For various reasons that I know I won’t be able to fully articulate, I’m admitting my own insanity in public. Maybe it’s an underlying egomania that wants you all to know just how hard I really am working at this writing “thing” this month.As a matter of fact, the number of words you see for my NaNoWriMo ticker is actually roughly double that. Yes. I’m writing TWO projects during the month of November. For a variety of reasons, I decided I wanted to see what would happen if I split myself in two and honestly went at work on two projects with my two different writing personae.

The first project I can talk about openly and freely because it’s a literary fiction piece that involves a regular sort of person dealing with extraordinary events in her life. Her husband is in an accident and put in a coma for twelve weeks. During those twelve weeks she has quite a few personal ups and downs, though I’m not yet sure what they will all be as I’m still just writing that. The story will ultimately focus on the time after her husband has returned home and is re-entering family life. My sixteen year old rolled her eyes and told me something to the effect that it had to be literary fiction because it was depressing and serious. She continued with telling me that everything I write is disturbing.

That was certainly the case for the novel I wrote two years ago that is on an editing hiatus. I got the insight I needed to fix it a while ago, but haven’t gotten around to opening it up and re-writing the entire novel from a different point of view and in retrospective instead of current time. This approach fixes that whole pesky “Unreliable Narrator” problem I was having trying to write about a teenager going through a heartbreaking and self-destructive time.

The other novel I’m writing is under a different name that, so far, only my hubby and a friend or two know. It shouldn’t surprise anyone who knows me well that I am interested in writing romantic smut. Okay, okay, the term I prefer is “erotica” because it’s well written and there is a story to what I write. But, the last thing I really want to have happen is for someone to do a search on the Rockenbeck last name and have it connected with such overtly adult material. Let’s say it’s somewhere between the low-level Harlequin Blaze program and Anne Rice’s Beauty series in it’s level of content.

I find myself wanting to be in the open about this somewhat covert activity more keenly because of the recent elections. My mind has been a-whirl with some of the campaign rhetoric of people who scare the hell out of me on any number of levels. I know that a lot of people made fun of Christine O’Donnell when she put up the commercial declaring “I’m not a Witch, I’m just like You.” Well, no, ma’am you most certainly are not just like me. I’m far more concerned with her up-tight Victorian-era rigidity and fear of sex and can no longer stay completely mum about my own views on the subject. (See this link for more…)

Unless people like me–normal Americans with homes, families, two cats, two cars and a garage admit that sex (and even “GASP” masturbation) is part of our normal daily lives, people like that are just going to gain ground politically and socially. Their anti-sex, fear mongering, anti-homosexual, anti-freedom rhetoric is cloaked by their use of the American flag and their so-called claims to God and country.

I, for one, am sick of it. So, every once in a while, I will make references here and there to my other, still mostly closeted persona. And, I won’t be afraid to mention sex here. No worries about me getting graphic on wordpress, but neither will I be utterly complicit by my continued silence.