Where's Your Hammer?

I've always said (and you know that I'm the ultimate authority) that songs are poetry set to music.  Depending on the song, you can find a lot of truth in the lyrics, which is why so many people have written and identify with songs over the ages.

On May 15, 1963,  the song  "If I Had a Hammer", won a Grammy for Peter, Paul and Mary.  Written by Pete Seeger and Lee Hays in 1949, it was a song that supported the progressive movement .  Like most folk songs, it was recorded by a number of people such as Johnny Cash, Sam Cooke, Trini Lopez, Aretha Franklin and of course, Peter, Paul and Mary.

The song was also an anthem of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.

The power of the song , is how the lyrics so clearly state that each of us has the power within us to make change.  We don't have to wait on others to make the first move.  At first glance, though, that may seem like the case:

"If I had a hammer/I'd hammer out love between my brothers and my sisters all over this land...."

The use of the conjunction "if" creates a subordinate clause that says if the singer had such equipment, he/she would do the following things.  The song starts out talking about all the things the singer would do "if" they had a hammer, a bell and a song.

By the end of the song, however, we see that he/she does have the equipment needed and thus can go out and make a mark in the world.  

"Well, I've got a hammer, and I've got a bell, and I've got a song to sing.....it's the hammer of justice, it's the bell of freedom,  it's the song about love between my brothers and my sisters...."

Do you have a hammer?  A bell?  A song? All three? Then you are more than ready to effect change in your corner of the world.   

Do it.

Dahlia

The Sultry Scribe

Having the Tables Turned: A Writing Prompt from Siobhan Kinkade

So last month, after her interview, Siobhan Kinkade forgot to give me a writing prompt so we could properly turn the tables and put me in the hot seat. She has since remedied this, hoo boy...This proves that sometimes I should keep my big mouth shut!

So this month is kind of a part two of last month where I respond to her challenge and write a little something with the prompt she's given me. Sigh. I'll put her prompt in bold, and go from there!

***

It was a dark and stormy night and the fairies took over the stripper pole. It was the only recourse when Beltane fell on a moonless, rainy night and the last Maypole in town had been bulldozed decades ago to make way for a rest stop. It wasn't the best solution, to be sure, but tradition had to be kept and the local strip was closer to the Faerie mound than the nearest field. Quietly they emerged from what unsuspecting mortals took to be an over-sized speed bump misplaced in a back alley. Through the years they adapted to life in the city, so pixies and elves, brownies and sylphs, redcaps and trolls emerged from their underworld home, all dressed for a night in the seedier part of town.

They grouped together in a lump, all staring up at the flashing sign for Tit-tania's with eyes that were blue, green, yellow, orange, and black. Round and slit pupils widened and contracted at the convenient name. It was all the sign they needed that they were where they needed to be. 

The mortals inside never knew what hit them, especially when gold coins pelted the dancers into fleeing the stage. The elfin maidens that took their place may have been dressed in club wear, but they moved with the grace of the ages-old and whirled around the poles with a fire that no mortal could replicate. Pixies swirled about their heads like sparks of light, so fast that their movements burned a trail of an after-image around the dancers' heads,the streaks mingling with the long hair.  The brownies chugged beer since no ale was available, and trolls watched gaping mortal men out of the corner of their eye. The age of sacrifice and tithe was over, but if one of them reached a grubby hand for a Fae maiden, then they were more than happy to remind the humans why they were unworthy.

Businessmen, young men who were barely out of boyhood, old men with nothing better to do...they all gaped in awe at the display going on around them as the creatures in the audience joined hands and circled the perimeter in a dance as old as time. A particularly mischievous sprite cut off the blasting music and poised itself at the edge of the stage, pipes in hand. The sweet music drew the spurned human women back towards the stage to watch, tears streaming down their face as they viewed the grace that they'd never have. Their human audience stared, unable to reach for wallets. They didn't need to; their admiration was something the celebrating Folk hadn't had for a long, long time. 

Into the night they danced and celebrated, invoking envy, nostalgia, and a heartbreak for the old days. Troll and lawyers guzzled liquor together, brownies hit on strippers jokingly, and all celebrated and danced to the ancient music, enjoying the holiday though most couldn't even remember what it was. 

Just as fast as the Folk had arrived, they disappeared. Leaves were left where their coins had been thrown and none of the club's patrons could rightly remember what had happened or how much time had passed. They only had a strange memory of joy and an even stranger heartbreak of missing something they could not name. 

***

Whew, mission accomplished! As always, you can find me in the following places:

Blog  Facebook  Twitter

Next month I'll be back with another interview!

SK Presents: "A Healer's Bond" By Raelynn Blue

Good afternoon, my lovelies! It's Siobhan, back with a new book for your perusing pleasure. This month we're moving into a new category: Fantasy. Well, romantic fantasy. Just keep reading, because the more I talk, the less sense I'm going to make.

*****

Q&A #3:

A HEALER'S BOND by RAELYNN BLUE

Erotic Romantic Fantasy

1. Adele saves Wyatt's life twice within hours. How?

2. Who is Horea and what's his reason for wanting Wyatt?

3. What are the noir oscuros?

4.What is Adele's connection to Wyatt's home?

5. What as the connection between Hyden and Greensboro?

BUY THIS BOOK: MMP Store

The John Doe bleeding out on the ER gurney had to be the sexiest man Adele had ever seen. Too beautiful to die. As an ER nurse, she works to save him, but her bond–her connection–to him lingers long after he’s out of danger. What she didn’t expect was that before the night was over her life would end up in his strong, surprisingly capable hands. Wyatt Young’s exile had few perks—condemned to Greensboro, he had a steady stream of loud, cranky people, and lousy food. Constantly hunted by his uncle, he’s startled when he wakes up shirtless in a hospital, with his sword missing and his torso ripped apart. A beautiful healer helps him recover—a healer he can’t stop thinking about even when he passes out. A bond is formed between Adele and Wyatt—one they can’t fight. Wyatt’s uncle seeks to make Adele his personal healer—at any cost. Adele is the key to Wyatt’s salvation and his redemption. He won’t let her go without a fight. Ever.

*****

This was definitely a sizzling hot read! Check it out for yourself and be sure to let us know what you thought.

Tune in next month for a new book and all new questions!

Velvet Curtains, Love Muscle, And Other Embarrassments

E. A. Black writes dark fiction, dark fantasy, and horror. She writes erotic romance and erotica with the pseudonym Elizabeth Black. Visit her web sites at http://elizabethablack.blogspot.com and http://eablack-writer.blogspot.com. Friend her at Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/elizabethablack

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[Image from Punch an Pie, by Chris Daily and Aeire]

I've edited many books as exchanges for my own edits or as a favor. One thing I've noticed is that sex scenes are sometimes dragged down by the same old descriptive words: cock, pussy, cunt, willie, shaft, slit. Blah de blah de blah.

Sometimes you have to shake up the words, but you don't want to go overboard and end up writing purple prose. It's too easy to let yourself fall into Bulwer-Lytton Awards territory, like the 2012 winner, runner up, and dishonorable mentions in the Romance category:

Winner:

“I’ll never get over him,” she said to herself and the truth of that statement settled into her brain the way glitter settles on to a plastic landscape in a Christmas snow globe when she accepted the fact that she was trapped in bed between her half-ton boyfriend and the wall when he rolled over on to her nightgown and passed out, leaving her no way to climb out. — Karen Hamilton, Seabrook, TX

Runner-Up:

“Your eyes are like deep blue pools that I would like to drown in,” he had told Kimberly when she had asked him what he was thinking; but what he was actually thinking was that sometimes when he recharges his phone he forgets to put the little plug back in but he wasn’t going to tell her that. — Dan Leyde, Edmonds, WA

Dishonorable Mention:

Tucked in a dim corner of The Ample Bounty Bar & Grille, Alice welcomed the fervent touch of the mysterious stranger’s experienced hands because she had not been this close with a man in an achingly long time and, quivering breathlessly, began to think that this could be the beginning of something real, something forever, and not just a one-time encounter with a good Samaritan who was skilled at the Heimlich Maneuver. — Mark Wisnewski, Flanders, NJ

Chain-smoking as he stood in the amber glow of the street lamp, he gazed up at the brownstone wherein resided Bunny Morgan, and thought how like a bunny Bunny was, though he had read somewhere that rabbits were coprophages, which meant that they ate their own feces, which was really disgusting now that he thought about it, and nothing like Bunny, at least he hoped not, so on second thought Bunny wasn’t like a bunny after all, but she still was pretty hot. — Emma DeZordi, Dollard-des-Ormeaux, Quebec

Their love began as a tailor, quickly measuring the nooks and crannies of their personalities, but it soon became the seamstress of subterfuge, each of them aware of the others lingual haberdashery: Mindy trying to create a perfectly suited garment to display in public and Stan only concerned with the inseam. — D. M. Dunn, Bloomington, IN

So you want to use words other than The Usual Suspects? How about some of these substitutions (From The Glossary Of Sexual Slang):

anus

asshole, bung hole, butt hole

breasts

boobs, headlights, knockers, tits

buttocks

ass, behind, buns, butt, fanny, rear

clitoris

button, clit

penis

cock, dick, dong, joy stick, meat, organ, pecker, peter, poker,  prick, rod, tool, wang, weenie

semen

come, cream, cum, jism, load, love juice

testicles

balls, family jewels, gonads, gones, nuts

vagina (or vulva)

bearded clam, bearded lady, beaver, box, cunt, honey pot, manhole,  muff, pussy, quim, snatch, toolbox, twat

Other substitutions:

vagina (or vulva)

fiery slit, cleft, folds, velvet curtains

cock

joystick, hammer, love muscle

You get the idea. There are all kinds of creative words you could use when writing your sex scenes. Just make sure you don't cringe when you use them.

10x10: A Haunted Birthday

I recently went to Disneyland and none was more astonished than I that I was inspired by, of all things, the Haunted Mansion. Below is the poem that came of the trip… In exactly 10 lines.

Haunted Birthday

Whirling, swirling

Dancing on air,

It’s an ethereal party

For Princess Fair.

Bright & light, candles

By magic appear,

Party unfurling,

Getting in gear…

Whisper of a kiss, caught with care

A ghostly finger traces a single tear.

Wynelda Ann Deaver

  You can find me at http://wynwords.wordpress.com/   where I blog books, writing and parenting. 

  You can catch my debut story, Dragon's Champion ,at Mocha Memoirs Press.

  Till Next Month!

Uhhh...

Why do people want me to keep talking and interacting with the general populace? Have I not scared you all away by now? No? (waves hands) Shoo! Go away! Leave me to be disturbingly introverted so everyone can question if I'm the next Phantom! (looks around) Why are you still here?! (sits back) Nicole put you up to this didn't she? So I'll write? (sigh) There's a lot of diabolical in that tiny bit of height...Alright, alright, I'm going...But I don't have to like it...

                                                                                                                     Nikki W.

Stranger than fiction...

As one who hails from Boston, MA...

I have very little to convey of our city's recent few days in the national spotlight.  I was at work, sitting in front of a lap-top in a quiet office when a co-worker said she'd heard about the Marathon explosions on Twitter.  (I'd heard about 9/11 in much the same way.) The next day, I get a robo-call from the city telling me the subway has been shut down.  As it slowly sank in that, for all intents and purposes, the city itself had been shut down, it felt increasingly surreal.

Like a modern-day version of some cheesey old western; the whole town shuts down, everybody locked in their homes, the curtains drawn as two gun fighters meet under the noon-day sun in the middle of a dusty street.  Or, one of those Grade B action movies complete with car chases, gun play and fleeing desperadoes throwing bombs at pursuing cop cars.  But, this was reality (whatever that is.)  It was hard to believe two punks with a few guns and home-made bombs could have the power to shut down a whole city.  An over-reaction on the part of city government, perhaps.  Whether it's likely to encourage or discourage such terrorist exploits in future, only time will tell.

And, as always, we take what we can, or need to, from the aftermath.  There was a celebratory mood in Boston after the sole surviving bomber had been captured.  It was as if we'd won a sporting event or something.  "Boston Strong" became our mantra of the moment.  We'd weathered the storm and come out stronger.  Okay.  We locked ourselves in our apartments for a whole day and proved a city this size could survive an attack by two guys.  Forgive me if I fail to see how we've earned this degree of self-congratulation. It seems at times like this we almost need explosions of madness like this to make ourselves feel stronger.

Crazy perhaps, but then so is our seemingly insatiable fascination with evil, as reflected in popular fiction.  We love these kooky police procedurals featuring psychologically disturbed FBI agents and profilers matching wits with ridiculously lurid serial killers, evil geniuses who are about as close to reality as Batman villains.  The elaborate artistry of fictional serial killers...the human butterfly sculptures of Hannibal Lecter, the forest gardens of buried corpses with their hands held aloft as if in greeting, naked women impaled on moose antlers.  A guy with an Edgar Allan Poe fixation who somehow brainwashes a woman into writing his name over every inch of her body and then fatally stabbing herself through the eye in public.  (We're a deeply sick culture.)

Quite apart from the obvious (and pathetically adolescent) obsession with misogynistic violence, maybe the real reason we create fictional villains out of the darkest parts of the frustrated male psyche and then write stories in which their grotesque and intricate puzzles are unraveled by profilers and ingenious police shrinks is because we take comfort in the fantasy that evil can actually be dissected, analyzed, understood and anticipated.  In fiction, the super criminals and serial killers are always predictable by virtue of their brilliance and complexity.

In real life, evil is much more primal, instinctive and simple minded.  Or, at least more opaque.  We really don't have a clue what makes seemingly normal, well-adjusted, educated, intelligent men hijack an airliner on a suicide run into a sky scraper in the belief that 70 virgins await them in paradise.  Or, what makes one troubled young man out of thousands pick up an automatic weapon (legally obtained, BTW) and shoot up a school, butchering countless people, children included.  Or, what makes two brothers emigrate halfway round the world for a clumsy, haphazard rampage of random violence, supposedly in the belief that God wants them to.

Maybe we obsess over these random explosions of violence because they divert our attention from the larger patterns of sane, organized mass murder that have been going on since the dawn of time.  The sane among us have for centuries marched train by train like lemmings into gun fire.  As the world has changed and evolved, warfare has changed with it.  Gone are the days of declared wars between nation states; wars with clear objectives, beginnings and ends.  Now, civilization seems to be degenerating into an Orwellian nightmare of perpetual war, complete with rocket bombs that kill civilians anywhere and everywhere, both the Geneva Convention and due process of criminal law be damned.  No rules.  Torture becomes an acceptable, even laudable part of national security, and this shapes our culture.  As I sit here typing this, I'm watching a television show in which the heroes (FBI agents) brutally torture information out of a prisoner, blood streaming from his mouth as they finally wrench the truth from him.  (Oops...they just shot him dead.)  The villain they're hunting is a madman; he lives in his own private reality.  But, what reality are we creating for ourselves?

We won't let go of our guns or our predator drones or our nukes.  But, we will let go of our civil rights.  We will incarcerate, institutionalize, shock, water board, or otherwise torture anyone we decide might be dangerous.  But, that's okay:  We're the sane ones.

As a fiction writer, I create some pretty crazy landscapes, wacky worlds and bloody-handed monsters.  A lot of it is directly inspired by the reality we all see on the news daily.  And, most of it really can't hold a candle to the real thing.

Tom Olbert (author:  "Long Haul")
http://tomolbert.blogspot.com