Bye, Atus

I'm baaaaack...
Okay, so I'm two days early. And my mission to get something in the mail en route to publication, fame, and fortune has hit a little snag. I still think it something of a minor miracle that I (mostly) managed a month without blogging. Even more surprising, to me at least, was that I rarely even thought about blogging, or regretted not blogging. It's certainly easy to fall out of habit.
My story, tentatively titled "Sleeping Like The Undead", is about two-thirds done. It concerns a couple (much like Eva and I in an alternate universe: all my couples tend to be) who go out and buy a bed ("write what you know!") only to find it turns certain people into vampires. The premise, I grant you, sounds flatly ridiculous. But I happen to believe that one mark of a good story is convincing a reader to accept the flatly ridiculous. Stephen King is a master at that sort of thing, and while I am no Stephen King, I'd like to think I've learned something from the man.

Like King, I believe that stories are not so much created as they are uncovered. When I set out to write a story--or a blog entry, for that matter--I almost never know how it's going to end, except maybe in the vaguest of terms. Heck, sometimes I don't even know what's in the middle.

This vampire bed story zipped along tickety-boo until I realized I was going to have to write (gasp!) a sex scene.

There's no getting around it. There's no considering getting around it. It didn't occur to me at the outset, but as I dug up more and more chunks of story, it slowly dawned on me that a sex scene was going to serve as a crucial plot point.
And then I got to that crucial plot point, and froze. Shit, I thought, I don't even have the slightest clue how to write this.
Oh, a boilerplate sex scene I could envision in my sleep...and often do, ha-ha. But it is required that this sex scene be (a) plausibly "hot" (not necessarily explicit, but arousing) and (b) written from a female perspective.
The first stipulation's not that difficult, if I'm writing for a male audience. Just ask any woman: it's pathetically easy to excite a man. But (b)'s got me utterly flummoxed. I've read everything from fluffly Harlequins in which the descriptive power yields an uncontrollable urge to laugh hysterically--"he thrust his purple-helmeted warrior into her moist cavern of love"--all the way up through Black Lace and Herotica to Nancy Friday (whose supposedly non-fictional catalogues of woman's fantasies are, quite frankly, disturbing). None of this has given me a handle on writing a believable sex scene from a woman's point of view.

Once upon a time, a whole three months ago, this situation would have resulted in my putting the story aside and donning the "see? see? you'll never be a writer" hairshirt for the umpteenth time. Now it means a little pause while I consider my options. Remove the sex scene and I might as well firebomb the whole tale. I tried writing it from the husband's point of view, which was much easier but just didn't work in context. I can only see one viable option remaining: lower my expectations. Maybe I can't get every woman who reads my story to feel lusty, but I can poll my wife on her favourite sex scenes and write something that will affect her just a little bit.

Meantime, I'll be going to the library some time in the next little while to peruse a copy of Writer's Market. My stories, both "Sleeping Like The Undead" and "Market Share" (check the index at left for July 2006: it's a story in five parts) will be residing in slush piles long before we see slush piles out the window.

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Not much happening in the real world of late. The Sleep Number bed has yet to arrive our house...the one they shipped us from Ottawa or wherever showed up at the Sleep Country warehouse damaged, so its brother's coming next weekend.
I'm back on night shift, after much agitation. (Days are unbearably agitating, and so I agitated our District Manager until he forced our store manager to reinstate the night crew.) Eva's almost done the final volume of Harry Potter, which got here at ten o'clock (I'd be neck-deep in it right now myself if she hadn't slept for a couple of hours before embarking on it). I'm also reading Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, a weighty tome that is by turns fascinating and almost impossibly boring--the catch is that it can be both on the same page.

Hey, I did a blog.

*smile*