Life is pain!

Life is pain. I am one person split by responsibilities, desires, insecurities, feelings; who walks through the day's hours with aching hurts and frustrated plans, punctuated by bursts of happiness (every now and again). 

I go through routines, battered by duty, crippled by the pain of trying, desperately trying to find solitude in a life that has handed me a clearly-defined role to play; that of a female, in a world that is crowded and noisy and never lets up, never offers serenity, never celebrates female-ness, only seeks to define it and cage it. I live in a world that has defined the role of female as 'this' and 'that'. But I don’t want my femaleness to ‘tag’ me. I don’t want to play the role of female anymore. I want to quit.

I am chaotic but I love order and patterns; I hate violence but love writing about it; my novels are filled with male characters whose bodies I inhabit, but I am staunchly pro-women’s rights. I live in a writing world of inner debauchery but in real-life I am appalled by it. I am loving, but I loathe society’s expectations that females should be ‘nice’ and ‘kind’ and ‘submissive’. I love my female-ness and hate it too.

These schisms cause inner pain and this pain bleeds outwardly every single day.

I write to ease this pain and the novel-building/writing helps to soothe the lesions in my inner life. I am in full-on writing mode now…. in between the pain of living. I am writing about a woman whose analytical mind and utter ruthlessness makes her one of the most violent killers this country has ever seen. Her violence thrills me; the way she manipulates and metamorphoses from femme fatale to the testosterone-fuelled aggression any man is capable of, in the blink of an eye. I love her ability to feel absolutely nothing, but see everything, and to plot and scheme and her razor-sharp intelligence. 

Hezba, in The Hidden - http://tinyurl.com/pjhnuwe -  had plenty of this ruthlessness, this driven desire to break down the gender tag imposed on her. My new ‘femme’ character (as yet unnamed) is there, in my mind, smiling at me. She’s beautiful! Why? Because I love male and female beauty – the more unconventional the better - and want to live inside the mind and body of a beautiful person.  But what is making her so exciting to me, as she grows before my eyes, is the fact that she has within her a love of violence that I am trying to understand. And she will make me understand her……