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Writers

Keeping the Focus

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One of my greatest challenges is sticking to my planned writing times and actually writing for the whole hour I set aside each day for that purpose. The reasons are myriad. My phone buzzes when I get a text or facebook contact. I want to check for new emails I run a little late at “work” and use up some of my writing time the phone rings We have plans that conflict with my writing time I’m just feeling particularly ADD My plan is to always write from 5-6 PM, for an hour, without exception, but of course life doesn’t … Read more

Looking for Inspiration

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Where do you go when you need a little inspiration for your writing? What do you do? For me, it’s often music. Sometimes a certain song will tweak an idea in my mind, a seed that then grows into an idea for a story – not a simple retelling of the song’s lyrics, but more a feeling, an idea that springs from it. Other times, I’ll be stuck somewhere in a story, and I’ll be in the car on the way somewhere, and again a song will tease an idea free in my head, which will link to something else … Read more

Writing the Future

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One of the most difficult things for me as a sci fi author is figuring out what I think the future will look like. Not just socially – that’s often the fun part, coming up with new social constructs to hang my story on. But also physically. What will the cities look like? What will gadgets look like? How will they work? How ill we eat? Communicate? Have sex? These can be fun things to figure out too, but they can also be writing minefields. Take, for example, computers. 50 years ago, they existed only as huge, room-sized things that … Read more

Setting Off on a New Adventure With Old Friends

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I’m starting off on what’s sort of a re-write and sort of a re-imagining of a WIP I’ve had around for a long time. First, a little history. I started writing Oberon back in the nineties, It was my first attempt to really merge my gay identity with my love for sci fi, and I got maybe five scenes in before I left it to sit on the shelf, along with the rest of my writing career. Fast-forward to last year. I’d picked up my writing again after a decade’s hiatus, and came across this interesting little bit of a … Read more

Starting a New Trilogy

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I’ve decided to take the advice of my friend Jackson Cordd and let one of my short stories become a novel. Well, actually, three novels. It started out as a story fragment I’d written years ago, and picked up again last year to work on. It decided at first that it wanted to be a novel, and then finally that it wanted to be a trilogy – the first time I;ve sat down to plan out a three book arc. I’d written about 12,000 words when I stopped work a couple months ago on it to focus on some other … Read more

Turning Your Characters Gay

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Have you ever had a story that you wrote, oh, I dunno, ages ago, with a straight protagonist, that you’ve decided to turn gay? You know, one of those in the back of your filing cabinet that you dusted off and decided to give a fresh new take? I’ve got a novel I wrote 15 years ago – that I’m considering overhauling – including making the primary relationship a gay romance instead of a man and a woman. I’m a bit conflicted about it for two reasons: 1) I like my characters. I tend to kinda fall in love with … Read more

When Your Short Story Wants to Become A Novel

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I’ve never been good at short stories. For starters, I generally used to sit down and just start writing without an endpoint in mind. While it’s fun to have no idea where your story is going (it’s just like being a reader!) you end up with a whole bunch of half finished stories and a few that never seem to end. For a long time, when I tried to intentionally write a short story, I had a hard time reining it in. At a minimum, they seemed to want to become novellas… there just wasn’t a way to tell my … Read more

When Should You Have Sex (in Your Sci Fi Story)?

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Up until the last year, most of the stories I had written had been “straight” sci fi (pardon the pun) or fantasy – stories that relied on the sci fi or fantasy plot as the main driver of the story. Oh sure, they usually had a gay character or two, but not always as the main character, and even when they were, usually without a major “romance”. Then I discovered Dreamspinner Press and their upcoming anthology submissions page. I decided to try my hand at writing some short stories that were MM romance with a sci fi or supernatural twist. … Read more

Writing Characters Who Aren’t Like Us

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I posed the question “Why is there no market for FF sci fi, fantasy (or romance fiction in general)?” recently in the MM Gay Sci Fi group on Facebook. There were some great, thoughtful responses to the post, but the one that struck me most came from Angel Martinez: “even if you haven’t written a specifically F/F story – how many of you have included lesbian characters in your work?” And I realized that I have never had a lesbian character in one of my stories. Even though they often feature gay characters, and I believe in inclusion. I have … Read more

Setting the Scene

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When I’m writing sci fi (or any fiction, for that matter), I tend to write scenes fairly quickly, without a whole lotta scenery, and then go back and layer that in later. I usually do an initial draft, an indepth second read and edit, and then two more lighter passes to get everything right. I find that, especially for shorter stories, choosing a song that fits the theme or mood of the story often helps me “see” it better. For instance, my short story A New Year, about two men who meet, seemingly by chance at first, ever 11 years … Read more