Taming the Beast, by Raquel Taylor

I recently read and reviewed Raquel Taylor's Cambion's Kiss, a book which I described as having "at first blush, very hot sex and absolutely ridiculous worldbuilding."

This seems to be a theme with Miss Taylor. Since her "contemporary" fiction was silly, I decided to see what she would do with historical fiction, in this case a book called Taming the Beast. The book starts off with an almost absurd premise: a late 17th century (that's what I'm assuming, given the milieu) merchant finds himself ruined by a corrupt local magistrate and he and his family are put up for sale as slaves, including his very beautiful daughter, Cher.

However, we are led to understand that underneath her beautiful and proper clothing Cher has secretly been visiting a wizend little man in town who has given her a very proper and annoyingly 20th-century collection of tats and piercings.

As it turns out, there's been a vast conspiracy, almost since Cher's birth, to turn her into an instrument of love and cruelty to break the will of the Master Of Werewolves and destroy the curse that follows all werewolves everywhere.

But the sex is hot, even if Cher's transition is quite unbelievable. She and the male protagonist (it is a Romance, after all) Donatein have really great sex, lovingly and viciously described complete with whips and chains and all that. Recommended if you want great sex and can ignore the cheap cardboard sets recycled from one too many Discovery Channel historical specials.

However, I have noticed another theme in Miss Taylor's work. In both books the villain is a homosexual man, can only get what he wants by force, and his victim of choice is a sibling of the protagonist: in the first, the male protagonist's brother, in the second it's the heroine's. The temptations to psychoanalyze Miss Taylor on this point are almost too great to bear.

"You're mocking me, aren't you?"

# find JournalEntries -type f -name '*.txt' -print0 | xargs -0 wc -w
557,204.

That's fully a quarter of my total output over eighteen years. I was looking through it last night and realizing just how much of it is missteps, abortive "Wouldn't it be cool if" stories, and a whole slew of scenes, snippets, and miscellany that I look over and tell myself that there's really nothing here, no dramatic tension, no literary value, not even decent erotic tension or revelation between many of the characters in the story.

Looking through my half-million words(!) of rubble, let's see: there's a story about the first starship designed to take dragons elsewhere, a germ of an idea about the Pendorians meeting a "United Federation" (a combination of Western libertinism, puritanism, and missionary zeal, Russian economics, Soviet organization, Arabian hospitality, and Chinese civil government; with just barely enough magical tech to keep median living standards marginally above early 21st century American upper class norms, with a teleological horror of "improvement" and "technological advancement," a society which actively works to restrain science from improving the human, uh, ritan model), a dead starship full of dead greys (which may harm Silver Rayne's chances), a novellette riff on The Machine Stops and The Naked Sun with rebellious teenagers, Sterlings (crud, that's 140,000 words right there, ain't it?), a Misuko & Linia vs. Cthulhu outing, a Brave New World riff, a Bottle City of Kandor riff, a mermaid story, Robots of the Deep vs. The Vampire Girl of Fallow Five, two different Encompassment stories, a discovery of who Pendor is at war with, a pair of Hell Simulation stories, some interstellar politics, a (really bad and not likely to see the light of day) riff on The Matrix that's another Hell Simulation story, a couple of Aaden, P'nyssa, and Wish stories, two Hellstrom's Hive riffs, and more!

And yet I can't seem to find most of this stuff interesting. I mean, when I look at some of these and see that the last time I touched them was three or four years ago, I wonder why I should bother.

Still, I have a couple ready for posting. I think my problem is simple: I find short stories easy, as long as their a particular kind of short story. In a post-abundance culture, the human animal has a problem: what do we do next, if anything? Many of my stories revolve around a simple theme: boys meets girl (or several other combinations) and convinces her (or him) that life is worth living, often appealing to various arbitrary atavisms (sex, food, whatever) for no other reason than that they're pleasurable and there's no reason to believe that post-transcendence pleasures will be any better.

It's when I break out into writing novels that I break out into a cold sweat. Novels are not in my comfort zone. And they shouldn't be. But I shouldn't be content to sit around in my comfort zone churning out porny love and redemption stories for the rest of my life. Which is why some of my work is reaching for that scale. It's just a little more intensive and nerve-wracking than what I usually do.

(Why is there no "whiny" mood?)

(Subject line explanation: In Toy Story, Buzz delivers that line, "You're mocking me, aren't you?" before he comes to realize that he is not destined for interstellar greatness but is, in fact, a limited, small, child's toy. It's a bit how I feel when I look at my working directory.)

"This song's Enya-like lameness is saved by the accordian player."

That has to fall into the list of most improbable sentences: "This song's Enya-like lameness is saved by the accordian player." It is, however, a true sentence when spoken of Kepa Junkera, a Basque accordian player rarely heard or known in the United States. (Heck, his Wikipedia entry is just a discography, and doesn't even include his latest album, Hiri, which is what I was listening to.)

All of the songs on Hiri are anchored in a cheerful, powerfully content musical theme that seems to be backed by traditional themes and songs. Most of them don't have lyrics but there is something powerfully lively and, well, grounded to all of these pieces. The second piece, Kiri, is the one that provoked my subject because it does sound like it could have been written by Enya except for the accordian, which completely salvages it and makes it worth listening to. The first piece is fun, done with voices-as-instruments that almost seems written with a "Hey, one of our bandmates can do this weird thing with her voice" notion in mind. The kids thought it was cool, shouting "Play that again!" from the back seats of the car.

There are many other moments on this album that are really fun. All in all, it's an oddity in a world of plastic packaging: an album that makes the accordion, usually regarded as an instrument of torture, into a fun, exciting and above all honest musical pleasure.