Sex in my Fiction

In Of Wings and Sapwood, I think it’s pretty obvious that sex represents love.  The story can’t but be about love; they are all falling in love with one another, the three angels and Jane; some have past relationships, some present, some are destined to be together;  they have sex all the time.  Jane and Rue act out something that’s been mising from both of their lives.  Rue’s heart has been broken ever since he gave in to fear and pushed away the only man he ever loved.

Dan and Samuel find joy in each other’s bodies.  Samuel still loves Rue, and there is a part of his heart that Dan cannot touch.

Each one is “helping” the others.  Jane was sent to them all, and they were sent to her.  Just bringing Jane into the household turns their worlds upside.

My own experience with love and sex comes out in everything I write.  I have fallen in love through sex in all of my primary relationshops — even, to an extent, Dan.  I somethines think I”m working out my own neuroses in my writings.  This is particularly true in the violent stories.  Poor Evan Colson — what a decision he has to make.  And how I love to see him pushed into it.

Of Wings and Sapwood

This is the name of the story!  I had a hard time with the second word, because I wanted it to be part of a tree, and at first the logical choice seemed to be roots.  But besides sounding trite, it sounded predictable. 

So I researched “parts of a tree” and discovered the wonderful word heartwood:

As a tree grows, older xylem cells in the center of the tree become inactive and die, forming heartwood. Because it is filled with stored sugar, dyes and oils, the heartwood is usually darker than the sapwood. The main function of the heartwood is to support the tree.

Support the tree!  It shall be called Of Wings and Heartwood, and in addition to the reference to Jane’s strength we are rewarded with the reference to love.  But is sounded awkward.  I went back to the tree parts page.

Cambium: a tree’s growing layer; cells form here to form both bark and wood

This is Jane!  I cried.  Her strength and her scaly surface come from the same place.  Wait, what?  And it sounds silly.

The xylem, or sapwood, comprises the youngest layers of wood. Its network of thick-walled cells brings water and nutrients up from the roots through tubes inside of the trunk to the leaves and other parts of the tree. As the tree grows, xylem cells in the central portion of the tree become inactive and die. These dead xylem cells form the tree’s heartwood.

This is more like it.  This layer is what allows the tree to grow; sap flows, and everybody knows what it is.  (Everybody being a euphamism for my readers.)

YES, AND!

God speaks to me through my pen.

I’ve done it again! I’ve written another story about God! I thought Angel Tree was just a fun tale about a lady meeting three celebs and sleeping with them, and I thought the angel stuff was just corny feel-good, move-the-story-along stuff, but no. This story is about love and prayer and steadfastness and trusting and embracing life instead of trying to die. And the word “God” appears over and over. God dam. Oh, God. One person’s prayer can affect four lives, and more, since Jane and the angels have learned lessons.  God answers prayer by putting our teachers in front of us.

**  So today I did extensive revisions, mostly to get the three “real” celebs out of the story.  I wound up changing a lot more than that.  The piece is now ready to be shown to an agent.

Angel Tree

Spoiler alert.

Jane Cornwell has lived in the Outer Banks all her life, suffered every possible loss, and still can’t pull up by the roots and go somewhere else.  She revisits the pain while learning how to keep it from happening again.

The story of thousands, right?

And she winds up finding love, right?

From an angel?

I love this story.  I love it.  It’s gush and maudlinity told in spare language.  It was written start to finish and minimally edited.  It is Fan Fiction, and whether it’ll be changed for publication attempts or just reread for years by me is an open question.  In the story, Stephen Colbert, Jon Stewart, and Paul Dinello, all magically ummarried, are in Duck, NC for a week, originally to finish a writing project but latterly to say To hell with writing and just have a cold spring visit to the beach.

Somebody must have said a prayer.  They meet Jane Cornwell and each of the four is infused with a reckless spirit.  People are getting both wounded and healed by other people’s words — not to mention the power of love.  Especially Unexpected Love.  And that includes a lot of sex.

Jane is forty, plain,  apparently not curvaceous (since she was mistaken for a man), and “addicted” to a rigid time schedule that includes rigorous exercise and a job involving keeping things in order.   She is confined by her roles as daughter and wife, though she has been neither for over ten years.

And all this is, of course, learned gradually.  Oh my.  I really love this story.

Why hurt Colt so bad?

I wonder if my life’s experiences are the matrix for the evil I write about.  If so, then it should be my life’s experience also that love burns it away and shrieves my characters. There is no level of evil equal to the power of God, of Love — the Creator and destroyer.

This is all at bottom a result of my relationships with Dan and Harley.  I would be incomplete without these guys.

I don’t regret posting this .. .

I’m just sorry my own kid saw fit to be publicly embarrassed.

Seriously, I think mothers should nip this in the bud.  I sure as hell wasn’t beaten at soccer in a hotel room in 1982.  And it’s not just me.  Hundreds of people could be offended.  Others could be emotionally upset.

Grace? Humility?

 

I think our Highest Good is in being a channel of God’s Will in somebody else’s life.  The times I’ve experienced this have been my greatest states of Grace.  It didn’t matter to me afterward whether the other person liked me, gave me credit, or even knew that I was the “source” because the channeling was the only important part of the transaction to me, and it was a gift to realize that I was found worthy. 

 

This reminds me of something I sometimes share with other alcoholics.  I can’t call myself humble because if I say I am that means I’m not; but I know what humility feels like because I’ve had it twice, for about fifteen minutes each time, and I was stamped with Indelible Ink (God as Editor metaphor?) by the experience.

In which Bentley stands up, Dan eats vegetables, and a poet is reborn

Another old post from MSN.  Note the year.  This was one of the greatest nights of my life.

From: Bentley  (Original Message)

4/5/2005 9:29 PM

I wrote a poem about the death of my father.  It was about Dad, dedicated to Jack McCarthy, and addressed to Dan.   It was my first specifically performance poem, and I read it to Dan at an open mike, kind of like, reading this to that bearded scholar guy back there, glad the rest of you are here.  I asked Dan to stand with me, and he stood, but he didn’t come to the podium.  After I was done, I was returning to my seat and Jack stood and embraced me.  I was hugged in public, in front of a whole bunch of other poets, by a nationally-known performance poet and poetry slammer.  It rocked.    And Brad got to see it!  I hadn’t known until I read it online that that’s why Brad didn’t perform Orange Gloves, because he didn’t want to follow me.  That blew me away.  Part of my reason for going there was to see him do that poem.   Dan and I fell more deeply in love.  Well, I did.  he drove home, and I fed him nuts and bit the ends off cucumbers for him, and we recited poems to each other, our own and those of Wordsworth, Blake, Cummings, Yeats, Millay, et al,  on the whole ride back from Mohegan Lake, NY, across the Hudson on the Bear Mountain Bridge and down the Parkway that’s named for those cliffs, and through the dark to Green Brook, where I slept in his arms for two and a half hours, rising at 4am to drive to work.  A long ride before sunrise, with my window down, and I recited poems over and over and over, seeing which ones responded well to Bentleyesque storytelling voice.    Would that life were made up of such nights.

Is it immoral to celebrate a person’s death?

What I told my nephew in answer to his question.

Will, don’t ever Google-Image Benito Mussolini’s remains. Talk about a celebration. I agree that death shouldn’t be celebrated, but only because collective life well lived would never make it necessary to hunt down and kill an individual. While it’snot my fault specifically that Osama bin Laden made the choices he did, it’s on mankind in general, and espcially everybody who believes they haven’t done enough to prevent war. I take respsonsibility for the hit, and I say that with no disrespect to the Navy SEALS. It is what it is. I never did anything to prevent the events that led up to it. That’s why I want to see the photos. I want to loook at his ruined head and tell God I’m sorry.

Just. Don’t. Argue.

I did something I’ve rolled my eyes (I hope privately) at other people for doing.  I got into an academic argument on a message board, and clearly I pissed one person off really bad.  She (I thought until tonight it was a he) not only disagreed but found it necessary to make a number of snide, condescending personal comments, including such suggestions as I didn’t know the situation so I shouldn’t be talking, and I shouldn’t talk about a woman jerking a man around when I myself was talking bawdily.  I sent her a private message responding to some of it, but she kept on until I got mad.  So far, she has the last word, but it’s hurting me, dude.  I wouldn’t care whether she was wrong if she hadn’t insulted me on the board.  I have to let go of this, and most of all I have to stop talking to her.