Doubts Creep In

Wrote a thousand words today which is higher than average, but still: What if it’s bad? It felt kind of boring to write, maybe it’s boring?

Okay, think of one good thing you wrote today without going back to look at it… They go to the park on [protagonist] Bart’s birthday and get high with the hippies on the hill, then hit on one of the older hippie guys and make him so uncomfortable that he leaves.

Well that’s a little triggering – like, they made somebody uncomfortable then laughed about it. And wait, what are the politics you’re presenting in this book, anyway? It’s an incest fantasy but incest hurts a lot of people. And you’re an approaching-forty (in just a few days, people!) dude writing about a sexually-precocious teenager and isn’t that a little irresponsible? Someone could use your work to justify their violence or ignorance…

Maybe, and that would pain me. But to address the first charge: the characters are teenagers, and teenagers do mean shit. I’ve done mean shit. It’s my fiction and it’s my truth. I have legitimate and even painful reasons why I write and fantasize about incest, and writing about it makes me smile and will probably make other people smile and/or get hard and if I hurt somebody, maybe they’ll tell me and I’ll understand and maybe it’ll change me, but until then I just do what I do…

And that’s as much “talking myself out of holes” as I’m going to do today.

Above: The song of the day has just got to be Dead of Night by Orville Peck which my friend just introduced me to last night. Gothic Lynch Lana Americana, pierce my vein and flood it in, baby.

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