for me, it's the stories that matter, not the money. That's why I hate to see the stories polluted by the greed of those who publish them.

flesh-and-blood zeitgeist

by Jean Roberta

When I'm trying to write about the flavour of a certain era or setting that I've lived in, I'm always tempted to describe the actual people who were there with me.

One of my earliest stories is "Storyteller's Tale," first written in the 1960s, when I was sixteen, and slightly revised many years later. It's a kind of condensed kunstlerroman, or a story about how I started thinking of myself as a writer. I had two younger sisters, and I used to tell them bedtime stories.

It was the era of the war in Vietnam, and my family had recently immigrated to Canada from the U.S. because my father had been hired to teach at the local university. My classmates in high school persistently asked me if I had an older brother (i.e. a motive to leave the U.S. to evade the draft). I was the oldest of three daughters, but in some sense, all the young male draft-dodgers who passed through our house seemed like my brothers. In the following story, the draft-dodger was actually the son of my father's former colleague, but I described him as my cousin to make his deliberate seductiveness seem even creepier than it seemed to me at the time.

The story-within-the-story is a variation of an allegedly true account of how one of my grandfathers (a small businessman and a politician) died of a heart attack in 1944, before I was even thought of. I've met him only in dreams.

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There's something melodramatic about a moving day: furniture hangs suspended between big, sweaty movers and my parents screech tensely at each other like married birds. Boxes held together with Mama's saved string clog strategic doorways. My little sisters fight; the movers grunt; my father shouts with a cigarette between his lips; and I listen. But instead of moving all at once, we had been shifting boxes to the new house for several weeks. It was like living in a war zone during a short cease-fire.

The summer of 1967 would later be described as the Summer of Love, but it hardly seemed that way to me at the time. My cousin John arrived from Chicago as a draft-dodger when we were gradually moving from one end of Regina, Saskatchewan, to the other, when we needed him least. When I got home from school, I saw his black suitcase on the floor. Male voices in the living room were talking in the loud, urgent way my relatives do when they get together, having so much to say that they leap from topic to topic and back again. Mama was shouting into the phone: "He just arrived this morning." I breathed quietly several times, and went in.

There he was, flung carelessly on the sofa. He seemed wrapped in the warmth of June, while we were still recovering from our first winter in Canada. The seams of John's pants were strained beyond endurance, and he looked as though he would have grinned lewdly if he'd known I was thinking about them, cousin or not. We exchanged cliches.

"Did you come all by yourself?" I asked, watching him staring at the front of my sweater. He had a way of staring in a drawl. Obviously I didn’t need to inform him that I had become a young woman of sixteen since he had seen me last.

"I'm a big boy now." It was the same sexy, sleepy voice I remembered from last time. It was perfect in its way. He never stuttered and always looked you in the eyes when he spoke.

"Did you have a good trip?" I felt duty-bound as a hostess, tied obscenely to him like Joan of Arc tied to the stake.

"Sit down and I'll tell you about it," he purred, stretching. My father began to talk. I walked out of the room, my pleated plaid skirt flapping militarily about my knees like a bagpiper's kilt.

I felt uncomfortable in my girdle and stockings. Picking up a nearby brush, I sat at the kitchen table to brush my hair. This is a thing I always do to relieve tension, just as my father swears. We can't always be couth. The longer my hair grows, the more justified I feel in brushing it, and the older my father is, the louder he swears. He swears and I brush; and often the importance of a situation can be measured by the intensity with which we do it.

I ate a cookie and went upstairs, my stockings rasping against each other. They were a pair I had bought for 59 cents in Woolworth's and they were like steel wool. I remembered thinking there should have been a warning on the package, like, "Caution: the metal in this product subject to melting at high temperatures." The mesh pattern stood out in ridges on my legs. I was girdled, strapped in, pushed up, squeezed to an acceptable shape. I longed to run naked through a fountain.

I went to the public library. I always enjoy libraries; in the civilized quiet, I can read or think whatever I want to, without distractions. Sometimes I even have imaginary love affairs there, but with a sensitive young man, not with ape-men or incestuously with my cousin John. Leaving the library, I went to the record departments of several downtown stores, and then walked home.

For the next few days, I spent my afternoons out shopping or reading alone, reluctantly coming back to our half-empty house for supper. John often left too. One day Mama told me he had met a girl somewhere, and that she was taking him out in her car. I was interested, and somehow embarrassed when he galloped down the stairs in a different shirt. There was a honk from the street, the slamming of a door, and he was off.

"How would you like a story tonight?" I asked my little sisters, who were squirming in their seats. Unlike some children, they have a passion for home-made stories and home-made cookies. At ages ten and seven, they still seemed too young to know what was and was not hip. We withdrew to the overstuffed purple armchair.

"Tell us a true-life one!" shrieked Laurie. Her ordinary voice is a piercing shriek. When she's excited, it rises higher until it almost passes out of human hearing range.

"Certainly," I intoned.

"What's the name of this story? Make it spooky."

"How Uncle Cedric Died Sitting Up."

"Ooh."

"Ssh," I began, and told them about our uncle who was known for his violent temper throughout Texas, and owned a cattle ranch. It seems he and a neighbor engaged in cock-fighting, and staged a fight between their favorite roosters, each man betting heavily that his would win. During the fight, Uncle sat down on rock because of the hot sun. After several hours, the other man's chicken was the only one left alive. Laughing, the neighbor approached our uncle with his hand outstretched for the bet money, but for once, Uncle Cedric was silent. He was dead of a heart attack at 48, sitting bolt upright.

"Why did he die?" whispered Anna.

"Because it made him so mad to lose," I answered.

"Ooh. Is that really a true story?" Laurie demanded in a surprisingly low voice.

"Well, we did have an Uncle Cedric who died." Mama was calling them to bed.

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This story has remained unpublished. In some sense, it is still a virgin.

My sexually-explicit stories, of course, are in a whole other category. I started writing erotica with the intention of getting it published, if possible, so calls-for-submission that ask for "true" stories are problematic. Telling factually-accurate stories about my sex life seems like a very bad idea, especially since it has involved various other people, male and female. What to do?

I promised my Spouse several years ago that I wouldn't describe her as a character in an erotic story, so describing my current sex life is not on the agenda. However, I can describe ex-lovers who are no longer in my life. It helps if they never seemed highly literate (or interested in realistic fiction), and therefore I can reasonably hope that they never have and never will see themselves described (or caricatured) in print.

The woman I call "Gabrielle" in a story which appeared in First-Timers: Stories of Lesbian Awakening (Alyson Publications, 2006) was too tempting not to use for this purpose. And it does feel like exploitation. My qualms about consciously using a live person as source material fought with my desire to write something that would fit a particular call-for-submissions, and my desire to see my words in print won out. Here is the opening scene in "Gabrielle's Fountain." (The title refers to a g-spot orgasm, and the explanation of Gabrielle's ancestory is based on what she told me.)

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Her ketchup-red hair, her laughing blue eyes and her healthy female curves gave off heat. Just being near her sent tingles up and down my spine.

Like animals craving each other’s warmth, the crowd was packed onto the dance floor of the gay bar. It was after the legal cut-off time for serving alcohol, but no one wanted to brave the dark and the cold, to stagger over the ice in the parking-lot to find cars which were mostly rusted, dented, and as unwilling to leave the premises as we were.

I liked to think I was a realist who could see what was under my nose. But I also liked to think I was a visionary who could see what was possible. I liked to visit the river town of Riel, Saskatchewan, because it seemed more fluid in several ways than my home town of Forgetville, the seat of a government which was officially and without sarcasm described as “provincial.”

Riel was named for a wild, possibly insane French-speaking halfbreed who had tried to establish his own nation on the Canadian prairie a hundred years before, in the 1880s, and who had been hanged in Forgetville as a traitor to the federal government and the British Crown. What dyke wouldn’t love the romance of that story? And what dyke could resist my wild red-haired girlfriend in Riel, especially after she bragged to me and her other drinking buddies about being the great-great-granddaughter of Riel’s second-in-command, Gabriel Dumont?

She called herself Gabrielle in the bar, although her large, Catholic family knew her by a different name. Her parents had bought her a small house a block away from theirs when she was a 21-year-old on welfare who refused to let them send her to college. By the time she was thirty, she had trained them to accept her parade of different jobs and different girlfriends, her tribe of Siamese cats who liked to fuck on the round oak table under her picture window that faced a major bus route, her vegetarian cooking, her trade in marijuana (grown in her backyard greenhouse), and even the naked revelers who attended her moonlit garden parties and wiccan rituals in summer.

--------------------------

So there it is: trace amounts of reality in two works of fiction. I'm sure that many of my imaginary characters have been inspired by people I've met in the real world, but they appear in stories as composites, changed beyond recognition (I hope) by the alchemy of imagination.

The next time I need to establish a zeitgeist, or the spirit of an age, I think I will use unreal characters in a real setting. It seems safer and more honourable than dragging people who have shared some of their lives with me into my imaginary world.

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It is Not Midnight and It's Not Raining

by Amanda Earl

My characters are like a collage or perhaps Frankenstein's Creature would be a better analogy. I take a mood from one person, a physical attribute from another, a bit of history from another and so on. All of these bits are micro particles, just one or two atoms from each that come together and form an entire made up being. And I can't usually figure out the ratio of real to imagined in the final version of the story. On rare occasions (so far) one of my stories will portray a character who is strongly based on one specific person.  Even then, I usually extrapolate, exaggerate or change the nature of the character to suit the story.

Example: I have this beautiful, intelligent friend who I admire greatly. I popped some of her attributes into a story I wrote at the beginning of this year, but I changed her personality and added some traits that are modelled after my own. I created another character with some of my own attributes too. I had these two chicks fuck a guy and each other in the tale. Neither my friend nor I are into women, so there goes reality. But this is what the story required, so I did it. I also let her know and she was flattered and relieved that it was in fact a well-written story.

While I find it uncomfortable when people look for real autobiographical or biographical detail in my stories, I like it when they recognize themselves or others in my work when I haven't deliberately set out to write about them. I think a good character is one readers can relate to or lust after or be afraid of or all those things at once.

There are times though when someone is so intriguing to me or the reality of the situation is so compelling or bizarre that I feel I need to write it in fiction form. An example of such is the story "How I Learned to Give Good Head" (Tasting Him, Oral Sex Stories, Cleis Press, 2008). It's pretty much a word for word true account or at least my memory of what went on with me and some hook up in Montreal in the winter of 2000. The names have been changed to protect the not-so-innocent. Thanks to this guy I became a really fabulous cock sucker. He said men would thank him and believe me, they have.

Sometimes I've needed to write about people or incidents in my life as a form of catharsis. In the past year, I wrote the most uncomfortable story I've ever written. It was closer to the truth autobiographically than any I have ever written before. It was about growing old, mortality, feeling unattractive to a man I was interested in who clearly didn't feel the same. But the main character's thoughts and actions were heightened, way beyond any I've ever felt or experienced. In order to be comfortable sharing a story with such autobiographical resonance, I needed to believe readers would respect the difference between me and this fictionalized version of me in this story, between the man in the story and that heightened version in my story. Otherwise I would never have felt brave enough to write so candidly.

I think this invisible divide between reality and fantasy is a pact between reader and writer. When readers don't respect it and insist that a work is autobiographical or push to find out if the characters are based on anyone real, they are breaking that pact. The pact is insurance that a writer will feel free to create in any way she desires. And that's essential for creativity, in  my opinion.

Ironically by being able to extrapolate from my real life and exaggerate it, I made the story even more true, if that makes sense. The reason for this is because the emotions I felt were real and I translated that feeling into the story. I apologized before the story was published to the man who inspired the story. It was a bit uncomfortable, but hey, we're still friends. And as a fellow writer, he seemed to understand and accept my inclusion of some of the details of our friendship in the story.

Part of being a writer is to have empathy and compassion for others. Writers take their empathy and use it to create characters readers can feel compassion for, or hatred for, or longing for etc…It's the emotion that is the real part, but where it is applied in a piece of fiction is the writer's choice and often in large part invention or the assembly of jigsaw pieces for a whole new puzzle.

In real life I am quite open about myself. I admit to being a happily married polyamorous slut with a lust for younger men. But there's something about creative writing  that seems to leave me more vulnerable. I'm not really sure why. Perhaps it's because the truth just happens…just is, but my fiction is something that comes from my own peculiar way of looking at the world. And I know I'm peculiar and eccentric but do I want others to think of me that way? Maybe. I'm not sure.

Sometimes my fiction espouses my philosophies and values and sometimes it is diametrically opposed to what I believe or somewhere in between or not related at all to it. Whatever will work to write a good piece of fiction. But it's all a world I've created to be read and interpreted by others. So sharing this world is a scary thing. Sometimes in my writing my motivation is a need to find kindreds, people who share my values, my way of looking at the world, my hopes and desires. Writing for me is a form of intimate connection between writer and reader.

Therefore it is not surprising that readers try to make a correspondence between reality and what's in the story. As a reader, I too have an instinct to try and match up the details of the story with the details of the author's life or look for people I might know if it's a writer who's a friend of mine. It's human nature.

I seem to remember that the Canadian author Michael Winter wrote what was referred to as a fictional memoir entitled "This All Happened" where the characters mapped pretty closely to folks he knew in St. John's, Newfoundland. I think he took some flak for that. You can imagine how his fellow Newfoundlanders must have gossiped. Juicy stuff.

And for those of us who write erotica or romance, there's even more of a tendency for people to assume or hope that what we write is autobiographical. Heck, you want to believe that someone is having wild, unbridled sex, so the erotica writer's steamy tales give us all hope that sexual freedom actually exists in this puritanical century. I admit I've written erotica in the hopes it will help me get laid (it has), I've taken out my frustrations of not being able to fuck some man I'm interested in by writing a story in which some version of him appears. I've even tried out some scenarios with my husband (especially mmf threesomes, which i adore) and with hook ups (public sex is a particular fetish of mine) just so I could write about them. Yeah, I've done all that. I've also imagined the sex lives of friends and complete strangers and written some kind of version of such in my stories.

Much of what I write as fiction is motivated by curiosity. Since almost nobody I know is willing to give me the juicy details of their sex lives, I have to imagine them. And I have a filthy mind and a great imagination. If you want to give me the deets of your juicy sex life or you have a few fantasies you'd like to share, please do so. They might end up in my fiction.

Basically it's all fodder for my creativity. Your life, my life, my fantasies and yours. I usually warn people I meet that I'm a writer and I can't help nor will I try to control my creative impulse to magpie their lives. I suggest that if they have a secret or something private, they shouldn't tell me about it unless they are comfortable with its fictionalization in some way. But I am more obsessed with the tiny seemingly insignificant details of their lives. 

Such detail is what makes a story more realistic. I spend a lot of time sitting around in cafés or bars or on the street observing people and their interactions. It's possible I became a writer so that I could be a lazy voyeur. One of the reasons I like social media so much is because it gives me insight and information about people. I am fascinated with the most mundane of details. I glean FaceBook, Twitter, Tumblr and Pinterest for all the clockwork of humanity I can get my greedy little digital paws on. I even go on to these online data sites and get men to tell me their fantasies. I let them know that I'm using the material for my fiction. For the most part, it titillates them. Sometimes we all get a good wank out of the experience.

These days there's a genre referred to as creative nonfiction where people meld reality with creativity. And of course James Frey got into huge trouble for calling his  semi-fictional novel "A Million Little Pieces," a memoir. The line between truth and fiction is being blurred more and more. How about we just accept that all literature is fiction, whatever we call it? It's meant to be art, it transcends reality and reflects universal truths at the same time. That's the paradox of art.

Writers are liars. At least I am. I always have been. As a child I told stories of Gumby and Pokey's adventures in show and tell. My teacher asked me to bring in something real and I didn't know what she meant. My imagination has always been very real to me.

Like all good liars, I use a dollop of truth and a dollop of fantasy. A good story is a stew of real and invented ingredients. Taste the stew; enjoy the stew. Just don't ask me how I made it or whether I made the gravy from scratch or used a package of Knor's.

"Then I went back into the house and wrote, 'It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows.' It was not midnight. It was not raining."-- Samuel Beckett, Molloy

Chickenshit

By Daddy X

I’ve often been tempted to write a memoir, but afraid to because it might hurt people I know and love. Not that I would say things particularly negative about friends and lovers but it could bring to light issues that some people don’t even know exist. If it sounds like past lies regarding past indiscretions would catch up with me, that’s a good part of it.

None of us gets through life without hurting others; it may not be our intention, or our particular bent. However, in the course of living there are those little betrayals, those mini-lies and tiny omissions that affect a certain convenience at the time but could now be construed as suggesting more serious connotations to our relationships. The braver-than-I Anais Nin goes into this in her diary.

In fiction, our literary efforts are drawn from a melding of past experience and fantasy. We can shape the villain, the hero, the heroine to what we want or need for the story, but when writing about real people we have to get it right. Is our memory skewed by our individual perspective? Another person’s experience of the same incident won’t be the same as ours. Put it down on paper and you may have an argument on your hands. Or a lawsuit. Or lose a friend.

Maybe I’m just chickenshit, but I don’t want to write about people I’ve known. And then again, if I were to write about someone famous (unlikely ‘cause I’m too lazy to do the research) I’d likely get lots of flack on all sides of any issue or detail in the recount. If anybody read it at all.  :>)

Wait a minute! I just remembered I did write a piece about something and someone real. Not much chance of this ever getting back to Hattie, and it didn’t really happen, but it could have:

Reunion What If

“Hi Hattie!”

“Hi Tom. Still the long hair, huh?”

“Not much left now; gotta wear a pony tail and a hat.”

“Boy, did I chase you in high school.”

“I think the first time you asked me out was in seventh grade. Middle school, they call it now.”

“I asked you to all the dances way in advance. Worried you’d ask another girl first, or somebody else would invite you.”

“Ha! Yeah you did.”

“Was that the reason? Why we didn’t- Was I too forward? Too needy?”

“Nah, it just worked out differently. By the way—sorry, I heard when your parents passed.”

“Both within two years.” 

“I remember how they trusted you. When you threw parties at your place, they’d go out and leave you in charge. They really knew you, didn’t they? I remember the only time I ever touched you, you cried your eyes out.”

“You were the first boy ever to make me cry. I was really mad when you met Frannie. I thought she was such a slut. Then you two got married.”

“Actually, we were both virgins until the prom. Took me six months to get into her pants. We still love each other dearly.”

“Really? Wow. You think maybe if…”

Are they real? Really?

“Do you base tour characters on real people?”

I get that question all the time. Maybe it has something to do with the sweatshirt I wear that say “Be careful or I’ll put you in my next book.”

I think it’s hard to write believable characters if there isn’t at least a smidgen of a real person in them. I mean, sure, I create my fantasy men in all my heroes, but can I tell you?  Each of them has a little bit of someone in them.

For example: in my Phoenix Agency series book, Delicious Danger, Rick Latrobe is actually based on my firearms instructor, a former Army Ranger. He even looks sorta like him. And Xena the dog? She’s a purebred Caucasian Ovcharka, the Russian sheepdog said to have psi abilities.

In He Came Upon a Midnight Clear, Cody Alvarez was inspired by a cowboy I nearly kicked to the curb. Literally. I was sitting in front of the Bear Moon Bakery, a gathering spot in our little Texas town, reading a book and drinking my skinny decaf mocha latte, swinging my foot and paying no attention to anything. It was a cool December day but nice enough to sit out side. Suddenly my foot connected with someone’s leg and a big “Ouch” made me look up and blush with embarrassment.

Then my jaw dropped. Standing in front of me, all six foot two of him, was the quintessential Texas cowboy, with is square-jawed face, jeans hugging his long legs, boots that were definitely worn for work, ranch coat and the required Stetson. After I apologized I introduced myself, gave him one of my cards and asked him if I could take his picture.  I guess I’m lucky he didn’t call the cops on this weird old lady.

Anyway, he did let me take his picture and when I wrote HCUAMC it was his picture I stared at when I created Cody.

I also out a lot of myself into my characters. Cassie in  Once Burned is based on my experiences as a sports reporter, and two of my heroines—Rina in Do You Trust Me and Faith in Jungle Inferno—are romance novelists.

But I think my favorite character, who is based on a lot of people I met during my years in the music business, is Dallas Creed in Downstroke. And this scene is drawn from an actual event.

So here I was, waiting for my first glimpse of the man on a stage since he and his pickup band played the Raccoon Saloon all those years ago. It was time to find out if I’d actually managed to wipe Dallas Creed out of my system. If bottling up my emotions and using other men to wipe away traces and memories of him had worked at all.

The night had a magical quality to it, a perfect Texas night with stars blinking against a black velvet sky. A very soft breeze stirred the air, chasing away the last heat of the day. The sense of expectancy in the outdoor concert facility was nearly palpable. Anticipation fairly zapped through the air like bolts of energy. I could even feel it myself, the kind of feeling you got on Christmas morning when you ran downstairs, or when you were right on the brink of the most outstanding orgasm you’d ever had. Seventy-five hundred people moved restlessly in their seats in front of me. An almost equal amount were spread out on the rise of the hill behind me, drinking and staring at the stage with binoculars, even though at the moment there was nothing to see. They were all waiting for the same thing.

The curtain was drawn across the stage, heightening the edge of expectancy. Especially for me, much as I hated to admit it. What was behind there? What was his band like now after they’d tasted success once and were back on top with him again?

I could feel the energy sizzling through the crowd. Well, why not? If nothing else, Dallas Creed had always had an electric presence. Add in the staging, his suck-my-tongue voice and the electricity of his music and you had a knockout winner.

The soft notes of a viola floated in the air from behind the curtain, joined immediately by violins, and I wondered what the hell? Violins? Then I realized it was a synthesizer. And obviously a damn good musician coaxing music from it. The sound that mimicked violins seemed to hold the audience in thrall, as if they were expectantly awaiting a grand moment. The music built and built as the magician behind the synthesizer added the full-throated sounds of woodwinds and the rich tones and powerful chords of an organ, swelling to a crescendo. The last note held and held and held, flowing out into the crowd, pulling at us as if to say, Wait for it, it’s coming.

Then I heard the familiar first downstroke of the rhythm guitars as they began the intro to the first song. The curtain drew back slowly to reveal the band onstage, the bass guitar and keyboards now adding their voices, the drums accenting them with a syncopated beat.

All sound ended abruptly and the crowd stilled for a breathless moment. The band launched into a rich intro to one of Dallas’ hits, an upbeat tune called Cowboys Get It Right, a song I realized the synthesizer had laid the foundation for. The spotlight came up and the man himself jogged onto the stage.

To my dismay, my traitorous heart tripped at the sight of him and an emotion I refused to name clogged my throat. Dallas Creed was definitely a lot older, forty-three to the twenty-three he’d been the last time I saw him in person. Newspaper photos had kept me up with his aging process, but no picture could do justice to the energy still radiating from this man. The energy that had drawn me to him in the first place.

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Won’t you leave me a comment about how you see characters in books? I’m giving away a copy of Downstroke to one lucky winner.

But All My Characters Are Real!

Sacchi Green

Oh, you mean real as in actually being visible to someone besides me. Well, I have to admit that occasionally my vision of a character shifts a little when I happen to see someone who looks more perfect for the part than the image already in my mind, but I’ve never yet gone up to someone like that and told them that they’re really characters from my stories. Maybe I should have. There must be worse pick-up lines.

But yes, just as I put something of myself (usually something I can’t fully express in any other way) into my writing, I do sometimes base characters loosely on real people I know. The first time I remember doing it was with someone I’d met only briefly, but whose writing I’d found so engrossing, to say the least, that I imagined I knew her well. I did get to know her better through the years and quite a few shared anthologies, and in fact she wasn’t all that much like my character, but a much more remarkable person. Still, here goes with the first mention of that character in my long-ago story “Of Dark and Bright” in, I think, Best Lesbian Erotica 2000, or maybe 2001.

The first time you saw me, you retreated.

     I should have been glad. These few days to myself had been hard enough to pry from a life of too many entanglements. No matter how graceful the undulation of your line out over the stream, how elegantly precise the settling of your lure onto the water, barely creasing the tension of its silvered surface, you were an intrusion. Good fly fishing form, skilled hands, nice balance, but--go away, kid. You bother me.

 

     I watched, unseen, as you moved upstream, searching out the deepest pools among the rocks. No closer, I thought. Go back. Even at a distance, even before I understood, I was reluctant to let your serene concentration be rippled by a chance encounter.

  

     My elkhound Raksha tensed on the opposite shore, gray fur blending imperceptibly into the rocks and driftwood. A low growl rumbled in her chest, a prelude to whatever menace might be required.

     I signaled with my eyes to be still, since my hands were occupied with balancing stone on stone, building structures to be photographed--some as cover art for a book set on a distant planet, some as a sequential study of "ephemeral art" showing the effects over time of wind and water and ice, and some for my insatiable obsession with aspects of light and dark. I should have wondered at how quickly she subsided, but I had forgotten, for the moment, that her savagery was reserved for unknown men.

 

     Then the trout struck. Your lean, intense face transformed with joy--and I knew. I watched you play the fish, draw it carefully, inexorably toward you, stoop to deftly grasp and then release your prize. The lines of your body revealed what the multi-pocketed fishing vest, the baseball cap over close-cropped hair, had at first concealed. But I already knew.

     The stream swirling past my hips might as well have rammed a log into my crotch. A hunger raw as pain, irrational as the jerk of a hammered knee, lurched deep and low inside me. I cursed at my old-enough-to-know-better self; and in that moment of distraction my balance wavered.

     One stone shifted, then another. I tried to restore the equilibrium of my construction, but the pebbles in the streambed turned under my feet. I staggered, and stones from the disintegrating tower bruised me on their way to the bottom of the river.

     You heard the avalanche of rocks and looked up. In a calmer moment I might have enjoyed your expression as your gaze traveled over the surreal array of stone circles and pillars, the camera and tripod on the shore, and Raksha observing you with a lupine grin. By the time you saw me I was pulling myself up onto a wide, sun-warmed boulder, and then wishing I hadn't, realizing how mercilessly revealing my soaked t-shirt had become, how inadequate my denim cutoffs had always been. Damn it, how far into the wilds did I have to go to be spared seeing myself through someone else's eyes?

     Expressions shifted across your dark-browed face like the drifting shadows of clouds on the mountainsides. I knew you were cursing the shattering of solitude, and considering what, if anything, of yourself to reveal. I saved you the trouble of deciding.

     "Raksha, stay!" I commanded, turning toward the shore, knowing that she had no intention of doing otherwise. I stepped from rock to rock until I stood beside her. Then, one hand on her shaggy neck, I faced you again, smiled, and nodded in casual acknowledgment of shared humanity.

     Your answering smile was brief, startled, and lit with a sweetness you would have cursed yourself for showing. You could pass, in the right circumstances, but never with that smile. Then you turned away. I watched you retreat downstream, leaping from boulder to boulder with a long-legged, impetuous sureness that sent a shiver of delight across my skin.

I really hope that the model for this character never realized she’d inspired it. There’s one strange thing, though…fairly recently she (now he, actually, one of several such friends) has taken up fishing as a passionate hobby.

Then there’s the piece I wrote for a “true stories” anthology, “Learning It at Her Knee” (in First Timers, edited by Rachel Kramer Bussel) in which all the characters, even the minor ones, were real people. Only two really count, though, the one who loved to be spanked, and the one who gave me spanking lessons. It’s hard to choose a short enough excerpt from this to give a good idea about each of them, but I’ll see what I can do.

[This begins in the middle, after some “practice spanking” in my hotel room at a Fetish Fair before we returned to the BDSM play party for the expert instruction. It my be worth mentioning that we’d started out with surveying the contents of V’s toy bag, which by chance included a couple of YA books soon to be returned to the library, and I’d decided she should be punished for bringing such virtuous works of literature to a naughty affair like this.]

"Yes..." V said breathlessly, "we'd better rest some before going back to the party." Then, when she'd rolled sideways on my lap and I was gently stroking her inflamed thighs and buttocks, she added, "I had no idea you'd have so much endurance!"

     Maybe she said that to all her first-time spankers. I didn't mind. I'd nearly forgotten about the party, but I didn't mind her eagerness to get there, either. She wanted the public aspect, and so, I realized, did I. Even the fleeting paranoid thought that she might be using me to get Q's attention didn't bother me. The prospect of getting Q's attention in a context I wouldn't usually manage was at least as appealing to me.

     We rested and talked for a while, and resumed our play briefly to take advantage of the couch's upholstered back. I tried her leather belt wrapped aropund my hand to leave just the right length to strike with, and admired the texture of the marks it left on her, but still preferred the sound and feel of my hand on naked flesh and her body across my lap.

     We rested a bit longer, this time with V sitting quietly on my lap and leaning her head against my shoulder. The parental comfort-after-punishment stage, I decided. Very pleasant. When she finally asked, tentatively, whether I though Q would be ready yet, I cheerfully agreed that it was time to go and see.

     "Q certainly has...well...presence, doesn't she," V said as we gathered up her toys, leaving the books behind.

     "She certainly does," I said, with only a little envy, and ushered V out the door.

     Q was not only ready, she'd staked a claim to a chair between the sling, in use but only languidly, and a tall sideboard bearing trays of safe sex supplies. From the way a young redhead was avidly chatting her up, if we'd been five minutes later the spanking lesson would have started without us.

     V sailed right in to claim her place. She showed Q the ebony hairbrush and a wooden paddle with one side finely ridged and one padded with velour. "We've had a very nice session of basic spanking," she said, glancing at me with bright eyes and a warm smile. "Maybe you could start out by hand, and then switch to these other things. I don't like too much of the bristle side of the brush, but a little is good. And the soft side of the paddle once in a while gives me chance to come down and get ready for more."

     She launched herself across Q's broad lap with no hesitation and wiggled and squirmed until they were both satisfied with the balance and leverage. I missed holding her myself; on the other hand, I could press close to Q's side and imagine what it would feel like to lie across her thighs with my ass exposed. I was quickly distracted from this pleasant reverie, though, when Q kneaded V's upturned buttocks lightly and speculatively, then gave one a sharp, resounding slap.

     "That's what a full flat-handed stroke sounds like," she told me, and lay a swift, staccato series of them across both sides. "Where you strike varies the sound..." she moved down the thighs and then back up to the curve of the ass, "...and so does how you shape your hand." She demonstrated this principle, too. A curved hand produced a more hollow, drumlike tone. I'd already discovered some of this myself, but watching her large, strong hand in action held a fascination all its own.

[Quite a bit snipped here for brevity]

    

     V, when she stood up, was visibly shaky. I brought her a drink and led her to a place on a crowded couch. "You sit there," she told me faintly, "and I'll sit on the floor at your feet."

     "No," I told her firmly, "I appreciate the thought, but it's your ass that needs a soft spot. I'll even bring you some fluffier pillows." So I did, and then spent the waning hour of the party leaning against her knees, not as a slave but a guardian, while she stroked my hair and whispered an occasional "Thank you" into my ear.

     Q came by with her girl before leaving. "Are you staying for the night?" she asked V. "You really shouldn't be going out into the cold."

     "You saw how big my room is," I told V. "There's even an extra bathroom. You don't have to worry about anything."

     "Well..." she said shyly, "I have to go back there for my books, anyway...."

     "It's settled, then," I assured Q. "She won't want to let Jane Aiken Hodge and Madelaine L'Engle catch a chill. Don't worry, I'll take good care of her." I got up to help V to her feet; and, much as I usually like to watch Q from behind, I didn't even glance that way as she departed.

Q has been to some degree the inspiration for several of my stories, although the characters always became very much themselves. This next one, “Sunset, Sunrise,” (in Hot Lesbian Erotica edited by Tristan Taormino) is the only one, I think, where people who knew us recognized what I was doing, and even so it’s completely fictional. The setup here is that Rory, the central character, is a sculptor with a studio in Wellfleet on Cape Cod who makes end meet by working in an upscale restaurant. This part is fairly near the beginning.

At table six I stood by the young lady's shoulder, gazing deliberately down into the lush cleavage revealed by clinging azure silk. Then I glanced at her companion, hoping for a reaction. It didn't even much matter what kind.

     Clear hazel eyes in a sun-ruddy face surveyed me with a hint of amusement, and recognition.

     "Good evening, I'm Rory," I said demurely. "I'll be serving you tonight."

      The corners of her mouth twitched. (Her? Sir, on occasion, without doubt; definitely a Daddy; but yes, in my own private lexicon, Her.)

     "Hi Rory," she said. "You must be moonlighting. Didn't we last see you covered in mud?"

     "Close enough," I acknowledged. "Art feeds the soul, but that's about all."

     I'd been smeared with clay when they'd wandered through the collective gallery that afternoon and glanced into my studio, obviously looking for a corner just secluded enough to pretend no one could see them making out. The butch had resisted the kid's tug on her muscle-T long enough to look appreciatively at my nudes in porcelain and stone. "Go ahead," I'd said, as her hand hovered over the rounded marble ass of a full-bodied figure crouching on all fours. "Go on, it's meant to be irresistible."

 

      The carnal magnetism of her grin hit me like pounding surf. When her big finger stroked the smooth buttocks and probed down between the tempting thighs my crotch got wet enough to dampen the clay dust layering my jeans.

     "Must have been quite some model," she said appreciatively, ignoring the pout of jealousy quivering on her girl's full red lips.

     "So's yours," I said, looking boldly over the delectable young flesh my sculptures could only symbolize. This got me a sultry look through the girl's long lashes, a reassessment of my weathered androgyny, but Daddy just laughed and steered her back into the hallway.

     My imagination seethed with visions of those large hands kneading and squeezing tender breasts and belly and thighs. The girl's shorts had been brief enough to reveal rosy traces of the proprietary bar-code Daddy's hand had imprinted on her naughty ass, with possible assistance from the back of a hairbrush. They must be staying somewhere close enough to have indulged in a bit of after-lunch action before taking a stroll through the galleries.

        

     When they'd gone I stepped out into the hall for a moment just to immerse myself in the space that large, solid body had occupied. I could feel her primal energy flowing through me. My hands tingled with the remembrance of contours never actually touched.

     Cadillac Mountain granite from Maine, speckled pink and gray, I thought, sketching furiously in my mind.

[There is, of course, much more.]

As those of you who’ve read my post a couple of weeks ago on the subject of “letter to an ex” may suspect, this person is now “he” in my own private lexicon  (although on rare occasions I slip up) and even on his driver’s license, and I’m joyfully attending his wedding in just a couple of weeks.