The Week That Was

A week filled with conferences that was as much amusing as it was baffling. It started off with a powwow conference involving some of the biggest names in theoretical physics and research. Which made it so much funnier when the bitchiness of the participants (99.9% male, there was only one female participant who wasn't a family member of a participant) came out full force from day one.

Guess male egos are as fragile and testy as female ones huh?! Then the tea was poisoned - seriously, it had an overpowering smell of detergent. Goodness! And don't get me started on the food. So apart from giving half the audience headaches from the technical presentations, they wanted to kill us with the refreshments. And bear in mind those refreshments brought the other half of the audience out of slumberland into the land of the living.

It was with a sigh of relief that I went on to attend the tech conference. It was, surprisingly, fun. Ok, I'm no techie but at least I understood most of what was going on and in any case, there was enough wry humour going around to make things bearable. Tellingly, no one bothered to answer the contentious questions I threw out there. No one wants to ponder the consequences/side effects of profiling via big data upon health insurance. Tell me no one worries that with all the focus on covering themselves that insurance companies are not looking for ways to streamline their client base so as to cut the payout probability.

It was hilarious that this guy who was the age of some of my former students was trying to emphasise the stability of the UAVs to a friend of mine who asked. Bear in mind, the military use UAVs have always had stability problems, would commercial use UAVs be that much better. If so, hmm, what does that say of the designers and engineers who work on the military use models? And out of nowhere, this cute researcher popped up and for once, I seriously considered hitting on someone while on business. Only three things stopped me: I don't want to damage my professional reputation, he is 5 years younger and he looks like my ex fiancé the one my friends labelled the Spanish psycho.

But seriously, it's been loads of fun. Inspirational in some unexpected ways. The optimism of researchers who talked about doing things simply for good rather than $ contrasted with the slick elevator pitches. The solving of a problem here and now in the case of The Drinkable Book stood in stark contrast to the driverless car enthusiasts arguing over range of use and refusal to engage with questions on the ethics of accidents involving driverless cars.

And finally, the relentlessly monotonous presentations of bureaucrats were thankfully erased by the humour and sense of Google's Director of Games who joked about installing jacks on people's heads for connectivity with the internet - one guy raised his hands to express his wish to be the recipient of such a jack - seriously dude, you aren't being cool, you're showing how desperate you want to seem cool. Hope you even considered what Mical said about receiving a DOS on your own brain once the hackers get to your brain LOL

So how did your week go? Hope it was as fun and more productive than mine was.

No work done on the writing, beta readers forgive me!

All Tapped Out

Writing is like being in labour. Ok, that's what I've heard in any case. Since I haven't been in labour before, I'm not entirely sure the analogy is appropriate. The process of my struggles with my latest story is as close an experience with pregnancy as I'm getting so far in my 30+ years of life. In a way, the feeling of being pretty sure about the storyline, but feeling conflicted and enervated kind of reflects my conflicted feelings about having kids.

As I've said to friends, I do want kids, just not quite the other things that seem to accompany the said kids. I wanted kids with my ex fiancé but not the marriage, so basically we disagreed on a fundamental point. He wanted marriage but not necessarily kids, he was willing to compromise if he had to. We never really talked about it, there were endless arguments but not any real discussion. And while it wasn't the ultimate trigger that broke the relationship, it was a big factor.

Same thing with the story I'm writing right now. It started off as an obsession with the storyline and the intolerable selfishness and lack of remorse on the part of the cheating wife. And yes, there's a pattern to what triggers me :P Then as I got progressively mired in conflict about which ending I wanted,  the process just started to frustrate me. It was like a baby who refused to come out. Right now, I just want to finish the damn thing. I apologise to my beta readers who're probably smiling patiently and putting up with a cranky writer - sorry and love y'all!

Think Meša Selimović put it quite nicely in The Fortress: The listener is the midwife in the difficult birth of the word. Or, still more important — if he desires to understand.

Defining Judith Loewe

It's awkward to say the least when one has to define oneself.

Particularly when one isn't all that sure what one is.

March 2015 marked my first venture into writing erotic romance and as the year progressed, erotica. 2015 also saw me venturing into a genre where I'm a minority. Make that a minority among the minority. As a fellow female author noted, LW is a genre populated largely by "old lonely white males". I chuckled when I  first heard that because it rang so true - sorry guys. Make no mistake, I think some of the writers in LW are of the finest in the online erotica space. And I'm glad and honoured to call some of them friends. I've avoided even reading LW stories for so long simply because the vitriol and misogyny scared me in some of the first stories I'd read. I'd only dared venture further because some of the themes struck a cord in me that other genres perhaps missed.

Betrayal is a theme that triggers the worst response in humans and it's perhaps worse for someone like me. I'm a feminist and a liberal , I don't enjoy misogynistic behaviour so it came as a bit of a surprise that I thoroughly understood and empathised with the impulse to punish that comes with the BTB segment of LW. For me, the urge to punish is not so much directed solely at the female as it is directed at the one who violates trust. Readers and critics may ask why LW? Well, it could be for two very parochial reasons: betrayal by men are so common that it loses the shock factor and despite the feminist movement having made leaps over the decades, social mores dictate that women are supposed to be the faithful, steadfast half of heterosexual relationships. The latter makes me laugh because practically speaking, it would technically mean adultery should involve only married men and unmarried women or homosexual partners. Perhaps the real reason why LW is so gut wrenching is because most expect married women to be paragons of virtue and when expectations are that high, disappointment is inevitable and the consequent reaction is necessarily over the top.

So what is my position on all of this? I write LW stories because some stories just provoke roiling emotions and writing becomes a form of catharsis. 

As I've said to various commentators and friends, I write to entertain myself. As bad as it sounds, I'm in this because it's fun and I enjoy it. It's a bonus if readers enjoy it too. I don't want to be defined by the convenient categories that everyone likes sorting others into. I'm a bunch of contradictions. I'm an X% non-white female writer who is probably transiting from quarter life crisis hangover (10 years hangover) to midlife crisis. One who's pondering returning to the UK and going back to school, not the dreaming spires though, pretty sure another dose of that would drive me batty. One who's tired of loneliness but honest enough to tell the closest thing to a dream man that she doesn't love him enough to marry him. Maybe I'm just dumb.

So what's up in 2016?

Frankly,  I'm not too sure myself.

One thing's for sure: I'm going to rediscover the fun in writing and perhaps enjoy life in the meantime.  Happy 2016 everyone. Do read my stories if you can stand them. Would love to hear feedback.  😈😇🐣