Greetings from Chicago

I'm here in the windy city for the conference on Alternative Sexuality. I, and several other authors, will be discussing the mainstreaming of BDSM in romance and the positive and negative issues that go along with that.

Tres amusing, no?

I like to do these academic panels from time to time. It's interesting to see what the rest of the world thinks of what we do. Generally, no matter what the academic audience, they tend to be engaged and positive about the panels. My guess is that they're a welcome break from the standard stock -- I know as an attorney, when there are either role play or visits from the bench with war stories (anything outside of here's the five things you need to know about this minute area of law you will never put to practical use panels) are always far more entertaining and thought provoking.

Tonight I'm going to a reading by several of the Lambda finalists.

Of course the side benefit of being in Chicago right now: International Mr. Leather is happening this weekend. Tight butts, chaps, boots. God the eye candy.  A couple of us will be heading there on Sat. to see the sights and engage our kink.

Lying fallow

It's a bit weird that every time it's my time on the blog, I've just returned from a business trip. First Moscow, then Chicago, then Warsaw. I can't tell you much about Warsaw. I can talk about a local five star hotel and that it has very comfy beds and a restaurant that serves a strange mix of Asian foods, from Chinese, Thai, to Japanese, and compared to other places where I've eaten, you get skinned alive with the bill.

Warsaw is a haunted city, a city of ghosts. I'm not sure November is the best time to visit it. I missed both the National Museum and the Warsaw Uprising Museum. But the scars of history run deep in this odd place, full of classisist facades meant to impress and then the crooked, aged, fading Old Town. Where the taxi driver points out the war memorial, saying "voina, voina", and I'm the only guest in the taxi who knows voina is war. Not that it was ambivalent when the taxi driver added "Hitler, Hitler". I certainly want to go back and explore the history of the place and see it in daylight. In a foggy late November evening, Warsaw only showed two faces, and that clearly wasn't all there was to it.

Not that I'm going anywhere near Poland with my current World War II novel. Maybe I should. Maybe I should write another, a different story, dealing with the things that happened there. The sheer amount of suffering almost demands it, and also adds a "stay away", if we're talking romance. You need huge amounts of skill and mental fortitude to cut fiction from the bleeding wounds of history - respecting your material (and the people who died and suffered) on one hand, and at the same time telling the story.

I'm deeply ambivalent about touching anything relating to the Third Reich. I can't delude myself I'm doing it for art, for one, like the literary writers. I aim to entertain, primarly. But I'm aware I'm treading ground where only a thin layer of time covers the millions of skeletons under my feet. Rarely am I more aware of my nationality and birth language/mother tongue than where my ancestors have spilled blood, and within living memory.

While immersing myself into the history of the Third Reich and its people (in many ways, it's a foreign culture and a different planet), I'm fallow as a writer. I haven't written any meaningful quantities for three weeks now, partially because I've just finished a couple novels, partially because I've been away on business, and strangely, I struggle to write while sitting in a hotel in a foreign country.

It's disconcerting in that "oh ye gods, I'll never write again!" kind of way, but I know stuff is going on in my subconsciousness. Thoughts, feelings, energy. Much of the stuff writers work with is intangible. As a famous writer said, writers and spiders make a living from their guts. I know things are going on, I can feel the current pull and move, but the surface is untroubled. I'll have to trust that things will begin emerging when they are ready.

Serendipity

I'm still on a business trip in Chicago – first time US, first time Midwest, first time Chicago, and I reckon I couldn't have made a better start inside the States. At least everybody says so. I'm right now stuck in a hotel lobby waiting for time to pass so I can grab a last meal before I put my stomach at the tender mercies of British Airways (there's a pizzaria around here that has a very interesting take on pizza – it resembles a savoury cracker more than anything else, but it's very good).

Most of the trip was devoted to business, but I did manage to get some writing research in. See, there are things in the US that we don't have in the UK. I've eaten some terrific bagels, shopped at Walgreens (I needed a couple protein bars), and yeah, Starbucks in the same around the world. I met contacts in Caribou Coffee (a shameless Starbucks clone - ad why not clone something *good*?), and went into a Barnes & Noble and a Borders (we do have Borders, but yours is nicer).

I got a feel for Chicago, I hope, or at least the business area, and downtown, and the Gold Coast. All of that is not what my company paid for (well, they did, I'll make them pay for the protein bars), but it's all research. One of my Russian characters is relocating here to live with a couple Americans, so I walked the street with “Russian eyes”, remembering Moscow and how he'd see the city. I made some photos too to jog the memory.

Needless to say, I didn't write a word, and I even “missed” the launch of my latest book, “Transit”, which I wrote with Raev Gray and was published by Dreamspinner. It's a seriously busy day when a writer is surprised by a book launch.

Things are germinating, however. The “guys in the basement”, as Stephen King calls the muses, are moving furniture. And all the lucky accidents are working in my favour, too.

I walked down Michigan Avenue at around noon, and there was a Borders. Now, writers and bookshops are like moths and flames, but I did have this feeling of “I should look for Jewish soldiers in WWII while I'm here.” Not exactly the kind of topic that is on the bestseller lists, but Borders had the perfect book.

The need to come to grips with David was overwhelming, and that was one of the things that has been worrying me a lot lately. What do I know about Jewishness in war? Well, there it was, eye-witness accounts of Jewish GIs. I believe in that kind of lucky accident. Very often, when I define a problem (“I know nothing about horsebreeding in Eastern Prussia in the 1940ies”) and then go into a random bookstore, I tend to find the exact book that answers that exact question. Just like I get quartered in the exact area where my character would end up living – out of the whole wide US of A.

Writing is very often just lucky accidents, or a series of small miracles, or a chaotic brain seeing patterns where none exist. You decide, but it works very well for me.