Tag Archives: psychology

Sex and the Big Brain

November 21, 2014Blog, Inspirationpsychology, reading, sexuality and story, writingK D Grace

(Archive)

I had a sex blogger ask me once how I could possibly write about things I hadn’t experienced. My answer at the time, though accurate, was a bit flippant I suppose. I said that it’s fiction. It’s no more difficult for me to write about sex that I’ve not experienced than it is for Thomas Harris to write about serial killers when he certainly isn’t one.

I think I can write about sex I’ve never experienced, would never even want to experience in the real world because I have a big brain. Oh, not my brain in particular. All humans have ‘em, and we use them in sex even when we’re not having sex. The thing about having a big brain is that it adds a new dimension to a biological act. In the hormonal, pheromonal soup that drives us to fuck, we get the added pleasure of making it up as we go along. In our heads — anyway we like it. And this, we can do completely and totally without the help of anyone else.

Which leads me to wonder how much of fiction writing – any genre of fiction writing – is really our big brain masturbating – first for our own pleasure, and if we get lucky and our work gets published, then we get to be exhibitionists and do it for an audience. Is that yet another layer of our sexuality? There’ve been countless of books and essays written on the connection between sexuality and creativity, and I’ve experienced it myself. When it’s right, when I’m in the zone, the rush, the high, the incredible buzz of getting characters and plot to move together in just the right tango of conflict and passion and drive, the experience from a writer’s point of view is extremely sexual, and yet somehow better than sex. It’s sex on steroids, it’s free-falling, it’s roller coaster riding, it’s fast cars, mountain tops and touching the tiger all rolled into one. And it all happens in some nebulous part of our brains that only a neurosurgeon might be able to pin-point for us. And who cares? Who cares as long as it gets us there!

Those moments don’t happen often, but it doesn’t matter. They happen often enough to push us forward, to keep us going and writing and longing and digging deep for the next wild brain-gasm. I just came off of one of those experiences while racing to finish the draft of The Exhibition. It was a
late-night write, a dark, dangerous sex scene in which the characters staged a coup and completely took control of the action. I came away staggering, looking down at my hands, wondering how the hell I wrote that. I was too hyped to sleep, too creeped out to think about who might be waiting for me in my dreams after what I’d just written. And yet … And yet I felt stretched, expanded, like for a second I’d seen sex at the core where the dark and light meet and swallow each other up. And what’s left is a wild, crazy pull to translate what just happened into some kind of written account that will convey that feeling, that sense of being beyond myself, yet deeper into the dark recess of myself than I felt really comfortable going. And as any writer would, longing to drag my reader right in there with me, into the dark, into the fire.

It was a long time before I could sleep. It was a long time before I felt quite like myself again. And that’s what got me thinking about my big brain,
which at times, seems so much bigger than just the space in my head. And I guess maybe I do have to experience something in order to write about it. But the big brain creates that experience in the privacy of my own head. That being the case, how could I not keep going back for more? How could I not want desperately to write what my big brain allows me to experience? How could I not want to bring it out and flaunt it for the reader’s full participation?

The Word I Just Can’t Say …

November 2, 2014Blog, Inspirationmy writing process, psychology, Saying NO, writingK D Grace

Perhaps there’s something wrong with my mouth, the way my tongue touches the hard palate, or the way my lips purse. Perhaps it’s a genetic defect, though I don’t recall either my father or my mother having the problem. But then again it could have skipped a generation, I suppose. Maybe my mother dropped me on my head when I was a baby …

On the other hand, it could be some sort of psychological problem. Maybe I need to seek help. Maybe Freud would say I got stuck in one of the early stages of childhood development … oral? … anal? (Oh knock it off! I can see where your naughty minds are going with that one ☺) Possibly there’s a 12-step group that deals with my problem, or maybe there are psychologists who specialize in my particular affliction.

Note to self: Check online for self-help books on topic.

Well, it’s no good speculating when the damage is done. I suppose now all I can really do is treat the symptoms — the waking up in the middle of the night with my heart racing, the excess drinking of coffee, the panic attacks when I sit down at my laptop to work in the morning and realize just how much I have to accomplish that day, the associated inability to do housework, my inclination to hide out for days with no companionship other than my laptop.

I have a sneaking suspicion that my affliction is common among writers, though when I’m suffering from a particularly bad bout, I feel like I’m the only one in the world who just can’t do it.

I feel like I’m the only one in the world who just can’t say NO!

Oh, believe me, I’ve tried, but I break out in a cold sweat of fear that this might just be the one time when I absolutely, under no circumstances, should refuse the possibility that this could be the best opportunity ever. So I say YES!

The way I see it in my fevered little mind, saying no shuts doors. Saying no means that whatever might have resulted from the simple uttering of the YES word, whatever adventures I might have had, I’ve just refused with a simple two-letter word. I’m a firm believer that the more doors we walk through, the more doors are opened to us. That’s all positive, that’s all a good thing, but just how many doors can one person walk through before they become a twitching, neurotic heap, hunching bleary-eyed over their laptop? … er … wait a minute. Why does that sound so familiar?

I suppose as NaNoWriMo is now well and truly upon us, there’ll be a lot of people wondering if they should have said no. Maybe it’s a Pavlovian thing. Yes means possibilities. Yes means new opportunities. No means the doors are shut to those possibilities. Saying yes generates a sense of excitement, a sense of anticipation of new adventures, of new plots and new characters. But doesn’t saying NO also open the door to other, different possibilities? Saying no means that I could actually have time to give my house a proper cleaning. Saying no means I might have time to do girlie things like shopping for pretty stuff and practical stuff I’ve put off shopping for because I said YES too many times. Saying no means I could do some much-needed redecorating and renovating. Saying no means I might have time to take up a new hobby, to take an online course, to learn to speak Italian …

But to me, saying no means feeling lazy and unproductive. OK, I get that those feelings are just a part of my inherently neurotic self, but I feel them nonetheless. And if I’m honest, I can’t neglect that the doors that saying NO would open are often doors that I’m a little bit scared to walk through. Better the devil you know … Instead, I say YES, and I feel the exuberant panic that’s a cross between jumping up and down and punching my fist in the air in triumph and excitement and banging my head on the desk in the cold sweat of fear as I moan, ‘Ohmygod! What have I done?!?!?!’

I’m in that scary exciting, run away screaming, writing like a madwoman against tight deadlines space at the moment. Grace Marshall is frantically writing Interviewing Wade to come out in February. KD Grace is butting in to write her first ever M/M novella, which just also happens to be her
first ever vampire story. To Rome with Lust is less than a month from its release date, with a two-week blog tour hard on its heels – posts still to be written … I’m right in the middle of the Lakeland Witches blog tour, and there’s a tongue-in-cheek billionaire novella waiting in the wings. All this in the midst of feeling bereaved that Demon Interrupted had now had its online HEA, and I’ll miss writing sexy, romantic stories for you on my blog. Do I dare say YES to another serial??? *Twitch, shiver, anticipate*

I’ll admit my reasons for sharing my NO-rosis with you are a bit mercenary. I needed a blog post for today and I couldn’t say NO! Also, I’ve read that it helps to talk about our neuroses. Isn’t that the first step to recovery? Doesn’t that mean I might be more likely to say NO next time???

… No, not really?

Didn’t think so …

The Power of The One

July 27, 2014Bloginspiration, psychology, reading, writingK D Grace

(Archived from post written for ERWA Sept 2012)

Like most writers, I spend a lot of time analysing what makes a story work. Why does one story grip me when another doesn’t? Why do the characters in one tale make me want to curl myself around them and never let them go while others feel more like they’re only people waiting at the bus stop with me, people who barely register in my mind.

How much of what makes a story work is plot and how much is character? Sometimes nothing happens in a story, and I’m enthralled. At other times everything happens in a story, and I don’t care. Am I just picky? I wonder if in the age of free Kindle downloads, being spoiled for choice hasn’t jaded us so much as it has left us frantically searching for The One. And the stories that really do work for me are the stories in which I most fully experience the power of The One.

It seems to me that the power of The One is more evident in erotica and romance than it is in any other genre. I suppose that sounds really obvious in a Cinderella and Prince Charming, or best fuck ever sort of way. At the risk of over-simplifying, it’s all about being The One, finding The One, enticing The One, seducing or being seduced by The One. Happily ever aftering with The One.

In our need to connect, in our need for intimacy, it seems to me that the power of The One draws us more than any other element of story. It isn’t so much the need for a knight on a white horse as it is the need for a kindred spirit, as it is the need for someone who groks us, someone who gets us on the deepest level of our quirkiness, our flaws, our potential, our Oneness. The archetypal story is that The One goes on a journey that no one else can go on, and on that danger-fraught journey, The One finds The Other One, the only Other One who really gets him/her, who is the flint to The One’s steel. And the resulting fire is what propels the story, what takes the reader in and entices her into her own place of Oneness. Hearts and flowers – maybe. Best fuck ever – could be. Magnetic connection – bound to be.

The thing is, not everyone’s fire is fueled the same way. One person’s One is another person’s bloke at the bus stop. The story of The One can be a game of substitution in which our minds edit out the hero/heroine and insert ourselves making the story about us. WE become The One. Or the story of The One can be more of a voyeuristic menage in which we find ourselves happily inserted into the relationship, experiencing a bit of the hero, a bit of the heroine, and basking in the chemistry that happens in the space between, when two Ones collide. I find this to be more of a 3D way to experience The One. In a lot of ways that space in between, that joining place where the rough edges rub up against each other is the real One. The joining place is the space in which the two become a different kind of One.

Beyond romance and erotica, the power of The One is what so much of story is about. The One who catches the serial killer. The One who is the serial killer. The One who wins the battle, The One who pulls the Sword from the stone, The One whose face launches a thousand ships. The One who can wear the glass slipper.

The tale of The One is the mathematics of story. The One plus the Other One equals One, and that One is
the Whole, the plurality of One.

The tale of The One is the physics of story. When the One fuses with the Other One, they join together to form THE ONE. That fusing results in a release of energy, energy that feeds the reader, energy that drives the story.

When The One reader finds The One story, the energy released can change the reader’s internal landscape. The constant search for The One story by the reader is a treasure hunt that can change everything. Every reader has experienced that post coital bliss of indulging in The One story. It’s chemistry, it’s fire, it’s magic! It doesn’t happen often, but every time it does, it’s enough. It’s enough to drive us on in search of the next One

Tunnel-Visioned in Storyland

July 2, 2014Blogdeadlines, psychology, The Mount Series, To Rome with Lust, work in progress, writingK D Grace

It’s that time again … Deadlines are tight, and I’m deep into Storyland. It comes as no surprise really, and my husband is well used to it by now.

‘Did you feed the birds?’ my husband asks.

‘They’re in the refrigerator,’ I reply.

‘Are you hungry?’ he says.

‘I mailed them yesterday.’ I mumble.

I pour plain hot water from the mocha maker into my cup because I forgot to put in the coffee. Never
mind. I slap a teabag in the hot water and go back to the computer.

Spiders have taken residence in a number of nooks and crannies. Some of the webs, I’m sure could now be considered ancestral mansions. My arachnid friends know the odds that dusting will happen in the near future are slim, and the safety of their homes is pretty much guaranteed. I think they’ve gone to watching telly when I’m not looking, and they’ve misplaced the remote. At least they keep the sound down so I can work.

The laundry hasn’t been sorted. The flowerbeds haven’t been weeded, and I don’t know what’s at the bottom of the papers avalanching off the end of my worktable. So what’s the problem?

Tunnel Vision. Yep, it’s that time again. Everyone who knows me knows it happens periodically, and every writer can completely empathise. It’s a disease from which we all suffer. When it happens, I go underground. It’s like I’ve temporarily left the planet, and for all practical purposes, I have. When I’ve got tunnel vision, I’m sucked mercilessly into another dimension, the dimension of the story. The thing about the dimension of the story is that it’s a whole lot easier for me to go there than it is for me to come back. Short stories involve fairly brief stints in the land of Tunnel Vision. Five thousand words and I’m back home in time for a reality check. And the spiders tremble.

But these days I spend most of my time in the world of the novel, and whenever I go there, it’s hard to say when I’ll get back home again. Add to that the fact that the novel is full of love, sex, intrigue, populated with people I’d like to be living in places I want to go, and I’m very likely to linger as long as possible. In fact, I bet if you could go someplace similar right now, you would, wouldn’t you?

Come on, be honest! Everyone who’s ever read a good book gets the chance to follow the writer into that great world of Tunnel Vision. We all go there willingly and happily while the eight-leggers take up residence and the carpet crunches from lack of Hoovering. We’re disappointed when it’s not quite the world we’d hoped for. We’re equally disappointed when it’s more than we could have imagined. When that happens, we don’t want to leave. We want to stay with those characters we’ve grown so fond of and settle right in to that place which now feels like home. We’ve grown used to the excitement, the adventure, the sex, the love, the intrigue, and we’ve especially grown used to the opportunity to, for a little while, be someone else.

The land of Tunnel Vision is also the land of multiple personalities. In my novel, I get to be ALL of the characters. They all whisper in my ear and tell me their sordid secrets and their darkest fantasies. Then I, like an evil gossip columnist, splash their inner workings all over the written page for the world to see. Bwa ha ha ha ha! I get to do that because I’m the most powerful person in their world. In fact, in their world, I’m god. K D giveth and K D taketh away!

So, I’ve come back from the world of Tunnel Vision just long enough to grab a coffee, write a blog post and ignore the spiders. Consider this a postcard from The Mount in Rome, where the whole Mount Series started, and where Liza Calendar’s very sensitive nose is making Paulo Delacour very hot. It’s my way of saying ‘having a great time, wish you were here.’ I promise a detailed account this fall in the form of the latest book in the Mount Series, To Rome with Lust. But in the meantime, I’m out of here – back to Rome, back to Paulo and Liza, back to Martelli Fragrance’s secret formula for the best perfume ever! See you!

Typos, Auto-Correct and Freud: A Blot Post for All My Sweetits

June 29, 2014Blogpsychology, writing, writing and creativityK D Grace

Any writer will tell you that word-herding is hard work. Words are unruly things and not always willing to fall in line like we want them to. They’re tricksters just waiting to trip us up when we least expect it. So today I’m blotting about typos and, the bane of everyone’s existence, auto correct. Why? Because I’ve just had a very fun twitter convo with Madeline Moore about my latest blot post that’s up for everyone to read right not! She promised me she would go to my blot and buy my book not. She’s probably reading it not, even as I write.

Writers constantly play with words, and as Madeline and I tweeted back and froth, I got to thinking about how much fin we all have when the wrong word is used — either because of a typo or because of an over-zealous auto-correct. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve NEARLY called someone ‘Sweetit’ on FB or in an email. ‘i’ isn’t even close to ‘t’, so I can only hypothesize that because of what I do for a living, fighting the unconscious urge to write ‘Sweetit’ instead of ‘Sweetie’ is probably a Freudian thing, or maybe just my dirty little mind leaking out on the keyboard. If I call you Sweetit in any of our correspondence, please take it in the spirit in which it is meant and know that it was probably my wicked mind’s way of giving myself the finger … in this case the wrong finger on the wrong key.

The other day I had the misfortune of being the victim of auto-correct when I asked Vida Baily about her ‘WIPE’ instead of her ‘WIP.’ The silly convo that followed was caught for posterior on Facebook because for some reason, the ‘edit’ function wouldn’t work. This morning, as I was looking down through my blog content folder for an older post I wanted to refer to, I saw in the documents that I recently participated in the ‘Snob by the Sea’ blog hop, which will come as a real surprise to Victoria and Kev Blisse, who organized the ‘Snog by the Sea’ blog hop to promote Smut by the Sea. Honestly, there was not a jot of snobbery in that fabulous blot hog, just a lot of hot snogging!

I can’t count the number of times my characters have ‘shit the door behind them’, which is far more painful than shutting it … one would assume. And my poor Lakeland witches were nearly caught at the top of Honister Pass in a snot storm. I once read a story in which the hero’s face was pinched by an uncomfortable erection … After I fell off my chair laughing with relief that it hadn’t been fatal, I was reminded how easily I can make a sentence go on and on until it’s hard to tell what part of a character’s anatomy is being pinched by what … or whom … Sentence argument is very important!

The thing is, as writers we think a lot faster than we can get those thoughts down on paper. When those thoughts come out of the imagination, and when our characters and plot take control and drag us down the rabbit hole, sometimes it feels like we’re actually just secretaries struggling to take down their words and actions as fast as we can before faces get pinched by erections and whole villages are buried under snot storms.

Language and word play say a lot about a person. They say a lot about a writer, about a story-teller. Writers choose to dance dangerously with words, so it comes as no surprise when we occasionally trip over our own semi-colons. It doesn’t help that I’m the world’s worst speller Then there’s the constant battle of homophones. I’ve had the odd pale face end up pail … and while faces may be good for showing emotion, they’re not very practical for carrying water. Seriously though, it gets really tense sometimes when every word counts, when I want to make sure that my readers catch every nuance, every scent, every taste, every feel of flesh on flesh. That being the case, sometimes a writer just needs to play with the words and let them have their head. That means occasionally shitting the door on the more serious word-smithery and leaving the plot and the characters to stew in their own juices just for a little while, just long enough for a silly little blot post to all of you Sweetits out there before I get back to more serious word-herding.

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