Monthly Archives: December 2009

Last Post of 2009

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This post feels like it should be a benchmark of sorts wherein I talk about everything 2009 meant to me. But I’ll keep it brief and leave deeper introspection for another time. This was an awesome year. I finally got a publication!! Plus I launched my  very own website and am damn proud of it. There.

I couldn’t do much writing over the past week with the holidays.  In my little bit of free time, I started a “low impact” project: proofing THE REGISTRATION. Per a writer friend’s advice, I’m trying to cut 5-10 words from every page to get it into range for YA fantasy. So far I’ve slashed about 300 words. Only 4,000 to go!

I also caught up with my favorite podcasts and blogs.  My dear friend Jerilyn Mettlin has a really fun podcast The Because Show that is kind of like The View for LA moms who like to shop and keep up with the trends.  They recently did a plug for The Next Family, a resource for non-traditional families, the emerging majority—adoptive, interracial, same sex couples, etc. They’ve got a great looking site plus super cute photos of kids.

Another site I like is andrewjimenez.com.  Andrew is a NYC-based musician, poet and unabashed romantic who I’ve been following for awhile. He writes about his everyday experiences, and there’s an intimate, honest quality in his work I really admire.

I’m still reading Felice Picano’sLike People In History as part of my self-directed, long overdue study of gay literature.  I said last week I’d have a word or two to say about Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance.  Here they are.

Holleran is an amazing writer.  There are passages in his book that are some of the most lyrical and transportive prose I’ve read. The story takes place in the 1970’s where a group of gay men are getting laid like 10, 20 times a day on a quixotic mission to find beauty and love but more often coming up with STD’s and deep, angsty grief. This is a world before AIDS and the mainstreaming of gay culture, but there’s a gay archetype there that holds up pretty well today. I say archetype rather than caricature because caricature implies superficiality or falseness.  Archetypes hold some level of truth; they tell us something about ourselves. So while I’m not crazy about this particular archetype, I think Holleran does a dazzling job illuminating a facet of gay male life.

Archetypes can be subverted, redeemed or catapulted to tragic ends.  In any case, the important thing I think is that we learn something true about the human condition. In Holleran’s book, what’s revealed is the exhiliration yet impossibility of possessing perfection and I think the confusion between beauty and love, which is a problem not exclusive to gay men but certainly common among us in my experience. For Holleran’s characters, beauty is physical perfection and finding it is more intoxicating and more addictive than all the drugs they take and, of course, a fleeting experience.

About halfway through the book, I became impatient with this repeated cycle and wanted a reason to care about the characters beyond their hipster lifestyles. Especially the main character Malone. Besides Malone’s initial struggle to find his place in the world in the first quarter of the book (my favorite part), there’s not much to like about him. His journey is a downward spiral of the internal conflict variety so he becomes like that self-destructive friend who complains he can never find the right guy but subotages every potential relationship. I suppose the psychology should appeal to me as a social worker, but Halloran doesn’t give many clues to Malone’s psychic workings. Malone just wants to possess beautiful men. He’s given up on himself. I can get behind a character thwarted by personal hang-ups if I can relate to the hang-ups and/or feel a transformation has occurred by the end of the book. Like Neil McCormick in Scott Heim’s Mysterious Skin – Neil is certainly not the most likeable guy and puts himself in insanely dangerous situations, but I felt where he was coming from and was rooting for him to the end.  This didn’t happen for me with Malone. There’s an open ending to his story leaving readers to guess his fate. I think he drowned intentionally trying to swim back to the mainland from Fire Island or got killed in the fire at the Everard Baths as many of his peers speculated. It came across as tragedy for tragedy’s sake – affecting like any suicide or preventable death, but it didn’t pack a bigger punch, similar to my reaction to Brokeback Mountain.

Now to close on a happier note…Santa brought me the perfect Xmas present:  an autographed copy of Gregory Maguire’s Matchless!!

Happy New Year!!!

Progress and MooreToons

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This has been a really productive week.  I finished editing the second section of my novel and sent it off to my writers crit group for their thorough evaluation (gulp).  The novel is holding at 55K words.  I’m putting it aside for awhile to catch up on other things.

Such as making better use of this site…

You’ll see I edited some content, added a few links and installed a new Recent Posts widget.  What I really need to do is take a tutorial on WordPress.  My web editing skills are a wee bit pathetic.

But about the new links – Kevin Moore’s blog (mooretoons.com) is an awesome place for socially-progressive political commentary and cartoons.  The dude is brilliant and always on top of the religious conservative (and other) hypocrites.  Lately, he’s been following Republican fear-mongering over health care reform and the hoopla over the James Cameron’s Avatar (is it a left-wing conspiracy or a right-wing conspiracy?)  Personally, I do groan a bit over films that place a white character in a minority setting where he or she learns to be a better person.  Kinda patronizing.    Just watching the trailer for The Blind Side made me groan.  I know it’s based on a true story, but how do you pull off a movie about a nice, rich white lady who takes in a troubled black kid without coming across as condescending? The gay equivalent in Hollywood is the tired storyline where a straight guy pretends to be gay to achieve some sort of advantage and realizes:  “Gee, it’s hard to be gay.  And gays are just like us, y’know.” (e.g. I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry).  The Secret Lives of Bees is one film I thought managed to cope pretty well with the pitfalls of that “fish out of water” formula.  Maybe it was more palatable because it was a female cast.

I also added Duotrope Digest, a free searchable database of literary markets.  It’s an incredible resource that I rely on a lot.

Last, reading-wise, I finished Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance. Maybe I’ll share my thoughts on that book next week.  But I moved right onto another book to complete a gay literary trifecta:  Felice Picano’s Like People In History.

Happy Holidays!!

Angels

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Those who have been following my weekly musings know that my work-in-progress concerns angels.  Lately, I can’t escape them.  They’re on top of Christmas trees, twinkling in TV commercials and invoked on evening news stories about good deeds during the holidays.  WHEN THE FALLEN ANGELS FLY could be considered a new take on It’s A Wonderful Life, far-derived, I think.  But it’s hard to write about angels without lapsing into Christmas associations.  It should be a perfect time to complete this project.  Even for an atheist like me.

I do maintain a foggy sort of spirituality.  I believe in the goodness of people and figure that goodness counts for something in this world or beyond.  What it counts for – karma or a higher state of enlightenment, I’m not sure.

Anyway, I’ve been moving through my manuscript a little faster.  Now I have a deadline:  I have to get the second section of the novel to my writers group by December 21st.  This will happen.  I’ve only got about twenty pages to re-read and edit.  Right now, Richard is preparing written testimony for the arraignment of James Hartsdale, a guy wrongly accused of Richard’s murder.

The book is more about angels with a lower case “a.”  There’s fantasy elements for sure, but what inspired me most is the randomness of everyday life, the tragedies and miracles that hit from out of nowhere and how people associate these things with otherwordly phenomenon.  I think we’re all capable of being “angels” (as well as “demons”).  I meet an angel just about every day.  The woman who holds the door open when my arms are full with shopping bags.  The co-worker who brings me an iced coffee even when I haven’t asked for it.  The cleaning lady who folds the toilet paper roll into a little triangle so that I can fantasize that I’m living in a luxury hotel.  So yeah, I’ve caught the holiday cheer bug, and this post is approximating mushiness.  It’s the angels on the brain and what the concept entails:  love, good will, believing in the impossible.

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.