I could talk about advice not taken, mistakes made, people slighted, opportunities missed, pity parties so elaborate they are weekly street festivals. Someday, I’ll write about those things. But I’ve been so surrounded by distraction lately that I’m thinking about what’s left when distraction falls away. Some of that is what follows here.

1. There are two writing ladders of which I am now aware. There is the craft ladder, on which you improve all of the abilities that get covered in writing manuals and workshops and writer interviews conducted by or for other writers. And there’s the authenticity ladder, on which you find truth. Your truth. At the bottom of that ladder, you have to do it with a low quality plastic spork. Somewhere in the middle, you do it with a jewel-encrusted titanium sword. I suspect that near the top, it’s all about your bare hands. In an ideal world, you’d ascend both ladders simultaneously…but there is no such thing as an ideal world, is there? The craft ladder is shiny and well-maintained and visible for miles, but the truth ladder has chipped paint and is broken in places and behind clouds in others. It’s a little like the Christmas tree in the Charlie Brown Christmas special. Plenty of opportunity for disparagement, plenty of shed needles, and everyone’s secretly a little disappointed when the gang covers it with tinsel and lights toward the end.

2. Using creativity is about setting rules. I like those kinds of rules because they’re not limitations, they’re guideposts. I like setting down guideposts and then going what feels like completely bonkers. I don’t think it’s actually completely bonkers, though. In recent months, looking at something I wrote and thinking “I’m going to be wearing a sandwich board and talking to pigeons soon” has been a fairly good indicator that I’m on the right track.

3. The other day Kyle Minor said this on Facebook about about stories under 1500 words:  If you go shorter, you can ride the lyric train and let the last sentence save you. It was like the floor opened up underneath me, that sentence. I love to read and I’m not much of a musician. But a lot of the time, what I actively try to emulate is a song, or a part of a song…something that is three or four minutes long. Probably related: I dream about trains all the time.

4. I dislike the overuse of the word “fear” in discussions of approaching the act of writing. I spent a lot of time as a student thinking that it spoke to other students, who had legitimately intense and terrifying secrets they wanted to share. I had secrets I wanted to share — what writer doesn’t? — but they were (and still are) smaller and in some ways, mundane. Fear isn’t a good word choice for what stands between me and the page much of the time. There’s no one word that covers all for everyone, but a phrase that is close comes from the Bene Gesserit Litany against Fear. The second line:  Fear is the mind-killer. What the Litany neglects to mention, understandably, is that there are other mind-killers besides fear.  Most of the time, what gets in my way is mind-killing.

5. I’m always in pursuit of myself. If keyboard writing stops working, I switch to longhand. If lines seem limiting, I go to sketch paper. If sitting at my kitchen table makes me jumpy, I go back to my regular desk. No one tactic works for very long. I’ve been wondering if my reptilian brain — the one that really likes by-rote things like Bejeweled or solitaire — has grown to blimp-size, and that’s why I have to keep up the chase. It’s a more pleasant theory than the one in which a side of me continually mocks another side of me.

6. Most of the time, when I sit down to write I have to take out the garbage first. I spend somewhere between 15 and 30 minutes just writing about whatever’s going on in my head. Stuff going on in my life, things I’m obsessing over, grievances, whatever. I have a journal, and this is even separate from that. There is always muck to be skimmed off the surface.  If I have the luxury of substantial time, I’ll push the garbage phase to that full 30 minutes because I know that toward the end I will want to be writing about something else…anything else. If I do that step correctly, there’s a quiet afterwards that is empty and spooky and if I’m lucky, beautiful.

7. There’s an essay in Alice Walker’s book  In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens called “Writing The Color Purple.” In it, she talks about how the characters visited her — almost like imaginary friends. I used to work like that. I’ve been thinking about trying to take it up again, because imaginary friends have the extra perk of comfort. In the meantime, though, I often start with artifacts and go at them with the archaeologist toothbrush. Three for the last three stories on  this page: Christmas trees, Keurig coffee makers, Jack Van Impe.

8. I love the highs I get from having a story that is humming along nicely. What I love more, though, is when it’s obvious that it has been heading in that direction all along. Some random object, idea, emotion I was rolling over mentally five days ago, seemingly unrelated, clicks into place like it always belonged there…because it did. I wonder what I would think of that phenomenon if I was an atheist.

9. I love Margaret Atwood’s novel  Cat’s Eye for many reasons, but a big one has to do with how it depicts artists’ relationships with their work. The main character, Elaine, paints subjects and themes that draw from her life, but aren’t distinguishable to her audience as such — there’s a significant gap between those two experiences, and it has an effect on how she responds to the art community. Her ex-husband, meanwhile, changes media and schools and attitudes with the times — it’s nearly parody, how it’s portrayed. I think most writers who keep with it for any length of time are probably some combination of the two.

10. My standard answer to “why do you write?” is that I write to make sense of things. I don’t think I succeed in that very often, though. Mostly what I do is show you something, and maybe you say “Oh yeah, I’ve seen that too,” and then we both move on. I don’t glance back right away — just like how when I leave a restaurant table, I don’t want to see who sits there next. But sometimes I circle back later, because I’m both obsessive and easily bored, and I see that you’re someplace totally different, and it gives me a little bit of hope.

Ed: Vallie Lynn Watson recently edited the fine, fine, Writing, Place and Film issue of Rick Magazine and she was kind enough to write a dispatch about her day as an extra on the set of MY FAVORITE TEENAGE SOAP OPERA SET IN NORTH CAROLINA IN THE WHOLE WIDE WORLD or as you may refer to it, the one true show to rule them all, One Tree Hill. If you are a fan of the best show in the whole wide world, you will love every juicy moment. If you are not a fan, I am sad for you.

Had to be at a parking garage at 6:30, and they drove me in one of their ever-present long white vans to Clothes Over Bros, a block away. Went in a side/back door and joined about a dozen other people of all ages/races in a small, sort of hot room. We’d end up being in this room off and on for half the day, toiling in folding chairs. Had to fill out tax forms””I hadn’t even thought about getting paid as I of course would’ve done it for free, but I’ll get about $100 for the day.

I was in four scenes (fingers crossed that they’re all used!). The first two were really taxing: I had to walk back and forth in front of Clothes Over Bros. The first of the two was about nine o’clock, and when I rounded the corner on my walk, I almost ran smack into Austin Nichols (Julian), who looks hot as shit with his hair all curly and unkempt. And then Lee Morris/Norris (?), Mouth—or as I like to call him, Minkus—was right behind him. The scene was the two of them exiting COB, and in most of the shots I was walking right past the front door as they exit. Right when we were finishing all this up, Sophia Bush (Brooke) walked up in the clothes she was filming in a couple days before (a tight, lovely gray and black number and weird heels—they have this bulb-like thing at the bottom of the actual heel).

(By the way, if you wanna try to spot me, this is all for the second episode of the season. I am as short as I always was, my long, blonde, curly [probably frizzy] hair was down, and I was wearing an empire-waist turquoise/green patterned dress that may be too boobalicious and probably makes me look pregnant, though I sucked tummy in with all my might. And was wearing too much makeup).

Back to the waiting room for a couple more hours in the folding chairs. Most everyone was nodding off. It was warm, and they didn’t supply us with coffee! They did provide us with weird (leftoverish) food throughout the day, and water.

About noon, more walking in front of COB. I could see inside that Daphne (Brooke’s mom) and Sophia were filming an argument. At the end of the scene, Daphne exits COB. She looks as mean as I expected. I kinda doubt I can be seen in this shot.

Back to the waiting room, and the nice older ladies I’d made friends with at 6:45 started to get on my two-hours-of-night-before-sleep nerves. They thought it was cute to stand in a line and show off their ballet plies (sp?). I kept going to the bathroom (people probably thought I had some drug problem!) because to get there, you had to go through the middle room that is attached to the actual COB store/set (for those who don’t know, this is an actual space, a former business, in downtown Wilmington). I could see all the cloth chairs with names on them (Brooke, Millicent, and Julian’s were in the back corner). I could see the monitors that the directors/producers were watching on. Once on the monitor, I could see Sophia goofing off, making faces right into the camera. Cute. There was always music blaring between takes, probably to keep the energy up.

About 1:30 we were all driven in the vans to lunch (oh, got to walk through the front of COB, the actual “store,” which was cool) two blocks away, in a Hilton conference room. Before we even walked in I could hear Sophia’s throaty voice. She was at a corner table, sitting next to Lisa Goldsomething (Millie). As I was getting my food at the buffet I heard Sophia say something about her and Austin (Julian, her on and off-screen boyfriend) having watched Ghostbusters the night before. I sat down and tried not to stare at their table (she was still wearing her black and gray) but it was hard not to. She’s very loud—her voice carries—and seemed to draw all the attention in the room.

About three, another dozen extras who’d be playing doctors and nurses in the next two scenes invaded our hot folding-chair room. About four, we were all white-vanned over to Cape Fear Community College to film two hospital scenes. This time our holding room was a large lecture classroom, much nicer except the old ladies sat down next to me and drove me batshitcrazy. As I texted my friend Vickie, I DID NOT NEED TO KNOW ALL DETAILS OF ALL THREE OF YOUR DIVORCES, ANNOYING LADY! At one point, oldlady2 said, “I wish I knew how to text so I wouldn’t have to speak.” Really, lady, really?

Different people were chosen for different scenes. About 4:30, I was chosen and went to the “hospital” cafeteria where I immediately heard Sophia, then spotted James (Nathan) who was not sitting in his cloth “Nathan” chair but instead, tucked into a back corner quietly reading. Tried hard to see what book it was, but couldn’t. Sophia, who he recently dated, approached him with her IPad thingy and said, “Can I show you something?” He was polite to her but standoffish.

Then Joy (Haley) came in and the three of them set up for their scene, sitting at a cafeteria table. The conversation was about Brooke’s mom calling the cops on her, and something about Haley being pregnant (I still have not seen the last six episodes of this past season, so I’m not up on what’s going on. Going to wait to get the season 7 DVDs next month and watch the season in its entirety, some weekend with a couple bottles of wine.)

In this scene, I had to walk across the cafeteria, pretty much right behind Nathan&Haley. Of all the scenes I filmed I’d guess this is the one I could most likely be seen in. I’m carrying a turquoise purse.

Back to holding and then about an hour later, me and a goth (is that still the right term?) dude were chosen to film a scene in the “hospital” waiting room. We were sat in some chairs, goth was told to play with his IPhone and I was given a coffee cup of water to be sipping on. As they were setting up, Jackson (Jamie, the darling little kid who’s no longer blond) sat down in the chair next to me and was playing and talking to everyone.

It was six chairs, three on each side, back-to-back. Sophia sat down on the other side; we were back-to-back catty cornered. They filmed a scene where Jackson ran up to her. If this airs, you should be able to see the back of my head and maybe a little bit of my profile; I kept turning my head that way some but didn’t want to be too obvious. At one point, Joe Davolla (director) came over and very quietly—as though trying to convey the mood—suggested Sophia act more longing (something about wanting a baby).

A little more time in the holding room and then at 7, the white vans took us back to the parking garage. I so wanna do this again!

I started playing EverQuest in 2001. Most video game addiction stories start with a friend who coaxes you into playing, and mine is no different. Over the course of two weeks I went from “I dunno…” to a full time career as a bronze-plated, hammer-wielding, high elf cleric healer.

It was a weird time in my real life. I’d quit writing fiction a few years before, and I’d just left a reasonably lucrative career as a marketing writer because my employer had been irritated by the inconveniences of my high risk pregnancy. Now, I was working second shift at a call center with a baby at home. All of my priorities had changed dramatically in less than a year. Cracking the skulls of giant rats outside the gates of West Freeport was cathartic in its violence, and comforting in its predictability.

I went through an mild addiction phase with EverQuest, where I sometimes ate dinner at the computer screen. I still think of it as a happy time. My friends and I would go home from work and play for hours. We’d fight crocodiles in an oasis, or hole up in the goblin-filled dungeon of Highpass Hold and fill our bags with loot. But the best part was the joking around. Playing a game like EverQuest or World of Warcraft is like standing in the Hall of Presidents in Disney World without a tour guide. One is asked to take it seriously, but the degree to which that’s actually done is entirely up to the participants. That choice can make the difference between being bored out of one’s mind and going to bed early, or staying for hours before noticing that the sun is coming up. My friends and I had a lot of adventures that way. We once spent a night just jumping off of the Plane of Air to land in the Ocean of Tears below. Once we fought to the center of a witch’s lair, and the keyholder fell asleep at his monitor. During the day, we sent each other links describing new places we wanted to visit, quests we wanted to finish, treasure we wanted to loot. Everyone else thought we were completely intolerable.

Because the game occupied my intellectual energy (the baby, happily, took up the rest of my energy), I was thinking about other things besides how angry I was at the enormous change in my real life circumstances. I could make a stupid mistake in a dark dungeon, and then laugh about it by the fax machine the next afternoon. My friends had play styles that reflected their personalities, and asking each other to correct tactics could sometimes end up as personal criticisms. Part of what broke that first gaming addiction for me was realizing that despite appearances, I was ill-suited to play a healer. I still deal with the consequences of that discovery, on both sides of the monitor.

The big surprise came when I wanted to write fiction again. One afternoon at work, I was (sleepily) reading the forums at eqcleric.com and someone had posted this:

“Does anyone else think it’s strange how we heal? We wait until people are nearly dead before we do anything, in order to conserve mana. But in real life, could you really wait until your friend was almost dead before you did something about it?”

Many clerics replied that the total absence of mana in the real world was an important consideration, but it got me to thinking. Thanks to EverQuest, I had gained some new points of view. As a cleric, sure — I’d learned a way to turn a blind eye to suffering in the interest of the greater good. But I’d also learned what can happen when someone who claims to have the same allegiances has lied. I’d learned about wanting a reward for weeks, only to get it and realize it wasn’t quite what I’d hoped before — even though I’d known exactly what it was the whole time. I’d learned that the pleasure of arriving someplace new can be wholly contingent on one’s traveling companion. And I knew what could lead to stepping back from a world and a life that had been generally good, and nearly all consuming.

None of those events was reliant on blessed claymores, angry pixies, or dragons that respawn once a week. But they were part of the gaming life, because they’re part of any life. Realizing that is what brought me back to fiction. There have been times since when my gaming and writing balance has been off kilter, especially when one of them offers me something shiny and new. But is life ever completely balanced? In the end, the two reap rewards for each other, and I can’t complain.

Later, I spent some time in a role playing guild. From a more technical point of view, that was also very educational. Roleplaying gamer decisions — what armor to wear, what quests to choose, even whether to walk or run — must be justified by narrative and backstory. Even on an ordinary day, good roleplay gaming presents small but interesting writing challenges. Cheat on those, and guildmates will notice. Do well at them, and become an architect for larger stories.

Eight years and eight games* after EverQuest, I play Aion once or twice a week. It’s cookie cutter in design, but very pretty to look at. My character Ambiguous is musclebound with broad shoulders, purple armor, long flowing black hair, and just a hint of lip color. The female characters seem to like Ambiguous a lot. I also play Left 4 Dead. That game is only about stumbling through warehouses and sewers and forests with a rifle, zombies at every turn. Left 4 Dead gave me strange dreams for a while. (One of them led to There are always children.) All of that said, I’m waiting for Star Wars: The Old Republic, which will come out next year. There’s going to be a smuggler class. Lately I’ve been thinking about how people can be unintentionally heroic while just trying to make a living. I can’t wait to try that out.

*Dark Ages of Camelot, City of Heroes/Villains, Lineage 2, The Matrix Online, Star Wars Galaxies, Guild Wars, World of Warcraft, and, of course, EverQuest 2.

Erin Fitzgerald is editor of The Northville Review. Ambiguous’s character profile is here.

Sometimes Sex Is Just Sex

My conservative aunt once asked my mother, after reading one of my poems, “Why does he always have to write about sex?” My mother, trying to smooth things over, responded, “Sometimes the sex isn’t about sex. It can mean different things, like getting screwed by the government.” I appreciated my mother’s attempt, though I don’t think it made my aunt feel any better (at the time, under the Bush administration, my aunt trusted the government quite a bit and couldn’t imagine it screwing her). In many ways, both my aunt’s and my mother’s responses were typical. We often feel the need to question all sexual content or to justify sex by making it about something more. But what if the sex is just that, sex? Is that so wrong?

A few years ago, I would have bought into that need to make sex into some metaphor or symbol for something “grander,” but I’ve now come to terms with the fact that sex is a valid topic on its own and needs no other justification. For anyone who has read much of my work, they will know that I devote a lot of my poetry to examining sexuality. Oh, and did I mention that the majority of the time I’m writing about gay sex? This makes it even worse. Some can handle heterosexual sex, but gay sex just crosses the line. The questions start flying: Why do you have to rub your gayness in my face? Why are you being so graphic? Why are you helping push the stereotype that gay men are sex-obsessed?

I remember in a graduate poetry workshop someone questioned one of my poems by saying it was just trying to be shocking. This is a response many people take to sex in general. If you are showing or writing about sex, you are just trying to shock people. To me this comment says more about the person saying it than the poem in question. Shock is relative. Are you shocked because mass media and politicians have told you that you should be shocked by gay sex? Are you shocked because you are uncomfortable with your own sex life or sexuality? Perhaps this is the point of such a poem: to make you think.

Being gay you quickly learn that no matter what you do you will shock people. Once you accept this you suddenly stop caring and are truly free. You realize it doesn’t matter if you are cautious or not, you will still make people uncomfortable, so you might as well go full force. I write openly about gay sex because so few do. Even other gay poets often refrain from dealing head-on with the intimate details.

I’ve been with my partner for six years now and I love examining, in my work, the ever-changing elements of a relationship and of a sex life. This is something I haven’t seen that much of in gay poetry, or really even in straight poetry. In the gay world there are many “hook-up poems,” or “club poems,” or “let me compare you to a Greek god poems,” but very few, what I call, “ever-after poems.” What happens after you meet the man of your dreams? This is what I try to examine in all my work and part of that examination is sex based. Sure, sex is hot the first time, but how do you maintain that good sex? Yes, many are turned off by it. But I refuse to write any differently.

A few weeks ago I had two poems published in Velvet Mafia, which is an online queer magazine that seeks alternative gay work and erotica. I found the site months ago, but hesitated to submit. I kept thinking do I want my work associated with an erotica-type publication? As someone who has been academically trained, I had that feeling of not wanting to associate myself and my work with something “low-brow.” Of course, I eventually came to my senses and realized nothing on the site is any different in quality than the work I write. Many would try to classify some of my poems as erotica, though most are not written with the intent to get you off.

In this situation, I had to confront my own stereotypes and ask myself why do I deem erotica as something less? It’s just another form of writing and has just as much place in the world as any epic poem does. I’m not saying all erotica is well-written, but not all poetry is well-written either. I also made myself admit that the poems that are posted on Velvet Mafia will probably get more readers than my poem published in The Antioch Review, which is a well-established and respected literary magazine. That is not saying anything against The Antioch Review, but it is putting it all in perspective. People may be shocked by sex, but secretly they love to read about it.

I’m a firm believer in writing those poems that are hard to write. The poems some will never respect or understand. These are the poems that need to be written. I always tell my students if you are scared to write it, or scared of what others might think of you, then that’s the thing to write. As for my aunt, she might never appreciate a good gay sex poem, but I like to think just maybe I’ve made her think.

Stephen S. Mills earned his MFA from Florida State University. His poems have appeared in The Gay and Lesbian Review, Hoboeye Online Arts Journal, The Broken Bridge Review, PANK, Velvet Mafia, The New York Quarterly, The Antioch Review, Redheaded Stepchild, and the anthologies Poetic Voices Without Borders 2 and Ganymede Poets, One. Others are forthcoming in Knockout, Limp Wrist, and Word Riot. He is also the winner of the 2008 Gival Press Oscar Wilde Poetry Award. He currently lives in Orlando, FL with his partner and his dog. Website: http://joesjacket.blogspot.com/