The Stories Behind The Fly Girls, IV.

We're about halfway there, folks.

A quick update on the book: It's currently the 5,358th ranked title on lulu.com, which is actually not bad at all. I'm only about halfway towards my original sales goal though, and things seem to be slowing down. So please--PLEASE--if you've purchased the book, and you dig it, spread the word. And please--PLEASE--if you've purchased the book, and you dig it, share that information with me. I'd love to post some of the responses folks are having to the poems.

That said...let's do some liner notes:

21. Lunares -- This is a lot of people's favorite, and it's certainly one of mine. Cindylu is one of those great friends that I don't actually know, have never actually met, but am still amazingly inspired by her. I've already mentioned Travel Hailu in a previous post, so you get a sense of the basic organizing principle for this one--haiku. Cindy asked for a poem about lunares (or birthmarks), and I went ahead and didn't research the history of the phrase. I ended up coming kind of close though, and with a poetic term like that, and form like haiku, it's kind of hard to go wrong.

22. Jellyfish -- This might be the weirdest poem I've ever written. I was told to write about having sex with a jellyfish. So I did. Write about it. Not do it. I took it as a challenge, and my main character ended up taking it as a challenge too. The rest is history. Bizarre history.

I just thought of something else about Lunares -- it has found its way, in excerpted form, into Tyree, which is, as loyal readers know, the sequel to Guernica. That's all.

23. Fly Girls: Read Me -- This was based on RGV's answers to my questions about dreams and fears and all that good stuff. She was kind of close to a lot of my own inner workings, so the piece just sort of poured right out. I did sneak in some of her personal stuff--references to her relationships with men and her need to allow herself weakness. I really enjoy writing from a woman's perspective, both in poems and in plays--even when they take me to places pretty distant from myself. Maybe especially then.

24. Munchies -- Man, just remember that not all these poems are autobiographical. Some of them are. This one might be. This one also might not.

25. Good Loving: A Sketch -- Someone said to write about good loving, and I almost wrote about the H-Town classic Knockin' The Boots, but opted to go in the sketch direction instead. The term good loving (and its dirtier cousin, good lovin') always feels raw and filthy to me, but there was a strong need not to go full-out in that direction in this one. And besides, thinking about the rawest, filthiest moments I could imagine or remember, they always came back to being madly, wildly, truly in love with the other person involved. And that lead to this.

More soon.