Do not go lightly to the table

At the risk of sounding like a member of a cult, I’m going to once more paraphrase a point from Steven King’s On Writing that’s stuck with me.

He says that whatever you do, do not go to your writing lightly. Go there sad, go there angry or jubilant or frustrated, but do not go there lightly.

This is advice I need to take.

To go my writing lightly is to go there in a half-daze, ready to write another sentence just for the sake of doing so, the way I imagine someone might lay bricks.

I confess that the last week or so has not been amazingly productive. I’ve written 6k rather than my planned 10k and been coming the closest to ‘writer’s block’ that I have in a while.

That said I’m not a big believer in ‘writer’s block’, at least for myself. I’m a sit there and wait till something happens kind of guy, even if it takes half an hour of staring at a blank page.

Except over the last week I did still write, in drips and drabs. And when I did I often felt like I was going through the motions for the sake of it.

At the current point that I’m at in book two, the protagonists have reached a city where they are trying to investigate an artefact. I know roughly how they’ll succeed. I see the end result, the next ‘step’ of the story. All I’m doing is laying down the pieces, brick by brick, till they get there. The result is this feeling of drudgery like I’m just going through the paces, one at a time. All the while the internal editor is harassing me in the back of my head about whether the writing is up to snuff, or just mediocre and boring. I have not come to my writing with any feeling of pressure, urgency, a sense of discovery or tension as to what was about to happen next. I’ve come lightly to the table.

Writing fiction is a bit of a trick in that I’m trying to say something that isn’t actually explicitly there on the page. I might want to say, “This forest is warped by magic,” but instead of writing that I’ll describe how fucked up the trees are. I might want to say, “He was deeply infatuated with her,” but I’ll try to show it through how desperate he is to please her in dialogue. This can even happen in an entire short story, like wanting to say “That Don Quixote has more in common with an innocent child than an adult,” and write a short story about a delusional modern knight who meets a lost child. But I won’t just write that one sentence that ‘says it’. I’m not always sure why. Sometimes it’s force of habit, to ‘show’ instead of ‘tell’, but sometimes its because I know that stories aren’t instruction manuals, but magic tricks and worlds the reader ought to get lost in.

But now, I’ve been coming to the table close to empty and there’s little I want to say underneath the surface. For me, the more there is to say, the easier it is to write. My emotions; frustration, joy, anger, the need to articulate a memory, even the urge to have fun, they inform what I want to say underneath the explicit and without that the writing is hollow. There’s still the plot, the ‘what happens next’ but there’s less of the honest interactions between characters that bring them to life.

So how do you make sure you don’t come to the table lightly? I think it involves a degree of self-awareness to begin with. Noticing the lack. Then adhere to a rule: you’re not allowed to write like that. I’m going to experiment with that a little. I’m going to ask myself whether I feel anything at all, or anything of note before I write. Is it possible to summon feelings if not?

The last thing I want to do is wait for inspiration or whatever the hell to come by. Luckily, I have among my other attributes, the ability to get inordinately excited about many things. I think I can find the excitement in a scene, if not its DOA as is.

But whether or not I can get it up, it’s worth thinking about what it takes to not come lightly to the table.

I have a suspicion that the problem of lightness doesn’t just apply to writing. After all, we sometimes call it ‘passion’ when we go to our work with the opposite of lightness. Passion is rather constructive. Frustration and misery often less so. Except the great thing about creative work is that any emotion can be constructive- at least I believe so- whereas when you’re at a lot of jobs there are a lot of detrimental emotions.

I think that’s partially why folks like me do so much creative work. Bipolar-types and otherwise people with overflowing emotions. We’re full of that which is not light, and all of it is raw energy and foundation for creating something new.

So next time I’m going to see if it’s possible to go to the table with something more than lightness, even if its the very frustration at myself for feeling light, to begin with.

On that note here’s the next part of HTWACN, which I did not write lightly.

Chapter 4: the second line onwards.

As we stand in the toilet, a fully formed idea grips my mind, one I jot down in short form, in bullet points and arcane notes that only I would ever be able to decipher, which is why when I am in coffee shops I boldly mark my spot with my notebook, whilst working solo and retiring to the restroom, knowing that anyone who took it would be lost among my cypher, among the gnomic corridors of my mind.

Nonetheless, the idea is of the werewolf girl being a student, a university student, newly graduated with a degree in English, as one should write about what one knows. She works at a publishing house and is assigned to romance novels, which endangers her life and the lives of those around her as the erotic nature of these novels brings out the wolf within. She can only read them whilst tied to the bed, or chained to the chair. I will describe how she ties herself to the bed, bedecked in her smallclothes, in great and lurid detail, before putting in quotes from the romance novels she reads, erotic tidbits, like a story within a story, a meta-story indeed, and then she discovers one day, that the romance novels are all from the same author and at personal request to be edited only by her.

Mysterious notes appear in the manuscript. Notes asking for her phone number and all she has to do is post-it note it to her apartment’s window, facing outwards, and despite the dark and distance the anonymous author promises to find her and in his words “Please you with pain.”

The first time they meet she thinks they will have sex, but she is only there for inspiration, he says, because he has been told by a seer that she is the key to his art, for when she reads something truly erotic she will transform in front of him. So in a toilet, they meet, and he insists on reading an excerpt, but she baulks, terrified of who she might become. She resists, desperate to leave, but he grabs her wrist and demands she wait. She says that now is not the night, but his touch brings out her nails, which grow and grow till she is sprinting away as he calls out to her calling, “I need you. I need my editor.”

Perfection.

Ah but the toilet in the here and terrible now, ah, but in the toilet slumps a billionaires body, two holes at his neck, his watch gleaming in the sodden fluorescent light of the toilet.

I recognise him. He’s Alain Zimmer, the prince of Lan Kwai Fong, the son of the founder of this debauched realm. “Is he dead?” I ask, dread seeping into me, blood going cold.

“I have not checked,” said Francesca. She glances at me plaintively, appealingly, desperately, terribly, and I slowly approach my fingers quivering. Francesca says, “Don’t bother with the neck or wrists, you have to press your ear to his chest and listen. Trust me, I know first aid.” There is no irony in her tone, which is why I think it will be a great scene in my novella. Irony is best appreciated by witnesses. So I angle my body, ear out, ready to punch my skull into his ribs, thinking of how Francesca’s life might very well be over, that she will be imprisoned or forced to go out in the day, and when her skin shimmers in the sunlight they will know she is a vampire and what then? The normals will experiment on her, possibly, stake her if they know their history, but more likely she will damage their basic understanding of biology and taxonomy when it comes to humans.

The council will not stand for that, of course. They will take her first, or take her out if the stories are to be believed. Now I press my ears to the prince’s chest, wondering at what transpired here. As I do so I am reminded of a similar incident, to when I first saw Francesca, the first time I noticed her and the first time she noticed me. A flood of images returns.

University, in an evening lecture on Chaucer. A never-noticed lithe hand erupts upwards from the seats, fingers wiggling sensuously as if to garner even more attention. The raven-haired woman has her chin in her other hand, lackadaisical, almost bored, except for the small smile that curves across her red lips. She asks if iambic pentameter is actually real, or a figment we have created because to read some of these verses is to force the iamb upon it, she asks the whole question in iambic pentameter to make the point, and when Professor Paisley asks, “Could you repeat that?” And “One more time, but please speak normally,” Francesca says,

“See, even you couldn’t understand me.”

And we all laugh, and I think, a girl who can make me laugh, only in my dreams.

A party later that week: she walks towards the dance floor, a sinuous inamorata, then as she does her legs her hips, her whole body gyrates as her hands ejaculate roofward and I am drawn to her, only to be blocked by the meaty walls of better-looking men, of mounds of flesh and muscle that have fucked their way through college.

But then, a chance meeting, an assigned group project, her laughter released by my witty prods, giggles and then that finger poking my chest, that black-nailed marvel pressing my shirt inwards and the question, her saying, “I am so nervous Bob, I’m really worried about this project.”

“But you look cool as a clam,” I say. “A clam in winter,” I add. And she giggles again and takes my hand and I nearly gasp from how cold it is, how the air-conditioning has frozen it, as she touches my fingers to her neck and I feel the bloody pulse, throbbing, throbbing, right by her skin, and our knees touch and her smile is only for me, and if I could have frozen that moment like her hand I would have, but all things must pass.

Then visiting her in London after we graduated. Her room. Tickling her, because that is how sex starts in films. Noticing how she always insists we meet at night and then reading into it, till she says, “I love...” and my heart hovers like a butterfly on a stem, till she finishes with, “Spending time with you.” And the world sinks into oblivion. I could have stayed that night on her floor, sleeping over like a friend, but the frustration, the sheer desire to touch her would have driven me mad, so instead I stumble outwards, packing without saying a word, into the full moon night. The first time I feel the beast within. The shackled creature. That night I roam wild.

Then her words, after her first job, on the phone. How she wished I stayed that night. How she wanted me the way a woman wants a man, how she felt that she bungled it. Then when she visited Hong Kong I could not make it to the airport before she left, I was stuck in traffic. I had one last chance to hold her, one last chance before she was whisked away to her new life on angels wings, to Max who she would meet on the plane itself. But traffic was meant to be.

Now, I remember her pulse-quickening and wonder, did the pulse come first, or did my touch bring the pulse about? She had come to visit Hong Kong to renew her citizenship and asked if I was available and ever since then I drunk texted her every night, a fool, frustrated by the terrible revelations on her social media wall.

She is engaged to Max. Who I lied about liking.

But now I press my ears to a man’s chest and find, to my dismay, that he is not breathing.

Chapter 5

Chapter 5: The body

“Francesca,” I breathe, heavily. I turn my bleary red eyes to face her. The world swims as tears occlude my vision. For in my mind’s eye I see a terrible possibility, a horrid premonition of a fell world that could be. My goddess in handcuffs, head shaved by a prison barber. Showering in the cold among a group of other women, tattooed, prone to violence, how they regard her firm buttocks with their roving eyes, ready to pounce on her as a soap flies from her hand like a butterfly escaping a romantic’s fingers. Watch it soar, spin in mid-air, suds detaching like childhood dreams till it careens to the floor. Francesca, innocent bends over, exhibiting herself like an open door, and now, the tattooed women surge forward, fingers desperate to pick her lock, poor Francesca pinned to the ground and O! I cannot look any further with my inner eye, though the vision claws at my imagination with lurid, black-painted nails.

“Francesca!” I repeat, my voice cracking. “How could you do this to...”

“To him?” She says, hanging her head.

“No!” I move to her, brushing against the sink with my hip, then lift her chin till her eyes meet mine. “To yourself. Your future. Tell me, was it a crime of passion? What madness drove this tragic development?”

I watch her hands shake as they thread into one another, watch her slump against the mirror of the toilet. “It is a long story Bob. But the truth is...I...I...it was not my fault! It was the mirror.” I look at the mirror. Within there is no reflection, just the penis-graffiti’d wall behind her. “The magic mirror,” she whispers. “Alain was a collector of the occult, like Hitler. And he had among his belongings a mirror that cast my reflection. I was transfixed, Bob. Can you imagine seeing yourself for the first time?”

I could not, having seen myself many times. I regard her always slightly unkempt appearance, the way she wears no makeup except her red lipstick. Only now do I find myself curious as to how she is able to apply it without smudges. How do any vampires? It must be by touch, or enhanced smell. The heightened awareness of the Nosferatu must aid in the application of makeup. “I was transfixed, Bob,” she says again. “He showed me his...red room he called it. And within was the mirror. Then he told me, he said, “Bite me you sultry ho! That was how he spoke to me. But then the mirror...I did not want to Bob, yet at the same time I did- can you imagine what that’s like?”

“To be conflicted, to be filled with the urge to do one thing whilst the higher mind grapples against your own psyche?”

“Yes!”

“To question your own intentions, to wonder, ‘is it I that wants this, or is it the thing inside me?”

“Yes!”

“Of course Francesca! A thousand times yes!”

“Yes, yes, yes! That was the power of the mirror...I did not want to, yet I could not resist. Bob, this was a mishap, I must tell you how.” She places her hand on mine, as she leans her head against the hand dryer. “It is a sordid tale, but I have to tell you the truth.”

And in that moment the third terrible aspect of my personality reared its foul head. For a third of me is man, another third wolf, and the final a writer. Not just any writer, but a parasitic, opportunistic hack, who devours potential story-lines as a fat man might cheesecake. So when she tells me her story I am already recording it. I take out my notebook and claim it is to help keep track of the details, when really I am scurrying away this sickening, torrid chain of events for a potential novella...dare I say it my own novella. She tells me of Alain and I recount her tale now, with liberties taken in a few specific aspects so as to disguise the true nature of her tale. I shall call it,

The chase of the Nosferatu

Which begins with Francesca, who in the tale I shall call “F”. F is an engaged woman, who works in marketing for a pharmaceutical company, where her creative powers are perpetually stymied by the cold restraints of government regulation. She wishes to sell cough syrup to babies with sweet promises, to peddle UTI pills as if they were more than broad spectrum antibiotics. She dreams of slogans, shreds advertisement designs that she furtively sketches during lunch hour- all of this talent wasted in the name of ethics. Such is her frustration, and the frustration boils over to her personal life. M, her fiancee, is a sad excuse for a man- he is a person of science, one devoid of imagination. The only sex they have ever have is vanilla, the only position, missionary, sacrifices F had made, has allowed for in her life for the sake of her love for M’s stalwart, dependable nature; simple, predictable, a foil to the wavering force of her soul. Yet she craves something more, and when “A”, the billionaire, finds her at a conference, a set of events is set into motion that can only end in tragedy.

The presentation is made during a pharmaceutical conference overseas, where F and A are present, and although the reception of her lecture on logo design is lukewarm at best, A is struck by her figure, dressed as conservatively as possible in office attire, as if she’s a remnant of a repressed, Victorian past, barely an inch of skin visible, as her eczema has flared up. (Though Francesca has flawless skin! Ah, the creative liberties I must take for the sake of plot.) “A” is in awe and after the presentation, demands his security follow her, to learn her address. Thus begins his insidious surveillance of her life. “A” approaches her company with his own pharmaceutical needs, demanding a new advertising campaign for the aphrodisiac they currently make, and requests “F” by name- a chilling foreshadow when she learns that she was requested by name from her manager. “A” is a VIP client, and so he makes ridiculous demands of F and her team, keeping her late after work, so that his team of crack ex-CIA bodyguards can break into her apartment and install surveillance devices in all the rooms.

He personally disguises himself to follow her at every opportunity. Sends her mysterious anonymous gifts of borderline BDSM office clothing, all tight belts and chokers, corsets and stockings, which she never wears, because Max, that is, “M”, would be too disturbed by the subliminal cravings they might evoke. “A” waits in the shadows, tracing her every step, whilst she picks up clues that something is amiss, crumb by crumb, till she formulates her trap- a letter, written at home and left conveniently on a dresser, of her erotic fantasies concerning a billionaire or lustful intent, who has an obsession with office wear, and how she wishes they would meet, how she wishes that if only she was stalked, followed to an orgiastic place of noise and dance- a nightclub rendezvous, where she wears a trench-coat above a conservative blouse and then the gambit- to Lan Kwai Fong she goes, and as she sits at the bar he approaches- placing his hands around her eyes, going, “Guess who!” But of course she cannot, and that is the thrill.

Thus begins their lurid games of hide and seek. Throughout her days he would creep up on her, as if from nowhere, to place his moisturized palms around her eyes and whisper strange phrases into her ears. How she pretend to enjoy these ambushes, gathering evidence on her phone, which she sets on ‘record’ throughout the day, to catch him in the act!

And then he provides her with a sex-contract. If she signs, they can begin their affair in earnest. Millions of dollars, protection, excitement, glamour are offered- but she is faithful to M in all his drudgery, like he is the chronic skin disease she cannot shake. But alas, M is in debt. M has a terrible vice, a penchant for gambling on dog-races, and she must make up for it and so enters the graces of “A”, manipulating him for his money whilst concealing her actions from M and wrestling with whether she is prostituting herself or beating this sexual predator off at his own sick game. But then, ah, let us inject a degree of Magical Realism, as Salman Rushdie might, and produce the magical mirror.

There he asks her to bite him, but does not know she is Nosferatu- and then she does and O! Drains him of his life’s blood, not his money, but actual blood. All of which takes place in the confines of the club’s toilet where they first met.

Where, in the material world, now lies his still body.

What a tale! So sick! So appealing! But I relent when I see that now, in the real world, Francesca stares at me with eyes of defeat.

“Help me hide the body Bob. I know you can.”

I laugh. “How Francesca? I am only a writer!”

But the answer is already within me. The terrible fact. Already I can see perfectly in this poorly lit toilet. For I know my eyes have begun to change, have become the predator’s. I glance at the mirror and see the yellow irises staring back.

“You are not just a writer, Bob,” she says, stroking the burgeoning fur on the back of my neck.

Of course, I cannot bury the body. I cannot hide the body. A terrible hunger begins to form in my stomach.

She wishes me to consume him.

“His blood is sweet,” she says. “It tastes like money.”

And though the animal within wishes to agree, I cannot help but pray there is another way.