Every day I sit at this desk, Simon automatically pulls up a chair beside me, does his whole Tap Tap Tap thing while nibbling on watermelon, swinging his legs, and casually tells me his agent thinks he needs to be in more stories.
Here’s a little secret. I’m a bit obsessed with The Farmhand.
While I’ve never lived on a farm in rural Georgia, I passed quite a few of them while driving from Atlanta to the mountains with friends a couple years back. This was around the time Good Luck Getting Rid of Me wasn’t even a twinkle in my eye, although, amusingly, the person sitting next to me was quietly plotting to become the star of it.
But that’s another story. One that just dropped on RISK! this week. Wanna hear me sob after being arrested for a crime I didn’t commit because a vindictive narcissist thought he was writing my life story?
Spoiler: He soon realised he was a badly written side plot.
Anyway, back to the farm.
The one I describe in The Farmhand absolutely does exist because I saw it through the window that day. I remember looking at those farms and wondering what it would be like to grow up gay there. Rural Georgia isn’t uniquely terrifying, but small communities anywhere often map out lives before you’re even born. Everyone knows everyone, your parents know their parents, people remember you when you were six, and there can be expectations about who you’ll become, who you’ll marry and what your life is supposed to look like.
What happens when you grow up and discover that the life everyone imagined for you isn’t the one you want?
In Levi’s case, there’s the additional complication that he doesn’t like girls. He likes the new farmhand and, rather inconveniently, his penis.
That was when the scenery outside the car window started becoming a story in my head. I wondered whether there might really be a young man living on one of those farms, knowing exactly who everyone expected him to become and terrified they might see the real version of him as a disappointment. Maybe he was leaning against a fence right then, watching cars like ours drive past and wondering whether any of us were on Grindr.
By the time I eventually sat down to write the first chapter, I could still remember that farm and the lambs. I wondered if there really was a Levi out there somewhere, or perhaps a Rodney.
That’s basically how The Farmhand started, although obviously things got somewhat out of hand after that.
Especially when Simon turned up.
He’s now as real to me as almost anyone in the story, which is slightly concerning considering he’s a fictional lamb with a watermelon problem. More importantly, Simon doesn’t understand why Levi being gay requires discussion in the first place. Rodney arrived, Levi liked Rodney, Simon liked Rodney, and as far as he’s concerned that should have been the end of the fucking matter. Humans are fucking stupid.
Simon’s words, not mine.
The Farmhand 15: What They Don’t Know is here.
The Construction Worker at the Glory Hole came from a considerably less wholesome drawer in my brain.
I’ve spoken openly about cruising bathrooms when I was younger, and my experiences with glory holes. This was at a time when coming out felt more like a fantasy than something I might actually do. Over the years I met plenty of men who existed somewhere between the life everyone saw and the one they quietly wanted, which meant that when Miles and Rhett came along, I already knew them in a way.
Neither of them is one particular person. They’re really a combination of men I’d known, pieces of myself, places I remembered and things I understood, all moved around until two people who had never existed started feeling like they had.
That’s where the line between truth and fiction gets blurred.
Writers are thieves, although not in ways that require lawyers. We steal the way somebody laughs, something a stranger says on a train, the smell of someone’s aftershave, an awkward silence from twenty years ago, or the unsuspecting guy in the supermarket who has absolutely no idea how good his ass looks in those pants while deciding which breakfast cereal to buy.
We steal from ourselves too, which means that quite a lot of me has ended up scattered across men who aren’t me. Sometimes I know exactly which part of me I’ve given them, and sometimes I don’t notice until the story is already written.
I can remember a bathroom from decades ago and give somebody who never existed a completely different life inside it. That’s what I did with The Hole in the Door. Brad’s life was not mine, but I shared a lot of his early sexual experiences.
I often see comments on my stories asking how much of what I write comes from memory, and the answer varies wildly depending on what you’re reading.
Take the Science Teacher I absolutely did want to blow and rail. While I sat in college deciding what I wanted to do with my future, it never occurred to me that one day my future would involve writing a detailed account in which I did both.
Had my science teacher not spread his legs under that table and given me a clear view of his bulge, neither I Blew My Science Teacher nor I Railed My Science Teacher would exist today.
So thank you, Sir, wherever you are. Your contribution to literature has finally been acknowledged.
Actually, his name was Mr. Cliff, but Rex Morgan sounded soooo much hotter.
I see the world as one enormous box of spare parts, and writers as the questionable people rummaging through it after everyone else has gone home. We keep whatever catches our attention, mix it with things that we claim never happened, and eventually hand the result to you as a story.
Sometimes those spare parts don’t even come from one writer.
Freckleman64 and I are ecstatic that our Epilogues for Naughty Stepson arose from those spare parts and that many of you enjoyed them. That collaboration was a lot of fun, and thank you to many of you who commented and told us so.
What do you guys think? Should Freckles and I do another? We may or may not have already discussed the premise for the next story.
Now listen up my Foxes. You know I have a slight leaning toward science fiction. Those of you who have read Circle in the Sand know I can go into orbit with my stories, quite literally.
That’s what happened with Under Surveillance and Pod Men. I think with this week’s Pod Men 6 you might have an idea where it is going now. New people appeared with weird gashes where penises should be.
Absolutely nobody in that story came from a memory. Except maybe the blonde guy with blue eyes who looks suspiciously like the guy I railed late one night after rugby training.
Let me ask you a question. Do you have some spare parts you want to turn into a story?
One of my Pantless Friday audio listeners is going to be appearing on a podcast in the coming weeks. After having Freckles on my podcast a few weeks ago, I began entertaining the idea of hosting others.
If you’re game, if you think you can tell a hot story, then let me know.
And if you’d rather hand me the spare parts and let me do the writing, I’m also open to commissions for your own story or series.
Thanks for being there. I appreciate every single one of you.
Simon would also like to thank his fans, although I’ve just been informed that all future correspondence should be directed through his agent. Apparently, he’s landed the lead role in a new Netflix psychological thriller, Silence of the Lamb.
Simon stars as a young lamb who hasn’t spoken since witnessing the suspicious disappearance of an entire watermelon harvest.
His performance is already being described by his agent as brave.
He has no dialogue.
He just goes: Tap Tap Tap.
Fox Emerson. G.H.K.®
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