Day in the Life of an Idiot

 

Despite not thinking I'd make it to the venue on time with Mason's complicated school schedule, I managed to arrive at the Strike Theater about five minutes to 8:00 pm. The Strike Theater is an interesting place. It's in a business incubator type complex in Northeast Minneapolis.

For folks not from around here, how do I describe the NE vibe? It tends to be arty, maybe even veering towards hipster, but definitely the sort of warehouse district vibe (even though, here in Minneapolis, NE is home to a lot of residential properties, too, a lot of post-WWII, economical style housing.)  

The exterior, which I did not get a good shot of, had a lot of neon lighting and a heavy-duty chain link fence around the front door? The shot I took is blurry, but I think you can get a gist of the place from it.


image: blurry shot of snow, neon, concrete, and chain link fences. Welcoming? Maybe if you're a spoken word poet.

The pictures I got of the interior of the door might give you a better sense of the place. I mean, when I go to places like this, I feel very... cool and sophisticated, you know? As a small(-ish) town Wisconsin girl, we didn't really have places much like this, except maybe the Pumphouse--which was also a warehouse converted into a theater, but... somehow more upscale? Or maybe this is one of those places that is upscale BECAUSE it is so down market? If I sound snarky, I'm not really trying to. I love these kinds of places and it really does make me feel very "big city."


image: EKIRTS (strike, backwards) above the steel and interior of the industrial steel doors and bank of leaded windows. 


image: lonely mike on an empty stage... can you feel the beat, fellas?

I mean, I think that's it. This is totally the kind of venue that I imagine Lenny Bruce performed in, you know? Only, if he were ever in Minneapolis... 

Anyway, the Not-So-Silent-Planet reading is an open mic. It's apparently one of the only speculative fiction open mic readings anywhere. Every time I agree to do this show, I wonder what kind of fool I am.... I whine about how I need to learn to say 'no,' how all my reading is garbage, how I can't believe there's going to be a BAND.... (yes, a group called Bad September played)

Then, I go, and I have an AMAZING time. 

One of the first performers set the scene by reading erotica generated by one of those learning AI programs. It was a HOOT. I laughed myself almost sick. The performers were punctuated by science fiction erotic haiku, if you can even imagine such a thing. People read poetry about succubus, stories involving space age PTSD and sex, and hot, hot ghost stories. I honesty felt bad being the final performer because once again (this happened last year with the amazing tentacle smut by Tom S. Tea) I was upstaged by a really funny, super-erotic story about the wife of Cerberus's poly amorous one-hour hook-up with a mortal. 

I ended up reading a sex scene from Tall, Dark & Dead (that ancient gem). I think it went okay, because I set-up well. First of all, Mason gave me the idea that if I was going to read straight smut, I sure really dress as stone-cold butch as possible.


image: me, attempting butch in the My Burger

I explained my outfit and then told the story of what happened the first time I handed out a straight sex scene to my writers' group, Wyrdsmiths. Many of you have heard this story before, but it goes like this: I am what used to be known in queer parlance as a "gold star lesbian," so I was VERY NERVOUS to be handing out a straight sex scene. When the critiques came back I was mostly assured that the sex was very sexy and such, but they said a curious thing. "Lyda," my group told me, "You forgot something." I'm wracking my brains thinking, okay, there was kissing, nakedness, orgasm, what could I have forgotten???? They looked me dead in the eye and said, "You forgot the penis."

Which... apparently is IMPORTANT to the straights??!!!

So, I tacked up a little note over my writing desk that read: REMEMBER THE PENIS.

Having set up the reading this way, I think it helped make what was otherwise a fairly straight (pun intended) forward sex scene more interesting, because when I read the bits that involved that particular set of genitalia I could make note of it and people laughed.

All and all a wonderful time. 

I am forever and always impressed with the quality of writers that exist in the Twin Cities. We really do live in an amazing town for this stuff. Brava, y'all. BRAVA.

Oh, hey, and if you want something completely different, don't forget I'll be at Dreamhaven tonight at 6:30 pm! http://dreamhavenbooks.com/event/speculations-event-lyda-morehouse/

So, that means that I've posted Tate's latest installment. It's sexy times again... because Alex and Valentine have rushed back to Robert's house to try to play at a little B&D. And... let's just say Alex is not very EXPERT at the whole dom thing....

http://www.wattpad.com/49931265-unjust-cause-part-8-of-tops-and-bottoms

Because you know what? It's not all 69 Shades of Awesome. I don't know about you, but I'm lucky to be able to THINK during sex, much less plan out how to get someone tied to the bed. And, part of the fun of this particular experiment in self-publishing is that I get to write sex the way I want. I'm personally very fond of silly, vaguely-awkward, (more like my real life experiences) sex. I mean, I still hope, one day, to write the super-hot, yet not, scene in which the cat interrupts the sexy times, because YOU KNOW you've had that happen, and far too often we don't celebrate that stuff for the wonderfulness that it truly is.

Plus, I queered things up some. Not just by queering the dom/sub status of the traditional male/female (which I ultimately don't do in this one, but which I plan to by the end of this story), but also when Valentine is talking about this former lover, who is a phoenix. This person is reborn presenting as different gender with each fiery rebirth, but Valentine is VERY ADAMANT that Jin never CHANGES gender, just presents differently.

This is very important to me.

I suspect, if I were still being traditionally published, this would be one of those things I would have fought with my publisher about, and more likely than not, eventually capitulated on. To this day, I'm bummed that I gave up the fight for Matyas' queerness in the Garnet Lacey series. In the book in which Garnet gains the power to see people's inner gods and goddesses, I'd wanted Matyas to have a goddess inside. It wasn't going to change anything about him, not one thing, but I got a very firm 'NO. IT IS NOT DONE.' Boys had to have gods, and girls had to have goddesses, full stop. I THINK I managed to have a waiter in Paris who had a goddess, but that was okay because he was just a throw away character. Because GOD FORBID someone people liked be just-so-very-slightly-hinted at having queerness of any kind!! Dude was sleeping with a girl at the time, even. Though one, I might add, who wore sensible shoes and had a dog, but we won't talk about how CLEARLY I WAS SIGNALING HER QUEERNESS. (This was Izzy. In my head she was a butch bi-woman.)

Not that I have FEELINGS for REASONS.

Sometimes it's so very hard to remember that it was science fiction that taught me the radical notion that you can't judge who you'll love by your lover. A story written by Theodore Sturgeon in 1953 called 'A World Well Lost' was my very first exposure to a sympathetic queer character. I found much more relatable men and women in Elizabeth A. Lynn's books, and, a lifesaver, given that I grew up int the 1970s in a smallish town (though to be fair to LaCrosse, there was at least one gay bar, and my father had an out lesbian colleague at his Catholic college.)

And I did write queerness into my science fiction, rather blatantly. It was just less okay in romance. I will say, this is why I tended to capitulate on fights about this stuff. I mean, I always felt I was trespassing into a foreign land, anyway. (As some of you know, I was lucky to remember to include certain bits of male anatomy.)

Anyway, it's nice to be able to stretch a bit in this. Of course, now we have to see how it goes over with "my public."