A Muse to Live For - Official Excerpt Sneak Peek

 I had meant to post this to my Wix Website first, but the Interwebs is so slow today that I will put it here instead. Here's Muse's official excerpt. It's sensual and bittersweet, I hope, like the rest of the story.

London, 1884.

An artist lives to create. When Nathaniel’s urge to paint died, so did his will to live.

Until the night he meets Gabrielle.

Gabrielle may be just a poor prostitute, but she has the beauty of a Pre Raphaelite stunner, and the otherworldly aura of a fallen angel. She also has a secret. Gabrielle is Gabriel, and when Gabriel’s dark past comes knocking and Gabrielle must abandon her new career as an artist’s model, Nathaniel’s whole world comes crashing down again.

Better to die than living without her love, and the breath-taking creative drive she brought him.

But it’s dead easy to die for a woman. Any fool can die for a woman. To live for her, that takes altogether more courage, doggedness and imagination.

COMING SOON from Evernight Publishing 

... a book with my soul in it...

❤️💔❤️

Official Excerpt:

I am not sure how to touch Nathaniel. I want him to kiss me again, I want him to hold me, I want him to look at me that way he does in his studio, when he watches every line of my body and sees a woman. And at the same time, I wish he would see me for what I am, all that I am, once and for all, so I don’t have to hide anymore.

So I shed my jacket, and the blouse underneath. I shiver a little in the cold when my arms are bared, and he runs his warm palms on my goosebumps, soothing them.

Then I stand to unbutton my skirts and petticoat, and untie my bustle, and I let it all swish down around my knees, and I stand here naked, in my small chemise, and stockings and corset, and my boots.

I am still silk-skinned and woman shaped.

Except for that one thing.

I steal a glance at his face—I can hardly bear to look at his eyes, standing here so naked—thinking he will wince, or frown. Or scream, what do you know. You can never tell, with a sensitive artistic temperament.

But he does none of these things.

Instead he goes to his knees on the floor, like a man about to propose in some play, and with a sort of mute reverence he strokes my thighs and my buttocks, and the back of my knees, through the stockings. When he lays a kiss and then his forehead on the hard of my hip, where the bone pokes sharply under my skin, I put my hands on his crazy hair, and hold him there, and with the barest, lightest touch of his fingertips he caresses the front of my corset, on my belly, and then down, down.

And to my acute embarrassment, the damn thing shivers to his touch, stiffening, rising.

Well. He has certainly seen me, now. He really has.

He is not screaming.

I pull him to his feet and I step out of my puddled skirts, and gently I undress him. Jacket and shirt and trousers and drawers, socks, everything.

He is as tall as I am, which I had never noticed, because he always stands with his head bent and his shoulders slumped. He’s not muscular, but there is no fat on him either. He has well-built bones under his lumpy clothes—he badly needs a good tailor—and he would be rather handsome if he held himself straight, with his chin up, and didn’t look so much at odds with himself. He’s pale, but not as pale as I am, and there is just the merest spray of hair on his chest.

I caress his skin all over as I undress him, and he looks transfixed, as if it had never occurred to him that it takes two to dance this dance. Perhaps he thought I’d make him spend the night on his knees adoring me.

The heat of his skin is like a deep current, and it draws me to him.

We stand here mute, the only sounds the drumming of the rain and the swish of falling clothes, and gently kissing lips.

When I push him to lie on the bed, I have a moment of dread that he might want to do that to me. I cannot have it. I will not be taken that way ever again.

I’ll make my living giving blowjobs for the rest of my days, I guess.

But I am not afraid of him. I do not believe he’d be capable of hurting a fly, let alone me.

“So, do you fancy that blowjob, finally?” I whisper in his ear, smiling, but he holds me close, too close for me to slide down along his body.

“I love you,” he whispers, his lips on my ear, so that words are made into a caress, “I love you, I love you.”

“Hush,” I whisper back, bearing down on him, grinding my cock on his. “Don’t say such things. It cannot be. It can’t.”

“This night, this once, please, let me say it. I love you, I love you, I love you.” His body rises to meet mine, and I feel those tears spilling now, with joy, and grief, and pity. Pity for him, for me, for both of us, lost in this narrow garret under the drumming rain, orphans in this storm, desperately naked in this terrible iron city.

“Only this once, then,” I whisper. “Tomorrow, you must forget.”

And before he can answer or kiss me again, I slip out of his arms, and down, along his chest and belly, so he cannot see me cry.

I have pleasured so many men this way, but never one I loved, and maybe it’s the same thing, and yet it’s something altogether different. He’s all silk and warmth and heaving life and fire pulsing, and his flesh matters to mine, so that my whole body loves his.

“You—don’t—have—to do this,” he whispers at first, but then he surrenders finally, and lets the pleasure take him.

I told him, the first time we met, that I’d do him for free. Who would have guessed, then, that I would end up doing him for love?

And I don’t know if he’s a virgin—but he is indeed quick. His cock grows even tauter on my tongue, and he breathes in short, hard gasps a few times. When his body arches and heaves and his hand fumbles at my cheek, I hold him, and hold him, and hold him… He comes with a broken moan, hotly. I swallow it all.

On the street I never do. But here, now, with him, I could not bring myself to spit.

You can also read the beginning of the first chapter here.

Favourite thing I’ve written and why #evernighties

Dear readers, the Evernight Authors have banded up for a year-long blog challenge, with a new prompt every Thursday meant to encourage our tired brains to post more creative and interesting content (or so we hope). So here I go with my first post, and it's a whopper, if I say so myself.

I am always utterly in love with whatever I write. I cannot write in a lukewarm, premeditated, mechanical way. But my favourite things are certainly Woman as a Foreign Language and A Muse to Live For.

Having to choose, I will go with Muse. Both of these two stories belong to my loosely interconnected transgender trilogy (Spice & Vanilla being the middle book), and both have a strong autobiographical streak, but whereas WaaFL’s main character, Nina, is based on a much younger version of me, Nathaniel, the hero in A Muse to Live For is an alter ego much closer to my present self, and he allowed me to put into words a whole scary lot of emotions that had nowhere else to go.

I have always been attached to the concept of “muse”, muse as a specific person, not muse as a disembodied, psychological state of creative fervour, because I always very much felt it on my skin.

A muse is different from an inspiration... you pick an actor or a model to give a face to a character, that happens all the time, and it can be wonderful, it can bring a character to life in ways you had not anticipated... but a muse you don't pick. It barges in your life when you least expect it and turns your vision upside down ... A muse brings you to places, creatively, that you had never imagined or suspected before.

It is mystery, and magic. It is wonderful, compulsive, and terrifying. Sometimes it's all you can do to hang on and hold it together, while your puny talents are used to try and express something much, much too big. Where does it come from? I do not know. It is a power not of this world, and when it leaves, it leaves you in pieces.

It makes me laugh to read the “experts” saying "there is no muse, only habit". Poor bloodless saps, if only they knew.

Having been thoroughly “mused” in the last eighteen months, and having gone through the most intensely creative period of my life after four years of writer (and painter) block, I felt this topic to be especially poignant.

I wanted to write about the fearsome, transforming magic of true inspiration, the powerful and entangled feelings and flows of energy that bind an artist to their muse, and the devastating depression that can result from the loss of all this.  How to describe a relationship that includes elements of love, obsession, and a sort of mystical reverence, but also a kind of fear, and a harrowing sense of dependence? Because if an artist is not creating they become an irrelevant person. They might as well not exist.

And how to convey the astonishing disconnect between an artist’s perception of their muse as something noble, pure, almost supernatural, and the everyday, down-to earth, flawed, fragile human reality of the person who, for some mysterious reason, carries this inexplicable power of inspiration, and is often as puzzled as they are flattered by the artist’s fascination?

And how to morph all this creative/destructive power into the deliriously wondrous ever-after that such energy can fuel, once released?

The choice to base the book in Victorian times was partly due to the fact that I wanted my artist to be innocent of the revolting cynicism brought to poetry, art and literature by Freud and his minions. But I also specifically wanted to write a Pre Raphaelite, if not one of the original Brotherhood, at least an associate of the second Pre Raphaelite movement. I have a veneration for Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who also, undoubtedly, knew the power of a true muse first hand. 

It was strange how many eerie coincidences kept cropping up between my characters’ story and Rossetti’s life, which I only researched more extensively while writing the book, culminating perhaps, with a line he wrote to his mistress and greatest inspiration, Jane Morris, when she was away in Germany, “…no one else seems alive at all to me now, and places that are empty of you, are empty of all life…”. When I discovered this, it gave me the queerest shiver, because I had used almost exactly the same words in my story, and because that is the absolute and terrifying truth of it all.

I do not know if a Muse to Live For is able to express all this in any coherent or intelligible way—there was so much emotion, and words can only do so much—and somehow wrap it into a beautiful, and believable love story. But I gave it my best shot, and such as it is, it is my most beloved story to date. It will be coming soon from Evernight.

Book News, A Muse to Live For

What happens when a gender-queer romance meets with the author's lifelong obsession with D. G. Rossetti, his stunning models, and the great poets of the 19th century?
Hopefully, good things.
The "Victorian Story" was at first called Paint Me True, and it originated from a curiously vivid and "well narrated" dream I had pretty exactly a year ago. I filed it under "future short stories" and left it at that, because I was writing Spice & Vanilla and I was completely taken up by it.
And it was to be a short story (of course) and very straight(forward) (of course). Easy peasy.
Well, unfortunately (?) I am crap at anything easy-peasy, so when I actually started to tinker with it last February,  the tale immediately grew in the telling, especially when it appeared that it could be connected to Spice & Vanilla, however tenuously, so that it became the third installment of my "transgender trilogy". After that there was no chance of keeping it simple. Ahem.
Despite the gender queer aspect however, the core of the story is the artist's experience, his inspiration, and the obsession, passion and depression that go with it, a topic that is very very deeply rooted in my own soul and experience.
Sometimes the story became a strange almost supernatural experience. The more I read and wrote about Rossetti the more eerie coincidences I found.

It is also a very, very heartfelt love story. I love it passionately, and I think that together with Woman as a Foreign Language it is my favorite piece of writing ever.
I made many character sketches for this story, mostly of Gabriel/le, not surprisingly,  but also of Nathaniel, although he is very much my alter-ego and didn't like to have his picture taken.

London, 1884.

An artist lives to create. When Nathaniel’s urge to paint died, so did his will to live.

Until the night he meets Gabrielle.

Gabrielle may be a just a poor prostitute, but she has the beauty of a Pre-Raphaelite stunner, and the otherworldly aura of a fallen angel. She also has a secret. Gabrielle is Gabriel, and when Gabriel’s dark past comes knocking and Gabrielle must abandon her new career as an artist’s model, Nathaniel’s  whole world comes crashing down again.

Better to die than living without her love, and the breath-taking creative drive she brought him.

But it’s dead easy to die for love. Any fool can die for love. To live for it, that takes altogether more courage, doggedness and imagination.

#transgenderromance #queerromance #crossdresser

Model for Nathaniel is Henry Ian Cusick. Model for Gabriel/le, Danila Kovalev... as always. I am struck by how much Danila K. resembles Rossetti's models, and often, when describing Gabriel/le in the story I found myself using contemporary descriptions of Lizzie Siddal and Jane Morris.And once, I discovered, which was both beautiful and rather unsettling that Rossetti and I had picked exactly the same words, independently, because I am sure I had not read that before, to describe the agonizing separation from our muse and love... Writing this story has been indeed a strange experience...

Here's a few pages from the beginning of the story, just to get in the mood of it...

(unedited)

A Muse to Live For

Chapter One

London, November 1884

Nathaniel

A mirror is an awful thing to have about one’s home.

One can, with care, go about life lightly, without knowing of one’s own existence, which is not a bad state of affairs, considering. Invisible and insensible, one can live on. In a manner of speaking. I, of course, have been a dead man for five years. But one can go on, in a way. In a sort of muffled darkness. Careful not to make a sound, or raise any dust.

Until one has to shave. The mirror stares back at me haggardly, telling the whole tale over again.

Dead. Dead to the world, and buried in these two darkened rooms.

It is fairly poor taste to disturb the dead, and I resent the intrusion as much as any dear departed would. If only Henry would let me lie in peace.

This mania for the music hall has become a perpetual nuisance. Hardly a month passes that I don’t have to go through this torment. It’s Henry’s way of doing me a kindness, or so he says. Says it will cheer me up. It doesn’t. It’s sickening. But I go anyway, because Henry’s ruckus if I don’t go is worse. Not in the amount of noise and exertion perhaps, but it’s more personal. At the music hall, I just float away. It’s just noise.

It might be easier to go and spend one and a half penny at the barber shop; but I dislike the man’s hands on me; he chatters without pause; his suspiciously pliant and universal political views annoy me; and besides, I’d have to walk the length of the road in my current state of unkempt overgrown shagginess. Worst of all, I would have to pass Mrs. Crabwood’s parlor downstairs. She thinks unshaved men should come and go through the traders’ door, which I would not mind, as such, but her reproving look would be unbearable.

I wish people were not so ready and eager to look me in the eye. If eyes are windows in the soul, should we not grace them with some privacy? There’s not one person on this earth whom I’d want to know my soul, and me theirs.

No, better to face the soulless mirror, and my own darkness. Marginally better, at least. I find scissors and snip unevenly away, before taking up the razor. The scissors are blunt like everything in here, and each cut pulls the skin, as if niggling at the puckered proud flesh over a half healed scab.

The scab being me.

It’s a twenty minutes-walk to Henry’s, most of it along the river. In summer it would be a pleasant walk, under the spreading plane trees, with the boats plying on the sunny water. Now my boots plash softly into sodden fallen leaves, and slick horse muck. Still, the bare trees looming in the mist have a gaunt beauty, and for a moment, the briefest moment, I wish I had a pencil and a sketching pad with me, to jot down the twisting, muscular forms of their outstretched limbs.

Time was when I never went anywhere without paper and pencils. But that man is long gone.

I am just in sight of number 16, Rossetti’s house—he’s gone these last two years, poor tormented soul, with all his women and his menagerie, may he rest in peace—when a gentleman in a dark coat steps out of a cab not two yards from me and hands out an elegant lady, who turns around to shake out the folds of her gown and unwittingly looks me right in the eye. I shudder, hurrying on.

Really. I mean it. If it’s true that eyes are windows in our soul, why do we look people in the eyes? How many people have you ever known that you’d want to share your soul with? One? Two? Twenty? Fifteen thousand? Or maybe none at all?

****

Gabriel

There is this to be said for my profession.

I can sleep in.

That unspeakable time of day, the early hours of the morning, when the whole world trudges along the streets with dead eyes and heavy feet, on to another day of toil, is spared to me.

I see the tiredness of the world at the other end of the day. But by then it’s dark, and there is not much to see, and the tiredness has a different flavor. To me, that’s mostly the flavor of a man’s spendings, which I mostly spit on the pavement. You get used to it. You get used to almost anything, given time.

Darkness or no, I must be seen of course. I am the one in the stolen foggy spotlight of the lamppost’s golden halo. But the darkness outside stares back blankly, and mostly I like it that way. I have seen enough of the world to last me a lifetime. My business needs the night, in any case.

I wish I could say my bed is warm and comfortable, but mostly it’s lumpy, damp and cold. But it’s mine and quiet, here at the top of the silent house. Mrs. Gride doesn’t like noise. She says it makes her temples ache, which is all stuff of course, but still, we all creep about as quiet as mice. No, much more quiet than mice. They do not listen to Mrs. Gride’s injunctions about walking along the drugget, talking in a low voice and making no sounds. I can hear them chewing and scrabbling behind panels and wainscots at night, when the house sleeps, and I come home to my lonely room. Usually they are the only ones to welcome me back. I’m always the last one to return. I feel a bond of likeness with them. We all live at the edge, behind screens. It doesn’t stop me from throwing shoes at them when they cross the room too boldly, or go close to my wardrobe. I have little enough as it is. The mice will have to nest elsewhere. I am not a charity institution after all.

In the morning the bed has a narrow strip of warmth in the middle, a stripe exactly as wide as my body, and I must not move, lest I stray on the flabby cold linen outside, but still, eventually I find the nerve to reach out and fetch my cigarettes, and light the first of the day. I smoke it in bed, my one and only indulgence. I have become adept at smoking in bed without shedding ashes on the sheets or setting myself on fire.

I watch the thin, ghostly, white smoke curling and floating towards the pale grey skylight, swirling into a puff of breath. It’s likely to be the most beautiful thing I’ll see all day.

I have a small pile of work to do for the girls downstairs, so I finally heave myself out of bed. I don’t ask money for these small jobs. By tacit agreement, I help out and the girls close an eye on my strangeness. It works very well for all involved.

Later, much later, in the light of a single candle, I shave at my little mirror (an evening ritual, for those like me). As usual I give fervent thanks that nature hardly gave me any beard to shave. Then I shed my trousers and my waistcoat and my shirt and wear my other things.

The stockings, which need mending again, but will do for one more night, in the dark, a small chemise. Then I put on my boots, with small heels and about a thousand fucking tiny buttons. They are old, second hand or third, like everything I own, but well-greased and waxed and buffed to a sheen. It’s cold out there, and wet.

And then my tight, tight corset. It needs some fancy bending to lace it up by myself, but I am limber. I pull the laces as tight as I can around my waist, feeling the shape of me change, like some creatures are said to change in the light of a full moon. The core of the corset is whalebone and steel, stiff like armor. It knows my true shape better than my body does. It hardly needs padding at the chest, hard as it is, but it suits me to pad it anyway, for the weight of it, with two silk cravats I keep for the purpose, so old, worn so soft by use, so waxy with the damp of my skin, that they almost melt to my chest. My skin is all tingling now, and it’s not the cold. Silk and steel hug me so close, so much tighter than my day clothes. I am almost naked, and yet every bit of me is more defined and clear, like I have come into sharper, truer focus in the searching eye of a telescope.

I paint my lashes and my eyelids, black and black, to make my eyes shine. I paint my lips red. That marks me as the whore I am, and I don’t mind.

I am what I am.

My wig hangs from the corner of the wardrobe. Freshly brushed, the blonde hair shines in the candlelight and waves like a ghost in the faint breeze as I open the wardrobe door. Maybe the ghost of the woman whose hair it is, who knows. She might well be dead. I don’t know what would be creepier, to wear the hair of a dead woman or the hair of a live one. Still, I’m stuck with the wig for now. I am not pleased with the color, which does not mix with my dark hair. But I got it almost cheap in Middlesex Street. It was the sort of bargain where nobody asks too many questions.

I wear my violet skirt over a small horse-hair bustle and a blouse and tight bodice. I don’t button this all the way up, but I put on a shawl, for the cold. The wig, which in summer would hitch and sweat, is almost a comfort now. I look at my mirror one last time as I tie my hair in a loose chignon at the nape of my neck, and stab it through with a horn comb. No pins.  I learnt the hard way not to trust a man around a hairpin. The mirror is too small to see much. My pale face, the dark circles of my eyes, the red lips, the ghostly locks. All the rest I can only imagine.

But that is my life. Imagining myself, conjuring myself into existence … especially the parts that don’t fit in the narrow, narrow picture.

A MUSE TO LIVE FOR

Coming

2019