It’s All Just Sex Magick

Deb R. Lewis

When I was first working on this thing (which has always been called Oonagh–I’ve never known why, but there it is), I put the most naïve, passive, and boring parts of myself into Bridge, the main character, and surrounded her with characters that seemed larger than life. These were characters I admired and wished desperately to hang with for real (since I would never be one of them). It was a work of utter fantasy.

Grant Morrison is on record saying that his graphic novel, The Invisibles, was a hypersigil. He changed his appearance to that of the main character, put the main character into adventures, and these manifested in Morrison’s life, down to the broken ribs. Really, you should hear him tell it.

Now, elbows deep in the blood and guts of rewriting, I’m finding that I’ve actually met these types in real life (different costumes, perhaps, but the same personalities) and I’ve been up-ended in the same way as Bridge, thrust thru a personal paradigm shift (or three), only more difficult in that I didn’t have the safety nets the current draft offers. Further details are too tender to dissect here, but I’ll tell you the correspondences are so uncanny, I can’t just chalk it up to the hero’s journey structure.

Morrison has no need to rewrite The Invisibles (though the first few books feel like a bit o’ throat clearing…), but I do need to rewrite this book. The question for me, as a believer in certain types of magick is, do you fuck with such things? Am I redrafting an old working? If it hasn’t been published (or is it my satisfaction that matters?) is the working finished? Have the tumblers quit spinning? How many years before I know?

I ask, “Do you fuck with such things?” as if it were relevant—as I’m combing through, excising every damn thing that makes my pen itch, tightening what’s to be saved before I begin to expand and extend. It’s too late; I’ve begun. Change it to, “What happens when you fuck with it?”

It sounds like I’m just throwing the old f-bomb out there, but really, writing is very much like fucking. Excellent lover you excellent writer, you listen with your whole being: feel for the result of your cumulative strokes, for whether you’ve been doing one thing too long or racing too hard to the high point, biting a little too mean or not mean enough, and so on. Only now there’s an added variance—does the mojo feel right?

The test right now is to listen to the story. Fear nothing and listen hard.

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Spot illustrations for Fall/Winter 2023 issue by Dana Emiko Coons

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