Hello darlings,
Anyone making art at a professional level has to balance tradeoffs between speed and quality. Give yourself too-tight deadlines and you’ll inevitably be pushing things out the door before you’ve done them justice. Spend years tinkering with ever-more elaborate layers of detail and meaning, and you won’t make enough money to survive. Perfection is all well and good if you’re some kind of chocolate heiress or a duke with unusual hobbies, but most of us have to live with the tension between devoting time and love to our work and food on the table.
With that in mind, thank you again for being so patient and supportive while I hole up in my cloister writing about the erotic theology of blood.
I’m still figuring out how to balance the kind of deep concentration I need in order to write effectively and well with the fact that online silence is invisibility, and invisibility a death knell to art. The internet has put its finger on the scales of the speed-quality balance, incentivizing artists to pump out low-effort schlock with the speed and force of a power washer. But I believe that for true long-term sustainability, for books that are read for years afterwards and that have a life of their own, one must make that sacrifice of time. So thank you again, I will have new things for you as soon as they come.
Make unto thee any graven image
We finally have a design for the official, final edition What Manner of Man book cover! As I’ve said elsewhere, I’ve been discussing this off-and-on with my editor since February of last year, and I’m super excited about it.
We're going for a very stylized, antique, turn-of-the-century-type design (see this page for some random examples of the kind of thing I mean) framing the central image which will be, by contrast, painted more in the style of vintage paperback romance novels (you know the ones.) I think you’re all going to lose it when you see the completed version.
There’s a concept sketch patrons can see right now. (Patrons also get exclusive access to all forthcoming progress / updates WRT the final artwork.)
Apocrypha
At the moment, the lion’s share of my effort is focused on adding new dialogue between Father Ardelian and Lord Vane, so I’ve been reviewing things like St Augustine and the Catechism of the Catholic Church (in a sexy way, I promise.)
I’ve also been returning once again to one of my major sources of inspiration for What Manner of Man — Erotism: Death & Sensuality by Georges Bataille.
In his youth, Bataille was a sufficiently devout Christian that he nearly entered the priesthood himself. However, Bataille, like most philosophers, was an unstoppable pervert and could not be held back by the likes of the Catholic Church. He therefore turned aside from the priesthood in favor of a life dedicated to unlocking the secrets of erotic transgression. He even founded a secret society dedicated to beheadings — although they never successfully carried out any human sacrifices themselves (the story goes that all of them wanted to be victim and none executioner.) Truly inspirational.
I do not have the space in this email to explain the full scope of the ideas in Erotism, but I suspect readers of my publication may be interested in religious ecstasy, sex, and death; and how the sacred is created through taboos around sex and violence. It’s not a book without flaws, but I think it’s safe to say that should you, during this What Manner of Man intermission period, wish to fill the gap with some French philosophy, this is a good choice.
(Though if you want just a taste of Bataille you may prefer to begin with The Sacred Conspiracy, a short piece less than a thousand words long.)
Another stray priest
At this point I more or less keep a collection of long-dead priests. (Look, we all need hobbies.) I want to introduce you to a significant source of inspiration for Father Ardelian: my favourite professional sadboy, Gerard Manley Hopkins.
In 1890s England, the hottest trend among young gay men was converting to Catholicism. Oscar Wilde, the poet John Gray, everyone was going Catholic (I blame the French.) Gerard Manley Hopkins, a relatively unknown Oxford graduate and repressed gay poet who studied under Walter Pater, took that to the extreme of becoming a Jesuit priest. This was a decision that guaranteed he would be miserable for the entire rest of his life (if his writing is any indication, maybe he enjoyed that.) Upon conversion, he burned all of his existing writing, but afterwards continued to compose poetry, almost uncontrollably. The result is a body of poems that are like diamonds of erotic repression.
Nobody in the history of the world has made lying in bed at night not jerking off sound so beautiful:
Carrion Comfort by Gerard Manley Hopkins Not, I'll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee; Not untwist — slack they may be — these last strands of man In me ór, most weary, cry I can no more. I can; Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be. But ah, but O thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on me Thy wring-world right foot rock? lay a lionlimb against me? scan With darksome devouring eyes my bruisèd bones? and fan, O in turns of tempest, me heaped there; me frantic to avoid thee and flee? Why? That my chaff might fly; my grain lie, sheer and clear. Nay in all that toil, that coil, since (seems) I kissed the rod, Hand rather, my heart lo! lapped strength, stole joy, would laugh, chéer. Cheer whom though? the hero whose heaven-handling flung me, fóot tród Me? or me that fought him? O which one? is it each one? That night, that year Of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my God.
I’m currently in the process of writing some material in reference to this poem specifically into the final draft of What Manner of Man.
The WMOM That Never Was
As you may know, What Manner of Man went through a variety of tortured drafts before settling into its final form. The following is one more peek behind the curtains at the development of What Manner of Man.
Are listicles dead? Too late, this one is a listicle. Here are my Top Six Weirdest Bits that Fell by the Wayside During Successive Rewrites:
1. Father Ardelian witnesses a scene of transcendent gothic horror: gay sex. 🌈
The first draft of the opening chapter was a gothic horror short story about Father Ardelian's experience of being stranded and alone in a completely hostile St Silvan’s head.
He landed on the shore expecting to be greeted by the local priest, and instead was interrogated by a suspicious and cold Danny. The further he walked into the village, the more alien it became, the stranger its people. Moment by moment, he realized that he was out of his depth. Friends who read this draft have assured me that it was a beautiful, slow-building horror.
Eventually he came to the centuries-old ruin of a church, long-abandoned, and knew that he was completely alone. This meant he had been deceived into coming here.
But that’s not all! He entered the spooky ruins and witnessed…
(creeping dread, suspense, etc.)
...two men having sex.
This is the thing that breaks him. He flees for his life, collapsing to his knees and — [rolls this into a big ball + shoots it into a wastepaper bin]
This was so fucking goofy. My god.
2. For some reason, Danny’s defining character trait was that during their first meal together, she offered Father Ardelian a piece of cheese on the blade of a knife. 🧀
This survived like five drafts. My editor kept commenting on it, and I kept putting it in. It was absolutely foundational to who she was as a character. In some manner, that cheese on a knife may even now subtly pervade the fabric of Danny's personhood.
“’Atta boy,” said Danny, offering me a piece of cheese on the blade of her knife, which I accepted with gratitude.
3. Implication that Lord Vane had been turning all of the other priests into sex slaves. ⛓
(There may be readers among you who feel heartbroken and betrayed by this cut.)
This is one of those instances where erotic power imbalance and tender romance are completely at odds with one another, and I decided to go with the option that left more room for romance — (let me know in the comments if you would have preferred I go harder?)
The following is a snippet from the early draft where Danny and Sylvia were men named Peter and Nathan.
Peter closed his eyes. “We’re already lost, there’s nothing you can do for us that we can’t do for ourselves. Every hundred years or so he emerges from that house to prey on every healthy young man on the island. Then he vanishes again.”
“I found records of invitations to other priests, centuries of them,” I said.
Peter nodded. “To pacify us. He has one around at all times, usually. It’s only that we threw the last one off a cliff.”
“What — what happens to them?”
“He makes them his thralls. You’ve done better than most, I have to say. I don’t think most of them last as long as you have.”
Join my Patreon to read the rest!
Support from patrons directly enables me to keep writing and,
in addition, gets you access to lots of frequently-updated
exclusive content like this post.
P.S.
Father Ardelian is in the running in a queer book character tournament! Straight away they’ve pitted my boy against Chuck Tingle. Are there enough of us to give poor Victor a fighting chance? (Voting ends tonight!)
Father Black, the eponymous character of my debut novel, The Sacred Sins of Father Black is also in the running.
I was an English major at a very catholic college and just realized that I somehow never actually read any Hopkins, despite hearing his name a lot. Boy, that's some artful repression right there!
GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS MENTION! He's my favourite poet of all time! You're right about the erotic repression, two of my favourite poems that follow the same theme in different ways is The Windhover and I Wake And Feel. The Windhover is probably my favourite of all time, and I've got it memorized. I Wake And Feel was the first poem I read of his which made me question if he was a homosexual (and google said I was right! So. Props to my literary gaydar?). I love it though. Everytime I read it I feel the need to get up and dance-run around my house in glee. I can't wait to reread the ebook version and find the references :) what a joy!