Just when you think you did your research.....

Turns out it wasn't enough.

Many years ago, I began to write a murder mystery for the best friend I ever had. He was dying.

It was based on a scandal that happened here. It involved the upper crust of the city's 'HIGH' society. I had met many of the protagonists personally. I was the trophy person at many a party... 'look at this AMI I picked up!' Oh yes it was fairly oh-ful. But I often paid them back for their vulgarity with tinly veiled sarcasm. And the scandal involved some fairly kinky things I had never even HEARD of. And never really understood.

So some months ago, I was trying to re-construct it and finish it, for Mark's sake. (Good, grief, I was sending ten pages a day per airmail to California, and hoping to finish it in time. 'Write me a murder mystery,' he said. He was the brother I had wished I had had. And I loved him very much.)

Well, it involved a lot of characters, and Larry Kramer's 'Faggots' had just come out and I admired the structure. So I went with it. Short takes that you pull together into one whole cloth. Far more difficult than I had imagined.

Mark died after I had finished the fifth chapter, and I was so devastated, I stopped writing for nearly twenty years. I was just speechless. He was only thirty years old. He believed I had talent and potential.

Whatever, as above, I started re-reading the ms. It isn't so bad. But I realised that I did not understand some basic things and so I went 'researching' one day at home and made a couple of contacts with people who gave me some background on what I wanted to know. It involved an SM site. They were both nice and gave me what I needed to know. And in case you are wondering, one of the first rules in creative writing courses is: write about what you KNOW. One day, one of them messaged me, and I called it up at work and forgot to delete the address in Firefox. So my colleague saw the site, and fucking freaked out. He was shocked, I tell you, SHOCKED.

He said, 'PLEASE don't tell me you run around in leather stuff on your days off...' (Which he obviously thought absurd....)

And my inner gremlin rubbed his hands in pure glee. That he would think that after knowing me nearly twenty years was hilarious for me. So I played 'evasive', and laughed my ass off, inside.
And just to be clear---never have, never will. NOT interested.

Otherwise, I do not care what consenting adults do.

But the other day, I got a mail. It was so off the charts for anything I have EVER seen, I blanched. Seems I only scratched the surface. It involved an unspeakable Yahoo group, and now I understand less than I ever did before.

But am NOT going to go there.

Some people seemingly get so fucked up and lack so much self-esteem... words fail.

But I don't need that for my project.