The Common Man

I wrote more when I knew fewer writers. That’s just the truth of it.

I’m not saying that knowing writers or communicating with them is bad (well, I am kinda saying that but) but for me personally it makes me forget why I even started writing in the first place. Because it sure as hell wasn’t so some jumped-up MFA grad boy can shout “CRAFT!” at me every two seconds, or even so I could edit other peoples’ work or even to give talks on writing at all. I’ve touched on it before, but the only reason I ever picked up a laptop was to harass people. That’s the point, that’s the juicy spot. If I’m not harassing anyone, then the goodness of writing is lost on me.

Florida nostalgia from my recent trip down south.

All this to say that knowing writers and being around them overmuch drains the point. Because really, the common man is where it’s at. The guy who couldn’t tell first person plural from third person omni is the guy I wanna talk to about my writing.

“Tell me, Common Man, why isn’t my plot working? What’s going on with this character?” I ask him over a steaming plate of fries at Steak n Shake.

And Common Man will sniff it out every time, more reliable than a trained hog after truffles, and more straightforward than Craft McSentence Level on why he should be up for a Pulitzer. I miss my friend, Common Man. I don’t know him any more.

Back when I was in undergrad, when I was the DEFINITION of prolific, Common Man was my constant companion. That’s not to say Common Man was never knowledgeable in his own field—he could be a biologist or a waiter or a hostess or just a soon-to-be college drop out. He saw my blind spots. He sees yours too. He may not know what to call it, but I could always count on him to do a better job in talking light and straight than the average writer.

And I look on Twitter and cringe sometimes. I see these hashtags and this fucking DISCOURSE. Why the fuck do we have to have discourse? What does it have to do with writing? With storytelling? The writer’s head is so far up their own ass that they NEED Common Man to pull them out again, to gently wipe the shit from their eyes.

I remember going to Waffle House at 1 AM and looking at Common Man over coffee and pecan waffles.

“So, what’d you think of the story?” I asked him.

“The main character’s trying to fuck his friends.” Common Man inhaled a sausage link. “Sounds gay to me.”

“Yes, you’re right,” I said, tears in my eyes. “You’re so right.”

I love him. I miss him. I’m fairly lost without him.

A Female Deer

So I did have a request to talk about my latest (definitely) and greatest (hopefully) project.

For obvious reasons I cannot post a snippet, but I can post an elongated blurb that allows me to do three things at once: 1. procrastinate; 2. explore my feelings on it; 3. post the moodboard.

Here we go!

Picture it, kids: The lowlands of Tennessee. An autumn. A darkness more felt than seen. Mid-to-late-’90s when Walkmans were clipped to everybody’s hip and the cool kids listened to AFI. And nine high school boys all arrive by caravan to the mouth of the wildlife management area to begin the Doe Hunt of their generation.

The story follows Farley West, a 15-year-old long dismissed and regarded as less masculine than his peers. He’s ready to prove himself a real Young Buck to his friends, his dad, and, above all, his uncle who has been there for him since childhood. But when the Doe Hunt starts, his friends immediately turn on him and from the way they salivate and call him, "Doe," with those sugar-choked voices, Farley has a feeling that they aren't exactly looking to shoot him.

Here’s my glorious moodboard for it; it’s really hot so bring a cold Gatorade.

I have a lot of love for feminized boys/men; how their society tells them what they are because they seem to fit into a certain category by either personality or body type (twinks, for example), and how the guy himself responds to that. Is it easy to wear other people’s expectations when you’re conventionally attractive and you’re rewarded for fitting into the box? Is it heavy? Is it both at once and what does that mean for him? And does he ever resent being placed on a pedestal? How much is he thankful to the pedestal when he sees others struggling in the mud down below?

Because of all those things buzzing through me when I wrote this, they’re pretty prevalent themes in the manuscript. The amount of violence in this isn’t new or special for me, because I’ve done a lot of it before, but I think the speed at which it happens is rather novel for me specifically. The events in the main storyline happen over a weekend, and there’s a second stream that takes place throughout Farley’s life growing up in Red Creek.

My first novel took place in White Hill, which is the sister town of Red Creek, both separated by about fifteen miles of turnpike. If anyone starts a rumor that I want to build a world around these two towns a la Derry and Castle Rock, you let them know THEY’RE RIGHT.

I like familiarity, I like to have already been oriented in a story when I start writing it, and this is the best way for me. One of the main characters in this novel is also a satellite character in the first novel, which is nothing if not fun. I just want to get back to enjoying my goddamn writing life for once.

If I ever had a class of kids who asked me if I would recommend becoming a writer, I’d tell them fuck no. It’s awful and lonely and sad and you lose your innocent love for it. You gain a forced love for it, like a marriage you know you can’t exit, like one from the old days before women could divorce. You stew in it and have to live with it because if you don’t, people will say, “Well, what was it all for?”

So then you look around the room of your own and you see a little love. Something you can hold in your hand. You cup it carefully to try and keep the wind from blowing it out. It warms your face. And you remember the roaring firestorm of your youth and think, This will do. For now.

That’s this novel.

The Hole in Your Sex Scene

What the fuck’s wrong with you people?

… Okay, that’s not very nice. But it’s how I feel — and I have a lot of feelings about this hole business. I’m honestly flabbergasted whenever I see it, or maybe that isn’t even a strong enough word. Bamboozled? Is that stronger than flabbergasted? Will the world ever know?

Let’s take a step back. Let’s set the mood.

You’re feeling a little introverted tonight. Your roommates or family or dogs are either away or in another room. You’ve got a hot beverage beside you which works only as a temporary balm for the post-Christmas doldrums that have descended over your hemisphere. It’s cold outside, and dark. You’ve recently dived headfirst into a new fandom and have heard the fanfiction scene is lit, or so your white friend on Instagram says. You head over to AO3 and settle in for a night of steamy sex scenes with little to no plot because who gives a good goddamn, you just wanna imagine two hot guys going at each other like the world’s gonna end. You find a story, scan the first paragraph to make sure they can put a sentence together, and say to yourself: Good enough!

Everything’s coming up roses. The main characters find each other in the woods and are inexplicably horny. They give little consideration before tossing away their heterosexuality like ill-fitting uniforms and start rimming each other on the ground. Then—

It happens.

You see it.

And your once flooded basement shrivels painfully with the sudden lack of moisture.

Jojo slipped his fingers into Dio’s used hole…

Agh, God, why!? Why, Lord? Why would the writer do that? And you know, it’s not a sometimes thing, for people who don’t regularly debauch themselves. I’ve seen it in published novels too. I’ve honestly got no idea about why this is such a phenomena, because it’s universally awful.

And don’t @ me, okay, I’ve never done that shit. Even when I was FOURTEEN, I knew better. Holes are holes are holes, and we’ve all got them on our bodies, but first of all they do have NAMES. You don’t call what you breathe through your nose hole, do you, you degenerate? What about your food hole? Hear holes?! How ridiculous does that sound in normal tone? Now you wanna throw it into something sexy? The hell’s wrong with you?

Sexy is subjective, I get it. I’m the first one to say it. But who honestly thinks of a hole and thinks, Ooh la la?

Big holes.

Gaping holes.

Sinkholes.

It’s all either ridiculous or disgusting. Where did young girls learn this kind of language? Is there no such thing as finishing school anymore? Where are the goddamn debutantes?

It’s an easy enough fix. You literally do not have to say hole. The human imagination and context of a reader is what helps your writing along. We know what you mean when you say:

Jojo slipped his fingers into Dio.

That’s literally all you have to do. Take words out and it instantly becomes better. Readers around the world will be thankful. I’ve had tons of girls compliment my sex scenes because, as filthy as they can be, they don’t require the flicker of an image of a character fucking SPELUNKING.

Motivation, or: What I Talk About When I Talk About 2005

Picture it: Nashville, TN, 2005. A young black girl has recently discovered soft-core porn and her parents don’t know she has access to Skinemax on her bedroom TV. She's new to the area. Her love of Yugioh is in full swing. She has a chalkboard on her wall full of fanfiction titles, plots unknown. She’s often naked and wears plaits. She writes and she loves to write, with no real expectation of the activity besides happiness and fun. She will not live forever.

Lasses and lads, that young black girl was me.

And that unmolested love of writing is… gone.

That’s not to say it’s always gone. It does come back every once in a while. A glimmer of it, or a ghost only hinted at on the edge of a photograph. It’s hard to touch, anyway, and it doesn’t like to be touched. I haven’t been that girl in so long.

The hardest part of writing, we think, is motivation. Which isn’t wrong, it is hard to find time enough and inspiration enough but I think the crux of it is finding love enough.

Back in those days, I had enough love for 1,000 yaoi girls. I just enjoyed it so damn much and lately I’ve been trying to examine why. Why don’t I feel that way anymore? It’s hard to put your finger on if you don’t admit to yourself why you write or have ever written in the first place. Why did you ever start?

For me, it’s easy.

I do it to harass people.

That’s as straightforward as I can be. And there’s no open forum I can really voice all my opinions in, so it’s a good thing I paid for my own domain, eh? Yeah, I like harassing people with my writing, always have. That’s what got me started, what kept me going, and posting, and amassing readers. I’ve had legit thousands of people subbed to me and I was delighted to be able to write just outrageous, disgusting, ridiculous things and have people show up week after week to read and respond to it.

Let’s take it past fanfiction — when I started writing original, I was in undergrad, attending my first fiction writing class with the great Dr. Mini. I was scared shitless but there was this fire in me: look, new people to harass! I glanced around the room shiny-eyed, salivating. What a great opportunity.

I remember, specifically, my second fiction writing class at MTSU where one of the other students was a total prude. He, for some reason, despised anything with sex in it. He simply was not having it, dahling. So I latched onto that and wrote about sex the entire semester, going so far as to start off a story with it and I drank in his discomfort like an aged Italian wine.

Fast-forward to now.

What am I now?

• an adult

• usually alone at home

• writing original

• barred from sharing original work outside of sending it to editors because putting it online suddenly makes it unpublishable

• ergo no one but editors reads my stuff

So what does that mean?

I HAVE NO REAL REASON TO WRITE.

It’s cause and effect. I know you’re supposed to want to write for yourself, for your -gag- ART, oh Jesus save me from ART, but fuck man, do you know what this does to me? I have no one to harass, It’s like a predator alone on a desert island with no sheep to eat. I’m dying, oh, I’m dying.

And my agent wonders why my next book is taking so long, but that’s another post.

…

No, fuck it, it’s THIS post! I’m lovely and lonely and I belong deeply to myself and I don’t want to. At this point, the only way I motivate myself into writing and finishing this goddamn book is by sheer force and threatening but there is no JOY in it. Writing is joyless for me now and so when I think back to 2005, what was arguably the height of my fervor for writing, I don’t just think of the scene and emo kids, the Death Note AMVs, the long nights spent on MSN while rewatching the L death scene, the Hot Topic trips, discovering masturbation, the hot Tennessee summers, the ice cream sandwiches, the giant house shoes I wore, my hair in long braids, the sound of a locker door slamming, ringing down an empty hallway, a Snickers bar melting in my hand.

I think, I wish I could love it again.

The Sisterhood of Fandom, or: How We Ate Each Other

Like some other women writers my age, I came up through the fandom circuit. I feel like that’s hard to say—and I know a lot of you will deny your own involvement in it and let me just stop you there, because I know you were right beside me: those long nights on FFN, trying to hide explicit material from your family, searching for ungodly things on DA, hanging in the lull of LJ, the prompts, the yule exchanges, the launch of A03 and the horrors that awaited us there, and your modesty washing off you like loose dirt against the tide, year after year, a dissolution, a devolvement, a triumph of camaraderie, and always, always waiting for the next comment. Like a roller-coaster. Like a drug-fueled delusion.

My point is you’re my sister, and I love and hate you like a sister.

The list of fandoms I’ve been attracted to is long and we don’t have time for it. Instead, I’ll list fandoms I’ve actively participated in, starting with the grand majesty, Yugioh, or Yuugiou (if you’re insufferable). That came first and might as well have been the last for the way I long for its simplicity. I was 13 - 17 when I went through it, but 17 was hazy as I started phasing into my next big thing, Death Note. I mean, fuck, we all remember that, right? It was our nightmare. It was our salvation. FFN was our Somme.

DN lasted, I don’t know, until maybe I was 20. Three years seems to be prominent. Then there was the dry spell, the I don’t know years, where I was little more than a piece of algae in the Pacific. The time went by slow, anyway. What came after that was a real nipple-twister. The thing is, I’m not exactly proud to have been affiliated with the Hannibal fandom, and maybe that’s because it wasn’t too long ago. From ages 24 to about 25 and a half. It was really a short amount of time, but I wrote for it like a madwoman and I watched the fandom in its death throes after the show itself got canceled by the network.

And this is where we are. Let me tell you how I feel about our childhood home.

I was and always will be a proponent of fandom being a haven for women and girls. And yes, when I say women and girls, that’s who I mean. I’m not saying that boys can’t be involved in fandom, they can do whatever they damn well please, but you’d have to be an idiot to not realize these things have been built and carried by a very specific group of people for years. People who organize shit and write shit and draw shit and make sure there are extracurricular things to enjoy. Way back when, that was us and girls before me and girls before them. Girls go wild. Literally. Elvis wouldn’t have been shaking his pelvis so much if girls weren’t throwing money at him and fainting in the front row. Women will show out for shit. I also feel like it’s an important coven where women are allowed to be fucking filthy sexual creatures. We write our own porn for each other because men legit do not know how. They don’t even know what’s sexy about themselves to relay it to us. So yes, in that sense, yay, fandom.

And in another sense, fuck fandoms! Holy shit, they bring out the worst in people. I’m in support of them for being a haven for women to sexually express themselves but then they disperse and form ship cliques and send death threats to people who ship things they don’t think should be shipped. Ideology becomes a factor, which was something prevalent in Hannibal fandom. People would actually get angry if a story didn’t have a HEA, because “Will and Hannibal deserve happiness and my life sucks right now and all I want is some fluff!” … Really, Mary? Fuck their happiness and fuck your fluff. It’s not like there aren’t LITERAL HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of fanfiction on AO3 alone you could read. Or, you know, you could write your own. There’s a novel idea.

I’m highly aware that some of these are early 00’s era lingo. I’m fucking 29.

[Lingo chart for the fandom impaired:

• Ship: a relationship with two or more characters romantically/sexually involved

• HEA: happily ever after

• PWP: plot what plot, or porn without plot, meaning it’s just an excuse to write a sex scene

• AMV: anime music video

• Fuck off: fuck off]

Here’s how it usually goes down, in terms of eras:

1. Creation: The fandom is created and all is well. The show/movie/media has been launched successfully and found an audience that’s not only loving it but wanting more and so, they create more. They find places to congregate such as Tumblr (fuck them) and Pinterest (they’re okay) and Instagram (cool) and Twitter (can’t even). Fanfiction starts with “missing scenes” from the source material, general PWPs, wherein fangirls suspect the characters could be fucking. There’s lots of instances of lube hiding in under a tree trunk in the woods. People are feeling it out.

2. Factions: The separation begins. Oil is spilled into the calm water. Ship A and Ship B rise as the top two interests. Fangirls who don’t identify with either of the king pairings make little nests for their favorites who are less lauded. Satellite pairings. Fanfiction moves into its next phase, which is exploring AUs and taking more liberties with its source material. Followings for specific fanfictions begin, as this era is when the bigger ones take hold, things that are 40ish chapters. AMVs are plentiful. It’s a good time for all.

3. Disaster: Chaos. Malignancy. Generally speaking, this era is just not good. People get overly excited in what they deem is right and wrong and the fandom begins to deconstruct. More and more people flood the fandom, people who are out to just ruin other’s good times. This is usually when a -gate happens, something that a couple fans do that ruins the name of the whole fandom. Examples are Steven Universe, Creepypasta, Rupaul’s Drag Race. Either linked to doxxing, harassment, death threats, ACTUAL KILLING. Delinquency. Is online delinquency a phrase? Let’s make it one.

4. Surreal: I know this sounds like a good era but really it’s worse than Disaster in some ways. This occurs when there’s no new source material being pumped out by the creator. People start making fanficton of fanfiction and we start to Russian nesting-doll ourselves. This happened back in Hannibal and I still have war flashbacks, I still hear the bass of the bombs going off in the distance, as I watched some of the most ludicrous stuff being pumped out. Steam is lost. People go on not because it’s fun anymore but because their skeleton demands it of them. Joyless and unnerving. A ghost ship passing you by in the night.

Now, let me say this. Throughout each of these phases, new girls are discovering the show or movie or what have you and they are experiencing that first magical era anew. It’s always Creation Era for some girls and that’s a great thing. It’s a thing I hope I can always remember when I’m frankly horrified by the way fans reduce each other and hate each other over imaginary people.

I know what you’re wondering.

You look at your screen and think, ‘Is Robyn in a fandom now? Is she experiencing Creation Era anew? Or is she bitterly coming to Surreal somewhere?’

The answer to all your questions is always yes. I’m always experiencing some era of some fandom because I eat content for breakfast, lunch and dinner. I even produce for a fandom, although that’s not something I’m going to wave around like a flag. I still participate, but on a smaller scale, and I only ever produce for small hidden things. You get old, you get tired of it. You’re happy for the little ones who dance and sing and frolic, and sometimes you do the same, but it’s never really like that first time. I’ll never rush home from school again and throw my bag down, run to my computer to check comments and start writing while I talk to my friends on MSN or AIM.

But other girls will, do, are. I wish it could be Creation and Faction for everyone, forever, and in a way, if you tilt your head and squint, it kind of is.