A Long Overdue Hello

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I came by to approve a comment on one of my old posts, and I was slightly horrified to notice I hadn’t made a peep around here since last year. This is my first post of 2020. Happy New Year! Happy Valentine’s Day! Hoping you had a great Oscars Party!

Ugh. I’ve been a terrible correspondent. Where do I begin to explain? I can’t blame everything on the world going bust with Covid-19 and the continuous trauma of our times here in the United States, or the stress of quarantine-living and working from home. Those things had an impact on my writing productivity for sure, but the truth is I mentally stepped away from being author Andrew J. Peters months before any of that. The reasons felt too personal and in some parts too much of a downer to share publicly.

But [deep breath] I’m going to take a dive into what’s been going on with me.

I’ve always been the sort of person who prefers to get the bad or I should say harder news out of the way first, so let’s start with that. 2019 was a tough year for me as a writer. Some great things happened, like seeing my short story anthology make its way into print, but I’d been struggling with the angsty realities of being a small press author for some time. I’m searching for the right metaphor. The air ran out of the balloon? That doesn’t quite capture things because I’d been thinking long and hard about what to do with my writing career. It’s been more like an intentional pause.

I hesitated to share how I was feeling, and not just with my readers. I only told my husband and a few close friends. I worried about sounding whiny or sounding blame-y or letting down the people who helped me get to where I am. I know some writers who have publicly talked about the things I was experiencing, but still I dreaded coming out about my own struggle. The optics seemed like a disaster. Successful authors don’t complain about how hard it is to make it in the industry and admit defeat. Who wants to buy books by someone like that? It just felt counterintuitive.

I’m still not convinced I’m doing the right thing by talking about it now, but I’m at a place where that’s okay. This will be cathartic and maybe it will be of some use to other writers who might be silently feeling the same way.

When I started writing with an eye for getting published, some ten plus years back, I was really humble about it. Writing was my second career. I was a newbie with a ton to learn. I soaked up all I could about writing craft from books and blogs. I attended conferences and retreats, and I avidly participated in writers’ forums and made a lot of writing buddies. I joined critique groups and for a while co-led a group for queer writers. I was hardly a jaded victim of early success or peaking too soon.

Starting out with my short fiction, I blithely reached for the stars but gratefully ended up publishing in non-paying markets for the most part. Through a writers critique group, I learned that my first novel manuscript, which I labored over three years to write, was total crap, and I spent a year figuring out how to fix it and then another year executing that fix. Then came two years of querying agents and just about every small press that took unagented submissions. Easily, I accumulated over one hundred rejections. I had some really deep lows, but I always bounced back. I’d never been more determined to accomplish something, and I’d never worked harder on anything in my life.

As the saying goes, it just takes one yes, and wow, that yes happened with an LGBT publisher in 2012, and it included a respectable advance.

Still, I like to think I kept my head out of the clouds. Words of wisdom from writers who were further along in their careers helped. Write your next book. What’s done is done. Don’t look back. I had a lot to write. That same publisher picked up my next two books, and I placed a series with a second publisher and a different planned series with a third.

Some of my titles did all right with sales. Most barely broke triple digits, including a title that was a finalist in the Foreword INDIES. I had an agent for a while, but she couldn’t get an editor interested in my title. The disappointments always stung, but I found a way to shake them off, usually in no more than twenty-four hours. I kept focused on both improving my writing and getting better at networking and marketing. And I kept writing books.

In 2019, I had a publishing contract for a short story anthology I’d never dreamed would come to life and a novel manuscript that was getting bites from agents in just my first few queries. It felt like things were taking off.

But then, they didn’t.

Despite a shit-ton of my own promotion, the anthology debuted to crickets chirping. Meanwhile, after all those initial enthusiastic responses to my new manuscript, rejections from agents, then editors started coming in. The wheels came off. There’s another metaphor. I started asking myself: what’s the point? I don’t expect a lot from my investment of time and creative energy, but I can’t keep living completely in the red.

I don’t mean financially. I’m privileged to have a good-paying day job. With that recent manuscript, I’m pretty sure I could work my way over to a smaller publisher and find a home for it. Yet I was thoroughly demoralized by the prospect of doing that.

For what? To take another manuscript I busted my butt to write through the arduous editing and production stages just to have another title out that a handful of people will read?

This is no dis to small presses. Those folks work hard as hell and pour their lives into keeping their businesses afloat because they love books and believe there are stories that need to be shared with the world. This is me talking about me. I took an inventory of myself and decided, I just wasn’t getting enough out of publishing my work. I needed a break. I didn’t have the energy or enthusiasm to keep trying to get published and promoting myself as an author.

I fully admit I’m not the greatest at the business side of writing. I loathe self-promotion, and I’m just not a natural at it. I pushed myself to do it for years, accepting that no writer can say their job is done just because they’ve put together the best story they can write. Even the big house publishers expect their authors to do a lot the selling on their own.

But I came to a reckoning. Do I want to keep grinding to promote a book that’s going to give a publisher a bigger share of the profits? I don’t expect to get rich, and believe me, I haven’t made any of my publishers rich. It’s the lack of an emotional return on the investment that brought me to my knees. And I’m not saying I deserve more because I’m such an awesome writer. But I deserve something, and I just haven’t been getting much.

A sidebar to that reckoning is the type of stories I write, gay fiction, are always going to have a limited readership. That’s not a statement about homophobia or discrimination in publishing or among readers. It’s just what I believe to be a fact. And I’ve got no interest in writing anything different or trying to write to market (whatever the heck that means). It’s a lonely place to be.

So, I’m on a pause from being author Andrew J. Peters. Since the start of the year, I’ve done zero with my mailing list, zero social media promotion, zero with my Patreon page, and zero work on drumming up publicity. It actually has been kind of awesome.

But I know myself. I’ll come back to it sometime. Maybe writing this post is a step in that direction. I don’t know for sure.

Meanwhile, I have been writing and doing something pretty different. It started as an experiment about two years ago: self-publishing my racier work under a pen name. I never thought I’d say this, but I’m really enjoying self-publishing. Yeah, there was that twenty-four hour period when I was in tears because I blew up my website and had to completely recreate it. And I’ve had some meltdowns doing file conversions. But overall, it’s brought the joy back to my writing. I’m not raking in cash from it, but having control over production and marketing makes a big difference for me. The self-promotional work is less dreadful because I’m directly and proportionally reaping the profits. What I put in is what I get out, and the process of building a readership feels more organic. It’s the fresh start I needed.

Thus, the story behind my disappearing act has a happy ending. If you’re curious about what I’m working on, drop me a line. Only if you’re 18 and over though. It’s explicit stuff. 🙂

I’ll end by saying thank you for believing in me and for picking up one of my books and dropping me a line from time to time. Maybe I’ll be back in action writing gay fantasy and young adult books in the future. You’ll certainly hear about it if I do, and I’m happy to keep in touch in the meantime.

Be healthy and well, #BlackLivesMatter, and vote!

My Year in Books

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It’s become a tradition for me to do a year-end post about the books I read and reviewed. Goodreads helps a lot with that (though annoyingly, I couldn’t find a way to copy, share or use html code for the personalized graphic as I had in years past). Anyway, you can see my Year in Books arranged with pretty images and statistics here.

I read a total of 23 books, which is down one book from last year. That’s not too bad considering this year I spent a little more time on manuscript swaps with writing buddies. The genres fell into the following categories:

LGBTQ+ sci fi/fantasy: 13

LGBTQ+ general fiction: 4

LGBTQ+ mystery: 2

General sci fi/fantasy: 2

LGBTQ+ YA: 1

Non-fiction: 1

And I’m happy to say 95% of the LGBTQ+ titles were #OwnVoices. 🙂

Fourteen of those books I read for review sites, which explains the preponderance of LGBTQ+ and fantasy titles. I volunteer to review those genres. I have two favorites to recommend from that group.

The Gurka and the Lord of Tuesday by Saad Hossain is a laugh out loud, Pratchett-esque sci fi comedy drawn from Arabian folklore. You can read my review at NY Journal of Books here.

My other favorite title that I reviewed was This Town Sleeps by Dennis E. Staples. It’s a family saga/ghost story set in an Ojibwe community, with a gay lead character. This Town Sleeps was also the last book I finished in 2019. I received an advanced review copy. It doesn’t release until March 2020, and the review hasn’t gone up yet at Out in Print.

 

Some other honorable mentions: I did well with gay mysteries this year, and I highly recommend Marshall Thornton’s Late Fees and Michael Craft’s Choirmaster.

As for the nine titles I read entirely for leisure or research, Tom Cardamone’s short story collection Night Sweats: Tales of Homosexual Wonder and Woe tops the list. The stories are visceral, often disturbing and wildly imaginative. Tom and I did a Pop Up Swap on my blog, which you can read here.

I also really enjoyed J.P. Jackson’s Magic or Die, which I read for another author swap earlier in the year. That title is a gay mutant/superhero fantasy that draws on the author’s extensive knowledge of pagan beliefs and practices.

So what’s next for me? Nothing too different, I expect. Since I’m continuing as a reviewer at NY Journal of Books, Out in Print and Queer Sci Fi, I’ll be reading more sci fi/fantasy titles, especially those of LGBTQ+ interest. Plus I’m still working on expanding my Intro to Gay Fantasy reading list, hoping to discover some gems and classics. Sadly, I didn’t find any titles to add to the list this past year.

I’m also going to read more books written by authors of color.

This post also serves as my Happy Holidays post for 2019 so here’s a handsome fellow in the holiday spirit for you.

via GIPHY

I’m so grateful for your support and hope you have a rollicking or relaxing time, whichever floats your boat. Let me know how you did with books in 2019 and/or what you are looking forward to reading next year. 🙂

Part Two of my Pop Up Swap with Tom Cardamone

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Today, my Pop Up Swap interview with Tom Cardamone continues, and we switch seats to discuss Slashed and Mashed

TC: Andrew, I’m intrigued! Not many writers have more than one series under their belt before tackling short stories. The usual path is the reverse, so I’d like to hear about the steps that lead up to this project.

AP: I did start out as a writer in a typical fashion, submitting short stories to journals, but you’re right, I don’t have an extensive history with short fiction and anthologies, and I haven’t had a short story published in five plus years. I had pretty much stepped away from shorts in order to work on longer projects.

Slashed and MashedSo the deal with Slashed and Mashed is I was writing content to create a Patreon page and thought it made a lot of sense to queer up some classic myths. That tends to be my fantasy métier, and I love gender-swapping and revisiting characters with a different spin.

I ended up with a bunch of stories, and then I got more serious about them, running them by writing buddies and thinking about an anthology as a goal, whether I found a publisher or published the book myself.

I truly had no idea what my chances were getting anyone interested in publishing the collection. As you noted, I’m not known as a short story author, plus the kind of retold myths and fairytales that typically garner interest in the gay publishing world are happily-ever-after (HEA) romances, of which I had a few, but I didn’t want to limit myself to that.

So I pitched the idea to my editor Elizabetta at NineStar Press since she likes my writing and NineStar welcomes diverse fantasy and cross-genre titles, not solely focused on HEA romance and they do short story anthologies. We had a lot of back and forth about what would work best in terms of varying story length, mood, characters, and themes.

Not every piece I submitted made it into the collection. The publisher prefers “complete” stories, so the anthology leans toward longer works with start-to-finish plot arcs. I see the wisdom in that now that the book is out in the world. The fuller stories tend to get the most positive response from readers. Anyway, I’m happy with the variety in the seven pieces we included.

TC: How’d you arrive at the title?

AP: I also pitched a few possible titles to my editor, and we both liked Slashed and Mashed. I think it sums up the connective tissue. I wanted to reboot stories pretty boldly, and slashed is a nod to slash fiction, and I like that shorthand for subverting heterosexual canon.

TC: I loved the twist in the opening story, and not giving anything a way, I’m wondering if you’re a Mary Renault fan?

AP: Absolutely. I don’t read ancient world historical fiction as often these days, but there was a time when I was absorbed in it, and Mary Renault is the grand dame of ancient world historicals. I’m humbled you made that connection. With “Theseus and the Minotaur,” I wanted the story to have the feel of historical accuracy, fictional as it is. I wanted it to be a portrait of the two main characters with greater depth than the epic myth, which doesn’t really go beyond their surface characteristics and motivations.

TC: What was the first book of hers you read?

AP: Naturally, I started with The Persian Boy. I had big expectations, and that book was a case of meeting them and then some.

Mary Renault

English/South African author Mary Renault. Image retrieved from Wikipedia

I’ve also read The King Must Die, The Last of the Wine, and The Charioteer. The Persian Boy remains my favorite. Renault is probably the most reliable historical storyteller in my estimation. I don’t know that for a fact, but she has such a voice and an ear and an eye for the time period, you just don’t question anything she says.

And her rendering of Alexander’s relationship with his slave Bagoas, as well as with his companion Hephaistion, feels so honest and real. They’re not heartwarming romances. I mean, there are definitely heartwarming moments, but they’re complicated as they necessarily would have been. Another thing that made me a Renault fan is the fact she took the story from Bagoas’s point-of-view, giving that lesser known historical figure the humanity he deserves.

TC: I’ve read some interesting discussions on-line about women writing gay stories, with the accusation that they’re crowding gay writers out of the market, though their audience seems to be women. I’m of the mind that this argument isn’t necessary but rather such books signify a cultural phenomenon that’s worth talking about. That said, some writers who happen to be women and happen to write gay characters are making fantastic books. Are there any that you’ve enjoyed?

AP: I haven’t been shy being one of the voices in that discussion, and I always qualify my position by saying writers should write whatever the hell they want within an ethical framework, and I admire many female authors who write gay characters.

My other lead-in is the issue of who gets to tell gay stories, I mean the ones that see the light of day, goes way beyond what women are or aren’t writing with regard to gay subjects. I think what a lot of people don’t understand about the #OwnVoices movement, which I’m proudly a part of, is it’s not an effort to elevate marginalized writers as “better” authors of marginalized stories. No one is winning that argument given the vicissitudes of what constitutes quality and value in literature. Issues like cultural appropriation and lived experience come up in the #OwnVoices discussion, but for me and a lot of authors I talk to, what’s even more important is equity, i.e. how do we support stories about marginalized communities written by marginalized writers?

The crowding out issue you mention is interesting and complex because you need to consider intersectionality and the fact that gay male white cis gender authors like myself face some obstacles in the industry on one hand but many privileges on the other that don’t exist for trans writers and queer writers of color and women writers in other contexts.

I’ve done some research on #OwnVoices in gay fantasy, and my conclusion that somewhere between five to 20 percent of published titles are authored by gay men sounds dismal at first blush. But then you step back and look at what’s getting published generally in queer/LGBT fantasy, and it’s a lot more white, cisgender G stories, and that’s regardless of authorship as far as I can tell. So really writers like me aren’t doing too bad in that regard and as allies should be talking about the lack of diversity within diversity so to speak.

I agree female-authored MM is a cultural phenomenon which has had a big impact on the market and perhaps more significantly, for some of us, on gay literature as a category and a tradition, which is slightly different from the idea of being crowded out.

I never describe my work as MM, for example, but that’s what publishers, reviewers and readers generally want to call it, and it’s gotten to the point where I see it as a generational thing. I run into young gay authors who talk about their work as MM. It was jarring to me at first. I mean, MM started as slash romance by women for women and intentionally tropish and eroticized, and none of these guys are actually writing that. But nowadays, you have folks calling books by André Aciman to Andrew Sean Greer to Adam Silvera “MM” so I think it’s a losing battle to be the grumpy older guy pointing out: hey, we used to just call books about gay people gay fiction. Though I still do that sometimes.

So setting aside my commentary, I’ve enjoyed many books with gay characters and themes written by female writers. Mary Renault probably shines the brightest for me. I was also blown away by Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian, which similarly leaves you scratching your head: this couldn’t have been written in the twentieth century; it’s got to be translated source material.

In queer fantasy, I think Ellen Kushner’s Swordspoint is a classic, and Ginn Hale’s work stands out as well. I also loved Patricia Nell Warren’s The Front Runner, and now I think I’ve outed myself as partial to lesbian authors who take on the gay male subject.

TC: Back to Slashed and Mashed, with The Peach Boy, I was thrilled that not only did you visit my favorite literary landscape, Japan, but that you did such a believable job. I was transported. Can you tell us a little about the research that went into making this tale?

AP: Thanks! I’m glad. I know you’re a Japanese culture aficionado, and a ton more well-traveled and versed than me.

I looked fairly high and low for a story to subvert from Asian folklore. I actually tried doing something with my very favorite Chinese myth about how the panda got its spots, and then I gave some thought to “The Passion of the Cut Sleeve,” which is a surprising queer story from Chinese history about the relationship between Emperor Ai of Han and his court minister Dong Xian. Nothing worked in my head, and I couldn’t find any stories from Southeastern Asian sources that gelled for me either. Hopefully, I’ll have the chance to go back there and see if there’s something I can queer up.

Momotaro shrine in Aichi Inuyama, Japan. Photo retrieved from Wikipedia Commons

Momotaro shrine in Aichi Inuyama, Japan. Photo retrieved from Wikipedia Commons

I have to say I was both excited and a little terrified by the prospect of taking on Japanese folklore. I adore Hayao Miyazaki’s animated films. They’re so imaginative and different from Western stories. I’ve also read and watched some gay manga (yaoi), and it’s really madcap and sentimental, which fascinates me. But it felt like quite a reach to successfully capture the voice and tone of that kind of Japanese lore.

I knew a little bit about Momotarō (aka the Peach Boy), and I started reading versions of the original legend. It’s strange in some ways, but I have to confess it’s also one of the more accessible Japanese hero legends for Western readers, so the lights started blinking in my head. I can do this!

I also read Royall Tyler’s Japanese Tales to get some background on folk beliefs and customs and settings. If you get the chance, take a look at “Two Buckets of Marital Bliss.” I think you’ll enjoy the humor there.

TC: I particularly liked that the story centered on an older gay married couple. What inspired you to spin it in this direction?

AP: I thought about taking the approach of queering Momotarō himself, but I discarded that pretty quickly because I already had two young adult hero pieces in the collection (“Theseus and the Minotaur” and “Károly, Who Kept a Secret”). What appealed to me more was reimagining the older, childless couple who find a boy inside a peach and focusing on what it would be like to be an older gay couple in 18th century Okayama Prefecture. More generally, I wanted to include multigenerational gay men’s stories in the collection.

Japan was still very much a feudal society in the 1700s, and that got me interested in taking the Momotarō story a bit deeper, how this older, peasant couple navigated taking in an orphan. And Japanese culture isn’t infected by the stridently homophobic religious beliefs of many other parts of the world, but I was aware there were and still are prejudices toward LGBTs based on traditional gender roles and norms. So I wanted to depict that part of the struggle, these two men, a widower and an older bachelor who made a home together in a small village and then face the decision of what to do with an orphaned child.

TC: While you supply some very needed positive portrayals of gay relationships and desire in Slashed and Mashed, you don’t sugar coat things. I was particularly glad to see a narcissistic gay character get his just deserts- were you following the form of fables or aiming for well-rounded characterization? And while much has been said about narcissism in the gay community, it’s always as an aside, and never dealt with head on- does “The Vain Prince” serve as something of a corrective?

AP: Well, I agree, but if I’m being honest it was not all that intentional of a commentary in “The Vain Prince.” The spoiled princess from “The Frog Prince” was my inspiration point, and I also had the contest of suitors from the opera Turandot on my brain. More so, I thought of that story as subversive in the sense that male beauty and certainly gayness aren’t things that get celebrated and indulged in traditional fairytales, so it struck me as time for a very pretty and very gay prince to have his day. Other than that, I think I held to form with a story about a cold-hearted beauty who gets a hard lesson in the importance of self-sacrifice.

Now I thought you might be leading into “Ma’aruf the Street Vendor,” who has the misfortune of falling in love with a young, handsome and very self-centered “artist cum model” Fareed. While the tone is light and absurd in that Arabian Nights reboot, I did think of their relationship as something that happens with some frequency in the gay community.

It’s kind of two thorns in one for me. You have this pretty, narcissistic guy who takes advantage of an older man he doesn’t really care about. Then you have this older guy who sacrifices everything because only a pretty young man makes him feel worthy and desirable. I think those are situations we still contend with in our community, and the beauty obsession has a negative impact on how we relate to one another. Part of Ma’aruf’s journey is recognizing he doesn’t need a hot, young guy to fulfill his sense of happiness, and in that I’ll admit I was channeling my criticism of youthful vanity as well as older guys who become fixed in the search for young beauty.

The other story that touches on the narcissistic theme is “The Jaguar of the Backward Glance.” I actually didn’t really think much about what I was doing with the gay characterization there until one of the story’s early readers, who happens to be straight, commented that the main character René is hard to like because he’s so petty after he gets discarded by his lover.

René’s story is set in the seventeenth century, and I had in mind both historical and contemporary challenges to gay identity formation. He’s this closeted thirty-five-year-old man, who is terrified of being discovered as gay and turned quite bitter toward the world because he can’t have what he desires. So when he finally experiences sex and affection then loses it because his lover falls back on heterosexual convention, it totally made sense for me that he’d be destroyed in the proportions of teenage heartbreak.

It’s frankly not so different from how I reacted to unrequited crushes as a young adult, and I hadn’t suffered nearly as many years feeling injured and alienated as poor René. He has suicidal and homicidal fantasies, which I can see as coming across as “petty” in relation to a failed week-long affair, but I felt gay readers could relate to that. René is a narcissistic character, but not so much by constitution as from the trauma of having to hide his gayness. I do think that’s the genesis of narcissism in some cases. We turn inward and create this inflated sense of ourselves as a defense against a hostile world.

TC:  Can you talk about the global reach of the book? You have adapted tales from multiple cultures, was this your initial intent or did your reach grow as the project grew?

AP: I wrote a lot of classical myths initially in developing my Patreon page, and it hit me at some point I’d love to go broader with world folklore from the standpoint of representation as well as creating a collection that’s a little different from the ones that have come before. There are a lot of queer retold fairytale collections based on classic European sources, so part of my motivation was creating a collection that offered something new and different. For me, my natural tendency is to represent the community realistically, in all of its diversity.

TC: New York City pops up as a location, too. Our city is a character in much of literature. Sometimes I try hard to put a story somewhere else, other times I can’t wait to write what I consider a “New York story.” Were you of the same mind with your work here?

AP: In a way, yes. I’m one of the millions of gays who flocked to New York City as a place where I could be myself, and yes, I’ve read many gay novels set in NYC. Actually, I’d say those novels had a lot to do with me coming to NYC.

As a writer, I don’t think I’ve been as concerned about actively avoiding NYC as a locale versus being part of that breed that’s terrible about choosing to write what I know. I tend to write stories in fantasy or historical settings. Then, even with my contemporary work – the Werecat series and Irresistible – the stories came to me as starting in New York City, but then I had the characters running off to far flung places that served the plot.

I will say when I get the chance to place situations in the city where I live, it’s a big weight off my shoulders. Zero location research went into “A Rabbit Grows in Brooklyn.” Well okay, I did peek at a street map of Fort Greene, on which I based Ramon’s neighborhood. Ma’aruf’s story also begins in New York City, Queens even, where I live, so that setting was easy for me to render.

TC: In our chat about my short story collection, Night Sweats: Tales of Homosexual Wonder and Woe, you brought up a favorite, out-of-print gay classic, Saul’s Book by Paul Rogers. In your research for Slashed and Mashed, did you uncover any gay titles that deserve some renewed attention?

AP: I mention in my author’s note, there are two gay fairytale collections that inspired me to try my hand at short retellings: Jeremy McAteer’s Fairytales for Gay Guys and Lawrence Schimel’s The Drag Queen of Elfland. Somehow, I bet you’re familiar with the latter, Tom. Some of Schimel’s pieces remind me a bit of yours in subject and mood. Schimel also explores HIV+ characters in his stories, which I think is rare and so important for a modern fairytale collection.

TC: Cool talking books and stories with Andrew, thanks for this, I hope we get a chance to do it again!

Pop Up Swap with Tom Cardamone

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Hello my long-neglected darlings! Papa’s back (with strange new affectations you may have noticed), and he’s got a long and meaty Pop Up for you.

Wow. That didn’t sound as creepy in my head as it came out on the page. This isn’t that kind of blog. What I have today is my author exchange with horror/fantasy/erotica author Tom Cardamone. I guess the erotica part had double entendres on my brain. I read Tom’s short story anthology Night Sweats, and he read my recently published anthology Slashed and Mashed: Seven Gayly Subverted Stories.

This Pop Up will be a two-parter. Today I post my interview with him, and I’ll post our conversation about me next week.

Here’s Tom’s impressive bio:

Tom Cardamone is the editor of Crashing Cathedrals: Edmund White by the Book and author of the Lambda Literary Award-winning novella, Green Thumb, as well as other works of fiction and non-fiction. You can read more about him and his writings at www.pumpkinteeth.net. And check out Crashing Cathedrals over at ITNA Press.

I met Tom years back when we were both tabling for Bold Strokes Books at the NYC Rainbow Book Fair. How far back? Meh. These days I’m lucky if I can answer that with an accurate range, but I’d say it would have to be somewhere between 2013 and 2015. A few years later, we joined up again at NYC’s inaugural queer comic-con Flame-con. And we hit it off and kept in touch. I’d read an anthology he edited: The Lavender Menace: Tales of Queer Villainy so I was already a fan. Then I read his novella Green Thumb and loved it, and I reviewed his erotic-fantasy The Lurid Sea for Queer Sci Fi.

Here’s the back cover blurb from Night Sweats.

Set in Japan, small town America, midnight Manhattan, ancient Greece and Rome, and beyond, these stories run the gamut of urban nightmare, gay love lost and found, dragons, super villains, a fairy addicted to meth, and Satan on the subway. Readers of Night Sweats will find tales that push boundaries while supplying ample scares, erotic thrills, much wonderment, and some woe.

 

 

 

 

So let’s dive in!

AP: Tom, you know I’ve been an admirer of your writing for some time. Big thanks for taking part in the Swap.

I loved Night Sweats. It left me with so many lasting images, from Cyclops babies to giant owls descending on small towns in New England to hallucinogenic fairy snot. I’ll get to some of your inspiration points and storytelling approaches, but I wanted to say off the bat, that quality of taking readers to places they haven’t been before is really present across the collection and pretty darn impressive.

I wanted to start though with more of an editing and production question. What was the process like for you selecting and ordering the stories? Slashed and Mashed was my first short story collection, so it got me intrigued about how other writers navigate that process, and maybe you could share with me and my visitors how you saw your stories fitting together as an anthology?

TC: Thank you for that outstanding introduction! I’ve enjoyed your work as well, and think Slashed and Mashed really covers some important ground, so congrats there! It’s one of those books that I wished had existed and been accessible in my youth.

To your question of story selection: years and years ago I read Nabokov’s Dozen, which featured thirteen of the maestro’s stories, and it’s stuck in my head that thirteen is the magic number. That said, I also pay attention to the flow, as if they were pieces of a quilt, and then the greater story tells itself, in terms of which one belongs at the beginning, the middle, the end and so on.

Also, and I think this applies to other writers as well, there are always pieces that are interesting but maybe experimental, too short or too weird to find a home anywhere else but in a collection of your work, where the consistency of your voice gives them buoyancy and permanency, so I’ve always written stories that I’ve never tried to place, but just crossed my fingers and thought “If I ever cobble together another collection, I know right where I’m going to plant this dark little seed. . .”

AP: That’s a great point. I’ve got some dark little seeds myself.

There’s a lot to love about your collection, and related to that topic of theme and subject, I’ve read two of your longer books, which were both on the dark and gritty side. With Night Sweats, you certainly included stories in that vein with characters on the margins like “Honeysuckle” and taboo orgiastic adventures like “Diabolical” and “Halloween Parade.” If I’m remembering correctly, there’s just one love story with a heartwarming, happy ending: “Blue Seaweed,” which I suspect was a germination point for your longer work about Nerites by the way, no?

TC: “Blue Seaweed” reflects my obsession with ancient history and myth, a fascination we share! This story, about a Greek boy during the time of the Roman Empire who meets a Godling from the sea and sparks fly, underwater as it were -this was one that gestated over a long period of time, and benefited from early readers, something I rarely do, but I did want love to win with this one.

AP: Nice. I’ve mentioned with regard to Green Thumb, your writing reminds me of William S. Burroughs in its hallucinogenic lyricism (or lyrical hallucinogenics?), and your work explores similar themes about the gay experience like lust and desperation and cruelty and loneliness and jealousy. Those were major themes from gay writers of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. I’m thinking of John Rechy, Edmund White, and Paul Rogers whose work I devoured in high school and college.

I’m great at long, meandering lead-ins to questions, and I also have a tendency to wrap up several of them together. Who do you see as your influences?

Saul's BookTC: Well thank you for the awesome Burroughs comparison, I’ve certainly read most of his work. And you’ve certainly hit upon some of my major influences. It’s very nice to hear Paul Rogers get name-checked. His lone novel, Saul’s Book, is astounding, more so once you learn he was murdered by his lover and adopted son shortly after publication.

Another writer I admire, Paul Russell, wrote about him in a book I edited: The Lost Library: Gay Fiction Rediscovered. Other writers who have influenced me, especially early on, are Kathe Koja, Octavia E. Butler, Geoff Ryman and John Varley. Stylistically and the breadths and depths of their imaginations leave me breathless, which is what I hope some of my readers feel as well. The gay writers that you referenced, along with Saint Genet, are definite influences as well.

AP: I’m ashamed to say I’m only familiar with Geoff Ryman and Genet, but I can see the connection in both cases. There’s a haunting sadness in a lot of Geoff Ryman’s work and Jean Genet of course was provocative and unapologetic in his approach to sexuality.

I mentioned before I sensed some of the stories fed into your longer work. “Blue Seaweed” and “The Love of the Emperor is Divine” reminded me of The Lurid Sea for different reasons. I also got hints of Green Thumb here and there, not the post-apocalyptic setting but from your depiction of anthropomorphic characters and the eroticization of the unusual and from the tone of death and desperation. All of which makes for great, high impact reading by the way.

I don’t write short fiction nearly as much as you do, but I did have the experience of some of my shorter work leading into writing a novel. Around the time I wrote “Theseus and the Minotaur” from Slashed and Mashed, I wrote an experimental piece about Telemachus from The Odyssey and another based on the Nerites myth. It hit me later: hmm, what would happen if these four gay boys met up and had an adventure? That turned into a YA buddy comedy I’m currently pitching around.

Do you find that your shorter work stimulates an interest in writing longer pieces? I know you write both, and I’m curious if you find yourself more at home with short versus long?

TC: Confession: I write short fiction mostly to avoid novel-length projects, so I can feel productive while still dragging my feet.

AP: Alrighty. I’ll step back from that one.

Back to the fantasy subject, I recognized little reference points here and there — Greek/Roman sea godlings in “Blue Seaweed” and the superhero/super villain theme in “The Ice King” and “Kid Cyclops” — but there’s a lot of originality with the characters and situations. You have a spectacular imagination.

A common thread is alienation and the line between beauty/desire and the grotesque/repulsive. I mean, you have two stories with men fellating a pretty gory, reptilian devil. “Halloween Parade” concerns a guy looking to have sex with Michael Myers. Here comes my deep question, what do you think your choices of subject and I guess I’d say aesthetic have to say about your worldview and/or just your own experience in the world?

TC: I think it’s my commitment to going in a different direction, to figure out what we avoid talking about and having a full discussion right there, no matter how uncomfortable the subject matter.

AP: Interesting. I think that’s what makes your work high impact for me as I said. It’s confrontational, and whether or not you like the characters or the situations, they stay with you because they make you stop and think.

I have to confess, I used to read gay short fiction regularly, but that was before I hatched the great idea to start plodding through writing novels about ten or so years back. So I’ll share some of the short fiction writers I admire, but I bet you’ll be much more up to date than me.

I like Sam J. Miller, Victor Banis, Lawrence Schimel, Scott Hess, and Charlie Vazquez to name a few. Back in the day, I was a big fan of the queer fantasy journal Collective Fallout, which sadly folded in 2013. This year, I reviewed a similar anthology Broken Metropolis, edited by Dave Ring, and it was fabulous and made me appreciate the next generation of up and coming queer writers.

What short fiction writers are you reading these days?

TC: You mentioned some great names! Sam’s in The Lost Library, and Charlie wrote a great piece for a book I’ve recently edited: Crashing Cathedrals: Edmund White by the Book, which is a celebration of Ed’s work, book by book; his oeuvre is seminal, beyond impressive, it’s historical, and putting that together was an adventure.

Crashing CathedralsI’m currently reading Trebor Healey’s latest short story collection, Falling, and I love it. It’s astounding how stories that are thematically linked can also be so diverse yet well-drawn. And Craig Gidney is a favorite of mine. I interviewed him about his collection Skin Deep Magic a few years ago, and definitely recommend it as well as his first collection, Sea, Swallow Me and Other Stories. Both are stellar, fans of Tanith Lee will be impressed, and gay boys will see a multitude of reflections in his work that are otherwise hard to find.

As you’ve recognized the influence of 80s and 90s gay writers, I must say that I did not know Andrew Holleran had a short story collection, he’s so known as a novelist that this escaped my attention, but earlier this year a friend recommended his book, In September the Light Changes, from 1999. I found a perfect hardback at the Strand and devoured it. So of those times yet timeless.

AP: Great suggestions! Both Healey and Gidney have been on my TBR list for too long. I’m bumping them up per your testimonials.

Onto another topic, the two of us have talked about the state of the gay publishing before, most recently over drinks perhaps to numb the pain. Like me, you’ve bounced around a bit in terms of publishers, and we’ve chatted about the joys and discontents of the changing market and the limited reach of the few remaining small presses for gay fiction versus m/m romance. Perhaps you could share your view based on your experience?

TC: Let me turn that around and reposition it as advice for an up and coming writer: decide now if you’re a commercial artist or an outsider. I knew early on I was in this for the story, and the stories I was going to tell would be from the margins, for the margins. So if you choose the latter, be prepared to do a lot of the heavy lifting, and know that you’ll be genuinely proud when you break new ground, but when you do break new ground, it will be midnight in a wet cemetery and you’ll probably be alone.

AP: Egad. Too true. Well, I do see your point. I think I mentioned this to you before, it’s a sad reckoning that even queer books that garner acclaim through programs like Lambda’s annual awards program often only achieve a small readership.

My last Swap with fantasy author J.P. Jackson got me thinking about how my writing has, and hasn’t, changed over the years. I could go back to what I wrote in grade school as an extreme example, and even though the kind of hack jobs I did back then were pretty hysterically awful, I can recognize some similarities in the way I approached character even those many years ago.

On the other hand, since I started writing with the goal of getting published, I have noticed that my interests have changed a little. My early work was quite serious in tone, and I mentioned my latest work is a buddy-comedy and overall, I’ve been drawn to writing humor more.

Do you find different inspiration points since your first short fiction pieces came out? I’ll attribute my switch to lighter stories as something of a safe zone in which to write about my observations of the world and perhaps, just perhaps as I get older I’m learning to not take myself so seriously. Do you think getting older has influenced your writing?

TC: Aging has had a huge impact on my writing because it has deeply affected my reading. I’ve always read one author biography a year, just to sharpen my literary interests and see what else I can learn about the craft. At some point, during the last ten years, my interest in nonfiction has really perked up. I struggle to finish a novel but can consume a biography in just days. Something inside of me is hungry for the truth, not that fiction doesn’t often lead there, sometimes profoundly so, but I’ve felt for a long time that so much of our history remains untold, uncovered, so that as my readings take me in that direction, I see my writing following that same compass.

AP: I’ve noticed you’re editing and writing nonfiction lately. Selfishly, I hope you’ll return to fiction down the line. What are you writing these days? Do you have upcoming projects?

TC: I’m working on a true crime piece to see if it grows into a book, so stay tuned.

AP: Awesome. Anything else you’d like to say you wish I’d asked? 🙂

TC:  Yes, to meet for drinks! We should go to Julius again, though now that it’s cold out, maybe Metropolitan, I love their fire place.

AP: Deal!

I’m back on WROTE!

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WROTE podcast

MEDIA ALERT! I sat down with Vance and Baz to talk about Slashed and Mashed, mythology, diversity in queer lit, cultural appropriation and a whole bunch of other things. Those two guys run an amazing podcast, which is now up to episode 243. Pretty darn impressive. They both have an awesome sense of humor too.

So take a listen either at their website or better yet subscribe to their show on Apple Podcasts or iHeart Radio or wherever you listen to ‘casts. If you read LGBTQ+ fiction, you’ll likely find an interview with one of your favorite authors. And let me know what you think of my interview. 🙂