Showing posts with label sex. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sex. Show all posts
Friday, July 12, 2019
Thursday, August 9, 2018
Playboy Channel
It's important always to treat a character with respect, even the tawdry ones, the bit players and stock figures -- tailors, waiters, uniformed cops, cab drivers. Little glimpses need to be three-dimensional and real. It's never wrong to be honest about where they are in life, how they move, talk, think, hide themselves from others.
Characters who transform, undertake challenges, and put their future at risk, are "principal players." There is no story without such people. Some of them are heroic men and women, some are dangerous villains. It's possible to see virtue in a villain, no different than a hero with inner conflicts and limitations. I'm speaking mostly of male characters. Women seldom deliberately do wrong, although it's good to see the extreme and exceptional. One of my favorites was a film star -- Ophilia Opfir -- always outrageous, mercurial, a comic figure. Now that I think of it, all of my women were wonderfully complicated. The Good Walk Alone had several female characters, no two alike, vital to the story line. In Mars Shall Thunder, Wendy and Emma played pivotal supporting roles, far more important than the men.
Leading ladies are important to me. Sorry, that's an understatement. The Good Walk Alone is Janet DiMarco's story. Mars Shall Thunder is Laura Oak's story. Chris is nothing until he meets Peachy in A Portrait of Valor.
Chris and Peachy are the subject of this essay. They deserved a series of novels. I risked everything to do it -- personally, financially, and artistically. I don't regret it, although I doubt that Chris and Peachy will be well received by readers. Their exploits are sexually explicit, adults only. My best bet is the Playboy Channel. It was important to give Chris and Peachy a voice of their own, in honor of their exceptional lives and exceptional challenges.
Christopher Cable, P.I., is a better man than I am, far more complex, far more courageous. He was an only child born into a military family. His birth took his mother's life. His father was a stern naval officer who became a powerful member of the Deep State, if you know what that is. Chris was raised by colored servants, if you know what that is. He went to Ivy League prep school, a sprig of privilege. He spent summers in New York with show people, his mother's clan of Broadway actors, dancers, musicians. When he was 18 years old, he was accepted in Marine Corps Officer Candidate School to honor his father and follow in his footsteps.
Combat changes people, always, and Chris fought with courage that could not erase sorrow and guilt and revulsion. He hated killing. As an officer, his duty was ever-present and clear, ordering men to their death and dismemberment. Rising to the rank of Captain, partly on merit, partly because his father pulled strings, Chris couldn't continue. He resigned, changed his name, and fled to Los Angeles -- a disgraced black sheep who abandoned his duty and his father's iron sphere of influence and expectations.
Ex-military is where most of our cops come from, and Chris had friends in L.A., ex-Marines who went into law enforcement, well-paid private surveillance, and medicine. None of those jobs were right for him. Chris couldn't deal with fussy paperwork or take orders, especially an order to do nothing, to drop a case, let the guilty skate because they had political pull.
When the saga opens in A Portrait of Valor, he's alone, lonely, miserable, age 38, jailed for killing a man, which he regrets but was compelled to do, to save a crowd of laughing drunks and doped-up chicks at a Hollywood nightclub. Terrible karma. The man who hates killing, forced to kill as a licensed private eye, working alone, financially strapped, hardened to life, expecting nothing but trouble. Not handsome, covered in battle scars, Chris cleans up every night and tries to be cheerful, drinks in nice nightclubs and dinner joints, hoping to meet a single woman his own age or thereabouts. He's ignored, night after night, year after year.
Enter Peachy.
I don't think I want to talk about her, a truly exceptional woman among women, beautiful, brilliant, elder daughter of a billionaire nuclear physicist (a horrible father), turned her back on wealth and made her own way in the world, a Stanford Ph.D.
Wonderful couple who saved themselves for each other, wouldn't settle for less than ideal romance, astounding sexual chemistry, risking their lives for each other repeatedly. This is the glory of heroic fiction, to paint the beautiful.
They meet and marry in A Portrait of Valor, and it nearly costs Peachy her life. They cheat death again in The Tar Pit showbiz mystery, throw global banking and CIA officials for a loop in Charity, and separated, incommunicado and older in Finding Flopsie, they struggle to understand what's happening in an alarming, globetrotting case of murder and extortion.
Think series franchise, a modern Nick and Nora Charles.
.
Monday, January 15, 2018
On women
I've known 75 women intimately and hundreds more in circumstances that allowed me to see into their hearts and minds as a film director, as an amateur sleuth and world traveler. I was always keenly interested in the bravest and brightest.
In previous writing, I quoted Mark Twain, "There is only one good sex, the female one." I argued that women should be exempt from the criminal law, granted a separate and equal share of government by constitutional amendment (the entire U.S. House of Representatives) and a monopoly of civilian law enforcement. It is my conviction that women have a separate moral purpose apart from men, one which a man learns to understand in marriage but never fully embraces because it would unman him.
Generally speaking, foolish to do so, women as a species are resolute, industrious, coy, secretive, curious and observant. When she gives birth, she is "settled" and her primary purpose sharpens to an absolute, amplifying her powers. Motherhood confers the will to kill, like a mama bear, blunt instrument of life and death if man or beast threatens her children.
No different than men in some respects, women can be self-destructive (drug addiction and alcoholism, prostitution, thievery, and irrational tantrums). The human condition applies to both sexes equally, but women have a deep silence and arbitrariness that men often see as disturbing and mysterious. She can smile come hither then sneer go to hell unpredictably.
In the work that I am about to attempt, it is imperative to depict women as individuals, some ideal, some ordinary, and one seriously deranged and murderous, none of which are typical. The purpose of fiction is to offer contrasts, danger, intrigue, combat, and the costly price of triumph. Only the most admirable of women will undertake a mission of steely commitment separate from the biological and utilitarian destiny that urges her to play along, suffer a load of shit without response. Men do it, too. They knuckle under to keep a job, obeying the laws and customs of polite society, shunning risk of a painful adventure with uncertain outcome. Warriors are few.
There have been numerous heroic female warriors -- Boadicea, Joan of Arc, Phoolan Devi, Emiline Pankhurst, and Margaret Thatcher spring to mind, but there were many thousands in world history. If I was a better student, I would remember more names, like the wildcat who disarmed and stood on the neck of an invader that she would come to admire and mate as his queen. Even the dumbest male student should know the steadfast dedication of Marie Curie and Florence Nightingale, the charismatic crusades of Aimee Semple McPherson, Mary Baker Eddy, Susan B. Anthony, Madame Blavatsky, Ayn Rand, Gloria Steinem, and Anne Coulter.
Women dominate popular literature for good reason, because women read.
They play second fiddle to movie heroes and villains, but without women on screen there is very little story to tell, merely men struggling to kill each other. One of the best classic films is The Inn of The Sixth Happiness starring Ingrid Bergman, the true story of a housemaid who decides that her mission in life is to go to China and preach the Gospel, traveling alone on the Trans Siberia Railway and ox cart, by force of character given official status to abolish the cruelty of foot binding and, amid the horror and destruction of a Japanese invasion, to rescue 150 orphan children by leading them hundreds of hours through the mountains. Women do these things because they are biologically impelled to save life and ameliorate suffering. In American colonial history and medieval Europe, women were the healers and heretics that men feared and persecuted, then banished or killed and slandered in bitter calumny.
I owe a great deal to Ayn Rand in particular, a woman who stood alone, did whatever she had to, and fought for the right to be heard. In the beginning, she was awkward and inarticulate. Her ideas of good and evil, true and false and necessary took decades to refine and express in English, concepts that were forged by experiencing Soviet Russia as a young adult. I could not have learned to think clearly without Rand's compelling achievement. She paid an incredibly high price, shunned and betrayed and villified.
That said, my style of storytelling has nothing to do with Ayn Rand's example, although her novels mesmerized me and taught me about passion, notably absent from male authors like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. It's amusing and revealing that Rand liked Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer and Ian Fleming's James Bond, hard men of action. Her own fictional male heroes were intelligent, upright, unbending, creative, courageous, and virile.
I'm a little different. My hero is sufficiently valiant but slightly stupid, as most men are. His principal virtue is a sort of plodding endurance, instilled by Marine Corps discipline, always faithful and inured to hardship and danger. The woman he meets and marries is in a class by herself, spectacularly alert, bisexual, a polymath with a Ph.D. -- genius level brilliant -- the elder daughter of a billionaire inventor, a father she despises. Her younger sister is a spoiled brat, twisted by fear and seething monstrosity, as ugly and vicious as a woman could be.
To inhabit their femininity, their female physiology and biorhythms, is a daunting task as a male novelist. Like my hero Chris Cable, I'm slightly stupid, attempting the clumsy heresy of writing a female point of view told in first person. Sigh. Life on life's terms, old chum.
A woman's life is enormous. Think of it exactly so, as massive as an egg, with millions of tiny aggressive sperm vying to penetrate and spawn new life, only one of which can succeed, a primeval right to choose under assault, the result of reflexive or involuntary union. What will happen next will forever transform her, unless she elects to remain childless by employing a foolproof method of birth control like having her tubes tied, a decision to live for her own sake as a high priestess, independent of biological destiny. More than ever before in history, fertile young women are drawn to a career and a personal crusade, the hunt for an equal to love and honor, uncomplicated by the duty of children. Others want very much to breed and nurture, gift themselves in service to the future, hoping that men will protect them.
Men are untrustworthy in that regard, however much they enjoy the warmth and wonder of innocence. That's why an exceptional class of female warrior must step into the fray and kick with the strength of her kind, indifferent and hardened to men and women alike, unless they share an equal dedication to justice, the armed defense of cherished liberty, bulwark of our nation's commerce, energy production, farms and factories to feed and clothe children.
In previous writing, I quoted Mark Twain, "There is only one good sex, the female one." I argued that women should be exempt from the criminal law, granted a separate and equal share of government by constitutional amendment (the entire U.S. House of Representatives) and a monopoly of civilian law enforcement. It is my conviction that women have a separate moral purpose apart from men, one which a man learns to understand in marriage but never fully embraces because it would unman him.
Generally speaking, foolish to do so, women as a species are resolute, industrious, coy, secretive, curious and observant. When she gives birth, she is "settled" and her primary purpose sharpens to an absolute, amplifying her powers. Motherhood confers the will to kill, like a mama bear, blunt instrument of life and death if man or beast threatens her children.
No different than men in some respects, women can be self-destructive (drug addiction and alcoholism, prostitution, thievery, and irrational tantrums). The human condition applies to both sexes equally, but women have a deep silence and arbitrariness that men often see as disturbing and mysterious. She can smile come hither then sneer go to hell unpredictably.
In the work that I am about to attempt, it is imperative to depict women as individuals, some ideal, some ordinary, and one seriously deranged and murderous, none of which are typical. The purpose of fiction is to offer contrasts, danger, intrigue, combat, and the costly price of triumph. Only the most admirable of women will undertake a mission of steely commitment separate from the biological and utilitarian destiny that urges her to play along, suffer a load of shit without response. Men do it, too. They knuckle under to keep a job, obeying the laws and customs of polite society, shunning risk of a painful adventure with uncertain outcome. Warriors are few.
There have been numerous heroic female warriors -- Boadicea, Joan of Arc, Phoolan Devi, Emiline Pankhurst, and Margaret Thatcher spring to mind, but there were many thousands in world history. If I was a better student, I would remember more names, like the wildcat who disarmed and stood on the neck of an invader that she would come to admire and mate as his queen. Even the dumbest male student should know the steadfast dedication of Marie Curie and Florence Nightingale, the charismatic crusades of Aimee Semple McPherson, Mary Baker Eddy, Susan B. Anthony, Madame Blavatsky, Ayn Rand, Gloria Steinem, and Anne Coulter.
Women dominate popular literature for good reason, because women read.
They play second fiddle to movie heroes and villains, but without women on screen there is very little story to tell, merely men struggling to kill each other. One of the best classic films is The Inn of The Sixth Happiness starring Ingrid Bergman, the true story of a housemaid who decides that her mission in life is to go to China and preach the Gospel, traveling alone on the Trans Siberia Railway and ox cart, by force of character given official status to abolish the cruelty of foot binding and, amid the horror and destruction of a Japanese invasion, to rescue 150 orphan children by leading them hundreds of hours through the mountains. Women do these things because they are biologically impelled to save life and ameliorate suffering. In American colonial history and medieval Europe, women were the healers and heretics that men feared and persecuted, then banished or killed and slandered in bitter calumny.
I owe a great deal to Ayn Rand in particular, a woman who stood alone, did whatever she had to, and fought for the right to be heard. In the beginning, she was awkward and inarticulate. Her ideas of good and evil, true and false and necessary took decades to refine and express in English, concepts that were forged by experiencing Soviet Russia as a young adult. I could not have learned to think clearly without Rand's compelling achievement. She paid an incredibly high price, shunned and betrayed and villified.
That said, my style of storytelling has nothing to do with Ayn Rand's example, although her novels mesmerized me and taught me about passion, notably absent from male authors like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. It's amusing and revealing that Rand liked Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer and Ian Fleming's James Bond, hard men of action. Her own fictional male heroes were intelligent, upright, unbending, creative, courageous, and virile.
I'm a little different. My hero is sufficiently valiant but slightly stupid, as most men are. His principal virtue is a sort of plodding endurance, instilled by Marine Corps discipline, always faithful and inured to hardship and danger. The woman he meets and marries is in a class by herself, spectacularly alert, bisexual, a polymath with a Ph.D. -- genius level brilliant -- the elder daughter of a billionaire inventor, a father she despises. Her younger sister is a spoiled brat, twisted by fear and seething monstrosity, as ugly and vicious as a woman could be.
To inhabit their femininity, their female physiology and biorhythms, is a daunting task as a male novelist. Like my hero Chris Cable, I'm slightly stupid, attempting the clumsy heresy of writing a female point of view told in first person. Sigh. Life on life's terms, old chum.
A woman's life is enormous. Think of it exactly so, as massive as an egg, with millions of tiny aggressive sperm vying to penetrate and spawn new life, only one of which can succeed, a primeval right to choose under assault, the result of reflexive or involuntary union. What will happen next will forever transform her, unless she elects to remain childless by employing a foolproof method of birth control like having her tubes tied, a decision to live for her own sake as a high priestess, independent of biological destiny. More than ever before in history, fertile young women are drawn to a career and a personal crusade, the hunt for an equal to love and honor, uncomplicated by the duty of children. Others want very much to breed and nurture, gift themselves in service to the future, hoping that men will protect them.
Men are untrustworthy in that regard, however much they enjoy the warmth and wonder of innocence. That's why an exceptional class of female warrior must step into the fray and kick with the strength of her kind, indifferent and hardened to men and women alike, unless they share an equal dedication to justice, the armed defense of cherished liberty, bulwark of our nation's commerce, energy production, farms and factories to feed and clothe children.
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