Long Stretches of Silence

Guilty pleasures.  This one was hard for me. I have a quote from an allergy cookbook, of all things. The author said "Do wrong or feel guilty. Life is too short to do both." I never once used a recipe from that book, but those two lines alone were worth the twenty bucks I paid for it.

After a week of seeing what my fellow word-whores would admit to, I realized that my guilty pleasure is running away from home.

Weird, right? Yes, I play World of Warcraft and it is a pleasure. No guilt involved. My husband plays, too. We're a formidible gaming pair. DPS gnomes all the way. We both read voraciously. No guilt involved - we're learning something, right? Okay. I suppose there's a moment of guilt when we walk out of a bookstore four hundred dollars poorer. . .Hi, my name's Marcella and I'm a book addict. Still don't feel guilty.

But running away from home? Oh yeah. It's a pleasure loaded with guilt. Don't get me wrong. I adore my family, the whole big, messy lot. (No calling to ask if *you're* the messy one I'm refering to - we've all been there.) It's just that when you're immersed in the give and take of family life - dishes, lunches, who broke what, 'Mom, where's my. . .' and 'OMG, I'm going to lie in wait for my coworker in the company garage just so I can run over his toes. . .', it's hard to carve space out for yourself.  As much as I love my husband, my felines, my parents, my in-laws, my sister and her family and all of my friends, there's an irresponsible part of me that craves long stretches of empty time, silence, and responsibility to no other living thing besides myself.

I suspect that's true for most of us. At least, I hope that's the case. I'd hate to be the only whack job on the website. The venial guilty pleasures: an hour or two of TV, a few chapters from a well-worn, much loved book, a couple of PUGs mowing through ICC in World of Warcraft, represent for each of us a respite from what everyone else in our lives needs from us. We grab an hour here or there and stitch together the frayed edges of sanity thereby. But there comes a time when only mortal guilty pleasures (like abandoning one's family for a few days) will do. When the pressure has built past a certain point, I feel stretched thin, like that onion paper your school secretary used to use with carbon paper (for those of you old enough for that image). When that happens, my head is filled with constant noise. I can't see. I can't think. I can barely feel. I sure as hell can't write. The only cure is running away from home. Responsibly.

My husband and I sit down with our schedules. We agree on three or four days for my disappearing act. I go to the same place each time (because I love the place). The Palace Hotel in Port Townsend, Washington. Port Townsend is an enclave of artists, aging hippies and farmers. The town was one of Washington's first seaports. Many of the buildings date from the Victorian era. The Palace is one such building. It's been many things in its history, including a brothel. Thus, I feel right at home.

Time has no meaning when I run off to the Palace. I wake when I want. Eat if I want. Or not. Walk the streets. No. Not like that. We're *word* whores. The point of the exercise is to empty out, to give up being so many things to so many other people, if only for a little while. For the time that I'm away, I get to devolve. I can put off the mantle of wife, kitty mom, daughter, sister, and friend. I'm just me. Alone. Out on adventure. Seeing things I'd never otherwise see. I'm the alien observer my wretched schoolmates used to accuse me of being in junior high. Not that I'm bitter. Anymore. After all, most of them have already died very messy deaths in my stories. Yeah. That's another pleasure. And no. I don't feel guilty about that one at all.

Victory or Death: My Guilty Pleasure

It's probably pretty easy to guess what my guilty pleasure is. From the time I was in sixth grade and discovered Bard's Tale on my Apple II e, I've been hooked on computer games. (I seem to recall I had an ancient version of The Hobbit as well...truly horrible on the monochromatic green screen.)

From there things moved on as the computers got better - King's Quest, Zork, Death Knights of Krynn, Doom, Doom II, Quake, Masters of Magic, Dungeon Keeper, Dungeon Keeper 2, Ravenloft, Elder Scrolls,IceWind Dale, Planescape: Torment, Heroes of Might & Magic I, II, III, IV, V, Civ I, II, III, IV, V, Caesar I, II, III, Grim Fandango, Sam and Max, Day of the Tentacle,The Sims, Sims 2, Sims 3, SimCity, Baldur's Gate I & II, Neverwinter Nights, Neverwinter Nights 2, Dragon Age, Knights of the Old Republic, Mass Effect, Mass Effect 2, Fable, Fable 2, Ultima, Ultima Underworld, Spore, Syberia, Syberia II, The Longest Journey 1 and 2, Vampire: The Masquerade, Myst,  and a crapload more.

And yes. World of Warcraft.

I don't know how many hours I've spent wasting time on building virtual cities or conquering hordes of advancing orc armies and that's okay. I did try the pencil and paper type of D&D when I was younger - but I was the only girl in 6th grade who wanted to play and the boys weren't overly interested in helping out the n00b.  I tried again in college, but unfortunately I discovered I really didn't like having to watch the guys roll for how long their male character's penis was or how many inches my female character could "take". I gave up when the one guy made his pet wolverine have sex with a tavern wench and never returned. *ahem*

Bad luck on my part, I suppose. Computer games at least gave me the dignity of being able to play at my own pace and use my own logic to solve puzzles or take down a dragon. Or romance a pixel hottie. Or cut a swath through ravening hordes of daemons. Whatever flavor I'm in the mood for, I can find it.

Gaming is the one thing that I really do enjoy and rarely have the time for these days. In fact, when I'm under any sort of writing deadline I don't really even load anything up, because it's far too easy for a simple five minutes at the auction house to become a case of "just one more quest" or "just a few more mobs to kill and then I'll go up a level" and the next thing I know it's 2 in the morning and I haven't done anything productive at all.

So these days I play in binges. When I finish a project, I'll do a weekend bender here or there, but overall, it's definitely not as much as like. 

Savage Sensuous Surrender

by Jeffe Kennedy

My mother raised me to be a reader.

She read to me every night before bed, and at other times, too. An avid Sesame Street watcher, I was sounding out the words on the big grocery store sign when I was four. By the time I was six, she gave up reading to me, because I'd read over her shoulder and correct her when she skipped words.

I was delighted because I finally could read through the whole part where the spider dies in Charlotte's Web - my mom always cried too much to get through it.

She belonged to a ladies book group back then and later she and my stepdad joined a couples book group that still meets, nearly forty years later. My mother kept a list of great books and worked her way through them methodically.

Every Wednesday after school, we went to the library. I was allowed five books per week, which sometimes barely lasted me. When I finished the juvenile section, I headed to the adult shelves. I discovered fantasy, science fiction, literary fiction. I loved it all. Around the time I hit twelve, I started picking up the romance novels in the wire stands with the candy and magazines at the grocery store. The library, of course, did not carry them.

"Put that down," my mom would say, "those are trash novels."

Now, this is a woman who never tried to limit what I read. Sometimes she read the edgier ones, too, but never did she say something wasn't worth reading. Except for the romance novel.

But the covers, the descriptions, they called to me with their siren song of sex and passion.

I had to know.

So I bought my first romance novel, Olivia O'Neill's Indigo Nights, at the used bookstore down the street.

Lady Caroline called no man master, but her wild, rebellious spirit drove her from the staid Victorian England of her birth to the opium dens of Suez and beyond - to the lush, bejeweled pleasure-domes of decadent maharajas... through jungle mazes rife with intoxicating dangers and jasmine-scented temples of pain and ecstasy... and into the arms of dashing Captain Rowlan... more »d Steel, the only man who could match her thirst for freedom. Plunged into a world aflame with revolution, these magnificent lovers play out a tumultuous drama of unquenched passion, exotic desires and eternal, all-conquering love.

This description telegraphed the code words to my blossoming sexual self. Pain and ecstasy? Intoxicating? Thirst, aflame, unquenched passion and exotic desires?

Oh yeah. Sign me up.

The cover looks so cheesy now, but in my mind it glowed like an amethyst jewel. On the back they dance in front of the Taj Mahal, ride a rearing white stallion and she dances in a harem outfit next to a tiger. At the bottom it says Savage Sensuous Surrender.

I didn't hide it from my mother, but I didn't exactly show her either. And oh, yes, I loved the book in all its scorching, sweeping, wildly unlikely splendor. This was a book firmly of the 70s trope, where the heroine succumbs to the insistent desires of many men - from the dashing Captain Rowland Steel to various Sheikhs and Maharajas. They all wanted Caro, and most of them had her, too. And, of course, Captain Steel rescues her in the end and they go off to lead feisty, tumultuous lives. Happily Ever After.

It rung every bell in my brand new world of sexual and romantic fantasy.

Over the years, romance novels became my guilty pleasure. I never shook quite shook the idea that they were trash, that they somehow polluted my mind. They became my special junk food treat. I studied the classics through high school and college. I read widely and with eclectic fervor. But when I needed a break, a chance to rest my mind and just indulge in a lovely ride of a read, I turned to romance novels.

The disdain is still out there. Even some of my sister writers who write in some of the many genres romance now encompasses like to distance themselves from the romance tropes. They make fun of the happy ever after. They imply they're too smart to write it. And yet, the stories still carry the thrill of the savage and sensuous. Werewolves and demons bring exotic pleasures to our intrepid heroines now. We might frown now on the idea of the heroine being date-raped by every man overwhelmed by her beauty, but we've substituted mate-bonds and the irresistible hypnotic command of the vampire.

I'm not much for guilt these days. Life is short and if something gives me pleasure, I value that. And romance has come out of the closet. Websites like Smart Bitches, Trashy Books (their tagline is All of the Romance, None of the Bullshit) speak for women like me. They explore far better than I can why romance, now the biggest selling genre of all books, remains the red-headed stepchild of the reading world.

As for me? Oh yeah - sign me up.