Who is this Lacey Reah and what is she like?

To help break the ice, I found some personality interview questions and answered them. If you'd like to know more about me, ask me anything.

1. When are you most alert morning or night? Depends on when I eat the most chocolate. ;)

2. If you were a tree (or animal) what kind of tree (animal) would you be? I would be a hawk. Hawks are sharp, strong, fierce and have foresight and perspective.

3. If you were a Star Trek® [or Star Wars®] character, which one would it be? Nothing like a geek question to verify a person’s geek status. I would definitely be Mr. Spock. I really identify with him, being half Vulcan and half human myself. Let me explain: My father rebelled against his strict religious upbringing and is a hard core atheist who believes strongly in “logic” and science. In fact, I recall him many times in my childhood criticizing me for not being “logical”. I did very well in my philosophy of logic class despite my classmates complaints that it made no sense to them so I often see things differently as most humans, noting that they don’t see the “logic” in things. However, my mother is a very spiritual and intuitive woman so like Spock, I also have a human side. I’ve learned to use both intuition and logic when dealing with my problems.

4. If you could trade places with any other person for a week, famous or not famous, living or dead, real or fictional. With whom would it be? My son

5. If you could be any character in fiction, who would you be? I would be Princess Naussica from the Studio Ghibli film, “Naussica and the Valley of the Wind.” She lives in the toxic future, where plants have become poisonous to breathe and though everyone is afraid of mother earth, she still finds it beautiful and learns how to reverse the toxins. However, she isn’t able to convince the politicians to save the earth because of their own preoccupation with war and destruction. She is fearless and follows her heart. Because of this, she finds answers that other people are too blinded by fear to see.

6. Would you consider yourself as a quiet, calm person or an active person? I’m like a puppy. One moment I’m frisky and running around in circles, and the next moment I’m calm and just lying around

7. If you could be a superhero, what would you want your superpowers to be? Super psychic powers of telepathy and telekinesis.

8. If you had only six months left to live, what would you do with the time? Tell everyone I ever knew how I felt about them and spend most of my time with my love ones, savoring every moment with them.

9. If you were a type of food, what type of food would you be? A supreme pizza.

10. Do you have any interesting habits? If so please list them (Examples might be suck on a finger, twirl hair, roll tongue, double jointed) I have monkey feet and pick things up with my toes when I don’t feel like bending over. I eat a lot, bad habit. I tend to twiddle my toes when I’m anxious. I bend back my fingers and make weird sculptures out of them. I can spin things really fast in many different ways. I kick in my sleep.

Philosophical Quotes from "Fireflies"

Below are some of my favorite philosophical quotes from the novella, “Fireflies.”  Although the story contains some explicit erotic scenes, it does raise many questions about the meaning of life.

Pierre is a dreamer and is satisfied with keeping his fantasies nothing but that. My dreams become goals and I learn to make them real... —Fireflies by Lacey Reah

She doesn’t snarl. She smiles instead, but it is a half smile. She is hiding something, an imperfection. There is something about her teeth, the sides of them that she doesn’t want me to see. I am fascinated by this unseen flaw. I want to know what she is hiding. Perhaps this is what is missing from my life, some mysterious flaw that I won’t want to correct... —Fireflies by Lacey Reah

How can I not go back? Was it not just the other day that I was musing to myself how perfect my life is? How perfect it was? And even then I wasn’t satisfied until I did something to perfect it even more... —Fireflies by Lacey Reah

Memories frequent my mind of a time when making love was not so rushed, when I was the one being seduced, before it became so important for me to finish the kill. For so long, the need for food and the isolation from mankind has left me indifferent to such thoughts. But lately, I find them plaguing me more and more. Then I meet her... —Fireflies by Lacey Reah

After all, I start to think, when we look back, and I mean, really look back on our lives unconditionally, isn’t it the beautiful moments in time we remember? We might analyze the stories. We might question the feelings of the past, but our true, most accented memories are the brief moments that meant nothing at all, except that they were beautiful in one way or another. I might ask myself many times whether or not I loved this girl. But I’ll never question the fact that we stood on a bed of moss, surrounded by fireflies... —Fireflies by Lacey Reah

She was stronger, but I managed to outmaneuver her. She needs to believe I’m far more powerful. It’s the only way. After all, being nice doesn’t seem to be working... —Fireflies by Lacey Reah

What was it about us? What do we have in us that allowed us to cheat death and change into something new?  I suppose the two of us were already a bit wild. Maybe it doesn’t take as much of a transformation as I think it does. Perhaps we were already halfway to becoming beasts. —Fireflies by Lacey Reah

“No, I should go. You’ve been much too kind.”

“Don’t lose yourself out there, my dear. This city can eat you right up if you let it.”

“I won’t,” I respond reassuringly.

“But there’s always something,” he continues. “Something keeps us going when everyone else has left. Even if it’s a small thing, something is bound to fuel our will to go on—even if it is just a beautiful lady, who is open enough to let me help her.”  He smiles faintly... —Fireflies by Lacey Reah

The fireflies, though scarce, hover in the darkness, watching me. What do they want? How are we connected? —Fireflies by Lacey Reah

Questions are something I thought would never bother me again. They only bother human women, women who are bogged down with the demands of civilization. Yet they bother me now. I thought I had changed... —Fireflies by Lacey Reah

I no longer see fireflies glowing in the surrounding bushes and grasses. I do not see their patterns of flashing light blessing the vast landscape of the great park. There are a few still lingering and they stay close to me. Why are they here in the summer and gone in the spring? Just like Natasha, their lives are transient. What was her fascination with them? Why are they fascinated with us? Vampires live forever. We read about them in strange books. I know the fireflies do not. They are here and gone within the span of a season. In the stories, there are rules. There are answers. People learn quite easily how to kill a werewolf or a vampire. In stories, people find answers to their dilemmas. In stories, people are handed the answers through the advice of a doctor or mystic. I read somewhere that you can make yourself human again if you kill the first vampire in the legacy. I wonder if Jesse believes such crap. Maybe she is just trying everything, hoping that she will find an answer eventually. What will that crazy girl try next? —Fireflies by Lacey Reah

We’re diseased, is what we are. We aren’t some new species of animal. We’re human and those who don’t die by our hands catch what we have. —Fireflies by Lacey Reah

You compare your life to that of a firefly but it is never that simple or fantastic... —Fireflies by Lacey Reah

“We aren’t social creatures,” Natasha once said to me. I believed her. Then why do I feel so alone? I realize now that I was a fool to believe her. What could she have known? I know nothing as does Jesse. —Fireflies by Lacey Reah

Quills

This blog is dedicated to the character Madeleine from the famous play and movie, “Quills.”  She is a linen maid in an insane asylum who has become friends with the Marqius De Sade and even helps him publish some of his filthy writings from his prison. 

Madeleine: If I wasn't such a bad woman on the page, I couldn't be such a good woman in life. –Quills.

We once had an old friend over for dinner and he looked up at my bookshelf and laughed.  When I asked him what he found so amusing, he noted that the Holy Bible and the Collected Works of the Marquis De Sade were stacked on top of each other.  Last night, I was up with the cough and had trouble sleeping.  My husband couldn’t help noticing that if I wasn’t lulling myself to sleep with some moral or spiritual text written by the Dali Llama or Ghandi or what not, I was escaping into a fantasy world of horror or erotica.  I told him I had been reading a short story about an obsessive compulsive who was sewing up the artery of a victim he had found, or did he kill her?  It was very gory and intricate.  “This is what lulls you to sleep at night?” he asked.  

“Yes, but right next to it is the autobiography of Ghandi and His Experiments With Truth.  I’m reading that too.”  
“You’re weird,” he sighed, shaking his head.

Coulmier: But why must you indulge in his pornography? 
Madeleine: It's a hard days' wages slaving away for madmen, what I've seen in life - it takes a lot to hold my interest. –Quills

When I was a young girl in the summertime and I didn’t have to worry about going to school the next day, I amused myself by watching midnight episodes of The Twilight Zone while the rest of the family was asleep and could no longer fight me over what channel to watch on the set.  Those were my times of peace as I got as far away from reality I could to journey into a world beyond space and time. 

“But what about reality?” people ask.  “You must keep your head out of the clouds.”  Anyone who is acquainted with my life knows that my reality is quite clear.  I have my duties as a working mother and my life is run like a factory.  I have read my share of self help books and professional literature and I work very hard at my business. So when I do have time to myself, I think I deserve escaping into a dark world where I can be shocked and amused by monsters and ghosts.  I don’t scare easily, never have.  I’m not afraid of adventure and I think I’m a better person for it.  Fairy tales were once dark fiction about a castle and an evil queen and a young girl thrown into a horrifying adventure.  Stories we told when our cousin’s came over or around the campfire highlight some of the happiest times of my life.  There’s nothing like a good scare.  It takes me far away from my worries and puts me right to sleep. If I’m lucky, it might just keep me up all night.

Madeleine: Some things belong on paper, others in life. It's a blessed fool who can't tell the difference. –Quills

Madeleine: Your publisher says I'm not to leave without another manuscript. 
Marquis de Sade: I've just the story. It's the unhappy tale... of a virginal laundry lass. The darling of the lower wards where they entomb the criminally insane. 
Madeleine: Is it awfully violent? 
Marquis de Sade: Most assuredly. 
Madeleine: Is it terribly erotic? 
Marquis de Sade: Fiendishly so. But it comes with a price. A kiss for each page.  --Quills

Secrets

As I grow older, I'm starting to lose my fascination for secrets. Unless you've killed someone, who really cares?  No, that's not what I meant.  Thing is, people do care.  People are judgmental of our mistakes and sometimes we are judgmental of ourselves, so secrets become important.  When I was a teen, I started a journal, something I would have started when I was a child except that I knew that my older brother would read it.  When he moved out to join the army, I started one.  I loved writing.  I was alone when he left.  My other brother was a decade younger than me, more like a son to me at the time.  My parents were judgmental so I never confided in them.  Looking back, I realize what a lonely world it must have been to believe that everyone would judge me for my secrets which weren't really secrets, but I'll get to that later.

The words I wrote were very abstract at first.  They were observations I had of society, of the crowds at school and the shallowness of most people around me.  I wrote of death, light, darkness, dreams, poetry, the universe, perfection but beyond these things was something much deeper.  One day, I walked into the counseling office in my school and asked if I could speak to the school psychologist.  I only remember the end of the talk when she told me that I'm normal.  There's nothing wrong with me but when I write, I should be more specific.  So, that's what I did.  I started to do something very scary.  I got specific.  At times I'd be shaking while I wrote or looking up to make sure no one could see me.  I wrote down repressed memories of beatings I took as a child, of my first sexual experience with a boy, of how I felt when ran on the shore of the beach and how watching the waves was the only time I truly felt free.  As I got better at writing what was most uncomfortable, I started becoming comfortable with it.  The incidences of my life started to flow.  I would write down anything anyone said and use the log as blackmail.  My life was scrolled down.  My thoughts were recorded and the therapy worked.  My memory got worse.  I stopped hanging on to memories, to anger, to dark thoughts.  After I wrote them down, the memories would fade.  I didn't have to dwell on them anymore because I had recorded them and could forget them until I revisited my writing.

One day, my older brother came home to visit.  He wasn't even home an hour when I came out of the bathroom to find he had taken my journal from under my bed and was reading it.  I screamed.  I cried.  I wanted to beat him.  He told me how much he loved my writing but I still hated him.  Then he left and I wrote about it and forgot about it.  One journal, I taped up, then I opened it.  I could seal them all up but I liked to read them.  I never caught my brother reading my journals after that but he did I'm sure.  He was a good liar, good at keeping things to himself.  Piles of secrets accumulated.  I had to put them in a large box to ship them to the east coast with me.  My journal was my best friend, the only thing I could confide in.  It was magical.  It was sacred.

Now they are at the bottom of someone's closet.  I don't write journals anymore.  I write blogs.  After learning that my husband read them, privacy became a silly lie that I believed in.  I'm a zealot who lost faith.  What's the point of having secrets.  People know them.  They just won't tell you they know them.  Not long ago, my father told me he used to read papers I threw away, papers I through out because I didn't want anyone to read them.  Recently, my older brother told me he read them but only to learn more about me. Why is it so hard to sell a book?  Why is it that people don't read anymore, but when there is a diary in front of them, they'll read that.  I lost a journal once.  I was at the book store.  I went back and they had a pile of journals that people left there but mine was missing.  I've learned to let go of my best friend.

I suddenly find it so funny that I have a pseudonym.  Why build this new persona just because I'm writing erotica?  Because I work for a conservative company, and if they knew what my book was about, would I still have a job?  But it's silly really, Like writing a diary is silly.  What's wrong with writing about sex?  People have sex all the time?  Why do people have to lie about being gay or straight or even a man or woman?  We spend an awful lot of time appealing to people's sense of judgment when we should be shattering through them.  Perhaps the person who judged me the most after reading my tome of secrets was my husband.  There are things I don't even remember that are hidden in there.  When you do what I did, you realize how fallible our memories are. I re-read that thing years later and was shocked at all of the things I had forgotten.  Our brain censors our past for a reason and it isn't fair when other people know what you don't even remember and hold it against you.  This is why we bury secrets.  Sometimes we stick them in the back of the closet.  But take heed.  They aren't safe there.  Anything can be dug up.

When Writing about Sex Vampires is "Writing What You Know"

I had been writing plays for so long, but after having a family and moving away from NY, I lost interest in workshopping plays and spending hours working with actors and creating something for an audience.  I had written a play that might have been too big for a non musical stage and decided to turn it into a novel.  That novel turned into a life's work of trying to perfect a very complicated theme and story.

I realized that I hadn't written prose in a long time.  I had grown accustomed to writing nothing but dialogue.  In playwriting, unlike screenwriting, we are asked to use as little stage direction as possible.  I needed to hone my skills in descriptive writing.  Someone told me to write what I know.  I'm very uncomfortable writing about real life but he meant to draw things from within.  I am a fitness instructor and personal trainer so I should know a lot about the human body.  I used to be an actress so I should be able to describe a look or an emotion well.  I was also getting burned out from writing something with so much meaning and spiritual significance.  I needed a break.  I did some research and learned that most publishers do not want a ton of meaning.  They aren't looking for what impressed our English teachers.  They just want to publish something entertaining.

So I set out to write something entertaining, something descriptive, something with very little dialogue as an exercise to become a better writer.  I read a blog where a woman talked about her "button" and it started a thread on how women can multiply orgasm.  Men wrote in and confessed that their orgasms are quick and that not much happens afterward.  Intent on writing what I know, I drew on my martial arts and yoga training.  In studying Chi Kung, I learned that the practitioners believed in Chi, or energy control.  Jieng Chi was described as something you are born with.  It is also your most powerful energy.  It is your sexual energy, what came from what your parents created.  It is creation itself.  You can't get anymore powerful than that.  I decided to write a short story about a species of vampire that feed off of this powerful sexual energy.  Of course, they hardly waste their time on men because their orgasms are so short.  What could be more entertaining than lesbian sex vampires?

It is written in present tense because, for a long time, I didn't know what would happen next.  I made it up as I went along.  I discovered a lot about myself as I practiced my ability to describe the human body.  I did make the story entertaining and entertained myself with the idea of these women being controlled by creatures that had the ability to suck orgasm and orgasm out of them until all of their jieng energy had been released.  There is an awful lot of sex, gore and violence.  But on top of that, my protagonist struggles with issues such as free will, her humanity and her animal instinct.  She also struggles with her identity and her feelings towards other characters in the story.  It's a love story on top of the graphic sex.  My friends who have read the story have said it is so much more than a smut story and they were the ones who encouraged me to actually do something with it. You can be the judge.  

It's now available everywhere books are sold.  You can check it out here:

http://www.amazon.com/Fireflies-Lacey-Reah/dp/145028163X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1367443389&sr=8-1&keywords=lacey+reah