McCutcheon reading poems in public is not appreciated

[mccutcheon]

Tonight I was hissed off the stage by a few women with unshaved legs. Good thing my coffee cup was full of whiskey.

[mccutcheon]

Is a poetic license like a diplomatic passport? I know some drug dealers who use theirs better than I use mine.

[mccutcheon]

I'm a poety prostitute, I make sure the financial transaction transpires before the actual act itself, just in case something goes wrong. Like last night I took the money and ran.

[mccutcheon]

I have this style or voice I'm trying to create but people seem to think it's too lite. I will try to go deeper. As a writer I don't want to spell it out. Understand?

Nice poem.

[Dallas]

Yes, I see what you are going for. I didn't mean "spell it out". I was saying more, "make us care about the characters". I guess I wanted to empathize with them a little more than I did. I felt like a voyeur when reading it. (Which I guess could be good, but I get the feeling that is not all you were going for.)
In the V.D. piece you wrote, I think you are closer to what I am talking about. Maybe the Two Girls piece I read was not the best example of what you do as a whole?
Like I said, you are a good writer, I just feel like you are hiding a little too much. Like you are afraid to open up too much, but I think if you opened up a little more it would take you from good to great.

~Dallas

[mccutcheon]

wow! I better start opening up. Right now in my Europe novel ( I have an American one and a Europe one) the main guy is on a train in Italy on his way to Greece, and in the hallway talking to a girl with a British mum and French father. The girl is reading Sherlock Holmes and she hates people. She is trying to explain how people who don't like people very much are the ones who get burned by love the hardest. I'm really into this girl, so much so I want to make love to her, and make her come to life, and I think I'm into her deep and it could be very good, maybe great. But then again I'm writing it NOW, it always takes me a week to see the work I do is crap and I had better fix it pretty damn fast.

[mccutcheon]

I'll add something else. I write mostly from the 1st person male point of view, so that in itself limits what i can get out of the females. In Girls' Night Out I wrote from a woman's side. and the screen play Captain Marks is all women.

Also in my defense I usually make the women much stronger and smarter than the guys. Look at Cross Fader, he was a jerk and she made him pay.

I find writing much harder than most people. I can't spell, have a very limited vocabulary and don't know shit about grammar, or is it grammer....I'm only just now learning the difference between passive and action verbs, passive verbs being bad I believe. So I have a lot more to worry about than just getting deeper. Damn this is hard. Dallas don't you love to write? from one writer to another. with passion. McCutcheon

[Dallas]

First off, don't ever call what you are doing crap. I feel we have a tendency to become the lowest self we believe ourselves to be. I know the whole "Have a positive attitude, believe in yourself or no one else will" and all of that other typical sounding sunshine sounds awfully cheerleader of me, but I do hold value in it. My work is better when I believe in it. When I say "I can't", I won't, when I say everything is possible, the words flow faster than I can collect them.
I had similar "breaking through" issues when I spent a lot of time editing and re-editing and thinking too much about what I was going to say before I said it. It helps to sit down when it occurs to me that it is time, start writing, and write everything and anything that comes out. Like there will never be an audience for this work, it will never be reread so I have the freedom to be as honest and as open as I need to be without judgment. There are times when I am writing that I think, "God, I don't even know where this is going or how it will ever make sense." But when I go back and read it, it is some of my best work. Just a spell check and a word change here and there.
There is no formula for opening up, I guess it is more whatever works for you.
Do you have any truly close relationships with women? Not the sex based kind, but true and honest sisterly type affection or friendship. I think if you do, and you were to draw from that a little more, your female characters would be a little more believable.
I am a woman and I felt that some of your female characters were a little "Letters to Playboy" type girls. You know, the kind that only exist in the minds of men. Then again, your woman character in V.D. with too much make-up and false eyelashes, I could SEE her. She reminded me of someone you would see through the window of a bar in the middle of the afternoon. Laughing with the bartender, looking far too at home in the smoky, grimy atmosphere.
This woman that reads Sherlock Holmes and hates people, well first, I don't know if a woman who hates people would necessarily be reading Sherlock Holmes unless of course it was something that her father read (Who she has issues with, but loves) or it was a gift from an ex-lover that she reads to remind herself of why she hated him.
The desire to make love to her is the primal feeling, it is what you want to do because you are attracted to her. You think it will turn the light on, but it won't. For a woman who hates people, sex is just another hallow reminder of what is wrong with the world. It reminds her of the uncle who's hugs turned to passes when she started developing breasts. It reminds her of how men only see that she is beautiful and always seem surprised when they realize she also has a brain. It reminds her of the times she had sex just to fill the empty void, and couldn't wait to get through the sex to have that few moments of snuggles before she got dressed and went home. Of the men who said they would call, but the phone never rang, and the construction workers that hoot when she walks by on her lunch break when all she wants is to be left alone, to be invisible for one moment. To be the plain girl who can watch people without anyone wanting to know her name or her marital status.
That is a girl who truly hates people and needs to have a light turned on. Sexual advances won't do it though, you have to get into her head first. The sex is only a bonus prize after the fortress she has built around her is penetrated.
If you go straight for the gold and get there right away and it is this amazing mind blowing experience, blah blah blah, it will not be believable to women, especially women who truly have been burned enough to say they hate people.

~Dallas

[Jack Chiefton]

I write as good as a baby smearing shit on the wall, and thats the truth. I also grovel in loneliness better than anyone ever. I also like to drink beer all the time, lay on my bed with the fan on me, usually naked, and still sweat like a gorrilla in heat. I have also noticed that being alone sucks when you live in a "semi" big city, but is bliss when living in a small city. I also have realized that mccutatheonator hates me, and have fully realized I could give a rats ass. I have also noticed that i don't like reading as much as I did about a year ago, and honest writing means about as much to me as a soiled diaper in the trash can mixed with rotten lettuce and cheese. I would rather just fish, and drink beer, and lay in the grass with not a thought in my rock hard head. Yeah, that's reality, that's bliss, that's fucking heaven. Hey Lazlo, in the wise words of Jonny Rotten: "Get Fucked" or "Fuck Off", yeah, bloody cheers

[Jack Chiefton]

Oh yeah, and see you sometime in the soil.

[mccutcheon]

when i said i wanted to sleep with this girl I created I meant I was in love with her. Me, not anyone in the story. sometimes I live in my own head too much.

Her name is Beatrice. She likes Sherlock Homles because she went to Scotland as a little girl and saw Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's house in Edinburgh (McCutcheon is a Jock name, also my real middle name) and it reminds her of that. Not that i write that.

Here is a part of their conversation. Bare in mind that Beatrice is a young, smart, beautiful, self absorbed spoiled brat with a brit reserve and a french sexual snobbery. and the guy is a young American writer who is blocked on his second novel and already spent the advance.

“You fall in love even though you hate people?�

“The few exceptions, the people I give my heart to did nothing but hurt me. Since I don't like people, when I do meet someone who can match me in beauty and ideas I give away myself. Then put them up there. It is always failure. I hate all people now.�

“That doesn't seem very healthy.�

“What is unhealthy is being in love with a boy who leaves you and fucking another man just so your stomach doesn't cry out in pain, only to find his penetrating penis feel much more foreign than fun.�

“Yeah, that would suck, I guess,� I say not too articulately.

She looks at me. I see disgust in her eyes. I'm another one of those bastard boys who only wants to fuck her. She is right.

[mccutcheon]

jack you snuck into the thread while I was writing, you naughty little doggy.

[Jack Chiefton]

That was my whole masterplan, hehehearhar, boggie woogia

[mccutcheon]

Terrorist!

[Dallas]

She seems a little more believable when you describe her background. I knew there had to be a nostalgic reason for the Sherlock Holmes. I have one in the midst of my book collection and it is purely for nostalgia reasons.
How long have they been talking before the conversation moved to such a personal place? If she was that big of a snob and that closed up, I doubt she would be opening up too quickly. She would be more likely to pull the fake smile head nodding thing that girls do so well and her mind would be going a million miles an hour dissecting the whole situation.
Unless of course she is attracted to him, then she would say things like that to make herself out to be all hard when the soft little voice inside is hoping maybe he will be the one to break the spell.
The much more jaded side of her knows better of course. So everything that comes out of her mouth is flippant and stand offish, borderline cold.
She is telling herself in her head as she passes off these short jaded answers that he is the wrong guy, she should know better than even talking to him, men like him always lead to trouble, but there is always that stupid little romantic girl in her that is always attracted to that type.
It is like heading for a brick wall at a million miles an hour and saying, to hell with it, and taking your hands off the wheel. She knows where it is heading, she knows she will get hurt, she knows he won't be the one, but something inside of her likes the pain. There is some strange comfort in always being right about these sorts of men. At least they are predictable, no surprises.

~Dallas