I’ve been in and out of therapy since I was fifteen years old. That’s two-thirds of my life for those keeping track at home. I’ve been severely depressed since I was seven, which is, coincidentally or not, the same time I became aware that I would die one day. Once I realized that, I became obsessed with death, alternately horrified by and attracted to it. I haven’t made a secret of the fact that I’ve been suicidal most of my life as well. Suicidal is too harsh a word for it, though. It’s not as if I wanted to kill myself, per se; I just didn’t want to be alive. I was terrified of what was on the other side, however, so I stopped myself from crashing my car into the divider on the highway, from sitting in the garage with the door shut and the engine running, from submerging myself in a bathtub and never come out again. It’s been a long time since I’ve actively had to stop myself from doing something rash, but the thought it never far from my mind. Whether it’s, “I could end it all right now,” or, “Holy shit, I’m going to not exist one day,” death is hovering over me. I know it’s coming for all of us, but it feels so intimate and personal. When I was getting my MA in Writing & Consciousness fifteen years ago, my thesis was death, and every story I wrote for it had some element of death to it. It wasn’t as if I made a conscious decision to write about death, but that’s what interested me at the time.
To be honest, it’s still what interests me. I like reading and writing murder mysteries, and most of the fiction I write these days still centers around death. There might be some romance in it, but it’s secondary. Don’t get me wrong. I like writing a good sex scene as much as the next person, except, most people don’t write good sex scenes. They’re not easy to write, and it’s further hampered by the fact that many publishers won’t let you use the actual words for genitalia. Any time I read sex scenes, it’s ‘throbbing member’, ‘loins’ (sometimes even moist, which is so fucking gross), and ‘nether regions’ all over the place. Nary a penis nor a vagina in sight, let alone a dick, cock, or pussy. I don’t even read ‘tits’ much in literature. When I write sex scenes, I use explicit language because I think the euphemisms are silly. They take me out of the moment because who the fuck says, “I put my hand on his hardening member”?