Tag Archives: Eric Mays

The Authors Speak Interview Is Up!!

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Bizarro author Eric Mays’ interview with me went up on The Authors Speak website!!   This was a great opportunity to get the word out about my projects and toss back and forth our perspectives on the publishing industry, the state of LGBT fiction, retold fairy tales and dreams of turning books into musicals.

What does “bizarro author” mean you might ask?  Well, bizarro fiction has emerged as a specialized genre described delightfully by its proponents as “the genre of the weird,” created by a group of small press publishers in response to the demand for good weird fiction, and “Franz Kafka meets John Waters.”  Having read Eric Mays’ “Naked Metamorphosis,” I’d call it urban fantasy meets “The Evil Dead” series.  I haven’t read much bizarro, but the titles are pretty damn brilliant– Cameron Pierce’s “The Ass Goblins of Auschwitz” for example.

So I’ve been basking in a little sun-shower of publicity and trying to get back to work on revising my latest manuscript.  Wish I could say it was cruising along but between work and social obligations plus a bit of a mental gnarl, it’s barely inching along.

Next week, my blog goes dark while my partner and I entertain house guests.  In July, hard core writing starts anew, I promise.

A Love Poem?!?

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I had so much fun writing a poem last week that I tried it again.  It is National Poetry Month all month after all.

Before I get into it, I got some fantastic news this week.  I was asked to be interviewed for the “Author Speaks” series at Eric May’s ZomBicurious blog!!  More news on this to come.

And a writing update…my manuscript revision is poking along sort of in a breakthrough/breakdown rhythm.  Sadly, I’m currently feeling more on the breakdown beat, but, I remind myself, like the needlepoint wall-hanging in my former social work professor’s office:  “There’s Always Hope.”

As for this poem, I felt if I was going to express myself in poetry, which I do so rarely, I should do it on a subject that means a lot to me.  Our 9-year anniversary is coming up, and this one’s for you Honey-Bunny.

Nine

When We were younger, We, as in you and me, or Us,

You used to ask me to sing you a song,

Or tell you a bedtime story,

As we lay in bed,

Our bed,

Not a hand-me-down from an ex or a mattress and spring board bought on special delivery,

The bed we picked out together and were reminded of in monthly bills,

Like the slices of our wedding cake we ate each month on the day of our anniversary.

~

You made me wonder if men ever lose their innocence,

Was it a lie that we inevitably grow up?

Or does boyhood burrow like a pup in blankets,

Coaxed out at the sound of mischief,

Or the tone of a voice he likes.

~

So much of our life has been spent as boys,

Studying each others’ faces when the other one isn’t looking,

Sleep-ins, Mario Bros., late night cookies,

Repeated TV jingles that amuse and amuse us over and over again,

Alone, we are well-matched playmates,

Retreating from the complexities of life,

We invent a secret language,

Blushing when we lapse into our words in front of others,

Our words,

Which came to us as naturally as holding hands.

~

This is not to say we haven’t had our resentments,

Our cold silences,

As boys are apt to have from time to time,

Photo albums record thinning hair and tiny grooves on necks and foreheads,

How could it be when we have grown so young together?

With games and songs and bedtime stories,

And now this poem for you.

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).

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.