How the Erotic Readers and Writers Association Storytime list helps me to write

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On how long it takes to get into print and the circuitous routes for getting there

With the universe’s typically skewed sense of timing, at the very point when my work life is at the most precarious and stressful that it’s been in years, getting work published seems to be getting easier.

I explained on my last post that my first anthology of short stories, “Writing Naked”, went into print this week. I’ve also heard that I’ve had stories taken up for two other anthologies: “Santa Claws” a comic Christmas fantasy is in Susannah Indigo’s “Sex and Laughter”, http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0971662371/qid=1123491646/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/103-9469017-0653462?v=glance&s=books coming out this month; and “I want to watch you do it”, another comedy piece for Maxim Jakubowski’s “Best New Erotica 5” coming out in January 2006.

It shows what a long term process getting a story published is. I wrote “Santa Claws” in 2002 as a fun piece for an ERWA Theme weekend. It was later used in a slightly modified form on Clean Sheets in 2003. It didn’t seem a likely anthology candidate to me: it’s about a devil (he wanted to be Satan’s Claws but there was a mistake on the paperwork and now he wears a Santa suit) sent to summon a (slightly overweight but carrying it well) super-heroin to Hell on Christmas Eve. But then Susannah Indigo manages to pitch a collection on “Sex and Laughter” (who can resist that combination?) and suddenly this story is mainstream.

“I want to watch you do it” is another example of story that was a long time coming. The humour in this story comes from the trouble that follows when a guy is told by his girl-friend that she wants to watch him masturbate. The original version was written in early 2004 and was much shorter – when the humour stopped, so did the story. I submitted it to Clean Sheets and encountered one of those editorial reactions that keeps me going back to Clean Sheets time after time: Bill Noble came back to me and said something like: “The opening to this is really funny. Wonderful. But then it just sort of collapses. How’s about you re-write it with a better ending?” This could have been my cue to through a tantrum and take the story elsewhere but I re-read it with Bill’s comments in mind and I decided he was right. On re-reading it was clear that I’d sort of run out of energy once the humour in the situation was explored. But the characters still had more to offer. They loved each other in a complicated kind of way and I wanted to know what would happen next. So I extended the piece, Bill accepted it and it went on to Clean Sheets in the middle of 2004. Susannah then chose it as the opening story for “Writing Naked”. By the time it makes it into “Best New Erotica” it will be nearly two years old.

I learnt from “Santa Claws” that sometimes you just have to find the right anthology for a story to fit in. I’m hoping to do this with the upcoming “Aqua Erotica 2” which has pushing the boundaries as its theme. I liked the style of the first “Aqua Erotica” http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0609806564/qid=1123491882/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bbs_b_ur_2_1/103-9469017-0653462– who could resist a waterproof erotica book that you can read in the bath – and I’d like to have a place in the sequel. I’ve sent some of my favourite (though not necessarily easiest) stories through for consideration. I’ll keep you posted.

My first book of short stories is published this month

I said in an earlier post that I was moving towards becoming a Writer, with a capital W, and this month I sort of get my membership card: my first book is being published. It’s called “Writing Naked” and it’s available from Amazon at either of these links:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0971662398/ref=nosim/cleansheetsmagaz

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0971662398/ref=nosim/eroticareadersas

I thought I’d use this blog to work out what this means for me.

Well, the first thing it means it that I can now go to Amazon and see a book with my name on it being advertised. That brings a smile to my face. I’ve had my nose pressed up against the bookstore window for so long that it feels strange to find myself on the inside.

Of course, I’ve been in print before as part of an anthology and that is a wonderful feeling. I remember being stuck in the US on business just after “Deserving Ruth” was published in “Best New Erotica” and passing the time by browsing Barnes and Noble (I love how late book stores stay open in the US) and they had the book. I stood there holding it and realising that anyone could come in and buy it. I had no control over my story any more. It had a life of its own.

The other thing I realised was that I wasn’t going to tell anyone. Normally, being published is the kind of thing that you put on your CV/Resume, even if it’s only to show what a well-rounded chap you are, but saying “by the way, did you know I write erotica in my spare time?” doesn’t play well in the business world. In my case, it doesn’t play well at home either. My wife hates that I write erotica. She would be happy with me writing just about anything else but not this. If the erotica I write is too speculative then she sees it as a grubby attempt to get strangers off. If the erotica is too truthful, she sees it as too intimate to be shared with outsiders. True, none of my erotica is autobiographical but there is always a link between life and fiction, even if it’s only the things that the writer chooses to pay attention to.

So I won’t be going to book-signings any time soon and you won’t find my photograph on the back of the book – although that is no great loss. There’s joke that sums up this situation – skip the next paragraph if jokes bore you.

Rabbi Levi is a golf addict so when an opportunity comes to take a round of golf on his own on a course he’s always wanted to play, he takes it, even though it means playing on the Sabbath. He plays an extraordinary game, finishing the round with three consecutive hole-in-one shots. This is little short of miraculous and raises a problem of faith for the rabbi. Rabbi Levi falls to his knees, looks up at the sky and says, “Oh Lord, why, when I break your law and play golf on the Sabbath, do you reward me with such a magnificent score?” The sky darkens and a deep, God-like voice says, “So who ya gonna tell?”

But, jokes apart, I’m excited about having a book of my stories published. The fact that all of the stories are mine makes the choice of book by the reader much more personal. I mean, if someone buys “Sacred Exchange” or “Porn to Poetry” I have no means of knowing if they even read my story, but if they buy “Writing Naked”, then it’s because they want to read what I’ve written. And when they’ve finished reading it, they will have view, not just of the stories but of me.

I remember when I found Barbara Kingsolver’s first book of short stories “The Bean Trees”: I enjoyed each tale but what I enjoyed most was the idea that I’d found a new author who’s perspective on life and who’s use of language excited and refreshed me. In my most honest moments, that’s how I want people to feel when they finish reading “Writing Naked”. It’s a big ask, as my Australian colleagues say, but it’s one that gives me something to aim for.

Of course, with a book of short stories, it isn’t true to say that the book is all mine. I’ve discovered that the editor plays a crucial role here.

When Susannah first asked me if I’d like to put a collection of short stories together I was at a loss to know which ones to choose, so I sent her everything. I’d been writing for years by then and “everything” was a lot. Susannah had the distance and the skill to sort through them and find the best. Not just the best individual stories but the stories that would work best as a collection. She also gave me feedback on where a story might benefit from a re-write, and, as new stories came along, she changed the line-up to incorporate them.

By the time that I got the unproofed galleys to look at, the book had taken on a life of its own. Susannah had managed to sequence the stories so that the reader is constantly finding something new. She’d also turned a thin suggestion from me into a distinctive cover graphic.

So now the book is there. Too late to change anything. It is what it is and we’ll see what people think of it.

So what did I learn from this process?

Getting a book of short stories together takes a long time and you need support and commitment from a good editor.

You need a largish body of work to choose from and you need enough variety in what and how you write that when you pull the stories together they don’t all feel the same.

That it is tremendously helpful to spend the time going back over all the stories you’ve written so that you can see what works and what doesn’t and what underlies what you’ve written in terms of theme, imagery, language, characterisation and plot.

One outcome of the re-read for me was to question whether I’m writing erotica at all. In “Writing Naked” all of the stories have sex in them, usually multiple sex scenes that are, I’m told, hot to read. And yet, when I re-read the stories, what I felt best about was that these stories will make people laugh and cry. I think they will also put them in touch their own sexual experiences and fantasies. But they are not the best material for reading with one hand.

Which gets us into questions about the nature of genre writing. But they will have to wait for another day.

Thanks for listening.

Problems in the real world

I’ve been away for a while. My alter-ego, he-who-earns-the-money, has been going through a stressful time this month. For a couple of weeks it looked as if he’d finally managed to screw up big time: no money, no job, no ability to carry on living in Switzerland and virtually no one to talk to about it. At times like that a week can feel like a year and a sleepless night can feel like a century.

On the up-side, he lost 6 kilos, got to spend more time with his wife, worked off some fear in the gym and found out who his real friends are. On the downside he was made to question exactly who he thought he was and how the hell he got himself into this mess. Actually, that’s probably still the upside. The real downside was the impact on his wife. It felt like he’d driven over a cliff and she was strapped into the passenger seat beside him, able to do nothing but watch.

In the midst of all this, the Montreux Jazz Festival was going on. Tickets were already bought and paid for, so the uncertainty was put to one side for an evening and we listened to Tori Amos and to Tom McRae. Except that you can’t put that kind of anxiety to one side, so when Tom sang “Falling feels like flying ‘till you hit the ground” I felt like I finally knew what he meant.

Things are better now: not yet resolved but at least manageable. It turned out that sometimes, if you’re lucky, you bounce when you hit the ground.

Now in all of this you might think that Mike Kimera would have been a dormant figure, set aside while other priorities ruled. But that is to misunderstand what Mike Kimera is for.

I took refuge in Mike Kimera from time to time.

There is a story coming out on ERWA in September called “Burger Queen”, about a disturbed man obsessed with a server at his local Burger King. It was sparked partly by the Clean Sheets food month and partly by an empathy with what it might be like to be so wrapped up in a delusion that your reality on slightly overlaps with those around you. I think the most chilling thing for me was a comment from one reader: “I work with sex offenders and you may or may not be pleased to know that your depiction is very accurate.” It is not entirely comfortable to have these “accurate” voices in my head, but better perhaps to have them on the page than leave them creeping around my imagination, semi-formed but persistent.

And I went through the galleys of my first ever book, “Writing Naked”, but I'll talk about hat another time.

What I wanted to share is that I’ve discovered that being Mike Kimera, if only for a few hours at time, helps me to continue to deal with the real world. A refuge is not is not an escape, it is a place to gain strength, a pause in the fray that staves off tiredness and preserves the will to continue.

So Mike Kimera will continue and so will this blog.

Thank you for listening.

"Reflexes" - the story behind the story

I want to tell you the story behind a story of mine. The story is called “Reflexes” and I think it is one of the best things I’ve written yet it has taken me two years to find a home for it.

“Reflexes” tells the story of a mixed race Australian couple caught up in a near-future war in the Pacific. It’s an emotional read that isn’t always comfortable. It contains sex and violence and politics but it is about love and loss and the choice we face between forgiveness and revenge. The title alludes to the fact that so many of our actions are not choices but reflexes.

I think part of the reason it took so long to find a homes was that it doesn’t fit easily into a genre – it has sex in it but it’s not erotica – it’s sf but the sex is a little too graphic for some of those sites (hopefully the success of Richard Morgan’s books will make the SF press re-think some of their attitude to sex).

But I think part of the reason I couldn’t place it is that the cynically named “Patriot Act” and the Orwellian wet dream of “Homeland Security” together with the rising number of dead in Iraq have created the perception that it is risky to publish a story like this. It’s ok – even trendy – to publish thoughtful erotica or speculative fiction that deals with difficult issues on far distant worlds but something like “Reflexes” is too close to the here and now and too “un-American” for most websites to handle.

“Reflexes” now has a home at Sedona’s Attic http://www.sedonasattic.com/index.php?module=pagemaster&PAGE_user_op=view_page&PAGE_id=67&MMN_position=85:85

Sedona’s Attic provides the perfect venue, focused as it is on sex and politics and religion.

Writing “Reflexes” was a strange experience. It met a need in me that just wouldn't leave me alone.

It was 2003 and the war in Iraq was just underway. The Americans, with the mandatory appeal to motherhood and apple pie, called it “Operation Iraqi Freedom", the British, with their usual obscurity, called it “Operation Telic” (which, when you look it up – and I think most people had to - means “Directed or tending toward a goal or purpose; purposeful.”) and the Australians, with a dash of romance or a nod to sports called it “Operation Falconer”.

Together with a lot of folks in Europe, I was depressed by the ease with which European powers slid into America’s wake and another war was started. Living outside the UK and with easy access to the French and German press, it was startling to see the tenuous links being made to weapons of mass destruction and operational support for Bin Laden. When Bush gave Hussein 48 hours to get out of Dodge, it seemed incredible to me that any one could see this as something other than a war driven by Bush’s personal agenda.

It wasn’t America’s involvement I was angry it – it was the countries that followed them, including my own, who, it seemed to me, were either cynically currying favour with Bush or had lost themselves to a rhetoric that could only produce more and more dead bodies. I felt they should have known better and behaved better. I believed that they should have listened to the wishes of their own citizens.

Then I was sent to Australia on business. It was my first time in the country and I’d been looking forward to the trip. I’ve always enjoyed working with Australians back in Europe. I tended to get on well with them – we got each other’s humour and shared a fairly straightforward view of how to get things done – what I think of as the Oz version of Nike’s slogan, “Just Fucking Do It”. And I was staying in Sydney at the Four Seasons Hotel, right in the middle of downtown.

I went to Australia expecting to slide into the place and the culture with only a minimal amount of effort. Maybe it was the timezone difference (which meant I was awake in the middle of the night) or the fact that I was in the uncomfortable role of being the “bloody Pom from headoffice” who had been sent to Sydney to “kick some Ozzy arse”, but I had a difficult time.

In those circumstances, small things grow out of perspective and I became over-sensitive to how white Australia is. I’d just come through India and Thailand and ended up in country that felt more white than the UK (in fact the numbers are about the same).

So I found myself sitting up at night, thinking about the war and researching Australian politics on the web. I realised that part of my reaction to the war had been driven by the exposure I’d had to multinational teams. I’d travelled widely and made friends (and enemies) in many countries and it seemed to me that the war just ignored the humanity of the people on the receiving end. Then I realised that that was too simple – the war ignored or discounted the impact on the soldiers who went to war and on their families.

In the isolation of my hotel room I analysed what I felt and I realised that it was partly anger at politicians who choose to lead through creating fear and hatred, partly contempt for those who let themselves be lead, but mostly sadness for how ordinary and predictable and “normal” it all was. It had happened before. It will happen again.

I used “Reflexes” to discharge some of that emotion: to free myself from a sense of helplessness; to ground myself back in individual human reactions to “regime change” and “pacification”.

I don’t mean this to be a political rant. The whole point of what I have to say is that politics are not the driver here. I wanted to focus on the decisions of individuals in difficult circumstances.

Please take the time to read “Reflexes” and let me know what you think.

I’ve just spent a few days in London on business. After years of living in a place where, in the nearest big town, the traffic lights turn to flashing amber at 8pm (after that the volume of traffic is too low to need traffic lights) London now comes as a shock to me: the volume of people and traffic, the noise they make, the just-below-the-surface mix of tiredness, aggression and endurance in the faces in the crowd, the ethnic mix, the tourists, every fashion style known to man; it all results in a kind of sensory overload that forces you to tune parts of it out.

I lived in London for a few years, in Belsize Park, down the hill from Hampstead Heath. I enjoyed the energy of the place and it’s resilience, but it never felt like home.

Actually, I can’t think of anywhere that feels like home. The place where I grew up is in my blood but I was pleased to leave it and I visit it rarely. Besides, I’m no longer the person who grew up there and it’s no longer the town I lived in. No one steps into the same river twice and all that.

I travel a lot. Last year I made multiple trips to Australia, Brazil, the US, and India. When I travel, I become an extreme version of myself. On the one hand I isolate myself, never choosing to speak to others, resisting asking for help, trying to stay inside my head. On the other, I absorb the flavours of the place and the behaviours of the people avidly. My job means that my days are long and filled with people talking English and acting within the boundaries of corporate culture. At the end of such days I just want to eat and sleep. Occaisionally, the corporate forcefields are switched off and I make contact with people: one colleague cooked me a meal at her home in Germany, Indian colleagues shared the festival of colour with me and invited me to their homes, Latin American colleagues value longevity in relationships and now embrace me on meeting and keep me out late at night drinking.

But mostly, I’m an outsider. Hell, who isn’t? J The difference is how you react to being outside. If I’m not careful, I turn it into a badge of honour. What a thing to have on your gravestone “I stayed outside and sulked”

Strange isn’t it, that someone who writes so much of intimacy, should avoid it so often? And yet I wonder whether that is one of the reasons why I can write about it.

Or maybe writing is part of how I deal with locking myself up so tightly.

This time around in London, I was being pitched as the major expert on the topic of the month: one large consultancy giving advice to one very large company on how to make more money than before. Being a a major expert is a comfortable place to be. But it wasn’t always like that. My first year or two working for a big consultancy I felt sure that someone would finally notice that I had no right to be there. I would enter our big headquarters and feel I had more in common with the guys running security than the guys running the company.

On the way home from one of those visits I wrote the first draft of story called “London”. It’s one of my few gay stories. I don’t know why I made the character (me) gay. Perhaps to reinforce a sense of difference. Perhaps, because, as the author, I can do what I want to characters.

I’ve decided to include the story here so you can see the overlap between Mike Kimera and the guy who pays the bills.

London

© 2002 Mike Kimera All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without written permission from mikekimera@yahoo.co.uk

I had forgotten how pretty London can be. Full of energy and life, light and money. Dressed in Christmas finery, it sparkles and displays itself. Beckoning you to eat here or watch a play there, but never to pause, to just stand and breathe in the night. London streets are like rivers, you swim or you drown.

Pushing through shoals of tourists, I descend into the Underground at Piccadilly, heading to the discrete hotel in Marylebone where you, I hope, will soon be running my bath. I imagine your strong forearm testing the temperature of the water.

I fell in lust with you because of your forearms. You looked so fierce in the club, naked to the waist, arms folded across your sculpted chest, blue eyes blazing in challenge. New boy in town, signalling top not bottom and determined to be taken seriously. I might have passed you by, found less troublesome company, but I needed to trace the corded muscle of your forearms, wanted to test the softness of the blond hair that covered them. The club was too loud for conversation. I placed my hand over yours, waiting for an invitation. You stared at me but didn’t move. Gently I slid my fingers down towards your elbow. Still you did not move. I made to turn away, disappointed but not surprised. Most likely you wanted someone younger. Then you did it. You grasped my wrist, pulled me to you, and kissed me. With that first kiss you sucked out my soul. With the second you gave it back, marked as your property, to be used for your needs.

Taking my seat on the Tube I place the bottle of champagne that I was given today, between my legs. It sits there proudly. I know you will sneer at its pretension, swigging straight from the bottle to show your contempt. I smile at the thought of your lips around it.

The champagne is a token of my visit to Head Office today. The place stinks of alpha male aspirations. The entrance is a vast cave of green marble with water flowing over lighted glass and tasteful uplighters highlighting the vaulted ceilings and the corporate art. “We are here” it says, “By the river, rich, successful, see how well we’ve done”. My heart should swell with pride as I exercise my right to go there. Except I keep wanting to click my heels together and have my ruby slippers bring this game of vanity and boast to an end. “Surely” I want to say, “You can not be serious.”

I’ve was called in to HQ to be blessed for a year of achievement; stroked and petted and encouraged. It is so much a boys club (though half the people there were women). Gold stars for over achievers and a nice report card to take home to mummy. If only they knew who I really go home to.

Many of my colleagues are nice people: pleasant dinner companions; well travelled; well read; well bred. I am their token rebel. The one who has such an amusing disregard for forms and procedures. Perhaps a little too intense. A little too critical. Never quite relaxes. Never quite becomes… one of us.

There perhaps is the thorn on the rose. That little prick of class. Of Eton and Cambridge or Harrow and Oxford. Of generations of education and money and ease. Not their fault but mine. I cannot, will not, become… one of us.

Of course a much bigger prick, yours, separates me from them. You are my class warrior, with your working class voice and your fuck-off-and-die attitude to the chattering classes. I wonder how they would react, these colleagues of mine, if they knew that I daydream of the taste of your cum in my mouth and the fierce heat of your cock in my arse.

The tube spits me out. The night is cold and cloudless. I stand in the relative quiet of the square, in front of our hotel, the first place where you ever let me sleep the whole night in your arms, and realise that because of you I can stand still in those London streets. I can let the river of people flow past me and I will not drown. For a few seconds I let myself absorb the London night. Let myself feel the beauty of new light on old stone and see the red of the buses and the black of the cabs in the warm glow of the stores and cafes and theatres. The city doesn’t care that I’m back, but I’m glad to feel its pulse again.

I shed all thoughts of work like a coat on a too hot day and mount the steps of the hotel with the same eagerness that you will soon mount me and eclipse the tiresome world with the intensity of your lust.

On being a Reader and becoming a Writer

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To boldly blog?

I’m sitting here in front of my laptop, trying to imagine that I have just opened the first page of a hard-backed journal. It has that new book smell. The pages are smooth and completely blank. The pen in my hand is eager to spread ink across that open space, to possess it, to change it completely.

And yet I hesitate. The book will never have so much potential again. At this moment, it could become almost anything: a playground for my imagination, a prison for my fears, a soapbox for my opinions, a magpie nest for all the fleeting ideas and images that sparkle and capture my attention. But once I write in it, the book will start to become itself, something of which I have specific expectations, a place where certain things can be said and certain others cannot. I will start to develop a concept of what writing in my journal means. This loss of potential is the price any writer pays for saying something. Narrowing potential, resolving the probability to 1 or 0 is part of the process of creating something.

But one of the reasons that I’m sitting at a laptop and not in front of some hard-backed journal is because what I want to create here could turn out to be radically different from the linear, insular, self-referential journal.

The potential of the blog format is fundamentally different from the journal.

The blog introduces the concept of readers. The reader brings meaning to what is read, but each reader brings a different meaning. The tagline on my email reads: “What you read is not what I wrote. I provide the text. You supply the meaning.”

The knowledge that there will be readers changes what a writer writes even when the writer is not aware of it. Particularly when writing in the first person, a writer starts to construct a persona – in this case, the acceptable face of Mike Kimera – to meet their own ego needs and to create a specific relationship with the imagined readers.

The blog allows for comments and so introduces multiple writers and the kind of stilted, serial dialogue that, while it is often frustrating, sometimes produces ideas and images and views that are well beyond the capacity of one voice.

So, I’m sitting at my laptop, fingers poised over the keyboard, and yet I hesitate. It is tempting to give the blog a purpose, a mission, a sound-byte value proposition to market myself across the web; something that differentiates me from the thousands of other voices braying for attention or shyly waiting to be noticed. Except that that would miss the point.

I invented Mike Kimera (meant to be a pun on Chimera – I hadn’t realised that in the US this would be accepted as a real name – so much for humour crossing the Atlantic) five years ago so that I could be someone other than my day to day self when I wrote. I’ve made this blog his and not mine so that I can extend from the fiction that he/I write and into the wider range of things that I think about when I am writing in his name.

So this blog doesn’t have a destination or a target demographic or an over-arching purpose.

Mike Kimera is its starting point. He writes (and sometimes publishes) erotic fiction or at least fiction that tends to look at the impact of sex on people. He has his first book of short stories coming out. He’s learning about writing. He’s living in a foreign country and coming to terms with what that means. He’s heading towards fifty and has no idea of what that means. He’s a science fiction fan and a movie junkie and spends way too much time at work. This blog will be his refuge and his greenhouse.

Feel free to drop by at any time.