Writing

Some Bookish Thoughts: Writing and Reading

Usually, I wouldn’t bother with a whole blog post in response to someone else’s blog post. It’s enough to share it on my social media and leave it at that. But these two posts have captured things I haven’t quite known how to express, and I wanted to say something about them. I didn’t want to leave random comments on their blogs because that made me feel slightly like a stalker or maybe just a super socially awkward person with boundary issues. Anyway, that aside, these are both terrific writers, and if you’re not reading them already, what the heck are you doing here on my blog instead? Shoo, shoo! Go read!

First up: Heidi Belleau on writing bisexual characters. Do Bi People Need You (Yes You!) To Write Us?

This is a great summary of my own current feelings on the matter. I’m really not bothered by non-bi-identified writers including bisexual characters. I think it’s great, when it’s done well. Heidi touches on some of my bigger issues (chiefly gatekeeping of bisexual characters and where they “belong” in m/m). But she really nails it with the tropes and the need to actively understand bisexuality and bi-identified people.

I sometimes worry that being bi, I have to “perfectly” represent us. Which is frigging hard. Like…I have to avoid any and all appearance of tropes or stereotypes or just plain “bad bi” characters because if I don’t, then I have no right to call out non-bi authors doing a cruddy job of it. I’ve seen us get blasted for things, like the reviewer who referred to one of my characters as a “perfectly PC feminist bisexual.” One of my own favorite authors had a review which suggested her bisexual character was a gay man with a “boob fetish,” and lots and lots of my fellow bi writers have had vile things thrown at them the minute they dare have on-page “heterosexual” sex. Meanwhile, non-bi-identified writers spew tropey garbage and get cheered for “representing” the B in LGBT. Thanks but no thanks.

Anyway, read all the way to the end to check out Heidi’s AWESOME list of bi writers. You can follow them on Twitter, and I will vouch personally for a good number of them as a reader.

Next: Hans Hirschi on his reading preferences. Books, books, books: what I read and why.

You really need to read the post before you read my response to it, but I’ll sum up: Basically it’s like he read my mind. I’m completely in favor of a good love story, and there are marvelous examples of well-written books that fall strictly along genre lines. But I, too, am looking for something different. I might not fall quite in parallel with Hans here—I don’t mind a sad ending, probably in part because I didn’t grow up looking for queer lit and only finding the depressing stuff, and in part because while I lived through the 1980s and 1990s, that era looked pretty different for me.

Still, I’m most drawn to books about interwoven relationships: family (by blood or by choosing), friendship, long-term partnership, parenting. I like authors who rebel against genre mandates and do their own thing. I like complex situations and stories which speak to social issues. I love when there’s more going on than what’s on the surface of the story. And yeah, I’ll admit that I like when things aren’t tied up in a neat little bow and everyone’s problems are solved on page—a hopeful ending more than a happy ending (though I’ll take the happily ever afters, too!).

A dear friend told me once that the best love stories start in the middle, and I think they’re right. I don’t mind the meet-cutes and the falling in love and the sweeping each other off their feet, but I want more out of my books. I want to know what happens when the fairy tale is over and patience wears thin and endless days of work and diapers and carpools and medical bills take a toll on a pair of no-longer-youthful lovers. Dear authors: if you write it, I’ll read it.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on one or both of these topics. Leave a comment, and let’s see where the discussion leads us!

Meanwhile, don’t forget to stop by next week for my book launch party. I’ve got some fabulous guest posts and book reviews lined up as well as a giveaway linked to my virtual book tour. If you’re in the mood to join in with a guest post or author interview of your own, I still have some spaces. Hit me up in the “talk to me” tab above. You can pre-order An Act of Devotion below by clicking on the picture.

Adam Lansing has always relied on his charm to get by. Sure, he’s starting over—new school, new graduate assistant position—but he knows he won’t have any trouble working his magic on anyone he chooses.

Antonio “AJ” Mancuso is deep inside his own head. He’s cool, calm, and confident. But despite all the friends around him, he often feels like he straddles two worlds. Is there anyone who could love him for everything that defines him—past and present?

From the first time they meet, Adam is determined to get gorgeous AJ to notice him. But just as the heat is cranking up between them, Adam spots AJ with another man. Adam strikes back through a fling with an ex. But when he discovers the truth behind AJ’s behavior, he realizes that his magic won’t clean up for him this time.

Being “Overly Sensitive”

Books, Writing

It’s been a long, long time since I simply blogged about something just for the sake of putting words to a feeling. But some things have happened, and I wanted to process them because they feel too big to simply sit with them.

I suppose this is something a lot of us have to deal with when what we do for a living is a creative pursuit consumed by others for their enjoyment. On a regular basis, we are an exposed, raw nerve, letting the world (or at least the part of the world that’s interested) in on our secrets. We pour them out in our fictional people, sometimes because it’s the only way we know how to get the whispers in our hearts and minds to stop.

In November, I published what is quite possibly the most personal novel I’ve ever written. I’ve been awed and touched by the response. Readers found many things which resonated with them, and even though sometimes writing and editing it left me in shreds, I’m glad I did it.

What I’m not glad of is the way a number of people have decided that my words, my characters, belong to them by virtue of having read it. I don’t mean plagiarism, though given the things happening to some of my colleagues, that’s always a worry in the back of my mind. No, I mean those who think they are entitled to speak for me about what I did or did not mean or should have meant or will mean one day in the future. Not a matter of readers’ interpretations—an outright telling me what I “know” about my own work.

The thing is, I’m fairly tough. You can ask my publisher (well, okay, no, don’t email her about this; it would be rude). My first novel had huge changes and large added sections. I never fought her on it because I knew she was right, and it made a better book. (I may or may not have slammed my head against my keyboard a few times, though.) Still, I didn’t get angry or cry or tell anyone how put upon I was.

Editing my second novel made me cry (once in public). There was the time my friend and colleague stayed on Facebook chat with me, talking me through a trigger because I didn’t know what was happening to me other than that I couldn’t stop crying and shaking. It wasn’t because of the edits my beta readers suggested; it was because it was intense and personal and soul-wrenching. In the end, I was a better person for having survived it.

Beta reader comments feel like good medicine, even when they’re negative. Bad reviews either spur me on to do better or make me cringe and laugh at how ridiculous they are. (I’ve lost track of how often I need to tell people I don’t write romance, for instance.) Sometimes, I go hard on myself because I compare my work to others and find it lacking. But that’s on me.

I love chatting with readers about what I’ve written. Even when there’s a situation or character they hate (I have a character in my upcoming novel who is not at all well-liked, and it will be very, very interesting when I write his story to see what happens). It’s fun to see how readers have processed something in a short story or novel.

The one thing, however, that is guaranteed to reduce me to a puddle is offering unsolicited advice about my work.

I think if I tried hard enough, I could come up with a reason for it. I grew up with a parent who had a near-obsessive need to “fix” things I did. There’s something awfully controlling about insisting you know better than the person who created something about what kind of product it should be. This is deeper than “you used a bad stereotype” or “your plot has big holes.” It’s more along the lines of suggesting fan fiction has the characters more “correct” than the original author or people sending copies of the film version to encourage the author to use them as “research” for their next project.

I’ve tried reminding myself that people mean well, and sometimes they get a little too enthusiastic about their enjoyment. But for whatever reason, it feels so personal, like a lack of faith in my ability to tell a good story. Like I need help to do it right. Like I might forget there’s a whole Internet out there full of books and articles and reams and reams of information from which I can draw. Like they possess some special, secret insight into my characters and situations which I don’t despite the fact that I created them.

It’s a lack of trust.

Not being believed is one of the few things that can cause me to go from calm and happy to panicking in under ten seconds. That tiny little lack of trust—that seed of “I know better than you” condescension—is enough to put me over the edge.

So I am asking gently that I be trusted to know my own work. I promise not to tell anyone else how to do their job properly, and I ask the same in return. Trust me to ask for help when I need it. Believe me when I say I know where to find the information I want. And above all, listen when I tell you I know my characters and situations intimately because they came from my heart. In exchange, I promise to keep working, keep trying, keep practicing my art so as to give you as a reader a better and more satisfying experience.

If you made it all the way through, thanks for reading! I’m still giving away FREE e-books, so check out my Amazon page and enter the giveaway for a shot at any of my work (except for multi-author anthologies).

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Not Sexy

Writing

The title of this post refers to the most frequent criticism I’ve had from readers of romance novels. I’m going on record saying I agree, but here’s why: I don’t write romance.

Well, not really. I do like a good love story, but real life is not about lonely people finding their soul mates and having oodles of hot, hot sex. I suppose that must happen at least some of the time, given how many people are married or partnered with at least one other person. Still, the world does not operate in the following steps:

Find TrueLove™
Hump like bunnies
Find out some horrible secret/have some horrible event happen
Believe TrueLove™ has been lost
Finally resolve the emotional drama and live happily ever after/happily for now (probably with more humping like bunnies)

I admit, I’ve tried to actually follow that formula in my writing, and this is probably why (some) readers think it’s not sexy. It is damn hard to write like that! I keep getting distracted by other important things.

In a recent online conversation with several other authors, I learned a few things I hope to take into the future with me.

I’m a person who loves slice-of-life books with a lot of plot. I don’t actually care much about the sex. I’m more invested in the characters and their situations, and I’m interested in their lives outside of any budding romance. I’m much happier reading about friendships and families, and I prefer the love story to be secondary—in fact, I don’t care if it’s not there at all.

I don’t write great sex scenes, nor do I enjoy writing them. One reason is that I think there needs to be a good reason for them to be there or they distract from the story. So I don’t see a huge need to build chapters and chapters of sexual tension and then get two hot people in bed together. If they’re intimate, it’s because it makes sense to the story, and that’s typically less “sexy” than when getting them together is the goal.

I’m invested in making sure lgbtq sex isn’t fetishized. I’m bothered by how many women say they see “no point in reading m/m romance if there’s no sex.” It goes right along with how many women also don’t want to read about femme men and prefer women be absent or minimal in the story (or reduced to the plucky BFF). I was absolutely appalled recently at the dismal reviews for one of the best books I’ve read in ages—and all the ranting was about “glossing over” the sex and not having an “alpha male” type character. Sex wasn’t an integral part of the story, and the characters would not have made sense as culturally macho men. What some straight readers want is a very heteronormative version of gay and bisexual relationships. I understand that it’s “just a story,” and I don’t need to read or write it. But I wonder how many women with such preferences are invested in being genuine allies outside of making their Facebook profile pictures rainbow-fied. (For a great video on what it means to be an ally—bisexual-specific, but relevant to other communities—see here.)

I want more from my lgbtq books. I don’t think all of our books involve relationships and/or sex, but a lot certainly do, in all genres. That’s not a terrible thing—for too long, we’ve been considered to have “unnatural” lusts, and our kind of sex has been taboo (or fetishized). It pleases me no end how many straight guys liked my first novel, despite having sexual situations between two men. These readers were invested in the story, and the sex didn’t put them off or distract them. That said, a lot of what I see is about romantic relationships, and books heavy on other storylines are not always well-received. There’s a lot of non-romantic speculative fiction (SF, fantasy, etc) featuring lgbtq characters, but what I want is more literary genre lgbtq books. Some mainstream authors of literary fiction already include lgbtq characters, but I’m looking for something beyond “I wrote a gay character once!” There are some lgbtq authors whose books are shelved as literary, for sure. I just crave more, and I don’t want my fellow authors, especially writing m/m, to feel locked into romance or romantic relationships.

I’m probably approaching my own work all wrong. Okay, maybe not completely, but at least in some sense. I’ve been invested in writing a story around a “pairing”—a romantic couple and how they got there—because I’ve had the sense it’s what people want. Except the things I want to say keep getting in my way, and I’m doing neither romance nor literary genre any good, as evidenced by accusations of “not sexy.” I want to write about intersecting lives and friendships and family and couplehood at multiple stages, not just the falling in love part. I’d like to write young adult books and stories about women and novels on the way faith and identity intertwine. In short, I want to free my own mind from trying to write “romance.”

Allow me to reinforce that despite my view of what I want to read and write (and aside from my concerns about how lgbtq people are viewed by straight readers), I don’t see anything wrong with reading or writing romance. So much of what’s out there is personal taste. This is about where I want to go, and I’d like to return to my desire to write compelling stories without worrying about how “sexy” they are. If someone chooses not to read it because it’s not romantic or steamy, so be it.

Some housekeeping and a writing project

Writing

I know, I know. I promised I would get back to blogging. But I’ve been wrapped up in another project, which I’ll share with you. For the last few months, I’ve been working diligently on . . . a novel. In case you didn’t know, I keep a second blog where I post mostly fiction with an occasional book review or post about writing. For about a month, I’ve been participating in WIPpet Wednesdays (WIP = work in progress) with a wonderful group of writers from all over. The link-up is closed for this week, but if you’re interested, you can join in next week. I always post the link in my WIPpet posts, but I’ll post it here, too.

Now for some links for you:

Here are this week’s WIPpets (link-up is closed, but do go and read them–they are wonderful!)

This is the writer who hosts WIPpet, K. L. Schwengel. The link is on the right side of the blog. Just in case I’m silly (like I was this week) and forget to link to it.

Here’s a link to all of my WIPpets since I started. They list newest first, so I recommend scrolling down to the first one and reading them in order. It doesn’t really matter, but they are chronological to the story.

This is the series I posted this week for my fiction blog, inspired by one of David Hayward’s cartoons (linked in the posts).

Happy reading! I’ll be around occasionally. I’m hoping to finish a good chunk of editing on my novel and on a secondary project this weekend so I can get back to snarking about Fifty Shades next Monday. I’m rethinking how I want to do that–I may stick with finding the worst lines per chapter and mocking them because that was far more fun than going through the whole damn thing and trying to summarize it.

Have a great rest of the week. Catch you all later! (Er, “laters, baby”?)

Passive Peeve

Writing

I’m going to stray off topic today, because this is my blog and I’m in that kind of mood. So, I’m going to talk about writing. Specifically, I’m going to talk about one of my biggest pet peeves: People who edit badly because they’re too rules-bound.

I volunteer for a beta-reading web site. For each chapter or story, the moderators assign two readers. This week, I had the misfortune of being paired with one of my least favorite fellow betas. I was the second reader, so I got to see all his comments before mine. I should mention that this guy is frequently a complete jerk. This is the same person who thought Wikipedia was an appropriate source to correct my use of upstate New York lingo. Dude, I live in New York. I’ve been upstate many, many times. I worked in the system I’m writing about (education), and I’m married to a teacher. Wikipedia? Really? Some of us have an affectionate nickname for this beta which I won’t repeat here. Suffice it to say, he’s one of the people I would like hand over to the woman who wants to punch people in the throat, or maybe Jenna Marbles could just tell him where to get off.

Throat-punching lady and Jenna aside, my problem with this particular assignment wasn’t just this guy’s beta-reading personality. No, he did something that is increasingly making me want to throw things at the computer screen: Correcting “passive voice.” I can’t believe how many people–including professional editors!–have no idea what passive voice actually is and choose to correct anything that even looks like it could be.

The Jerk highlighted two paragraphs of the piece we read and commented that the passive voice “stood out” in them. First of all, out of seven sentences, only two were questionable. Second, neither needed correction.

In the first instance, it wasn’t passive voice. The writer had used a legitimate verb tense, past continuous. Past continuous is important–it distinguishes between discrete events and ongoing actions. In the case of the story, the writer described several characters entering a room to find someone sitting in a chair. Using the past continuous verb form, “was sitting,” informs readers that the person did not sit down when the others arrived but had been sitting and continued to do so after their arrival. It’s an entirely appropriate phrase, and it is not passive voice.

The second sentence was legitimately passive voice:

A door opened in the wall.

Doors don’t just open; a person, the wind, or some other force has to act upon the door. However, the above sentence is good use of passive voice. Active phrasing, “Someone opened a door in the wall,” wouldn’t have worked here. It’s boring. Telling us that a door opened is mysterious. We, the readers, do not know who or what opened the door. This is a situation in which we want a less active phrasing in order to draw the reader into the story. The door opening as the result of some as-yet unknown force builds tension and intrigue.

Which brings me to why this makes me so ragey. When we–as writers or editors–become so focused on not breaking the rules, the writing becomes constricted. Grammatical rules can be broken under the right conditions. Provided we know and understand the “official” way to structure sentences, we can bend words to suit our purposes. It’s what separates good writers from great ones, and good editors from great ones.

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Odds 'n' Ends

For the last two days, I’ve been struggling to find something to write about. The weird thing is, I don’t feel burned out or stressed, the typical causes of writing failure. I just . . . don’t have anything to say right now. Go on, you can make fun of me for that–especially if you know me offline.

I suppose part of it is that I’m working on some fiction and I’m pouring my energy into that project, which I’m currently having beta-read. I’m excited about what I’m writing, and I’m enjoying the process. (Nope, not going to tell you yet–I’d like to get the whole thing done and beta’d. I may post it as a serial on my fiction blog.) I only have so many hours in the day, since I also need to work on editing projects and homeschool my daughter and drive the kids around to their activities.

Another part is just a function of not having much to say. I’ve spent years deconstructing a shaky faith built on a legalistic version of Christianity. I’m now in process of reconstruction. I was at church the other night and I mentioned to a couple of people there that coming into a church that doesn’t teach salvation based on receiving Christ as personal savior has been alien to me–in a good way. Being in a place where the emphasis is on “God is awesome!” rather than “You are unworthy!” has been refreshing. To an extent, I still don’t fully trust church as an institution. I’m still guarded when it comes to participation in church activities. But I’m healing, and that’s what matters to me.

The third piece is that I think I’m softening on some things and learning as I go. When I left legalistic Christianity, I temporarily exchanged it for legalistic feminism. That’s not healthy. I discovered that feminism can be just as much a belief system, in a sense, as religion. I needed to distance myself from people claiming to speak for me and from terminology (which I’ve used and now regret) that I view as harmful. No matter how many times women tell me that they have the right to be angry, I can’t see how “kill all men” is helpful in any way. I’m not talking about “being nice” in hopes of getting people in our corner; I’m talking about how anger can be expressed without that kind of hyperbole. I don’t feel pressure to conform to someone else’s feminism any more than I feel pressure to conform to someone else’s Christianity.

I’m still figuring out how to write from this place. It’s where I started–the gap between my faith and my experiences of the world. Now I need to learn to write from the gap between my feminism and my experiences of the world. It’s the place in which I don’t want to hurt other women, but in which I need to protect my own spirit as well. I learned that being angry all the time made me self-righteous and burned me out to the point that I had to block people on social media because they were indirectly causing my anxiety to peak.

Anyway, I’m sorry about the crickets in here. I know that if I’m patient with myself and allow for the time I need, I’ll be able to write in here again. For now, I’m going to work on other projects while I enjoy the beautiful sunshine streaming in my windows. Whatever today brings for you, may you find your small ray of hope in it.

Some Bookish Thoughts: Writing and Reading

Being “Overly Sensitive”

Not Sexy

Some housekeeping and a writing project

Passive Peeve

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