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30th December, 2010. 9:03 pm. Welcome, stranger people!

This is the writing journal of the lovely, talented, beautiful and modest [info]ladykathryn. If you're interested in stuff other than my scribblings, that's the place to be. If you're not on my friends list over there, please introduce yourself here! This is mostly locked, but I leave the occasional entry open to give you a taste of what's going on.

Welcome!

Current mood: artistic.

Read 3 Notes -Make Notes

26th December, 2005. 10:02 pm. Erotica's Lessons

Here is my first experience with erotica. I am eleven, and I have picked up, at random, one of my mother's spy novels. It is a disaffected, almost decadent tale of post-Six Days War Israel. A major plot point revolves around a group sex for hire scene, described in loving, almost obsessive detail. I still remember the particulars of the plot - the grotesque terrorist leader, licking the shaft of another man's cock before entering a woman's ass. (Even at this age, I note clinically that this can't be comfortable; he uses no lube and is not gentle.) He's about to die, and he doesn't even know it yet. This brought home to me that men can be made fools of, by sex. It will be several years before I learn that women, too, can be brought low in this way.

Fast forward a year, and I have discovered the smutty romance novel. I am not interested in those which fade to black after the joyous abandonment of a single kiss. I want details. My favourite begins with two rape scenes, both within the first 20 pages. It goes on from there, and within two hundred pages our intrepid heroine has fucked her lover, her lover's best friend, the governor of Virginia, a ship's captain, two slaves, a goodly portion of the British peerage and her own (female) cousin. This teaches me the following: that quantity is not quality, that governors are not good lovers and that miscegenation laws exist for a reason. I want, desperately, to know more - there is not enough description here, despite the authoress's best efforts not enough detail. I have at this point never seen an erect cock. Mere words are not good enough to assuage my curiosity.

I spend a few years pretending that sex does not matter. In my high-minded, naive young teenaged world, matters of politics and the fight for female equality is more important than any base instinct. I rationalize it away, claiming that sex, like chocolate, will not be craved if never experienced.

My first kiss (all right, the second) is enough to prove how wrong I am.

Next is college. College is where I discover the nasty, verboten joy of fucking women. How can this be dirty? I wonder, face-deep in my next-door neighbour's cunt with her juices dribbling down my chin. Here I find Susie Bright and Carol Queen, mavens of bisexual erotic writing. There is more to the world than what I have experienced, things that were only whispered about in my heretofore mainstream sexual education. Bondage, domination, deliberate causation of and hungry chasing after pain, humiliation of all kinds, anal sex, erotic fantasies I'd never even dreamed of, golden showers, downright torture, all described in loving detail. My own fantasies sudddenly became a magnitude brighter, my orgasms more intense due to greater involvement of my brain. I develop a habit of falling asleep immediately after masturbating - even putting my naughty book away, so as not to shock my prudish lesbian roommate, can be a chore. My mind has been overloaded, it needs to shut down. It is here that I learn that sometimes sex has no higher purpose than sex. Fucking is sometimes just fucking. Sometimes a cigar really is a phallic symbol. I begin to experiment - girls, boys, grrls, bois, a three week long excursion into slavery with a dom I learn quickly to detest. I enjoy pain, but not humiliation. There is no pleasure in submission; though The Academy and The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty are alluring when I'm horny, when the edge is gone they merely make me sick, and slightly sad. It is not that I am ashamed of the heroine's acts, but that they are ashamed of their own.

One summer home, I stay with my mother's friend, who lives in her deceased maiden aunt's house. Exploring the neglected library, I discover a trove of Victorian erotica, well-thumbed and mysteriously coverless. One book, My Secret Life, falls open to the chapter wherein our hero explores the art of Greek love with a willing tradesman. I wonder what it is to have a cock, to be the active partner, holding the one you're fucking down as you do as you will. That will have to wait for later.

My early twenties were not a time for sexual exploration; I've mostly forgotten it now. The only standout is the first and only issue of Hustler I've ever looked at. The made-up faux lesbians with trimmed cunts, tongues hovering 2" in the air above clits for photogenic purity, did nothing but make me wonder how much one got paid for such photos.

Erotica is now both a release and a pursuit. Pursuit of the novel, of that with just the right edge, not too soft (I still want details) and not too hard (I care not for humiliation). I find pleasure in true stories, not of the Penthouse variety but of the sharing with a purpose variety. Most of all, I'm learning to write my own stories. If what's in my head isn't detailed enough to give you a raging hardon, to make your vagina twitch in sympathy or to make you run off to bed, I'm obviously not trying hard enough. So it comes to this - I'm writing, once a week, of my latest fantasy. Feedback is requested, if anyone's still reading this. If not, I shall muddle through somehow, I'm sure.

Read 9 Notes -Make Notes

18th March, 2005. 7:40 am. Linden

Ages ago, when I was in ninth grade (a young ninth grade at that) my life was turned upside down and shaken. My mother went back to school full-time to earn her degree, and I and my two younger sisters went to live with my father in an aging industrial town in the Berkshires. Within a week, I knew that the high school just wasn't going to work. Overcrowded, underfunded and tough in the nineties mode of toughness: gap-suited boys and girls in size 0 Guess jeans roamed the halls, picking on and beating on anyone they didn't like. I, with my Isreali paratrooper's bag and my torn jeans and my khaki tshirts, was a prime target. That was overlooking the awkward haircut, the buck teeth, the zits, the gawkiness, the budding rack of Dollyesque proportions (or so it felt at the time.) I went, overnight, from being on the fringes of barely accepted and having my own social circle to being an absolute outcast.
This, clearly, wouldn't do.
Looking around at my options, I saw only a few. A foofy girl's finishing school whose proprietor my father knew, or the public high school in a nearby town, far funkier and better-off than the one I lived in. Guess which I chose? I girded up my loins and went to beg the principal to let me attend his institution under Massachusetts's pilot school choice program. This program has since been discontinued. It's a pity, it was a true lifesaver for me.
Ah, that was better! Sure, it took me an hour to get home in the evenings. I had to walk half a mile, take a bus and then walk from the center of town, past the abandoned GE factories and the pond which, it was rumoured, three-headed fish could be pulled from. Past the house I lived in, for a brief period, as a child. Past the shop where the manky old men stared lasciviously at my unbound breasts as I walked by. (I considered myself a Feminist and refused to wear a bra. I am thankful for it now - I still don't have to wear a bra.) Past the used bookstore, which was stacked so high with dusty old paperbacks, and so ill-watched, it was very easy to shoplift books from. Honestly? I don't think the proprietor cared, as I always brought them back when it was done.
But oh, the school. Rather than a set series of classes, I got to pick and choose: don't want to take American History? How about industrial history, or political science? Creative writing instead of bland pap disguised as a literature class. Even in gym, choices: archery? cross-country skiing? making out with a cute chick and exploring breath play in the disused aerobics room? Sure, why not? The cafeteria, too, had multiple choices. I usually chose to save my lunch money and buy something else, but hey, I could have basically whatever I wanted for lunch.
All of this was wonderful, but best of all was the drama club. The school of which I speak was far too 'leet for the usual high school production, with thrown-together costumes and uncertain blocking. They contracted Shakespeare and Company to lead a drama workshop twice a year - a modern play in the fall, and a Shakespeare production in the spring. The year I was there the modern play was an adaptation of Studs Terkel's "Working", with monologues designed by the actors. I adored drama in high school. Oh, certainly not on the stage: I once blew my lines in a walk-on in elementary school, and haven't gotten much better since. But I would tech like there was no tomorrow. Costumes, makeup, lighting, set design, advertising, I loved it all. Getting to work with professionals put me just about over the moon.
And then there was Courtney. Courtney was my best (well, my only, really) friend at this school. She was so intelligent she scared me - they let her test out of calculus and have special one-on-one higher math sessions with one of the teachers. And oh, she was beautiful. She had the clearest skin I've ever seen, even to this day, and beautiful grey eyes. She was my partner-in-crime, and between us we essentially did the entirety of the costume and advertising work for the play. We even found a nun's habit for the girl who was playing both hooker and nun.
Anyways, the productions were held at The Mount, which was Edith Wharton's home. This place is a true mansion, absolutely beautiful and still furnished as it was when she lived there. We had the run of the place, except for the actor's personal bedrooms on the second and third floor. We could sit in the library and read her books, raid the cupboards in the giant kitchen for snacks, and skate in sock feet across the marble floor of the salon. I used to love to go into the costume barn (the second floor of the carriage house, really) and browse amongst the accumulated detritus of hundreds of productions past.
Also on the grounds was the Linden Walk, a path flanked by two rows of linden trees. In the spring they are beauteous things, covered in fluffy blossoms and smelling like ambrosial nectar. In the fall, they are sullen, but still vaguely scented. The scent of the linden is somewhat rotten then, a tiny waft of decay underlying the sickly sweet honey and sweet lime smell. I prefer it that way. I used to sit between two trees, lean against them, and wish myself someplace else desperately. It never worked, but I felt someday it would.
The linden perfume I'm wearing is the palest of imitations of that rotten sweet scent, but it reminds me.

Make Notes

16th July, 2004. 3:42 pm. Picture

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Most of the time, I am inclined to disagree. The depth of most pictures is static, the subject and background mediocre at best. Most importantly, there is no context, no before and after. It's simply a moment - how can a moment be worth the same as an essay?
Here, though, I find a picture that is an exception. A picture by Hiromix, in the latest issue of Giant Robot. It is a self-portrait. In it, she stares uncertainty at the camera, bangs in her eyes. Her lips are chapped, and hang slightly, poutily open. She looks as if she needs to put her contacts in, the soft eyed look of the morning after.
Is this picture worth a thousand words? I'm not so sure, but I do think that she captures something beyond the normal domain of photography or portraiture. So often, it seems, people in photos are not real. They are posed, they are stiff and abstract, they are art instead of life. They don't move, nor do they speak. This picture, though, speaks to me.
Maybe not a thousand word's worth, but how about 200?

Read 4 Notes -Make Notes

16th July, 2004. 3:32 pm. Play and Obsessive knowledge - the crossover between children and geeks

What is the defining characteristic of a geek? I think we've all determined that it is not discipline (for indeed, know we not history geeks, SCA geeks and music geeks as well as the classic computer geek?) nor is it gender. It's not defined by a set of hobbies (though it certainly can be inclusive) or by socioeconomic status.
I think what defines geek is the ability to play, and the ability to acquire obsessive knowledge. Consider - the tools of a geek's trade are routinely referred to as toys. This holds true even when said items are patently not toys - routers, electronic keyboards and very large mainframes are obviously not, in the strictest sense, toys of any sort. Work is not work, it is play (if you're lucky) and sometimes, it comes home with you. Computer geeks routinely have projects which would, to anyone else, be work. However, to a programming geek, an open-source project is a refreshing change from their day-to-day programming.
Geeks also have an affinity for actual toys. Some of the more common geek hobbies include legos, roleplaying games, anime and manga, action figure (i.e. boy-dolls!) collection. In my office there are no less than 6 toys - a stuffed Cthulu, 2 Hello Kitty stuffies, a magnetic poetry board, a Rubik's cube (no, I can't solve it), and a Nerf dartboard.
Children, particularly intelligent children, often become fixated on one subject. They research it exhaustively, until they know even the minutiae of a given area of knowledge. Dinosaurs are a popular area of obsessive knowledge, but there are others. I could give you an in-depth lecture on Roman and Greek mythology by the time I was nine. My daughter is a rock expert - she far outstrips me in her mineral knowledge.
Most adults have lost this ability by the time they leave college. They no longer focus exclusively on one field - to many adults, in-depth knowledge of any given thing is out of the question. However, adult geeks retain the ability far into adulthood and even old age.

(this is obviously not finished yet!)

Read 3 Notes -Make Notes

2nd April, 2004. 2:24 pm.

The watery afternoon sunshine wavered through the streaky, lead-paned glass over Becca's head. Sighing, she leaned back in her ancient wooden chair, stretching her neck and cracking her knuckles out of mindless habit. When her boss had recruited her straight out of Harvard's medieval studies program, he hadn't said a word about this. She'd spent all day wading through a decrepit legal document. It was several pages of cramped, water-stained, and poorly written Latin, with an occasional sprinkling of Norman French. She was only about halfway through it, despite working through lunch. It was one of a series she'd worked on this week, each more boring than the last.

Standing and stretching more, Becca carefully placed the document back in its box and reached for her jacket. She had learned fast that sunshine doesn't mean anything in England. Even during the long, warm summer evenings, one might expect to get rained on. She had taken to carrying a lightweight rain jacket everywhere she went. She wasn't about to carry around one of those spears with dresses on the English called umbrellas, but the jacket folded up into its own pocket and fit neatly in her messenger bag. It wasn't much of an imposition.

Becca wrestled the door to her office open and stepped out into the long, narrow hallway. She worked on the top floor of the (something) Institute, a tiny, obscure museum in Cambridge. The ground floor below was well-kept and brightly lit, a tiny showplace of historical documents. However, the top thre floors, where all the work got done, retained their 18th-century air, complete with cramped quarters and faulty internal systems. Becca tried not to stay past dark anymore - the first experience of trying to find her way downstairs in the cramped darkness of the back stair was horrifying enough.
She had a small flashlight attached to her keychain, but its weak beam was not much comfort in the darkness.

Hearing a scraping noise, she glanced down the hall. Her neighbour, Dr. Kevin Reilly, was coming out of his office. Kevin was a fellow Harvard graduate, and when Becca had first come to the Institute he had tried to make her feel at home. However, Becca sensed that something was very "off" about Kevin - he had tried too hard to be her friend, and had hinted strongly that more would be welcome. When Becca rejected him, he took it hard - screaming at her that they had to stick together, that everyone was against them. He rarely spoke to her now, and that was fine with her. What a weirdo!

Kevin locked his door, fumbling with the big key, and turned to stare up the hall at Becca. "They're coming for me," he breathed, his face pale and sickly-looking. "They found out I knew, and they're coming!" He turned and loped down the hall, almost tripping on the first uneven stair.
Becca stared after him, a strange feeling creeping along her spine. What was he talking about?, she wondered. Was he OK? As she stood pondering, she realized the sun was no longer shining in the tiny window at the end of the hall. It was getting towards dark - she'd best get out of here. She decided to go after him and make sure he was OK. Locking her door and throwing her rain jacket over her shoulders, she strode resolutely to the stairs. She, too, almost stumbled on the first step, forgetting that the tread was tilted slightly upwards. Out the door at the bottom of the stairs. She looked left and right, up the cobble stone alley and down towards the pub where she routinely took her lunch. Kevin was gone, and the street was almost empty.

Sighing, Becca headed for the bus stop. She'd find out what was wrong with him tomorrow, she decided. For now, home, a bath and bed.
(But wait! There's more - mysteries, dead people, occultists, Elves and real estate deals, coming up next!)

Make Notes

24th March, 2004. 8:24 am. remember these [bones]

"letters from home" - letters pinging back and forth between soldier & wife(? maybe GF) WW2. girl leaves, guy writes her a letter about what it's really like.

mystery story - dual-timeline story Boston setting archival librarian/female student. (blue notebook)

Make Notes

22nd March, 2004. 1:21 pm.

I've not posted anything here yet. I will, I promise :>.

Barely spring, but still,
The chill air has frozen the
pink cherry blossoms.

Read 4 Notes -Make Notes