Charlie J Forrest

Knowing how to handle drop is a really great thing. For the record I generally don’t advise going to work, staring blankly at a computer for 8 hours, and realizing the most emotionally honest conversation you’ve had all day is with a possibly magical slug.

This is sort of the background to my thoughts today post-Eroticon.

Two themes that ran, hand-in-hand through the conference (and headlong through my brain) were subversion and transgression. I’ve been worrying a little lately that some of my writing hasn’t been scratching that deep cathartic itch I get.

There’s a trio of stories I wrote a while ago under the rather daft title “The Woes of Nelly” (I’m currently looking for a freelance title-writer-generator, preferably one who’ll work in exchange for slugs). I’ve been in two minds about them ever since I wrote them. A friend once described them with the fantastic line “I’m not reading that you fucking weirdo!” and I’m rather inclined to agree. Except that, unaccountably, I’ve never carried out my plan of pulling them from the shelves. In part it’s because the damned things sell better than all the stuff I’m prouder of. But I realised this weekend that there’s something else. Something drove me to write these uncomfortable stories and to hide them away wouldn’t just be cutting out a well-performing set of products, it’d be hiding something away, perhaps something that’s better off dragged out into the light, like a fat slug on a summer morning.