This Is Nadine's Lover

Answer: Thus far, one may argue, that I have been writing so as not to be accused of self-caricature. At the same time I've been kicking myself for my inability or my reluctance to write sequels. During my erotica phase, after I had written my first short piece "Nadine's Husband" for Brown Sugar (Plume Penguin), I was called on to write a second and said I could not. I had exhausted all of the erotic content in my heart. I always write from the heart. But my editor waved a good chunk of money at me, and suddenly I felt my erotic heart pumping in my chest. When I finished the story, my editor read it and said, "Where is Nadine? Where is Pam? These are not the same characters." Groan. So I went back to the computer to accomplish a task that seemed to me boring and unpleasant, if not downright impossible. To revisit the scene of the crime after the crime has been solved. Where was the joy in that? Where was the inspiration? It seemed like too much work. It seemed too much like work. But money is money. Beat on, my starving artist's heart. O, the things we do for money. What I gave her next was met with the same complaint. "Where is Nadine? Where is Pam?" This time I had an answer: "This is Nadine's lover's wife. She suspects that he is cheating with Nadine, and so she sleeps with her best male friend who has been in love with her since childhood. The best friend she sleeps with is also the best friend of her husband, Nadine's lover. In other words, the lover is sleeping with his best friend's wife. In other, other words, the lover, the wife he is sleeping with, and the husband who is sleeping with Nadine were all best friends as children, get it?" She got it even if you don't, and more importantly, my heart was pumping for these new characters and this fresh scenario. Nadine be damned. "Nadine's Husband part 2" would proceed without you. She did, however, show up in parts 3 and 4. With all that money being waved around, one can only delay the inevitable for so long. But it taught me something about myself and about my writing process in general. For me, writing is effortless when I write from inspiration. When I write for work, I write well, but it is, in fact, work. And I don't necessarily find it pleasurable. Work writing resides in the head, from which it I can be pulled when needed . . . Because of practice, because of my academic training perhaps, I am able to do this efficiently. Inspired writing resides in the heart, out of which it copiously flows once the heart is tapped. I think that with this story, I may have found a key that may tap my heart at will. I'm not promising sequels, or anything like that, but I'm not ruling them out either. There are quite a few more issues that can be explored in that magical realm above the firmament.