Dear Subscriber,
If you missed getting my free copy of Cousins, the Edgar Allan Poe Birthday Celebration story, then it’s one of the freebies in the above promo (click on the image). Believe me. The ending is both “steamy” and “darkly romantic.”
My good friend from Norway, Lillian Haugland, and I are childhood sexual and mental abuse survivors. She works with the police in Norway to counsel victims and interview suspects in a variety of cases involving abuse, rape, and other unsavory activities. I say “unsavory” because most of these activities are being ignored by the public to their detriment. I wrote a private blog post about sex trafficking and abuse, including my own childhood experience.
Of course, fiction is not reality, but when adults allow children to experience fantasy in order to purge the abuse they may have experienced, then it’s one very good way to get them to discuss it openly with parents and counselors like Lillian. I wrote about commercial films that assist in doing this, as is the case of the movie Blaze, and an Australian visual artist who made it. I believe this film deserves to win Best Foreign Film, if not simply to accentuate the need for more attention to be paid to victims and their treatment. Sadly, this film is about a girl who “merely” witnesses a rape and is traumatized, but the true story is one of rape and incest that happens every day all over the world. Thirty-four percent of all rape victims have been abused by a relative.
I find it quite ironic that the most popular genre of fiction is Romance, but any fiction that attempts to show, confront, and heal people who are victimized by the most unreported and hidden crimes of the Twenty-First Century, are labeled “pornographic,” “obscene,” and (most of all) “triggering.”
Triggering is what needs to be brought into the light to heal, folks. Ask any psychologist or psychiatrist worth his/her salt. You can’t heal until you’ve seen your demons for who they really are and then accept them to go on. Also, they never, ever, disappear completely, which is the tragedy behind this kind of abuse. The counselor in Blaze states this very up-front to the twelve-year-old girl, as mine did to me. It’s the Truth.
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Have a fantastic week, and check-out my fantasy metaphorical tale to purge the psyche, Orkidedatter, created with the help of Lillian Haugland. It’s available in digital and audio, and is also for viewing in California through the American Library Association’s Biblioboard.com online website. We also donate proceeds from the sales to our favorite online site RAIN, the National Sexual Assault Hotline.
James Musgrave
