Illustrating ElvenSword, DemonThrong and AngelFire

I saw this image in my Twitter feed by artist William Kenney.  I liked it so much I asked him whether he'd like to illustrate my Tapestry of Life trilogy when it's published.  And he said he might do it.

Now I just have to get my trilogy published!  I've written nearly 60,000 words of AngelFire, the third volume in the trilogy. I'm about halfway through.  I had hopes that I would have finished it by now, but I've had a few spells of writer's block.  I'm working on it again now.  And I have completely revised and rewritten DemonThrong and ElvenSword, so they're ready to go as soon as AngelFire is finished.

You can follow William on Twitter, here, and on Instagram, here.

My Writing

Source

I've been writing a lot over the last couple of weeks, although I haven't yet achieved my target of 1000 words a day, which equals 3 novels a year of  roughly 120,000 words each.  Although I have high hopes of reaching that target soon, as I settle down to retirement.  Even what I have written does mean that I have been able to post a new Majorca Flats episode almost every day.  It's gratifying to see my readers returning.  You've been very patient.  Thank you.

I've almost reached the end of Majorca Flats.  Perhaps another 20 episodes, and then we will have the climax that I've been planning since quite early on.  Not that there aren't several strands to the story--my characters insisted--but this was an important thread.  A gay serial killer, driven to his crimes by internalised homophobia and rape as a boy, entering, and never really leaving the lives of my people.  I wanted to write a story where even those who suffered most from life have hope and find someone to love.  And I wanted it to be convincing.  Happy-ever-after stories need to have the angst and sorrow and suffering but they also need to have convincing pathways out of these situations.  I don't know whether I've done that.  I suspect I will change a lot when I rewrite it.

It will be very strange finishing the tale of these friends and their families in and around a late 19th century Melbourne Victorian Terrace.  When I write, the characters in my novel become my friends, my acquaintances.  I know them.  They tell me in no uncertain terms, no, I'd never do that, or are you crazy? or c'mon, give me a break!  So I shall miss them.

I might go back to do a second volume, but not yet.  I have so many other stories, some requiring rewriting and some requiring just writing--the first draft isn't even done!  I think I will start with ElvenSword.  That was the first novel I wrote, and they say you should write your first novel and then throw it away, because it's with your first novel that you learn the basics of your craft.  I didn't throw it away and perhaps I should have.  Anyway, it needs intensive rewriting, more than any other of my novels.

Here is a list of my novels, some completed, some unfinished, and some needing rewriting:

ElvenSword
DemonThrong
AngelFire
I Get No Kick From Champagne
Footy
Zing Went The Strings Of My Heart
Majorca Flats
The Music Of Love
Dragon's Gift

Nine altogether.  I had no idea I'd written so much, even without counting the short stories.

As I redo each chapter of ElvenSword and DemonThrong, and as I finish AngelFire, I will post the new or rewritten chapter to my website (the WordPress one).  I'll let y'all know here on this blog, and on my website, and on my groups when I do post a new chapter.

One thing I've worried about is whether I have too much sex in my stories.  To be honest, sex scenes are hard to write, at least for me. The pathway between being turned on and finding it silly or risible or just dull is narrow.  However,  sex is a central part of our lives.  Not writing about it is to accept the religious narrative that it is somehow wrong or dirty, and it most emphatically is not.  It's OK to write about murder (Dorothy Sayers or Agatha Christie or Ngaio Marsh, for example) but not about sex.  Yet we all have sex, often (well I hope we all do!) but none of us has murdered any one.  Sex and sexual attraction is a central part of our lives.

I knew that my sex scenes, especially the gay ones or threesomes would consign my books to one small shelf in the bookshop, even the virtual one, but I felt it would go against my principles not to write them.  Yet recently I read C S Pacat's trilogy--Captive Prince, Prince Rising, King's Gambit--which received rave reviews and were satisfying reads.  The sex in this trilogy is explicit and gay, and she's been published by Penguin, no less.  She's also a Melbourne writer like me.  So I've decided that my sex scenes will be fine.  Things have changed a lot since I began writing, fourteen or fifteen years ago.  The little niche I inhabited hasn't quite expanded to a cavern.  But it's surely bigger than it was.  Even so, I shall probably write less explicit sex scenes in future if only because they take much longer than anything else.

Anyway: there you are.  I'm writing, and I will be writing more.  Thank you all for being so patient over the last five years.

Happy Endings

If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course,
on where you stop your story.
-- Orson Welles

[From The Slab, I think]

I'm just finishing the rewriting of The Wolf, a romantic story set in Cappor, the world of my novels ElvenSword, DemonThrong, AngelFire and The Torc, and I'm struggling to end it properly.  I'll let you all know as soon as it's published: it'll be in the next issue of Wilde Oats.

Books I'm working on.

This charming graphic from hyperboleandahalf

I've written, half written and 10% written these novels:

Footy  -- about a straight footy player who meets a bloke who becomes his best friend.  Only the bloke he meets and grows to love is gay.
ElvenSword -- the great city of Cappor and its empire is decaying.  The task of those who would save it:  to find Vordath, the Bearer of the Sword of Fanuiloth, out of the millions who make up the empire's population.
DemonThrong  -- the sequel to Elvensword. 
I get no Kick from Champagne -- a laddish troubled boy takes on the armies of evil and becomes a man, in the process finding the love of his life.
Majorca Flats  --- a novel in progress, about the inhabitants of a Victorian terrace in Melbourne.
The Torc  -- a partly written novel set in the ElvenSword world
AngelFire  -- the partly written sequel to DemonThrong
Gift of Dragons  -- SF.  Why did the Urdani's civilization collapse?  Who or what is the living God?  And who's been surreptitiously buying up tactical nuclear weapons on Earth, and why?  About 1/3 written.
The Music of Love  -- a het romance with a gay character, partly written.
Zing went the Strings of my Heart  -- a secret group within Melbourne's police department is fighting a serial killer, whose victims are drawn from the city's non-human population.
The Musketeers --  four guys share a house.  One of them is gay, the other straight.  Well, straight-ish.
The Café Budapest -- a story about a café in a small country town, its owner and the people who come to visit.
Parringo Road -- a man goes back to the country town he grew up in and the boy, now man, he was in love with.
Heaven is a Pair of Wooden Wings -- a stranger turns up at Jake Fribourg's farm, a stranger with a deadly secret.   And Jake loses his heart and finds out too late he shouldn't have.

Plus there's my lady's thriller, Black and Deep Desires.


I'll be posting a chapter from one, or two, or even three of these every week.  I've been too busy to do this over the last couple of weeks, but I hope to start again soon.  I also intend to submit some of them for publication.  Watch this space!

Oh, and my short story set in Cappor, The Wolf, has been accepted for the August issue of Wilde Oats.

Laurell K Hamilton

I've been reading Laurell K Hamilton's latest, Bullet. I've never read her before, suspecting that I would not find anything interesting or relevant in her writing. Hence my surprise: I enjoyed the story. Oh, it's not the best writing. Thin characterisation; an indifferent plot; a huge cast of characters who probably only fully make sense if you've read all the previous Anita Blake Vampire Hunter novels (Bullet is number 19); and lots and lots of sex. The unexpected wrinkle to the sex is that most of Anita Blake's boyfriends (and I lost count of how many she has) also have sex with each other, with or without her. And the sex is very, very hot. I suppose it's because I'm used to reading and writing erotica that this doesn't strike me as a negative. The way I see it, sex is an integral part of human life, and we humans love it. So it's entirely logical that we should write about it, make films and TV shows about it, and find it fascinating and a turn on. As I wrote earlier, religion has perverted sex by making only a tiny part of it sacred: the sex within marriage, "in the proper vessel". All other sex is profane, to varying degrees, some in fact an abomination. This nonsense spoils so much.

A while ago I had a kind of epiphany. Reading a short story in Neil Plakcy's Mahu Men, Sex in Salt Lake, I realised something about myself. Over the years I have more or less considered myself a gay man who got married, because he found that the person he really loved was a woman. I didn't find other women erotic. My lady was enough for me. I found Sex in Salt Lake very erotic:

“She suddenly planted her lips on mine, and swung over to straddle me, her leather miniskirt riding up to her waist. It took me by surprise; it had been a while since I'd had such intimate contact with a woman, and I was assaulted by sense memories, as well as the strangeness of it all. My dick didn't mind it though; it popped up to attention. Was I really gay if a woman's kiss and caress could turn me on? I always thought a bisexual was somebody who couldn't make up his – or her – mind. It only got stranger when I heard a key in the lock and then the door swung open. A haole bodybuilder type stood there, framed in the light. He had a deep tan and his dark hair was shaved down to stubble. […] Mindy was still straddling me on the couch and she leaned over and began kissing the edge of my chin. […] My eyes fastened on his body and wouldn't let go as he began to unwrap himself. First he pulled his T-shirt above his head, revealing washboard abs and biceps as thick as my leg. […] My body was going nuts, and I wasn't sure if it was the pressure of Mindy's ass on my stiff dick, her nibbling on my chin, or the show going on in front of me.”

My body's reaction when I read this story made me understand something about myself. All the years of marriage, until recently, I didn't allow myself to respond to women's sexiness. That I would respond to men I took for granted -- though I didn't act on it. But somewhere deep inside my mind I told myself women -- except my wife -- weren't sexy. My reaction to Neil Plakcy's short story showed me that that wasn't true, that in certain conditions I find women -- women other than my beloved lady -- intensely erotic. I found that extremely interesting.

In Bullet, there are extended orgies (no other word does them credit) where Anita Blake is repeatedly brought to orgasm by the two or three (or four or five) men she is with, and in one case with a woman. I found the description of sexual pleasure from the woman's point of view interesting -- and incredibly hot. As a gay man I am an outsider, and so in a way I can identify with all the protagonists in a story, or with none, a duality which can perplex and offend insiders. And again, reading these scenes made it clear to me that I am bisexual, rather than a gay man who happens to be married. A bisexual at the gayer end of the spectrum, perhaps, but undoubtedly bisexual. And that is most intriguing.

Over all these years I kind of believed somewhere inside me that being bisexual was a cop out. You were either gay or straight. Bisexuals were just confused. Oh, I could accept the intellectual proposition that we are all to some extent bisexual, that there was nothing wrong with being bisexual, etc, etc. But it didn't really impact on my deep (and subliminal/unconscious) conviction that I was gay (albeit with a dearly loved wife) and that claiming to be bi was a bit of flummery, really. The nature of an epiphany is that something you didn't know, or knew deep down but somehow denied, is revealed to you. A Pauline conversion, if you will. A "blinding flash"*, in everyday speech. The revelation is still shaking me. In the nicest possible way.

A few other points. Nowhere in Amazon does is warn you that there will be hot monkey sex in the book. Odd, since they go on ad nauseam warning one about the sex in their gay erotica. You know the sort of thing, 'may offend', 'contains explicit sexual content', 'situations which some readers may find objectionable (anal play, male/male sexual practices.)' No such warnings about Ms Hamilton. Why not? Because she is a best seller?

Also, I was worried about DemonThrong, which turned into a bit of a fuckfest. Not my fault, the characters took over. But it worried me (a) that all this sex was icky and (b) that it was unsellable. But WTF, if Laurell K Hamilton can do it, and make a good living doing it, then why can't I? The only possible thing to worry me is whether some other blogger somewhere reads DemonThrong and then comments 'erotic and hot, but alas, rubbish'. ;-)


*Epiphany comes from ancient Greek ἐπιφάνεια = manifestation, ἐπι= has the general meaning of 'on', and φάνεια means appearing/appearance and is related to phenomenon (φαινόμενoν in Greek)