The Lonely Alien Cafe

On the Scrat Hills

2012-01-26T11:19:00.006-07:00

There's something very satisfying about climbing a hill that you see every day. At the top of the basalt hills south of us--we named them the Scrat Hills, after our beloved artist cat who disappeared in 2010--I felt that I was part of these slopes. I often have a sense of loss or frustration with the distance between myself and the features of this landscape. I've always talked about climbing the Scrat Hills. On the afternoon we climbed this slope, I finally felt close enough.

This is "The Dome," an outcropping of what appears to be igneous rock. The rocks are covered with bright green lichen, which makes The Dome even more conspicuous in the dun landscape. The Dome is the Blanca Flats equivalent of Ayers Rock in Australia; there's something sacred about it. Even the dogs are drawn to The Dome.

The land stretching out to the mesas looks like the floor of an empty sea.

Jake and Shelby climbed the hill with us . . .

Looking out towards la Culebra, you can see nearly all the way to San Luis. I loved being surrounded by the soft basalt slopes. Despite living at the foot of one of the highest mountain peaks in Colorado I'm not much of a mountain climber; old hills are more my speed.

* * * *

Today I was reading some of my earliest entries in this blog. I started the blog in 2007, around the time I launched my now defunct author's website. I was frustrated and confused (still am, to some extent) about how hard I had worked to steer myself off the course that felt the most natural to me. Why do I deliberately turn away from the projects, the visions, the work that feel the most important?

Maybe the photographs I've been taking and the short poems I've been writing don't mean much in the scheme of things, but I love the fact that they just exist, like the dry grasses and the stones here. They grow or they don't grow, live or don't live, but they're present. They exist. Nothing else I've done has given me such a sense of release from the wounded monster of my ego.

This is an excerpt from my October 10, 2007 entry:

I built the house that I huddle in now, my legs cramped from crouching, my back sore from staying curled up in such a small space. I poured a hasty foundation over dream-sand, threw together walls that rattle around my ears. I worked hard—maybe not honestly, but hard—to get to this place and build that house. I must have had faith, at some point, in that journey.

Would I be any more willing to take an entirely different direction, one that leads more directly into my heart? That path is hard, and I might be too soft for it now. There’s no guarantee of shelter. On this trail, you risk an exposure that’s both beautiful and brutal. The food you gather on the way is sparse and mysterious--stones and shadows, leaves and light, the occasional peace that comes when you’ve accepted that there isn’t anything but this.

That journey begins when I refuse to say ‘yes’ to anything I can’t completely, utterly believe in.

The heart, in solitude, has to learn to recognize its own voice again.

Valley Light

2012-01-08T21:22:00.005-07:00

These photos were taken at Viejo San Acacio, the oldest standing church in Colorado. Of course, the church is neonatal compared to other historic buildings in the country or the world, but the relatively brief history of Costilla County, it's considered quite old. See how the blue of the Virgin's grotto echoes the sky?

Now that I look back at these photographs, which were taken on the first evening of the new year, I think I was photographing the light more than the church.

The church is adobe covered with stucco. We've looked for Viejo San Acacio in the past, without success. Finally we referred to the trusty Gazeteer to find the church, which is not located in contemporary San Acacio, a very small community that hangs onto its heritage despite its diminishing population and the growing number of vacant buildings.

There's something profoundly moving about the light in this area of the Valley. It has a full, burnished tone that's far, far older than the structures it illuminates. The light resonates with a rich, low sound that draws me back to the city of San Luis -- as if the homemade tortillas they sell at the local gas stations weren't enough. I think I would know that light even if the high desert terrain and the mountains weren't there to provide a context.

New Year Begins

2012-01-03T12:27:00.004-07:00

I'm having trouble getting back in the swing of things at the start of the year. I've been puttering around with a few personal projects, spending a lot of time scavenging in the desert with my camera. It's January 3 already -- shouldn't I have won the Nobel Prize for something? 2012 is flying by!

Seriously, I've been downshifting for a long time. I think this landscape poked a hole in my ambition. I don't have a lot going on, and I'm starting to like it that way. It's hard to scrape up a lot of ambition when you live in a suburb of Mars.

I'm very happy to have two tanka included in the first issue of Inner Art Journal, an online journal devoted to tanka, haiku and other simple forms of poetry. There's a wonderful article on tanka practice posted on their home page. It's a simple, quiet journal -- easy to stay focused there.

I hope your year is off to a good start.

On the Last Day of the Year

2011-12-31T20:35:00.006-07:00

A fierce westerly wind began to blow early this morning, as if to make up for yesterday's calm, idyllic weather. By midday, Blanca was all but submerged in a sea of dust. Eric took this photo of our new sunflower windsock. He decided that today would be the perfect opportunity to test the sunflower's relentless optimism. I thoroughly expected the windsock to be somewhere in New Mexico by the time we finished running our errands in town, but it clung to the post, as cheery as ever.

After the trip to town, we decided to the last afternoon of 2011 at Mountain Home Reservoir with the dogs. The reservoir must be a testimony to our recent drought; the flat, frozen dish of water lay at least 50 yards from the boat landing across an expanse of sand and weeds.

But the frozen water had an austere beauty -- the mysterious opacity of ice. The last evening of the year looked something like the last evening of the world.

The dogs, who apparently didn't mind the signs of pre-apocalyptic drought, had a blast. Jake wore an orange bandanna for the occasion; Shelby wore a purple one.

On the way home, this view of the Blanca Massif met us on the other side of a crest in the road. This stunning, unexpected gift seemed like a good portent for the new year.

Updates and Reflections

2011-12-08T08:59:00.005-07:00

This year has been . . . memorable. I'm going to miss 2011, not only because I love the number 11 and got a thrill on the 11th of every month, but because a lot of gnarly yet positive changes took place. I had a difficult slump during the summer and early fall, but I'm coming out of that and have been working on some new projects.

I'm updating Tsisnaasjini again. Somehow I drifted into writing tanka to accompany the photos. Tanka are kind of like haiku on steroids -- a form of Japanese poetry that consists of 5 lines. I've been reading tanka for several years now, but didn't begin writing them until recently. The form seems to lend itself to my haphazard, amateur study of this microcosm of the desert; with tanka, I can capture my observations in a distilled format. I can compose tanka when I'm not sitting at the computer, which is a big plus, since I spend about 15 hours a day sitting down and am always looking for an excuse to get up. I think of tanka when I'm walking, doing dishes, lying in bed early in the morning, or just puttering around picking up rocks.

The Soaking Life is a new project that Eric and I have been working on for the past few months. This blog is dedicated to the pursuit of health and happiness through sitting around in hot water until your skin shrivels up and slides off. We are posting reviews of hot springs we've visited, healthy recipes and articles about balneotherapy, or the therapeutic use of hot, mineralized water. Eric just posted an extensive bibliography of books and articles on balneotherapy. I'm about to head over there to post a blog on the health benefits of sulfur. Please stop by anytime!

Thanksgiving

2011-11-24T13:40:00.004-07:00

Thanksgiving menu at the Lonely Alien Cafe:

Pork tacos
Chicken enchiladas
Vegetarian tamales
Parboiled organic merlot potatoes
Salsa, salsa, salsa
Crabapple bread
Sweet potato pie (possibly two) with the skins left on!

Telephotography

2011-11-23T08:37:00.006-07:00

My new telephoto lens lets me fulfill my dream of walking around inside the clouds on a foggy morning.

I bought the lens converter a few months ago, supposedly so that I could take detailed photos of the landscape around here. And I've done that. Really. But I've also turned into something of a spy, searching for signs of life in the settlements around us. An intense curiosity combined with a profound shyness makes an excellent private investigator. Or maybe just a garden-variety snoop. When I was a little girl, I read the novel Harriet the Spy over and over again, until the covers fell off my paperback copy.

This photo was taken with the lens in place, without the distance adjusted. I like the way the black circle frames the clouds and shadows.

November Frost

2011-11-22T09:12:00.007-07:00

Clouds had hovered over Blanca all afternoon, and at night they finally shed a gentle rain. It wasn't even 6 p.m. yet, but it was already dark. I went out to turn the solar panels to the East, so they would catch the sun in the morning. Our generator is on the fritz, so we rely completely on the panels for the time being. That means a lot of early nights, eating dinner and reading by candlelight and flashlight, going to bed by 11 p.m. It's hard to be a night owl when you can't see in the dark.

When I went outside to turn the panels, the sky was carpeted with stars. The air was cool, suffused with the scent of sage from the rain. I looked out to the South and saw lights in the houses in our neighboring settlement of trailers and hand-built hybrid homes. I look for lights in that settlement every night. Signs of humanity in a sea of rabbitbrush and sage.

This morning, the moisture left by the rain had turned to frost. Frost delineates the beauty of each small thing; even the smallest grass blades take on an exquisite delicacy.

Vegetarian Lasagna (Coming Soon)

2011-06-27T11:05:00.010-06:00

Here they are, a battalion of lasagna ingredients-to-be, waiting to be transferred to their new home.

Our greenhouse has walls now! Eric put up the Clearspan Polymax sheets a few days ago. Sheets are attached to the frame by very fat nails with rubber washers.

Eric built the original frame last Fall, and he's been modifying it gradually to adapt to the wind. Yesterday he moved the plants outside to their new domicile, where they are now getting used to a very brisk East wind and strong June sunlight.

I'm trying very, very hard not to pressure our plants to produce eggplants, tomatoes, peppers, etc., too soon. I don't want to give them performance anxiety or anything. It's just very difficult when you know you have everything you need to make a fabulous vegetarian lasagna . . . in about a month. Sheesh, eggplants out here are $3 a pop, when they're available at all.

Plants include:

Basil
Cucumbers
Eggplant
Roma tomatoes
Yellow tomatoes
Bell peppers (green, orange and purple)
Oregano
Rosemary
Spinach
Onion
Garlic

Shelby, a.k.a. "The Boss," had to inspect everything to make sure it was up to code. Of course, building codes in Blanca Flats seem to encompass just about every kind of structure except for tents and hog sheds.

We'll add the roof -- corrugated plastic -- within the next couple of weeks. I love the way the greenhouse looks right now, like a giant box kite that could rise off the ground, float into the sky, sail off to the mountains.

A Zone of Identity

2011-06-07T18:11:00.009-06:00

Last night, the smoke from wildfires as far away as Arizona turned the sun into an apocalyptic omen. You could stare directly into the weird red orb without blinking -- it was like confronting a ferocious beast that had suddenly been stripped of its fangs and claws.

Months before we bought the A-frame and moved to Blanca Flats, I read J.G. Ballard's novel The Drought. I was mesmerized not only by the imagery of a drought-stricken terrain, but by the main character's growing association with the barren landscape. As all bodies of water recede in this slow apocalypse, a desert of random isolates takes shape, freed from the narratives of water. For Dr. Charles Ransom, the loss is liberating. He recognizes a reflection of himself in the parched riverbed, and the recognition heals the wounds created by his broken marriage:

. . . the failure of Ransom's marriage was less a personal one than that of its urban context, in fact a failure of landscape, and . . . with his discovery of the river Ransom had at last found an environment in which he felt completely at home, a zone of identity in space and time.

-- J.G. Ballard, The Drought, copyright 1965

I know exactly how it feels to find the "zone of identity"; for me, that zone is here, in a landscape that resembles a parched seabed.

Yesterday morning when I went out to take some pictures, I found a small clump of my own matted hair caught in the weeds. Thanks to our Blue Heeler's tireless campaign to overturn our garbage cans and scatter wads of tissue and empty cans everywhere, my hair made a circuitous journey from my hairbrush to the bathroom trash to the front yard.

I usually pick up the debris I find around here. It feels like a custodial duty, like my small contribution to the well-being of this spiky ecosystem. But it seemed appropriate that my hair had snagged on the weeds, as if the dead dirt and gray vegetation had officially claimed me. So I left it there, thinking a crow might use my hair to accessorize its nest.

New Blog - Making Myself Accountable

2011-06-06T10:28:00.007-06:00

I finally took the plunge. I've been telling myself I was going to begin this project since October of 2010. Month after month, I put it off, or made the first few halting steps and then dropped it. This weekend, I got so fed up with my own lack of follow-through, so sick of all the small obstacles I manage to strew in my own path, that I decided to begin.

Now, here it is. I'm not going to hold myself accountable for taking and posting a photo each day; I'd only be setting myself up for failure. But I am going to try, as hard as I can, to post a photo every morning.

Since August of 2009, when we moved into the A-frame, I've probably taken hundreds of pictures of her, at all times of the day, in all her moods and seasons. Now it's time to make good on my promise.

Wild Horse Mesa

2011-05-24T10:44:00.006-06:00

Wild Horse Mesa is one of our local landmarks, an outcropping that shelters several small towns as well as a few of the impromptu trailer settlements that dot Blanca Flats.

The other night, when we took the dogs out, we saw three horses grazing their way across the blue basin that slopes gently for miles to the Wild Horse Mesa. The horses wandered apart, then merged, then separated again in the deepening twilight.

They lifted their heads and noticed us. Dust billowed from their hooves as they ran. The horses appeared to be running in slow motion, almost floating through the dusk. A wind coasting down off the mountains held their manes and tails aloft.

We had seen those three horses on a previous visit to the area. Somehow, they don’t appear to belong to anyone. Their tails are long and unkempt. Their patterns are their own.

The wind was bitter and damp, even in late May. With my slow, frail body encased in a puffy coat, I envied the strong horses. I coveted their speed and freedom, and their thick, coarse hair.

I thought I could feel the earth vibrating as the horses soared across the plain.

Later that evening, I learned that an older woman I knew died a couple of days ago. She came from a town not far from the Wild Horse Mesa, a town whose lights we can see twinkling across the blue when we visit the area at dusk.

The woman’s death and the appearance of the horses seemed connected to me. She was so deeply rooted in her own body, its habits and flaws and symptoms, so irrevocably tied to her own pain. I thought, maybe her spirit is being carried by the horses now, and she’s free of the torture of ten thousand irritations. No longer shackled to her toileting schedule, her laxatives, her pain meds, her constant aggravations with her nurses and the kitchen staff, she has merged into the blue night.

The body can be a burden, but eventually, inevitably, it flies.

The Woman Who Never Lived in the Castle

2011-05-09T14:09:00.002-06:00

I seem to spend a lot of time visiting empty homes in Blanca Flats. Maybe that's how introverts socialize -- through a lateral interaction with people who are no longer physically present. But the fact is, there are a lot of empty homes in Blanca Flats. This county, in general, is filled with abandoned or partially completed dwellings, the shells of dreams. In some cases, the builder couldn't afford to finish the project. In others, the house was built, but the would-be residents decided that they didn't want to live out here.

Blanca Flats is like a giant, empty chessboard at the end of a very long, meandering, melancholy game. The few landmarks on this empty desertscape take on an allegorical weight. The Castle. The Dome. The Abandoned A-Frame. Any one of these icons is visible from our house. Even without binoculars, we can see structures ten or twenty miles away.

According to local legend, recounted by neighbors who are now living in Florida and Costa Rica, the Castle was built by a man whose wife decided that she didn't want to live here. What is it about the Flats that bothers people? The silence? The isolation? The continuous confrontation with empty space?

I can sympathize with people who don't want to live in Blanca Flats. Apparently, the only people who do want to live here are those who can't afford to relocate to Outer Mongolia or join some speculative safari to Mars. There are many times when I miss the comforts of being a consumer. The problem around here is that even if you won the Colorado Lotto, there just isn't much to buy, unless you want to blow $50,000 at Walmart.

The only thing out here that's for sale in abundance is land. Lots and lots of empty land. And space, and wind that sounds like the voice of the world before anything spoke.

There are definitely times when I can relate to The Woman Who Never Lived in the Castle. Times when I'd love to apply for a credit card again, take it to some lavish spa and treat myself to a head-to-toe makeover. But the problem is, I feel so disoriented when I'm not here, when I'm away from this expanse of land. The space and I have merged, somehow, into one empty, dusty being.

The Castle has been empty for years. It's a large stucco building that looks like a reproduction of one of the old adobes in the Valley, complete with the vigas, or wooden beams, that extend across the ceilings. In the back of the building is an empty courtyard. I've never been inside the Castle, but I've peered through the windows, past the boards that block access by curious intruders. Inside, the Castle looks like the gutted interior of a human body, fibrous strands stretching across darkness, webbing the shadows with silver.

Vanishing Neighbors and Aluminum Trailers

2011-04-18T09:50:00.011-06:00

Our neighbors are vanishing, one by one. The neighbor who lived here is now in South America. He left this house behind, with its formal drive and carefully cultivated trees.

The house reminds me of the opening line of Lisel Mueller's poem "Scenic Route":

Someone was always leaving
and never coming back.

I'm not sure which is worse, the fact that we've lost three neighbors of our four neighbors over the past two years, or the fact that we still visit their empty homes. We just sort of wander over to these houses, which they've abandoned like shells, and haunt the places.

At least we still have the jackrabbits. And the snakes. And there's a new herd of antelope in the area.

This really is a cool structure, an example of the "SLV Hybrid" school of domestic architecture. Our ex-neighbor built the house around an old trailer -- a common practice around here, like the practice of building homes around old boxcars -- adding large living area, small kitchen and bathroom.

At the South end of the house, facing the Wild Horse Mesa, is a jewel-box of a room lined with windows.

Our ex-neighbor did the custom woodwork on the ceiling, which resembles a spiderweb.

The house has an amazing view of Blanca Peak.

And here is the "guest cottage," with a view of a mountain range known as La Culebra.

The house is available, if anyone is searching for an isolated high-desert home surrounded by mountains.

* * * *

Last night, an unbearably bright moon illuminated Blanca Flats like a theater. In the light of that moon, an aluminum trailer turned phosphorescent.

By the grace of the moon, the battered old sardine can glowed.

Currency in Stones

2011-03-22T09:56:00.007-06:00

I think of my shopping excursions in capital letters now. Running into town to go grocery shopping isn't the same as Going to Town to Buy Groceries. The latter sounds like a strategically planned mission, and in a way, it is. With gas at $3.35 per gallon, and money for food and supplies always planned down to the dime, shopping has become a pretty big deal.

I get a sickening rebound effect from these shopping adventures lately. I feel almost giddy when we set out to Alamosa, looking forward to buying a "shot in the dark" at Milagros, our favorite coffee shop, loading up on treats at the health-food store, buying hair dye to color my graying roots, finally paying off my overdue fees at the library and checking out something new. But the money passes through my checking account like an electronic form of water, and by the time we head back home, I feel drained, worried and slightly sick to my stomach. It's like the aftermath of a giant binge, only we just bought a few supplies.

There's still money in my accounts, and more will be dribbling in by the end of the week, but it never seems to be enough. In the past few months, I've learned how much I rely on my income for my sense of self-worth. And how much I rely on small treats -- candy, cosmetics, new books -- to stave off anxiety, fear and depression.

Last Tuesday morning on my early walk I found a bunch of new rocks. The stones were dreamlike in their beauty and abundance, turning up everywhere, calling to me from the road. One after another, I picked them up and put them in my pocket. The earth has its own currency. Currency of wonder, beauty and wisdom -- these amazing, raw gems.

I wonder how long they've been here, when and where they were formed, how they came to be in the road. Some rocks are cool because of their color; others because their shape fits perfectly in my hand; some because they are veined with multiple textures; some because they are scarred in unusual ways.

I think most of the rocks out here are some form of quartz, opaque or semi-opaque. I believe that some of the stones I find out here are jasper, a semi-precious stone that's supposed to bring strength on journeys.

For as long as I can remember, I've been hounded by an unnameable fear. The fear has taken on different targets over the years, but it always centers on a form of loss. Loss of security, of money -- and now, of the shaky freedom I'm building.

The wind that sighs over the vast space, caressing the parched sage and rabbit brush, reminds me that everything is already lost. That's not a depressing thought to me, not at all.

The rocks are here, and the wind, the sky and the mountains.

Antelope Sighting

2011-03-11T12:29:00.004-07:00

I'm plagued by a sense of falling behind these days. I'm not sure if I'm scraping the bottom of my spirit or if the financial situation is grinding me down, but I get tired a lot. I've started walking with Shelby and Jake first thing in the morning to recharge my brain cells and get my sleepy blood moving.

I started taking these sunrise walks because Mount Blanca, the Wild Horse Mesa, the Dome, the Scrat Hills and the other beloved landmarks around here remind me why I'm doing this. They motivate me to keep writing, even when I'm struggling to put words together.

I love the dirt roads that have grown over with prickly pair and rabbit brush, and the old, faded sheep trails and irrigation ditches that traverse the land like tired veins. I love the way the high desert constantly, tirelessly restores its own sparse vegetation. I love living in a dirt-poor county that's criss-crossed by roads that go nowhere. I love the treasures that I find in the chunks of quartz and agate, and I love walking past the underground homes of rabbits, snakes and fire ants.

This morning as I trudged along, with Jake and Shelby off on some dog adventure, I couldn't stop thinking about money. I'm still trying to catch up with my bills, worrying about taxes, fretting about the future. I slumped over as I walked, watching my feet pick their way over the clumps of cactus.

I felt drained. I felt worried. And guilty about being out walking on a clear March morning, instead of sitting at my desk earning money at 7:30 a.m.

Then Shelby dashed by me at lightning speed, her short Blue Heeler legs churning up dirt. I looked up to see what she was chasing. Four antelope sailed across the landscape.

I haven't seen an antelope since Election Day, when a herd of the delicate beauties materialized as we were on our way to vote.

I have to imagine that an antelope sighting is a good omen. I believe in animal omens. I do think that birds and mammals offer portents. Whether or not this sighting has any significance, the antelope made my worries dissolve, at least for that moment.

When I got home, I looked up the meaning of antelope in Ted Andrews' reference book on animal totems, which I consult whenever I see a creature that seems significant:

The pronghorn feeds on shrubs and sagebrush. It can actually go for months or even a lifetime without drinking water. It has the ability to get water from the plants that it eats. This reflects that the pronghorn can teach you how to replenish yourself in whatever environment you live.

Animal-Speak, Llewellyn Publications, St. Paul, MN, 1998

I am fairly sure the antelope were running toward the wildlife refuge or the river. You can always find water in Blanca Flats, even though it looks so parched and desolate at certain times of the year. In the Valley, there's always water under the surface.

I keep telling myself that some things are more important than worrying, like walking, and writing for myself, and seeing antelope.

Wind-Whacking, Smoke-Sucking, High-Velocity Thingie

2011-03-07T22:03:00.009-07:00

My new financial crash diet has forced us to be more innovative. And self-reliant. I've also become more contemplative because, well, there's not much else to do. Sometimes I feel like I've ended up on Walden Pond with a detour through Gilligan's Island. I don't know if I'd rather be Thoreau or Tina Louise. Given that I'm one of the few human females within several miles, I could probably qualify as Ginger.

The heat in our house comes from two sources: the ambient heat from the sun room that gathers during the day, and the wood stove. On clear days, the sun room gathers light like a glass trap. The warmth radiates through the house and lingers until evening. In the winter, the temperature can get up to the high 50s indoors without even lighting the stove. Our house is about 1,200 square feet, and when the elements cooperate, it gets pretty toasty in here.

(I never thought I would refer to 56 degrees F as "toasty," but that was before I'd been through a few nights where the temperature sank to -30 or below.)

When the sky is overcast, the house stays cold. On gray days, we use the stove for heat, with a little propane space heater at night. This house used to admit drafts like a leaky old ship, until E. attacked the leaks with a caulking tube.

I think I'm going to take up sun worship -- not just figuratively, but literally. You don't want to piss off the sun out here. You'll be very, very cold, and you won't be able to access the internet, watch a movie or take a shower.

Or maybe I should worship the wind. The wind pushes the clouds in front of the sun, after all. We've had a few problems with the prevailing winds in Blanca Flats. These are the same winds that have been throwing their weight around for millions of years, creating the Great Sand Dunes and generally dumping dirt everywhere. The south wind still blows a lot of dirt around Blanca Flats. Worst of all, the south wind crams air down our chimney, which is located on the south side of the house. When you're trying to burn wood in the stove, this phenomenon fills the house with smoke, sets off the alarms, and makes me worry about the whereabouts of the members of the Costilla County volunteer fire department.

We've been talking about buying a special wind-defeating chimney top since we moved in. But the chimney had a bigger issue -- it was lower than the roof, which not only violates county building codes (which aren't enforced very meticulously, judging from the ramshackle particle board mutations that people inhabit in Blanca Flats), but forced the wind back down the chimney every time there was a big southerly howler.

Phase one in our battle against the south wind involved making the chimney higher than the house. That seemed to work fairly well, until a gale-force south wind proved us wrong by blasting air down the smoke stack one frigid night, turning our wood stove into an ash-spewing volcanic monstrosity.

Phase two involved buying a new chimney top -- not just a cap to keep the birds out, but a "high velocity wind-beater." Unfortunately, my scrawny budget hasn't left us with a lot of extra money to buy one of these things. When E. announced that he was going to make a high-velocity wind-beater himself, I was skeptical. I always shake my head when I read instructional articles online about building your own satellite dish, or your own iron lung (although the Professor on Gilligan's Island could have succeeded brilliantly, I'm sure). And why would you build your own wind-beater, when you can just buy one online?

Because they cost almost $200, and you can make one yourself for about $25, as E. proved this weekend:

Sheet metal: $14.00
Spray paint for cool Goth look: $5.00
Black pipe: $6.00
Tin snips borrowed from neighbor: $0.00

This thing is so cool -- it looks like the ornament that would crown a very large, goth/industrial Christmas tree.

We lit a fire in the stove last night, with some really delicious, hot-burning pine, and the wind was incredibly well behaved. It was obviously tamed into submission by the high-velocity wind-whacker.

Naan Pizza (or Non-Pizza?)

2011-03-01T13:54:00.009-07:00

One of the conveniences of my old urban/suburban life that I miss out here is pizza delivery. I didn't order pizza all that often when I lived in the city, but knowing that I had the option was reassuring, somehow. How else can you have tiny packets of stale parmesan cheese and chili pepper flakes brought right to your doorstep?

Most days, the landscape of Blanca Flats doesn't look desolate at all to me. The immense wealth of all this sky and unoccupied land reminds me that if nothing else, vision and thought and air don't cost anything. However, the neighborhood looks a bit barren on Fridays and Saturdays at around twilight, when I realize that I'll probably never see a battered Ford Pinto with a Pizza Hut sign on top pull up to my door.

We don't get U.S. mail delivery out here in Blanca Flats, so hand-delivered pizza with green peppers, black olives, mushrooms, and all my other favorite tidbits isn't likely to be forthcoming any time soon. The closest place to get pizza is Fort Garland, about 10 miles to the East. Great pizza, but they don't deliver.

Since we moved here, E. has become a highly resourceful cook. He created a version of pizza using Indian flatbread as a crust. Believe it or not (I still don't), the WalMart in Alamosa sells pretty good naan. And as it turns out, the right kind of naan -- not too flabby or spongy -- makes an excellent crust for an individual pizza.

The foundation of naan pizza is fresh tomatoes. You can use a marinara sauce from a jar, but honestly, it just doesn't have the same flavor as live tomatoes.

Here are the cooked tomatoes before they meet their fate in the food processor:

E. spreads his homemade tomato sauce on a piece of naan, then adds freshly grated mozzarella cheese, black olives, zucchini, green peppers, sausage, onions and whatever other toppings we have in the refrigerator. He bakes it in our propane-powered oven at around 375 degrees for about 15 or 20 minutes.

The result is naan-pizza, a delicious alternative for hermits who don't have pizza delivery.

We were actually talking about cooking tumbleweeds yesterday. E. says he thinks people used to eat them during the Great Depression. I'm thinking that they might not be bad if you boiled them for a long, long time.

Next week's special: Tumbleweed Quesadillas from the Lonely Alien Cafe.

Moon and Sun

2011-02-25T08:32:00.004-07:00

There are a lot of things I didn't know about the moon's behavior before I moved out to Blanca Flats. Having spent my whole life in suburbs or cities, I never realized that the moon actually provides viable illumination when it has no competition from the mass of fluorescence that I used to consider "light."

I didn't know that moonlight casts shadows. The first time I took an evening walk during a full moon and saw my shadow extending along the road, I had no idea how the shadow had been created. I actually looked back over my shoulder, wondering who'd installed a street lamp out here in the middle of nowhere.

I have seen the way moonlight leaves a long, wavering fingerprint on water, but I've never seen the moon leave tracks on an open stretch of washboard dirt.

The full moon starts to ascend from beyond the mountains much earlier than I realized -- sometimes by three or four in the afternoon. It hangs in the sky and waits for the sun to go down.

Then the moon begins its interrogation in earnest.

The moon can be frightening.

The burnished moon, the moon sickly colored orange by dust, looks like an eerie inversion of the sun when it hovers over the Eastern horizon at two in the morning.

At dawn, the moon may linger in the sky, taking its time setting.

Sometimes, I think: The moon resents.

When the moon is full, its light makes the desert landscape look like the bottom of a shallow sea. The spiny plants extend their fingers like coral. The volumes of blue above the terrain don't exactly resemble air or water. Standing in the sunroom, looking out beyond the glass, you feel like you're watching the world from the interior of a submarine, E. says.

I've finally learned the difference between East and West. Not just conceptually, but viscerally. It comes from following the sun with the solar panels during the day, catching power to keep this odd organic ship we call a "house" running. I've never had a good sense of direction, have never known how to rely on natural light as a compass. I felt fairly comfortable with Right and Left because I could always use my hands as a references, but the four points of the compass have eluded me until now.

It's not that I've never been camping. I had been in the country plenty of times before we moved to Blanca Flats. But I think you have to live with an open terrain for awhile before your flesh, bones, blood and nerves start to remember how the elements work.

How to Live on Nothing

2011-02-22T07:33:00.018-07:00

The previous owner of our house ended up in foreclosure. According to one of our (two) neighbors, the guy was something of a party animal. He apparently sank into financial ruin after getting involved with the local “vodka crowd." When you look at this photo, do you see anything that vaguely resembles a crowd? I haven’t been introduced to anyone in this social subset; apparently they’re reclusive in their habits.

Our neighbor also said this:

I had the sense that he either quit or lost a well-paying job. He never learned how to live on nothing.

I've never forgotten this statement. It's come back to haunt me several times since I left a fairly lucrative job to work out here as a full-time freelance writer. I love what I'm doing, and in many ways I'm happier than I've ever been in my life, but I'm feeling the pinch. Definitely.

In the sparsely populated, off-the-grid netherworld of Blanca Flats, people have turned “living on nothing” into an art form. If you own a piece of land – and there’s a lot of it out here, mostly unclaimed – you’ve got everything you need. Got your own well? A septic system? Even better, but they’re not necessities. You can pull gallons of free water from an artesian well on Highway 160.

As far as septic systems go, when you live on ten or twelve acres, who needs indoor plumbing? Granted, it gets a little chilly when you have to go outside to pee at four a.m. when it's twenty degrees below zero, but at least the scent of human urine keeps the coyotes away from your cats.

I’ve been in debt since my twenties. Every year, the mountain grew. I’ve been scooping away at the mountain of credit card debt with a teaspoon, but the debt kept growing, along with my despair. As larger chunks of my paycheck went to pay off high-interest credit cards, I got into the habit of pulling out those cards to pay for gas, groceries, firewood and dog food. Not luxuries – necessities. That scared me.

For the past few years, I’ve been dreaming on and off of going back to school to get an advanced degree. Suddenly I find myself at the beginning of an advanced degree program in personal debt management. The cost of tuition is roughly the same as the cost of a Master's degree. That’s unsecured personal debt, nothing but credit cards. Paid off in monthly installments for the next four years.

I have a lot to be grateful for, and believe me, I thank the wind and tumbleweeds and sagebrush and mountains each time I look out the window or walk downstairs to get a cup of coffee. I have lots of freelance work to do. I’m not homeless or starving, in fact, I’m trying in vain to lose the same fifteen pounds that have been dogging me on and off since college. I’m surrounded by living creatures that I love, and in some cases, that love is returned.

Rock-Hounding with a Bossy Blue Heeler

2011-02-20T08:30:00.012-07:00

Our house is full of rocks. Rocks on the windowsills, rocks in front of the computers, rocks on the kitchen counter tops, rocks on the bookshelves. My coat pockets are crammed with so many rocks that I'd probably drown if I fell into one of the creeks or rivers around here (provided there was any water in it).

A few days ago the road graders came through Blanca Flats. They're giant, dinosaur-like machines that silently scrape our dirt roads smooth. After a month or so of wind, snow and speed-racing pickup trucks have turned the roads into washboards, the graders will come back.

I can never figure out how the graders work so quietly. I never hear them go by our house. Every now and then I'll glance out the window and see one of them sailing slowly in the distance like a prehistoric ship on the sagebrush sea. After they're gone, I know I'll find the best rocks. The graders scrape up all the chunks of quartz, agate, jasper and other stones that lie just under the surface of the soil.

If I were a true animist, I'd believe that all of these stones have voices, and that they're constantly engaged in some form of quiet prayer.

Yesterday morning I went out for a rock-hounding walk with Shelby, a.k.a. the "Bossy Blue Heeler," a.k.a. the "A$$ Biter." She has been known to bite our male guests in the butt. She snaps at my heels when she feels I'm walking too slowly, or turning in the wrong direction.

I'm glad I have a bossy blue heeler to help me find the proper direction in life.

This gem isn't a rock -- it's an antelope's hoof print, captured in soft dirt. The antelope are as silent and anonymous as the road graders. You glimpse one occasionally, loping across the prairie, staggeringly graceful and solitary. Or a herd of them floating across the landscape now and then.

Spring is here. The fresh new color in this plant is so subtle, you almost wouldn't notice it if you weren't familiar with the pale browns and sea-greens of the vegetation. The plants have come to life after last week's snow.

Our friend K. tells us that blue heelers jump up on their humans all the time because they want to be on our level. I think Shelby perceives her lack of height as an annoying impediment to her goal of world domination. The flattened ears and ingratiating smile are a ruse. She wants to be the boss of me, you and everyone else.

When we first adopted Shelby, all of our dogs were wearing brightly colored Western banadanas. We wanted to make sure that the denizens of Blanca flats who are fond of shooting at coyotes didn't mistake them for wild canines. Now that Shelby's here, she's the only dog who wears a bandana. She ripped off all of the other dogs' colorful flags.

Easy Tomato Sauce from the Lonely Alien Cafe

2011-02-18T07:35:00.011-07:00

The San Luis Valley teems with hot springs. Underneath all the tumbleweeds and sagebrush, rabbit warrens and rattlesnake holes, water leads its own life just below the earth's crust. The aquifer and the springs are the subconscious of the Valley -- always in silent turmoil.

Thanks to the moist tropical heat from these geothermal springs, the owners of the Sand Dunes Pool, where we swim at least once a week, grow fresh tomatoes and basil almost year-round. They sell what they call "salsa tomatoes" -- on the verge of being overripe -- at the pool's snack bar. Whenever possible, we go home with a few pounds of these squishy red beauties. E started making his own tomato sauce a few months ago, and he's been perfecting the recipe ever since. The basic easy tomato sauce doubles as a salsa when you add a little more chili and cayenne pepper, a touch of cumin and any other spices that suit your palate.

The salsa deserves its own 12-step program. It's highly addictive, and you can spoon it onto anything -- tortillas, omelets, enchiladas or tacos. We eat a lot of Mexican food at the LAC. The basic tomato sauce can be used on pasta, pizza or in lasagna.

Just as a minor disclaimer (as if the 12-step reference weren't enough), the ingredients read like a list called "Foods to Avoid if You Have Gastritis or GERD." However, I have never had heartburn after eating this tomato sauce, and I seem to be prone to digestive disturbances these days. Maybe the lycopene in tomatoes counteracts all the acids and peppers. Lycopene, one of the sexiest plant pigments on the phytochemical scene, is absorbed more effectively from tomatoes when you cook them with oil.

Easy Tomato Sauce Recipe: For Sauce and Salsa

Basic Easy Tomato Sauce Ingredients:

2 1/2 to 3 lbs. of fresh ripe tomatoes
10 whole garlic cloves
2 tbsp. dried oregano
2 tsp. sea salt
1 tsp. ground black pepper
1 tsp. mild chili powder
1/3 to 1/2 cup olive oil

For Salsa:

1 tsp. cumin
1 tsp. mild chili pepper
1/2 tsp. mild cayenne pepper

Remove cores from tomatoes, place in 9 x 13" oven pan. Add whole garlic cloves and spices, then place in oven preheated to 350°F for 30 min. Remove and cut tomatoes 2 to 3 times, enough to break them open. Return to oven and bake at 400°F for 35 to 40 min. After baking allow to cool, then place in food processor and "pulse" a few times.

For salsa, take half of still-warm tomato sauce and add salsa spices. Improvise according to taste.

Frugrungity

2011-02-15T23:19:00.015-07:00

Tonight, just for fun, I threw a bunch of old credit card statements in the wood stove and watched the flames incinerate my obscene interest rates. My little lark turned into a symbolic immolation. Tomorrow my debt management program starts. Four years of monthly payments, and supposedly I'm free.

After twenty years. Twenty years of slavery to plastic.

Changes in my enforced zero-plastic lifestyle have driven me to coin the term "frugrungity." Simply put, frugrungity is a grimy form of frugality. When you have to be so frugal that you're grungy, you're there.

A few clues that I've crossed the border from frugality to frugrungity:

I've started to excavate three-week-old dirty socks out of the bottom of the laundry basket because I figure if they've been sitting there that long, they've been granted some kind of dirty-sock amnesty that allows them to revert to cleanliness without having to survive the Laundromat.
I curl my hair with toilet paper because I can't afford to get it cut, it's straggling all over the place, and I refuse to invest in pink sponge rollers.
I've started using white vinegar to clean everything. Everything, that is, except what I clean with sand. Soon I'll be scrubbing my dishes and clothes with rocks, like the pioneers did.
I'm actually considering eating that can of sodium-free black beans that's survived three moves with me over the past four years.

Life isn't really all that frugrungy without credit cards. I blew a dollar on cherry sours at the Loaf n' Jug today just to feel like a big spender again. I only wish I'd started my plastic-free regimen when gas didn't cost $3.05 a gallon in the Valley.

Tonight we went to the Soap n' Suds in Alamosa for the first time since early January. Somewhere along the way, the Soap n' Suds stopped offering 50-cent washes on Tuesdays. All the machines are back to the same old price, damn it.

On a positive note, the new batteries that E. installed have been working beautifully. We have power around the clock now, with the voltage hovering around 12 - 13. He is becoming the Arch Wizard of off-the-grid electricity. All I know is that sunlight hits the solar panels, which transmit power to this little battalion of golf-cart batteries that allows us to run water, use our computers, play our jazz CDs, flush the toilet and all that stuff we couldn't do if we were truly homesteading out here.

Here is the well house, site of the fractured pipe that cut off our water during a deep freeze. In the sun, the little hut looks so cheerful and innocent, nothing like the scene I encountered a couple of weeks ago, when icy water was blasting out of the pipes with arterial force.

Even in the midst of our frugrunginess, we have amazing food at the Lonely Alien Cafe. E. made a rustic pear tart with blackberries, one of his specialties. He used red Anjou pears from the health food co-op in Alamosa. That's where we get almost all of our coffee. We haven't become so frugrungal that we're willing to sacrifice organic free trade French roast coffee beans.

Life can't be all that grim when you have desserts like this.

Soul in Poverty

2011-02-14T07:59:00.004-07:00

Melody Beattie writes, in The Language of Letting Go:

Money isn't everything, but it takes money to solve certain problems. I was sick of "letting go" and "letting go" and "letting go." I was sick of "acting as if" I had enough money. I was tired of having to work so hard daily at letting go of the pain and fear about not having enough. I was tired of working so hard at being happy without having enough. Actually, most of the time I was happy. I had found my soul in poverty. But now that I had my soul and my self, I wanted some money, too.

-- Copyright 1990, The Hazeldon Foundation

For the most part, I have been poor during my lifetime. There were times when I made more money, and times when I made less, but it all pretty much averaged out to "poor."

Mostly, there were times when I was able to pretend to myself and to others -- to keep the peace, to hide my inadequacies as a wage-earner, to make people happy -- that I had more money than I actually did. Credit cards filled in the gaps between appearance and reality.

This is no longer the case. What I have is mostly what I can see out my window. When I get tired of needing and wanting and scraping to make an income, I take a walk, or look outside, and I can see how much abundance there really is in this supposedly barren landscape. Space, sky, dirt, breath, and the knowledge that this hard, gentle beauty is all there is. Most days, that's enough. Some days, it isn't.

It's hard to feel that security and progress are perpetually, tantalizingly beyond your reach. I get discouraged easily. I am trying to stay positive, and have faith.

Winter Update

2011-02-11T08:46:00.008-07:00

Two 11s in today’s date – that’s a good sign.

Temperatures have been hovering around zero in the Valley; a light snow from Sunday still hasn’t melted. In the well house, the water pipe that leads from the submersible pump to the pressure tank froze solid, then erupted during a brief thaw. We did the old routine of carrying buckets of water to the house for a couple of days. I don’t really mind lugging water to fill the dogs’ bowl, coffee pot and toilet tank, but it’s nice to have running water in the house again.

The well water comes out of the faucets as cold as a glacier.

I’m glad that I can be here to watch the landscape – its slow, subtle, almost imperceptible changes. The tiny transformations in the high desert plants and the dramatic, rolling changes in the sky are what I love. Nothing happens quickly.

After a snow, the skeletal weeds turn a pale silver-green as they absorb rare moisture through their straw-like roots. The barbed-wire spikes of the tumbleweeds soften. The sage around our house is not doing much yet, but huge, aromatic plants are thriving over by San Luis, where heavier snows fall.

The landscape is harsh, but under any harshness, there’s an immense tenderness.

The snakes are sleeping underground. The coyotes whoop and howl in the mornings, sometimes. Every now and then, a freight train passes against the mountain. Always a big event.

Since E fixed the chimney to be higher than the house, the stove devours wood. I haven’t learned how to chop wood. I should probably put that on my agenda. Wood-chopping, and learning the names of the plants around here. Prickly pear, sage, tumbleweeds – that’s all I really know.

How can you be so important to me, and I haven’t learned your names?

For awhile I was afraid that I was becoming a recluse. Then it occurred to me that are different ways of associating with the World. For the first forty-some years of my life, I associated with people. Now I’m associating with mountains, rocks, plants, birds, snow, and sky. If anything, I feel less isolated now than I felt when I was in the thick of everything. I’m grateful that I can do this.

Tsisnaasjini

2010-10-23T10:16:00.006-06:00

We've had a few days of rain. Clouds are still hovering over Mount Blanca -- fat, puffy clouds. When they clear, the mountains will be capped with snow. According to local wisdom, snow on Blanca means that winter has officially begun. It doesn't feel like winter down here yet, but it's got to be pretty frosty up at 14,000 feet.

They don't call the mountain "Blanca" for nothing.

The Navajo call her Tsisnaasjini. Dawn Mountain, or White Shell Mountain. My new project, the secret enterprise I've been mulling over all month, is to take a photo of her every day for one year. I won't post them all; I might not post any of them. The goal of this project isn't to collect images of her, but to summon up the discipline to acknowledge her daily -- something between contemplation and obsession. Some days I won't be here to see her. That doesn't matter; she hovers in my consciousness.

I took the first photos two days ago.

We had a truckload of pine delivered to the house this morning. We haven't had to fire up the stove yet, but temperatures keep falling at night. By the end of last winter, we were buying $4 bundles of wood at the Loaf n' Jug for those final fires. We still have a couple of those lying around. Buying firewood at a convenience store is a lifetime first for me.

Bad solar days this week. The rain kept the power in the house at around 11.9 volts, at the best. We had to start the gas generator almost every morning just to flush the toilet and grind coffee. At seven o'clock today, the sunlight was pale and brittle in a gunmetal sky. The air had a bite. A band of coyotes was running behind the house, their howls and whoops welling out of the sagebrush. The dogs acted tough, but didn't pursue them.

Some Saturday mornings are slow and listless. I haven't been able to do much but sit around drinking coffee and be a witness to the space and quiet.

Hashed Blue Potatoes and Deep-Fried Adrenal Glands

2010-10-03T14:52:00.006-06:00

Coffee du jour: Dazbog's wholebean Mocha Java, brewed in a little Italian espresso pot and served with organic whole milk and sugar

I can't believe September melted away so quickly, with only one blog entry. I worked too many hours and sank far too deep into my own desultory thoughts. I love the word "desultory," though I honestly don't know exactly what it means. I'm afraid that knowing its definition would rob the word of some of its brooding mystique.

This has been an unseasonably warm Fall, according to expert meteorologists at the Soap n' Suds Laundromat in Alamosa. By now Southern Colorado should have been inundated, or at least lightly powdered, by one or more snowfalls. I don't mind. To me, this extended afterthought of Summer makes up for the nonexistent Spring. The Valley's potato harvest, which seems to provide employment for about eighty percent of its population between August and October, is coming to an end. The sky has a thin haze of dust from the fields. Everyone I know seems to have some form of potato-dust-induced bronchitis.

E. made hashed blue potatoes for a late brunch today. We used to have to hitch up the buggy and make the trek up to Denver to get these sapphire beauties, until E. discovered the motherlode of blue potatoes at an organic ranch here in the Valley. He came home with a giant sack of them, which we have eaten mashed, parboiled, and now hashed. Their blue pigmentation apparently comes from a group of phytonutrients called anthocyanins, which you can find in other "blue" foods like blueberries and purple cabbage. Phytonutrients have antioxidant superpowers, staving off heart disease, cancer, split ends and other deadly conditions.

Eating something that beautiful would have to make you beautiful, don't you think?

I have been doing a lot of research on adrenal fatigue lately, partly because I've been writing about it, and partly because I think I may have it. I have a whole host of symptoms associated with this condition, including a short temper, fuzzy thinking, impaired concentration, mental exhaustion, and a waistline that's starting to resemble the Michelin Man's. To my intense distress, I found out today that drinking more than three cups of coffee per day can lead to an 80% increase in the secretion of adrenalin. This hormonal overload will ultimately fry the adrenal glands, making it impossible to cope with stress.

I have never been able to cope with stress, anyway, so I'm not sure why this new revelation is so distressing. Probably because it implicates my favorite vice, coffee, in what I had always considered a character flaw: an anxious, overwrought personality.

That's how I ended up brewing a third pot--not cup, pot--of freshly ground coffee at 2:30 in the afternoon. I refuse to let my deep-fried adrenal glands have a moment of rest today. I want them to keep pumping out adrenalin until my kidneys catch on fire.

This extra pot of coffee should give me the energy to finish the dishes, clean the litterbox, finish putting away the laundry, and drive all the way up to Del Norte to visit Jack's Market, which has the best salsa and goat cheese in the Valley. However, my adrenal glands are so exhausted that I'll probably just make it to the market.

Sagebrush Therapy

2010-09-01T09:26:00.005-06:00

Brown birds skate across a sea of sage and tumbleweeds. The sun is high, bright, unambivalent this morning; it will be a good solar power day. Across the expanse of flatland, dun hills form an alien landscape of cones and parabolae. A road trails along one of the hills like a bone-white thread, leading to a faraway house that I've never noticed before. Those small human settlements are everywhere, visible in some lights, hidden in others. Old trailers, hand-built shacks, wind-battered mobile homes, broken-down school buses -- the people who live in this desolate place are geniuses of alternative architecture. The common dream in the Blanca Flats isn't home ownership, it's space ownership. Space and time and land ownership, with the added benefit of all-you-can-eat sky. It's true that the wind out here can drive you nuts, but I'm starting to suspect that most of the inhabitants of the Flats are nuts, anyway.

After all, you have to be crazy not to want to live in a McMansion in an American suburb, on a property seamed by twelve-inch segments of grass that separate you from neighbors who inhabit nearly identical boxes.

I've met a few of our neighbors here. They're experts at living on practically nothing, acquiring what they need through barter, making things last, making things themselves. The most popular luxury in the area is probably high-speed internet access, and people seem to spend more money on their trucks than they do on their mortgages. I don't have the gift of self-denial. The thought of not having a plump cushion of disposable income terrifies me. I like expensive, whole-bean coffee; I like to buy books impulsively on Amazon. I enjoy spending obscene sums of money on my hair and skin. I'm addicted to the illusions of happiness and security that are belched out by the machinery of American consumerism.

Many of the lots in this "neighborhood," which was optimistically titled San Luis Valley Ranches years ago (no one has run a successful ranch on the Flats in ages), were purchased by people who have never lived here. Some of them have never even seen their property. Maybe they just never made it to Colorado, but always meant to buy an RV and camp out at the foot of Mount Blanca for a summer. Maybe they keep the idea of their land like a dream in their pockets, a vision of serenity and freedom that they can touch when the gears of the urban world start to grind them down.

Life can be a grind here, too. The relentless wind, the frigid winters, the miles of uninhabited space, the shortage of opportunities for employment and companionship. People in the Flats seem to drink a lot. The dirt roads are littered with empty beer cans and liquor bottles. Solitude and silence are luxuries in small doses, but when they stretch on without a reprieve, they can become torments.

The sky is cloudless today, a vertical ocean of atmospheric blue. We won't have to worry about starting the gas generator to power the house. I'm a person who worries a lot about running out of things. Today I'm not fretting about the aquifer under the Valley drying up and parching our well. At least for a moment, I don't feel like I should be anywhere else, that I'd be happier anywhere else, or that I should be back in therapy or on antidepressants. On mornings like this, the sky and sagebrush offer enough therapy for a frayed mind.

Wish Prague Were Here

2010-08-28T11:24:00.012-06:00

Coffee du jour: Mostly arabica beans, with a few Kona beans sprinkled on top. Ground up, pressed, then sweetened with organic half-and-half and turbinado

That immortal motto is posted in the window of the Globe Bookstore in Prague. What a fantasy that was . . . all of the Czech novelists that I read in my twenties were there, waiting for me as if two decades hadn't passed since I first fell in love with them, in a bookstore that also serves a divine iced latte.

Europe still seems like a dream. The other night I asked E, "Were we really in Prague?" I never thought I'd do any serious traveling. I was always afraid to take time off work. Too many responsibilities at home, too many bills. And then we were suddenly able to go--Amsterdam, Prague, Budapest--and I loved it, more than anything I've ever done. Three months later, the trip is still too kaleidoscopic in my memory to bring the whole experience into focus, but every now and then a shard bursts to the forefront of my mind, and I'm able to seize it, either in thought or in words.

My memories of Prague and Budapest have been emerging as weird, fantastical stories, fragments of fairytales. Engulfed in words that were unfamiliar to me, my mind sank into a realm of pure imagination. I thought I'd feel alienated, stranded on my anglophone island, but being adrift on a sea of Czech or Magyar was a form of freedom. As an adult, I've never learned a language organically, through immersion (or submersion) in the signs of another culture. I loved the way a word or phrase would suddenly pop out of the linguistic soup, would suddenly make sense to my middle-aged, English-saturated mind. Foreign languages, like poetry, rewire the brain's circuity.

Sometimes when I throw a question out to the universe, the answer comes back in a strange form. E found an odd little book about writing in a used bookstore and brought it home for me. I was leafing through it when I found an answer to the question I asked last Sunday, about how a writer can tell when their work is "true":

When anybody, however inept and unimportant he may be, writes himself a poem or story, just so he can have it, just so he can read it in bearing, say, some ache or joy of his, a production takes place that is authentically prompted.

-- David Greenhood, The Writer on His Own

I can relate to this, even though Greenhood's collection of inspirational fragments seems to be addressed to males. Every now and then I write something that feels like it was created as a kind of talisman, something to hang on the mental equivalent of a keychain, a piece of work that reflects a bit of my imagination so accurately that it brings me pleasure to read it, no matter how it might rate on whatever scale of "acceptable" writing I might be using at the moment. I wrote a few short things like that about Prague, which I've been carrying around with me, like souvenirs.

Today I wish Prague were here. Or here were Prague, whichever is easier. I'm fighting off a sense of inner fatigue, something like depression, only more concrete. I have built so many barriers for myself, a whole obstacle course of walls that I have to get around in order to feel halfway at peace. I don't feel like running through that maze today. I'd like to just be at a train station, waiting to be transported somewhere wonderful.

The Soul Needs Something Lush Sometimes

2010-08-22T08:26:00.006-06:00

Coffee du jour: Vienna roast mixed with Kona, with soy creamer and turbinado

There aren't many wildflowers that can survive the high desert terrain here. The plants that flourish are spiny, salty creatures, skeletal and hard, like coral. Tumbleweeds, sagebrush, and prickly pear dominate the landscape. If you hike up a thousand feet or so into the mountains, you can find some fragile, delicate specimens that nourish themselves in the moister climate, but down here in the flatland it's just too hard for most plants to survive. A couple of brave California poppies from the wildflower mix that E planted made it long enough to blossom, only to have their orange petals ravaged by grasshoppers. The insects, jackrabbits, and prairie dogs will devour anything remotely juicy.

I read a passage in a book last night about a woman who'd created a miniature paradise in her back yard, with exotic flowers and a koi pond. She said she'd built that small, lush refuge for the sake of her soul. The soul does need richness, fragrance, moisture at times. Exotic landscapes offer an oasis for the senses, a reprieve from a land that's constantly forcing the mind into a confrontation with itself. Ever since I read her description of her private garden, I've been dreaming of orchids, gardenias, birds of paradise . . . in an atmospheric bath of warm, moist air.

Maybe this is another expression of my escapist, highly distractable nature. I've been trying to access a form of truth in my writing that's buried under multiple layers of self-consciousness and fear. That's one reason why I moved out here, because I hoped that the sky and mountains, the austere expanse of sage-covered space, would take me out of myself. If there's any comfort in this landscape, it's the solace of understanding your own impermanence. The pleasures and conveniences of the city aren't available. Fifteen miles away we have a Wal-Mart, and a small health food co-op that sells culinary trinkets and exotic gifts (and offers salvation in the form of a large selection of fair trade coffee). There's a good bookstore and a wonderful coffee shop. But the multiplicity of consumer distractions and opportunities to spend money that I had in Denver aren't here.

If you're a writer, and you're reading this, please tell me what helps you to work authentically. When do you feel that your writing is true?

Wind in August

2010-08-19T22:00:00.013-06:00

The August wind brought a premonition of winter tonight. Summer doesn't last very long in the Valley, apparently. We had a long, chilly, austere Spring, with hard winds blasting down off the mountains. Summer was a few weeks of idyllic golden mornings followed by muggy, thunderous afternoons. Tonight a mass of clouds moved in from the North, carrying fierce gusts of rain.

I write a lot about the weather now. It's hard not to become obsessed with it, when its shifts and mood swings are so dramatic, the clouds and light so in-your-face gorgeous. The wind has a whole vocabulary of rage, sadness, violence; in this small A-frame house in the middle of a prairie, we're a captive audience.

Sometimes the wind and space and silence can nudge you toward the fuzzy end of the spectrum of sanity.

The moon is a klieg light, shearing inner space.

Whatever shifts and stirs and prowls the oceanbed of sage

is not kind. This silence numbs the cerebellum.

The wind taxes the quiet mind at night.

Under its northbound drone a voice mutters, gives orders—

for the first time, I understand psychosis.

Wings and fangs give the dark its love-death texture.

Furred meat will dot the highway at dawn. Animated flesh—

forget its tender worth, or go back to someplace softer.

I’ve stopped searching the road for gentle signs at sunrise.

That road is a hopeful wound in a land that stretches out its offerings

of thorns and dust and agate to draw us in

and in, and deeper in.

- AT

After a Long Silence

2010-08-15T11:53:00.013-06:00

Coffee du jour: French-pressed kona with soy creamer and a teaspoon of turbinado sugar

It's been so long since I posted to this blog that I had to reset my user account. I've also forgotten how to access any of the files on my website, so the pub list over there is woefully out of date, and will have to stay that way for awhile. I feel like the Rip van Winkle of internet self-promotion.

I didn't stop writing over the past two years, but I did take a fairly major break. I bought a house in the middle of High Desert Nowhere (I love living nowhere), and am now the proud owner of 10+ acres of tumbleweeds, sagebrush, and rocks. My closest neighbors are jackrabbits, snakes, coyotes, and bugs. Many, many bugs. Oh, and mice. Out here it's hard to maintain the illusion that the earth is not dominated by insects and rodents. I'm living on their turf now. Here is a view from the front yard. I recently learned that this mountain, which is one of the sacred mountains of the Navajo nation, contains granite that's almost two billion years old! That puts my midlife crisis in perspective.

So a few of my creative brain cells are starting to regenerate, we finally got high-speed internet access, and I've decided it's time to dive in and write--and blog--again. This summer a short story, interview, and article appeared in an amazing new webzine, SomethingDark, devoted to the darker side of fetish. I was delighted to be a part of such a cool, edgy project. The site is just plain gorgeous, with some stunning photography and writing. Each issue will have its own theme, and the debut is dedicated to the care, feeding, and worship of stiletto heels.

In other recent publications, my short story "The Resurrection Rose" appeared in Susie Bright's anthology of dark erotica, Bitten: Dark Erotic Stories (Chronicle Books) July 2009). The book is beautiful, and the collection is getting some great reviews. I drew from my background in French history to write this tale of vampirism and horticulture. Now I can't say I never did anything with my B.A. in French lit.

Since I moved out here, I've been doing a lot of photography. It's gotten kind of discouraging, though, this effort to document the sky and mountains with words and images. There's just no way to capture the infinite subtlety and mutability of the light and clouds. Sometimes you just have to give up and be a slack-jawed witness.

I have a few works-in-progress--several poems, a couple of short stories, and a shapeshifter novel about a rebel gang of coyote kids living near a Navajo reservation--and am thinking about attempting grad school again. My most urgent work-in-progess, however, is the second pot of coffee I just brewed, so will get back to that next.

Proofreading and Poetry

2008-02-07T05:40:00.000-07:00

I'm currently slogging through the proofs for my sex-in-the-library novel, Kiss Between My Lines. To me, this stage always feels like watching home videos of last Thanksgiving: Oh, god, my hair doesn't really do that all the time, does it? Why did I wear THAT? That's not my butt blocking the turkey, is it?

But seriously, I did have a lot of fun writing that novel. I was practically raised in public and academic libraries, have always adored them, even did a stint at library school in an MLS program. Probably best not to go into the choppy history of my graduate education, though. We'd all get seasick.

Oddly enough, I haven't been reading a lot of fiction lately. I'm mostly reading poetry. I'm carrying three collections around with me in my book bag these days (I take public transportation everywhere, and riding the bus requires packing a lot of reading material). Marie Howe's The Good Thief, Brenda Hillman's Bright Existence, and Jason Bredle's Standing in Line for the Beast have been going with me everywhere. In terms of voice and style, these poets couldn't be much more different, yet there's a similarity in their intensity, their inventive language, and the mad, glorious light that their words release into a world crowded by the prefabricated images and noises of mass media.

When is this snow going to end? A friend offered to run away to San Diego with me last night. We'd just get in her car and keep driving West until the temperature rises above 20 degrees. Look at this stuff. Look!

Okay, I cheated and posted a pretty shot from one of my favorite walking trails (I walk a lot, when I'm not working, muttering to myself about flying monkeys, or reading poetry). The truth is, this stuff is ugly. Small tragedies are happening all over the city as people crash and burn on the ice. Yesterday I saw a poor guy fall down on the sidewalk, spilling a fresh cup of coffee all over the frozen sludge. Coffee, no less -- anything that makes you drop the heavenly host first thing in the morning can't be a good thing.

Getting Possessed

2008-02-04T00:22:00.000-07:00

If you're in the UK, you can buy a copy of this demonically erotic Black Lace release on February 7. If you're in the US, you'll have to wait till April 1, but you can get a sneak preview of this anthology of shapeshifting and transformation tales at Lustbites this week. Possession features novellas by Mathilde Madden (lustful werewolves), Madelynne Ellis (sexy youkai), and me (psychotic ballerinas getting possessed by pissed-off fallen angels).

Please stop by and check it out. After all, sweet little Annie doesn't get over to the Dark Side very often.

Better than Catnip?

2008-01-11T06:56:00.000-07:00

Today on Lustbites I posted excerpts from my new Cheek novel, Lying in Mid-Air. This is very tasty erotica, just ask my cat. She couldn't wait to sample the story . . . she even crawled into my suitcase to get her very own copy.

Mmmm . . . juicy fiction. Better than catnip!

And look what it did to her -- she turned into a raving sex maniac:

Yummm . . . savoury punctuation!

No More Christmas Deadlines - Ever

2007-12-26T08:57:00.001-07:00

I learned an important lesson about deadlines this year -- if you sign up to write a summer book, your deadline runs smack into Christmas. Ideally, of course, a writer would be well organized enough to finish her manuscript and her shopping weeks before her deadline, with plenty of time for proofreading text and mailing gifts.

Yeah, right.

That beautifully organized writer ain't me, I'm afraid. I was flailing around trying to finish my sex in the library novel while shopping, wrapping, etc. But the manuscript has been submitted. The gifts have been bought, given, and opened. Oops, except for a couple of packages that have to go out in the mail today. I'm taking full advantage of the 12 days of Christmas this year and sending stuff out until at least mid-January (hey, that's better than 2005, when no one got my gifts until March).

Over at Lustbites we're celebrating the 12 Days of Christmas, too, with all kinds of naughty treats for your visual pleasure! Werewolves in bondage . . . dancing detectives . . . naked Spartans . . . come join the ribaldry -- I mean, revelry.

For those of you who prefer more sedate winter images, here's a shot from my Christmas morning walk in Denver yesterday. I had a wonderful holiday -- hope yours was lovely, too.

Snowy Bridge

The Season for Giving . . . and Receiving

2007-12-21T06:42:00.000-07:00

Soixante-Neuf, anyone?

Come over to Lustbites today and hang out with a bunch of raunchy erotica writers discussing this classic position.

Today is my Birthday . . .

2007-12-14T06:56:00.000-07:00

Last night I dreamed I received two extraordinary birthday gifts: a tattoo on my belly, from a beautiful young blond man, and a manual typewriter, from myself. (With the Kindle and all this other technology coming out, why am I still dreaming of typewriters?)

I woke up with no tattoo, and of course I'm typing away on the computer instead of on an exquisite old typewriter, but it's still my birthday. Yes, I'm a Sagittarius, which means I have no impulse control, so today will undoubtedly involve massive amounts of sugar consumption and the purchase of a small mountain of books.

To celebrate, I'm giving away copies of my new baby, Lying in Mid-Air -- an erotic romance about sex, love, and the screwy ways we alter our identities to obtain both -- to the first three people who send me an email wishing me a happy birthday: annetourney@yahoo.com

U.S. Release Date Today

2007-12-10T03:33:00.001-07:00

Lying in Mid-Air

'smartly written . . . satisfyingly real'

4.5 Stars from Romantic Times

The Side of Her Face, the Back of Her Hand

2007-10-10T06:25:00.001-06:00

I wait all week for a walk like this—empty autumn trail, camera, iPod, an hour or two of unstructured time. Seven-thirty on an October morning, and a simulation of dusk is already unfolding in the shadows of the trees. Everything holds its own opposite at this time of year; time shows the side of her face, the back of her hand, whenever a green leaf reveals its browning underbelly. Red fingers, vividly alive, curl around the promise of a white wisp that shatters in a strong wind.

My life is veined with the same contrasts. My heart has acquired a murmur, and its new rhythm alternates between frustration and longing.

Whatever I’m given to do, I don’t want to do.

What I’m given to be, I don’t want to be.

But who gave me those responsibilities?

I did.

I built the house that I huddle in now, my legs cramped from crouching, my back sore from staying curled up in such a small space. I poured a hasty foundation over dream-sand, threw together walls that rattle around my ears. I worked hard—maybe not honestly, but hard—to get to this place and build that house. I must have had faith, at some point, in that journey.

Would I be any more willing to take an entirely different direction, one that leads more directly into my heart? That path is hard, and I might be too soft for it now. There’s no guarantee of shelter. On this trail, you risk an exposure that’s both beautiful and brutal. The food you gather on the way is sparse and mysterious--stones and shadows, leaves and light, the occasional peace that comes when you’ve accepted that there isn’t anything but this.

That journey begins when I refuse to say ‘yes’ to anything I can’t completely, utterly believe in.

The heart, in solitude, has to learn to recognize its own voice again.

There's something more.

I Collect Light

2007-09-22T20:32:00.001-06:00

I collect light.

Light connects to other light.

The light at the creek this morning connected to the light that slanted across the backyard of a tiny white house in a small town in Oklahoma on the afternoon of the Strawberry Festival. Which touched the light that fell on my doll's body when we buried her beside the swamp. Which bounced through time to become the light that glances over a shattered bottle in a vacant lot, making me want to cry for no reason, making me want to kiss you again.

Each coincidence of light joins the rest, in an ongoing reunion of particles and waves. Light on a tablecloth, light on a shattered windshield -- both the same. And the same as these:

The lamps I played with in the living room on the nights my parents left me with a babysitter, adjusting their beams to minimize my fear.

The unasked-for illumination of a face wrung dry from too much wine.

Light spearing through blackout curtains, defying your perpetual night.

The heartbreak of memory on a plane flying over a river at sunset.

Relief from the shadows between your shoulderblades while you slept.

Light stops my heart. I collect light the way others collect pills -- as a way out, as a way in.

Ride Me

2007-09-12T21:20:00.001-06:00

. . . and as Anne wandered through the park, she came across a bicycle, as solitary as herself, sitting in the middle of a gleaming emerald sea.

Coming closer, she saw that the bicycle wore a little white sign that read: Ride me.

She got on the bike.

She still hasn't come back.

Being and Nakedness

2007-09-12T07:20:00.001-06:00

Today I reveal my predilection for brooding, troubled, Existentialist hotties at Lustbites. Dive into the abyss with me . . . .

Scenes from a 3-Day Weekend

2007-09-03T23:03:00.001-06:00

Artsy puddle shot. Represents angst, conflict, depression.

Sinister toyshop--closed and locked.
Represents failed attempt to revert to childhood in search
of comfort, reassurance, and creepy toys. No hope of return.

Cool vintage bar sign against cloudy sky. Indicates a desire
to seek solace in addictive behavior (or just a fascination with
cool vintage bar signs combined with a vague nostalgia for martinis).

Wow -- no Lazy Susan here! Suggests a manic insistence
on seeking joy in the midst of an emotional shitstorm.

Flower pr0n. Eye-sex with flowers is the next
best thing to eating frosting with your hands.

Why Do I Post My Erotic Poetry?

2007-09-02T23:27:00.000-06:00

Because it's embarrassing, of course! Why else would I do something so insanely self-indulgent? Posting my erotic poetry to this blog is the equivalent of wearing a fluorescent lime-green bikini with a miner's helmet and a pair of combat boots to a wedding.

I love to write poetry. I just can't do it reliably yet, or well. (And at one time, in my much thinner twenties, I did own a fluorescent lime-green bikini.)

Uncoming

I have a secret wish
that you would never let me come again,
that you would torture me for light years, till pleasure
wasn’t pleasure anymore, but evolution –
no big bang, but a creation dream
Not coming, but uncoming,
or becoming.

The long withholding
would be a string that tied me to you,
and you would slowly let me rise,
year by year, a naked kite,
until I joined the life-forms
in some starry zoo behind
your eyes.

There would never be
a shattering, never an explosion;
instead, the sheer skin of our universe would stretch —
light bends, but doesn’t break —
and we’d be animals of air
grazing on each others’ shadows,
never empty, never filled.

This is sex
the way I want it with you:
Instead of banging at each other in a bone-race
our souls would invent a sweet meandering,
upwards, your hands
would me unwind
your mouth me uncreate—

word one would me
unmake.

New Article - Lustbites

2007-08-27T07:22:00.000-06:00

Read all about my lurid teenage fascination with televangelist preachers on Lustbites today!

Dirty White Shoes: How Televangelism Turned Me Into
A Smut Writer

Doin' my part to spread my warped interpretation of the Gospel.

Hallelujah!

With love, Your zero

2007-08-22T20:05:00.001-06:00

What's happened to all that wild, hallucinatory, surrealistic spam that use to flood my inbox? Opening my email used to feel like being hit in the face with a word-salad bomb. Now I tend to get nothing more than dry little one- or two-word missives, followed by a big ugly GIF advertising some pharmaceutical miracle, usually having to do with erectile dysfunction.

Or with grass. Grass -- how to grow it, nurture it, trim it, fertilize it, etc. -- is the latest trend in my spam lately. I do love a lush, healthy lawn; there's something magical about an expanse of incandescent grass (have you ever read Anna Kavan's hypnotic and disturbing fantasy, "A Bright Green Field"?). But I live in an apartment. In a high-rise building. With a concrete balcony overlooking a concrete patio. Any grass that gets grown around here is going to be on a Chia pet.

Then today, to relieve the monotony of limp erections and stiff grass, I received a mysterious message signed by someone who identifies herself only as "lonely girl" and "Your zero". It's apparently addressed to her friends, Facade, Proxy and Factory. Which one am I, I wonder? I think I'll be Facade; that seems the most appropriate. Check out this odd little gem:

Facade, Proxy, and Factory --

Hi. How is the day going? Email me at richi@mailmessageonline.info
only. I am lonely girl. Hope you will like my pictures.
such as blocks and dolls, or commerce business,
stressed-out case.

Your zero

Poor Lonely Girl. I do hope she finds a way to relieve her stress and loneliness, maybe by playing with her blocks and dolls till her friends show up. Of course, with names like Facade, Proxy, and Factory, they could be in prison. Probably for masterminding a scheme to hack into the world's largest database of Russian porn and replace all the Slavic sluts with CareBears.

Barely Restrained

2007-08-20T21:18:00.000-06:00

No, not that kind of restraint, for once.

This blog is about the kind of restraint that kept me from buying a can of cake frosting at the supermarket yesterday, dragging it back to my cave, and devouring it with my hands.

I thought about it. I really did. I stood in front of the row of colorful cans, my brain spinning with the promise of a sugar high, and imagined myself dipping my fingers into that sweet, synthetic goo, without the intercession of a useless chunk of cake.

Who needs intercession, anyway? I'm a Protestant; I don't need mediation to reach the divine. Not when there's a can of Betty Crocker Strawberry Supreme inches away from my nose. Or even better, that sublimely pure, almost virginal stuff known simply as "White Frosting".

What keeps us from taking that final, irreversible step towards nirvana?

Maybe it's the same psychic barrier that halts that mad, self-annihilating impulse to jump off the top of a skyscraper.

We restrain ourselves from reaching for unadulterated joy, the way we restrain ourselves from diving into the abyss.

So after getting all mystical on your hiney, I hate to admit that I didn't even buy the damn frosting.

There's always next weekend.

Sigh.

Death by a thousand papercuts

2007-08-18T13:39:00.000-06:00

I spent most of the morning circling my computer like a dog trying to find a comfortable position to lie in. It's way too early in this project for a block, so I have to assume that my butt was rebelling against more computer time after a week spent sitting behind a desk. I finally sat down and wrote a sex scene involving martini olives and a pair of hungry lips (the kind that shall never speak a word).

During the week, when I'm riding the bus to work, I overflow with creative ideas: dazzling, strange, fabulous. When the weekend finally comes, I'm stuck in a lassitude that's as thick as molasses. And all of that divine weekday inspiration translates into . . . a pussy martini.

It's frustrating.

So is trying to download Mandy Roth's droid romance onto my ancient Palm Pilot, and getting one incomprehensible error message after another. All week I've had visions of curling up at the coffee shop down the street with a vanilla latte and Mandy's novella of Svengalian android lust. But I'm too technologically inept, or my equipment is too archaic, or both, to download a simple PDF file onto a handheld device.

The frustration continues.

Yesterday evening I went out for a walk in the neighborhood where I'm hoping to rent an apartment. With my typically irrational, emotion-driven lunacy, I thought I could find the apartment of my dreams by wandering around in the general vicinity of the place where I'd like to live. Amazingly enough, I found a place that seemed perfect: a building from the 1950's or '60's, surrounded by enough trees to grace a small arboretum, on a quiet corner across from a crack hotel. Okay, the half-deserted crack hotel isn't a big plus, but the yard behind the apartment building was an incandescent slope of emerald grass, with a round stone table in one corner and a little chair tucked under an aspen tree. And the building is right around the corner from the bus stop, several used book stores, and my favorite place to spend money frivolously (yes, it's Walgreens -- I'm high-maintenance white trash).

I wrote down the number on the "For Rent" sign in front of the building, and the URL on the banner attached to the wall. The URL turned out to be invalid. And the number, when I called today, was disconnected. I called 411 -- no listing for any building by that name.

I'm wondering if I dreamed it. Or if the building houses nothing but the souls of the dead. I wanted to cry. All of these small frustrations add up. It's like death by a thousand paper cuts.

My emotions are leading me around by the nose today.

I think it's time for more coffee. Or chocolate. Or both.

Dolls don't dream of steak . . . do they?

2007-08-16T21:30:00.001-06:00

I woke up early one morning, still gathering the fragments of a dream, and saw a raw steak lying on my pillow. I didn't know what the meat meant (that I'm hungry? that I'm human?), or where it came from, but I knew that it was mine.

One of these days, the meat and the porcelain will be reconciled.

Meat—

I am doing everything
and anything

except touching you.

You who were mine
I don’t know you,

your gloss of age,
your graveyard tang.

You with your resurrection whispers, your
sweet swooning into shit, I don’t remember you

so leave me

upwind of your rich decay. Meat,
the blood you seep is yours

and mine is mine.

Tendons tight as wedding bands, silk membranes,
bonded muscles,
any similarity to a heart—

all yours.

Wait, if you want, on my pillow.
I have already dreamed you into a dragonfly.

The Cover's Out!

2007-08-11T07:34:00.000-06:00

Just saw the cover for my December Cheek release on Amazon:

This must be my MMC (main male character), Joel. He looks kinda distressed, doesn't he? Maybe because the top button of his jeans fell off . . . or maybe because Joel can't seem to tell the truth to anyone with two X chromosomes.

But then, the three women that Joel falls in lust with aren't all that truthful, either, especially when it comes to crafting an identity that will catch and keep a lover. We all do that, don't we, to some degree? We play up our strong points, spice our personalities with a dash of exoticism, shove our petty jealousies under a sofa cushion. Sooner or later, whether it's after a few dates or after a few months, the stress of relating consistently to another human being weakens the shiny new identity we've built. Before you know it, the claws are unsheathed, the extra roll of belly fat can't be sucked in any longer, and the whole relationship goes to hell.

Or maybe that's just me.

One of the perks of being a novelist is that you get to play out your worst fears, your deepest neuroses, in fictional format. Then you can step back, shake your head, and sigh over the many mistakes that your characters make in life and love, knowing that you, yourself, aren't nearly that flawed.

I'm here to confess today that I am that flawed -- even more so. I am a deceitful, jealous, insecure, emotionally unstable beeyotchka with more than one extra roll of belly flab. I surround myself with a net of pretty fabrications in order to hide the flesh-eating ghoul that I truly am.

Well, maybe I'm not that bad.

But someone should spank me, anyway.

Still in Dark Mode

2007-08-05T14:36:00.000-06:00

I finished Falling Dancer today; all that's left is a final read-through (not much time for nitpicking, since deadline is Wednesday). As soon as that's done, I have to start my next erotic romance, which is due in -- argh! -- December. But my mind is still in a dark mode . . . I don't feel like concocting any happy, healthy fantasies yet.

Today I found a poem that I'd drafted months ago. I brushed it off, tweaked it a bit, and decided to post it here because, well, I really have nothing else to do with it.

My deepest fantasies aren't bright at all; most of them are so subterranean that they've never seen light of any kind. Here's one of my oldest, a creepy little lovechild born of desire and fear.

Your Shadow and a Schoolyard

Sometimes the selves we’ve woven
to play out our secrets aren’t enough

to hold all that I want from you;
the gauze that hides the wound strains thin
across my hunger.

I want to meet you as a stranger,
at the intersection of your shadow and a schoolyard

be your popsicle-licking prisoner,
feel my heart stop when I read the length
of my captivity in in your eyes.

Nothing less than no escape, no fairytale
salvation from this kidnapping—

This is me being stolen by you,
you vanishing with me,
neither of us coming home
to curl up on the couch with tea.

In this story
I don’t daintily choose words to script my love;
I find them groping blindly for you
in the dark. My nails
gouge alphabets of longing
on your arms—

stockings tearing, knees bleeding, as I climb the wall
of the well where you hide me.

For Romantics Only (Sluts Welcome, Too)

2007-07-29T21:14:00.000-06:00

Diary of an S&M Romance
By Dollie Llama
Copyright 2006, 2007 PEEP! Press
Available at Amazon.com

Dollie Llama and her master ThornDaddy have a free BDSM podcast, “Submission and Coffee,” at www.askdollie.com, where you can hear them discuss their relationship--and play with their friends--in juicy, adults-only audio. They read from Dollie’s diary in episode #60.

~ ~ ~ ~

I love classic romances, where a heroine meets the artist/writer of her dreams living in a studio in L.A., falls madly in love with him, has scorching-hot kinky sex, engages in power exchange, and explores her sexual and spiritual nature through submission and erotic pain. She ends up becoming his wife, his muse, and his precious little cumtoilet, among other things, and they live happily ever after while broadcasting the intimate details of their marriage to the world.

Well, maybe "classic" isn’t the word to describe that romance, but the tale fulfills the wishes of my kinky heart. I was delighted to read Diary of an S&M Romance, by Dollie Llama, the true story of a widow discovering her submissive nature, her spirituality, her creative life, and finding a relationship that encompasses all of the above.

Written partly as a first-person memoir, partly in the form of private emails, Diary offers both an insight into a submissive woman’s psyche, and the opportunity to take a voyeuristic peek into a real-life, 24-7 master/slave relationship. Dollie's diary follows the course of her relationship with her mentor, husband, master, and spiritual guide ThornDaddy, from their early email exchanges on Bondage.com; to their meeting and first play sessions; to her collaring as his slave, wife, and muse. Their emails are passionate, often raw, over-the-top love letters exchanged between two people who are clearly, crazily in love.

Dollie's story, which starts with her first bondage fantasies, resonated with me from the opening pages. I've always believed that for those of us who are drawn to bondage and discipline, the attraction to confinement and captivity, punishment and pain takes shape when we’re very small. Scenes from cartoons, television shows, stories, and childhood experiences burnish themselves into our imaginations; I remember poring over spanking scenes in novels by Ruth Chew and Laura Ingalls Wilder, and being mesmerized by watching the Pink Panther bound in rope by a band of sadistic mice. The memories that Dollie describes are very much the same. She traces her desires back to these initial images and experiences, which planted the seeds that blossomed into one hell of a kinky flower. When I read her description of how she reacted as a young girl to watching a cousin being punished, I thoroughly understood her response:

Although I didn’t really care much for my cousin, I walked very close to her, observed her as carefully as I could, looking for the hidden "specialness" I thought had to be there following such an event. I wanted to ask how it felt but that seemed somehow obscene.

I was on fire with what I had seen, but had no context in which to place my feelings. It shamed me, but I was excited. As soon as we got back I rushed to the bathroom and masturbated. I didn’t know how to process what I felt, and buried the whole experience deeply . . . So deeply that it didn’t surface again, except in random fantasies I tried desperately to deny until I was 40. (page 12)

I know what Dollie means about envying the secret "specialness" that punishment brings, for those of us who crave being the object of stern and loving discipline. I’m also very familiar with that tingly sensation of being caught in the space between shame and excitement, craving experiences that ought to feel bad, but that feels so deliciously good to those who "get it".

And I know how it feels to experience all that decades later, as a grown, professional woman, when your sexual and spiritual lives refuse to merge with the vanilla mainstream. Dollie’s vision of independence--the freedom to make decisions that determine the most intimate aspects of her life--seems to be at odds with the feminist ideal, until you examine the defining key to her relationship:

So many women are embarrassed by their sexuality, even in today's more accepting, hedonistic world. Today's society is open about our sexuality in ways that would make our grandmothers faint, but the double standard still exists. When Daddy calls me a whore, a slut, a groveling wench fit for nothing but serving him sexually, I am free to be that wanton woman, driven by nothing but my need for the Man who owns me.

And it's my choice. This is something our grandmothers never had. To me, making the conscious decision to live for my man is the ultimate in freedom, the ultimate in feminist thought in action. (page 13)

Our choices define who we are, and shape who we become. Making those choices consciously, with self-respect and care, isn't easy in a culture where our roles are often handed to us, prepackaged and preordained. Dollie's relationship with her Daddy is a unique one, crafted through a negotiation of emotional, sexual, and spiritual needs. (The Daddy role, by the way, has nothing to do with incest, and everything to do with fulfilling Dollie’s needs for protection, affirmation, and unconditional love.) It's also the result of a long period of self-examination for Dollie, who waited for thirteen years after her husband's death to enter into an intensive power-exchange relationship. Rather than trying to define herself through the roles of dominance and submission, Dollie spent a significant amount of time nurturing a healthy, strong, independent, self before engaging in a deep emotional and creative partnership with a dominant. She discovered what she truly wanted, and settled for nothing less:

The first meetings with Daddy were spectacular. Very sexual. Rather a welcome change for me as I had been playing mostly in public, and limiting my play to pain scenarios, with little or no sex. Satisfying in themselves, but not the basis for heartfelt romance.

And I wanted romance.

While I was willing to compromise on who could beat me, my heart and soul were only going to be given to the right man.

My early conversations and correspondence with Daddy made me suspect that he might be that right man.

After that first time, every time I saw him, I found myself opening up, giving up a bit more of myself to him. He never took what I wasn’t willing to give, frequently asked to ensure I was OK, but also had the knack for pushing me to places I never thought I could go.

And he made me love it. (page 140)

It's the intersection of emotional, sexual, and spiritual connections in this story that makes this memoir so powerful for me. For Dollie, the physical sensations of subspace touch the core of her spirit:

Mystics speak of having out-of-body experiences. For me, subspace is an out-of-mind experience--I am nothing but my body, an instrument played by another for our mutual joy. When flying way out there, I can accept, and enjoy, real pain. I find redemption in fear. I lose my will, my need to do anything beyond exist for the immediacy of the sensation. My endorphins are flooding; I am ecstatic. (page 35)

How often do two people share a rapport at all these levels? Accepting your partner’s "kink" is one thing; loving that partner because of their passions, and meeting them there with joy, is quite another. ThornDaddy's experiences as a Dominant are equally powerful:

I'm still trying to figure out the female sub psyche. I am enamored with it, elated with it, and swimming in it. It consumes me, and every day is new and shimmery. The power I've been given is a little frightening, but I'm enjoying the ride. And I'm learning from it every day, not just sexually, but as a human in general. (page 137)

In that just-plain-weird language that couples invent when they adore each other, ThornDaddy describes what it means to be Dollie's Daddy:

I feel like Dollie is a gift from God, and I say prayers expressing that, several times a day. And I pray with her. We like to pray naked, we pray thanks, and pray for people, and also pray "for all the kitties in the world." We end our prayers not with "amen", but with "a-mew."

Then we fuck and cum and hold each other, trembling like wet children cleaving to their parents. (page 68)

Oh, did I mention that Dollie and her Daddy love cats? The kitties even join the couple on their podcasts. In case you should doubt their passion for felines, check the kitty pics at the end of the book, right there with the sexy pics of Dollie. Novices navigating the sharky waters of the BDSM world will find advice in the Diary and on the podcasts on how to avoid predators, wannabes and dangerous dolts in one’s quest for BDSM romance.

"The Wall of Fun" chez Dollie Llama
The toys were hung on the wall with care,
in hopes that her bottom soon would be bare.

~ ~ ~ ~

Dollie found the glass slipper that fit her kink--or more accurately, the satin collar that fit her lovely throat. How many of us get to live that fairytale? But there's enough reality here to cancel the possibility that her relationship is built on fantasy. For Dollie, there are the practical challenges of moving back and forth between her work life and her sexual life, and the adjustments that have to be made in a life devoted to serving her Dominant's will. Like including other women in a couple’s play--always a touchy topic, and one that has ended more than a few D/s relationships. It takes a lot of trust, mutual respect, and self-understanding to find a path where both partners can be happy, peaceful kitties.

Diary of an S&M Romance struck many chords for me, some of them so personal that I feel uncomfortable writing about them here. I’m grateful for Dollie’s openness of expression, and for her gift for speaking her mind, both in her book and on her podcasts. Speaking of podcasts, you really have to be a "kitty in the corner" while Dollie chats with her Daddy and their guests, laughs, and moans in ecstasy. Three words: Sexiest voice ever.

Slap-Happy Love

Possession

2007-07-25T21:55:00.000-06:00

We think we know our lovers better than anyone who shares our genes—we tell ourselves that because we're so familiar with our lover's flesh, our souls are interchangeable. We trust feverishly in the make-believe of desire; when we touch a raw sore in the beloved, we slap a fantasy over the wound and call our delusions tenderness. We take our lovers into our mouths, cunts, hearts. Our edges merge. We can’t—or won’t—imagine a time when our soulmate will turn into a hostile stranger. Once the beloved goes alien on us, we become alien to ourselves.

- Kelda, in Falling Dancer

Well, that's what I've written on this project so far. And it's due in two weeks!

No, not really, though I've had deadline nightmares like that. I've been fighting off a serious mental funk lately -- a combination of fatigue, sadness, and vague apathy -- still, I've managed to keep plugging away on my paranormal novella, Falling Dancer. The subject of spiritual possession fascinates me. My main character, Kelda, a bartender/exorcist who calls herself a "co-dependent for lost souls," has a gift for releasing fallen spirits from the bodies of helpless mortals.

What makes a human vulnerable to possession? And what is possession, anyway? From the perspective of the lovers, friends, and family members of Kelda's clients, possession is anything that turns the beloved into an absolute stranger. Addiction. Mental illness. An altered neurological state. In the case of the suicidal ballet dancer in my novella, a leap from an apartment window becomes the path on which she's seized by the fallen spirit who covets her beautiful body.

They want us, these lost spirits, known in Kelda's vernacular as Fallen Ones. They long for the material; they crave sensual experience, erotic sensation, the solidity of having a flesh-form. Once they've taken over, getting them to let go is a fight for the body through a collision of souls.

I'm not sure what's more disturbing -- losing a loved one, and having them disappear completely, or losing a loved one who remains in your midst, but out of reach. Touchable, but not; always almost tangible.

Since I was a very small child, I've found comfort in stories, because they give me metaphors to play-act my fears. Losing someone I love, being permanently alienated from them, is a very old fear that can still plunge me into an emotional cold sweat. The supernatural gives us a stage on which we can act out the bizarre dramas of daily life. Paradoxically, the paranormal helps me make sense of the normal. In the end, "normal" human behavior is more mysterious and troubling to me than anything from the realm of demons and fallen angels.

~ ~ ~

Possession, an anthology containing paranormal erotic novellas by Mathilde Madden, Madelynne Ellis, and Anne Tourney, will be published in April, 2008 by Virgin Books/Black Lace.

Same blog, new name

2007-07-21T08:03:00.000-06:00

I changed my blog title. I kept having this nagging feeling that the old one didn't make sense, at least not to anyone who never met my muse, Dolly. And it seemed a bit too pervy, even for me.

Same blog, though. And Dolly is still its guardian spirit, looming over my monitor, telling me to get off the freaking internet and work on my novella. I hear her shrill little voice crying, Deadline! Deadline!

Writing, art, life, and jellyfish

2007-07-20T06:29:00.000-06:00

The RWA conference was lovely, as it turned out. I didn't expect to have so much fun, or to learn so much about publishing, or to be so inspired by other writers. A few of us Virgin authors wrote a group blog about the conference on Lustbites, which is much livelier than my account here.

Dallas put me off at first -- the streets around my hotel seemed like sterile, corporate corridors -- until I discovered the Arts District and the West End within walking distance, and learned how to take the light rail instead of taxis. Public transportation is always a great way to tap into the underground life of a city. And to get mugged. And to catch communicable diseases. But what's a vacation without a few secondhand viruses?

Not being accustomed to beehive buzz of a large writer's conference, I took a couple of days off just to wander around on my own. I fell in love with two artists at the Nasher Sculpture Center: Jonathan Borofsky and James Turrell. I couldn't drag myself out of the room that held Borofsky's "Running Man," the "Chattering Man," and a host of prints of anonymous businessmen in silhouette, each assigned a mysterious number. The mechanical sighs and whirrs of "Chattering Man," his endlessly working jaw, were somehow soothing to my restless brain. And the streams of digits printed on "Flying Man" made a strange, schizophrenic sense.

Turrell's outdoor skyspace was a single, light-filled room with a window in the ceiling. I sat there for a long time. There was something austere, quietly demanding, in that spare space. My body was still, but my mind wasn't quiet. It was as if the light were gently questioning me, and I couldn't come up with adequate answers.

Saturday I met a Texas friend of mine, whom I've known for about a year through My Other Blog. She and I agreed that the aquarium would be a lovely place to live, if we could afford the rent. We watched cuttlefish go through bizarre mating rituals, and exquisitely translucent jellyfish spin through black, liquid space. We had chicken enchiladas at a restaurant in the aquarium overlooking an indoor rainforest with a waterfall. Our conversations seemed to focus on love, loss, loneliness. All the limitations that life imposes on desire. Maybe that's the kind of thing you think about a lot when you're 40, but I tend to believe it's just where we both are mentally at the moment. After lunch, we walked through the West End, where a food festival was taking place. The streets were filled with the scents of spice and sugar and meat, and banks of smoke from a dozen barbecues. After the heat and commotion, we found a cool and quiet sanctuary at Crowe Collection of Asian Art. We spent over an hour there, wandering and thinking and never-quite-touching the beautiful objects.

I so wish I had my camera that weekend. I lost it a couple of weeks ago, and I haven't felt quite right since. I'm strictly an amateur photographer, but that camera had come to feel like a material extension of my imagination. It was a way to capture scenes that spoke to me personally, images I could use to share my inner landscape (which is kind of sketchy and decrepid, and should probably be razed and replaced with condos).

Since I've been back, I've felt flat and tired. Work has been chaotic, even more stressful than usual. My apartment feels increasingly alien; I'm planning to move in a couple of months, and I'm starting to feel estranged from this building. I wanted to post much sooner about the trip, but between fatigue and stress and trying to catch up on writing deadlines, I've been having a hard time keeping my head above water.

Sunday was my last day. I was scheduled to leave in the evening, so I decided to try to find the Dallas Arboretum on the light rail. I ended up going in the opposite direction (I think), and got off the train at a small, picturesque town once I realized I was lost. I sat around in a coffee shop, writing and sipping a way-too-hot Americano, for a couple of hours, then walked over to a nearby park. The park was all decked out with a man-made pond and one of those quaint, Twilight Zone bandstands. The whole place was eerily quiet, as if someone had pressed a "mute" button on the town. There just wasn't any noise. Anywhere. Even the kids didn't make any freaking noise -- they just ran around and flapped their arms in total silence. It reminded me of the scene in Carnival of Souls, where Candace Hilligoss runs frantically through a public park, drowning in the sudden, inexplicable silence of a world that doesn't acknowledge her existence.

If I could have taken a picture of anything in Dallas, it would have been the boarded-up, abandoned old Dallas High School, across from my hotel. I could see it from my window: a grimy sandstone castle, its outbuildings and playing fields disappearing under weeds. I'm not sure why that building held such a fascination for me. I think it's because I could feel the lost energy of adolescence there, the ghosts of anxiety and hope, lust and fear. All of those turbulent emotions and ideals that must have overwhelmed the kids who went to school there -- all lost.

That night, I took the plane back home. Reality resumed with a crashing thud.

Where is she?

2007-07-10T21:47:00.000-06:00

She's been with me since childhood -- I think that's when we find our muses, or they find us -- but I can't always reach her. She opens a door briefly, then closes it before I can capture what's behind it.

I hear the light ghost of her laughter, her tiny taunting footsteps, but I can't catch her. Am I too old? Too slow? Or just too exhausted from obsessive thought and the routines of grownup life to keep up with her?

Even in my most "adult" novels, maybe especially in my adult novels, I've relied on the spirits of childhood. That's where the roots of these stories are buried; I have to tease them out of memory, detach them carefully from the weight of maturity. Fairytales, whispered slumber party stories, visitations from old ghosts -- that's where my imagination first found a voice.

Creative growth isn't always a matter of going forward. Sometimes it requires going back.

It's National Shed Week!

2007-07-04T20:19:00.000-06:00

I should probably write something about Independence Day, it being the 4th of July and all, but idealistic thoughts of liberty were blown right out of my head by the discovery that it's National Shed Week.

You know what sheds mean to a spanko, don't you? Visions of impromptu paddles grabbed from the woodpile in a fit of passionate anger by a brawny male!

You've been a bad, bad girl. To the woodshed with you!

Actually, there are some fascinating sheds out there, as I learned at the Shedworking blog. Some of them, like the Roman temple shed, are lovingly designed tributes to an historical reality; others embody dreams of independence and self-sufficiency. I have a friend who bought property in a rural area of Colorado and fitted it out with a modified storage shed that she bought from Home Depot. It was a bit like this one, only she tricked it out to add a small loft inside (if you're going to spend significant amounts of time in a 10'x10' structure, it helps if you're 5'1", like my friend):

Storage Building from Home Depot

I envied her, having that small refuge where she could think and work in gorgeous isolation, free from the mental static and stress of urban life. There's a sentimental segue to Independence Day in there somewhere. Self-reliance and the American spirit, etc., etc. But I'm not going to push it.

Instead, I'll point those of you who share my personal predilections over to my favorite virtual shed, where Bethany publishes her romantic spanking stories.

"Slavish imperceivable wildfire"

2007-06-28T06:57:00.000-06:00

Beneath her serene exterior roared a slavish imperceivable wildfire, consuming her from within, driving her to extinguish its flames in the beds of pickup trucks and the darkened corners of her local bowling alley . . . .

Once again, I wonder why I bother trying to write fiction. I've been out-pulped by Spam again -- yesterday I received an email from Faye Helton, entitled "Slavish imperceivable wildfire". I can't remember what the body of the message contained. An ad for a miracle drug. A promise of sex with strangers from some faraway country. Stock offerings too miraculous to disclose through any other channel than my junkmail box.

But who could resist that title?

As someone who's been struggling lately to maintain emotional equilibrium, I deeply understand Faye's need to publicize her slavish imperceivable wildfire. Sometimes you just need to let the world know that no matter how calm and efficient you may look, no matter how smooth your surface might be, you are afire from within.

I think we all fall victim to the slavish imperceivable wildfire, at some point in our lives. We can only hope that its flames will simply lick our toes, or singe our hair, rather than turning us into raving human torches.

We are not our inner fires, but we are not ourselves without them.

Spam reminds us what it means to be human.

Guest blogging on the dark side

2007-06-26T22:22:00.000-06:00

The lovely Mandy Roth let me step into her nocturnal world of dark fantasy, futuristic fiction, and paranormal erotica to do a guest interview about writing, marketing (or my attempts to do both). Mmmm . . . . I like it there with all those sultry, shapeshifting types.

Thursday resolutions

2007-06-21T05:55:00.000-06:00

Thursday is a good day to make resolutions, don't you think? Close enough to the heart of the work week to feel like a serious commitment, close enough to the weekend to hold a glimmer of hope.

Here are mine for this Thursday.

Stop getting up in the middle of the night to eat cold Pop Tarts. That's not only fattening, it's demented.
Start writing in daily increments again, 300-500 words every morning. I've been lapsing back into my Weekend Chunks method, where I procrastinate all week then churn out a bunch of stuff frantically on Saturday and Sunday. Not only do I resent being chained to the computer on the weekend, and loathe myself for being lazy, I lose my day-pass to the world I'm trying to create.
Stop flogging myself -- that could be fun, if it were a literal activity instead of a figurative self-inflicted torment -- over the fact that I'm so bad at romantic relationships. One more thing I need to work on, but there's no point in destroying myself over it. Meanwhile I have lots of stories and poems to write, and pictures to take, and "Girls' Manicure Night" with my new cat (where I try to trim her claws, and she tries to bite my hand off).

My Sweetheart Cemetery Flower Girl

In the vast body of poetry dedicated to love, it's comforting to find this gem from a woman who understands why some of us, in our need and fear and longing, fail.

Thank-You Note

I owe so much
to those I don't love.

The relief as I agree
that someone else needs them more.

The happiness that I'm not
the wolf to their sheep.

The peace I feel with them,
the freedom --
love can neither give
nor take that.

I don't wait for them,
as in window--to--door--and--back.
Almost as patient
as a sundial,
I understand
what love can't,
and forgive
as love never would.

From a rendezvous to a letter
is just a few days or weeks,
not an eternity.

Trips with them always go smoothly,
concerts are heard,
cathedrals visited,
scenery is seen.

And when seven hills and rivers
come between us,
the hills and rivers
can be found on any map.

They deserve the credit
if I live in three dimensions,
in nonlyrical and nonrhetorical space
with a genuine, shifting horizon.

They themselves don't realize
how much they hold in their empty hands.

"I don't owe them a thing,"
would be love's answer
to this open question.

- Wislawa Szymborska
View with a Grain of Sand: Selected Poems
New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1995

Romantic . . . in a stupid way

2007-06-16T13:54:00.000-06:00

The best compliment I've ever received on one of my books came from a friend who'd just finished reading Taming Jeremy. I loved her remark so much that I knew I'd have to eventually record it somewhere.

"It's really romantic, she said, "but in a stupid way."

She's right, and I love it that she's right. I love the stupidity of romance. I love the lame things that people blurt out to each other when they're falling in love, tripping over passion and confusion and fear. I love the fact that in spite of the
limitless possibilities of language, we can still be struck dumb by emotion, and that when we do find words to contain our feelings, they often come out hilariously wrong.

Unfortunately, these gaffes aren't limited to speech. Often they take the form of unutterably ridiculous decisions or actions, blunders we'd never make if we weren't under the influence of 100-proof desire. These are the scenes that I like writing best, not because I like to make my characters look like idiots (I'm already an expert at that; I don't need to project it onto these poor fictional creations), but because it's when they're at their most vulnerable that they truly become real to me.

One of the scenes I enjoyed writing most in Head-On Heart (hot cover, but it makes me wonder if I should have called the book Hand On Butt) was the pre-dawn erotic encounter between Amity and Daniel, in the back seat of her convertible Thunderbird. Amity is a terminally unemployed wannabe musician; Daniel is the has-been rock star she once had a raging crush on. When the undulations of fate bring them together on a road trip across the West, searching for the first guitar that Daniel owned, they begin to fall in lust. But because Amity has the misfortune of being the heroine in one of my novels, passion has pitfalls. Like this one:

Unlike most of the guys who’d undressed Amity in the past, Daniel was skillful, thoughtful. Either he’d had more practice than the average male at removing complicated female clothing, or he was just better—period.
When he eased his way down to tease her nipples with his tongue, Amity decided that he was just better. He knew how to approach a pair of breasts, courting the outer edges first, moving in towards the areolae, leaving butterfly kisses around the pink circumference.

Then he pulled the corset open to reveal a few more inches of Amity’s skin, and he froze.

‘What the hell. . . is that duct tape?’

‘Oh my god. This is not happening.’ Amity threw her hands over her face. Her cheeks were hot under her palms. Maybe if the burning flesh of her face seared itself to her hands, she’d never be able to look Daniel in the eye again.

‘What did you do to yourself, sweetheart? Looks like you broke a few ribs and got patched up at an autobody shop.’

Daniel let out a sputtering choke, then gave up and collapsed into helpless laughter. He laughed until his howls turned into silent, spasmodic whoops. Tears streamed down his cheeks; Amity could see them twinkling on his cheeks in the moonlight.

‘It’s not that funny,’ she said. ‘Crissy was trying to give me boobs. You know, those two protruding objects that most women have on their chests? Those jiggly things that get everyone’s attention if you don’t happen to have any talent?’

Amity wrestled herself out from under Daniel’s weight and sat up, yanking the open flaps of her corset over her duct-taped chest.

‘Some of us aren’t born with pretty ornaments that we can dangle in front of people,’ Amity went on. ‘So we have to fall back on boring things like hard work and talent.’

‘And tape?’ Daniel gasped.

‘A little tape doesn’t hurt,’ Amity said, with as much dignity as she could muster.

A strip of duct tape can't stop a pair of horny about-to-be lovers, and Amity gets exactly what she wants by the end of the scene. But she doesn't get there without being opened first -- physically, emotionally, sexually -- all of her tender parts laid bare. Stupidity, the way I see it, leaves us in a state of vulnerability that's unbearably intense. It humiliates us, but it also makes us beautifully human. That's what makes it erotic to me.

And it's also what makes Amity real to me. In fact, I feel her in the room with me right now, asking me how I could possibly claim to love her and still leave that scene in the book.

Head-On Heart (Virgin/Cheek, April 2007) is available at Amazon.com.

Where do you get your ideas?

2007-06-10T14:43:00.000-06:00

Mmmm . . . pantyhose!

I get asked this question once in awhile, though not as often as, "Would you please stop having ideas, or at least cover them up in public?"

The answer is simple. My ideas are emailed to me, fresh and hot each morning and throughout the day and night, as Spam. Where else could an erotica writer find such concise, vivid, blatantly sexual, high-concept plotlines?

Like the title of this little gem, sent to me by Gload Houston (I'm not sure who "Gload Houston" is, but I imagine him to be a dark and tormented outsider, a cross between Heathcliff and the Lone Ranger). Although the body of Gload's message was your garden-variety XXX Spam, the title was sheer inspiration. I wrote a haiku about it, just to capture the essence of how it made me feel.

Three Office Girls In Pantyhose, Making Love

Skirts slide to the floor . . . .
the hiss of lips on nylon.
Coffee cup shatters.

One of these days, I might write a story about the three office girls and their salacious adventures, in or out of their pantyhose. Maybe even a novel. Who knows? You can do just about anything in nylon.

That new blog smell

2007-06-10T13:14:00.000-06:00

I had to do some triage on my blogs -- they were getting out of control. I just moved my writing blog because I can do more cool stuff here than I could there.

So if you want to find me, here I'll be.

Or I might be here:

That's enough blog-fidgeting for the day -- I should probably do some actual writing, huh?