Category Archives: GLBT fiction

Now Available: The Water-Irises

Posted on by
Reply

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. :)

Passages

Posted on by
4

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.

Now Available: The Bridge

Posted on by
Reply

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.

Holiday, Schmoliday

Posted on by
Reply

It’s been a while, hasn’t it? I actually trashed my most recent blog post as it turned out to be way too self-indulgently whiny even for me. Har! So I just avoided posting anything for a week since I figured I wasn’t going to be Ms. Congeniality, considering my writing deprivation.

That said, my holiday from working on Helleville – I don’t expect to get back to it till late next week – has turned out to be less agonizing than I expected. Mind you, I do get reminded about what I’ve been missing every once in a while, and when that happens, I get pretty damned grumpy. Overall, though, I’ve been too busy to think about it – to an extent, anyway.

The highlight of my holiday, ironically, happens to be a day that had the most errands crammed into it. It’s because after running around to take care of stuff, we rewarded ourselves with an afternoon showing of The Avengers, which I seriously, seriously loved as popcorn entertainment. Tomorrow, Saturday, we’ll be at Sonoma for the Echelon Gran Fondo, and then on Sunday, we’ll be at my sister’s for a family reunion potluck thing. Next week is just as filled up as this, with my boss asking me to work extra hours because we’ve been swamped with orders, which is a good thing overall, though I’ll admit to agreeing to the extra hours grudgingly.

One thing about forced holidays from writing is the fact that I’m able to stand back and be more objective about what I’m doing and what I hope to accomplish in the future. And it pretty much eased the sting of work-in-progress separation anxiety.

When I started feeling burnout a couple of years ago, I tried to experiment with ways of “healing” (for lack of a better term), which included writing Arabesque, which, in turn, didn’t quite pan out for me. Then I tried my hand in writing non-LGBT fiction, which also fell flat. This week, while watching my keyboard gather dust, I took stock of how things have progressed so far in relation to future goals.

Then I decided to resurrect an old short story and tweak with it, cautiously assessing my progress each time even though we’re looking at a thousand new words written. While it started out LGBT, I tweaked it for a more general audience, and what got me going was a special source of inspiration: my sisters. I’ll talk more about that next time. For the time being, let’s just say that having an actual (solid?) inspiration really made the experimental rewrites a lot easier to do.

I guess in this case, I learned that there’s a difference between saying, “I want to write a story for a mainstream audience” and saying, “I want to write a story to honor my sisters.” The latter is a lot more personal, just as my writing fiction for LGBT teens is personal. And it looks like that’s what’s been missing in all those attempts at experimenting with new stories and themes.

I honestly have no idea how far I can take this, but even if the story ends up getting trashed, the “Eureka!” moment was so worth it.

And She Emerges All Bloodied and Battered

Posted on by
Reply

Yowza. What the hell just happened? What a way to start the year – month after month of increasing agitation and a crisis of confidence that comes to a head in April. That’s like 1/3 of the year already done, and I’m left reeling and confused. But things are finally settling down, and I’m getting back into a rhythm.

I hate second-guessing my decisions and my work, but I guess those moments are important. They force me to sit back and think seriously about my goals – if I have any, that is – and to reassess the direction I’ve taken. I mean, I continue to be haunted by dozens of “what ifs” regarding my market. Having one of my co-workers retire recently in order to pursue his true passion in art really ate away at me and made me question so many things.

I was actually tempted to take May off from writing LGBT YA fiction in order to focus on producing a fantasy novella that has a more mainstream appeal, but I tried that before, and it fell flat. Sad to think that I was ready to sell out just so I could quit my day job and just focus on my writing. In the end I just had to let that feeling work its way out of my system, and today, I was able to sit down and hammer out 5,000 words for Helleville.

The doubts are still there, though, but they’re not as harsh as before. I haven’t thought about historical fantasy fiction in a long time now, and for that I’m glad. Letting go of that genre indefinitely was a bitter pill to swallow, but I got over it, and now I’m just focused on contemporary stuff and am enjoying my new work-in-progress.

I guess the doubts that linger now touch on my chosen subject matter for Helleville, which revolves around a single mom and her gay kid who’re both tossed into an alternate world by the Soul Warriors as a way of rehabilitating them back into “virtuous” living as defined by the grandparents, who’re both social conservatives. In previous books, I tried to avoid being preachy or outrightly critical of certain people, but this book is different, and it’s necessary for me to make a point regarding the nature of the alternate world in order to establish the conflict arising from the choices that the trapped residents ultimately have to make.

It’ll be a tricky balancing act, and I’ll be going over the pedantic elements during the revision process and will be making them more subtle. Hopefully, anyway, the dark humor of the whole thing will help, but I won’t shy away from my purpose. Too many kids are getting hurt, and having grown up in a conservative Catholic household, I feel pretty confident in my criticisms.