Category Archives: genre fiction

Now Available: The Water-Irises

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And here’s the last short story of this collection, finally available. :) “The Water-Irises” is a French fairy tale, which I wrote about five or so years ago. Hugh LaCaille is also the prototype of Garrick Mortimer from the Desmond and Garrick series.

Hugh LaCaille’s quiet, scholarly life is interrupted one day by a wealthy but obnoxious businessman who hires Hugh as a tutor to his young son. Ignace Fournier is incensed Aubin’s passion for nature and poetry is a threat to his dream of seeing the boy grow up to be just as successful as his father in commerce. When Hugh finally meets Aubin, he realizes there’s a great deal more than what meets the eye as far as the boy’s concerned … particularly his curious and outlandish stories involving a strange kingdom found at the bottom of a pond filled with water-irises.

The most alarming claim Aubin makes touches on a special friendship he’s nurtured with the young ruler of that mysterious kingdom. Forced under time pressure to instill discipline into the boy, Hugh grapples with questions he’s never before faced, and he finds himself looking deeper into his heart for difficult answers … and even more difficult choices.

You can purchase the story and read an excerpt over here.

And here’s a bonus for you – while Queerteen Press usually offers a 20% for all new releases, they’re offering a site-wide special for the Memorial Day weekend, and all books purchased from the site are offered at a 30% discount through Monday. :)

Why Movie Soundtracks Rock

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Because some pieces make for fantastic muse fuel for future stories. Like this one:

Or this one (okay, so it’s not a movie soundtrack, but a TV series theme):

And especially this:

Yeah, I get far more musically inspired for historical fantasy fiction than contemporary fiction. Go me. :D This blog post, by the way, is really more of a note to myself. I need to save and file away these videos for future use.

Passages

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It looks like 2012 is shaping up to be a pretty intense year for me. So many changes have been happening on all sides, and it’s been pretty hard keeping up with everything. To an extent, I find it difficult to cope with some of these changes, but when I sit down and really think about it, all of them are really for the good. I’m not going to elaborate on all of them, of course, but let’s just say the end result was of me quietly setting my work-in-progress aside and working on something that was completely unplanned but now has given me a very specific goal to shoot for.

I blame my ex-coworker, Herbert, who recently retired to focus on his art, for giving me a major kick in the (non-existent) ‘nads and forcing me to get off my whiny, sluggish butt and go for what I’ve always been pining for the past couple of years. On the publishing front, all of my usual go-to places for book reviews no longer review and/or have gone off to pursue other things. Which leaves me kind of stuck – a nasty place to be in if you’re a small press author who’s constantly struggling against the status quo in your market as well as your niche.

What I’m taking away from all of these is the necessity of adapting, and while it took me a while to come to terms with certain possibilities, I find that things really aren’t that scary.

I’ve been writing and publishing LGBT YA fiction since 2008, and now that I’m at a crossroads – or more like have taken a step down a path that I never thought I’d ever take in a million years – I wonder if this means I’m at the twilight of my career writing as Hayden Thorne. Mind you, I still have Helleville to complete as well as the next Masks sequel, and it’s very likely that my output under this pseudonym will be limited to novel-length fiction, though for how much longer I’ll be doing this remains uncertain, and I don’t want to jinx myself by making guesses. It’ll certainly be a while before I give up the ghost on LGBT YA fiction; however, my output will go back to the way it was when I first started publishing, which means two novels a year.

My new goal is to supplement what I currently write with fiction outside what I currently produce (hopefully cure me of my burnout this way), and I hope to self-publish those stories under a new pseudonym. Or maybe I’ll use my real name for a change. Who knows? I tried writing those stories in the past, and every time I did, things fell apart on me, and I couldn’t find it in myself to continue. I’ve blogged about my experiences before. If anything, I convinced myself that it was useless, and it was a sign that I was “meant” to write what I write and nothing else.

But with my experimental story, which I’ve titled “The Nightingale of St. Barthélémy”, I managed to prove myself wrong. Happily, in fact. Today I finished the first draft of the novelette, and it requires several revisions and edits. Then comes the usual kind of nightmarish process of hiring an artist for the cover as well as the formatting for upload at Smashwords and Amazon. Oh, yeah, there’s also the inevitable marketing horror, but since it’s not LGBT, I’ve got a broader arena to play in, and it’ll be interesting to see what’s out there.

I honestly have no idea where this’ll take me, but seeing as how I’ve been wishing for this kind of change for some time now, it’s a great feeling, getting over that first (psychological) hurdle.

Genre Envy!

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As I slowly pick my way through the entire Midsomer Murders on Netflix, my love for mysteries is enjoying a resurgence. Or more like a rediscovery. Back in its heyday, which is the 1990s, A&E offered a fantastic collection of literary adaptations, which included mysteries. Their focus was heavily on British programming where those were concerned, and I didn’t care one bit. It was great watching Jeremy Brett as Sherlock Holmes, Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth as Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy, John Thaw as Inspector Morse, etc.

Once the classic literary adaptations stopped coming in, it was mostly British mysteries that filled their program schedule, and I ate everything up. Twenty years – give or take a few years – later, I’m depending on Netflix for my non-TV fix; I no longer watch TV, so whatever interests me via streaming is what my primary viewing pleasure is all about.

I’m seriously loving these mysteries. I used to watch them purely for entertainment value, and while I still do, now it’s like I keep half of my attention to “logistics” for lack of a better term. I love puzzles, firstly, and it’s always a treat following clues here and there and coming up with my own theories as to whodunnit and then comparing my conclusions to what’s slowly revealed.

But lately I’ve been experiencing what I call “genre envy”. Now I watch these shows as a writer, observing the way the plot unfolds and what clues and red herrings are all laid out throughout the episode as well as the events leading up to the resolution.

Midsomer Murders, for instance, is really crafty in the way each episode flows and yet there’s always that breadcrumb that you need to latch on to that’ll play a part in the mystery’s solution. Those breadcrumbs, though, are always so trivial and inconsequential – at least in the way they’re initially treated. Once the mystery’s solved, Barnaby picks those breadcrumbs out of the muddle of information he has and shows us how each turns out to be an important part of the overall puzzle.

I’ve never written a mystery before, and while I’d love to try my hand at it, it’s a genre that requires a special kind of skill – multi-tasking, pretty much – in which the writer has to have several important things happening simultaneously that are both significant and yet not. It’s like having strands of important details woven into the rest of the trivial stuff, and they’re so cleverly hidden that the audience wouldn’t know how it all worked till someone points it out in the end.

I seriously wish I could do that. It’s like a chess game that the author has to plan out in advance, sweat blood over the details, and make sure to weave all those things together seamlessly. Unfortunately it’s a skill that I don’t have, but I appreciate it in others, and I’m constantly in awe of writers who can pull off a great mystery.

And as a final sparkly-eyed word on writing mysteries, I thought I’d share a gratuitously fangirly image of Sean Pertwee as Hugh Beringar, who gave Cadfael a certain kind of Medieval hottitude. Rawr.

Now Available: The Bridge

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Short story number eight is now available! “The Bridge” is the only non-fantasy story that I’m releasing in this group, though it does have a very, very slight hint of the supernatural toward the end, and I wrote that in for a bit of humor. Anyway, here’s the blurb:

Remy Pépin’s been dealt too many harsh blows in his young life. Orphaned, miserably poor, and subjected to occasional bullying from his employer, Remy’s only source of joy and hope is in a superstition shared by a dear friend, Mathilde Jolicoeur. It’s a superstition involving a lit candle sitting by a window, which Mathilde claims attracts luck.

Day after day, Remy lights his candle and waits, convincing himself not to hope for good fortune to come his way — until one snowy evening, when another boy appears at his doorstep, seeking shelter.

The book page at the publisher contains an excerpt, and you can check it out here. As is the usual deal, you’re also entitled to a 20% new release discount if you purchase the story directly from Queerteen Press, and that discount will be good for a week from the release date.