Process journal: erotics

How do you know when to stop working on something and take a break? What else might your writing need from you?

I knew that something wasn’t working in my fiction project. I have tested the story, figured out the architecture, felt my way into the mood, characters and setting. I take pleasure in the work every time I return to it.

And yet…

Something isn’t working, and hasn’t been working for some time. It’d not that I can’t write long-form projects. I have completed three books, and each of them was a labour of love. To create art, you need to examine your relationships to yourself, to others, to beauty, and to eroticism.

I have long been a channel for a specific angle in my writing: I can work with the minute textures of abusive or coercive relationships, and of powerful institutions. I can write warped prayer books that glow cold blue. I can weave books like they are shrouds.

I love my books, yet I don’t want the next book I write to be an archive of trauma, but a living thing, warm in my hands.

In trying to rewrite it outside the gaze of the institution, I kept only two things: the liminal zone I had called Blood Forest, and the power of academic research.

Blood Forest, in the book, is a weird zone, like the ones in Annihilation, Stalker, and Solaris. Like the deepest part of the ocean in Our Endless Wives Under the Sea. In Blood Forest, there is the history of violence, but also the power of human erotic magic and nonhuman desire.

My two main characters are researchers on the psychedelic plant mould, ergot, and they meet-cute at a conference that asks whether ergot was responsible for historical mass psychogenic events including the Salem witch trials. I want to celebrate obsessions and deep interests which can be pursued outside of institutions, as well as those researchers and teachers working inside flawed, and sometimes abusive, contexts who transform the lives of those they work with.

But most of all, I want to stop writing about trauma and abuse so narrowly, and instead to explore queer erotic potential.

To write this book I need to deal with my own trauma responses and to deeply prioritise that. Sometimes, to write something new, you have to become the person who can write it.

I will start by making time to rest, time to wander and flow. To prioritise that like my life depends on it. To tend to my nervous system. To tolerate and move through intrusive thoughts, and floods of images. To see the deep and gentle power of erotic possibilities.

As well as honouring blood that has been spilled, I want to write about blood circulating in warm bodies, flushed cheeks, and beating hearts.

I wish you all rest, replenishment, and encounters with art and beauty.