Is the working title of my novel in progress. I’m about 60,000 words in, all in the Scrivener program, which I don’t understand at all other than it is a stripped down word processor, and presumably I am a few clicks away from it spitting out a manuscript. I’m almost down with my second story line, all in female first person. My reading came in handy, I think. We’ll see. The female characters have become more dominant and the story lines are so different but part of that I think is that my writing has gotten better so the more I write the better it gets so the first stuff I wrote is shit, but what are rewrites for? Hunh?
I’m pretty sure I’m only writing this much because of John, my last writing instructor. He just told me a few things that I’ve been adhering to, and it’s off the to races, at least in volume if not in quality, but his point was to get the volume first, then worry about the quality. My book is very sexual, two coming of age stories intertwined and connected, and then the story line from forty years later. I’d say it’s definitely an R, or more, but I can always tone it down, but that would be easier than toning it up, I think. I’ve read a fair amount of purple prose in preparation for it. I hope that research worked. It’s late. I’m done writing. On my monitor are images of Michelangelo’s David, Modigliani’s Reclining Nude, Bernini’s Rape of Proserpina, and Titian’s Venus. Father Alessandro is educating Carmelita about sex after she was caught by her mother with Jose under the tree.
It’s the next day now, but I wasn’t in the mood to write just yet. Below is an exerpt of the girl’s parish priest counseling her after she was found naked, by her mother, with a boy her age.
He took his arm from the top of the pew that had been around my shoulders and picked up the first book, thick, with the colors on the edges indicating a lot of pictures. Good. I liked pictures. It was on top. I could see that the book under it was a bible. No color on the edges, no pictures, only old words in an old language hard to understand. There were five book-markers between the pages of different lengths. He opened the book at the one marker sticking out above the others. I could see that all the markers were of different lengths and not in order. I saw a marble statue of a large muscular man holding a beautiful women in the air. Her left hand was pushed against the side of his face. It looked like he was wearing a crown and he had a long curly beard. They were naked but for a length of cloth. His legs were strong, his arms flexed, muscles straining. I could see the bulge of the muscle on the inside and above the knees that I had seen on Jose. The cloth covered his pene but I could see a small corner of the curly hair exposed on his right side. I could see his fingers pressed into her flesh of marble, her opened eyes, opened mouth. I could hear her screams, feel her fear. I saw her right arm flailing in the air behind, fluttering hand. I looked up at Father. “This stature, Carmelita, is known as The Rape of Proserpina. It was carved form marble in 1621 by Bernini. It depicted the story Proserpina from Greek mythology that was written by a Roman poet called Ovid in 8 AD. It’s the story of a beautiful young maiden who was the daughter of Gods. She was kidnapped by the God of the underworld, that’s Pluto, the man you see. He wanted her to be his wife in the underworld. At that time in history, the time Ovid wrote it, Jesus was about as old as you are now.” Father was looking at me still, “What do you see, Carmelita?” “I see a man taking a girl who doesn’t want to be taken.” I looked at the man’s body, the side of the woman’s breast, her face, her left big toe curled up, the right one curled down. “They are both beautiful, the muscles, their bodies—I don’t know any people that look like that though.” “That’s right, Carmelita. Even then, way back in 8 AD, there were stories of men taking what they had no right to. When I look at this, I see your mother on the day she was kidnapped from her home when she was twelve years old, as old as you are now.” He turned the book to the next longest marker, removing the one he’d just turned too, holding it in his palm. I saw a naked lady with small breasts and long golden hair. She was standing in a large seashell on the shore of an ocean. Her right arm was folded up, her hand shielding her right breast, but her left was exposed. There were small pink flowers on stems in the air, like butterflies flying, and a naked angel, a man, flying, holding another girl with golden hair—they were over the water on the left. She was naked too, but folds of blue cloth were draped around them both so that all you could see was the girls small left breast, like the girl in the shell. To the right of the beautiful woman standing in the shell was a dressed older lady approaching with a large blanket to cover her with, it looked like—the blanket was light pink and had green plants with small white flowers. On the shore of short green grass, there were trees with green leaves and small straight trunks. Small white clover sprinkled the ground at the older lady’s feet. I looked up at Father. “This is a famous painting called The Birth of Venus. It was painted by Sandro Botticelli in 1480. What do you see, Carmelita?” “I see beautiful people, a flying angel, and they’re all naked except for the lady with the blanket.” I looked again at the angel, “But they look more normal, like people I would see, if they didn’t have clothes on,” then I blushed because I’d seen Jose naked, so I’d just told Father a lie because I have seen, and Jose looked kind of like the angel to me.