Time Off

I started blogging in January with really poor computing skills. I resisted getting an internet hook up of any kind, since all I needed my computer for was finishing the book I had roughly written and which sat gathering electronic dust as it awaited the final chapter and another edit or two. I thought being "on line" would be a distraction. I then had a Dell PC I bought five years ago and a good printer, so who needed internet. The only one who did use the internet connection when I last had one, was Charlie, my first and last love. And all Charlie used it for whenever I was around my own place and noticed, was for internet porn.

I have never been one of the women who likes porn in any form. I like movies with erotic content, sometimes scenes from books turn me on, but one woman's erotic content is another's ick! And I have heard women say they like porn. But I have never actually met one. Maybe gay women like lesbian porn, but what is a turn on for the men I've known, pornographically speaking, has never turned me on. It has embarrassed me, bored me, annoyed me, disgusted me, but never turned me on.

I read what was thought to be pornographic by a lot of "good Christian people," the book, Lolita, by Vladamir Nabokov, when I was twelve. It was banned in the States, but was smuggled into the country by thousands of American tourists with taste in 1955, the year it was published in France. My parent's were the first on our mostly Mormon block to actually have read the book the year after it first came out. I read it shortly after they did, by finding it's hiding place in my dad's sock drawer. My dad was a student at the University of Utah working on his PhD in Experimental Psychology. My mother was a working wife too sophisticated for her time. And to me, her only child she was Maggy, indifferent mother. Sometimes even hostile. We had a love/hate relationship, right up until the bitter end.

My father and I had an altogether different relationship. But by the time I read Lolita, it had turned into wholesome by contrast to it's past odd and inappropriate closeness. We were not a typical household, by anybody's standards. Not by any time's. We were a familial aberration. We were perversity personified. My very young life was pornographic. So pornography holds no charms for me.

The novel Maggy is my work of "Autobiographical Realism." My third husband was a writer. A real writer. I asked him early on, before I'd actually read anything of his, what his style was. He said, "Autobiographical Realism." He was a short story writer, finishing his Master's Degree at the U of Utah, on a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, when I met him. We took a class together. It was a graduate seminar in English Lit. and the only plays I remember reading that summer were Pinter's, so it was probably something like, The Plays of Harold Pinter. I was married to husband number two when I met husband number three, the writer. Anyway, if you asked me what my style as a writer is, I would tell you, "Autobiographical Realism." It could also be called "Memoir."

All this, to say simply, I'm getting my novel finished and posted, cause I have an angioplasty coming up, and don't want to leave it unfinished, and I do want it published, if only on my own blog site, if only for my own egotistical amusement. If only to say to myself, "I have finished it."

Want to talk, leave me a comment. Want to get personal, send me an email. Want to get to know me better, start reading the novel--so far, there are twenty something, or thirty something already posted and linked chapters and in the proper order. Otherwise, I'll see you next week, or when Hillary gives up. Whichever one comes first.