Just wanted to let folks know that my erotic short The Doge’s Daughter is free on Kindle today and tomorrow (thru Wednesday 2/19).
Pick it up if you haven’t already!
The quality of our lives has an interesting rhythm. We strive to make our lives better, lighter, and then at certain times we feel haunted and pulled down by darkness.
Certainly the horribly untimely death of Philip Seymour Hoffman this weekend had—and still has—the feeling of a bad dream. He’d talked explicitly about his addiction problems, but was always seen as someone who had beaten them LONG ago. But no, it couldn’t be as simple as that. I think of his films and then I think of what his last weeks or his last day must have been like, and it all barely makes sense. On film he’s in control, a master of his art. The consummate professional. To think of him lying in a bathroom with a needle in his arm, in an apartment littered with bags of heroin, just has the quality of … a bad dream.
But he leaves behind a magnificent body of work. In fact, he was in so many films that I’ve only seen about half of them! I think I first saw him in Boogie Nights, where he seemed charmingly clueless and chubby and immature. Then, in Magnolia, a harsh and disturbing film, his male nurse character was incredibly strong and compassionate. I remember thinking then that he had an androgynous quality, a quality that transcended male or female.
In Talented Mr. Ripley he gelled for me. He played a character who ought to have been despicable, the snooty frat-boy chum of Jude Law, but he was so brilliantly alive and intelligent that you couldn’t imagine that death in the form of Matt Damon’s weak, chameleon-like Ripley could bring him down. I’ll always remember the scene on the boat where he mocks Ripley for peeking at Jude Law and Gwyneth Paltrow having sex in the cabin. Perhaps he enjoyed not playing the voyeuristic character for once!
He played it cold and disconnected, too, and his Truman in Capote was a disturbing mix of effeminate charm and cold calculation who ends up subtly betraying everyone, not just his longtime lover, but his childhood female friend too, and the murderous boys whose story he’s fixating on/exploiting. It’s a study in alienation. Yet the film was a magnificent success. He deserved the Oscar. I’m so glad he got one.
It is horrible to see someone that I admire, born in my year, go like that. But unlike Heath Ledger and Cory Monteith, who died young in what seem to have been accidental overdoses, I have the feeling that Hoffman was more ready to go. Certainly he would have known what he was risking, with so much heroin in his apartment. I don’t want to judge him for what he did; I don’t want to be angry at him. Public anger is almost beside the point. (His family gets to be angry. They should.) We also should not forget that Hoffman was the child of divorce and seems to have had barely any relationship with his father, growing up. It is terrible when people repeat the mistakes of the past, of the abandoning parent, but sometimes it seems only too likely that they will.
Let’s talk about his presence, though. Mick LaSalle, SF Chronicle film critic, wrote a beautiful and perceptive obituary for PSH, in which he said:
There are rare actors such as this – people that audiences want to look at, people audiences can’t help wanting to look at, even if they don’t quite know why. In the case of Hoffman, his opacity was an odd gift – a quality present even in his throwaway performance, such as in “Hunger Games: Catching Fire.” With Hoffman, we never really knew what he was thinking – but we always understood that he was thinking, and that it was something interesting and mesmerizing and slightly out of reach.
The rest of the obituary can be read here. And rest in peace, Philip Seymour Hoffman.
Update: So this is probably the last image we will see of Philip Seymour Hoffman: an unnerving tintype (!) taken at the Sundance Film Festival, where he told a publisher who asked what he did, “I’m a heroin addict.” He was always honest.
I love seeing flowering fruit trees every January; seems like it happens here ridiculously early, and I’m always surprised.
But we are officially in a drought in California. We’ve had no rain here at all for months.
The governor has declared a state of emergency, and it remains to be seen what effect this will have on the public (after all, most of the water in California goes to agriculture, lawns and golf courses, that kind of thing).
So these dry, oddly warm, balmy days in Northern California (imagine T-shirts in January—I’m wearing one right now: it happens to be the Moveon.org Obama shirt that I no longer like to wear in public!), I think people are feeling an underlying fear. Fear of the unknown, of what might be around the corner, climate-wise.
Mark Morford said it better than I could in his latest column for SFGate, “Fine Weather for Creepy Melancholia.” He was at the beach sunbathing for his January birthday…
The rest of the country is freezing, of course. And I am grateful for this “nice weather,” this early spring which feels like summer, but still a little unnerved.
Another thing I am grateful for: being included on two vibrant new sites for lesbian authors and readers, Sapphica Books and IndieLesfic.com! Read more about it on my News page.
How has this winter been for you?
Reblogged from my friend Shannon Yarbrough’s site. I agree: “Looking” is a show that gives the finger to its audience. It gets the seediness and shallowness of the San Francisco gay scene right, that I will say. But who wants to watch?
Twenty-fourteen has started with a nice little burst of energy. I got the flu in late December (it may very well have been swine flu, since H1N1 is a predominant strain this year) and was knocked flat on my back for 3-4 days. The funny thing about that time is that I enjoyed the exhaustion. There was really nothing to do but rest.
And now, I feel good about putting 2013 behind me. I think we all do… I wanted to mention two people who impressed me last year. Pope Francis seemed an odd choice for pope, yet has become already both beloved and controversial. In a recent in-depth New Yorker article, the reason for the pope’s humility and soul-searching was revealed. During the Dirty War of the 1970s, the pope played an ambiguous role. (He was head of the Jesuit order in Argentina then, I believe.) Two rebel priests left the order and were picked up and tortured by the security forces. They weren’t killed, like so many people were during that time, but they believed that Francis didn’t do enough to save them. Another woman, Esther, whom Francis was very close to, was one of the “mothers of the disappeared.” She eventually met a tragic death, being one of those prisoners who were taken out in helicopters, disemboweled, and then dumped into the sea.
It’s clear that guilt and suffering, which have played such a role in Francis’s life, have made him who he is, able to empathize with homosexuals, the sick, the poor. He is the first pope whom I’ve ever felt any interest in or affection for. John Paul II was all glitz and gloss.
As for Edward Snowden, I am thrilled that he has been partially vindicated. Now we know that there is a massive program of spying going on in the US and that the NSA has a virtually unlimited reach. Snowden was willing to throw his life down the toilet to disclose these things. He’s acted carefully and shrewdly. I don’t blame him for wanting to stay alive: he presumably knows a lot more about what the special services are capable of than we do. He described himself to a journalist recently as “an indoor cat.” May he have nine lives!
Twenty-fourteen is the Year of the Green Wood Horse in Chinese Astrology. That makes it a yang year. I am more comfortable in yin years than in yang ones—I generally fear the fast-moving and sometimes drastic incidents of previous Horse years. In 2002 my mother died unexpectedly and I lost my full-time job shortly afterward. I was also asked to leave the longtime writing group I’d been in for more than ten years. All that upheaval was drastic. But this year may be better. Doesn’t a green wood horse have a benign, creative feel to it, like a child’s toy?
Take a look at this gallery of Year of the Horse images from the CBC blog. And check out the Google Doodle on January 31 🙂
Here are some things I look forward to in 2014:
1) Getting my new health insurance card from Covered California. Like a lot of Americans, I’m supposedly covered as of Jan. 1 but haven’t received confirmation yet. Here’s hoping! Affordable individual health insurance has been something I’ve been craving for years.
2) Doing more reviewing through NetGalley. Now that I have a Kindle, I’m able to receive electronic ARCs (advance review copies) of interesting books. I come across books I never would have noticed before. One of my recent reviews was of Gyles Brandreth’s The 7 Secrets of Happiness: A Reluctant Optimist’s Journey. Any book that treats chocolate seriously as a happiness-enhancer is worth it, in my view.
3) The new season of Downton Abbey starts Sunday—and I’ll be glued to it.
Book news update: My erotic historical short, “The Captain and Claire,” had a recent KDP Select promotion. Subsequently, I was thrilled to see that for a short while in December it reached #1 in the paid lesbian fiction category in the Canadian Amazon store! It has been selling briskly in the UK as well.
When icicles hang on the wall, etc.
Ah, Christmas. A woman called @KerriFar posted this pic on Twitter. It’s beautiful, isn’t it? (I hope she doesn’t mind me using it.)
I’m sure I will be back with a newsy and books-y post around the New Year (when I generally feel more in the mood for such things!) Until then, I’m grateful for a pretty good, stable year. At least two friends have had personal turmoil this year where they are anticipating having to leave long-term living spaces.
It’s said that change is good. I also know how difficult change can be, too.
I hope it’s a good Christmas for you and yours!
As we come up to the winter solstice, I’ve enabled snow falling on my blog. Thanks, WordPress 🙂 It may be corny, but I find it rather cute.
‘The Captain and Claire’ is exclusive to Amazon.
The solstice seems like a good time to fire up the Kindle with an erotic romance. My historical romance short, “The Captain and Claire,” will have a two-day free promotion on Amazon Friday, Dec. 20 and Saturday, Dec. 21. Reviewer Shannon Yarbrough called it “a superb erotic romance” and wrote, “Betsy is a bit inexperienced when it comes to sex, but then she meets Claire on board! Claire introduces Betsy to the Captain, and Betsy soon finds herself in the middle of an interesting ménage à trois, seduced by two lovers that each take her to her limits in very different ways. . . .There’s also enough naughty spice here to whet your reading appetite in this genre which will certainly leave you wanting more.” If you haven’t yet read it, check it out!
Switching gears, UK reviewer Terry Baker did a wonderful review of my novel Time of Grace, which can be found in full on the Affinity eBook site. After describing the tumultuous relationship between Caroline and Grace, Baker writes, “The historical facts appear to be accurate. The images I saw, were in fact as I’d visualized them whilst reading the story. The people mentioned in the book as leaders of the rebellion are real people. All in all, I feel Gabriella West has written a terrific and true to history account in her book. Her research is very well done. Her scenic descriptions were excellent.
The history and facts are carefully integrated and neither overshadows the other. In my honest opinion, there is a perfect balance between the facts, fiction and romance.”
As a writer who was placing two women in a particular historical period (Dublin in the lead-up to the Easter Rising of 1916), I wanted to make very sure that what I was portraying could have happened. I didn’t want to cheapen or exploit the historical milieu at all. It’s very gratifying to read Baker’s reaction, so long after I wrote the book.
It’s the first Sunday in Advent. I remember how interesting it was as a child to open one window of the advent calendar each night as we proceeded toward Christmas. I wasn’t religious at all, nor was my family, but perhaps it was cultural: my mother’s German-American heritage made her always want to make Christmas special for us.
On a more secular note: Canadian writer Anastasia Vitsky (who specializes in FF spanking fiction…) has put together a fun monthlong event on her blog, Governing Ana. Check out the FAQs for Ana’s Advent Calendar 2013 here. I’m very pleased that Time of Grace is one of the book prizes—but there are many prizes, and not only books. The event runs Dec 1-25, 2013, with new giveaways each day. I’ve not been involved in an event like this, besides a Goodreads giveaway, so it’s a new adventure for me.
And speaking of countdowns, Connecting the Dots, my AD/HD memoir, is on preorder at Smashwords right now. It will be officially released on Barnes and Noble, Apple, and Kobo on December 28. Read a sample on Smashwords, then reserve your copy early, if you can: sales will be recorded on the day of release, and it would be wonderful to get that little bump in sales around the end of the month!
It’s that time of year, and I wanted to give thanks for the lists of author resources that are out there!
I wanted to mention a few of them that feature Edit for Indies. First and foremost, I was particularly impressed by a blog called “This College Dropout: Resources for Indie Writers.” There are 150 organizations on the list. They offer promotional services or cover design or editing or publishing assistance. You name it, it’s there. All I know is that it’s compiled by a guy called Charles Franklin, and he obviously spent a long time putting together this exhaustive list!
It would be remiss not to mention World Literary Cafe, which has a listing of editors in its Author Forums. I put my name and info up there when the list was quite small. It’s now rather large, and it’s a great place to browse through in search of the perfect editor for you.
Dan Poynter‘s ParaPublishing site offers a ton of resources for independent writers. I’m included in his list of editors and proofreaders.
Author JM Madden has compiled a huge list of cover artists and editors here. I’ve used three of the cover artists she mentions for my own books (Go On Write, Fantasia Frog, Book Graphics), so I know she’s on the money 🙂
A sincere thanks goes out to these folks! And feel free to chip in in the comments if YOU have a particular listing you love to use.
First off, I should say I’ve been a fan of James Franco‘s film work. I shied away from reading Palo Alto, his not-very-well-received collection of short stories, and I think I did so because I was afraid I would be disappointed. The thing about writing is (unlike acting), you can’t hide. The psyche of the writer comes through. And in this book, which is misleadingly termed a novel, James Franco does reveal himself in the guise of multiple “fictional” characters.
So this is categorized by Kindle in the memoir section, and in my view it’s creative nonfiction. The point being, Franco isn’t a good enough writer yet to craft a novel. And this would be OK if the vignettes in Actors Anonymous really added up to something. Franco takes a hard line when it comes to acting teachers, acting classes, and other actors. But some of his insights are valuable. Here’s one: “To have an inside, there always needs to be an outside. The more elite the inside, the more people are on the outside. Get in there, but don’t live in there. Be on both sides.”
This is the Franco I’ve liked—the benign, seemingly self-confident, subversive, funny guy. But that guy is pretty much a mask, Franco reveals in this book. After one description of a character who resembles himself called “the Actor,” he concludes, “In actuality, he probably wasn’t charming at all.”
At some level I think Franco wants to be known rather than loved. (He’s had the love and adulation for years, and it doesn’t seem to have helped him much.) And I think Franco hates his persona, too, and this book is an attempt to lift the lid.
The book AA most reminded me of was Last Exit to Brooklyn, oddly enough. As I read the book, with its selection of unpleasant male characters who are all addicts or dead-end people in some way, I thought about Hubert Selby, Jr. I read Last Exit while in college and hated it. I didn’t hate its hapless characters. I hated the inner ugliness of the author, which came across on the page. I never read any other of his books.
Franco’s inner ugliness also comes across—which is, frankly, distressing. He boasts about all the sex actors get. He seems incredibly immature and insecure. There is one section, about “his” exploits in France with a couple of young women he calls Diarrhea and Cunty (!), that probably is the most fictional section of the book, but is just utterly repellent.
Franco has yet to learn that while Hollywood is a toxic place, there are different rules for the writing game. You have to have a scintilla of hard-won wisdom and at least show a tiny bit of interest in personal growth. Franco thinks it’s fine to dub all older women ugly and to make clear that he only pursues much younger, pretty women. His attitude toward sex is blithely disconnected and I am not sure how aware he is of his predatory attitudes. (I would say “nature,” but that seems too cruel, doesn’t it?) At one point he criticizes Marilyn Monroe for her cottage-cheese thighs!
I wish Franco would look at his attitude towards women. He likes women as sexual objects but he clearly doesn’t “like” them. Maybe that’s why he does so many gay roles, not out of some wonderful, life-embracing bisexuality, but because he just doesn’t like his female co-stars. Do they bore him at this point? Or is he compelled to sleep with them and finds this irritating? Who knows…
What worked best in the book for me was the segment where a former heroin addict called Sean is working at a fast food restaurant and ends up having sex in the filthy bathroom with an odd-looking Latino co-worker for money, all the while attending AA meetings and pretending to be “in recovery.” There was a real desperation here, and I liked the intensity and detail that Franco brought to it.
Then toward the end, Franco gets to the subject of his father, who has died suddenly. Again, there’s a compelling quality to these parts and an Oedipal intensity. It’s thinly disguised autobiography. But he basically throws his father under the bus. I’m sure the older Mr. Franco was a piece of work, but the younger Mr. Franco clearly is, too.
The book made me muse about a young man escaping a narcissistic father who doesn’t understand, support, or love him. He goes to Hollywood to reinvent himself. Surely he must have served under a number of narcissistic fathers there, since the power structure is pretty much all male. I can understand his need to escape and transcend acting at this point. He basically admits he’s coasting in his film work. I can see that writing would offer more freedom, more of an escape. Plus, it’s an “upgrade,” and intelligent people take you seriously.
But I don’t know, judging by this book, if Franco really can keep a foot in both worlds. If this book gets Franco laid less often… hey, it might be a good thing. Writers need insight and solitude; they need to have self-discipline. Franco still seems to have the mentality of a young, immature actor. All the same, there is a bravery in revealing that he’s not a nice guy (antisocial personality disorder came to mind). It’s just that doing that is not the same thing as writing a good book.
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