Tag Archives: gay writers

Wednesday Progress Report

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Not a stellar week for me in terms of output.  I only worked through 20 pages of WHEN THE FALLEN ANGELS FLY since last Wednesday, but  I was off the mark when I said that this is a re-read and light edit.  It’s practically a re-write.  The 2/3rds finished manuscript started at 45K words and now it’s up to 47.5K.  So I’m adding to it as I go along, sort of three steps forward, two steps back.  Mostly I’ve been fine-tuning Richard Carroll’s motivation.  He’s almost halfway through his journey to become an angel and still coming across as a whiner.  But I had a little breakthrough last night.  Right now, Richard, rematerialized as a middle-aged Manhattan psychotherapist, is teaching himself the trade so that he can help the witness to his murder who’s a heroin addict and self-injurer.  I’ve got about 50 pages to go until I reach where I left off with this manuscript five weeks ago.

The most exciting news is that I got some really encouraging feedback from a reader of THE REGISTRATION.  It totally made my week.  Enough to reconsider going through the manuscript one more time and sending it out to agents and small houses again.  This is my goal for early 2010.

So other than that, I set up profile on GLBT Bookshelf and skulked around a few writers  on-line communities.  I’ve got some vacation coming up from work when I can dedicate big chunks of time to writing.  I can’t wait!

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.

Weekly Progress Report

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I decided that Wednesdays are the best day to write a weekly progress report.  It’ll keep me focused on my writing goals at a time when work and personal life demands are compounding, hold me accountable, and create a mechanism for charting my progress.  Plus these progress posts are pretty easy to write even in the midst of “everything.”

So I’m a little less than halfway through a third read and “light” edit of WHEN THE FALLEN ANGELS FLY.  This is what I do:  write a big novel chunk then pore over it until I can live with moving on with the story.  I wrote 45,000 words of the novel from July to September, and I figure I’m about two-thirds to the end.  Right now, I’m re-reading the part where my protagonist Richard Carroll confronts a second assignment in his training to become an angel.  The re-read/edit is pretty tedious.  I’m hoping to get to the end of my draft in two weeks.  Then, it’ll be a lot more fun writing the last third of Richard’s story.

Quixotic publishing news and non-updates:  Believe it or not, The Paris Review rejected my short story THE TROUBLE WITH FINKLESTEINS.  So maybe submitting there was a little unrealistic, but I couldn’t help myself.  Now I go to Duotrope Digest and find a better publishing match.  Two of my pieces are out on submission:  CROTCHWATCHERS at Nighttrain and MIKE’S POND at Crazyhorse.  I should get verdicts in about a month.

I just sent THE REGISTRATION to the wonderful author Eric Mays.  We connected through the Facebook group LGBTI Writers and Allies and struck up a correspondence.   It’s been really great talking to someone with experience in the biz.  I haven’t tinkered with THE REGISTRATION or had it read for about six months so it’ll be nice to get a new perspective.

Last, I added a link in the spirit of my on-going OPERATION:  OPTIMIZE.  GayWisdom.org maintains a gay history archive, and you can subscribe to their free listserv and receive a daily e-mail telling you about significant events, biographies and quotes from gays past and present.  I’m thinking this will be an awesome source of inspiration for my writing.

OPERATION: OPTIMIZE

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I’m incredibly heartened by all of the support and positive feedback from friends, family and the AW community.  A lot of the credit for the site goes to graphic designer Larry Black who came up with the background and put up with my indecisive, yet exacting  direction.  Now comes what I call OPERATION:  OPTIMIZE.   I need to get lots of traffic here.  I’m slowly figuring out how to do things behind the scenes.  You’ll notice links added, for instance.   A word about those…

Absolute Write is the best writers community on-line.  Why?  Because it’s this huge, free, grassroots space, simple to navigate and full of writers of every stripe.  I recently started an LGBT Writers Groupthere.

Ganymede, of course, is the awesome journal that actually agreed to publish my work.

Gregory Maguire is my literary hero.  Eric Marcus is a terrific gay historian.

Lambda Literary Foundation is a not-for-profit that supports and recognizes LGBT writers.

Only five so far, but many more to come.  I’m being very picky.

But back to OPERATION:  OPTIMIZE…I’m building up my presence by networking at sites like gaywriters.ning.com, gayauthors.com, and gaywebsource.com.  I put in a listing request at DMOZ.org, and I’ve Facebooked my url like mad.  Drop me a comment if you have other ideas for promoting my site.