Words to live by.

 

Read this the next time you are desperately longing for encouragement:

Don’t let fear decide how you live, what you wear, what you say, or what you do.  Identify your fear, understand it and accept it, and move on.

Coco Graham

I believe reality is a marvelous joke staged for my edification and amusement, and everybody is working very hard to make me happy.

Terence McKenna

 

From Pure Joy springs all creation.

By Joy it is sustained, toward Joy it

proceeds and to Joy it returns.

From the Sanskrit.

Curse of the Spider Woman!

Of course, Curse of the Spider Woman is a Linda Mercury novel, and no novel of mine is complete without a passionate love story.

My centaur hero and my spider heroine have some serious history behind them, and it has really messed with their attraction.Let's have a peek, shall we?

      She rolled onto her back, away from him.

       “Where the fuck are you going?” he asked. He flipped her over to her belly. This was the position his stallion preferred. His primitive centaur instincts battered his discipline. He had to have her, had to mate with her, fill her, fuck her, tie her to him with the fragile bonds of pleasure until she would never leave him again.

       No more exile in the human world. She would be his mare, his herd. He leaned over and set his teeth in her shoulder, as a breeding mortal horse would.

 

Self-love and The Beauty Myth.

Naomi Wolf

I was doing some wandering in my old files and found these words of wisdom from Naomi Wolf, from The Beauty Myth.

***

            Can there be a pro-woman definition of beauty? Absolutely. What has been missing is play. The beauty myth is harmful and pompous and grave because so much, too much, depends on it. The pleasure of playfulness is that it doesn’t matter. Once you play for stakes of any amount, the game has become a war game, or compulsive gambling. In the myth, it has been a game for life, for questionable love, for desperate and dishonest sexuality, and without the choice not to play by alien rules.  No choice, no free will; no levity, no real game.

 

          But we can imagine, to save ourselves, a life in the body that is not value-laden; a masquerade, a voluntary theatricality that emerges from abundant self-love. A pro-woman redefinition of beauty reflects our redefinitions of what power is. Who says we need a hierarchy? Where I see beauty may not be where you do. Some people look more desirable to me than they do to you. So what? My perception has no authority over yours. Why should beauty be exclusive? 

Admiration can include so much. Why is rareness impressive? The high value of rareness is a masculine concept, having more to do with capitalism than with lust. What is the fun in wanting the most what cannot be found? Children, in contrast, are common as dirt, but they are highly valued and regarded as beautiful.

  

        How might women act beyond the myth? Who can say? Maybe we will let our bodies wax and wane, enjoying the variations on a theme, and avoid pain because when something hurts us it begins to look ugly to us. Maybe we will adorn ourselves with real delight, with the sense that we are gilding the lily. Maybe the less pain women inflict on their bodies, the more beautiful our bodies will look to us. Perhaps we will forget to elicit admiration from strangers, and find we don’t miss it; perhaps we will await our older faces with anticipations, and be unable to see our bodies as a mass of imperfections, since there is nothing on us that is not precious. Maybe we won’t want to be the “after” anymore.

      

 How to begin? Let’s be shameless. Be greedy. Pursue pleasure. Avoid pain. Wear and touch and eat and drink what we feel like. Tolerate other women’s choices. Seek out the sex we want and fight fiercely against the sex we do not want. Choose our own causes. And once we break through and change the rules so our sense of our own beauty cannot be shaken, sing that beauty and dress it up and flaunt it and revel in it: In a sensual politics, female is beautiful.

          A woman-loving definition of beauty supplants desperation with play, narcissism with self-love, dismemberment with wholeness, absence with presence, stillness with animation. It admits radiance: light coming out of the face and the body, rather than a spotlight on the body, dimming the self. It is sexual, various, and surprising. We will be able to see it in others and not be frightened, and able at last to see it in ourselves.

   

 

Quotes and snippets from Vamping It Up

Every so often, I like revisiting my books and choosing lines that I particularly like. Here are some from Vamping It Up.

Holly Barros hated her sex drive.

***

She would be a good girl. Like right now.

A good girl wouldn’t purse her lips in fascination at the muscles in another man’s shoulders as he dug a phone out of his back pocket. His enormous hand dwarfed the device. Wide, sensual fingers danced over the glass surface.

Big hands, big cock, Blaine’s werewolf cousins used to whisper when they watched soccer games and compared the players. He would have to have a horse dick to fit those broad hands. Her throat dried.

 ***

His outstretched hand was cool and dry as he helped her up from the couch. He placed his hands on her hips and guided her to his bedroom. “We have the time. I’m sure we can do it more than once. Math majors are fun that way.”

More than once? Wow.

“I’m not orgasmic,” she warned.

“I’m not goal oriented,” he replied.

***

Someone knocked on the door.

“Locksmith,” a voice called from the hallway.

“Coming,” Steven called back.

“No shit,” the locksmith yelled. “The whole building knows that.”

Steven laughed. She giggled, surprisingly proud of herself. Blaine could bite her. This is what really good sex was all about.

 ***

 Celeste’s hand left the camera frame and re-emerged with a full martini glass, complete with lemon twist. “My dear. There are no cures for a broken heart. But the best bandages are copious amounts of champagne, ridiculously expensive shoes, and a procession of nubile men.”

 ***

She wanted a life filled with pleasure. The big joys, too, like the epiphanies of generosity, not just bodily sensations such as food and drink and scent, but the sensuality of intellectual stimulation.

How many times had she come back from a challenging lecture on the politics of the emergence of the parallel court system ready to jump Blaine?

Cerebral pursuits turned her on.The corners of her mouth curved in delicious remembrance of Steven’s talented and curious body. Bliss and carnality and hedonism all conjoining with mental inspiration.

***

Being CEO of BarrosCorp was a difficult, demanding job. The long hours, endless travel, and the relentless pounding against the glass ceiling left Holly with certain needs. Animalistic, carnal, raw needs. Needs that were about to be met.

 ***

“And I see something that fits our vacation mood,” Celeste smiled. She beckoned to someone behind Holly. A perfectly ripped young man in a Roman gladiator outfit approached them, a golden tray of small bites on his shoulder. He stopped in front of the two women.
“Fruit, ladies? Chocolates, perhaps?”
“Some of us embrace the power of ‘and’.” Celeste said.

Rejections and all that.

Dracula's Secret got rejected by Berkley yesterday.

In order to keep myself optimistic and encouraged, I frequently read this quote to myself:

 ###

Here's what I tell my students on the first day when I teach one of my creative writing courses:

You will be published if you possess three qualities- talent, passion, and discipline.

You will probably be published if you possess two of the three qualities in either combination - either talent and discipline, or passion and discipline.

You will likely be published if you possess neither talent nor passion but still have discipline. Just go to the bookstore and pick up a few "notable" titles and you'll see what I mean.

But if all you possess is talent or passion, if all you possess is talent and passion, you will not be published. The likelihood is you will never be published. And if by some miracle you are published, it will probably never happen again.

Quote from Write Away: One Novelist's Approach to Fiction and the Writing Life by Elizabeth George

Since I have both passion and discipline, I feel most optimistic. :) Talent? Time will tell that. :)

Quote-tastic for the Holiday, part II

"May your walls know joy; May every room hold laughter and every window open to great possibility."
Maryanne Radmacher-Hershey

"Every day is a god, each day is a god, and holiness holds forth in time. I worship each god, I praise each day splintered down, and wrapped in time like a husk, a husk of many colors spreading, at dawn fast over the mountain split."
-Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

A great deal of life consists of hurling ourselves into poorly-mapped abysses. That's how things get _done_. We can try to choose our abysses well, but there comes a time when we have to leap. Daily.
-- Patrick Nielsen Hayden

"anyone or anything that does not bring you alive is too small for you." david whyte

"Do not be critics, you people, I beg you. I was a critic and I wish I could take it all back because it came from a smelly and ignorant place in me and spoke with a voice that was all rage and envy. Do not dismiss a book until you have written one, and do not dismiss a movie until you have made one, and do not dismiss a person until you have met them. It is a ****load of work to be open-minded and generous and understanding and forgiving and accepting, but, Christ, that is what matters. What matters is saying yes."
-Dave Eggers in "The Harvard Advocate."

Don’t let fear decide how you live, what you wear, what you say, or what you do. Identify your fear, understand it and accept it, and move on.
--Coco Graham

A bad reputation can set you free. After all, if you've already declared yourself to be a pot-smoking, acid-addled slut, your opponents are forced to oppose your ideas on their merits, rather than strategically revealing your hidden depravities. Shame is no weapon against the shameless.
-- John Perry Barlow

(so when people get snippy about writing romance, just smile and agree. "Why, yes! I am shameless!")