Monthly Archives: July 2025

OMG it’s finished!

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Last night, at 12:42 AM Eastern time, my Talespinnter and I finished the first draft of our novel Spin, by far the most difficult, ambitious writing project I’ve ever been part of.

This novel has a story. I mean, it also is a story, but on top of that it has a story. Lemme take you back.

I met her on Quora. She talked about beta-testing sex toys, I had some toys in need of beta testing, so I slid into her DMs with “hey, pardon the intrusion, but would you like…?” She said yes, I gave her some prototypes, she gave me an excellent beta report, she invited me to a tabletop role-playing game she GMed, and the rest is (still unfolding) history.

Anyway, I already have a wife, and a girlfriend, and a crush, so we needed something to call her. She’s a writer and a marvelously inventive creator of worlds, so we cast around for a bit, she called me her Toymaker, and I called her my Talespinner. A spinner of tales. A weaver of dreams.

One of her friends was like “The Toymaker and the Talespinner? That sounds like a YA novel!”

Naturally, we immediately started thinking of a way to write a novel about a Toymaker and a Talespinner. We invented a world, we sat down,a nd we started to write.

30,353 words into what we expected to be an 80,000-90,000-word book, we realized that the idea of casting it as a YA novel just didn’t work. The story that kept trying to emerge was not the story we planned out, but something much bigger, much more subtle, and much, much, much darker.

So we scrapped those 30,353 words and started over from a clean sheet.

We realized quickly that the complexity of the story meant we couldn’t wing it, so we drafted an extensive, detailed 11,000-word outline that also served as an extensive set of background notes on the world and its politics, much of which informs the story even though it’s not explicitly discussed in the story.

It’s now been over two years since we started work on this new, reimagined version of the story, with the working title Spin.

It’s a far-future, post-Collapse magical realism literary novel set in a world where the central United States is now a quasi-Calvinish theocracy called the Dominionate. Human population has crashed to under a billion people. Human fertility has crashed to about a quarter what it is now. As in The Handmaid’s Tale, fertile women are effectively slaves, but unlike The Handmaid’s Tale, the Dominionate has managed to build a stable society that actually works for most of its people. (That’s the true horror, I think, of slave societies; it’s possible to construct stable, prosperous slave societies in which most people—at least the ones who aren’t slaves—are reasonably happy. It’s a little distressing how quickly people can become inured to horror if their own lives are fairly pleasant.)

We’ve been grinding on this novel for more than two years. Narratively, structurally, and in scope and scale, it’s the most difficult thing I’ve ever written. We know the first draft is, well, a first draft, and still needs a lot of work, but I am immensely proud of this book.

At one point, we found ourselves having difficulty nailing down the timing of part of the novel, so I flew out to Missouri so that my Talespinner and I could trace the steps of one of our protagonists. That let us put together a detailed timeline, and get a sense of the kind of terrain our protagonist would journey through.

A few thousand years from now, this will be the site of Half-Circle Cothold, the tiny village home to Aiyah Spinner.

I just…I cannot tell you how I feel that this first draft is done. So instead I’ll leave you with this excerpt. I know this is first-draft material in need of polish, but I’m so delighted to have it done I want to share. Enjoy!

“Ever notice how God tells the powerless to respect the powerful, but never the other way around?”

Nathaniel tensed, so subtly Diego doubted she’d noticed. He raised a finger, a quick subtle signal to Nathaniel to stand down. “Perhaps that’s because those with the most power also bear the most responsibility.”

“Ha! Easy for you to say. Look at you. The Grand Inquisitor, sitting atop a mountain of skulls, with the full might of the Church behind you. People die at your command. You answer to nobody but the Emissary himself. Funny how those in high places seem to spend more time talking about their responsibilities than their power.”

Nathaniel tensed again. Diego folded his hands in his lap, observing her for a time. Finally, he said, “Do you love people?”

“What?”

“Do you love your fellow man? Do you wish for humanity to continue?”

She turned her attention out the window, away from Diego. “I like some people well enough, I suppose. Can’t say I much care for people as a group.”

“Ah, that’s where you and I differ,” Diego said. “You see, I am a fan of all mankind.”

“You have a funny way of showing it. You kill people. You enforce conformity with violence.”

“I protect humanity.”

“You protect the Church’s power. And your own.”

“Power, young lady, is a means to an end, not an end in itself. How much do you know of history?”

“Enough to know it has always been written by people like you.”

“You must know there once was a time when we built machines that flew through the air, that traveled the roads as we are doing now without the need of horses, that generated unimaginable power from the very elements of creation itself.”

“So?”

Diego held up his hand. “Indulge an old man with some measure of influence over your destiny, if you please. Do you know what brought that time to an end?”

“I suppose you’re going to say we turned away from God. We abandoned the Divine Plan.”

“No, I’m going to say I don’t know. Nobody does. The Church theologians have ideas, as theologians often do, but I would encourage skepticism of any theological answer that seems to suit the interests of the person offering it.” Larali’s eyes widened in incredulity as he continued, “What’s of greater interest to me is the cause of the cycle of growth and collapse that came after. Perhaps mankind wasn’t meant to live in large, complex societies. The ancients certainly didn’t think so. They believed our true nature to be tribal, suited to societies no bigger than a hundred and fifty or so.”

“What?” Larali leaned forward, engaged despite herself. “How is that possible? There were billions of them!”

“Indeed. Their scholars believed that in order for a large civilization to thrive, it was first necessary to replace loyalty to the tribe with loyalty to something else, something bigger than the individual, bigger than the family, bigger than the tribe.”

“Let me guess. Something like the Church?”

“Something like the Church.”

“So you’re the enablers of civilization.”

“Yes. What you say with scorn, I say in earnest. We are the enablers of civilization. The ancients built their societies by welding together feuding, warlike tribes through conquest, not just of armies, but of ideas. Disunity into unity through a single vision.”

“How convenient,” Larali snorted. “You cement your own power in the knowledge that it’s better for all mankind. The ends justify the means.” She stared into the darkness outside the carriage, where Lieutenant Blacklock’s horse kept pace. “You surround yourself with armed men to enforce your will, then sleep at night by telling yourself that you’re bringing the benevolent light of civilization to the wretched masses. How many of the ancients told themselves the same thing, do you think?”

“Spoken with passion, for one who doesn’t much care for people,” Diego said.

“Maybe I just don’t think you can slaughter your way to a perfect world.”

Transcendent Joy

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Every second of every hour
Let your actions speak your will

Raise your head up high
Raise your head up high
So the heavens hear you cry
Light the brightest fire
From the highest mountain
So the whole world knows
That your spirit can’t be broken

—VNV Nation, Resolution

I love dancing. I’ve loved dancing for a very long time, though partner dancing is still relatively new to me. One of the few things I regret about living in Portland is being able to go out clubbing at the Castle, the world’s best goth nightclub…and I say that after being in goth clubs all over the world.

I’m back in Florida at the moment, helping prepare my wife’s RV for a cross-country trip (during which we plan to shoot photos of abandoned amusement parks all through the US, with an eye toward publishing a coffee table photo book in 2026 or 2027).

So it came to pass that my wife is out of town for the weekend working, but her boyfriend was of a mood to go out dancing, and so he said, “hey Franklin, interested in going to the Castle?”

I first went there in…um, I want to say 1997 or so? Somewhere thereabouts. It’s been a fixture of the Ybor City district for a donkey’s age. And oh my God, it remains just as marvelous as I remember.

There’s something utterly transcendant about dancing.

There is something so pure, so absolute about losing yourself to the music that now, two days later, I struggle to express it, or even recall it, except as a maddeningly vague series of impressions.

I remember the joy, of course. If you could bottle and sell the joy I felt spending the entire night dancing, there might never be war again. It’s a joy so flawless and unadulterated that everything else in existence falls away into nothing, replaced by exultation that fills every corner of my being. I had forgotten, I think, in the years since I’ve last been goth dancing, just whas a jubilant experience it is.

Round about my third hour on the dance floor, when I was starting to feel tired enough that I kinda wanted to sit down for a minute but the DJ just kept absolutely killing it. There comes a point where you push past the fatigue into something else, something numnous, on the other side.

Parts of the evening only exist in my memory in fragments. I remember dancing to the Aphex Twin remix of the Nine Inch Nails song Reptile sandwiched between a goth lesbian couple to my left and a da-glo bubble-gum lesbian couple to my right.

Mostly I remember an overwhelming sense of sonder, the realization that every single person you see is living a life as rich and complex as your own, with their own histories and dreams, goals and ambitions, heartbreaks and sorrows, as though I were surrounded by two hundred brilliant, dynamic, complex universes, fifteen thousand years of joy and desire and loss and tragedy all intersecting in this one brief moment.

The dance floor exists in its own space, a small pocket universe set apart from the world. It’s a bit like being transported for a single night to some Land of the Fae—not a fairyland like one might find in a Disney movie, but a wildland, a place of the old fae, the dangerous and unpredictable fae…but not to worry, they’re not hunting, they’re relaxing and having fun.

At one point, a person who was obviously of the Fair Folk and not even trying to hide it grabbed my hand to lead me deeper onto the dance floor. The music poured through me, vibrating like molten silver down my back, and such delirious ecstasy took me that now, sitting here in front of my computer, I can recall only the shape of it, the outline without its substance.

There is a vicious, ugly streak of Puritanism woven deep in the fabric of American social life, a cynical suspicion and distrust of pleasure, a sneering contempt for doing things simply for the joy of doing them. We are all poorer, I think, for it, for forgetting that joy exists.

I’ve heard people say, often with a derisive sneer, that nightclubbing is fr twentysomethings with no direction in life, as though Serious and Grown Adults™ should eschew mere pleasure. I find that idea both toxic and farcical. If we are, as some people say, spiritual beings having a physical existence, then what virtue is there in denying that physicality, the very reason we are in this world in the first place? What point is there to existing, if we don’t lean into that existence? What has it gained us to turn our back on joy, besides strife, division, and suffering?

I think we are poorer for this turning away from the joy of existence. We are here today, and gone tomorrow. We take nothing with us from this brief moment in the sun. Let us enjoy what time we have.

On Being an Experimental Subject

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A couple of years back, my co-author Eunice and I started work on a new erotic novel, told in two parallel narrative streams: odd-numbered chapters taking place in Buffalo, New York in the present day, and even-numbered chapters taking place in London in 1871. The even-numbered chapters follow a Victorian doctor struggling to find a cure for furor uterinus, the formal name for “nymphomania;” the even-numbered chapters, a group of college friends who find his diaries and decide to replicate his experiments for…more entertaining purposes.

This is an essay about being experimented upon in a bar, not about writing. I’m getting to that, I promise.

Anyway, the novel, which we abandoned for a while and have recently returned to (with the assistance of my wife and my Talespinner), includes this passage:

“Is this another sitting room?” Jason said.

“I think it’s a parlor,” Leigh said.

“What’s the difference between a sitting room and a parlor?” Jason said.

Olivia glanced around the posh, elaborately decorated room, its windows just as large as the ones in the master bedroom. Several couches, a large comfortable chair, and a tête-à-tête all lurked beneath white shrouds. “One’s more formal?” she guessed. “What’s that thing?” She opened what looked like a large cabinet built into the wall, to find a shaft with cables running down into darkness.

“Dumbwaiter!” Leigh said. “For bringing things up. Brandy, cognac, cigars…” She tugged on a chain dangling from a lever in the wall next to the dumbwaiter. A distant bell tinkled. Leigh giggled. “I say, old chap, do be a sport and bring up the cognac.”

“What’s cognac?” David said.

“Little fish eggs in a tin?” Natalie hazarded.

“That’s caviar,” Leigh said. “Cognac is whisky for snooty people.”

Now, those of you familiar with cognac will know that it is not, in fact, whiskey for snooty people, it’s brandy for snooty people.

I am not familiar with cognac, but that’s okay because the characters are also not familiar with cognac, so it’s cool that they get it wrong.

That’s the setup. The story I mean to relay here is utterly different.

So I’m currently in Orlando, helping my wife get her RV ready for a cross-country trip. She lives across the street from a small neighborhood bar which the three of us—me, my wife, and her boyfriend—visited a few days back.

Three things struck me immediately when we walked in:

  1. We were literally the only people in the place besides the bartender;
  2. The bartender looked exactly, and I mean exactly, the way I imagine the character Natalie from the novel, to the point I turned to Joreth and said “holy shit, it’s Natalie!”; and
  3. The house special that day was a cognac drink.

So naturally, I ordered the cognac drink (as did Joreth’s boyfriend); and naturally, that led to an entire conversation about cognac, which, as I pointed out already, is not whiskey for snooty people, it’s brandy for snooty people.

The special drink, which the bartender (whose name, as it turns out, was not actually Natalie, which is good because had it been, I’d’ve been quite convinced I’d fallen through a dimensional rift into a fictional world) had never made before, was a rather complex thing whose making involves, among other things, a blowtorch.

“It’s an experiment!” not-Natalie chirped as she got out the blowtorch.

I do not, Gentle Reader, understand the purpose of the blowtorch. I mean, I do, it exists to apply fire to things, but I’m not sure what role they play in making a drink. She stripped the peel off an orange, cut it into strips, sprinkled it with cinnamon and…um, sugar, I think?, slipped it into the glass, sprinkled more cinnamon on it, and…

I will confess that I am not generally an alcohol connisseur. I can’t tell a Scotch single-malt from a dry gin. But believe me when I say, Gentle Reader, that drink was delicious.

10/10, would recommend being experimented upon by a character from a novel again.

Let’s Dance! Some Thoughts on Being Embodied

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If you could move inside my head, you’d…well, honestly, you’d probably find the experience a little disconcerting, because who does that? Moving into someone else would likely be unsettling no matter who you did it to, unless they were, like, an identical twin or something.

But if you could move inside my head, you’d probably find it especially unsettling, because I don’t live in my body. People assume that a body is something you live in, but actually, from an entirely subjective viewpoint, my sense of self is more a big ball of wibbly-wobbly…stuff. I am, most of the time, a ball that floats behind my eyes and operates my body like one of those mecha things in a certain genre of Japanese science fiction. A meat mecha. A meat mecha made of flesh and bone and bizarre squishy biology.

But this isn’t an essay about that. It’s an essay about dancing.

I like dancing. I enjoy dancing. Some years ago, I started getting into partner dancing. My wife and my crush are both avid, skilled, talented dancers, so they were, as oyu might imagine, thrilled at the idea I might extend my repertoir beyond goth/industrial dancing at a certain flavor of loud, frenetic nightclub.

There is, however, as you might imagine, a difficulty that comes from not living in one’s body. Learning to dance is a bit like learning to make a marionette dance; when you’re operating a meat mecha made of biology and fluids, getting it to do exactly what you want it to do is a bit of a challenge.

I learned through a rather strange set of circumstances some time ago that psilocybin mushrooms can, for brief moments, make me inhabit my body. The first time that happened, it was…um, startling. When you’re accustomed to living life as an invisible ball floating somewhere behind your eyes, operating a meat mecha by remote control, the sensation that you reach alllll the way to the ground is jarring.

Then, when I burned my foot and learned that opiate painkillers do nothing but make me puke profusely and exuberantly, but cannabis edibles actually work for pain management, I discovered that edibles also put me into my body, which was wonderful because, you know, inhabiting one’s body without hallucinating is a marvelous thing.

So it came to pass that Joreth offered to take me swing dancing a few nights back, and I thought, hey, I wonder if it will be easier to learn a new dance if I’m inhabiting my body?

Morgan Freeman voice: “It was, in fact, easier to learn a new dance when he was inhabiting his body.

The entire experience was, for lack of a better word, extraordinary. It’s far easier, as it turns out, to learn how to move one’s feet when one’s sense of self extends all the way to the floor. I don’t think I’ve ever caught on to something new in…well, in ever.

I mean, don’t get me wrong, it helps that Joreth is the best teacher I’ve ever had. But still, never underestimate the power of living entirely within your body, rather than operating your body the way you might a particularly fiddly meat-robot.

Interestingly, when the edible started to wear off and I shrunk back into that ball behind my eyes, she could tell immediately. (Her, mid-dance: “You’re becoming a ball again, aren’t you?”)

Anyway, the whole experiment turned out to be a resounding success, one I definitely hope to continue exploring again in the future.

The Borg Queen awakens

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Okay, so sit back, and ima tell you a story. It’s a story of kink, and depravity, and surprise serendipity.

So. I’m in Florida, helping my wife Joreth get the RV ready for a cross-country trip, during which we plan to do a photo tour of the abandoned amusement parks that litter the American Midwest like so many broken dreams of a bygone era. (We’ll likely do a coffee table photo book sometime in the next couple of years.)

Anyway, the day after I arrived, the local dungeon hosted a party, so your humble scribe and his beautiful wife showed up, of course, for an evening of kink and Killer Klowns from Outer Space.

The dungeon had electronic consent forms to be filled out on an iPad. On the consent form there was a profile, and on the profile there was a place to pick one’s favorite kink from a dropdown list.

Me: “I guarantee my fvorite kink is not on this list.”

Cheerful Woman Behind the Desk: “It cannot possibly be any weirder than this kink I just learned about!”

Whereupon CWBTD pulled out her phone and showed us…

…The Picture.

You know the one. The Picture that broke the Internet. The Picture that, every now and then, undergoes a new wave of virality. The Picture that, I’m told, ended up briefly on the official Sigorney Weaver fan site until a moderator took it down.

There are two things to know about The Picture:

  1. That’s a photo of Joreth;
  2. Wearing a xenomorph hiphugger strapon designed and made by your humble scribe.

In other words, CWBTD was right. My kink isn’t weirder than the thing she’d just discovered, it’s exactly as weird as the thing she’d just discovered.

Anyway, she was thrilled, and asked us to come back in yesterday for a bit of show and tell.

Which we did. The Borg Queen xenomorph parasite has been in storage since Barcelona, but it required surprisingly little repair, and we were soon on our way.

It was marvelous. They let us use the dungeon for a photo shoot!

The bad: I didn’t have my real camera, and we couldn’t lay hands on the Borg mask, so we did the best we could.

The good: There’s a photo night coming up next week, for which we will be better prepared.

The better: We met a lovely couple who were all like “ooh, Borg Queen parasitized by an alien xenomorph? That’s exactly my kink![1] Victimize us, please?”

Innocent victim: Mittyrin (image by author, reproduced by permission)

Fantastic fun, if that’s the sort of thing you consider fun. (Tautalogical cat is tautalogical.)

We drove home beneath the symbol of God’s divine blessing, or, you know, non-traditional relationships, which is almost the same thing, so truly I feel like Divine Providence smailed upon a fantastic evening.

[1] When I first started working on the xenomorph hiphugger, I remember saying “I don’t know what the point is, there are only three people in the world with this taste and I’m dating two of them.”

Oh, how wrong I was.