A Jane Austen Sex Scene?

One of the perennial jokes among Austen fans is her frequent use of the phrase making violent love.  As in, "He was making violent love to me!"

Standards change over time, of course.  As does usage.  To Jane's way of thinking, making violent love is when a man picks up a dropped handkerchief and returns it to its blushing owner.  Or, perhaps, when a would-be suitor offers a ride home in his carriage (elderly matron accompanying the two as escort, of course).

Still, as a novelist, I've often thought what a fascinating conversation it would make to ask Jane, were she still with us, whether she would choose to include a modern sex scene in one of her novels.

I mean, sure, in a modern thriller, a rousing and (hopefully) erotic sex scene is a staple.  But in the sort of thoughtful fiction that Jane wrote?

In Fighting for Eden, I found myself grappling with the same dilemma.  Here I have my main character,  quite thoughtful and often hapless Andrew, forced into the media spotlight when his best friend is killed fighting in Iraq.

Not the kind of story where one would expect a love scene.  Still...

His door quietly opened.  And, as if another one of his dreams, she floated like a spirit without stepping to the edge of his bed.  Her legs, he saw for the first time, were quite shapely in their musculature, stretching down in fine detail under the flannel nightshirt she was wearing, a musky heat shimmering around her in the night air.

Why did I include such a vignette?

I'd love to say that I was stretching myself as an artist.

No, at the time, it simply seemed like the kind of thing my fiery Jessie would do.

Happily, it still does.

Fighting for Eden is available on Kindle and from Lulu Publishing.

Two Artists Under One Roof

Right around this date, twenty-two years ago, in a dark and mysterious bar in China,  I asked a woman if I could buy her a beer.

She completely dissed me, but that's another story.

Yet, I persevered long enough to gain a first date a few weeks later.  There we sat, in a seafood restaurant on Sungjian Nan Loo (ie Sungjian South Road) in Taipei, Taiwan, making awkward conversation.  

The most intriguing part was that we eventually settled on the topic of jewelry design.  (There are several sources at hand in that part of the world for breathtakingly beautiful jade of various colors, sumptuous amber, and intricately worked silver.)

Now, if someone had tapped me on the shoulder at the time to let me know that within ten years, we would own a small gallery just north of Seattle, I would have immediately asked what he was smoking.  I have to be honest here:  I wasn't talking jewelry design with her because I was interested in it.  I was saying whatever I needed to say to get to a second date.

And, I did.  Which led to a third, a fourth, followed by countless ups and down, emotional highs and lows, the Chinese wedding, the American one, a gallery and - somewhere along the way - two slowly growing artistic careers.

Which begs the question: I've known and loved this woman for over twenty years.  Just how much, if at all, has she affected my art?

Quite a lot, actually.  When we met, I had no idea whatsoever of becoming a writer, whether novelist or playwright.  In fact, I was so far from appreciating writing of quality that - typical of my upbringing - I read only spy, military, and crime thrillers.  One after another.  

To read a thoughtful novel, instead of an action one, was to my mind a sign of the effeminate.  Only a "limp-wristed guy" (as we put it back in the Midwest) would ever do it.

And that's just reading such a novel.  How about writing one?

Here's a bit from my first novel, Fighting for Eden...

It was a beautiful ride.  In fields along the way, with a hawk soaring high above for company, they could see the lazy ballet of line after line of sprinklers throwing out their offering to the parched earth, their great ten foot high wheels rusting quietly in the morning's heat.  Pausing to watch a rainbow doing its sparkling dance over a water line, a sight she never tired of no matter how often she saw it, she spotted a coyote in the distance skulking along the side of an irrigation ditch and, glancing quickly at Jake, thought a prayer of thanks that he wasn't carrying a rifle.  Whip danced a few steps herself, rousing Jessie from her reverie...

Clearly not a passage you'll find in your average thriller.

Whence the change?  As I recall, Manya's greatest influence on me as a writer came down to one question that she asked me long, long ago.  We were discussing the merits of my typical reading fare, and she asked...

"You've read so many of these thrillers.  How many of them do you remember?"

Almost none, I had to confess.  They all just tended to blur, one into another.  I thought that was the point, actually.  Read to escape for a little while.

But, now, suddenly, this whole new world opened up.  Why settle for the routine, the common, when I could reach beyond them for those who had gone one better?  After all, if you've only so much time before the big curtain descends, why not spend it on the best?

And the rest, as they say, is history.

PS.  (Fighting for Eden is available on Kindle, also in softcover from Lulu.)

Bad Muse Day

In some alternate universe, I'm certain that I wrote well today.  (Sigh.)

Whither Novels?

Just got the question, from an unhappy theatre fan.  As she put it to me...

You write such beautiful plays , what the heck are you doing writing novels now?

Well, it's been a long process in coming, but basically my writing has grown too searching to fit into the one hundred minutes granted in stagetime.

Put another way - since I believe that all artists either accept that they are entertainers or that the only applause received will be their own - the most common remark about my last plays A Dropped Stitch, Teacup Tipsy and One Tile Short went as follows:

Um, I'm not sure I got all that.  I'm going to have to see it again.  Maybe three times.

Not a good sign.

Imagine my shock when one of the sweetest hearts in the world, an old theatre salt of decades' experience, quietly confided in me that she understood only about one third of Man In The Box's lines in Teacup Tipsy.  And that was after I felt artistically frustrated at having to take out, compress, boil down, etc., the writing.

In contrast, when I was writing Fighting for Eden, the canvas (so to speak) was so incomprehensibly huge that I felt lost in it for months at a time.  Over-shadowed, humbled, even crushed at times by the gargantuan portions.

Which is why, whenever I pick up a copy, I know that I am holding a year of my life in my hands.

At any rate, yes, I am certain that I will write for the stage again someday.  Just not soon.  At the least, I really want to finish this second big canvas, first.

Meeting That Audience

Just got the question.  (I suppose it was inevitable.)

What do I mean I'm writing a novel about special relativity?!

Okay, let's pause for a second.  All artists - whether we admit it or not - are entertainers.  If we're not entertainers who meet our audience where they are at, we will not be artists for very much longer.

That said, yes, I am most definitely studying relativity theory, both special and general.  After all, it is a lot to visualize.  How much will I use that in my new work?  We'll see.

I promise you this, though:  Only so much that it entertains.  And not one jot more.

Special Relationship

As I keep pondering special relativity to help my second novel (which is coming along well enough that I haven't been posting lately), I can't help but wonder at our seemingly insurmountable differences.

They appear, from a cosmic perspective, so insignificant.

Consider...

I'm standing in my kitchen sipping coffee and watching the neighboring squirrel play tag with a Stellar jay (ie a blue jay with a black head) for five minutes.  I appear not to be moving, right?

However, we all know that I am.  For the planet is rotating, west to east (making the sun appear to "rise" each morning).  That means that even though I haven't moved a step in the kitchen (their game of tag really is kind of fun to watch), I have moved five minutes along the direction of the earth's rotation.  As if someone had grabbed a marker and traced it out on the surface of a beach ball.

Then, too, during those same five minutes, the earth is revolving around the sun, counterclockwise.  So, it has gone its five minutes worth of travel.  That means I've been rotating as well as revolving without even realizing it.

The solar system, itself?  Yes, that, too, is slowly rotating, along with the sun, counter-clockwise.   (Why?  It's an artifact of how the solar system originally formed.  It's still going in the same direction as the earliest gases that spun off.)

And, of course, our solar system is orbiting around the entire Milky Way galaxy.  In fact, the guessing goes that the last time we were where we are now, in the galaxy, dinosaurs were roaming the planet and us, nary a twinkle in their eye.

(Begs the question, doesn't it?  Who will be roaming around the earth the next time we are at this same position in the galaxy?)

Beyond that, the entire Milky Way rotates as well.  Though, being rather flat, which direction - clockwise or counter - depends on which side you're looking at.  And, the galaxy, too, is moving...

All this said, with all this movement occurring in those same five minutes that I am sipping coffee (and most definitely not working on my novel), doesn't it make me feel small?  Sure does.

So small that I can't help but wonder at the differences that supposedly exist between us - those supposedly insurmountable ones between family, neighbors, colleagues, nations, even religions - that all too often separate us irreconcilably for a lifetime or more.

The differences seem so puny compared to all this movement.  Makes you wonder why we put so much effort into them.

But maybe that's just a matter of perspective...

Fighting For Eden Royalty

Just got news this morning that I'm about to receive my first royalty check from Amazon Kindle for sales of my novel, Fighting for Eden!

It's not a lot, and I have to wait until May 1st.  Nevertheless, it feels awfully grand!

If you don't have a Kindle (or Nook, etc), and still want to read FFE, Lulu Publishing has a nice paperback available.

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Just A Speck (I)

Here's a background sketch from my new character Zeb... 

Zeb stared up at the dark sky.  And began shrinking.

As far as he could see, the pinpricks of stars radiated across the far-flung heavens.  Heaven.  He smiled at the thought, wondering just where God's Mansion was supposed to be - somewhere in one of the radial arms of the Milky Way?  Or maybe in the Andromeda Galaxy, our near neighbor?  He kept looking up, toying with this idea and that, finding himself growing smaller and smaller as a result.  Well, shoot, he thought.  Aren't there over fifty galaxies in our little backwater block of the universe?  At least from what we can see of the universe, anyway.

Then, a fun thought:  What if Heaven is inside Sagittarius A*, that massive black hole at the center of our galaxy?

On and on he thought, staring at that impossibly huge sky, knowing that the longer he stared, the smaller he would get.  So small, that he began to feel like no more than a jot.  A speck of dust.  Completely crowded out in significance by all the galaxies, super-clusters, planets, comets - and whatever the hell dark matter was - that combine into making up the universe as we know it.  Just a speck.  Nothing more.

And that's when Zeb had his Cosmic Moment.  He realized that he may be just a speck, but that's still something.  Which is better than nothing.  That means that in this universe with its teeming billions of components, he numbered among them.  He belonged.

© Jeff Stilwell 2012

Whither Cattle Ranching

I am often asked by admirers of my novel Fighting For Eden: Where did I learn so much about cattle ranching?

(an excerpt)
Leaning into Belle's ass, feeling the sudsy soap that they had washed around Belle's vulva dripping down her shirtfront, she heaved the leg up.  Belle kicked a leg out in protest, but Jessie kept tugging until, grudgingly, it moved up toward her.  Blowing out a sigh, she attached the other catch to that, too, then stepped back leaving the chains hanging out Belle's backside like some kind of an appendage.  Just like a pap smear from hell, she grinned.  She shucked the rubber gloves and pulled on the rawhide ones from a back pocket.  Angel, not needing a word, was ready for her and signaled Felipe to reach over the flanks to gently stretch the lips of Belle's vulva for the coming pull.  She grabbed the handles of the chains, braced one boot up against Belle's haunch, let Angel grab her around the waist and they pulled...

Well, as they say, writers write what they know.  In my case, I know that I've grown to love, from horseback, the Yakima Valley.  Then, too, my father-in-law, John Schilperoort custom-fed cattle for a number of years in his long, storied life as a rancher.  (In fact, go back to the family farm, and you can still stand on John's underground molasses tank, used for the custom-feeding.  Bet it still has molasses in it, too.)

Also, John's good friend Harry Kwak, raised Angus cattle, just as my characters, the Van der Vaals, do.  Long retired now, he once gave me a tour of his spread, letting me pepper him with questions about feed lots, black leg, hardware disease, "raising pounds" and a thousand other details.

The rest, as they also say about writers, is imagination.

Zeb's Brownstone

Which reminds me, we're probably going to need a pic of Zeb's brownstone apartment.  Yes, that's Snickey snoozing on the front stoop.

Ol' Mrs. Masland must be inside enjoying her afternoon cordial(s).

I'm using this to keep me focused as I write my new novel...

Girdie?

Is this the Girdie from my new novel?  Perhaps.

She's a bit of a kick.  She lives in the Eternal Now so fiercely that each moment of every day must reflect that.  Or so she believes.

Oh, one more thing:  Girdie is a total thrift store nut...