I have not touched this project for the longest time.
Two months?
Three?
And there were times when my vision for what I wanted for this blog, and for my writing under the name LS Harteveld/Lauren, was so strong and clear that it seemed unlikely that I would pick this series up.
That cancelling The Book Club – where I write a new introductory chapter and then share one chapter from my novella Daemons and Demons – 
was the only logical, and likely thing to happen.
I would “tear apart” (meaning cherry pick chapters I like, and publish them as stories) the novel Daemons and Demons, and I still might! 
But I would no longer invest in finishing this Book Club series.

Broad strokes, my November/December vision for this site and my books is very simple: I m harvesting this site, creating books.
Based on topic, not on series or original diary sequence.
For example, the book Daemons and Demons ends with a chapter on Catherine Tramell of Basic Instinct.
That chapter will end up in my book “C.” which will only contain posts about Basic Instinct and Catherine Tramell.
And chronological, diary-like posts, like this one, and in particular with the layering of folding two diaries into one –Daemons and Demons, into The Book Club, and then publishing it as A Map Into Unknown – man!
Way too complicated! 
And a very odd thing to have in my collection. Or to get ready to print.

So the reason I have picked up this series is not because I am still as convinced as I used to be, that Daemons and Demons, folded into The Book Club (and published together as A Map Into Unknown) is an absolute must for me to publish, and that I should therefor just muscle through finishing it.
That I had dropped it was enough proof for me, that it was NOT meant to be.
So this is not an attempt to breathe life into it, out of some scarcity mindset of not wanting all that writing being wasted or anything.

But something happened today, that immediately made me think of this series, and I thought:
“Wait a minute! Wasn’t that series…. the one with that book club and that other book inside of it….. the one that I dropped a couple of months ago, and that still had all these chapters open….. let me see…. wasn’t that like 7 or 8 chapters or something?”
And I pulled out a folder I had also not touched in weeks or months, found the handwritten overview of chapters and how it all fit together and;
Bingo!
This series has indeed eight chapters left.
Offering the perfect framework for a very sexy proposal I was made today;
To masturbate every day for the upcoming week.

The invitation, from a new and anonymous man whom I call The Saint, was actually a lot more detailed and thought through.
It had more variation, layers, play.
This reminds me of a story about an escort I adore, her name is Avery Moore and early 2014 she became famous for publishing her time schedule/ where she spent her time on in 2013, which had been very prolific.
During Covid she offered packages to her clients that contained assignments, power play, erotic stories and so on.
The Saint’s assignment, which I am comfortably rounding off to “masturbate for one week” to protect what we have together, had actually come as a thought through and refined assignment, with teasing, thoughtful details, as if it was a professional bundle I could have purchased as an alternative to a sexual service.
But it was seven days, that part was easy.
And starting tomorrow.
Together with writing this blog on the eve of the start of this challenge, makes it eight.

The number of chapters of Daemons and Demons still to be shared in this series?
Eight.

And still, I had not immediately full-on decided I was going to do this. But I was definitely toying with the thought. What is better than a sex challenge with a stranger?
A sex challenge with a stranger you can write about!
Toying. Just toying with the thought.

But when in my very first email to him, the one where I shared my initial thoughts on his challenge, already brought out painful memories about my lover with whom I had been for five years and I had tears streaming down my face, I knew that this was the real thing.

This was not just some sort of sexy, chatty, it meant nothing email correspondence.
This guy was touching me emotionally. Or maybe I let myself be moved on places that I had carefully been shielding ever since my relationship with my lover ended.
Maybe I was allowing myself to feel things, now that I had someone to write them to.

But now I had or have a different problem.
It brings out so much emotion; I can’t write about it.

Not directly.

The things I allow myself to feel when writing him, are not what I will write in this blog.

If I had been able to write about them publicly, I would have done so, and those things would have been processed somewhere in the past 11 months.
But they were not.
It is the things I could not, and cannot, write about, that he seems to give me access to.
And I know I need to do this… not just to get ahead in life, but also because I m curious of what’s behind that door of emotions that I ve kept locked.
What it will do to me to see eye to eye with these things.

So for the upcoming 7 days, I will not be sharing details about masturbation, or the assignment I got. It will not be about The Saint, and also not about the painful stuff that our correspondence pulls from the darkness into the light.

But I will be here. For 7 days, daily.
Just a line, a paragraph, maybe two.

And the final chapters of Daemons and Demons are long, in-depth stories. And I remember the last one, the one I told you about with Catherine Tramell, as being very upbeat and purposeful.
There is light at the end of the tunnel.

So what I’m saying is, because those chapters are long stand-alone stories, it will not matter that I m not my usual chatty self.
And my blog posts stay short.

What I ve liked about the three weeks I wrote Daemons and Demons, and The Book Club, and even the book title A Map Into Unknown under which I may still publish this diary after all, has that ring to it;
Is that it is always about the journey from the dark into the light.
Into the dark.
Into the light.
There is always both.

And it reminds me of something Florence Scovel Shinn says in one of her books.
I can’t remember the exact words but someone asks her something along the lines of:
“When will I see the light?”
And she answers:
“When you can see in the dark.”