Wilde Oats Issue 20

Wilde Oats issue 20 is up, here.  It includes a new story from me, I am Sidhe.  There are six stories in the issues and three non-fiction pieces.

Forbidden fruit

That was the title of the gay-shaded e-zine which morphed into Wilde Oats.  Its symbol was a strawberry which made me think of it.  You can read some of its stories here.

Wilde Oats issue 16

We've been going for 5 years now.  That's pretty good for a magazine run by volunteers.  We have had some very good stories over the years, and several of our authors have gone on to make a career in writing.

Four stories and three book reviews in this issue.

You can read it here.

Wilde Oats

Working on our 16th issue of Wilde Oats!  Almost done.  I'm hoping it'll be up tomorrow.

Wilde Oats

The latest issue of Wilde Oats, issue 15 (we've been going for 5 years now!) has been published.

Eight stories, four book reviews, one reminiscence, one obituary.

You can read it here.

[Illustrated by the late and much missed Linda Laaksonen]

The Queen City Players Present

A story uploaded from the our archives to Wilde Oats.  You can read this beaut story by Matt Brooks here.

Wilde Oats Issue 14

The latest issue of Wilde Oats is out.  It's a retrospective issue -- the best of Wilde Oats in the nearly 5 years it's been going.  I'm very pleased to tell you that one of my own tales is there.  It's called Sarie Marais, and it's about a man who goes climbing by himself in winter in the Groot Drakenstein mountains east of Cape Town.  And about how a mysterious stranger saves him from dying in the snow and cloud of a July snowstorm.  And how he finds a good man to love.

 You can read Wilde Oats here

Coming out blues

A couple of years ago, a good friend, a bisexual bloke I was very fond of, pushed me very hard to tell my friends I was gay.  He thought it would be good for my soul.

So I did.  It took a lot of courage.  I was afraid of their disapproval and disdain, of losing their friendship.  I had only a couple of close friends, and I didn't want to reduce that number any further.

Well, they made all the right noises.  "I'm so glad you trusted me with this, N."  "It doesn't surprise me, but it doesn't change anything."  Yeah, right.  The bloke who said that at once started making a point of sitting as far from me as possible when we met, with his arms crossed tightly across his chest.  The other one, a born-again Christian, with all the baggage that brings with it, said all the right things, but suddenly stopped phoning me.

I haven't seen either of them for 2 years now.  Despite all their political correctness, their real feelings have been revealed (as so often is the case) by their deeds.

I can console myself by saying that this is the real me, and if they don't like it, well, fuck them.  Except that I miss them.  I was very fond of them  And now I have no close friends.  The guy who pushed me to come out has died.  And the others have dumped me.  We'd been friends for 15 years.

A friend is, as it were, a second self.  [Marcus Tullius Cicero.]  Yes, and their betrayal hurts.

Then, about a year ago,  I got to talking with a bloke on the train.  He was a nice man, with a kind face, and he seemed intelligent and funny.  We started down the road of friendship.  So when he asked me what I was doing on my laptop, I thought it would be OK.  I told him.  I was working on Wilde Oats.  Oh, he said, and immediately looked it up on his smartphone.  Next day he was still friendly, a week later he was sitting on a different seat and wouldn't meet my eyes and now he travels in another carriage altogether (the trains are in units of 2 or 3 coaches, and you can only move around within one unit.)

Ah well.  The world is what it is, and I don't have the strength to try to force change on it.  But I won't be telling anyone else soon that I write romantic m2m stories or that I edit a gay-shaded e-zine.  Nor will I be trusting straight blokes again.

Wilde Oats, Issue 9

Well, at last it's finished.  The final sprint to the finishing line always takes longer and is harder than I remember it.  But it's up!

I may be biassed, but I reckon Wilde Oats is the premier gay-shaded fiction magazine on the web.  In this issue we have ten new stories; reviews; opinion; and an interview with .... me!

You can read it here.

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.

Sigh

Wilde Oats is very nearly done.  I'm waiting on some very minor info and will upload the last pages then.

Meantime, thought you might enjoy this image.  Shapely ....  Bitable .... Sexy ... And that's just his bum!

Wilde Oats Issue 8

I've done about 90% of the work for this.  I have to do some final checking and tidying up, but I'm pretty much there, as far as you, gentle readers, are concerned.  By that I mean I still am waiting on one or two queries I've made to authors and our interviewee, but I can't finish their pages till I get answers.  So there'll be a new Majorca Flats post tomorrow, and Wilde Oats, including my story The Wolf, will be available by the weekend.

Busy

I'm working on the latest edition of Wilde Oats.  There's masses to do:  an interview with Rick R Reed, the gay horror author; editing my own submission The Wolf (the other WO editors liked it but said it needed a lot of rewriting, and they were right!); and converting stories, bios etc into HTML for upload to the Wilde Oats website.

I've had particular problems with the last task.  For a long time I used Kompozer but it's full of bugs, ranging from weird problems when you copy and paste to the fact that it "gets tired" after you've worked on a few pages and you are forced to close it down and start it up again.  So I switched to the WYSIWYG component of SeaMonkey, which is a successor to Kompozer from the same Mozilla community, which is relatively bug free and robust except for one horrid flaw: when you copy and paste text with embedded HTML links, it often pastes just the text, not the links.  Since the links have to be letter perfect, this is very, very boring and tiresome.  So now I have to use both Kompozer and SeaMonkey, savings files in one system and opening them in the other.  Backwards and forwards.  Boring boring.

Plus, at the work which pays me (writing earns me half of nothing),  one of the busiest times in the year is just about to start.  My job (and my pay!) is supposedly part-time, but at this time of the year it never seems like it!  Though the pay remains part-time :-).

Anyway, while I'm occupied with that (WO issue 8 is due out on  1st August), I'll only be posting Majorca Flats every second day (sorry!) and not much else (though I have several long pieces in my head.....)

Meanwhile, I thought you might like this image.

The image somehow reminds me of 'Jerry' (1,2), though these blokes don't look much like each other.

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.

Wilde Oats Issue 7 is up!

Eight new stories, two serials, heaps of reviews and an interview with the great Tanya Huff!  You can read it here.

I did the Tanya Huff interview and also a review of The Fire's Stone, her heart-warming bisexual fantasy.

Wilde Oats Issue 6 is up!

I've just finished uploading the latest Wilde Oats.

Seven new stories, one new serial, a chapter from Nan Hawthorne's gay historical novel, book and film reviews, gay art, things to watch out for, and more!  In my humble opinion (well, I would say that, no?) it's one of the best gay-shaded zines on the web.

You can read it here.

Enjoy.

(The pic is from a  book review Secret Historian, by Stanley Ridge, one of our editors)

Blue-Arsed Fly

Racing around like a blue-arsed fly, busy as.  I'm working on the upload of Wilde Oats, the online gay-shaded magazine I help create.  As usual, there is always more to do than I first thought!  It tedious work, but somebody must do it.  And this will be Wilde Oats sixth issue. Two years old, and getting stronger every day.

So, here's a pic of an extraordinarily beautiful guy for you to perve over.  It should keep you going.

When I am with you

I could not resist this image.

It's from a group run by one of the other authors from I Do Two!, Brian Holliday.  His really charming and heart-warming story in I Do Two! was called Home Cooking.  Brian has had a couple of stories posted in Wilde Oats, and there'll be another in the upcoming issue.

Wilde Oats Issue 5

The latest issue of Wilde Oats has been released.

Nine new stories, a chapter from Ruth Sims' latest novel, book and film reviews, and some incredible new art from Gene Moore -- who painted the image on the left to illustrate his luscious story In my Father's House which is in this issue.

Enjoy.

Wilde Oats Issue 4

I've been busy with the latest issue of the gay and bisexual e-zine Wilde Oats (I am one of the four editors) so I have alas not posted much here, nor written much. Wilde Oats has been going for nearly 18 months now, and we (the editors) are pretty pleased with how it's building credibility and readership.

There is no easy paper forum for writers of m2m (gay and bisexual) romance and erotica, especially if you are just starting out, no matter how good a writer you may be. My first story was published by the 'slash' e-zine Forbidden Fruit nearly six years ago now. FF was the predecessor to Wilde Oats. Now that I have had a couple of short stories published (the latest in the anthology I Do Two!) I remember with gratitude the invitation from the then editor (and founder) of Forbidden Fruit, Fiona Glass, to submit my story Lthon's Tale to the magazine. She gave me my first chance to be published. We at Wilde Oats do the same now for many excellent new authors.

Enough of this rambling! The latest issue of Wilde Oats is up, with stories, reviews, articles, rants and news. And when you've finished reading the current issue you can browse our archives.

Enjoy