*whew!*

I just blew out the candles. A good night of writing. It's been about two weeks since I last sat down, and I was a little nervous getting started. But some great stuff came. I'm really putting a lot of myself into this book. So much so that I wonder if when it's done, will I have anything more to say? Will that be it for me? Will I have totally shown my hand? (Beyond what I do--way too much in the opinion of some of my friends and acquaintances--here in my blog.) In many cases, it's the synthesis of things that I've been thinking about and mulling over all my life. I was writing earlier about a line of thought that I started following one balmy afternoon in May when I got out of my college Ethics class.

I hope that when the book is done, and if it gets published, people who read it will see S/M and practitioners of S/M in a new way. This is a deeply spiritual path, or can be. (If you go in for that sort of thing .) All the elements of religious ritual can be found in one good S/M scene, entire and complete.

When I'm "done," it's going to be very difficult indeed to entrust it to an editor. That will involve putting myself out there, and opening myself up, in a way I've never done before. If anyone reading it were to come back with some critique like, "shallow, facile, self-evident, sophomoric" or what have you, I will be devastated. By implication, it will mean that I--and not just my book--am shallow, facile, and sophomoric. If it's someone I like and respect, that would kill me.

I hope I don't have a crisis of courage at the end that will lead this book to exist only on successive iterations of my hard drive. I also hope I find a publisher if I do find the testicular fortitude to let the world at large in on my private meditations.

And finally, I hope I get to go on a book tour. I really want to go on a book tour.

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