About the Stories

Forty Years: I wrote this in just a very few days as the end of October ’09 and posted it mostly just to get some perspective and get get it out of my system. When I started it I only wanted to convey a sense of strength, depth and direction of the narrator’s desire. Only in revision did I try to show the surprising, surreal reality (surreality?) of how similar falling in love is with discovering one’s female led interior. For me, the final realization that I had fallen in complete and irrevocable love was a proverbial bolt from the clear blue, the total shocker I had tried my very best to avoid being aware of for as long as possible. In the story I tried to intensify the love shock with a change-up on the classic stranger’s eyes across a crowded room experience, and tried to capture that slow suspenseful sense of fate when we fall in love, the inexorable inexplicable doom about our desire for someone. ‘Surprising’ is also a rather understated adjective for my discovering I wanted to be a beta man, and in the story I tried to have these surprises parallel the surreal awareness of having sex with a virtual stranger. Thus the moment when he (almost accidentally) realizes that pleasing this woman, sexually and lovingly no different, is what he actually wants to do, and then that this is what he feels he was born to do is an acknowledgement (and later acceptance) of his personal erotic truth.

It would be great if every female led guy fell in love with their soulmate and had these issues figured out from their first experience, from their very first time out of the gate, but it’s not very realistic and I’m afraid the sex with virtual stranger device isn’t very realistic either. I think it was too surreal and the suspension of disbelief breaks down making it hard to identify with the guy, and forty years of inferred relationship don’t quite make up for it. Everything aside however, I would love to hear the same story (perhaps minus the stranger part) from the woman’s point of view and wish I could write it. Unfortunately, while my wife knows I wrote this story, she hasn’t read it.

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Out of the Many, The One: Not an erotic story, and if not so polished its ideas and imagery is more what I usually write. A true story about this is my wife read it the day after I wrote it and said she didn’t care for the whole extra arms thing but liked the ending part where he was doing her chores. She said this in all seriousness while I happened to be doing the dishes. I didn’t get to laugh very long before she added that I needed to do the dusting the next day. When I pointed this out, she smiled but I still haven’t a clue whether it was intentional.

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Glint is barely fiction; my wife really did say one morning, “This floor needs scrubbing” and that afternoon I really did start scrubbing it. Most everything else in this story has been changed and used as a pretext for exploring what make it so hard for me to motivate myself, thus a scenario in which a guy conquers his ‘acknowledgement demon’ and the woman gets her way. Of course, like most fiction, real life doesn’t work this way, doesn’t get resolved this way, but I think also like most fiction, the point remains the point here: if we pay attention to our interior spaces, in time we can have more meaning in our lives and better relationships.

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Exposure I wrote one morning after I saw a police woman, who clearly knew what she was about, laugh.

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In Constrain-ment Complete I used female physical strength as a symbol of ‘that rock solid hardness‘, a strength of character. I personally think I might have over done it a bit. (For the record, my wife’s not very buff and I’m fairly indifferent about buff women in general). If I did overdo it I choose to blame having just read “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” which if nothing else may have re-inspired my outrage over violence towards women – a violence which I admit isn’t actually really a part of my purpose in writing the story and I hope the issue isn’t too distracting.

Someday I am going to write another scene or two for this couple — because I’d like to show how such a woman might actually be being more than just and fair here, show that though her bad side is pretty rough it takes a long period of offense and stupidity to get there. I’d like to show this same woman off at her finest: utterly loving, forgiving, sexy and enticing.

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In Cosmic Bump I wanted to show how it’s the odd and unlikely, the improbable fittedness of persons, of both character and the order of events, that sometimes can give pause. Surely, surely, one wants to believe, things happen for reasons, good reasons.

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I really tried to give Mr. Uxory a real voice; the entire time I wrote this the main character had this thick Jersey-ish accent and is real blue collar joe, probably was a machinist before (and a good one) before becoming a taxi driver. I tried to maintain a real sense of taxidriver-ish monologue (veering the way you hope his driving isn’t, but picture seeing everything he says in a rearview mirror) but it’s really that there could have been all that working class angst about his identity via what he did and now does – but that he doesn’t have that angst, and why he doesn’t have it that I tried to have carry the story.

I also thought about clipping his words with more contractions to indicate his accent and throwing in more colorful phrases, but I thought that could get a bit obnoxious or just hard to read after awhile and possibly detract from the theme.

Honestly because of how strong his voice is in my head I thought he might end up just sounding “a too dumb to notice” kind of fellow – I tried to compensate for this by showing how he really took time to think about things, even obstensibly off the cuff as it were. Also accidentally at first but more intentionally in editing, I tried to give him a subtle sense of pride – in bucking the system, doing thing differently, and in standing up for his wife and in standing up for the love he has for his wife.

(For the record, I’ve not from Jersey or have ever been to Jersey. Or have been a taxi driver.)

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Perhaps the only thing one needs to know about The Incoming Class is that Ansonia’s name means ‘divine’.

However, I’ll also add that the general idea for the story came from my occasional sneaking suspicion that women, unbeknownst to the less observant gender (okay perhaps just unbeknownst to unobservant me) have some sort of secret club. Of course the purpose of such a club always seems less significant than the discovery that women might actually have secret club.

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I’ve found the mate for my soul, but to those single and searching I offer Differently Beautiful as hope and encouragement.