Writing Is Hard

Writing is hard. Seriously. A lot of work goes into it and its not always easy to write whatever I've decided to write about. The nature of a story is that occassionally you have to write about a character you don't 100% identify with. I very rarely write about Steve-like characters because of the nature of my writing (i.e. I write about crazy fantasy crap and I am a rather mundane human).

So, you may have noticed that my post frequency has just about hit nil lately. There are a variety of reasons. One is that as far as DnD is concerned, things are going extremely well so I feel less of a need to write things out to clarify my thoughts. Another is that I've got a few real life things cropping up that have to be addressed. The third is the story about The One-Eyed Man I'm working on.

I'm writing about Cenn the Reaver, a fairly imporant character in The Known World, and to Kusseth and the Fell Peaks in particular. Now, to connect the two previous paragraphs: the little blurbs about Cenn are difficult because Cenn is gay and I am not. I makes it hard to write things about he and Callifay and their relationship, I just can't get into his mindset because its an almost totally alien concept to me to be in a relationship with a guy. If Cenn is mad and kills shit, fine. I can understand that and can do some method writing or whatever and kind of relate to the character's mindset.

I'm writing these little bits and pieces with Callifay and Cenn because I'm rather fond of the Cenn character and the previous little bits of literature I've written about him have never shown the relationship between the two guys, there was just never really a point where I could go oh by the way, they have relations. I like the character enough that I felt I should do justice to the relationship and actually write something that at least implied it.

This whole silly thing is more goofily complicated by the fact that A) Cenn isn't a homosexual as we define it and B) He had a wife at one point. Cenn and Callifay are members of a race that doesn't have super well defined gender roles, some identify with male pronouns, others female, some are honestly neither. They don't engage in any sort of sexual reproduction, though some of them have the proper equipment to do the deed if they felt like it and some do choose that as a form of recreation. Regardless of "gender" no one from their race has nipples or a belly button and those that identify as females don't have mammary glands (to eliminate any remnant of seriousness or maturity: BOOBS!). So, Cenn and Callifay are gay but not...? Because to be homosexual your species actually has to have two or more sexes...? I've honestly no idea what's going on here.

I'm going for sort of implied relations I guess, so I resort to lingering hand touches or resting a hand against a cheek in the second part (which is saved in draft form in my dashboard), which I consider to be an intimate-ish thing. I don't know if its coming across well, or is just a laughable attempt at showing the relationship. I'm just trying to avoid the whole Brokeback Mountain "we were wrastlin an all of sudden now we're fuckin" thing.

I once read a book that took a heavy-handed approach to this topic. It basically amounted to a young lord and his best friend, the friend was gay, the lord wasn't, he just fucked the friend in the ass because having "real" relations with a woman would strip him of his magic powers. Seriously.

I definitely don't want this Cenn/Callifay stuff to be that goofy.

Music: MC Frontalot - Pr0n Song
Music: MC Frontalot - Nerdcore Rising