Or Death and Sex, as the case may be. A friend of mine (part of my regular weekly pinochle cadre) recently lost a friend of hers—a writer she worked for as a research assistant. Interesting subject matter that I’m not sure I can go into, considering the specifics, but enough for at least one book, which is being published posthumously by a university press.

My understanding of the situation, which is imperfect, is that the writer’s estate has the option of dictating what is done with the remainder of the work (at least one more book had been planned). My friend, the erstwhile research assistant, has received intimations that she may be asked to step-in as something of a co-author. We discussed this briefly after the game, and she mentioned she might want to talk to me about the process (after I repeatedly cautioned her that writing any book, but especially a book of this nature, was a profound effort). She knows I’m a writer, but like (I think) the majority of my friends, have never actually read anything I’ve written. Which is a little fucking odd, considering. So I’ve made the decision to both write more, and to post more excerpts, even when and if they’re not ready for public consumption (which will probably be most of the time). I’m a writer, and I should stick it out there and let people go at it with yardsticks and rulers (ahem).

So the above bad news was death, and the excerpt I’ve posted deals tangentially with sex, almost as a palimpsest of a character’s personality (which is a theme which will also be recurring for the “female lead” of the story, as she is what used to be called “a woman with a history.”). Sex is difficult to write well and convincingly in a “straight” work (straight meaning serious and non-pornographic as opposed to gay), and it makes me want to take a stab at writing a bunch of sex scenes to see if I can do it without resorting to unintentional parody or ridiculous purple literary shit. Thrusting metaphors! Glistening similes!

Now I feel like shit for being so flippant in light of the revelations of the first paragraph, but life goes on, vulgar and silly and making jokes at funerals.

Oh, yeah, you’ll need a password to read the excerpt, so email me if you’re interested and don’t yet have it.