Frustrated? Why, yes. Yes, I am.

Here is another excerpt from my novel, which is currently titled NOTHING IS REAL BUT THE GIRL, which is pretty fitting, seeing how it needs some rewriting, has no agent, and no publisher, all of which would indicate nothing about it is real except for me, and that, in and of itself, is, of course, questionable. Anyfuckingway, if you want to hire me for some kind of freelance gig, you should let me know, because every damn story I've placed has fallen through, which sucks the proverbial balls, and everything else I've pitched hasn't stuck to the wall, not yet, anyway, just dribbled down to the floor, leaving behind a long line of suspicious, odiferous matter. So, on with the excerpt, on with the show, on with the next soul-bleeding hour.

Drake Walter Raleigh looks down at this penis, and from what seems like a hundred jizzillion miles away, his penis stares back up at him. The cameras wanting, the crew foot-tapping, the director barking, what Drake is having a hard time doing is remembering the lines that he spent this morning practicing, after he stayed up all night, tossing and turning, falling out of bed at 6 a.m., worrying about getting wood. He can see the angry red dot where he injected 20 micrograms of freshly-scored Caverject into his pincushioned corpus cavernosum with a 30-gauge needle, a black market ritual performed in the pseudo-privacy of the trailer toilet, the floor littered with the detritus the girl had left behind her: an empty douche bottle and a drained enema bottle. He barely had time to apply his self-tanner, do a few pull-ups, and they were calling for him. These days, he can’t sleep, waking to bolt upright from night terrors in which he has elephantiasis of the penis, is felled by fatal priapisms, gets stabbed to death by pissed off starlets bearing sharp knives they clench between their teeth like Xena the Warrior Princesses. On this day, this he-can’t-even-count-that-high number of on-camera performances over the last seven and a half years later, he sweats under the unforgiving midday sun, staring helplessly at his otherself, and resigns himself to the indisputable fact that he no longer rules himself. He has succumbed to the merciless demands of his undeniable penis and its insatiable addictions: women, alprostadil, stardom. He knows whatshername is wondering what the fuck he’s doing, Let’s get this over with already, but he can’t remember her real name, her stage name, or her character’s name, and anyway, it occurs to him with a sinking feeling, his erection isn’t the issue, it’s how to pop when your penis is a robot that’s the fucking problem.

Pages

Tonight, I reached a page count in my novel that I've been aiming for, a number that suggests to me being over the hump of it, and hopefully resulting in some momentum while running downhill to the finish line. There's a ways to go, though, so we'll see how it goes. So far, it's been a grind most of the way. Lately, the most literary of music helps. All I know is that writing a novel is a b-i-t-c-h. Going in, you think you know, because you've read one or two or a hundred, but you realize about thirty pages deep that you have no clue what you're doing. It's like entering a haunted house but the car jumps the track, and you can't tell what's real and what isn't, if the story is what's crazy or if it's you, and the only recourse isn't lying on the bed with a pillow on your head but keeping on going. As of late, there's been a lot of pornography, a lot of dead bodies, and lot of the great sprawling cement mess that is Los Angeles. (Willard: "When I was here, I wanted to be there. When I was there, all I could think of was getting back into the jungle.") At some point, you start telling yourself you're engaged in some cathartic shit, when the reality that you stumble upon later on is that the skeleton in the closet is you. There's a frog on my desk, there's a sky that looks like it's on fire, and what's running through my mind is: "Baudelaire: Il me semble que je serais toujours bien la ou je ne suis pas. In other words: It seems to me that I will always be happy in the place where I am not. Or, more bluntly: Wherever I am not is the is the place where I am myself. Or else, taking the bull by the horns: Anywhere out of the world."

Recent Research for My Novel

Bullet Proof Vests
Saint Lucy
The Fourth Dimension
Los Angeles via Nevver
Oldsmobile Toronado
The Urge to End It All
Quantum Mechanics
Tralfamadorians
Squid Ink
"Yes, I’m very interested in the erotic, or pornography if you prefer, because it is there that the self ruptures...."

Write, You Punk

I have an agent for my novel, Happy. He is kind of a bigshot, so he will remain nameless, for the time being. But the point here is that I had a dream this morning that I ended up in a nightclub that was like DNA, and I saw him, and he was this crazy rock star on stage with a giant black mohawk, and his backup singers were the Vivid Girls. I turned to whomever I was with, and I was like, "Wow, I had no idea." He looked like Edward Scissorhands. I was impressed. I have no clue what all that adds up to mean, except to say the dream was rather pleasant. In any case, I am supposed to finish my novel by the end of the summer. Which is fast coming. I guess I better hurry the fuck up.

Crude But Effective

My old pal Hugh McLeod, who created the image you see here, sent me a shout out on Twitter: "Hurrah! My favorite pornographer is blogging again." Well, Hugh, it has been a couple years now. ;) Yesterday, I saw this card that he created, and I liked it a lot, so there you have it: electronic synchronicity or something like it. I like Hugh's blog because he always returns to the subject of creativity, and how to do what you want to do, and how to do what you want to do and survive at it: "It just kinda sorta happened, one random event at a time." It's a struggle, a real battle, to be a creative type: whether you're a writer, or a thinker, or a photographer. E. L. Doctorow: "Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia." Somebody who is related to my novel sent me a letter, and he included a note in it, and the note is written on very beautiful paper with his name embossed beautifully on it near the top in that way where if you run your finger across it you can feel the letters, and the paper is in the shape of a bright white rectangle, or, say, a tiny, shining gravestone, and the note reads: "Can't wait to read the rest! Here's to a ton of success in the future!" I took the other piece of paper in the envelope and tacked it to my bulletin board between two photographs: this one and this one. And I took the note, and I propped it up on my desk, so it would be right there, every time I sat down to write. So. So! So? Now it's time to write.

I Wish I Didn't Have To Go To My Day Job Today And I Could Just Stay At Home And Work On My Novel Because That's All I Want To Do Is Write

My Pornography

Writing isn't easy. Probably, I could write that line a million times, and that would say better whatever it is I'm trying to say. I'm working on my novel. The title is Happy. It was born out of my experiences in Porn Valley. It isn't easy. Not only is it hard to write, but I don't know what to say about it, so I say not a lot. Writing is crazy-making. Writing about these things made me crazy in the past. At this point in the story, my main character is going crazy, and that means it's like he and I are on a seesaw, and sometimes I'm up and he's down, and sometimes I'm down and he's up, and it's a lot like a battle, and nobody knows who wins in the end.

It's about pink salons, soaplands, and geisha bars. It's psycho-noir, apocalyptic tomorrows, dogs in nightmares. It's the story of waterboarders and whales, IEDs and pornography, Happy and Chance. I read an interview in I can't remember where with an author who had written a mystery, and the interviewer asked about the ending of the story, and the writer said something to the effect of why would he have written the book if he'd known what was going to happen in the end? Writing is like walking down the street blindfolded, and you're being led by a blind man.

Did you know Faulkner wrote As I Lay Dying in six weeks? On a turned over wheelbarrow? Working nights at a power plant? True or false? Does it really matter? When it comes to putting words on paper, what's made up is more true than what's real. Faulkner: "Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain." When you write blind, the words spill out on the page, and you can't help but see yourself.

What's this book about? The more I write, the less I know. Porn? I doubt it. Death? Maybe. PTSD? Suicide? Insanity? Yes, all that, too. But I don't know. In a way, I guess you have to turn a blind eye to it while you do it. Otherwise, you trip yourself up on your own psychoanalysis, the blind man leaves, and there's nothing left but you and the yawning chasm of the white page.

I am sure of one thing. Writing is lonely. The loneliest.

What I'm Doing

-- an excerpt from my novel-in-progress, Happy

Quote of the Day: Me

"'Hello,' says the waterboarder to the whale." -- from my novel-in-progress, Happy

Waterboarding and Writing

I spent part of this weekend working on my novel, Happy. It's based on my experiences in Porn Valley. Writing this novel has been a most unusual experience. Previously, I would say that I was at the helm of everything I'd ever written. This time, it feels like my main character is a tiny man driving a little car, and I am following. As a control freak, I wouldn't have liked the sound of that going into it had I known what was coming. But when it works for a writer, you don't ask too many questions. You just shut up and go along for the ride.

Yesterday, I came across a great review, "Speaking the Unspeakable," of Kathryn Harrison's new nonfiction book, While They Slept, written by Robert Pinsky for the New York Times Book Review. Harrison is best known for The Kiss, a memoir in which she recounted her adult incestuous relationship with her father. In While They Slept, Harrison focuses on the true story of Jody Gilley. When Gilley was 16, her 18-year-old brother Billy murdered their parents and 11-year-old sister.

Harrison writes about writing the unwritable: "People who cross the threshold between the known world and that place where the impossible does happen discover the problem of how to convey their experience. Some of us don’t talk about murders or intergenerational sex within our families. We find words inadequate, or we lose them entirely. Those of us who insist on speaking what’s often called unspeakable discover there’s no tone reserved for unnatural disasters, and so we don’t use any. We’re flat-affect; we report just the facts; this alienates our audience."

Writing about porn--or, really, sex, for that matter--is near impossible. Whatever one says in the act is more often than not secondary to the act itself, and if we write of sex, what can we say of it? The danger is falling into the gap between words and that which they seek to represent, never to return. Pinsky, whose many works include a translation of the The Inferno, ends with the hope writing will save us: "the daylight gaze of narrative itself as a form of empathy." Sometimes writing is like walking an imaginary tightrope between two invisible skyscrapers. It's hard to know if you're flying or falling, saying something or speaking in tongues, drowning or surfacing.

Porn Novel Writing

I'm written the first 40 pages of my porn novel, Happy, and it's coming along. I've been calling it a "porn novel"--even though it isn't, not really, anyway. I guess that's my shorthand way of saying "a novel based on my experiences in Porn Valley."

The first section focuses primarily on Xerxes Xavier, the novel's main character. He's 34. He was born and raised in Arlington, Virginia. I've been redacting his occupation, although if you read this blog you may be able to figure out what he does from previous ruminations. Suffice to say, he lives in Virginia for a reason. Of course, the story takes him to Porn Valley, which is another world, and story, altogether.

In the second section, the lens pulls back a bit, beginning to interweave the stories of other characters, among them William Randolph Hearst IV, who is the editor in chief of the San Francisco Times, and Lucy, who is a reporter. Lucy, I suppose, is me. But Xerxes is me, too. So it's hard to say.

Sometimes, I think the novel is about the death of my father. Sometimes, I think it's about love. Sometimes, I think it's about madness. All I know is that the scene I wrote today stars a French midget chanteuse. And what is one to make of that?

I've got more to write--about waterboardings, flashpoints, suicides.

(Video via Boing Boing)

Happy Novel Writing

So, I worked on my novel, Happy, some more, and now the first 30 pages are done. Like a Brit boy with a biscuit, I quite fancy it. It's coming out pretty well-formed, which is nice, and not a mess. Xerxes is the main character. He took a trip to Barstow. I love the desert. He drank too much. I didn't. The only part of it that's missing something is a poker scene in Vegas where I don't know quite what the cards should be.

I'd like to post an excerpt from it, but I suppose I shouldn't.

We'll see.

(Image via LPC.)

Oh, Happy Darling

Well, I wrote the first twenty pages of my novel. The one I restarted the other day. This is very different from all the rest. (Oh, aren't they all?) It's got Xerxes Xavier, now a Jr., and he keeps moving, so I keep following. He's pretty endearing. He started on the top of the Hollywood Hills, found a place to live at the base of Kagel Canyon, took a road trip out to the Mojave Desert. Sometimes, I have to run to keep up with him.

There's also a little girl. And a porn star. And a Happy Darling who doesn't remember who she is. Go figure! And a lot of waitresses. And a black woman named Chanterelle. And a landlord named Jesus. And where all these people came from, I don't know.

Writing is lonely except when you're in love with your main character.

Dear Alice

For the last month or month and a half, I've been working on a project that I can't talk about quite yet, but it involves sending out another book proposal, which is where it's at right now. (Hi, editors!)

In any case, the point of mentioning that is to say that between that and the blogging and the freelancing, I had gotten a bit sidetracked on the novel I am supposed to be writing, which is based on my experiences in Porn Valley. Which is to say I hadn't worked on it at all.

After all that time, I finally looked at it for the first time in a long time a few days ago, and it was messy. Very, very messy. I was mistrustful of this state of affairs, as I am not much of a drafter. When it comes out messy, it tends to be wrong. I would say that my approach to the novel that time around was ambitious: a big novel, broad in scope, lots of sturm with a side-helping of drang. But it was a mess, which I find to be... odious. In my defense, this attitude is genetic, I insist! My father was like this. Since then, I'd been thinking that perhaps I needed one character, one plot, one movement. Not Altman on crystal.

When I moved to New Orleans in September of 2003, I set out to write this novel. And at that time the central character was Xerxes Xavier. At that time, he was a writer. I mean, I think he was. What with everything that happened since, I have a hard time remembering. In any case, I've wondered since then if the first way was the right way. So I started wondering if I should toss what I'd written thus far and start over again with Xerxes as the main character, but a different Xerxes, in a way. Somebody hates it when I do this. I know this.

But I watched the truly beautiful video you see here (via Kottke), and I read this inspiring piece of writing about the creative process, and then I opened up a new Word document and started writing it.

"One clear day in May, Xerxes Xavier Jr. drives to the top of the Hollywood Hills. At the peak of the range, he stops by the side of the road, just past Mulholland Drive. Next to a redwood tree, he stands facing north, and the San Fernando Valley spreads out before him like a woman. From here, he surveys the great landscape: a 400-square-mile, pastoral valley floor bound by a series of dramatic mountain ranges. The Verdugo Mountains to the east. The San Gabriel Mountains to the northeast. The Santa Monica Mountains to the south. The Simi Hills to the west. The Santa Susana Mountains to the northwest. More than a century ago, California State Senator Charles Maclay overlooked this place and proclaimed: 'This is the garden of Eden!' Now, where conquistadores Californianos once galloped across wide-open ranges as cattle grazed serenely under Oak trees, there lies suburban America: tract homes, backyard pools, mini-malls. He has come a long way to get to this place. In the midday heat, the [redacted] stands in the dirt, not far from a road where no one is, bows his head, places one hand on his chest, says a prayer under his breath so no one can hear it, and dives in, headfirst."

Happy in the ER

In "Marry Him! The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough," Lori Gottlieb's controversial polemic on what the hell love has to do with marriage (not a lot, she says), Gottlieb opines: "Marriage isn’t a passion-fest; it’s more like a partnership formed to run a very small, mundane, and often boring nonprofit business." Maybe she's right. Maybe she isn't. I don't know. But I will say that the same could be said of writing. My paraphrase: "Writing isn’t a passion-fest; it’s more like a series of very small, mundane, and often boring acts undertaken in service of a business that rarely turns a profit." Maybe writing is like a marriage, one in which you can never quite make out what your spouse looks like. Or maybe writing is like a religion, one in which the true believer waits for a god who shows himself only through inscrutable signs. Yesterday, I had a fit over my novel-in-progress, Happy. I suppose this was inevitable. I am nothing if not an undoer. Luckily, the Harpoonist, a writer and book doctor, was there to help. Like an expert surgeon, she grabbed a scalpel and began slashing at the book on the operating table before her. Happy thanks her for the intervention that brought it back from the dead. If you are a writer whose book needs doctoring, I recommend the Harpoonist highly.

Literary Agents Are Like Assholes

Update: I woke up for some reason at 2AM and was eating some potato salad in my pajamas when I found that Time.com has declared the Reverse Cowgirl one of the "best blogs in the world" in their 2008 Top 25 Blogs First Annual Blog Index, and I'm their choice for sex blogger. Gulp. A big thank you to whatever closet pervert at Time managed to pull that one off. You are awesome. I'd send you some porn as a thank you, but I don't have any. Sorry! If you're interested in reading Letters from Johns, it's here, and Letters from Working Girls is here, and the story that I wrote for Newsweek.com in the wake of Spitzergate about what I've learned from doing Letters is here. If you'd like to look at some of my photographs, they're here. Oh, and if you want to check out my stream-of-consciousness style sex blogging, my obsessively updated Tumblr is here. Or, if you'd like to check out my favorite sex blogs, do pay a visit to Melissa Gira and Debauchette, two smart women who take sex writing to a whole new level. If you want to vote for Reverse Cowgirl at Time.com's poll, you can do so here. And thank you for reading the Reverse Cowgirl. It makes me happy. Now, back to our regularly scheduled programming, starring my relentless preoccupation with the weird world of pornography. SB

Every so often over the last five years or so, literary agents have approached me about writing a nonfiction book about Porn Valley. Over the years, I have approached my share of literary agents about the same idea, something I have detailed in various posts here. For some reason, it never really seems to work out, agents and me. I like the idea of agents. You know, like agents of change, or something like that. But I've never really needed one that badly, and, frankly, I've never really gotten along with any one of them all that well, and there's this way in which I think it's like I just don't get it. It's like, what do they do exactly? I mean, I know. But, you know. Anyway, they always have a new! totally! different! idea for this porn book. One thought it should be like Nickel and Dimed. One told me I should write nonfiction and not fiction because I was better at telling than showing. (Um, thanks?) The most recent one wanted me to be the one writer who finally told the "truth" about porn. And that's the rub, isn't it? I can't think about me, agents, and a nonfiction book about porn these days and not think of this crappy line: "You can't handle the truth!"--and I don't even like that movie. I am loathe to think of how many ways I've tried to spin the realities of Porn Valley in who knows how many proposals, for how many agents, for how many editors, for what? My mind always goes back to a meeting I had with one agent in a bar that rotated in a circle around the bartender. That's what this enterprise is like. Going around and around in a circle. Trying to tell the truth about Porn Valley to people who do not want to hear it. I am inclined to believe a book that posits porn as bad would sell. I am inclined to believe a book that posits porn as good would not. I am inclined to believe a book that posits porn as neither good nor bad disturbs people. I can't say porn is good. I can't say porn is bad. I can tell you this disturbs people. So, after banging my head against that wall, I let that go. I began writing my novel. In writing it, I've come to believe I was unable to tell the truth about porn in nonfiction. Facts are not enough. As I wrote here recently, Happy contains elements of noir, cyberpunk, and sci-fi. It's like I've created a kind of alternative universe, parallel to our own but wildly exaggerated, because it's the only world I could find in which I could tell the truth about porn. By creating a world that doesn't exist. Sometimes I think that's the only way people can tolerate the true story of porn. Either way, I don't know what I know, but I have come to the conclusion the opinions of agents, editors, and publishers are like assholes. They all have one.

A masterpiece is like pornography: it is difficult to say what it is exactly and yet, as the Supreme Court judge once said of porn, I know it when I see it. I know that a masterpiece, like porn, excites me when I see it. I know that, like porn, it reveals something to me. I know that, like porn, it tends to avoid sentiment, which is another way of saying that it has deep connections to truth. I know that, like porn, a masterpiece can often be shocking or scandalous. I know that I not only know porn when I see it, I know the difference between good porn and bad — and a masterpiece is always like good porn. And above all I know that, just as porn makes me want to fuck, a masterpiece makes me want to create. It’s a stimulant, an incitement that does to the aesthetic sense what porn does to the libido. -- Supervert

X

I shot this photograph on a porn set in a house over the Sunset Strip. The girl didn't know me. The guy did. The guy said to the girl of me, She's OK. Then, I shot them. Later, he told me, She fucks like a man. I believed him. Last night, I watched "No Country for Old Men." Late to the party, I know, but, my god, what a party. It turned Texas into the moon. And it was food for thought for me. Especially in terms of it being about chance while I'm working on a novel about Mr. Chance. Anton Chigurh is awesome. I am pretty sure I want to marry him. Nothing like a psychopath to protect a girl from the world's more murderous impulses. Who knew a haircut could invoke so much terror? I yelped copiously. In reality, Chigurh is humanity, an endless, toiling surge that refuses to die. My girlfriend begged to differ. Yay! I've loitered on the sets of pornography. I know better. Now, the road of my life is turning back again, and what looks to be ahead would appear to be a kind overlapping. What happens when time collapses, reverse overlaps this? They're all signs, I suppose. It's up to me to figure out which way to go next. And: Nothing is real except chance.

He shook his head. You're asking that I make myself vulnerable and that I can never do. I have only one way to live. It doesn't allow for special cases. A coin toss perhaps. In this case to small purpose. Most people don't believe that there can be such a person. You can see what a problem that must be for them. How to prevail over that which you refuse to acknowledge the existence of. Do you understand? When I came into your life your life was over. It had a beginning, a middle, and an end. This is the end. You can say that things could have turned out differently. That they could have been some other way. But what does that mean? They are not some other way. They are this way. You're asking that I second say the world. Do you see?

Yes, she said, sobbing. I do. I truly do.

Good, he said. That's good. Then he shot her.

Was It a Dream?

Usually, I try and write a focused blog post because it enables me to engage in the delusion that I have control over my life, which is a ridiculous fantasy because, of course, I have none. Right now, I'm working on editing a portion of my novel-in-progress, Happy. It's an interesting experience, different from the pure--if such a thing is possible--creative act. Helpful, nevertheless. In late 2003, I relocated from Los Angeles to New Orleans. The purpose of that dramatic act--I'd never been to New Orleans before, much less the South, and I'd decided to do so on a whim two weeks previous--was to get out of Hell-Ay and write a novel based on my experiences in Porn Valley somewhere else. When I first got there, I stayed in a tiny room in a little B&B of sorts not far from the French Quarter. One of those nights, Richard Ford was on some terrible cable access show talking about how you had to be somewhere else to write about the place from whence you had come, so it seemed like a good idea, what I had done, at least to the gods who live inside the TV from whence they send you signs electronically. Not long after, I found a 1,000 square foot apartment on Esplanade, which borders the French Quarter. It had 15-foot-high ceilings, the biggest doors I'd ever seen, a balcony with a wrought-iron railing. In front of this converted old mansion was a giant Oak tree from which hung strands of forgotten beads from Mardi Gras past. There I started writing my novel. At that time, it was called something else, If Only These Hands Could Talk. I rode a pink bike along Bourbon Street. I made a billboard covered with inspirations. But, over time, that novel seemed to not so much not work but to unwork. It's central character was unhappy. And, I don't know, looking back, maybe I was, too. I thought I had left what was haunting me behind in LA. Instead, I think I brought it with me, inside of me. And, eventually, the novel fell apart. And then I did, too. As I've written here before, I had something of a nervous breakdown in early 2005, when I was living in another part of New Orleans, not far from where I had started, in the Bywater. I lived inside a pink shotgun not far from the Mississippi River. But this place was darker. The walls were a kind of moody gray-green. At night, I listened to the trains slamming their way down the tracks, shaking the house to its foundation. That's where, in the spring of 2005, I went crazy. And I gave up that version of the novel. I spent that hallucinatory summer reading The Divine Comedy, having imaginary conversations with people who weren't present, starting to wonder if there were things in this world that could not be explained, and began to envision another way to tell my story. The version of Happy that I'm working on today was born out of that summer in 2005, the summer after the spring I went crazy before August came and took everything, and me, away. After that, I came here, where I am today, and now I'm writing my story the only way I know how. As it turns out, that's from inside the mind of a madman named John Chance, a pornographer, a character who may be the only way I can bear to look at everything in my life that has come before this day. This version of my book has elements of psycho-noir, high-punk, and "Blade Runner." I don't know why. Does it matter? I don't know. But lately I've been thinking that I don't think so. In any case, it's all an evolution, isn't it? After all, I didn't set out to write this post about what happened in New Orleans. That is something that I do very, very rarely. But there I've gone and done it. So, thank you for reading it. I suppose you know who you are. Don't you? In any case, this is the quote that starts my novel. It's by Danilo Kiš and can be found, fittingly, in The Encyclopedia of the Dead. In a few weeks, my birthday is coming. And I can assure you, I never, ever thought that I would live this long. Surely, this is a posthumous life.

"Was it a dream? Was it the dream of a somnambulist, a dream within a dream, and hence more real than a real dream, since it cannot be measured against waking, since it cannot be measured by consciousness, because it is a dream from which one awakens into another dream? Or was it a god-like dream, a dream of time and eternity? A dream without illusions and doubts, a dream with its own languages and senses, a dream of both soul and body, a dream of consciousness and corporality both, a dream with clear-cut boundaries, with its own language and sound, a dream that is palpable, that can be explored with taste, smell, and hearing, a dream stronger than waking, a dream such as only the dead perhaps can dream, a dream that cannot be denied by a blade nicking the chin, for blood flows at once, and everything one does is but a proof of reality and waking; the skin bleeds in the dream as does the heart, the body rejoices in the dream as does the soul, there are no miracles in the dream other than life; the only way out of the dream is to awaken into death." -- Danilo Kiš

The Girl You Lost to Cocaine

While I was sleeping, my friend Melissa sent me an email entitled "is this...?" and a link to this, a Susannah Muxtape. "I hope that music is yours," she wrote. I didn't make it, and I don't know who did, but I had a strong reaction to it, and I am listening to it. Now, I have to go to work for 12 hours, but I'll be thinking about my novel while I do it. The next part I'm going to write is about Porn Valley. The place. Have you ever been there? I go there in my mind every day. Today, I will be there while I do this other thing I have to do, as I shuck and jive, as I bow so low my face touches the ground, so that no one ever sees me.

He gave me a silver ring
But I turned away
And he heard me say,
"Oh, he doesn't, he doesn't understand
I don't need riches to make me care;
Just a ribbon for my hair..."

Fuck You, Creative Process, I Win

Today was the first day since I started working on Happy, my novel-in-progress based on my experiences in Porn Valley, blah-fucking-blah, where I was stumped, stucked, whatevered. I did a lot of writhing and procrastinating, surfing the interneting and eating of potato salading, self-hating and then finally lying on my bed with my head stuck in my pillow, imagining myself into the head of my main character until I finally had some idea of where I could start with it. Time is not something I have a lot of due to other obligations, so I wanted to, you know, get with the fucking program and also not have to spend the night tossing and turning and wondering what the hell is wrong with me for the 45th time. I was trying to make a point here, but I have practically forgotten it. I wrote anyway, and it was OK, and then I got something good at the end that I wasn't expecting. Wow, that was my point? How anticlimactic. I think it seemed more interesting when I read this afterwards via Boing Boing. It's COOP writing about what happens when the art gets away from you and becomes something else altogether, something better. ("I felt like a safe cracker, listening through a stethoscope as the tumblers fell behind the steel door, locks clanking open to reveal...") By way of another example, you can see the creative process at play on the page in the image above, as well, which is from Graham Rawle's collagist Woman's World. ("I decided on Mr. Hands for my antagonist because the word hands is easy to come by in adverts for nail polish, soap powders, and the like. The name also describes his licentious, groping nature.") And here's Rutger Hauer talking about improvising tears in the rain. ("I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.") Art will make you believe in God, dammit, because how else can you fucking explain it? Chance? Fate? Destiny? At the end of my scene, I wrote something unexpected. As I wrote, the words written on the man I was writing about began to shift, to writhe, to move. Maybe this pornographer is the story itself, and the story I'm writing is one in which pornography comes to life.