Category Archives: my life

Brief Wednesday Post

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It’s the Australian Open Women’s Semi-Finals tonight so I just have a couple of minutes to dash off my weekly update.  What does tennis have to do with writing?  Not much, I guess, although Maria Sharapova was the inspiration for one of my villainous characters.

The creative currents continue to flow as I write the third and final section of WHEN THE FALLEN ANGELS FLY.  I scaled a mental wall over the weekend, and I’m feeling pretty good about where I’m headed.  Right now, Richard is ransacking an attorney’s office for clues on why he was sent back to earth to help his murderer Lee Toback.

I’m moving nicely through Hanif Kureishi’s THE BLACK ALBUM, another book that was collecting dust on my shelf waiting for me to read.  Kureishi’s characterization is masterful.  Next up is a long overdue read of James Baldwin’s GIOVANNI’S ROOM.

Go Li Na!!  I love rooting for an underdog.

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.

Gay and Non-Gay markets

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I’m trying to find a “home” for several of my short stories.  Most of them are gay-themed — IN A WINE PHASE, CROTCHWATCHERS, MIKE’S POND.  Some of them are not — THE TROUBLE WITH FINKLESTEINS.  My standby resource is Duotrope Digest, which is a free, searchable database of literary publications.  A search of journals that are interested in ‘GLBT’ themes gets me a list of 43 pubs, but over half are lesbian-oriented, the remaining half are about 50% adult/erotica, and the rest are mainly genre-specific (sci fi, fantasy, or romance) .   One journal I want to check out is Chroma, a queer pub based in the UK and listed as open to a variety of genres.

I’m also trying to identify the mainstream journals that have occasionally published gay-themed stories;  there are so damn many to go through it could be a full-time job.  The publishing business has changed, as it has for the broader entertainment industry.   The number of gay-identified prints is shrinking while the mainstream media increasingly incorporates LGBT voices.  I’m not sure how I feel about it.  It’s nice that there’s greater access to literary LGBT portrayals and storylines just as you can find more LGBT characters on network television and wide-release movies.  But I find there’s still a lack of depth to LGBT characters in commercialized projects .  It’s the difference between watching Modern Family on ABC versus an independent film on Here! TV (I especially enjoy Here’s Donald Strachey series, Paradise Falls and Dante’s Cove).

So this isn’t exactly a rant.  In my limited research of the short story market, I’ve discovered many journals that publish LGBT-themed lit.  Ploughshares, for example, had a great memoir about working with LGBT youth in foster care by Ryan Berg in its Fall 2008 issue.  But I still think there’s something special about a cozy queer publication that you can read through cover to cover and get lost in an LGBT-centered world.

What I am reading

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I never feel like I have enough time to write, and I never feel like I have enough time to read.  The two things go hand in hand, I think, whether I’m doing research for a project, checking out markets, or just looking to activate my imagination.  Sadly, my relationship with books followed a typical trajectory.  I read constantly through school and college then sloughed into literary semi-detachment.  Polls show that readership in America is declining.  One quarter of adult Americans don’t read books at all.  Men seem to be especially lazy in this regard.  They only account for 20 percent of fiction readers.  E gads.

I purposefully set forth to read more when I started taking my writing seriously.  Now I’m always reading something and have three or four books in my reading queue.  In the past two months, I finished two great books:  Gregory Maguire’s Lost (I’ve now officially read everything by him) and Jeffrey Eugenides Middlesex (yeah, I’m playing catch-up on the modern classics).  I’m now reading Scott Heim’s Mysterious Skin.  Holy cow.  The book is frickin’ dynamite!  I’m simultaneously reading a novel manuscript by a member of my writers group.  Next up will be Eric Mays’ Naked Metamorphosis, which just arrived at my door from Amazon.  Then, I’m looking out for two books:  Scott Heim’s We Disappear and Gregory Maguire’s Matchless (just released).

Primordial soup

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I thought I’d talk about my writing process today.  Not that it’s been too active lately.  Since launching this site, I’ve been obsessively hunting down places to get the word out and trying to operationalize every bit of promotional advice I get from fellow writers.  But on a good day, here’s how it works.

Before I start a project, my head is a primordial ocean sloshing around with pre-developed life forms.  One celled themes.  Flagellating premises.  Microscopic construction sites where characters are built by hard-hat enzymes fitting bits of backstory along a helical spine.  Sometimes there’s an idea that has drifted around in the stew, sealed in membrane, protected from the noxious currents of forgetfulness and self-doubt.  It could  be a fixed impression from my childhood or an overheard conversation on the train or some unconscious brain print that evoked a vivid scene.  Locked in on the floating creature, mental synapses fire.  A web of cranial nerves is activated.  It flexes and extends, morphing into a psychic tentacle reaching toward the protozoan form.  The tentacle probes and squeezes, testing for viability.  If the squishiness is right – not too firm, not too mushy, the neural web prepares for the next stage.   Now it stirs in circles around the creature, capturing proteins of inspiration and Technicolor mitochondria in its centrifugal flux.  Flashing white hot with hope and possibility, the neural web warms the pool like a superconductor.  The perfect temperature is achieved.  Nutrients are absorbed.  Beyond the intrapsychic laboratory, the writer smiles.  Eyes glimmer.  He searches for a computer, a note pad, or even a discarded envelope on which to describe the thing that grows inside him.

The creature bloats.  Cells divide.  They arrange like squares on a child’s board game.  Plotlines.  Diversions.  Dead ends.  Simultaneously, a skin envelopes the mutating thing, signifying its wholeness.  But it remains amorphous.  A narrative pollywog.  Intact but undeveloped.  The psychic waters recede, and the creature flops around, marooned in a stark cerebral landscape.

It’s a vulnerable thing and like aquatic spawn only few will survive.  Some will be collected into formaldehyde  jars  and stored for future experimentation.   Others will be harshly judged and left to desiccate or, subconsciously, be cannibalized by heartier beasts.  But for those deemed worthy, the murky waters will flood in again, and the neural web will scour the pool, testing out new nutrients to feed its creation.  And under the right conditions, the creation will learn to swim and become its own entity, unaware of the forces that brought it to life.