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.

I'm working on Wilde Oats

I'm working on Wilde Oats and I'm pretty busy.  So for the next coupla days, you're prolly not going to see anything substantial from me.

Meanwhile, I thought you'd like some eye candy.

Normal programming will be resumed in a day or two, and I'll be posting then new chapters of Footy, ElvenSword and I Get No Kick From Champagne, as well as new episodes in the ongoing drama of the boyz and girlz  from  Majorca Flats.

This guy's a beauty

But tell me, do you think his eye colour is natural or from contact lenses?

It's exactly the colour of the eyes of  Ben, from my new novel Zing Went the Strings of my Heart.  It's a sort of sequel to I Get no Kick from Champagne.  In fact, he pretty much looks like my mental image of Ben.

Here're the first coupla paragraphs:

It was late when Ben came out of the nightclub. Alone.

It had been a good session. Fluid Exchange had been the lead band, and he liked them. He suspected that the saxophonist was an exotic. He was also not a little puzzled by the lead singer’s energy field—a wizard? A bard? He hadn’t felt one quite like that before. And he was sure he’d seen an elf on the dance floor, and another, younger, talking with the saxophonist and the lead guitarist. If it hadn’t been impossible – a human, an elf and an exotic – he’d have said all three were family, from the way they interacted.

As always, just before he stepped out of the protection afforded by the doorway, he quickly scanned each side of the narrow street, in both directions. There was nothing. Yet a prickling alert made the nape of his neck shiver. He had learnt the hard way not to ignore these warnings.

He turned and sauntered towards brighter illuminations of the main street, deliberately affecting a nonchalance he did not feel. Away from the light spilling from the door of the nightclub, it was dark, and his sense of danger grew. Like all his kind, he could see very well at night. There were no recent infra-red trails, no fading traces of dangerous auras. Yet the prickling was beginning to feel like needles piercing his skin. Out of a side alley, a space only a few yards wide and not much longer, he felt the residue of a wave of malevolence, a dab of filth brushing against his mind and fouling his aura. He reached for the weapon he always kept in his handbag, widened his pupils, tuned his ears to maximum alertness and breathed deep the foetid scents of rubbish, piss, dogshit, and evil. His gun raised, he turned into the alley, and began to walk forward.

I Get No Kick From Champagne, Chapter 10

I've just posted this chapter to my website. In it, our band of brothers moves all unwitting into danger, and there are some serious prophecies bandied about. Steven gets closer to admitting one truth about himself. Yet never has he been in more danger.

I Get No Kick From Champagne, Chapter 9

I've uploaded chapter nine to my website.

Enjoy.

ElvenSword & Champagne

I haven't been rigorously uploading new chapters. Mea culpa. Mea maxima culpa.

But your wait is over.

A new chapter of Champagne. In it, our heroes, our merry band of brothers, get ready to cross over into danger. And Tiltheus and Steven dance that peculiar dance that straight men (or one straight man -- the other is cheerfully bi) do when they find they are growing more than fond of each other. Love seeketh not itself to please....

Plus a new chapter of ElvenSword. Steppan and Fluin draw closer, they meet that vicious old ball-breaker the Duchess of Carnia for the first time (she keeps on turning up like a lingering fart in every volume of The Tapestry of Life; and keep a weather eye out for her daughter and her son too, for you'll meet them again as well.) I'll be posting the next chapter, The Sword of Fanuiloth day after tomorrow. And that's when things start to happen. A Chance Encounter? Perhaps not, after all. The Mother has plans.....

I Get No Kick From Champagne, chapters 5 and 6

Chapters 5 and 6 of I Get no Kick from Champagne have been uploaded to my website.

I get no kick from champagne
mere alcohol doesn't thrill me at all
so tell me why should it be true
that I get a kick out of you?

Ya know, I'm really enjoying rereading it. Can't always say that about my writing.

Which to Publish?

I can't decide which of my novels to submit for publication. I Get No Kick From Champagne is fairly polished and it was the first novel I really felt comfortable with while I was writing it. It's got some explicit sex in it, though -- which I think is necessary to the story, which is about a straight guy finding out he's more than that -- which will limit its placement to the gay shelves of straight bookshops (dear old Borders, for example). Maybe not even there -- lots of gay blokes won't even read books with bisexual characters. Some kind of gay fascismo. The novel I'm working on right now (intermittently, I do confess), which is provisionally called The Torc, also has bi characters, but will have no explicit sex, and will therefore be able to safely go on the fantasy shelves of Borders. Of course, even there, the thin-lipped Christian-Fascists might have a heart attack (if they had hearts), but still, it will be available for a wider readership. Trouble is.... it's not written yet! And it still needs substantial rewriting -- too much 'tell' and not enough 'show'. So....

BTW, the charming dragon picture is from this website. Hope they don't mind me using it (I'll take it down, honest, if you complain). And yes, there are dragons in The Torc. Definitely.