The Kindness Bench for SimLit Writers - For All Games!

Eight Cicadas has a lot of death and a lot of sex and relationships hinging on getting it on. I actually was reading the Art Commune thread and getting a little antsy just reading others' answers on the recent subjects of death and (a)sexuality, so how fitting.

I've had to watch a number of family members deteriorate and die, and while I was wise enough not to get into the usual end-of-life arguments (accommodations and care, religious stuff such as Last Rites, funeral details, the will, etc), I observed and always hated all the fighting that was outside of the dying persons' control. My poor great-grandmother, rest her soul, had to slowly die while watching fights between her kids and grandkids that we almost had to call the police for. It was bad. And on top of that, she wasn't asking to die. She had a bunch of relatives (like my brother and I, who were young and cute back then) that she gladly would have kept living for, had it been in her control.

It probably colored a tasteless and disturbing view of death I had as a teenager, where I wanted to avoid that drama at all costs. And when I felt everything was out of control, I wanted my own death to be in my hands. I felt wronged by the world and those around me, and wanted my death to be a controlled middle finger to leave with. Or a controlled middle finger to myself. You're self-harming, have a newly-diagnosed seizure disorder, and might never be able to drive? This is what you deserve!

So here I am five years later, writing Cicadas, half-romanticizing the idea of dying on your own terms as mortal main character after mortal main character downs a bottle of pills or drowns themselves and their newborn in the tub, and mostly showing the tragic buildup and collateral on those still living.

It's a culmination of six-eight years of growing out of the mindset and listening to others...just a little bit. There's a lot of both sides: being a nihilist and treating death as cheap and morally-ambiguous, and showing the honest and messy process of mourning. Because there's been a lot of back and forth between others and I about death and suicide over the years, and I think we both miss a lot of each others' sides. My parents often "guilted" me with their feelings on if I died, and I try my best to consider those both in real-life and in my fiction, but sometimes I default back to "I've heard about you, but what about me?" And it's weird to talk to other readers and hear lots of pity and compassion for the survivors and ambivalence for the dead, whereas I feel a lot of compassion for who I kill. I try not to do suicide without buildups, because a part of me still wants to make it clear that there's gotta be some suffering that is worse than death.

Eight Cicadas also doubles as a super-dark sex comedy when it's not being nihilistic about death. Anyone who's gotten past Chapter 50 probably sees the full extent of it. Annette is a worrying specimen who has both a clear bad history with sex, yet still centers her life around it. Hypersexuality is far from uncommon. And even beyond the dirty stuff, I have a way I like to portray relationships. They're passionate yet shallow. The focus, for me, is always on touch and cuddles and affection and acting more like teenagers in love than, well, actual adult couples I know.

Of course I've talked to others about relationships in real-life, and I've observed too, but there's always a riff. For a while, I blamed it on "well, I'm gay and most of the people I know aren't. Straight people are so weird." But there have been plenty of people who were cool with that and not so much when I had a one-track mind that focused on sex and affection. People get weirded out by my thoughts on sex. Ex-partners have. I used to think it was strange that it wasn't on their minds 100% of the time. I know I'm not normal, but I thought I was at least a little normal there!

It gets personal where I have this fear of being the 40 or 50-something year-old in a relationship, and it turning affectionless. Not even loveless, but the "sleeping in separate beds, rarely sharing even a kiss, no matter how they feel about each other" thing. But instead of confronting my fears, I just project them into my writing! Which is why you have Annette, Amy, and Sinbad all in their 50's and pursuing a raunchy polyamorous relationship anyways. Or how Bill was anywhere from his 50's to his 70's while with Annette and almost every scene with them ended in a kiss or a cuddle, or the implication that they wanted to do it right afterwards. Heck, Shark and Harwood were (probably) put together just to confront my subconscious fear of the same happening but later in life. Not that I have any plans to pursue 20-somethings while well into my 70's, but having copious amounts of gay snuggling then? Please. And why my plans have a lot of "x character get into sexy, passionate new relationship at age 45-55, continues indefinitely."

But I guess nowadays I do it with a lot of irony and further nihilism? Especially in regards to Annette. I'd actually worry for anyone who thought that she was an example of a healthy sexual person. Of course not! She uses sex and physical affection as a quick band-aid over this giant emotional gash in her. Life's falling apart and your husband's dead? That's no excuse to not get back in the sack. But other characters fall into the trap. The first thing I wanted to show Franco and newly-adult Hannah doing is getting ready for some fun under the sheets, because as much as I like them as a couple, are they really that healthy in their sexual urges? Or is it just to mask mourning or the effects of abuse? Shark's obsession over Harwood was rooted largely in sex and physical intimacy, even if I mostly just left that up to interpretation.

I try to laugh at myself about it. I've put myself in a lot of terrible, borderline-dangerous situations because I wanted to scratch that itch in any way possible. So instead of getting help, I make a black comedy out of it by projecting those urges onto my characters and making a statement about it.