Category Archives: reviews

Rewrite redux

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Well friends, I’m back to the rewrite blues.  I spent the past week reworking the middle section of Part II (WHEN THE FALLEN ANGELS FLY), and I’m still trying to grasp the right plot point, construct the scene, tincture the perfect blend of show and tell.  Romance is brewing between Richard and Rafi, you see.  I was trying to leave that storyline alone, but it opens up so many possibilities.  It’s irresistible.  Yet excruciating.  I guess I could take that as a good sign.  Psychoanalytically, you could say I’m experiencing countertransference to my characters, tapping into what it’s like when you first feel the stirrings of attraction.

I’ve heard other writers say:  “If only my main character would tell me what to do!!”  I want Richard Carroll to explain himself.  Guide me through this thing between him and Rafi.  Let me know what it’s like to feel love afer everything he’s been through.  But Richard wears it close to the vest.  At least with me.  Maybe we’re having our own lover’s quarrel.  I ask myself:  “What did I do wrong?”  Have I mischaracterized him?  Taken him places where he didn’t want to go?  Heroes are tricky people.  They need constant reassurance, ego stroking, the right lighting to show off their best sides, shade when they crave privacy.  And they get grumpy when they’re misunderstood.

So what do I do?  I’m at the point where I’m about ready to leave this part of the story, move on and see what kind of trajectory I’ve established from giving Richard and Rafi some momentum.  Very physics-like, this writing thing, and it’s a process that can only be mastered by trial and error.  Richard is going to have to understand:  I may not always treat you right, but no one can love you like I do.

Meanwhile, I decided to catch up on some gay classics.  I tore through Neil Bartlett’s Ready to Catch Him Should He Fall and started Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance.  Dated stuff, I know.  But I feel like I need some reference points for my novel, the great American gay novel, I delude myself.

Funny, I tried to read both books years ago and couldn’t get into them.  In my twenties, I was a bit intolerant.  I couldn’t take a story seriously if it was about the archetypical “gay scene” – sex, drugs and cattiness.  I wanted to read stuff that reflected my own life or, alternatively, stories that took me out of reality completely.  Now, my mind has opened up, I think.  Bartlett’s story is full of gay cliche’s – tragic aging queens, sexual objectification (one of the main characters is simply called ‘Boy’) and grown men weeping at piano bars.  But beneath this rather uninspiring though perfectly believable scene (the book is set in early 1980’s London), there’s an engrossing love story between two men described in beautifully-written, sometimes shocking passages.  It’s sexy and sometimes challenging.  I’m still sorting out how I feel about the violence in the main characters’ relationship.  But it’s a book I would highly recommend.

Chroma Review!!

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On this journey to cross over as a writer, there have been manic high’s and crushing low’s, sometimes, like yesterday in the space of twelve hours.  Last night, Nighttrain declined my short story CROTCHWATCHERS, the third journal to pass on what I thought was one of my strongest pieces.  There’s got to be a home for this story based on the title alone, right?  I went through my usual transmogrification of despair, displaced rage (in the form of angry, self-destructive Wii tennis) and a fair amount of self-pitying.

Then this morning, I casually checked my e-mail and was greeted by Chroma Journal’s review of Ganymede Stories One.  There’s me and my story THE VAIN PRINCE mentioned in the very first paragraph!!

Reviewer Marc Bridle calls the piece “an adorably amusing gay fairytale.  Peters’ anti-hero Adalbert is rather like a queer Turandot, and his prose swaggers along like a drunken queen in a nightclub, the very antithesis of what a fairytale should be.”

Ok, so I had to look up Turandot.  She’s a princess in a Puccini opera who faces a line of suitors who must answer a riddle to win her hand in marriage (or die if they get the answer wrong).  Didn’t realize I was channeling that story, but Holy Bejezzus! – I was singled out in the review amidst all of the talented contributors in the anthology.  I’m feeling humbled but frickin’ fantastic!  You can read the full review as well as a piece by Rainbow Reviews here.

Now the weekly progress report.  I reached 52K in When the Fallen Angels Fly.  Over the weekend, I wrote a new scene where Richard re-visits his afterlife, which has transformed into something like Super Paradise Beach in Mykonos.  Now I’m working on a slowly-developing romantic subplot between Richard and Rafi.  Things are vague, plutonic and, for Richard, excruciatingly ambivalent.

What I did on Thanksgiving vacation

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So this was supposed to be the week I got a lot of writing done.   I knew there’d be Thanksgiving dinner prep work to do, but I figured I’d have at least two full days free and clear.

Then, the sinus infection.

I spiked a fever over the weekend, went to the doctor on Monday and started a prescription for an antibiotic.  I’ve still gotten some writing done here and there even if it’s not as much as I would’ve liked.  Lessee…I’m over 50K with my re-write, up to page 154 of 198, and Richard and Rafi are having a blowup over Richard’s training as an angel.    Fight scenes are fun to write, especially from the Richard’s point of view.   He’s a headstrong 22 year old who thinks he knows everything about life.  After this scene, I’m predicting smooth sailing writing-wise to the end of Part II in the novel.  Working on Part III during Xmas vacation?  We’ll see.

I also got my copy of Ganymede Stories One over the weekend.  Very cool to see THE VAIN PRINCE in print.  The anthology includes stories by thirteen gay male writers and reprints by Robert Louis Stevenson (The Adventure of the Hanson Cab) and Oscar Wilde (Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime).  The distinctly grandiose British language in the latter two is a trip.  As I read them, I kept thinking about the conventional writing wisdom:  “show, don’t tell” and “be sparing with your use of adjectives and adverbs.”  How our literary tastes have changed!   But I think RLS and Wilde both have a great sense of dialogue which  teaches us something about the craft of writing today.

For me, the other stand-outs from the anthology are Eric Karl Anderson’s Beauty Number Two and Sam Miller’s Breaking the Bough.   Anderson’s piece is about an upwardly-mobile, “domesticated” gay man in Los Angeles who is drawn to an HIV-positive leather daddy.  His casual curiosity turns into sexual obsession and a potentially dangerous encounter.  This story stayed with me for days though it was difficult to read.  I found the main character, his partner and their circle of friends entirely unlikeable.  They’re materialistic, looks-obsessed, bitchy queens, and it was hard for me to get behind such a brutal depiction of gay men.   In my mind, there are two dangers in writing such a portrayal, but I think Anderson transcends both of them in a rather spectacular way.  First, you could end up with a piece where the characters are so one-dimensional or villainized that no one cares about them.  Second, a more insidious danger is when the only context for the flawed characters is oppression, thereby multiplying the unlikeability of the characters by a factor of victimhood.  The Boys in the Band and Brokeback Mountain used the latter disastrous formula which is why I can’t stand watching either film.   IMHO, Anderson narrowly escapes either trap by showing us another side of his self-absorbed, cheating protagonist in a single, unexpected moment (I won’t give it away).

My other favorite Breaking the Bough also deals with gay domestic themes though of a decidedly modern variety.  Will and Ted have just moved into an apartment in Harlem with their daughter Lily and Lily’s lesbian birthmother Fannie.  The story is essentially about Will’s fear of losing Lily despite he and Ted’s carefully brokered arrangement with Fannie.  For me, the subject of gay families evokes a wealth of opportunities for conflict, drama and fresh points of view, but what I especially liked about Miller’s piece was his use of setting as a catalyst for character development.  Will is a well-meaning, culturally-exposed guy, but like most of us white, middle class folks, he has some racial hang-ups.   Miller handles Will’s internal conflict about living in a low income, Black neighborhood with subtlety and realism.   When discussing the problem of garbage-littered streets, Will offers to Ted:  “It gives the neighborhood character.”  To which Ted replies:  “It’s so like you to romanticize squalor.”  Those little details are what I really enjoyed in this piece in addition to the allegorical and suspenseful subplot about an arsonist at large in the neighborhood.