Tag Archives: writing accomplishments

Short Story Acceptance!!

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After a bit of a publishing drought, I just got notified that my short story “In A Wine Phase” was accepted by the quarterly e-zine Wilde Oats.  The issue is slated to come out in August.

I wrote “In A Wine Phase” about a year ago.   It’s a quick look at a relationship in trouble, a 7-year itch kind of story, and it also deals with the meaning of family for gay men.  The story got a pass from another journal with some feedback from the editor, so I took another shot at it recently.  Really cool that sometimes when you put the extra work in, it pays off.

All in all, this is a pretty damn exciting time as I also have a column coming out shortly in La Bloga featuring an interview with YA author Alex Sanchez.  The article should be out this coming Sunday or the next.

So tonight:  a glass of champagne, a cigarette and feet up on the couch.

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.

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.

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.