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Tired today.  But I don’t regret the pages yesterday.  I wrote until I was the rush left me.  If I had tried to stop it prematurely, the scene wouldn’t have flowed right.  No regrets, but damn I’m tired.  I have finally dragged my butt into work after five in the afternoon.  Late, very late for me to begin work.
I’ve decided no page count today, just see what I can get done.  Just keep the flow going.  That’s it.  The only goal for the day.  Though it means there will be a page count tomorrow, when I was going to give myself Sunday off.  Oh, well.  Trinity is with her father this weekend, and I need to make pages while we’re a kid-free zone.    Why don’t I take today off instead, you ask?  Because I promised myself progress today, and I will have some progress.  Never break a promise to yourself.  Never.   Not on anything large or small.  Keep your word to everybody, but especially to yourself.  So many of us seem to treat ourselves as less deserving of courtesy and kindness than strangers.  Don’t short change yourself.  Even if I get only a page or two today, I will have done what I said I’d do. 
Truthfully, part of the problem today is where I left off yesterday in the story line.  The last chapter ended with the promise of sex, and today I have to deliver.  I believe, sincerely, that having sex in person is easier (not less fraught with emotional and physical difficulties) but easier to communicate to another human being.  When you run your finger tips tickling light across someone’s skin, they feel it.  You don’t have to worry that they don’t understand what you’ve done.  Why you’ve done it in real life is often a puzzlement, but not what.  On paper, you have only words.  Only words to convey the wondrous sensations that play through the body during foreplay and sex.  Words are great, but they are no replacement for actual tactile sensation.  And on this one, a picture is not worth a thousand words, not really.  Even visual images don’t convey what you experience first hand.  Don’t even get me started on pornographic films.  I find them, almost without expectation, to fall far, far short of real sex.  I think it’s because I have this attitude that there’s got to be some emotional impact to sex, and most porn just doesn’t seem to care about emotion, or personal relationships.  A friend of mine says that I make things too important.  I think coming together physically should be important, or why the heck are you doing it?  But that’s just me.  Opinions vary.
I think one of the reasons that Merry is harder to write for me than Anita, is that Merry’s attitude towards sex is different from mine.  Not more causal.  She’s usually got life and physical safety of those nearest and dearest to her on the line.  No not more causal, but different.  I wanted Merry’s culture to see sex as something beautiful, with no sin attached.  I manage to write it on paper, but I am from a back ground where the message that sex was dirty, men were evil, and our bodies were bad, was ground into me.  Gee, can you imagine what I’d write if I’d been raised to believe that sex was wonderful, men weren’t the villains, and naked is just the way God made us?  A very different world indeed.
I’ve put Nine Inch Nails in the CD player (Downward Spiral).  It’s often Merry’s hard music.  As opposed to A YEAR WITH FROG AND TOAD, which seems to be A STROKE OF MIDNIGHT’s Christmas music.  It does have a Christmas song on it, but it’s just the music that makes me feel good even when I feel bad. 
I’m going to go try and put the right words on paper, to explain an experience that is so terribly personal.  So easy to write, his hand cupped my breast, but making a reader feel what those words mean . . . That’s the hard part.