Thursday, January 24, 2019

Goodbye but Hello


Zestful Blog Post #300

Before I get into this post, I want you to know I’ll be teaching online this coming Saturday, January 26, in the Writer's Digest Virtual Conference for Novelists. Mine is the kickoff slot, at 1 p.m. My one-hour presentation will be “Supercharge Your Plot.” This is the earliest notice I can give, which I know isn’t much. But we’ll have a good time, so consider joining me and the other fine presenters. I might also note that Royal Caribbean canceled the sail date of the mystery-writing / forensics cruise I was so excited about, due to mechanical issues with the ship and drydock conflicts. But we’re hoping to reschedule that trip, again in partnership with Royal Caribbean and GoTravel.

On to today’s business.

I’ve been blogging weekly for almost six years now, ever since You’ve Got a Book in You launched. And I’ve been thinking of taking a break, or ending the blog permanently. One’s life has seasons. I feel the need to spend more time creating other stuff, doing different things. And as I watched post #300 approach, I thought such a nice round number would be a good place to conclude, or at least pause, this blog. Zestful Writing has led to a lot of cool interactions, both in the comments section and via email, and I’ll miss that. Writing a weekly essay also makes you come up with ideas, think through your points and support them, and write as clearly and concisely as you can. That’s been valuable.


But thinking up a weekly post, writing it, making a photograph or sketch (or finding a free image on line), cropping and editing that image, uploading the whole thing and responding to comments—all that takes up my writing time and energy for a day per week. That’s a pretty big commitment. I intend to make a book from the best of these posts, after I get through some more projects.

Which, yeah. Having given a lot of consideration to the questions I posed in last week’s post (Zestful Blog Post 299), I know I need to write more books at a brisker pace. Need to explore my fictional worlds further, and invent new ones. I want to write more nonfiction, including more good stuff for writers, and I want to teach more workshops, both in person and online. I need to simplify things where I can. As I’ve noted here before, one’s time is a zero-sum game, and our days on this earth are finite. If you know what your mission is, it’s a sin not to serve that mission. I intend to put out my newschats a bit more frequently, so if you’d like to keep up with me and all forthcoming work, please be sure you’re on that list, which is a different list from this blog. Sign up HERE.

I guess one should never say never, so who knows but what I might start this blog up again someday. But for now, farewell. Do stay tuned via the newschat, because I want to keep in touch with you. After all, you’re why I’m here.
Love,
Elizabeth

What do you think? To post, click below where it says, ‘No Comments,’ or ‘2 Comments,’ or whatever. If you’re having trouble leaving comments on this or other blogs, it’s probably because third-party cookies have been turned off in your browser. Go into your browser settings and see if that’s the case. Then turn them on again in order to leave comments. [Photo by ES]

Thursday, January 17, 2019

A Pretty Good Use


Zestful Blog Post #299

This post is dedicated to Katy Deutermann, who last Saturday passed from this life to the next after a sudden fierce illness. She was an avid reader of this blog and a fan of my books. And along with her husband Steve, she was a special and much-admired friend. Hi, Steve. (Who remains a special and much-admired friend.)

Most of us have lost comrades/acquaintances at a young age. A few of our schoolmates, perhaps, didn’t live to see their 20th birthday. Grandma and Grandpa go, then our parents. Along the way, you lose a friend or two before their time. God forbid you ever lose a child. Then the losses accelerate. And you realize, well, at some point I’m gonna be next.


And you think:
·       What am I doing?
·       What am I really doing?
·       What am I supposed to be doing?
·       Whose company do I cherish the most?
·       Who do I want to share a table with?
·       What is a quality life?

The seasons of life—and of work—come and go. Nobody gets it perfect. And that’s as beautiful as perfection itself. What’s a pretty good use of today?

What do you think? To post, click below where it says, ‘No Comments,’ or ‘2 Comments,’ or whatever. If you’re having trouble leaving comments on this or other blogs, it’s probably because third-party cookies have been turned off in your browser. Go into your browser settings and see if that’s the case. Then turn them on again in order to leave comments. [Photo by ES.] Thanks for looking in.

Thursday, January 10, 2019

Writing Queer


Zestful Blog Post #298

[This week’s blog is a meaty excerpt from my article in the current Writer’s Digest magazine, February, 2019.]

I didn’t know it, but I was mentally ill until about age 16. Anybody queer was considered mentally ill until 1973, when the American Psychiatric Association removed the diagnosis of homosexuality as a disorder (though ‘sexual orientation disturbance’ endured in the DSM until 1987). Like millions of LGBT children and adults, I knew I was different, and not in a socially acceptable way. We didn’t even know there were millions of us. We thought maybe we were the only one.

Back then, a person who wanted or needed to explore the queer lifestyle had to be extremely circumspect in their hunt for information and validation. The words queer, fag, homo, and lezzie were dreaded slurs, used by even young children who didn’t know what the words meant.

The word “queer,” however, has emerged as an acceptable term for any kind of alternative sexuality or sexual orientation. LGBT, which stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender, is the clunky yet useful initialism that surfaced in the 1990s. The addition of Q, meaning queer, includes pretty much any sexual/gender variation, including intersexual, asexual, cross-dressing. Not everybody agrees to these shorthand helpers, but in the interest of simplicity, I’m using queer here as an all-inclusive term.

Porn shops, peep shows, and underground bars, of course, were early refuges and—sad to say—cultural centers for queers. But if you were young, you were kept out, and if you were of age, you risked exposure, with whatever consequences, from arrest for ‘perversion,’ to expulsion from school or work, to ostracism by family, friends, peers.

Enter literature. You figured maybe there were books that captured the experience, right? So, alone, you hunted through library card catalogues and the stacks, looking for something—anything—to read. If you didn’t feel safe bringing a book to the librarian to stamp and check out for you, you stood in the stacks and read it there, shifting from foot to foot, ready to jam the book back into the shelf if anybody came by. Whatever books, that is, you could find.

What is queer literature? Basically, anything in which the main character or characters are queer, and where a queer lifestyle is featured, where queer concerns are addressed. Coming-out stories were, and remain, popular.

Why is queer lit even a thing? Because people are tribal; readers are tribal. We like to read about characters who reflect us because it’s a way we can learn how to deal with life and its challenges. Queer readers had been mentally editing / head-editing the novels they read for years, changing one character or another’s sex in their minds. Highly unsatisfying—and totally beside the point of queer existence.

The roots of modern queer literary themes can be found in classical mythology. Some of the gods enjoyed emotionally close relationships with male pals, for whom they would kill or commit vengeful mayhem. Apollo, especially, was quite close with Carnus, Hyacinth, and Cyparissus. Herakles (or Hercules) cared deeply for Aberdus, Hylas, and especially Iolaus, who helped Hercules prevail against the multi-headed Hydra.

Moving forward in time we find the Satyricon (1st century A.D.), a fictitious work by the Roman courtier Gaius Petronius, and The Tale of Genji (11th century) by Murasaki Shikibu. These works included frank depictions of male/male relationships, after which queer themes more or less went underground—that is, they were disguised or hidden in story elements, for centuries. An example can be found in Dracula (1897) by Bram Stoker, when Count Dracula seizes Jonathan Harker with the cry, “This man belongs to me!” In the seafaring novel Billy Budd, begun in the late 1800s by Herman Melville and first published in 1924, there’s a possible homosexual triangle involving Billy, Claggart, and Captain Vere.

Queers hunting for a literary hero might have come across Oscar Wilde (1854-1900). You found a career of literary talent and accomplishment, but then you looked into his life, and wow. “Gross indecency,” they called it. Prison time, they gave him. He died penniless.

Women interested in exploring same-sex relationships had to look harder, and there wasn’t much to find. You had the fragmentary poetry of Sappho (c. 630-570 B.C.). Maybe you came across Radclyffe Hall’s depressingly-titled The Well of Loneliness (1928), wherein the main character, Stephen Gordon (a woman), is arguably suicidal by the end, though she doesn’t quite get around to it onscreen, as it were.

Then maybe you read about Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, guardians of the Paris avant-garde in the Jazz Age. Well, what was that relationship about? Hm. Super hard to tell. Then you read Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast and you came across a little passage of dialogue that appears to record an overheard quarrel between two lady perverts. Great. Just great.

Sadly, due to cultural standards and expectations—we were all mentally ill, remember?—the queer characters had to die, or more ideally, kill themselves out of shame. Lovely.

A few examples out of hundreds:
Carmilla (1871-72), the title character in Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s serially-published novel;
Martha Dobie in The Children’s Hour (1934), play by Lillian Hellmann;
Sebastian Venable in Suddenly Last Summer (1958), play by Tennessee Williams (among other Williams characters who get killed off or at least humiliated for being different);
Brig Anderson in Advise and Consent (1959), novel by Allen Drury.

In mid-century American queer literature, Tennessee Williams keeps cropping up, especially with his play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955). The gorgeous character Brick doesn’t love his wife, the equally gorgeous Maggie—why not? There was this guy, this football teammate of Brick’s named Skipper. Brick and Skipper. Something there. But what, exactly? Maybe even they didn’t know. Skipper killed himself. OK, yeah. Read between the lines, friend.

Many good writers wrote closeted—about sexually ambiguous characters, with some between-the-lines stuff in there. Truman Capote and his Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948) might be an example. Patricia Highsmith edged into queer themes with her series of five books (1955-1991) featuring the character Tom Ripley, who appears to at least be bisexual, if not homosexual. She wrote a frankly queer-themed novel, The Price of Salt (1952) early in her career, but under the pseudonym Claire Morgan.

Contemporary queer lit is inextricably tied to the gay pride movement that ignited with the Stonewall uprising in New York City in 1969, named after the bar where members of the queer community rebelled against the police, who routinely raided such places and racked up arrests on ‘indecency’ charges and other crimes. Stonewall was a watershed moment that led to the LGBT rights movement.

Rights were fought for, rights were gradually won, and queers could come out a little more. There we were, blinking in the sunlight. More visibility meant more opportunity to get queer literature out there.
[End of excerpt. For the full article, which discusses the emergence of modern queer works as well as the current scene, hustle out to your local newsstand or go to www.writersdigest.com.]

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Thursday, January 3, 2019

Bald Patches


Zestful Blog Post #297

[I constructed the following story from usages and spellings I found while browsing on Reddit. If you’re not familiar with Reddit, it is the current most interesting social media platform, and happens to be populated largely by guys in their teens and 20s.]

I was watching the playoffs when an ad came on for some new car. The main person in the ad was a famous movie star who has turned into nothing but a corporate shrill. You know who I’m talking about: stalky build, wearing a sole patch, which are so last week, right? His last picture was a real dousey, take my word for it. I do recall when it came out, I made a B-line for the theater because I use to think he was cool. Before I got there, though, I stopped at an ATM machine to get money to buy a ticket, but I forgot my PIN number. After racking my brain for like 10 minutes, I remembered it. Later, I wrote my PIN number on my ATM card as a preventative measure against forgetting it again.

Let me just tell you about that movie, which starts with a grizzly crime where some guy stabs a college sorodity girl because she wouldn’t go out with him. It all seemed realistic, so I figured the movie wouldn’t be to bad. It seems the killer’s mom tried to reign him in, but she was a baffoon, and just couldn’t control him. She must have weighed 100 pounds soak and wet. Plus she didn’t understand her son very well and what he was up against in this fast pace, doggy-dog world we live in. The murderer keeps leaching off his mom, borrowing money to buy drugs, even while the cops are figuring out who did it. There’s another friend who tries to ween him off the drugs with no success.



The hero cop starts to hone in on where this guy lives, which is a coldasack at the end of a long street of nice houses. They intercept a message that the murderer sends to the government, trying to black male them into paying money to stop a bomb or something. This doosh thinks he’s going to pick up a fortune from the government to keep him from blowing up a kindergarden. Then there was something about too much partizenship in the government, but I somewhat lost track. I almost walked out of the show at this point, but I wanted to be polight to the ticket-taker whose this really pretty girl who was in my art class and who told me she highly reckon mended it. I use to be scared of talking to her, but now that I’m more mature, it was EZ-PZ. By the way, have I ever mentioned I’m a conasuer of movie-theater popcorn? Even though I’m lack toast and tolerant, I can eat movie popcorn because there’s not real butter on it, but it tastes like it. Another words, sometimes fake can be good.

OK, so somehow the cop figures out that the killer and his squad car partner are one in the same. A bunch of other stuff happens in a world wind of action, with the proverbeal apoclyeptic shoot out. Plus the killer cops’ mom commits sewer-side because she’s so sad and blames herself. That’s as much as I can remember.

I told the pretty ticket-taker Noah fence, but I don’t agree with your feelings about the movie. She was cool about it. Maybe we should get married. I’m a pretty funny guy. Wouldn’t it be hirlaous if I asked her and she said yes?

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