Rimbaud – The Infant Shakespeare

Jean Rimbaud – born on Oct. 20, 1891 – was the original enfant terrible. A precocious child genius (Victor Hugo called him, “An infant Shakespeare”) he had done all of his best writing and given it up by the age of 20. He was – throughout his life – a restless wanderer and a story is told (probably acrophycal) that soon after he was born, a nurse put him on a cushion but he rolled onto the floor and immediately began to crawl towards the door.

A child prodigy in school, Rimbaud won numerous prizes and was the head of his class in almost all of his subjects. Two separate tutors sparked a love of Greek, Latin and French classical literature, as well as an interest in writing original verse. At the tender age of 15 Rimbaud was already showing promise as a poet. The first poem he showed one of his tutors would later be regarded as one of his best.

Following the outbreak of the France-Prussian war, Rimbaud’s tutor who had encouraged him to write poetry left his post. Rimbaud was distraught. He ran away to Paris but had no money and was arrested and imprisoned for a week. This would be the beginning of many tumultuous such occasions. It was after this that his behaviour became increasingly erratic. He began to drink heavily, steal from shops, and began to let his hair grow long and abandon his previous neat appearance.

In 1871, at the age of 17, Rimbaud wrote a letter to fellow poet, Paul Verlaine, containing some of his poems and Verlaine responded by sending him a one-way ticket to Paris. It wasn’t long before the married Verlaine and Rimbaud began an affair. Their relationship became the stuff of legend. Verlaine had recently given up his job and taken up drinking. Now the two engaged together in drinking absinthe and smoking hashish. All of Paris was scandalised by their relationship. They eventually decamped to London in 1872, Verlaine abandoning his wife and their new-born son. This is somewhat surprising as – only a few years before – Verlaine had expressed his love for his wife in his poetry and they were only married in 1870.

The following year, Verlaine – seemingly frustrated with their relationship – returned to Paris alone. However, he soon began to miss Rimbaud. He sent Rimbaud a telegraph asking him to come meet him in Brussels. As soon as they were reunited, however, they began arguing again and Verlaine began drinking heavily. At one stage, in a drunken rage, Verlaine shot Rimbaud in the wrist. Initially, Rimbaud did not press charges but sometime afterward, as Verlaine’s behaviour became more bizarre (Rimbaud said he behaved as if he were insane), Rimbaud began to fear where it might lead and decided to have Verlaine arrested for attempted murder. Despite the fact that Rimbaud subsequently withdrew the complaint, Verlaine was sentenced to two years in prison.

At this point, Rimbaud returned home to Charleville where he completed his most famous work Une Saison en Enfer (A Season in Hell). Verlaine was released from prison in March 1875, and converted to Catholicism. At this point, Rimbaud had given up his short but mercurial writing career. Numerous reasons are given for this. Some say he was tired of the wild life; others say he wanted to become rich and independent. At this point, he was travelling around Europe – mostly on foot.

In 1876, Rimbaud enlisted as a soldier in the Dutch Colonial Army but within 4 months he had deserted and returned to France. Over the next ten years – up until his death – Rimbaud travelled all over the world to numerous destinations where he worked on construction sites as a foreman and as a merchant selling – amongst other things – guns.

In February, 1891, he fell ill and had to return to France where he was diagnosed with cancer. He died in November 1891, at the age of 37. Verlaine ended his life a popular figure in France. In 1894, he was elected France’s Prince of Poets. However, in his last years he was dogged by drug addiction, alcoholism and poverty. He died in 1896, at the age of 51.

Comics. They Don’t Make ‘Em Like They Used To!

I’m a comic book nerd. Anyone who knows me will tell you this. But, funnily enough, I don’t read that many comics anymore, and haven’t done in recent years. The reason for this is because they simply don’t have the same kind of sense of wonderment that comics once did. (And when I say “comics”, I’m referring to superhero comics. I still read other comics that don’t involve superheroes.) Now this might seem like some old fogey talking and bemoaning the fact that they don’t make them like they used to. And, I’m sure there were 60s comics fans who made similar complaints in the 80s and 90s. But it’s more than that.

When I was a kid I got a bumper omnibus reprint of a load of 60s Superman comics. And the imagination and inventiveness in these stories was breathtaking. Yes, there were some naff stories too but overall I was blown away by the ideas in there.

It’s a well-known fact that comics became much darker in the late 80s and early 90s, following the publication of Alan Moore’s Watchmen and Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns. Moore himself has often bemoaned this fact, stating that he didn’t want to make comics grittier, he just wanted to write a story about what it would be like for superheroes if they lived in the real world. He wasn’t setting out to make them all alcoholics and rapists, but his successors didn’t seem to understand this and took them in a different direction. But I didn’t have a huge problem with these dark and gritty comics; I loved Arkham Asylum by Grant Morrison, for instance.

The problem for me arises from the fact that that sense of wonder and boundless imagination is gone from comics to a large extent. I believe it’s possible to be dark and still have that sense of endless possibilities. And some might say that the reason comics no longer have that is because I’m not a child anymore. But there’s one fatal flaw in that argument, and that’s Grant Morrison’s All Star Superman. This was a 12-issue, out-of-continuity, limited series, where he basically took all the craziness of the 60s Superman mythos and updated it for a modern audience. It’s the one and only comic that resembles those crazy 60s Superman comics. And it was brilliant. Elena, a reviewer for website Sequential Smarts sums it up thus:

“Clark Kent/Superman, Lois Lane, Jimmy Olsen, Lex Luthor, and zany scientist Leo Quintum do pretty much the exact same things that they’ve always done – but fabulously. A modern Superman story that somehow manages to perfectly capture the limitless wonder – and complete insanity – of the Golden Age Superman stories, All-Star Superman is both a quintessential distillation and a fresh repackaging of everything that makes Superman awesome.”

So, it can be done. But – despite the fact that All Star Superman was a huge success – that, sadly, doesn’t seem to be something that the writers or the readers want.

Mores the pity.

The Every Dead Author Challenge – Edgar Allan Poe

The aim of this series is to read a short piece by every deceased writer who I haven’t read. With Poe, this is very interesting because I – like most people – would be very familiar with Poe, but not through his own writings. Rather, it’s through adaptations. I’ve seen the Vincent Price movies of the 60s – The Fall of the House of Usher, The Pit and the Pendulum and The Masque of the Red Death. When I was a kid, I read lots of Poe stories but they were all annotated adaptations written for children. So this was the first time I’d ever read a Poe story in its original form.

I decided to look at some of his most well-known poems: “The Raven”, “Lenore” and “Annabel Lee”. While I picked these three at random, I quickly realised there was a connection there. And the connection was this: all three poems deal with the loss of a woman through death. In 1835, Poe secretly married his 13-year-old cousin, Virginia (although she was listed on the marriage cert as being 21, presumably for legal reasons). Virginia contracted tuberculosis seven years later and eventually died in 1847. The poem “Lenore” is very much a poem about a heartbroken man grieving the loss of his wife:

“Come! let the burial rite be read- the funeral song be sung!
An anthem for the queenliest dead that ever died so young”

Although this poem seems as much tinged with anger as grief:

“How shall the ritual, then, be read?- the requiem how be sung
By you- by yours, the evil eye,- by yours, the slanderous tongue
That did to death the innocence that died, and died so young?”

One wonders if these lines are aimed at those who may have raised eyebrows at the age of his young bride. The poem “Annabel Lee” has a similar sentiment although it’s not quite as heart-rending or as personal as “Lenore”.

“The Raven” – probably his most famous poem – is like the final distillation of both poems. It opens with the line, “Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary”, telling the story of a man who’s sitting in the darkness musing about the loss of his beloved. A raven flies into the room, perches itself on a bust of Pallas and speaks to the man. But the only word the raven can speak is “Nevermore”. The narrator doesn’t understand why this is the only word he can say. The more he enquires of the raven, the more his mind starts to break down under the weight of the memory of Lenore. Until finally, he asks the raven …

“Tell this soul with sorrow laden if, within the distant Aidenn,
It shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels named Lenore -
Quoth the raven, `Nevermore.’”

At that point, the man breaks down and screams at the raven to leave but the raven doesn’t move. And, in the final lines, as illustrated below, the man says,

“And the lamp-light o’er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor;
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
Shall be lifted – nevermore!”

I don’t know that these poems could be called great poetry. There’s a lot of very simple rhyming: “dreary” and weary”, “rapping” and “napping”. But there are some quite nice lines in there as well, such as his description of the deceased Lenore:

“For her, the fair and debonair, that now so lowly lies,
The life upon her yellow hair but not within her eyes
The life still there, upon her hair- the death upon her eyes.”

However, beyond the actual words themselves, there’s something very interesting about these poem’s subject matter. Poe took a personal tragedy and turned it into poems that invented a whole genre: horror (and specifically, gothic horror). He was to be a huge influence on other writer – not just in the horror genre – but also writers such as Vladimir Nabokov and Bernard Malamud. Despite some issues with the writing style, I enjoyed the poems, especially the ideas behind them and I do think I would read more Poe.

And to finish, I’m sorry, but I couldn’t resist this one.

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As a Greek Philosopher once said, “What ya blogging for?”

I once read a quote by (I think) a Greek philosopher (I’ve goggled it but to no avail). It was something along the lines of, “A man should spend the first 30 yrs of his life experiencing things; the next 30 thinking about his experiences; and the next 30 writing about them.” Now given that he would have lived at a time when the average lifespan was 40-50 years, he was probably being overly optimistic. However, I do think he has a point.

Now that I find myself in that second period he talked about, I find I have a lot I want to say. And I’m not alone. This ties in with why I blog. I wrote a post called “What’s the Point of Blogging?” and I’ve often been asked, “Why do you blog? What’s the point of it?” The answer I would usually give is that I wanted to get my writing and my music out there and a blog is a great avenue for that. And that’s true. But I have a sneaking suspicion that perhaps there was a slight subtext to that answer. Which was, “Well, obviously that’s the reason. It wouldn’t be because I think anyone is interested in anything I have to say.” And maybe that’s an Irish attitude. But I also think there may have a slight subtext to the question as well. “Why do you write a blog? Why do you think anyone would be interested in anything you have to say?”

Apart from the fact of trying to get my music and my writing out there, the fact is, I do have something to say. And I think most people have something to say. That’s why we blog. So, are we trying to make sense of our life experiences, as the philosopher advises us to?

The short answer is – I don’t know. And I don’t think any blogger really does. I think we simply have a need to express ourselves. It’s more than simply about putting our songs or our poems or our stories or our thoughts about politics or whatever it is out there. It’s a simple need to express ourselves. We have thoughts, ruminations, mediations – whatever you want to call them – that have accumulated over however many years. And now, perhaps, we’re at the stage when we start to think about them. But rather than wait until the third chapter to write about them – which is 60-90 years – we’ve chosen to write about them now. Because the ability is there now to do so in a way that wouldn’t have been available to us previously. And, maybe, we do so in the hope that it will connect with someone else, maybe help them make sense of their experiences. As Henry Miller so eloquently put it:

“What we all hope in reaching for a book, is to meet a man of our own heart, to experience tragedies and delights which we ourselves lack the courage to invite, to dream dreams which will render life more hallucinating, perhaps also to discover a philosophy of life which will make us more adequate in meeting the trials and ordeals which beset us. To merely add to our store of knowledge or improve our culture, whatever that may mean, seems worthless to me.”

 

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You Don’t Have to Be Crazy to Write – But it Helps!

“Being a fiction writer is a good way to go crazy … You continually pick at yourself, the little sores that you have. They scab over and you pick them open again. Other people not only let them scab over, they let them scar over … Writers don’t do that. They can’t keep their fingers out of the sore. They’ve got to keep it bleeding. And it’s off that blood that they make their stuff.”
Harry Crews

Most writers – indeed artists of all kinds – can relate to that quote. Have you ever told someone you’re a writer and have them give you a look that suggest you’re a little strange, or that says, “Shouldn’t you have given up that making-stuff-up lark when you hit puberty?”

“O why was I born with a different face?
Why was I not born like the rest of my race?”

So said William Blake in one of his letters and it’s something I think every artist has probably thought at one time or another. You can’t be an artist without feeling, in some way, that you stand apart from the rest of the pack. In a way it’s a kind of madness. As an artist, you are viewed and judged as something different – whether the judgment on that difference is positive or negative – in the same way that a “mad” person would be judged. But it’s also a necessary madness. You can’t hone your talents without some sacrifice. All writers, painters, and musicians of note have all, at one time or another, sacrificed something for their art. Blake sacrificed comfort and financial security and died penniless so he could pursue his art. Most people would think that’s mad.

But is there a link between madness and creativity?

It’s easy to be flippant in answering this question, to point at the drug addicts, the alcoholics, the suicides and say “Of course. All artists are mad.” But there are drug addicts and alcoholics and suicides in all walks of life. So what – or does anything – set the artist apart? Well, while we can’t generalise about artists anymore than we can generalise about any other section of the population, there are some statistics.

The following extract is from an article entitled “Writers and Alcohol” by Ann Waldron

“Nancy J. Andreasen, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Iowa … did a 15-year study of 30 creative writers on the faculty of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where students and faculty have included well-known writers Philip Roth, Kurt Vonnegut, John Irving, John Cheever, Robert Lowell and Flannery O’Connor. She found that 30 percent of the writers were alcoholics, compared with 7 percent in the comparison group of non-writers …

Andreasen had begun her investigation to study the correlation between schizophrenia and creativity. She found none. But she did find that 80 percent of the writers had had an episode of affective disorders, i.e. a major bout of depression including manic-depressive illness, compared with 30 percent in the control group. Two thirds of the ill writers had received psychiatric treatment for their disorders. Two of the 30 committed suicide during the 15 years of the study.

The study is small but the relatively high rates of alcoholism and depression buttress the folk wisdom that creative artists are mad, with alcoholism an inevitable part of that insanity.”

And this excerpt from an article by Jane McGrath sheds some light on why this may be the case:

“Despite evidence of a link between genius and madness, no one has proved that such a link exists. However, scientists at the University of Toronto have discovered that creative people possess little to no “latent inhibition,” the unconscious ability to reject unimportant or irrelevant stimuli. As University of Toronto psychology professor Jordan Peterson puts it, “This means that creative individuals remain in contact with the extra information constantly streaming in from the environment. The normal person classifies an object, and then forgets about it, even though that object is much more complex and interesting than he or she thinks. The creative person, by contrast, is always open to new possibilities.”

So the next time someone looks like you’re mad because you’re a writer, remember, you’re in good company!

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Is There No Such Thing as an “Epic” Story?

On this day, in 1938, the Munich Agreement was signed permitting Nazi Germany’s annexation of Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland. As Wikipedia tells us: “The Sudetenland were areas along Czech borders, mainly inhabited by ethnic Germans. The agreement was negotiated at a conference held in Munich, Germany, among the major powers of Europe without the presence of Czechoslovakia. Today, it is widely regarded as a failed act of appeasement toward Germany. The agreement was signed in the early hours of 30 September 1938 (but dated 29 September).” As we now know, the “failed act of appeasement” was to lead to the horrors of the Second World War.

The following lines are from the poem, “Epic” by Patrick Kavanagh:

I have lived in important places, times
When great events were decided: who owned
That half a rood of rock, a no-man’s land
Surrounded by our pitchfork-armed claims.

That was the year of the Munich bother. Which
Was most important? I inclined
To lose my faith in Ballyrush and Gortin
Till Homer’s ghost came whispering to my mind.
He said: I made the Iliad from such
A local row. Gods make their own importance.

Patrick Kavanagh went on to write: “All great civilisations are based on parochialism – Greek, Israelite, English. Parochialism is universal; it deals with the fundamentals. To know fully even one field or one land is a lifetime’s experience. In the world of poetic experience it is depth that counts, not width. A gap in a hedge, a smooth rock surfacing a narrow lane, a view of a woody meadow, the stream at the junction of four small fields – these are as much as a man can fully experience.”

The “Munich bother” Kavanagh refers to, of course, is the “Munich Agreement”. But by phrasing it as such, he downplays it. He seems to be saying – as is evident from the paragraph quoted after the poem – that the argument about “who owned … that half a rood of rock, a no-man’s land” was just as important as what was going on in Europe at the time. (Of course, if one looks at the First World War, it could be said that all of those involved were also fighting over a “no-man’s land”)

At first glance, this is an astonishing claim: that the epic story of a thousand ships and a ten year war could be compared to a “local row”. But, of course, at its heart, The Iliad is exactly that. It’s the story of how one man has an affair with another man’s wife and the way in which the cuckolded husband takes his revenge. If we look at it that way, how many of our epic stories could be boiled down to a simple story? The brother against brother in The Godfather; The Great Gatsby – a cautionary tale of excess and a reflection of the period, which at its heart is simply a story of two lovers similar to Fitzgerald and Zelda; even the events of Ulysses – all ordinary, everyday occurrences taking place in the space of a single day, but given a mythic status by the author.

So what do you think? Are all the best stories based on parochialism?

Henry Miller on his Deathbed – “Alive to the End”

Today’s post is a simple one. This is Henry Miller on his death bed, after 89 years of an extraordinary life. Watch and be inspired:

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The Paranoid World of Philip K Dick

Philip K Dick was a member of a select group of artists, those who – only after their death – achieve the status they longed for in life. Dick wrote more than 30 novels and over 100 short stories. However, none of them received the respect that he longed for while he was alive. Part of the problem was that many of the novels and short stories were science fiction pot boilers that he wrote to make a living. This is not to say that these works weren’t good but many of the books upon which his posthumous reputation rests weren’t published until after his death.

Throughout his life, Dick suffered from various ailments – including vertigo – that gave him a sense that he was dislocated from real life. This would become a major theme in his work over the years. He studied philosophy in university and after studying Plato and other philosophers, he came to the conclusion that the world was not entirely real. This would also surface again and again in his writing.

On the website, The Modern Word, Richard Behren and Allen B. Ruch have written about Dick’s works:

“… beneath their direct style and standard sci-fi trappings lies a deeper world of intense emotions, metaphysical speculation, and frequently shocking ideas … Dick’s own contribution back to the science fiction genre was an unrelenting analysis of the question “What is Real?” Also central to his literature was the equally important question of “What Is Human?” From his early short stories to his final masterpieces, he asks these questions over and over again, often coming up with answers as deceptively simple as “What makes us human is our ability to feel empathy for other living creatures.””

Between the years of 1952 and 1955, Dick published over 70 short stories, all for science fiction magazines. He attempted to write mainstream fiction for a time but couldn’t find a publisher, so went back to writing science fiction again. By the end of the 60s, he’d become a cult figure in the science fiction community. (It’s a little-known fact that John Lennon called Philip K Dick from his “bed-in” to discuss one of Dick’s novels which Lennon hoped to film). However, he had also begun the descent that would lead to his premature death.

He had for years been taking amphetamines; in the early 70s, he started to experiment with a variety of different pills. His house in California was invaded by junkies and various other strays, and he became increasingly paranoid and convinced that the FBI had him under surveillance. A break-in at his house didn’t help matters, although it was suggested that he may have planned the break-in himself.

In 1974, Dick had what he called a “religious experience” and, from then on, began to experience hallucinations and started to believe that some form of intelligence (possibly God) was sending him information. He also believed that he was leading a double life – one in the present as Philip K Dick, the other in 1^st Century Rome as a Christian named Thomas. Given that he had written about similar subject matter in some of his books (most notably A Scanner Darkly) one wonders was it a case of (a very drug-addled) life imitating art. However, while he was most certainly drug-dependant and possibly delusional, none of his friends or his associates at the time seemed to think he was mentally unstable. And, indeed, he himself seemed to acknowledge that the ideas would be regarded as the ravings of a madman because he continuously tried to explain or to rationalise them in both his later novels and his journal, an astonishing 1,000 page tome which he titled The Exegesis.

Dick’s years of self-abuse finally took their toll in 1982, when he died from complications brought on by a series of strokes at the age of 53. His death came four months prior to the release of the film Blade Runner, the first film to be based on one of his stories. Dick had seen and liked the film but didn’t live to see its release. This may have been just as well as the film was a flop. However, over the years it has garnered a cult following, and numerous other movies have been made from his works (not to mention inspired by – The Matrix could have been written by Dick). He is now regarded as one of the great American science fiction writers. This is gratifying to see as Dick’s themes of identity confusion and the blurring of fiction and reality are perfect for our postmodern times.

And, in a twist that Dick would no doubt have loved, a Philip K Dick android was built in 2005. The estate of PKD and his two daughters gave David Hanson and Andrew Olney – who built the android – unpublished works which were downloaded into the android’s “brain”. The android made various appearances – one of which was at the San Diego Comic Convention to promote the movie of A Scanner Darkly – and the android answered questions from the audience.

Sometime afterwards, Hanson – travelling in transit with the android’s head – left it behind on a flight and it disappeared. In 2010, the head was once again built and you can see video of it here

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What Can Writers Learn From Songwriters? Paul Simon

Paul Simon is probably better known for his exquisite melodies and his excellent musicianship than for his lyrics. But he is a gifted lyricist also. However, his lyrics fall into two camps. Some are straightforward narratives (many of these he wrote in his early career); others are more experimental (something he did later in his career).

As far as the narrative songs go, what writers can learn from these goes back to something I mentioned in previous posts about sparseness and minimalism, about fitting as much into one line as possible. In the interview I did with Josh Ritter for Writing.ie, he touched on this as someone who writes both songs and novels: “The writing in both … in prose and in a song … can be surreal and wild and entertaining,” he said. “But you’re always trying to say it in the fewest amount of words.”

(I also mentioned to him one of my favourite Paul Simon-related quotes. Christy Moore says Shane McGowan said to him that melodies are floating all around us in the air and you just have to grab them before some other bastard like Paul Simon gets them! I can’t think of a higher compliment.)

The entire lyrics of the song “America” could be used as an example of this minimalism, but these two lines are a perfect example:

“‘Kathy, I’m lost,’ I said, though I knew she was sleeping
I’m empty and aching and I don’t know why”

These two lines convey everything we need to know about the character without actually “telling” us anything directly. Indeed, when it comes to the old adage “Show, don’t tell”, Simon is a master. This song is told from the point of view of a first-person narrator, so we learn very little about the characters beyond the fact that they “boarded a Greyhound in Pittsburgh”. But the characters are fleshed out by way of little snatches of action. In the beginning, the narrator tells us,

“So we bought a pack of cigarettes and Mrs. Wagner pies”

Later, he says to Kathy,

“Toss me a cigarette, I think there’s one in my raincoat”

And she replies,

“We smoked the last one an hour ago”

And we see them playing little games to pass the time:

“She said the man in the gabardine suit was a spy
I said ‘Be careful his bowtie is really a camera’”

Another example of this is the song “Under African Skies”:

“Joseph’s face was black as night
The pale yellow moon shone in his eyes
His path was marked
By the stars in the southern hemisphere
And he walked his days
Under African skies”

When it comes to the experimental lyrics, Simon is similar to someone like David Bowie in that, a lot of the time we may not know what the hell he’s talking about, but the imagery is striking nonetheless. From the playful imagery of “You Can Call Me Al”:

“A man walks down the street
He says why am I soft in the middle now
Why am I soft in the middle
The rest of my life is so hard”

to the striking imagery of “The Boy In The Bubble”:

“These are the days of lasers in the jungle
Lasers in the jungle somewhere
Staccato signals of constant information
A loose affiliation of millionaires and billionaires”

These lyrics are less straightforward narrative, more stream-of-consciousness, similar to something “The Beats” or Joyce might have produced.

Another thing that writers can learn from Paul Simon is the use of powerful imagery that leaves an indelible mark on the mind of the listener. To illustrate that, I’ll finish with this verse from, “Sounds of Silence”:

“And the people bowed and prayed
To the neon god they made
And the sign flashed out its warning
In the words that it was forming
And the sign said, ‘The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls
And tenement halls’”

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Guest Rant: “Censorship – Write Like your Parents are Dead!” by Jillian Godsil

Censorship is alive and well and living inside every writer’s head. It comes to fore when the topics get tough and every word matters. A clever observer once said the key to finding your true voice was to write as if your parents were dead. As writers, we have to grow up, to mature, to throw off our exhibitions, ignore the urge to self censor and just write (as if our parents were dead).

My first act of rebellion was to include bad language. Somehow writing the f word seems much stronger than saying it. For one thing, it remains on the page in full view long after it is written. There is no denying its presence. A spoken curse on the other hand can be an accident or an ephemeral explosion of sound. It may not even be heard. My next was to discover that a central character, the mother, was as horrible as you might even have the misfortune to meet. My third was to include sex, lots of it. In desperation my sister suggested I publish this terrible book under my ex husband’s name; and bring shame on my in-laws instead! My mother politely suggested I write proper stuff instead.

At a work reunion some years ago I met a colleague who was also writing. We spoke about composing sex scenes. He confessed it was beyond him; that the pages rejected his words. I asked was he happily married and he said he was. Newly inured by my own divorce, I could only suggest that he wrote as if he were never married,

Then last month at a book launch, I met two women; an old friend and a new friend. We were all writing. My two friends were writing crime books, dark subjects with bodies and serial killers and twisted methods of murder. They laughed over how they researched the most gruesome of topics with delight; how long it might take a body to decompose, how difficult it was to sever a head, how much blood might be pooled on the ground after a murder. They said their children despaired of them and the genre. They politely suggested their mothers write proper stuff instead.

Armed with this nugget of information I returned home to my teenage children. They know I am writing a book which contains graphic sexual scenes. I lazily call it my sex book, my Irish version of the Fifty Shades of Grey. It is actually hen lit; the grownup version of chick lit. The working title is The Cougar Diaries. I pointed out to my children that it could be worse; I could be writing about serial killers and twelve year old children being tortured and killed. They were not impressed. They politely suggested that they would rather I wrote despicable crimes than sex.

So I have a new observation for writers stepping into troubled waters. Write as if you were an orphaned lone child who never married and who never had any children!

Good luck!

PS:  Well done to Louise Phillips on Red Ribbons – her debut novel which includes a serial killer, dead children, and gruesome violence. It is a great read and my children would much prefer I wrote something along those lines.

Jillian Godsil is a writer living in Wicklow, Ireland. She went viral in 2011 and hasn’t looked back since. Her blog is at www.JillianGodsil.com.

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