The Fifty Foot Dream Lobster Versus the Evil Limpets

Author's Note: This is an emotionally fraught piece that's very uncomfortable for me to read. Nevertheless, it has some very powerful insights into the real dynamics of DANNY and, much as I would like to leave it out, I think it should be included because it probably contains more information on the 'true motivations' of DANNY, and its sub-textual ambiguities, than anything else I have ever written on the subject. It has been substantially edited down from the original blog which only ran 24 hours then was deleted from my blog site - so please forgive the odd 'clunk' where large portions have been removed. The "old fans" it refers to was an early minority group of readers whose only interest in DANNY was as 'gay erotica' and who inadvertently, and occasionally maliciously, plugged into my self-doubt. It took me a long time to realise that people can miss the point, both intentionally and unintentionally, and that is not my fault or responsibility. It was they who coined the phrase "just pornography" while describing the book.

I'm in the baddest of bad places with DANNY right now. Because of all the child abuse work I'm doing I seem to spend all my time discovering chunks of the book in my life. It's frustrating that Volume 4 is not released because I'd like to talk about it, about how many things have come out in it directly (like the recent living room floor rape scene) but I can't. One, because no-one knows what I'm talking about and two, because it would both spoil the plot and run the risk of 'explaining' too much.

I called a halt to editing DANNY because I needed to sort out the personal stuff first, if only because it was so strongly tied in and I couldn't do one without the other.

Now I'm in a funny place. A not comfortable funny place, an unhappy funny place. What I've embarked on now is like taking a truth serum for the book.

Perversely, it's not the ways my life crosses with the book that are disturbing, not of themselves. No, what is disturbing is the ways it doesn't.

Danny & John, how I've come to hate the very sound of their names. I fear them as if they were some kind of evil spirits sent just to find me out. I feel as if they are going to expose me. I have been outed as the child abuser and they my victims.

The truth is I have a nauseating fear in my gut that I've done something horribly wrong to them. I've lied in the worst possible way. I've bought into every myth, family, public and social, I could and turned out "just pornography" with no emotional or philosophical (for want of a better word) redeeming features at all.

Danny & John is, are, in broad strokes (very broad, they're a little more complicated than this) my relationship with my father and my relationship with myself. Now, until very recently I did not even suspect (liar)... Okay, let's try that again. Up until recently I did not know, really seriously entertain, that my father might have actually, physically, sexually abused me. I had always known (well, for a long time known) about the emotional incest. I lived with it every day, other people noticed it and that helps to validate it. It's not as 'secret' as actual incest and that helps fix it in your brain as a reality.

Now I've always 'understood' the double-sided nature of Danny & John and likewise I've never been wholly comfortable with the John & Danny dynamic. It has always worried me that I was one of Freud's toy neurotics, a sad little girl in love with her father. My only saving grace has been that the idea of sex with my father is so repugnant I'd rather eat spiders. It makes my flesh crawl. On top of this I hate him. Understand, I don't use that word lightly. I don't hate my mother, for example, although I have my moments, and there are things about her, and what she did, that I hate, but I don't hate her. She was just the unhappy fuck-up that life made her, she did the best she could, mostly, with what she had and who she was. But him, I hate. Trust me, it's hate and it's getting worse.

As I'm one of those weirdoes that can't have sex with someone I don't like then my father is not only not in the running but he's the antichrist of sex for me. I'd rather have been interred in Dachau, and I've been to Dachau, walked through the gas chambers, seen the 'medical' experiment wards, so I don't talk idly here.

This hatred has always saved me. I can't be one of Freud's little sexist gems who love the jackboot in the face because I hate the motherfucker and his jackboots.

But now, here it is. Now I am seeing my life stretched out between the pages of Volume 4 like some ugly testimony of childish devotion. I watch mini-me, disguised as Danny, sucking up (literally) to The Adored One and I see every filthy thing I ever did with my father. It's no longer me and John. It never was. It's me and daddy and I'm loving it.

I am the little slut on the steps. My father was right all along. I've lied and lied and lied again. I loved him. I wanted it. Even at three. And I've made poor Danny act it out, over and over again, locking him into his own nightmare with a pretty bow on it to make it acceptable. I feel sick to my stomach.

And the old fans role in this fuck-up? Why are they so dangerous, so suffocating? Because they're surface feeders. All the pretty porn that DANNY is redolent with, all that salacious sex that I worked so hard to create, is what they want, their driving force. Some of them are not far removed from paedophilia themselves (yeah, the girlies can do it too - shocking, isn't it?). And they bequeathed me porn as primary goal - the very thing I had, ironically, tried to avoid by keeping it out of the gay market, the 'slash' market, not dressing it up in sex colours, trying to keep my publicity firmly rooted in the perverse, warped camp.

But it backfired on me, and a lot of it was my own fault. I listened to them. I even tried to adopt some of their needs into my web site and ended up putting myself right back in My Family - A New Way. No, Chancery, that isn't what really happened, you haven't written some searing account of familial dysfunction, what you've written is "just pornography" and therefore lies.

See how listening to your 'public' can really fuck you up? Don't do it, I warn you. Once you've got them they'll stick to you like limpets. Evil limpets. (Now, there's an image).

I don't blame them for any of this. This was my fault. I paid attention. I took it seriously. I listened to my new 'family', who had just the same ulterior motives as my family of origin. And I got very, very off-course.

I felt that if I gave myself a break with DANNY, lost the hangers-on and their constant feeding of shite as insight, I'd be able to see the book straight again. I could break free and see why it meant something. I'd be able to get back inside it, forget about their obsessions with erotica and beauty and romance and see every angle and plane of the dirt and disease that makes up its true skeleton. DANNY was never built out of romance, it was built out of shared pain and fear, corruption and betrayal, warped, fucked-up humans relating to each other like sexed-up automatons.

And now I'm telling you too much. But, hopefully, a lot of you haven't read it and this won't matter. Hopefully I'm not preaching to the badly-converted.

Deep breath.

Okay, sanely, in my quieter moments I hold onto this. John is only a small part my father. And it is open to debate whether he is truly my father or actually just the part of my father that makes up me. One thing I do know is that John is definitely the Dream Lobster. Time I told you what that is.

Once, under hypnosis, I found myself 'rescuing' my 'inner child' (she seems to be starring in a lot of these blogs). She was a small dragon (I kid you not - hey these are like dreams, you can't control them), but she had lost her flame. She could no longer breathe fire. She had been totally extinguished and was fading away, turning to ash in my arms. I started to cry because I couldn't save her and, wonder of wonders, she started to inch back to life. I couldn't believe it. The more I cried and held her (Christ, this is Californian) the stronger she grew. Only she didn't stop. She got bigger and bigger and bigger. And as she grew I grew with her until suddenly we metamorphosed into a huge lobster.

Trust me, Daliesque and comic as it may be, there's a lot to be said for being a giant lobster. I stalked across Manchester town centre lopping the tops off lampposts and people's heads. They weren't doing anything to me, understand, I just wanted to do it. It was vengeful anger and I was loving it.

This, then, is John. A huge fifty foot lobster lopping off people's heads just because he can, because he enjoys it.

He is it, I am him and together we are the Dream Lobster. We are united in revenge. We are kicking-in the faces of anyone who ever crossed us. We kill because we can. We do unto others as they would do unto us. And that is good.

And this is what I am fervently hanging onto right now. That John & Danny are just the two halves of my whole, desperately trying to mesh up together, and not me buying wholesale into my family's fantasy of me and my father as the perfect dream lovers. Yes, I've maybe taken on some of my father with this, yes I'm working him and me out, but underneath it all John and I are just I split in two. He is who I longed to be; big, powerful, ruthless, determined, selfish, destructive. John got to a point where he could stop being a victim, a toy. He got to a point when he saw through the lies. He got to a point where he didn't need anyone's approval or love. He got to a point where hurting people became a good thing because it was the only thing left that could save you.

And, please God, maybe it will save me yet.

So, any of you who have read or are thinking of reading DANNY, start praying now that I'm right and that I can come through this and find a reason to finish it. Otherwise we are all fucked - and that, my friend, will be all the fucking you'll get.