I’ve been devoid of any creative imputes lately. I can’t quite pinpoint if it’s because of working too much, or just uninspired. My thoughts remain largely abstract and molded out of the imaginary, but I cannot seem to articulate them.

I’ve begun to outline an chapter in Tiny Tortures about my heroine’s affair with a modern-day gigilo. The kind of outline that rummages in my head for a while before I can wrangle it onto paper.

This character has all the superficial assets one needs to flourish by others choices and connections, the most noted being his Kennedy-family like good looks and gentlemanly charm. I like to quote him saying, “Pardon me,” versus the colloquial “Excuse me.” It’s a nuance I’ve plucked from an old friend, that works brilliantly.

My gigilo has no desire to live by his own principles, he waits for his affluent friends to tell him what to do so he won’t have to suffer through is own inadequacy and emptiness. He resides to use his wiles to woo rich, lonely, society women and gay men into giving him access to the lifestyle he wants. Unlike my heroine, he graduated top of his class at Johns Hopkins, amid a sea of envious admirers, yet he has no actual gifts or talents–except an aptitude in sculpting, which he treats as a science and uses to make generic designs for the bourgeoise.

He hates my heroine’s asceticism, talent, and purpose, as well as the fact that she knows him as a fraud. This is the character flaw on which they bond. She sees in him someone that may understand her struggle with reality. He does not, and fearing he might lose footing with high society abandons her at the novels climax.

She manages to cultivate a strong sense of self and altruism by the novels end, an although he enters the book in a mild state of self-inflation and self-righteousness, he ends in a frightening and irreversible moral decay.

This nearly destroys my heroine. Their relationship begins built on the lies they both tell, but her being the more naive, starts thinking she could accept no reality except a world of his kind, one where, as he tells it, the rules of morality are never swayed. She thought he was her hero, until she realized he was selling his passion for free tickets to fancy parties, selling his handsome smile to the wealthiest married woman who’s own emptiness he could manipulate into a cover story in Vanity Fair. A contradiction. “Lies are lies,” she’ll tell him, “What makes your lying to and about yourself any different from my lying?” He lashes out at her once she confronts him, he is too strong to compromise, but too weak to withstand the pressure, the kind of man who cannot bend but only break.

And he does. All his patrons have moved onto younger more talented boys, his parents long gone, his wife pre-occupied with finding a new husband to support her lifestyle–it is only his 7 year old son and my heroine that show any bit of tenderness towards him in his final moments. He dies never attaining the happiness he might have deserved if he had been an independent thinker, but it is what he deserves.