This might just be the most literary work I’ve written, and my original intention was to write it under my own name. It’s a darkly comic novella which happens to have a sex scene in every chapter, but moreover is a character study of my most complex protagonist, a man who has mastered the art of seduction, but finds that this does nothing to ease his loneliness.
Here is a handsome bad boy, living a hedonistic lifestyle and avoiding the consequences. He should be infuriatingly enviable, but hidden in his narration is an emptiness at his core, a pleading for companionship, for validation, for us to like him. He is rich, he is successful, he enjoys a string of lovers, but ultimately he is a pathetic figure, resorting to ridiculous challenges to give his life meaning.
Where his conscience should be, he has sentimentality, and it is this sentimentality that makes him want to conceal chapter 13, and the one action he regrets, of which even he is ashamed. In turn, this allows him to demolish the fourth wall, and speak directly to the reader, questioning their morality, and making them complicit in his actions.
He also develops literary pretensions in the course of writing his memoir, and leaves Easter Eggs for classic Renaissance plays, post-war science fiction and contemporary TV and movies. This is what he has in place of a fully developed personality, hoping the memoir itself will bring both growth and redemption.
He’s a wrong’un, no doubt. But he is funny, and quite charming, and really is fiercely loyal – albeit to the challenge rather than any individual person. But he’s only playing the hand I dealt him, coming to terms with childhood trauma mostly unmentioned, and I like him, despite his flaws.
And I’d really love for you to get to know him as well. https://t.co/KExf7DYtcn
jaywillowbay 