What about today? Still cold. The space heaters don’t really make a dent. I need fingerless gloves and am wearing a hat. Today I’m feeling kind of constricted — cold does that. So does imminent vacation. Last night I gave myself comfort foods & comfort time, after my chores were done.
What comes next? Being with the notebook pages first means I’m more conscious when I get to the computer page, means I’m more awake, means I’m thinking more about what I’m writing — my being more awake means my internal editors are more awake. This is why I like to write before the sun is up — my editors are not morning people.
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I’m going to be away from the computer for about a week, so I’ll be sharing with you some posts I wrote a couple of years ago after my interview with Britt Bravo and the Arts and Healing network, about the writing workshops and writing as a transformative process.
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Tonight’s the Erotic Reading Circle — have you been yet? It’s a great place to bring any erotic or sexual writing you’re doing, to share it with a generous and fun group of other writers and readers and get whatever sort of feedback you’d like. Bring your short stories, your poems, your scripts, excerpts from your novel, the texts or tweets that you’re working into a prose poem… bring the thing that you just started working on or somomething that you’ve been engaged with and loving for years.
Here’s something I wrote about the ERC a couple of years ago — and I continue to appreciate the powerful sharing and storytelling and support at every month’s Circle.
The Erotic Reading Circle meets at the Center for Sex and Culture, which is at 1519 Mission St, between 11th and So Van Ness, in San Francisco. I won’t be able to be there tonight, but I’ll leave you with something I might have brought tonight — and a prompt, too, so that, if you want to, you can write something to take to the Circle!
First the prompts: Read through the following three fragments and notice which one starts to percolate a sensual or hot or funny or seductive story or scene for you –
– this I whisper into your tender ears
– Stephanie always does as she’s told
– These marks I bear speak volumes
Let yourself be drawn to one (or more than one!), give yourself 10 or 15 minutes, and begin writing — and remember: feel welcome to change the prompts in any way that’s interesting for you (change the pronouns if you’d like, or add a “not” to the phrase…)
Here’s my write from this prompt, which I offered at the Declaring Our Erotic workshop earlier this month (this write is a bit sexually explicit):
Stephanie doesn’t always do as she’s told. Stephanie, in fact, almost never does a she’s told, which is how, in a round about kind of way, Stephanie finds her fine butch self tethered with a pair of thong panties to my kitchen chair while I tend to my business on the living room couch — and by business, of course, I mean my clit, and by tend, girl, well, you know what I mean.
Stephanie had been told that I am not a girl who likes to be kept waiting — it’s not like that’s not well know around our little mid-city queer community: Althea’s not just prompt, she’s pressed and split a half-minute after you’re supposed to meet her somewhere. That means I don’t wait. You show up early or you don’t show up. I had one butch girlfriend who used to stand outside my door and stare at her wristwatch til just the exact time she was supposed to be picking me up; only then would she rap her three short knocks on my door, knowing full well I was standing exactly 6 inches from her on the other side of that hard wood, wet and shaking in my dinner date duds, and I’d have to walk my heels in place just to make it sound like I hadn’t been — right — waiting for her practiced fist to rattle my cage.
She was long gone, though, and now it’s Stephanie I’ve got to contend with. Stephanie, with the kind of good looks that make you just want to tear your eyes out so you can walk straight. First time we went out, she pulled up in front of my building about the time she was supposed to be escorting me to my car, and I would have left her out there pressing the buzzer for all she was worth but I made the mistake of looking at her in that tailored suit, shoes she’d shined up just for the occasion, a fedora at a perfect angle and carrying a single white daisy she’d ripped from someone’s front lawn — not to mention (how can I not mention?), from my third story window I could see what else she’d brought me by the bulge in her gabardine trousers It didn’t help I hadn’t been fucked in six weeks and then there she was at my front door, smelling like clean and musk and hair oil and I Just had time to say, You’re late. this is the only strike you’ll get – before she quick caught my hand, gave me the flower, slid her other hand along my waist and gave me the kind of kiss that bent my toes and thinned every resolve I’ve ever slid under my skin. Ok. One chance.
That night ended with Yours Truly walking mussed and tawdry and perfect up my stairs after Stephanie urged me away from the entry-way spotlight and instead into the bushes for a sizable good-night kiss, and me promising, yes, she could inch those hard hands up there next time if she showed up for dinner on time. Next time would be dinner at my house, Althea on parade.
So I turned out a meal fit for the king she wanted to be and she’d be eating it now, too, if she hadn’t rung my bell three minutes and forty-four seconds past her agreed-upon arrival time. I can’t ignore that this is probably extra prompt for Stephanie — but if a girl doesn’t have her standards, what does she have?
However, I think I mentioned the extreme dry spell I was experiencing — and I decided, as I buzzed the poor butch in, to see if Stephanie can be trained.
Thank you for your presence, your pressures, your love and struggle. Thank you for your words: your words matter.
