She’s relentless. That’s what they say about her. She makes a choice and she follows it through, with the determination of a Rottweiler, whether she’s going after a john, casing a pimp out of her territory, or getting the girls who walk her streets to get their shit together. Usually they call her a bitch, but she laughs it off because, well, she likes the violent connotation.

She fucks for money. She never much liked the word prostitute, it sounds like a ‘social disease’ that some stuffy shithead in a suit attributed to ‘fallen women’ and no one has said anything better. She knows the activists are using the term ‘sex worker’ and she’s okay with it. It applies too, but if you ask her, straight up, she’ll say she fucks for money. Whore is a sacred word, to her, and one only a couple of people get to whisper to her in the heat of passion.

She works the streets because she likes to catch the violent johns off guard and take them out of the equation. Six years ago she got caught cutting a guy’s cock off and feeding it to him. She found a ACLU lawyer just as crazy as she was and they got the charge reduced no nothing. She spent six months in prison. In that time, she became a sort of martyr. Wherever people were demanding rights for sex workers, they held up pictures of her, even if she did kill someone in cold blood.

Sometimes she still feels things. She’s not a sociopath, so far as she can tell, but she can turn it all off when she needs to. But that whole ‘hardened’ thing is bullshit. She just chooses when she cries. And that isn’t often. She hunts so long as she’s still physically able to, and after that, she might take those activists up on their regular requests to come help them out. For now, killing fuckers who go too far is more useful than shouting at congress. She fucks way too many congressmen to think they’ll listen. Yet.

News people, good detectives, vampire hunters, all sorts of people come looking for answers about what’s going on in her turf. Even the werewolves won’t move in where she’s working because they think she’s crazier than they are dangerous. Or maybe it’s the same thing.

They say crazy. She says empowered. But that’s a debate for college students and bloggers.

She’s not a junkie, she fucks because she likes to. Men tend to be more trouble than they’re worth, so keeping them emotionally at arm’s length is the way to go. She doesn’t like junkies working in her turf. Too dangerous. Raises the risk of disease. But she’s got contacts in programs. They might help the junkies, she can’t. They may just get them out of her hair, and that suits her just as well.

She’s proud, dynamic, and aggressive in her sexuality. She fucks who she wants and doesn’t do anything she doesn’t want to. She’s arrogant, sometimes, and she rubs people raw. They either lover her for it or hate her, but in the end, they don’t walk on her. A poet she’s fucking calls her a ‘force of nature’ and pities anyone who tries to tie her down. She burns copies of ‘Pretty Women’ at protests and can quote Veronica Franco when it suits her but she never finished high school.

She’s been raped, she’s been beaten, but so have plenty of suburban housewives, if you ask her about it she’ll remind you.

She’ll deck you if she has to, but she’s rather hold you tight and kiss you till you shut up and do what she wants.

You can’t stop her, you can only survive her. She’s not a victim of the patriarchy, she’s the reason they’re afraid of women. And one day, she’s coming for them.

So yes, this is a highly idealized situation. Many sex workers in the US are beaten down, abused, and unable to stand up for themselves like this. I don’t think that’s the way it has to be, and I CERTIANLY don’t think it should be that way. That’s another post, however. Point is, you don’t want to play the millions of boys who go off to war and just get killed, you want to play the hero of war. The one who gets through the gritty reality and becomes a legend.

I want the same thing.

I don’t want you to punish me with STDs, even if that’s realistic, because I’m playing a sexually liberated woman who uses her talents (not just her body) to make herself powerful within her society and subculture. I don’t demand your war hero have crippling PTSD or life threatening cancer, because this is fantasy.

I don’t want you to punish me with pregnancy because that is not a story I want to tell with this character. (Unless I’ve told you otherwise.) I don’t want you to punish me with pregnancy because I think it’s sick to treat the creation of a new human being as a means to subjugate another human being. I have heard, in some form or another, GMs actually say, “ha ha, I’ll show that slut. I’ll just have her get pregnant and she’ll have to stop playing the character.” Worse still, then they hold the threat of ‘murdering the baby’ over my head if I play the character any way. Anything, in their sick little world, could result in miscarriage. It’s cruel and it’s weird and I want you to stop and think before using a creation of new life as a ‘consequence.’ Think about what that says to the people at your table. Think about what that means. It is not a thing than would ever be used to stop a male character, and so it’s an inherently unfair punishment for, frankly, something that doesn’t need to be punished.

In this particular fantasy, this woman has killed to avenge herself or her friends, but she isn’t a professional killer any more than your super hero who hunts down serial killers. And considerably less than your badass mercenary. There is a revenge element in this part of my fantasy that isn’t necessary for every sex worker character or even a majority of them. In that case, the violence free sex worker whose only crime is controlling her sexuality and making it work for her instead being a victim to it should be treated the same as your musician who entertain audiences and should be seen as more noble than your gun runner or your drug dealer.

So here’s my reality check.

I’m not the first one to do this. I won’t be the last, either. Writing is a thing of development. Everyday we’re developing better habits, better skills, and better methods. But that isn’t the only thing we’re always developing. We’re developing characters and ideas and settings and all of those other things that make up the stories we create.

Go ahead, look back into the history of say, Phillip Marlowe. He didn’t spring fully formed from the pen of Chandler as he appeared in The Big Sleep. Actually, Marlowe had appeared in a number of short stories with a few other names before he hit his stride in the first novel. Some of that was editorial decisions, but I think a lot of it was Chandler trying to feel out the character before he devoted a whole book to the guy. I’m glad he did. The level of character knowledge and detail Chandler had on Marlowe made him feel real. (That will explain my crush on the boyscout, you understand. It’s the quality of the character design, not because I’m a gooey woman.)

Am I saying you should write the same thing over and over? No, obviously that’s bad writing, or at least, dull writing. What I’m saying is don’t be afraid to practice a scene before you implement it. I’m saying try the same setting a few times to see what characters really ought to live there. I’m saying let your heroine go through a short story or two to be sure you really want her to be a punk rock werewolf hunter before you start writing the whole novel. Maybe in writing her, you’ll discover she’s more exciting as a tax accountant. (Okay, I dare someone to write a tax accountant/werewolf hunter.)

The greats have done it, you’ll do it anyway, might as well pretend like you were planning to do it all along.

[For more on recycling, try this!]

I was watching, mind you, and got my hands on her fat little trunk before she got all the way over the edge, but it was clear her intent. Yes, she wanted to crawl off the bed. No, she didn’t know it would hurt her. She hasn’t any concept of ‘I could get hurt,’ or ‘that might be scary.”

In fact, she really has no real sense of fear. Now, don’t get me wrong, she’ll get afraid after the fact. Also the dark. But things that she can see and reach for, things she can touch or taste, or somehow experience, no, she hasn’t any fear. She just reaches and pushes and explores with little concern for the consequences.

Sometimes, she’ll storm her way across the couch at a full crawling clip towards the desk where my husbands computer sits. The purpose for this? Apparently, her only desire is to grab on to the printer/scanner monstrosity on his desk and hang from it. There’s no where else she could go on the desk. She just wants to hang and climb and challenge herself, and gravity be damned! My husband thinks her suicidal need to hang from the printer/scanner has something to do with scanning her butt like those drunk secretaries do at company Christmas parties.

I’ve even found her attempting to climb my book shelf. Maybe to get at my books, or maybe, more likely, just to climb -something.-

I remember shortly after she was born. She would roll onto her stomach and cry and cry, mostly we figured, in frustration that she couldn’t move. She couldn’t go. It was so sad to watch her little head bob up and down, and her little feet kick no where to get her somewhere. The moment when she first got to her knees and really honestly crawled for the first time, she literally squealed with joy. Joy at being able to move and be in control. The dangers and perils that come of being in charge of your own movements just don’t matter. Moving matters.

Willy Shakespeare says ‘Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win, by fearing to attempt.’

What does this have to do with creating, with writing? To be honest, I didn’t know at first, I just watched my daughter and her fearlessness and kept being nagged by a sense that there was something I ought to learn in it. I realized it was trait in her that I respected, and envied it a little. Which is when it occurred to me, of course, I’m a dummy. I’m afraid. I’m afraid of putting my out there that it’s going to be rejected. That after all this time I’m going to find out I was never a ‘real writer’ after all. Whatever that means. I was afraid to take a risk just because there might be a consequence.

In that silly little moment of realization, I put together what my daughter was trying to teach me, unknowingly perhaps, when she tried to crawl off the edge of the bed.

I’ve decided to shrug off fear and doubt, and dive head first into the thing I’m the most afraid of. (You know, other than motherhood, ’cause that’s one I was gleefully thrown into, rather than dove.) So I’m putting my writing out there, out everywhere. I’m biting back my fear and taking a chance, because, like my daughter, I don’t know if I’m absolutely going to fall if I climb up on the scanner, and so what if I do? I’ve got plenty of people who love me and will catch me.

So anyway, thank you Tina, for being fearless, and reminding me how. /gooey mom time.

Also: Updates on the Anthology I was included in, you can download a sneak preview.

Three of my White Wolf titles are out, buy them at your local Dork Store. Immortals, Ancient Mysteries, Ancient Bloodlines.

And, my article for Pyramid Magazine is now out, here.

So, I start school again tomorrow and I am feeling very very mixed about it. Most of it’s just online classes to satisfy some random person’s idea of what a degree should look like. I am taking a creative writing class on campus in person with, I’m sure, a bunch of 18 year olds hoping for an easy A. 

It might be awesome, and I probably shouldn’t let my general hatred for the education system get in the way of my good time, but the feeling remains and I’m having a hell of a time shaking it.

In other news, I have a few things out to a couple of compainies, and I’m trying not to dismiss them just because it’s taking longer to hear back than I want. I have no outstanding work and that’s making me buggy. I can find my own work, of course, and I will, but contract work is just so much nicer. 

I have a head full of romantic stories. I don’t usually, and so it’s strange to me. Maybe I’m in heat.

On that note, 

TTYL