I feel like writing a long post about marriage and sex and feminism and sex and writing and sex.  Would you read it??   Ha.   I feel like it, but I can’t find the time or energy. 

I’m finding it difficult to blog like I used to and want to.  I guess it’s because I’m writing more in real life – I mean, actually WRITING, like words on page, as opposed to when I was “writing” my other books which was mostly research and constructing an argument and piecing it all together and footnoting and editing and rewriting.  A lot of busy work which ultimately added up to a lot of pages.  

Lately, I write fiction every day.  Sometimes for an hour, sometimes all day long.   But it’s mostly writing and it’s draining – intellectually and emotionally.  At first, I was still getting distracted by research, especially since one of my projects is a historical novel.  It’s easy for me to slip into historian mode and do research and compile facts and read about other people’s lives, dead people, from history.  

It’s harder to read fiction and then to figure out how to write it.  It’s hard to make things up – or, rather, to make them up and write them down in a way that makes them SOUND real… and interesting to readers.  And it’s hard to make up people – characters – that are emotionally complex.   All my writing energies are used up by the end of the day.        

I’ve been doing a lot of reading and thinking about writing ABOUT marriage and sex and feminism, which has me thinking about what I know and feel about those topics.  A lot, I’d like to think.  Is it really all that complicated?  Yes.  

I was reading an interview with a romance book author who was asked whether feminism is compatible with romance novels and why many feminists (and intellectual-literary types) disparage the reading AND writing of romance novels.  I myself have not read many romance novels, I have to admit, but I am interested in “scribbling women” and feminism and erotica… 

Anyway, the interviewee, the author, made the argument that there is nothing MORE feminist than women writing about women’s desires and women’s emotional and sexual fulfillment (because the heroine is *always* fulfilled in romance novels - it’s a requirement of the genre), in books primarily read by women.   Good point.   It’s just that, in the romance novels, those things come easily (no pun intended) and appear not to be complicated at all…