Aleksandr Voinov - Letters from the Front

Real life changes & update

2012-02-01T21:01:00.000Z

A few of you know that I've changed jobs recently - so I went to interviews in December and January, and got the one job I wanted. With my skill set, I'd have been able to return to financial journalism or attempt to stay in financials.

While media companies were hiring (and I got a couple interesting interviews), the few I went to visit can be described as "young and hungry", and "hungry" tends to mean extremely hard work, and "young" tends to mean shit benefits, and, anyway, I didn't "click" with any of them.

With thousands of banking jobs (like mine) cut across the financial sector in late 2011 (and ongoing), I moved "sideways" and secured a copy editor job at a rating agency. I started work on Monday, and so far, I'm really enjoying it. Biggest challenge right now: To learn their house style as soon as possible. It's very different to my old team, but not necessarily in a bad way. Just different. It did mean I had a lot of time off, and that's now gone. But: good riddance. I do need structure in my day, and I like interacting with flesh-and-blood people. And this job will enable me to get some qualifications and bullet points on my CV, which should position me well to go back into banking, if I should so desire. Also, I'm now officially "comma police", which is quite amusing in many ways. The company itself is awesome--pretty good benefits, holidays, fantastic offices (with cheap and good catering), very nice team. I'm a lucky bastard when it comes to jobs and companies.

Also, I got a new boiler installed last week--two days of dirt, dust and noise (and extremely low productivity on my end), and not one day too early. The "Siberian" cold in London is absolutely biting. I'm so glad my heating's way more efficient now (and two rooms are noticeably warmer, thanks to new radiators - or "rads" as the boiler boys called them).

Also, just before I had to start work on Monday, I finished "Dark Soul" on Sunday night, and since then have been tweaking the fifth and last installment to make the most of it. I need to do an outline for a friend's novel, and edit a co-project, and fine-comb "Dark Soul 5", and all those should keep me pretty busy during February, apart, of course, from getting all the paperwork squared away (a gazillion background checks for the new job, paperwork for the job I left).

So, yep, busy. It's a good kind of busy.

On the writing front, that space opera is demanding face time, and there's a couple sexy shorts that I want to write about Silvio and Gianbattista, but I'll see if I can't push these away a bit longer. They'll attack me and bite me in the throat when I'm not expecting it, so I'm not too worried. I also need to get back into the research groove for the birds books.

And I'm keeping all my fingers crossed for a friend who's sent her 120k novel to a literary agent on Monday. Since I did a proofing check on that piece, I'm really nervous and excited on her behalf.

Next step is to do some more improvements around the house--the front garden could be fixed up to look less ugly, for example. I have plans for roses and tea bushes, and we need to remove some weird bush thing, a juvenile ash tree, a rickety fence and an ugly 1960ies concrete walkway up to the door. Now that I have a new job, I can even afford to have that done. It's been an eyesore for more than a year now.

Now, back to editing.

Buck Angel Interview over at Amara's

2012-01-17T14:26:00.000Z

A guy I've admired from afar for a long time, Buck Angel, speaks about trans* issues, outing and other obstacles at Amara's today.

I can't possibly stress how important Buck is for the whole trans* issue. In my head, I've always referred to him as a gendernaut - somebody who goes places most of us never do, and vastly expands our understanding of gender and sexuality. Do go and check the interview out.

I blogged elsewhere & update on Dark Soul

2012-01-17T13:13:00.000Z

Welcome, new subscribers! Please feel right at home. :)

Last week, I blogged at Slash & Burn about finishing Dark Soul.

First of all, I'm really enjoying to see Dark Soul going viral. I don't think there were many stories I've written that have turned out to be so popular, but it's great to see all the reviews and tweets pop up. I consider those motivation to sit down and finish Dark Soul 5.

As an update - Dark Soul 4 is completed with my editor at Riptide, Rachel Haimowitz, and I expect to start edits on that fairly soon, so we're all on track for a late February release.

Dark Soul 5 looks like it'll have five stories, as I have a lot of plot to wrap up and am currently pondering to add a sex scene somewhere. Interestingly, every single story of Dark Soul explores power, and most attempt a mind fuck of some description. (Yeah, I know, I'm slow, bear with me for a moment.) Some of those are tied up into sex, others into loyalty and obligation. The most powerful stories - IMHO Dark Secret, Dark Night and Dark Lady I - combine those themes.

How do I know these are the best ones? They are the stories that I balked the longest over starting. ("The m/m readers will rip me apart if I put a sexy guy into a female dress" was one of the considerations, admittedly.) And they were the hardest to write overall, and at the end of every single one I sat back, thinking, or saying "holy hell, I need a drink/coffee." (But I do keep a bottle of vodka in the freezer for this type of "woah, hell.")

So it's a ride; for me too.

So, back to Dark Soul 5. Two of the stories are written and they clock in at around 13k. It feels like I have most of the plot still to get through, but least, the research part is done, so now I can concentrate on finishing what I've started in terms of the plot arches. As a side note, I did not expect Stefano to have quite that much internal strength, courage and humanity (well, he has to, considering the beating he takes throughout the series).

Overall, I'd reckon DS5 will clock in at 20-25k words, which means the whole series will be around 90k words, which should make an attractive paperback later in the year.

Right now, I don't want to be thinking about "what book next", but I do want to get the second part of William's story finished before I vanish in WWII for a year or two. (Possibly two.)

And then there's an attempt to write something for Riptide's rent boy call, too, but that's a very tentative "maybe". We'll see what the next year brings in terms of queer writing and in the mainstream.

"Dark Soul" is a recommended read at Dear Author

2012-01-08T16:13:00.001Z

Welcome, subscribers No 101 and 102. Feel right at home.

Big news here. "Dark Soul #1" has made the Dear Author Recommended Reads List. The review is here.

The reviewer Sunita pretty much nails my intentions with the first piece when I wrote it, and I look forward to answering the open questions with the fifth and last installment (I say "last", because I'm pretty sure it's the last one, but as it's not yet written, whether it IS the last one becomes clear when it's actually down on the page, because then *I* will actually really know for sure that it is. Books and characters have tricked me before.).

But of course the review is significant all by itself. Once you've written that novel (which is a road full of milestones, anyway), you face a new set of milestones. In the m/m genre, that would be:

1) Getting a review from a stranger

2) Getting a review from a blogger who actually has a clue (not everybody out there does)

3) Getting on m/m specialist blogs, like Jenre Wellread and Jesse Wave

4) Getting reviewed regularly on all the main m/m blogs

5) Getting reviewed on Dear Author

6) Getting reviewed by Publishers Weekly, I assume?

Dear Author is special because it's for the whole romance genre (including the much larger het part) and has a much wider remit in terms of what forms and formats it reviews. It's also very selective, and the reviewers use the whole range from A to F. Often enough, I'd wish we had more Dear Authors around to call bullshit.

So, having seen friends savaged on that blog, and sometimes agreeing, sometimes disagreeing with reviews of books I've read, I opened the link with a certain amount of trepidation. A bit like getting my first review from Mrs Giggles - you just don't know what's under the link, but you can't NOT click.

So, extremely pleased to get a good one, which is really in part my validation, but also that of my editor and Riptide as a business that's focused on quality. Making the Recommended Reads list first time is another huge step. It's great and I keep re-reading the review. No pressure on the sequels, right? (Then again, I can trust Rachel as my editor to tell me when the quality drops. Can't have that.)

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On a side note, interesting things are happening on the RL job front. I have a second interview with a Big Rating Agency, and the Biggest Shark in financial reporting has also taken a nibble. I expect an interview invitation from them, too.

Some people have a very mapped-out career plan (I'm looking at the finance people who are like: "Start as analyst, three years later, I'll be a Director, five, Vice-President..."). I don't work like that at all. I know my market and my skills and what's important, I have some really good - very colourful - experience, but I don't have a Master Plan (I don't even have one for writing). I just happen to come across great opportunities that are all working in tandem to create an interesting, pretty well-rounded skill set and enable me to write.

Or, as my partner said yesterday: "You remind me of Wintermute in Neuromancer. You're not great on the initiative or very proactive, but when it comes to responding to anything, few people can beat you."

I'll play black, then.

The "citizen-journalist" and the e-book piracy fallacy (then turns into: patronage)

2012-01-04T15:15:00.001Z

Today Publishers Weekly tweeted an article from that rather amusing, very mixed bag of a "news source", HuffPo.

It's an opinion piece by Harry Freedman, entitled "Why I'm Not Worried by E-Book Piracy".

I'd say it's worth checking out, only is isn't. The author conflates, in a tangle of derailed logical thinking, several debates: the indie vs trad. publishing debate; the pricing debate; the quality debate; and then tops it all off with the rather lurid hope that continued piracy will make authors "angry" enough so they will turn away from pricing their books at $0.99 - and because it'll make authors angry, e-book piracy isn't really harmful, so Freedman's "not worried". (How much of that is whistling in the woods is open for debate.)

Wow, talk about an intellectual fallacy, naivety and a lack of research (possibly due to a lack of data and experience. According to his blog, Freedman is a relative newcomer to e-publishing, so he might be forgiven).

This is especially lurid in the face of this news item: Piracy Drives One Noted Author to Early Retirement.

So, it's clearly working, Harry, isn't it?

I can state, knowing my own sales, that my sales have stayed essentially flat in the last 18 months. Or, to run some other numbers, I've sold something like 300-350 copies of one story, which is extremely widely pirated. I'd estimate that around 20,000 illegal downloads were made (this number doesn't include torrents, which are very hard to track, and it doesn't include what I call casual sharing, the "here, I bought this, you gotta read it, so I'm sending you the PDF" sharing between friends).

Now, not every pirated copy is a lost sale, I get that. Let's assume that 5% of those downloaders might have bought the book. That's 1,000 people - three times what I actually DID sell. And, no, the $300 total royalties I got from that story doesn't really pay for the (many) hundreds of hours of work that went into making it. And those are peak sales - after the first quarter, sales always drop dramatically - always. Chances are, those $300 are most of the money I'll ever make from the book.

That for a book that has very high ratings on Amazon and Goodreads and ranks amongst the best I've done. Am I worried?

Am I worried that in a growing genre, my sales are completely flat? Am I worried that if you type my name into a search engine, the first links are links to pirated copies of my books? Am I worried that I now have to spend prime writing time on sending takedown notes to websites?

It means less time for writing, no hope ever to be anything but full-time employed, and it also means not only fighting the Muse all the time and my own fears, but the sense of entitlement.

There's a strongly Darwinian streak in this debate, which runs like this: "If you can't make a living off writing even while being pirated, then you're clearly not good enough. If you drop out of writing, you just lost Darwin's race. It's not like there's a shortage of writers - ten more will take your place."

Yeah, at which point, art will return to the palaces of the rich. Every author will have to find himself/herself a patron. Thing is, much of that art was locked away - patrons very often didn't share it with the wider population until way after their deaths. Imagine how many paintings and sculptures we'll never get to see in our lifetimes because they are in "private collections".

Thing is, my genre isn't something that a patron would be interested in. So I'm considering every paying customer my patron, who can all pop a couple bucks into the kitty and in return, I'll do my best to be fun and entertaining (and hot. I'm not forgetting hot).

A Writer at University

2012-01-03T18:50:00.001Z

First of, in the meantime, this blog has reached 100 subscribers. Thanks, gals and guys, for pushing me into the three digits, much appreciated. :) (No idea how it happened, but you're all welcome. This is really the place where I very often speak to myself, like the weird pinstripe-wearing dude on the train mumbling to himself...)

ANYWAY. Big(gish) news all round, so that one first:

Riptide Publishing, Rachel's and my brainchild (now, scary thought, so maybe let's move away from that metaphor) has been nominated as best e-Publisher of 2011 by Love Romance Cafe.

Of course, cynical voices will say we only had three months to FUBAR, and that didn't happen. It was a steep learning curve, but Riptide's looking better with every passing month. Sod it, week. e-Publishing is THAT fast-paced. We've been selling books for three months now, and the business is already - very firmly - in the profit zone, vastly over-exceeding our financial expectations. We feel that our mission statement is pretty much 100% correct. There will be a broadening and deepening, staff-wise and genre-wise, but overall, we've had a terrific three months and are very pleased that we're nominated for this.

Also, "Dark Soul 1" has been nominated "Best Book of 2011". Considering that it's the first in a series, the last two installments aren't even out yet, and it made a very late entrance in the year, that's astonishing and I'm beyond flattered. (No pressure on the sequels, right?)

But not only that - a huge amount of "our" authors were nominated with Riptide and non-Riptide releases, and congrats to everybody for their hard work, we're extremely proud to work with some of the absolute top talent in the genre.

And - I've always said I was lucky with my covers. In this case, people can see just how lucky I was with "Lion of Kent", which scored the cover artist, Angela Waters, an Honourable Mention at Speak Its Name.

I bet I'm forgetting some more nominations, but that's it for the moment on this front. If anything, awards and suchlike always remind me that any book is a team effort, and it's a huge amount of work then to sift through it all and compile a shortlist. I know. I've done it in journalism. Thanks guys and gals, I'm very grateful for the hard work.

I've recently talked to one of my co-writers, and realized that writing is really largely overcoming obstacles. They can take a number of shapes, really, most are probably mental in my case. (They can be physical - I knew a writer once whose arthritis was so bad she could only type for 30 minutes per day, talk about serious limitations!)

Thankfully, my ego is pretty resilient overall. It's probably a layer thing. The outer layer is me going "Yes, I'm FUCKING AWESOME". The next layer down holds my insecurities. It's a big layer, and the inner critic lives there, too. That's the place where reviews hurt, especially when the reviewer says out loud what I was feeling down in my guts but didn't know how to fix. This is the place where I keep half an eye on my Amazon rankings and Goodreads reviews.

But at the core of it, deep, deep, down, there's a place that nothing can touch, and that's what powers the Muse. I'd reasonably confident that I'll always write, because I've always made up stories. It's integral to me like the spine or the skull bone. Nobody can remove it. I don't think it could even be damaged by outside forces. If we use the metaphor of a nuclear reactor (I've recently used that in my writing, so it's a close one), the radiation is always there. Whether I turn it into anything sellable is a different matter - and the plutonium core absolutely does not care. It's happily emitting radiation, whether anybody does anything with it or not, it'll just go on doing that because that's its nature. The best answer to "why do you write?" for me is "because I cannot not." It's my birth defect, or my calling, it is really what it is.

Now, a situation I recall from university becomes truly bizarre. I started university studying German Literature (made kinda sense at the time) in addition to American Studies and my major in History. Still getting my head around how this whole writing and novel thing works, so I figured some help from academia might be nice.

So we're doing the "get to know you" bit at the start of a German Lit course. 99% of the people there said they were studying German literature because they always liked to read (or were good in German at school). I, the dissident, admitted to being a writer and trying to learn some tricks from the pros.

Response from the lecturer running the course: "OH MY GOD! You should immediately drop out, because if you stay, you will realize that every story has already been written, and so much better by the Grand Masters of Literature than you could EVER HOPE TO BEEEEE!"

Let's not even begin to talk about how a man (who's made his life and career in academia by talking about the work of writers to the uninitiated) tells a creator to a) either not get involved in literary criticism as it would surely break the writer's heart; or b) give up writing and despair over his own inadequacy at the very start of his career in the face of the masters.

In other words, why play chess; you'll never beat Deep Blue. Why run; you'll never beat Usain Bolt. Why cook, if that Michelin star is WAY out of your league.

And surely, if all stories in all possible permutations have already been told, surely we've run out of stories way before Shakespeare. Sorry, Faulkner, what you did was a complete waste of your time ever since Ovid.

Also, I hadn't been aware that gay military sci-fi romance was so big in the Middle Ages.

Okay, I mocked the asshole lecturer enough now. I just dread to think how many young writers might have believed him, if only for five minutes, thanks to his Position of Authority. But then, writers do it because they must, so the real writers will have been okay, anyway. I'm just sorry for the moments of doubt this guy has left in his cynical wake.

And every story has a moral. I did exactly what the dude wanted: I dropped out of German Literature (now, having dropped out of the German language too, this has an ironic double edge) and turned towards American Studies, where one of my favourite lecturers ran this course: Creative Writing (my first CW course).

I hear wings beating

2011-12-31T17:56:00.001Z

The next time I'm writing a series, I'll write the whole thing before I publish a single book.

Granted, it's quite possibly terribly inefficient in terms of work. What if reception is so bad that you've just spent three years of your life writing a series that people are hating? And yep, overall reception has a huge impact on whether I'm writing the sequel, or feel like doing a prequel. Characters that are loved are more likely to come back on the stage for an encore. People hating the overall concept of a series can strangle the second part in its infancy. On the part of the author - total deniability: "It was meant as a standalone anyway."

Writing a series while parts are being published seems like a clever thing to do, then, until you do it in practice. (Hey, I'm still learning how to treat the Muse right - a writer's career seems largely a series of experiments on him/herself, trying to trial and error a way to stay alive and productive and more-or-less - but not too, that's dangerous, too - happy.)

When I started the Dark Soul series, I wrote "Dark Soul" for a gun kink anthology. Much like a lucky oil explorer getting the drill in just right, I then saw the earth split wide open. Geyser. Unstoppable. I'd hit 20-year old oil in my own soul. Holy shit, I hit THAT geological layer again, get the rig over here, NOW!

I wrote Dark Soul 1-3 in a happy daze, sucking on that general area and swallowing as fast as I could. Then, November happened, certain moderators of a certain Goodreads group stepped up their harrassment of trans* writers, "sniffing out" "fake men" and demanding that publisher police the contents of their writers' underwear or be threatened with boycotts, some bloggers ran around outing trans* people as having ovaries (gosh, the possession of ovaries now a crime or what? Personally, most trans* men would like to keep theirs in jars or wash them down the toilet, but they ARE kind of important for the body's hormone equilibrium).

Things thankfully died down (mostly, anyway, not that those mods ever learnt a thing or even apologized), but the important thing was, the geyser had died off. My "sure I can write this whole Dark Soul series, want the whole thing next month?" became pure boisterous posturing.

For weeks, I didn't even feel like a writer. Words were just scrawls on paper. I had moments (days) of intense loathing for pretty much the whole genre and everybody involved in it, including myself, then I slowly dragged myself out of that, realizing, deep down, that I'm not going to allow a few entitled assholes to ruin me as the writer, ruin my fun, or take my books out of the hands - and minds - of my readers.

In short, just because there are assholes and trolls on the internet, I don't have to suffer for them, or hurt those people who really want my stories. Of course, when I write, I'm emphatically NOT writing for the assholes and trolls out there, but I've also discarded the very petty idea of anti-dedicating my books ("This book is for readers, but not J., L. and JM, or A.S., who I hope burst spontaneously into flames when they read any sentence I've written" - ah, if words had such power!).

Although it admittedly would have been fun to watch how quickly and indignantly they'll deny having done "anything" to "deserve such vile treatment", while at the same time working very hard behind the scenes to damage me and my business, and that of my friends.

Honestly, regarding November I'm very nearly past caring, because my real battle - the one that almost nobody has any influence on whatsoever - is to finish a five-part series when trolls have stomped all over the well you'd been tapping. Why do I even bother?

I've spent what feels like two months staring at the screen, digging in my brain, using the sharpest tools I had to try and draw blood. Some writing is nothing less than digging through the
scar tissue of your soul and trying to get at a fresh artery. Some of us look inside like junkies trying to find one good vein. And if you can't find any on your arms, you can always go for the one in your balls or between your toes. We're talking THAT kind of writing.

I felt so bruised and so numb inside that I couldn't see the faint blue shimmer of a vein through my skin. And when the blade went in, I couldn't get deep enough to get even a spurt of blood. Anywhere. Obsessive writer that I am, I kept cutting away, kept digging, and probably made all my friends utterly miserable with my thinly-veiled self-loathing. A blocked writer is a pitiful creature, and he/she knows it.

I knew it would be two more parts, but I couldn't get them written. I analysed my own writing process from inception to final proofing stage to debug it, and I have some vague ideas what I can optimize now and in the future. All this under the pressure to have to deliver two novella-sized books of several stories that were nothing but a twinkle in the Muse's eye. My Muse, however, usually a hard-working and pretty reliable bastard, had fled the scene.

And then you're stuck in the middle of a series, much like a marathon runner who gets a foot blown off at kilometer 20. In front of what feels like thousands of people, most of whom haven't even heard the shot or noticed what's wrong. All they see is that "their" runner staggers and falls. A few go after the shooter, others stare or shout in horror. And while you stagger, all you can think of is to shout "I'm OK! I'm OK! Of course I'm finishing the race, no problem, I just, errr, stepped funny on a stone or something." It's not a pretty picture, because the reality is, you know something's badly wrong, and there's this myth floating around that writing is easy once you know how to do it, and we're all writing machines and reliably produce if given half an incentive, and surely the money is enough, right? We just sit down and do this thing. We're "professionals". Usain Bolt doesn't get a cramp. Muhammad Ali doesn't chicken out.

It's all nonsense. In the end, the battle is between you and the white page on the screen. If I can't find the hole in to the story, it's not happening. That's a block, and I haven't had a real one in ages, but this one was nasty. It was made nastier because of the loathing and disgust, the trolls, and a deep-seated insecurity whether anything would have changed after November.

The answer is, yes, everything has changed, and I'm still cataloguing the fall-out, good and bad. But the first area where I had to do damage control was in my own writing, and, specifically, Dark Soul and whether it would get completed.

You're getting all these funny ideas, too. Whether the pre-November parts will have the same tone. After that huge upheaval, will I write "differently"? How will people now read part 3, which was written well before any of that shit happened?

You manage to take the first steps in part 4 and keep thinking "is this what I would have written before the trolls ate my Muse?" There's a certain taint, a certain fear and tentativeness in the writing that is maybe totally in my imagination. None of my own struggles HAVE TO have made it on the page. Writers can happily suffer in real life and nothing of it makes it on the page. I think. I hope.

And while the trolls haven't destroyed my writing, I do wonder if they twisted it. If I let them down inside me too deep and they did shit in there than I can't even fathom. Or whether I'm clenching up, in a protective reflex, in expectation of their next move. Whether I write in a certain way to justify myself, and how my Muse works, and what my themes are, and how I tackle them.

And then you write more, and the tentativeness slowly falls away. You're a swimmer who has broken out of the pollution of the coastal waters. No plants that wrap themselves around your ankles. The sea out there looks like you remember it - cold and powerful and dark and threatening, and now your muscles are warm and you can SWIM again, for all you're worth. There's no help out here, but veteran that you are, you don't NEED anybody's help. You pull, push, stroke, the machine remembers how to do it, and all the creaky, painful, self-conscious shit, the stuff about expectations, good and bad, all falls away. It's done. None of that matters.

And suddenly you have 15 thousand words, and they might be different from the 15k words you'd have written before it all happened, but, never mind, those 15k are still pretty good words, there's no taint, no rage that doesn't belong. The trolls haven't actually reached THAT deep. They are beach trolls, but once you're deep and far enough in the water, they look like spoiled, bored children hitting each other with plastic sand spades.

In the last four or five days, I've written more than 15k words. Dark Soul 4 is almost finished, and once I've finalized the last scene, I'm going to swim further and bring back Dark Soul 5. I'd say they should both be done in January.

"Is he ever going to write a book for people like me?"

2011-12-28T22:57:00.002Z

Recently (a few weeks back, okay, make it months), my colleague and friend Chris Hawkins over at Riptide Publishing told me of a conversation she's had with one of my readers (I still struggle typing the word "fan" and will likely forever be stuck in that default...).

Chris explained that my reader is a paraplegic who loves my work and she asked Chris: "Do you know whether he's ever going to write a book for people like me?" Adding that she felt I could write a main character with a disability and do him (and her, by proxy) justice.

Now I don't know who she is (Chris kept this in strict confidence, just relaying the story). I responded that I have a lot of characters dealing with a disability. Vadim Krasnorada suffers from a a bad case of PTSD. Other characters have survivor's guilt, shell shock. Sergei Stolkov, in many ways Vadim's younger mirror-image, loses an arm and a leg and has issues with his prosthetics (which are stupidly advanced and those issues seem to be largely psychological). Kendras, like Richard, has a permanent limp after a foot/knee injury.

Of course, those characters who are permanently disabled get what I'd call "magical replacements". Stupidly advanced tech that makes the physical limitation pretty much only cosmetic. In short, if it doesn't seriously impact a character, it's basically a cop-out, and in many ways, I'm pretty aware of it.

After my experiences with Race!Fail (and my immediate, passionate denial of being a racist just because I had white main characters only), I've become ultra-wary of my own instinctive "but of course I'm not X!" responses.

In this case, we're not talking racism, we're talking ableism. The assumption, in short, that main characters can only be physically perfect, with all limbs basically intact. Now, of course, in erotic fiction, the perfect six-pack, the wise-cracking charm and the physical beauty are, in some ways, givens. It's the default.

It's also a pretty rotten message, which some people can understand as "only perfect/white/healthy/X/Y people deserve love and passion" - and are understandably upset about. While we as readers (and I'm one, too), slip into the skin of these perfect people (who are prettier, wittier, sexier, more confident ... than us), that skin doesn't always fit. The "default" excludes a lot of people.

I've written Kendras a black man, and it wasn't hard at all, once I really understood what was going on inside him, his skin colour didn't matter to "me the writer". I've written Silvio as a genderfluid person (Dark Lady II definitely crosses the line from crossdressing into real gender issues - and wow, was I expecting to be hanged and quartered for that, but it didn't happen), I've tackled various mental and physical injuries and damages.

Today, I think I've seen a character happen to me who is for my reader, whoever she is, and everybody out there who wants a character like that. He's pretty kick-ass, and I can't promise more, because all I've seen so far is a tiny glimpse, but something's germinating.

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On a side note, I've written more than 5k in the last two days. I can hope that I've overcome the agonizing writer's block that November has given me. I'm not quite sure if anything that I've written yesterday and today is any good, but attempting to write doesn't feel anymore like tearing out my eye balls. I've even hit the occasional patch of "flow". It's no longer like pulling teeth - and how much I missed that.

My Christmas post over at Riptide

2011-12-24T18:44:00.000Z

I blogged over at Riptide about Christmas (so I'm not repeating myself here). Merry Christmas, everybody, happy Sol Invictus Day, or you holiday/feast of choice and belief.

Follow this link.

Of rabbits and wolves, and bridge trolls and knights

2011-12-21T19:55:00.002Z

Today I was pointed at this most excellent post by Marie Sexton about the Muse and its natural enemies, and how sometimes, when the Muse gets wounded, it crawls away to die.

Read the full post here.

This is an incredibly powerful post about the power of the "haters". The wolves out there. They might take many shapes - for me, the wolves are people who harrass authors, who demand to know who we sleep with, and who sticks what into whom, all so that we are "legit" in the eyes of the wolves - or "trolls" as I like to call them.

The trolls are the demons lurking under the bridge. They eat the unwary. Sometimes, they injure the valiant during the combat. Sometimes, they take an arm or a leg. Passage into the next story, the next project, was rarely bought so dearly, has rarely left such gaping wounds. Some knights still soldier on and continue onwards, others don't. Others stay the fuck at home.

The problem is that the trolls don't just live under bridges. If the questing knight KNEW the trolls were under that bridge ahead, he could "weapon up", put on the helmet, change from the gentle steed to the charger, and lower the lance, armoured in his heart and body and ready to do battle with whatever comes. (Yes, knights in the Middle Ages didn't travel fully armoured and ready, they did have to change before the battle.)

The trolls I'm talking about today don't live under bridges. They live in forums, where they tell people to boycott publishers who are not policing the gender of their authors, and they live on mailinglists, and blogs (some even write blogs), and comment on blogs and hang out at any place where a juicy, unsuspecting knight might pass by. They have nothing more to offer than snark, nasty attitude, ignorance and hatred. Some of them even believe that knights quest for the "easy money".

Trolls attack the knight's horse if the knight himself cannot be brought down. They attack the knight's squire, his lady, his friends, even the peasant who told the knight which way to take.

They do it "because". I'm not sure what soul-sucking darkness lives in them so that they revel in the mayhem they can cause.

But to trot out the metaphor further: Being a troll or a knight, is, ultimately, a choice, but we can remember (and take heart in) that it's not the troll that might, eventually, reach the grail castle. Trolls are obstacles to overcome. In Campbell's The Hero's Journey, they are Threshold Guardians that try to scare us and test us and that look ghastly and mean, but ultimately, they don't matter. They have no real power.

I need to remember when I sit down to write that, in fairy tales and "romances" (and that's where the word comes from, in Western literary canon), the knight has a name, and we all remember Percival and Galahad, but I couldn't remember the name of a single troll.

Release day: Dark Soul 3

2011-12-17T18:16:00.000Z

Today, the third part of "Dark Soul" has come out from Riptide Publishing.
We're starting to see Stefano Marino's "war" up close and personal, and it's probably the most daring of the series yet. (And, to those who wondered, I wrote "Dark Soul 3" before the shit in November happened - way before).

So, here's Jordan Taylor's splendid cover:

AND! The first reviews are in, too - check them out at Goodreads.

Regarding the next installments - I'm currently working on Dark Soul 4. It's a struggle getting the words down, so after a solid three weeks of struggle I have something like 4,000 words (I've written blog posts that were longer). Right now, the next part is called "Dark Rival". I expect to write Dark Soul 4 before the year's up, and then Dark Soul 5 in January, which should be the last installment, and should bring the total wordcount to at least 80-100k, which is a good size to go into paper. I haven't really made any plans beyond that, the block is pretty harsh to me and strangles off all "wouldn't it be cool if/when..." thoughts which stand at the start of any book.

So, even writers-blocked to hell and back as I currently am, I manage a hundred words or so if I work hard enough. It might take eight or nine hours of solid work before I get even one sentence down, but I'm very much your average Taurus. Head down and charge, and the problem might go away. Works more often than not. :)

As one of the things to come out of all this, however, I've resolved to translate some of my German stuff into English. I can do translation when I'm too much of a whimp to dig up new words.

Rainbow Awards Winner

2011-12-08T13:58:00.000Z

I saw yesterday that Dark Edge of Honor - co-written with Rhi Etzweiler - has tied (three-way) for best gay sci-fi novel in Elisa Rolle's Rainbow Awards.

That makes me (us) an award-winning author. :) (But seriously, I'm very honoured and more than pleased, especially for Rhi, who's an amazing talent and this was their first book - here's an author that deserves all the recognition there is, in any case. Great co-writer, extremely hard worker, good friend).

Also, this wouldn't have been possible without Deborah Nemeth, our editor, who helped us fix a number of pretty serious issues with the book (like, she made us completely re-write the last three chapters, which went from "WTF?" to "OMG" under her guidance).

There's also another interview up here.

And a great link that's worth watching for all blocked writers out there.

My week largely consisted of staring at a screen while blood was beading on my forehead. You really can't fault me for trying to break through this shit.

I did buy some "sex toys" from Cult Pens and promptly broke my new black Rotring Pro mechanical pencil (me and mechanical pencils have a long history of trench warfare, as the Faber Castell issue a couple weeks back has shown) just three minutes after taking it out of the packet. I broke it while trying to put in a mine from Koh-I-Noor (coloured mines, great idea, but they are going to break your MUCH MORE EXPENSIVE pencil, so stay the hell away from those mines, or at least only put them in a clutch pencil!).

On a sidenote, I'm officially in love with the Rotring tikky 3-in-1, which took me a while to figure out, but it's clearly magic and extremely useful for editing on paper.

Otherwise, very little else to report - sending off the first few Xmas presents and juggling a gazillion things (slight exaggeration, but I did stop counting at a million).

The shape of it

2011-11-29T14:24:00.001Z

I've had a good think about my future in the genre, and I'm continuing to think. Right now, a double-track approach seems to make the most sense. The melodrama and the hate mob have driven me to reconsider whether I do want to stay in the genre. The messages of support and love and several versions of "don't leave me!" have made me reconsider how much power I'm giving the haters over my writing and the Muse.

Make no mistake, the Muse is still having dinner with the dodo, wherever they are. Not a wingbeat, no words, thoughts, or images coming from him, so as far as the writing urge is concerned, I'm currently "healed", like I haven't written a word in my life and can go happily on living without ever writing another word. There's an interesting calm in that emptiness, in the absence of story. Like a haunted house suddenly exorcised. A schizophrenic healed. Awakening after a night crammed full of dreams and nightmares. Deep breath - calmness - meditative silence.

It's odd not to be writing. All the time I have now for reading. The pre-Christmas stress seems manageable. Above all, I'm getting to bed at a reasonable hour. This is how "normal" (non-writing) people live. It's nice. No obsessing about word counts, no submission stress (I have nothing out there to sell, and nothing even remotely ready to go out anytime soon - the emptiness also characterizes the state of my projects folders).

I know, rationally, that I'll need to write the last parts of Dark Soul, but, as I said, not one wingbeat. I know, roughly, what'll happen, and that used to be a state I could rely on to carry the writing, but I've stared at a white screen long enough now to know that it's not that easy. I might have entered a prolonged dry phase (I've been dry for three weeks now). No writing at all. I've had a few of those earlier in my career. The longest was two years. I suffered like an animal in that time. Short dry spells can be anywhere between a few weeks and a few months.

I don't know, and I'm not going to stress over it. I'm just saying I'm pretty sure I can blame outside forces for it. The Muse asks "why bother" and "for what", whenever I get him to talk.

I'm working on finding an answer, but that's the rational part of me. What I want back is the ability to fall into my story and feel the passion for writing and for sharing a story with anybody outside myself (I'm happy to entertain myself, but I can do that day-dreaming without the hard work of actually sitting down and typing it all up. I can entertain myself with a novel-length day dream in one day and enjoy that for a week).

It doesn't help that everybody around me (in real life) tells me I'm "too good for that". Part of me knows, and that's why those words are gaining so much traction - I've done THAT dance before, I know the markets, I have the contacts, I can actually sell in the mainstream if I really, really want to. It means a lot of work and networking, might involve switching back into German, might involve building a totally new writer persona online. It's all daunting and complex and exhausting - last thing my Muse needs. I've been writing m/m because it's what I'm good at, what's natural for me, because it's fun and because of the readers.

But that doesn't mean I don't, ever, have mainstream ideas. And at the same time, I'm already pushing that particular envelope, and it might just be one more step to re-enter that realm.

For the moment, I've removed all "In the Works" projects from my website, because I think that some of the things I'm working on can go into the mainstream and those might need to go under a new pseudonym (I'm working on a few, but none has yet "clicked" for me), and because I have no visibility how many projects will actually happen. I had a pile of about twenty projects that I might potentially want to do, but after the last month, the life has been leached from all of them.

I'm quite happy not writing right now, just being a publisher, editing a bit and doing some project management for Riptide, and I don't expect much to happen in the next weeks or months. Which is fine. I'm ready for winter.

Blogging on Thanksgiving at Chicks 'n Dicks

2011-11-24T12:21:00.000Z

Just a really quick update - I've blogged over at Chicks 'n Dicks on Thanksgiving.

Then, Riptide has acquired Guiltless Pleasure Publishing.

I'm currently mostly catching up with emails after the turbulent last two weeks have thrown me way back, but the workload hasn't really abated. That means some paperwork, some editing, and dozens of emails, making sure everything is tidy and squared away.

Then, Counterpunch has been receiving some great reviews on blogs and Goodreads. Looks like the book really struck a nerve, which pleases me a great deal. And many love Dark Soul, which is awesome, too.

Hope everybody is having a great Thanksgiving (at least those of you who celebrate it) and soon a great weekend!

‘i see myself’: embrace the rainbow

2011-11-20T01:00:00.001Z

In the past few days, we have been privileged to witness an increasing awareness and understanding within the m/m romance community about the complex issues of gender/s and sexuality/ies.

This has been a significant and positive step forward in healing a rift caused primarily by ignorance and bringing hope where there was once anger, turmoil and devastation.

This is by no means an end, however.

For if there is one thing we have all learnt is that a rainbow cannot easily be grasped or defined.

Rainbows are constantly changing. Rainbows are not fixed. Even when an artist tries to portray them in a photograph or piece of work it is only one moment in time they are capturing, not the full journey of a rainbow.

It is this fluidity we need to embrace and encourage others to do so as well.

To this end, we are sending out a challenge.

A challenge to help us increase awareness, acceptance and support for the trans*, intersex, intergender and questioning people in the m/m romance community and broader community by adding this to your site:

We believe this will stand hard as a sign post symbolising hope as well as a safe space for GLBTQQ people to freely be themselves. Whoever 'they' might be at that particular moment and whoever 'they' might be in different moments in the future.

We do this on the day which marks the 13th International Transgender Day of Remembrance; a day for remembering those trans* who have been the victims of hate crimes.

We also do this in association with the Safe Reading Zone campaign; a promise to those GLBTQQ people among us that we will support them.

So, will you accept our challenge?

Perhaps this excerpt from an interview in September 2011 between genderfluid Andrej Pejic and ABC’s Nightline Juju Chang will help you make a descision:

Chang: When you see yourself in the mirror, do you think of yourself more as a man or as a woman?
Pejic: I like to keep my options open.
Chang: What does that mean?
Pejic: I see myself.

‘I see myself.’

That, friends, says it all.

Please help us spread this message.

With hope and love, Aleksandr Voinov, Amara Devonte and Kris for 'embrace the rainbow'.

The artist as public property

2011-11-19T11:30:00.002Z

It's always fascinating to me to explore just who we writers write for. In my personal case, I write because I have to.

When the Muse is his glorious, wing-beating self (imagine my Muse as a black-winged, vaguely human-shaped, vaguely male creature not unlike what I'd picture an angel as, but one of those kick-ass, sword-wielding angels, drawing a thunderstorm in one hand and soaring like an eagle when the energy is there) - there's simply no stopping. I know that the Muse is likely part of my own soul, some deep well of energy that I tap into when I work. Sometimes, writing has nothing to do at all with the Muse. Then it's just putting words on the page. Making the screen look untidy. Ruining perfectly good paper with ink scrawls.

When the Muse is involved, it's fire and fury and thunder. Then the book comes out in one piece, as if it has only been waiting somewhere else for the gates to open. It's lightning - indivisible, extremely powerful, and really interesting to feel pass through you.

So, in many ways, I write because I can't not. A book is a primal force that hits me like an earthquake. Tell that incoming train headed your way that you really don't quite feel like it. Hah. Good luck with that.

I can't refuse to write. I'm a writer, that's why I'm here for. If there's any reason or sense in human existence, mine is that I was put here to write my little black heart out (and help others do the same).

There've been some denizens of the lunatic fringe that think (and have said, although, crazy as they are, they aren't crazy enough to say that to my face) that my refusal to write in a certain genre is "holding my stories hostage". Yeah, so me writing is just giving people what they own anyway - like it's not me giving those stories to the world, but somehow TAKING something from those readers. Not just owing, but evilly withholding what's their due. To vid, read the "GRR Martin is not your bitch" post by Neil Gaiman.

(As a sidenote, these people are a tiny minority - while many have expressed dismay, they also respect my decision, whether it's permanent or temporary).

In response I want to repost (slightly rephrased and borrowing from other commentators for context) what I posted here:

Whether or not an author is "public property" and whether he or she owes readers anything is a question I've grappled with myself. E M Foster didn't write certain books because he felt he couldn't write about the gay subject matter. Kafka wanted all his work destroyed - everything we're reading of Kafka's has only survived because a dying man's wish was blatantly disregarded and a promise was broken. To read his work at all is to benefit from an act of treason. I'm on the fence about it, too. Kafka made world literature a richer (and much stranger) place, but on the other hand, those were his stories - he didn't owe us anything. At the same time, as a reader, I want to chain some authors to the desks and make them write book after book for me. As a writer, that same idea horrifies me.

In a way, we owe the Muse and the book to tell those stories (not that I could stop either). We got this gift, and I think we are obliged to to the best we can with it. As I keep saying to my writing “padawans”: Your Ego Doesn’t Matter.

Or, another analogy. I compare the job of the artist in his/her own community as that of the shaman to his/her tribe. We mediate, we heal, we walk the path into the imaginary/spirit world, wrestle and negotiate with spirits, and come back with gifts that heal/benefit the community. In return, the community respects us and feeds us (in my case, I do my own feeding, but the idea is to give something back to even out the relationship).

The last couple weeks have given the appearance that my “tribe” had turned toxic – on me and others like me. Handing over the hard-won kill to them, when all you see is clenched fists, is not easy. Personally, I’m not that selfless. So, the returning shaman, witnessing all that anger, turns on his heel and walks off to a less hostile tribe, sick to his heart over it.

In the mainstream, there are prominent writers writing under a variety of names that not necessarily reflect their physical, genetic gender. I’d never speculate whether Val McDermid is actually female or identifies as somewhere along the Rainbow spectrum (I frankly don’t know enough about the person), but there’s an example where the mainstream is a hell of a lot more accepting than I’ve seen the m/m community be over the last weeks. In the end, it’s the story that counts, and hopefully the author – without whom no story – gets their just rewards.

Of course, I’m hoping that the m/m community/genre will grow up. That we’re going to be less torn back and forth through what’s essentially some of the most odious residual traits of “fandom” (which, when it’s supportive, is very supportive, but when it’s bad, is VERY bad). What we need is a “level up”, to borrow a roleplaying term. If we ever want to hope to be taken seriously, this shit’s gotta stop.

I fully understand if people turn their backs in disgust. I received an email from a dear friend – one of the strongest writers in the genre – who is so hurt and disgusted she may never come back. This is collateral damage that many people will never notice, because few of those who left made the kind of blog post I did.

Bringing this to a close – I think we need to all be more accepting and tolerant, which, however, includes shutting up the haters, showing support to those who are under attack (whether we like them personally or not), and educating ourselves through all of this.

If the space is safe once again, the shamans will continue dancing and singing and bringing you those strange things from the Otherworld – hope, stories of love and overcoming darkness.

Whatever and whenever I personally will write, I honestly don’t know. The Muse is very silent right now. I will continue to act as a publisher and supporter in any case. What I will do is take a stab at the mainstream, quite possibly under a totally different name, I don’t know. It’s not something that will happen very soon. The damage that was done in a few days or weeks may take months to scar over, and may never fully heal. It's easy for attackers to move on, but the attacked live with the memories of shame, fear, anxiety, stress, horror and disgust for the rest of their lives. It'll always be there, sitting low in our guts.

Offering Sanctuary

2011-11-16T17:55:00.002Z

Preface: Your response to my last posts have been overwhelming, emotional, touching, gut-wrenching and overall EPIC. Thank you from the bottom of my heart. I'm hoping to catch up with the emails and posts at some point. I might need to sleep a little first.

The only hostility I've received afterwards came from people speculating that my last posts were "marketing ploys" to drive sales of Counterpunch and Dark Soul and to promote my own publishing company, Riptide, which is decidedly a trans and queer-friendly space.

I have to say, those people are such accomplished cynics that I'm frankly awed. I guess being soul-dead like that doesn't even hurt any more, right? For the record, Riptide is doing very, very well, thank you, without me publicly eviscerating myself. But I guess some people think Buddhist monks set themselves aflame because they are cold.

And I want to say a specific "thank you" to the gay men who have reached out. I've given the impression that I have been treated with nothing but hostility from the gay community. While I've had a couple unfortunate encounters (like Mr "I'm going home to have real gay sex now" and some telling me I only have body issues - yeah, rocket science - and need to get laid and my disquiet about my gender would get marvelously fucked away) - I've also received amazing, warm, genuine support, for which I'm deeply grateful.

I also want to add that I've been contacted by many, many trans and queer writers who are "under the radar" and who have experienced the same reprisals, doubts, and harassment. I wasn't surprised by any of those stories - saddened, horrified, but not surprised. I WAS surprised by how many we are. I said I knew of around 7-8 trans* and queer writers. We're getting closer to 20-30 now. I'm not counting the lesbians (double digits) and gays and bisexuals (loads). I don't keep a spreadsheet, but we are MANY, and I salute every single one of you. For your support, your work, your dignity in the face of adversity, I salute you.

I said all I can claim was "Freakhood" - no loving Rainbow family. I was wrong. There's been so much love and support from the rainbow people that I'm shocked and humbled and barely managed to sleep with my heart pounding so hard (and I'm eating my words; they are better with soy sauce). Thank you, guys, gals, and everybody in between. I'm proud of the community, of being PART of the community.

I'm also very, unspeakably (but I'm trying!), humbled by the support from our straight and/or cis-gendered allies. So many of you have reached out and spoken up. Thank you.

To all those who feel the reflex that I suppressed until my "coming out" - the reflex to stand up and speak up - and potentially shatter the identities you've built; it's OK to not do that. Nobody respects and loves you any less because you aren't "out and proud and loud." Please be safe. Do only what you're 150% comfortable with. You do much work behind the scenes, and we can see that and feel the difference, and it's appreciated. Nobody has the right to push you to where I was yesterday, staring down the cliff with only two options left: Jump or fall.

Before I start to sound like General Patton speaking to the Rainbow Army, I'll break it off here. I'm just saying, this experience has made me a better, humbler and less conflicted man and I'm offering the same support that people have shown me to everybody still out there, and I will continue to do what's right.

Which brings me to some house cleaning.

For the record, my posts were about the fall-out and effect of rampant transphobia and harassment on trans and queer writers. Why for us, "coming out" is more like death and a lot less like liberation. Why we don't want to be outed, why that destroys a very tenuous inner calm and peace that many of us have spent decades to build and achieve. I took the fall because my brothers and sisters were asking me to stand with them. I did not want to abandon Oleg, Bryl, and Danny - and all the others whose names I don't want to mention here as they are "passing", but I know they are watching and supporting.

Some people are congratulating my friends on "Finally he has stopped lying, finally he's out". Now, nobody has told me that to my face. To everybody who considered me a liar: Choose your weapon, and let's make an appointment. I believe early mornings are traditional. I'll bring a second. Either face me direct, if you have the GUTS, or shut up, you cowards.

Now, more house cleaning.

This situation was sparked by another author, AJ Llewellyn, outing himself as a trans man on his most recent blog post.

There has been wild speculation about the issue - others have made very convincing cases pro and con, and frankly, it's all out there on the table, and I'm too tired to join the chorus.

From what I understand (I don't have a PhD in Gender Studies, I can always be wrong), a person is trans once they claim they are. The trans community is extremely welcoming and open to to anybody joining. None of us would dare to question another's trans identity, because, you got it, EVERYBODY's identity is the result of an agonizing, often ongoing process. We would never turn on another trans* person calling them a faker or a liar.

Of course, this opens the community up to abuse and appropriation, when people claim trans status to enlist allies and to get a ready-made army to march for them. We embrace anybody claiming the label, because this is a mechanism that has, often literally, saved trans people's lives. If there's nobody else left, you can raise your hand and call for help, and you have instant allies. This process is VITAL and it's saving lives and sanity, and even possible exploitation doesn't give us the moral right to judge another. You say you're trans, you are. I believe we're a lot more enlightened there than most cisgendered people (some of whom have called me a liar... the mind, it boggles).

Now that AJ Llewellyn, a - to put it mildly - controversial character has joined our ranks, I am thinking back to my medieval studies. Let me explain:

In the Middle Ages, if you were a hunted criminal and managed to reach a church, you could claim sanctuary on hallowed ground. This meant that whoever was coming to enforce the law couldn't harm you and couldn't remove you from that sanctuary. As far as worldly law was concerned, you were untouchable.

Sounds like a great deal, right? A community is persecuting somebody for wrong/harmful behaviour, and all you have to do is claim sanctuary with a group who will immediately - reflexively, nobly - step up to defend you and protect you from punishment. A second chance. Awesome deal.

But the custom had a flip side: While the murderer or horse thief couldn't be hanged, he WAS subject to church discipline. That means: penance, some of which was pretty extreme. We're talking asceticism, flagellation, "mortification of the flesh", all those tasty things that made medieval spiritual life fun and games. The murderer/horse thief would have to atone for his sins, mend his ways, and subject himself to the rules of the church/order that he has fled to.

Personally, I'm ready to embrace AJ Llewellyn as a brother in trans.

I'm not questioning his new-found, brand-new identity, I'm not questioning that he's distressed.

I have my own history with AJ and it's not positive. I will emphatically NOT list his actions here. I believe we all know by now what they are.

But AJ has joined the trans community, and I welcome him.

But I am distancing myself - as strongly as I can - from AJ's behaviour (he has attempted to link himself to me in private posts, and I protest this link SHARPLY). Yet I cannot and will not doubt his brand-new identity. We trans people would rather be exploited than wrongly accuse one of ours.

AJ, welcome to your sanctuary. If you can mend your ways, do. If you achieve that, I'll be proud to call you brother. Right now, all we're giving you is sanctuary, because that's the code, not because we love you or even forgive you until you've shown that you can play nice and contribute, positively, to the community.

Here I stand, I can do no other

2011-11-15T12:27:00.003Z

This is the blog post that I never wanted to write, but I owe it to all genderqueer and trans* writers and readers out there. I’m hoping that my experience may serve to make the “community” a safe place for us – others like me. At present, I don’t know if the aftermath of this – action, reaction, consequence, if I understand correctly – will allow my Muse to survive. After this, I frankly don’t know if I’ll have the strength to go on writing using this name and this identity. This Self.

I’ve taken most of this from an email I sent a prominent blogger. I’ve changed names to protect the innocent and the guilty both.

The Call

I could quite literally write a book about my experiences and my thoughts on the matter. If something almost kills you, it's bound to provoke some Heavy Thinking. So apologies as this is going to be long.

I did not want to get involved in this at all. I've been "outed" several times on the internet. A former co-writer of mine who's seen me in RL has repeatedly outed me. I have been referred to on the internet as "one vicious tranny". A gay guy I've met in my London-based writing group has only recently outed me to a violently hateful group, then added smugly that he was now going home to "have real gay sex".

These experiences are rather typical, I'm afraid. It's why I only meet people in person as a writer who I trust to not go out there and tell the world who I "really" am (as we can see, my judgment is less than perfect - friends can turn to enemies rather more quickly than I like, especially when writers are involved).

Refusal to Heed the Call

This is not to accuse. I feel awful for first trying to stay invisible and secondly trying to ignore it, while my trans* friends were/are suffering because they are "out" about their status, while I was busy telling myself "I'm a writer, not a human rights activist".

Yeah, I guess Ezra Pound was just a poet, too.

The loss of "safe space" thanks to the rabid hate mob is probably at the core of the issue why I've put my stuff on hold. I originally bought into the myth how "tolerant" and "accepting" "our" "community" is. Well, it is, if you're gay and physically, born, genetic male. There's a worship of the cock going on I find a little disturbing.

Regardless - one thing I believe is incredibly important in this debate is to drive home - in some minds at least - the difference between "coming out" and "passing".

Crossing the First Threshold

For sexualities other than straight, "coming out" is a traumatic, cathartic rite of passage, that, yes, creates that "gay identity", which from then on is visible. I was very relieved when I realized, actually, I'm bisexual, and it’s OK to be that. I can love a person rather than a set of genitals. Being bi is, obviously, being under a "general suspicion" of cheating and being generally not trustworthy. Many lesbians tell a bisexual woman she's not "real" because she got her rocks off - even once - with a guy. Many gays call a bisexual man a "gay in denial". I do believe I never deceived anybody about my sexuality. I've gotten my rocks off with trans* people, with men and women, and it was fun every time. I'm not ashamed.

But yeah, "coming out" usually means that the enormous pressure that non-straight people live with is lifted. Wow, suddenly you float. The thing that made you consider suicide? Gone. People actually still smile at you. Some even call you brave - what a boost after you've spent most of your life cringing away and hoping that people will leave you the fuck alone, or at least not look into your head.

Now, "passing" is different. Trans* people live with this enormous pressure, but it never leaves. It's a miracle I'm alive. Between 16 and 21, I was constantly considering suicide. Then my mother died a painful, drawn-out death from cancer. And I thought "okay, throwing away a healthy, functional body is a waste and who are you to end your life when others are desperate to draw even one more breath and don't have that choice?"

Every time I considered suicide, I would remember my mother's face, just wisps of her gorgeous rich mahogany hair left, the skull visible as a herald of impending death, as she was weighing only 80 or 90 pounds. Who am I to kill myself when I'm healthy and not physically suffering?

Tests, Allies, Enemies

Then the internet. Online communities. I chose a neutral name (vashtan) and realized there's freedom in that. I've kept vashtan's gender neutral - I did not want to "deceive" anybody. Ever.

My first publications. Getting AlexANDER W. added into my German passport? HUGE rush. Unspeakable relief. The front was still lying, but the back - oh, the glorious back, the bit under "Pseudonym or Religious Name" - it finally spoke the truth. I'd become, legally, in a small part, black-on-green, Alexander W., ridding me in one fell swoop of a last name I've inherited from a wife-beating rapist father AND the wrong gender.

I was Alexander. I couldn't wait to tell everybody. The bloom rounded, tightened, seams began to appear. It was ready to burst.

I read everything about the issue. MTFs, FTMs, Intersex, intergender, trans*, genderqueer... suddenly I had words for that deep-seated unease that told me my very BONES were all wrong. Suddenly the "wow, YOU are a real man." Suddenly, all my games as a child - always the knight serving the lady, always the fighter, the bodyguard, the protector of the weak - suddenly made sense. Why even as a small child I bristled when somebody called me a "pretty girl". I wasn't. I was a boy. Imagine the heartbreak when boys at some point told me I couldn't play with them because I had long hair. I liked my long hair. I wasn't ready to give it up so I could play with the other boys. Non-conformist to the end, I guess. Boys had short hair, I refused to fit in, hence I was ousted.

Thus expelled from the boys, I tried to join the girls for company. They told me I was a boy - wild, physical, competitive. I also didn't give a toss about the current crush on some boy band. I just wanted to belong somewhere.

I didn't. I found, in the end, a bunch of outsiders who'd hang around me, because I had cool ideas and made up fun games. We were still the outsiders on the playground, but we were at least damned well entertained.

Ordeal

When my body developed, I prayed for it all to go away. I think the reason why I'm still here is largely because of one of the most powerful characters I've ever had. Silvio basically told me I was being a dumb asshole for staring at the pills in my hand and that my vertigo should at least keep me jumping from that bridge. Through all that, I've had friends (who had no idea - as far as they were concerned, I was just a bit of a tomboy), but as we've seen through things like Trevor and It Gets Better, friends sometimes aren't enough. I was a firm believer in reincarnation, but something always held me back from "trying again", as I called it back then. Reload. What's your return policy, universe?

For whatever reason, the male persona I built (or, arguably, that I am) helped me cope with the increasing pressure. Somebody calling me "Mr. Voinov" (which is just a translation of "Herr W.") takes the pressure off. It makes me smile, but there's always a tang of pain in it, too. Calling me "sir" is like if somebody tells you you're gorgeous and actually means it.

I'm coming back to "passing" now. To a trans* person, "passing" as his/her real gender is - unspeakably liberating. Suddenly, the pressure around you eases. You can BREATHE. You can even be yourself. I can't count how often I've been told I write "masculine", or even "hyper-masculine". I was told, when I started out, to write under a male pseudonym, as "the female style" is different - and women prefer books written by women, especially historicals. Or: "What woman cares about war, soldiers, or politics? They want woman issues." (Which, presumably, is about courtship, het sex, child-rearing and covering their husband's flank.) This drove me away from trying to make it in the historical mainstream - I never managed to get my head around "woman issues" - talk about biographical blocks.

Reward/Seizing the Sword

Fast forward a few years. Passing for male has quite literally enabled me to be a productive, positive member of human society. Give what I have to give - mentor, teach, give and write. I can give these because the pressure was off, the pressure keeping me contained, pressuring me into something I am emphatically NOT. If you expend all your energy fighting other people's perceptions, you have no energy left to do the important stuff, the constructive stuff.

Under such considerations, things like "I'll sell five more books if people believe I have a flesh dick dangling between my legs" aren't just laughably trivial - they don't even register. I've heard people say that they prefer women-written books to mine because "Voinov is clearly a male writer - like all of them, it's all heartless sex and violence, he just doesn't "get" romance." Some way of "passing", that! (But, hell, I take it.)

The thing is, tearing our protection away - negating our "passing" - is as traumatic as if a jeering mob out on the street were ripping your clothes off to laugh at the shape of your breasts or labia or dick and balls. I can't possibly express the amount of distress that my trans* writer friends have felt over the mob's desire to rip their clothes off. As far as I'm concerned, I have bigger balls and a bigger dick than a huge amount of born and bred males.

My sense of honour and personal integrity made me step up in defense of my trans* friends, most of whom have been bullied into submission and are scared of being made a target next. We'll all been there before. Most gay guys consider us women (I've heard some of the most vile, trans* phobic comments from gay men) – most women consider us women and do everything in their power to help society re-assert the gender binary. (Those are generalizations - I've encountered a lot of extremely supportive women of all stripes.)

While most gay men laugh us off as "not real men" (like I have to assert my masculinity to every gay man out there - even those I don't want to sleep with!), many women are truly vicious - "how dare she!"

I've always held the belief that the female hostility to trans* people is really a loathing of the traditional female role. Tearing our clothes off in public is a way to act against the "unlawful claiming of a more liberated gender". Men ARE more powerful in this society, and trans* men are seen as those refusing the female gender (while, in actuality, we're not refusing anything - it's not what we are and most of us feel an extreme disconnect to any perceived female role). We're damaged, freaks, deficient. Worse, we're cheaters, liars, impostors. We're claiming the "male privilege" not to be belittled, and maybe we even end up wielding power and authority and have respect. Yeah, how DARE we.

Some of us shrink away under the onslaught of hostility and pressure, cringing. So at war with ourselves, few of us are strong enough to fight against ourselves AND against the rest of the world. ONE of those battles is plenty.

Every time a specific prominent blogger attempts to out the most high-profile male-representing author in our genre, I want to rip her head off. Has nobody ever considered that this writer is actually who he says he is? Or would the fact that he's a prominent, visible, highly successful - and much-loved - writer in the genre have anything to do with it? The message to us trans* writers is, very much: Don't stick your head out, or we'll chop it off. Beyond a certain level of success, people are envious enough to jump on anything that makes a person vulnerable.

The Road Back

Frankly, I knew that launching Riptide would potentially "blow my cover". Who on earth is interested in trans* literature but a trans* person - and who at Riptide is clearly NOT a female? The fact that I'm being represented by an avatar, the fact that I'm not answering questions about my gender (and many tried asking them, which tells me it's something people feel they have a right to know about in detail) or what I think about women writing gay sex, or whether I get turned on when writing sex (yeah, sweetheart, want the number of inches too?) - all that immediately sparks suspicion.

The more visible I am - the more interviews I've given - the more that old pressure has come back. I've been told I'm too "soft", or "too gentle", or "too understanding", (or "too nice/generous") that a specific turn of phrase is feminine - up to my use of emoticons. People are scrutinizing everything I do - on Twitter, Facebook, there were people even re-posting blog entries from LJ that I've locked away to be only seen by friends. The pressure was mounting. Clearly, being anything but female draws suspicion, but I refused to be driven into neurosis by it. I am who I am, who I say I am.

The whole debate never considered the trans* issue. Just look at the words used: It was always "women parading as men", "women appropriating gay identities for gain and profit" or "women lying/cheating because they are sociopathic liars". It's like you're walking out in the streets, and suddenly, everybody's clothes are being ripped off and the crowd inspects us, naked, whether we pass. The border controls in the US are so intrusive that many US-based trans* people have stopped travelling. *I* am not going to fly to the US because I don't want some guy give me a body cavity search. The trans* body is more delicate, more complicated and a hell of a lot more fragile, even if you're built like an American Football player.

But while the debate went that way, us trans* writers were incapable of stopping it. Everybody speaking out on behalf of trans* writers knew that they would have their identity questioned. I was incredibly reluctant, because not only did I do a good job of "passing", but because I never saw myself as an activist for anything (I believe most of society's ills would go away if people were holding themselves to higher moral standards and realize that serving others means serving yourself).

Death

Basically, I didn't want to open myself up to the trans* phobia out there - I didn't want my gay friends to suddenly consider me as a "transman", which always means "not real man" (talk about worship of the cock) - always. Once that "trans* is attached, it conjures up images of a more or less believably mutilated female body, a more or less healthy mind inhabiting it. By being "trans", we're "less". Less strong, less healthy, less male or female. From "male" or "female", we turn into "not quite" and "less" in society’s perception.

I also didn't want to speak on behalf of trans* writers. We're still all individuals, and while I know at least, off the top of my head, 7-8 genderqueer/trans* writers – and boy, their talent, how much they have to give this community that hounds them so! - I'd never claim any kind of leadership here.

Basically, I was “passing” and working behind the scenes. Every trans* writer out there knows my status. I've encouraged writers to write and share their stories (rather than lock them away for fear of BEING VISIBLE and hence VULNERABLE), telling them the community was "safe"; people were "different here". Oh hell, was I wrong, and as the lynch mob of the M/M Goodreads Group and a number of bloggers and HUNDREDS of bigoted commentators descended upon us, my heart bled for my friends who went out there and fought or hid under the same old stone of crushing guilt and self-doubt.

It's not that we don't want to be "out" - I admire both Danny Juris and Bryl Tyne for the way they go out there and represent. My choice was different. I worked behind the scenes, working subtly, helping trans* people (you start to recognize them after a while, it's like gaydar, also, I'm really good at reading people), supporting my brothers and sisters, while still "passing" as male to a society and community I simply didn't trust to "get" it. Get me (yeah, and tell me I was wrong… I was not).

I simply refused to write emails or blog posts like this one I'm writing right now to every person out there emailing me who’d doubted what I told them. Doubted my integrity over the use of a pronoun – a use that has kept me sane and productive. This is stuff I almost killed myself over – I don't believe somebody paying 3-7 bucks for any given story I've written deserves to know all this or has a right to it, let alone a moral right in the interest of "customer transparency", as the moderators of the M/M Goodreads Group have claimed, to wild cheering and shows of support.

I believe that the exact geography of my genitals is my – very personal - privacy issue. Once you tell people you're trans*, the next question is about when you'll have the operation. My body then suddenly turns into the gore-encrusted battlefield of somebody else's gender perceptions, like it’s not my body at all, like I no longer have any power over it, and can’t be trusted to shape it when and how I want.

At the end of the day, a trans* person is only seen as valid once their bodies conform to what cisgendered people consider acceptably male or female. If you're not having the operation (because the attempt to make a dick always results in something that most trans* men consider laughably inadequate, let alone somewhat gross-looking) - you're not valid. At the very least, people want to know whether I've started testosterone yet. Which is a question like "do you still beat your wife" - once you step onto that battlefield, you can only lose.

I chose to act as I did not to deceive anybody. I did it to find a way to live in dignity. To not spend most of my time and energy fighting a battle I cannot win. You know, because every hour I spend begging for acceptance - from very often bigoted assholes - is an hour I don't spend writing.

I chose to live as a man over explaining - for the rest of my life - why people should please, please PLEASE "allow" me to be a man, if you please, if it's not too much of an imposition, if that's OK with you, sorry to disturb your ideas of male and female a little, there. There, there, let me be invisible instead so nobody gets their assumptions challenged.

Fuck that.

I'm a proud man, I've fought and worked extremely hard for what I have achieved. I'm not used to asking anybody for their leave to be what I am. I try to act as an ethical person, supporting my male, female, trans* and queer friends, writers or not. My mother taught me to live my life in a way that I can look at myself in the mirror in the morning, every morning. Whether I look in that mirror while shaving should be irrelevant.

I'm not ashamed of myself, or my friends. I don't believe I owe anybody anything. No born and bred male - or what I call "genetic male" - has to explain why he's a man. And no woman has to explain why she's female. It's just us who are questioned, exposed and harassed the moment we show one weakness, and people react shocked and have the BALLS to be OUTRAGED when we, like a hermit crab, desperately scamper to protect our soft bellies?

I've received so many emails - before I made the blog post – about "who or what are you really"? My policy has always been, if somebody asks me, personally, in private, what I am, I do the "bees and flowers" talk. Not because I don't want to lie, but because I believe people that are actually asking might actually want to know. And I have the hope that once everybody knows at least one trans* person, they will stop harassing the others.

Maybe it's time for the T in the alphabet soup to fight for our rights, but maybe it's clearer now why we don't. It's tearing away our passing, it questions the identity we fought so hard - often against physical violence, harassment, bullying, depression, addiction and all-round derision from men and women both - to build and maintain, as we have to, to have even a shot at sanity and happiness.

I've been tempted so often to tell those people "if you need to know the shape of my genitals, you are not my friend". Which is an, I believe, understandable response, but it's also really defensive.

I don't like hurting people like that. I *still* DON'T WANT TO HURT PEOPLE THAT HURT ME, can you imagine?

Sorry for the long, long, LONG diatribe - I want to make sure everybody understands where I'm coming from, my position, my experiences that obviously shape everything I am and how I respond to the threats to my identity. I've never seen myself as an activist or a figurehead.

I've received an email - from a gay guy - telling me "to come out and be done with it". He felt that my refusal to "come out" was the ONLY thing that drove me out of the genre and this way he wouldn’t be robbed of my stories. There it is - a gay guy who mistakes the roles and energies at work in "coming out" and "passing".

No, it's the prospect of being paraded naked in front of the jeering mob. No catharsis for me. No happy rainbow-flag waving gay family to welcome us. No gay identity to claim for us. All we can claim is visible, exposed, naked, soul-crushing Freakhood.

For me, "coming out" is the closest thing to destruction I've come in six years, after I stumbled, blind with tears (and I never cry), away from the London-based trans*men meeting, and considered whether I should just end it all under the Tube train on the way home. Boy, was that tempting.

Resurrection?

I'm still not sure how I should - need to - respond to it all. Do we trans* writers NEED a figurehead? Do I owe anybody to come out as a deficient male? Do I have to turn myself into a martyr for the baying mob, just because I'm writing some sexy, plotty stories about how people survive adversity and find love and redemption?

Do I owe it? Do I want to read a hundred comments pouring down the hatred of me and my kind when Dear Author posts "Aleksandr Voinov Comes Out as Trans Writer" [Please, Dear Author people, don’t use the word “she” or “her” when you do. Just this, please?]; do I deserve to be counted among those who are “Faking It” to quote the title of a blog post on Jesse Wave’s m/m review blog? Do I?

I'm not a Trans Writer. I'm somebody who, barely, survived the journey to be male, with most of my dignity intact. I have toughened myself up enough to not flinch anymore at "vicious tranny". Like a young guy who hears "faggot" the first time, "tranny" makes me flinch. But if you keep hearing it, you stop flinching. The vicious thing about such words is that it takes a lot of flinching before you can embrace a word like that.

I don't want to fight. I don't want to spend the next years - or even the rest of my life - explaining over and over why I'm a man and not a defunct female, why I'm a man, not an impostor.

But there are kids in my community – in my true community, my true family. One little guy from Finland whose blog posts (I see them on LJ) are all about how he can't stop vomiting from the stress the community is under. Somebody who clawed his way back to sanity and has repeated told me I’m an “inspiration” and he loves me. Do I owe it to Oleg to "come out"? Should I take the barbs and arrows and poison? Should I, being strong and dignified and, as yet, unbroken, step forward BECAUSE I am strong? Do I owe people a chance to break me, in public, humiliate me and deride my writing as that of an impostor? How many emails will I get that express people's disappointment in my "deceit"? Do I stand even a remote chance to explain all this while keeping my honour and dignity intact?

Those are the main questions right now.

And now that I’ve done it on my blog, will I flinch at "vicious, deceitful tranny" comments or can I take it, chin held high?

And once it's over, can I still open a vein and WRITE FOR THOSE PEOPLE, keep telling that same story of hope and love triumphing over darkness? Can I? Am I strong enough?

And there I thought I could just write stories and entertain people. Tell them about hope, and love, and the amazing resilience of the human spirit. (And people are shocked I might tell those stories to an audience that will not tear me apart for what I am. Silly me, what am I thinking, withholding my only gift and talent from people spending a couple dollars while at the same time feeling entitled to know whether I have ovaries and what exactly I do in bed with my freak body.)

Bottom line - I hope the whole, sordid, undignified, toxic mess has at least led to some people questioning their assumptions about my tribe, my people, my friends and made the world on the whole less hostile for them. But me, I remain here, deeply conflicted. Is this worth the destruction of my identity?

And, will I ever reclaim enough of my dignity to write again with confidence and grace?

Will I?

Monkey has stopped dancing

2011-11-13T18:49:00.000Z

This morning, I woke up with one decision crystal clear in my head. I've been spending the last three days with my friend R., who was diagnosed with aggressive breast cancer. We spent the last days talking through some heavy shit at times, about life, how we spend it, and what makes us ill, what keeps us going. What do we live for? We also laughed a lot, which is always a plus.

But this morning I woke up - and I'm quitting. That's the decision. In the last weeks, certain parts of the romance community have taken it upon themselves to harass and bully every trans writer in the m/m genre. People - my friends - have cried bitter tears, others have thrown away half-written or half-outlined stories. Others were so distressed that they have considered suicide.

Basically, I loved that community because it was so "tolerant" and "enlightened". I said that in all the interviews. That I love that sense of community. Never before as a writer have I had such close interactions with readers or bloggers. My interactions were limited to Amazon reviews and a rare email here and there before I became part of the m/m community. Wow, it's been fun. As writing is only a financial side gig for me (it's great when it covers the books I'm buying for research), that sense of community was the main thing I got out of it - something I've only recently realised.

Now that that same community has turned into a bullying, torch and pitchfork wielding mob that harasses my friends to tears, tramples on stories that haven't even been written yet, and drives artists to consider suicide, this is where I draw the line.

The very same community that cried crocodile tears over the "It Gets Better" campaign has now turned into the most vicious lynch mob I've seen in twenty years. Every transphobic asshole out there is having a field day. We'll soon have an Underwear Gestapo, taking monthly blood samples to monitor testosterone levels.

All trans writers I know in the genre are exceedingly distressed over this. My friends ask for their books to be delayed, are considering killing off their fiction writing altogether, because there's a baying mob screaming for blood.

It comes down to this: I don't want to write for bullies, for people driving my friends into considering self-harm. I'm not some monkey that dances when it sees a banana.

Now, I'm afflicted in that I have to write, but I have decided and resolved to put all m/m and gay romances indefinitely on hold.

There. Monkey has stopped dancing.

I will instead return to my roots, writing mainstream fantasy and thrillers and historical novels under a different pseudonym, which is still to be decided, but will not be released to anybody but my closest friends.

What does this mean?

Basically, that's it. As I've started "Dark Soul" and don't want to leave people hanging on the cliffhanger, I'm going to finish the mini-series (another 30-40k words), even though, it must be said, I'm reluctant as all hell about that.

I'm also going to finish a co-written project that my co-writer has committed herself to (because I can't leave *her* hanging), but after that, I'm throwing myself on the tender mercies of the mainstream.

After that, I'm done.

That means no more books in the m/m romance genre. Me and that genre are done, thanks to the nasties, the bullies, the mean assholes, thanks to the torch wielding mob of the Goodreads M/M Romance Group; and people like A.S., the old bitter troll that substitutes hatred and envy for talent and real passion; thanks to everybody who has sent a trans* writer an email demanding a geographic breakdown of their sexual organs because they are entitled to it somehow; thanks to everybody who has cornered and forced ANY writer out there into "admitting" and "telling the truth" and "coming clean".

I can't wait to share my stories with my new readers.

To my readers - I'm sorry, guys. I hope you'll enjoy those stories I'm leaving you. There's plenty talent out there, and I'm sure Riptide will help find you more great talent. I've heard they are good at that. :)

Out of touch for a while

2011-11-08T17:33:00.000Z

I'll be a little scarcer (read: really scarce) for a while. A close writer friend of mine has been diagnosed with a very aggressive disease, and I'm going to stay with her for a few days (going incommunicado). That it's November doesn't help, or that it's pretty close to the anniversary of my mother's death, sixteen years ago. The Big C really puts everything into perspective - writing, legacy, life and death.

Counterpunch launch

2011-11-05T20:01:00.000Z

Those of you who pre-ordered Counterpunch got the book two days early, but those who didn't had a day to read the book now. Counterpunch, my boxing novel is out and is getting good reviews here and here.

I know that authors say that a lot, but this *is* the best novel I've ever written. (If you read the reviews, you have a few people agreeing.) It's smooth where other books are more unbalanced, it's intense and tight when others are a bit wobbly. The plot works as it should. Brooklyn is a great character - I'm happy how he turned out. I enjoyed his company, but it seems many readers are, too. It's a substantial book, even though its shorter than other novels. Seems my "sweet spot" for novels is anywhere between 53k and 70k at the moment. For a novel restricted to one point-of-view, that's still a great length - a second POV would have made it longer, but diluted the essence I was going for.

I aimed for a somewhat claustrophobic feeling for Counterpunch - equivalent to the pressure a fighter experiences in the boxing ring itself. High pressure, relentless pacing, and things getting basically worse and worse until the relief happens, and for that, the camera had to be *in* the ring. Any outside view is detrimental to the atmosphere and pressure. No explanations, no foreign thoughts, we are trapped in Brooklyn (just like he is in his situation), and we have to get through it - somehow (like he does).

I do like the one-POV type books. Scorpion would have been considerably weaker if we hadn't stuck with Kendras throughout. It's also how my Muse works - he's usually only interested in one character, not two or three - at least enough to really analyse every thought and impulse. (Of course I care about the other characters, too.) I rather assume that's what I do best. I'm definitely doing that again in the first WWII novel, but switch to two or three characters in the second one (I think that one might be more of an ensemble cast, potentially - it's all fluid and needs some more thinking, but I'd like to do one of those some day).

So, yeah, such a fundamental choice can make or break a book, I think. I couldn't imagine Counterpunch in any other format or fashion. It turned out exactly as expected (or rather, hoped).

And there's more to tell, but not this year. I do need a break. Meanwhile, the muse can play with it somewhere in the back of my head. Yeah, I can at least pretend I have control over this. :)

Faber-Castell Ambition mechanical pencil (stupid and shiny)

2011-11-05T18:52:00.000Z

I have to admit, I spend stupid amounts of money on stationary. Fountain pens, mechanical pencils - if its shiny and pretty and cool, I want it. (I can always justify another purchase - sometimes I buy several, so I can give some away.)

So, today I regained the use of my Faber-Castell "Ambition" stainless steel mechanical pencil. The damn thing is too pretty for its own good. It's sleek, it's solid metal (I do like a pencil with some heft in the heat of the writing battle), it's German precision engineering. I'm a sucker for German/Swiss/Austrian(Czech) brands - Rotring, Pelikan, Faber-Castell, Koh-I-Noor, Lamy. Bring them on, I never had a bad experience with any of them (not that I could ever afford a Faber-Castell pen before).

So, yeah. I bought it as a "pick me up" at the pen shop in Heathrow when I flew out to Chicago, and it wasn't THAT expensive. I counted it towards my Christmas presents last year. (Yes, I'm justifying spending a small nation's GDP on what's basically a stupidly pretty mechanical PENCIL).

Anyway, as if to punish me for this act of conspicuous consumption, the bleeding thing broke only after a few months. I didn't actually *do* much to it, I wrote a little with it and otherwise kept it in a leather wallet. Hardly extreme sports in the Sahara fending off a rebel insurgency with just a pen for a weapon to block bullets.

Now what makes that pencil so stylish is that a twist of the cap pushes the mine out. Simple, elegant, genius. Until it breaks. Then the genius design falls flat on its bottom: you can't open the thing, you can't jiggle parts around until they fit and work again.

So I had to hand it in to a specialist pen shop (same chain I bought it from in the first place). They sent it to Germany (I assume changing a small broken spring exceeded any British engineering skills that are left in the country?) - which took eight weeks (they must have shipped it by coughing decrepit donkey mail).

Eight weeks and £10 later (which would have bought me 40 plastic mechanical pencils - enough even for this productive writer to stomach some losses), the pen has returned - that is, I picked it up a few hours ago.

It's sitting right next to me, looking stupidly shiny and elegant again, saying "Trust me. I won't break again. It was probably your own fault anyway. Love me again."

But I feel the shine is off. I don't quite trust it. It's let me down before - it might again. What happens if I'm in the middle of a brilliant sentence and the pen breaks again and I'm losing my train of thought? How can I ever trust you again, Faber-Castell, if I have to keep a 25-cents pencil ready whenever I use the "Ambition" to write a sentence, just in case?

Coming up for air (redux)

2011-10-30T15:58:00.002Z

I'm not sure where the last three months went (or rather, I'm sure, but I barely felt the time pass!), but here I am. Riptide Publishing, which has been eating most of my time and energy is open for business.

I had seriously underestimated the amount of time, energy and emotion this would take. Or what can go wrong, and what would be no problem at all. I've learned a huge amount about things I only had a faint idea about. There were some hairy moments, hilarious moments, silly and angry moments, but, bottom line, I'm damn glad we did it, and the rest of the team is awesome to work with.

I have a release to celebrate, too. "Dark Soul", the first part of the series of the same name, has been released by Riptide. I'm following up every 3-4 weeks with another part, and most likely that should carry us through to February or even March.

Beyond Dark Soul, I haven't written a thing in the last months - too busy working on the publisher, but it's now beginning to calm down (thank Gods!), and I expect to soon get back into it. My characters feel quite neglected, and the sense of failure I get when I'm not productive in
terms of writing is getting almost unbearable. Regardless how much else I have going on, if I'm not writing, I feel like a loser. That's how I'm wired.

There's a huge amount of interviews with me all across the blogosphere, too.

Here's a big one about me.

And about Riptide.

And soon there's a whole range of Dark Soul interviews and fun stuff at Amara's Place.

(I'm now stealing a moment to update my website...)

I blogged over at Slash & Burn

2011-10-07T13:31:00.000+01:00

Apologies - I need to get better about blogging, but wow, we're busy.

But I DID blog over at Slash and Blurn - about the stories coming up soon. You can still win that Kindle or $115 book certificate, btw. Just pre-order "Counterpunch" (at 20% off, too) at Storm Moon Press's website.

Hot boxers (NOT the underwear) and messed-up men, what's not to love?

I'm just coming to the end of my mandatory two-week break. (As a financial services worker, I'm legally forced to talk ten consecutive working days off - even though I'm not a trader courting burnout, but that's ok). Today, and the weekend, and Monday starts on the early shift - getting up at 5:30 will be a bit of a shock after the habit I've formed recently. Oh well, I'll live.

Autumn is clearly here. I remember, last year at this time I was very nearly burned out of my job (despite all the awesome travelling) and getting ready to go to Chicago. After a weird heat wave last week temperatures have dropped. It's *cold* and crisp now, as nature catches up with the calender. The mind turns towards taking stock - and what is left that needs doing. For me, that's taxes, mostly. A couple ARCs that we need to send out, a humongous interview I need to edit down as much as possible (a 6k interview?? HOLY HELL).

But life's good. So much better than last year. Can't wait for winter.

Saturday Snark from "Counterpunch"

2011-09-17T22:07:00.002+01:00

Marie Sexton has gathered some delicious Saturday Snark here. So I'm adding a short dialogue from "Counterpunch" (which you can pre-order here):

--------------------

“Brook!”

Brooklyn grabbed the bag and turned. It was the only thing he could do to not attack Les. “What?”

“You listening to me?”

“No.” Brooklyn bared his teeth. “Okay, now I am.”

“Take it slow. Too much strain isn’t good, either.”

Brooklyn released the bag and gave it a double-fisted shove. “Right. What now? Any more appointments?” Fuck, wouldn’t that be a Nathaniel word? “Any more perverts to fuck me?”

“Actually,” Les gave him a stare, “I’m tempted to say I’ll tell you when you’ve calmed down.”

Maybe he could get a punch in before Curtis tasered him? If it was a good punch—smashing nose and/or teeth—it might be worth it. No, not Les. But God, it was hard.

“Your attitude stinks, Brook.”

“So I’ve been told. You think I’m temperamentally unsuited to being a slave?”

Les shrugged. “Management just called me. No more appointments.”

“Oh really? And why not?”

“They want you to focus on beating Esch.”

“I’m not beating him with my dick.”

Les laughed, clearly despite himself. “That’s a thought. Damn, you should be a radio host. Chris Moyles could learn a thing or two from you.”

Brooklyn managed a smile. “Yeah. Cocksucking.”

Get Counterpunch early and win a HUGE Amazon cert. (or Kindle)

2011-09-17T19:32:00.000+01:00

Now that I've whined enough, here's something cool: You can pre-order "Counterpunch" from Storm Moon Press. It's currently 20% off at their website (that's right, just $4.79), and everybody who pre-orders gets entered into a draw to win 1) signed poster, 2) signed paperback, or 3) $115 Amazon gift certificate or a Kindle.

Also, you get to read "Counterpunch" two days before everybody else does.

Here's the link again: http://stormmoonpress.com/books/Counterpunch.aspx

Official launch will be on 4. November.

"Counterpunch" edits - done

2011-09-17T19:23:00.000+01:00

Ten days later - and I'm done with "Counterpunch", which received a pretty good scrubbing in the meantime. I've cut the lazy writing, sharpened my structure, fixed some factual mistakes (these days, all writers have to do their own fact-checking anyway), and cut all the flourishes and self-indulgence that added nothing to the book.

Which now means I'm trashing my print-outs, my notes and re-shelf my books on boxing. Clean up my work area and thus clear my mind of the book and characters. And then I'll sit down in a corner, cradle my hurting brain and whimper softly. (Editing a book means you have to carry the whole thing in your head and remember everything, because nobody else will ever point out the small issues and mistakes, and nobody takes ownership of this, so, essentially, this final edit is very much the writer's obligation, and wow, but it's hard work.)

Editing, I've heard it said, is the punishment for writing.

But holding the book like that, and having done my research and my fact check, I have ideas for a sequel, possibly. There's some intriguing possibilities with the characters, and another character who can mess it all up.

However, it's all up in the sky right now. I'll need to clear my head now, do nothing writing-related for a couple days (I'm thinking I'll play "Gears of War" pts. 1 and 2 to celebrate the launch of "Gears of War 3" NEXT FRIDAY!!!), then do the sanity and typo check on two novels of two friends - both urgent, both great novels.

After that, I'll write my half of "Lion of Kent 2" (which involves a metric fuckton of research) for Carina Press (hopefully), and hope to close 2011 with that.

In terms of novels, I'll dedicate 2012 entirely to WWII - both novels need to get going again or I'll lose the characters, but the research is intimidating to say the least. Twelve months for two historical novels and around 50 books of research sound about right.

After all the books written this year, I'm looking forward to taking things down a notch. Writing novels in 6-8 weeks is completely insane. I simply can't do it. I dig in too deep, deal with pretty complex things and I can't do that in 6-8 weeks. I'll need some time to find my equilibrium, so I'd say 2012 will be a "slow" year, and I'll definitely try to do some travelling, too after staying at home in 2011.

So, yep. Mission Accomplished. Now relaxing.

Counterpunch edits

2011-09-07T08:20:00.000+01:00

I got the edits for "Counterpunch" yesterday, which all seem relatively minor--a couple typos, passages where the rhythm is off, house style things and that's pretty much it (I guess I'm just a clean writer overall, and "Counterpunch" has come out pretty clean overall). So that could be easy, right? Err, no. I've recently been on a bit of a "trip to the past" with regards to my style, which tends to mean paring the fluff down even more, using a tighter POV and overall better structure.

Which means, knives are out and I'm giving this book the full treatment once I have a moment. (Work at work is crazy. We're again under strength, thanks to holidays and people leaving. Which is somewhat unfortunate in terms of timing.) The biggest decision I have to make is how to deal with any potential connected work.

Right now, there are a couple "missing scenes" from "Counterpunch" that would make a good addition to the book. Originally, I was hoping to write a related project (possibly a novella), this month, but I don't think I can fit it in. I'm also thinking that that novella might actually belong to a potential sequel or might stand completely on its own. The main issue is, the novella puts everything that happened in "Counterpunch" into a completely different light, and it seems wrong to simply deliver that like an afterthought. So, potentially, that idea might be large, it might start where "Counterpunch" ends, and I'm running out of time on the "Lion" sequel and a number other projects.

A couple days ago, a good friend told me she has an aggressive cancer, which in many ways brings home mortality (apart from all the other emotions that I can't speak about--least of all in public. That's stuff that I need to work through on my own, really). From my family history, I have a good chance to get cancer, too, so at least I have a fair idea how I'm going to end.

As a writer, it made me think of all the books I really want to write. It's that old mind-game: If you only had a year to live, what would you write?

In my case, that's "finishing Dark Soul" (a project that's ~20 years old), "Lion 2", and the two WWII novels. So that's basically what I'm going to do, before I think about any short stories, novellas or sequels to anything else. The WWII novels especially have been heavy on my brain, so I'll focus on those for the rest of the year and likely all of 2012.

2011 has been an insanely productive period, but part of me thinks "stop messing around" - it's like I'm running to all these other projects largely because I'm scared as hell to mess up the historicals. I'm scared witless of getting any of that stuff wrong. It's time to turn around and face that particular tiger.

I have that one short story to write and "Counterpunch" to edit, and then I'll tackle those three books. It might even mean that that's all that's coming out in 2012 or even in 2013, but I'm OK with that. If I still have time to play, I'm sure I'll find some projects to fill up the rest of the schedule.

More scarce

2011-09-02T21:39:00.001+01:00

Several of my people have asked whether I'm OK - so I'm just quickly writing that, yup, I am.

I'm just busy, doing dozen of hours of developmental edits for Riptide and spending the rest of the time not socializing - I've even left my RL writing group, hard as it was, but I simply wasn't contributing the level of critique that would have been helpful - and the remaining time goes toward preparing the Riptide launch and getting some writing in.

I've found the time to re-read the Two Birds book and the good news is that the writing's pretty good. It'll need some editing, but we have a pretty solid piece so far. Certainly not the worst thing I've ever written, which is something. The *bad news* is that I've forgotten the rest of the plot. I barely know what happens *now*, but after that I'm drawing blanks - and I had a full plot, I'm pretty sure of that. So, yeah, apparently two months or so is enough to forget a plot. Those were two busy months, but, still.

So, as the saying goes, if you don't hear anything from me, I'm writing (or plotting world domination via Riptide, or both). I've also started watching "Neverwhere" by Neil Gaiman, which, when I tried it many moons ago, didn't do much for me. Now that I know London, however, that's very different. I'm enjoying the insider jokes. Two episodes down, four more to go over the weekend.

Starting on Monday, I'm expecting the edits back for "Counterpunch", and that means more work and a whole LOT more work to turn this around for release. It's OK, it's a good book and I don't expect it to give me any trouble. And while I hope that the editor did more to it than fix a couple wonky commas, I am hoping there won't be huge rewrites.

Chances are, I'll be a bit scarce on the ground this month, as I try to put at least a historical novel and "Counterpunch" to bed. But autumn is the time to slow down, take stock and make the house ready for winter.

Guest blog here

2011-08-21T13:50:00.000+01:00

I wrote a guest blog post over at Michael's place.

Holding out for an anti-hero.

I also did some work for Riptide - reading and thinking, mostly, which is largely invisible work. It's all still Going According to the Prophecy. :) I've seen the newest incarnation of a painted cover that's going to take everybody's socks clean off, and there's a long questionnaire I have to fill out. Several interview requests. The biggest challenge is to be fun and interesting - I rarely perceive myself as that funny or interesting, really, but after about 36 years, I've got used to myself, I guess. Few surprises there.

On the front of my own writing, there's some hardcore work to be done on "Dark Soul vol. 2" before I can even think about sending that one in. Also, my brain is very much "between books", so I'm not even that strongly urged to write. Lots of stuff I should be doing, and I'll do all that. Possibly I'll just sit down for an hour a day without distractions and just pile words. Something's bound to come out of it. Now, it's all about overcoming that feeling of "meh".

Cover reveal and details

2011-08-19T22:08:00.000+01:00

I was way too busy to catch up with my own life. "Dark Edge of Honor" has been released as an ebook and reviewed and I'm staying out of that discussion. Many things I want to say, and I'll blog about them, at some point, but I'm just way, way too busy to be very erudite or sort through my thoughts. There are things I'd like to explain about the book and the characters, but at the end of the day, the book has to make its way without any explanations or help from the authors.

Less amusing is getting hate mail about how I'm deceiving my readers and how I'm not actually writing romance, which is bullshit, and I have the literature degree to prove my point.

Also, I'm very busy with the Riptide launch, which means editing and planning and budgeting, but it's all Going According to the Prophecy, as the running joke goes. Despite some amusing rumours out there, we're doing just fine and we're well on track to do exactly what was planned.

But more important is The Next Book. There's always The Next Book, of course, and in this case, it's "Dark Soul, vol 1", a collection of two short stories (combined wordcount: 20k) dealing with the same characters and happening right after each other.

The cover was done by the hyper & multi-talented Jordan Taylor:

I've just gone through the first set of edits, which are now back with the editor. "Dark Soul" is going to be part of Riptide's launch line-up - basically, I'm putting my money where my mouth is.

It still was vetted and edited like any other release - Riptide is not a self-publisher. Far from it - the edits I've had there were some of the most details and honest (read: pretty harsh, but real, tangible and constructive), and I believe, on a technical level, my prose has never been as clean as in "Dark Soul".

I'm working on the second collection ("Dark Soul, vol. 2"), and a third, maybe a fourth and fifth, but that's probably it. However, the characters have haunted me for twenty years, so who knows what they are going to do next.

Launch day: "Dark Edge of Honor"

2011-08-15T08:01:00.000+01:00

It's finally, FINALLY out. "Dark Edge of Honor", co-written by Rhianon Etzweiler and yours truly, is finally available here.
(It's also available elsewhere, but this is where we get paid substantially more than, say, from Amazon.)

Blurb:

Sergei Stolkov is a faithful officer, though his deepest desires go against the Doctrine. A captain with the invading Coalition forces, he believes that self-sacrifice is the most heroic act and his own needs are only valid if they serve the state.

Mike, an operative planted within Cirokko's rebels, has been ordered to seduce Sergei and pry from him the Coalition's military secrets. His mission is a success, but as he captures Sergei's heart, Mike is tempted by his own charade and falls in love.

When the hostile natives of the planet Cirokko make their move, all seems lost. Can Mike and Sergei survive when the Coalition's internal affairs division takes an interest in what happened in the dusty mountains of Zasidka Pass...?

Amara of course has the skinny. She also has a giveaway here.

And an excerpt about Mike.

And a deleted sex scene. (Yes, we cut some sex... but we're keeping the goodness around for moments like this.)

So this is where you can join the fun. There will also be interviews and more deleted scenes.

Riots in London, or #LondonRiots

2011-08-09T09:24:00.002+01:00

Last night, some people tweeted me whether I was ok - apparently there was rioting going on in London. I told them that I was fine and way, way removed from the violence in what I thought was only London Proper (I'm living in a commuter city just outside) and that, besides, my city is so sleepy and frankly rich - I call it "pork belly town" in my less charitable moments - there would be no rioting.

Chuckling a little to myself about the over-cautious, but very sweet attitude from my friends, I stood at the train station, grabbing my coffee and breakfast, when a visibly tired guy with tattoos on his arms - think type firefighter/battle-hardened copper - ordered TWO large coffees for himself, saying "what a night".

Curious as I am, I asked him what had gone on, and he said "The riots. They trashed the High Street." (To my US friends, "the High Street" is the quivalent of the "Main Street" - basically the main shopping street).

So, yeah, the riots happened in my city, too. I'm about ten minutes' drive away from the area, in a sleepy, very suburban area with terraced houses, which all look exactly the same. There's protection in uniformity, I guess.

So, looking at the news reports, I'm not surprised. Croydon and Lewisham - where the violence started and then washed into "my city" are deprived areas. I feel unbelievably queasy in both cities, and that lingering feeling of discontent and... coarseness, for want of a better word, has kept me away from the area ever since. The joke is that the only reason to go to Croydon - origin of trashy fake blondes and a weird, coke-snorting supermodel - is the IKEA store.

Lewisham has an excellent Indian restaurant, but the restaurant is in an area so ugly and down-and-out that basically, you want to go there in a largish group, ideally all male, and get the hell out of the area when it gets dark.

Now, I've lived in a socially deprived area. For 27 years of my life, I've lived in social, government-subsidised housing, but not once have I felt threatened there. I don't feel threatened even now - I have a very good sense of location and can usually tell well in advance if there's a threat anywhere. I'm good at judging moods. Both Lewisham and Croydon give me the creeps in a "I don't want to be here" kind of way.

My sensibilities are very much middle-class - but I'm a "kid made good" story. I come from those areas. I got educated, I worked hard, I left my "social class" and became very much middle-of-the-road middle class, with a little house and a little garden and a little pension, and a little business, and little aspirations to just get "more" of all the good stuff I have and generally be a nice, upstanding member of society. On the other hand, I do understand that same anger. If my life hadn't worked out, I could be there, throwing stones and torching police cars.

Britain has some huge social issues going on - the mobs of violent youths roaming the streets at night can only be understood if you've read Clockwork Orange. Youth violence is something Britain has just got used to, and it's frankly scary. I *like* staying a home, writing, but if I didn't, I'd stay home because the streets aren't safe, they don't feel safe, and I just dislike drunken people throwing bottles and shouting obscenities, only interrupted by them vomiting their cheap beer everywhere.

There are things I miss about Germany.

The Riptide Unleashed

2011-08-07T20:27:00.001+01:00

The reason why I've been busy over the last two months is now out in the open. Last night, at 4 in the morning, we Have Unleashed The Riptide.

Specifically, Riptide Publishing, an exclusive, high quality m/m and gay fiction publisher that focuses on quality, editing, good covers and excellent marketing support.

To speak from the very high horse: Riptide is my response to the State Of Our Genre. I didn't find a publisher that offers everything I want. That's how it works with writing. If you want something and it doesn't exist, then just make it.

Rachel Haimowitz and Chris Hawkins, my partners in literary crime (hah!) bring a wealth of experience in PR, editing, business and networking. I believe right now we're the leanest, meanest machine out there, and we already have signed up fantastic authors, and more big names and extremely hot new, fresh discoveries coming your way.

Apart from the rest of the team, who've put in extremely long hours over the last two months, we owe an extremely big debt of gratitude to all the amazing authors that didn't laugh us off when we pitched them Our Grand Strategy.

It's notoriously difficult to get anybody of note and talent to sign up with a completely untested publisher. While WE believe in this and know what we can do, many authors - logically, understandably - wait for the publisher to settle in first. Then approach authors who have published there, listen to the gossip, and, once all these tests are passed, submit something.

Not Our Authors. They jumped into the fray feet first. We're working with courageous and entrepreneurial people (who are also idealists, to a certain extent, to sign up when we didn't even have an active website). That's support nobody can buy.

Our "First Wave" authors are: Andrea Speed, Brita Addams, Bryl Tyne, Cat Grant, Damon Suede, Kari Gregg, L.A. Witt, Peter Hansen, Rhianon Etzweiler and Storm Grant.

Thanks, guys, we won't forget your trust and help.

We acquired anything from a short story to six books from each one, and most of them are already going through the editing process.

While we will do everything to fulfill our promises - and we are extremely well positioned to do exactly that and do things differently and better - we will mess up. Our processes will have to settle. We're already growing really fast, and the biggest challenge for every start-up is to grow in a controlled, sustainable manner.

This is the reason why we're not open to the general public and don't even have a submissions call out there. We need to cope with growth first, and we will never have hundreds and hundreds of authors. We're not designed to churn out fifteen so-so books a week - if all works out well and we ramp up to what we can handle right now, we'll publish 2-4 per month, and that includes short stories.

Right, I better get back to editing and reading submissions.

Coming up for air

2011-08-01T13:41:00.000+01:00

In the last few weeks, I've been working on the "Dark" project, which comprises a number of short stories that are all linked by one character and all of them focus on one aspect of that character.

Yesterday, I completed the fifth story, called "Dark Lady", which is the natural end-point to one of the Big Archs I had in mind when I began exploring this. So, as it stands, I have 5 stories, ranging between around 5k and 12k in length, with a total wordcount of just under 40k - that's 2/3 of a novel.

There are a couple more stories, of course, so right now this feels like around 7-8 stories in total, grouped together in pairs and triplets for added structure. The last part (stories 7 and 8) are still missing, but I have their titles and will play with them over the next few weeks, hopefully completing the whole "Dark" project in the very foreseeable future. Then it'll need tweaking and editing and publication, of course. Right now, I'm pretty damn smug about this project - as smug as you can be when emotionally drained.

I'm also trying to help a friend sell her book, so I'm making phone calls and sending partials to agents in the UK. Just a day in the life, but at least it's a holiday, since I've taken the day off work to recover and regroup.

So, what now? There's a project that demands urgent closure before I lose the characters (yes, I can lose characters). I've promised some short stories and potentially a short novella tied into "Counterpunch", so I better get cracking on that. I'd absolutely love writing something for the current Samhain Publishing submission calls, but I have to step away from that, telling myself I have no time whatsoever for *additional* books.

Then there's the "Lion of Kent" sequel, and the "Dark Edge of Honor"-related novella, and the "Two Birds" book, and, of course, the most serious and slowest of all, the original WWII novel.

I'm hoping to get through some of them before the year's up. Sometimes I look at the list of stories I have to write and despair. It feels like there's just no chance in hell to finish all that in a lifetime, let alone a eighteen months or so. Worst is probably that people are waiting for me to join them or re-join them on some of these, and I'm already working hard and can't clone myself, and then I get my own books thrown at me by the muse, just like the "Dark" project.

I'll get there. One step after the other. Too many projects is - so much - better than being blocked.

Now starting on the "Counterpunch" shorts.

Dark Edge of Honor - the "Sergei type"

2011-07-29T12:14:00.001+01:00

I've been wrapped up completely in a super-secret little project that is a lot of fun, too. And as it goes when you're having fun, time flies. It's already August, and I do wonder where the previous seven months went.

One of the things I did this year was edit/rewrite Rhianon Etzweiler's and mine "Dark Edge of Honor", which is our military gay sci-fi romance/thriller.

Here's the blurb:

Sergei Stolkov is a faithful officer, though his deepest desires go against the Doctrine. A captain with the invading Coalition forces, he believes that self-sacrifice is the most heroic act and his own needs are only valid if they serve the state.

Mike, an operative planted within Cirokko's rebels, has been ordered to seduce Sergei and pry from him the Coalition's military secrets. His mission is a success, but as he captures Sergei's heart, Mike is tempted by his own charade and falls in love.

When the hostile natives of the planet Cirokko make their move, all seems lost. Can Mike and Sergei survive when the Coalition's internal affairs division takes an interest in what happened in the dusty mountains of Zasidka Pass...?

It's a sizeable novel at 96k (and you can pre-order it here), and it presents a different version of one my favourite characters ever.

See, Vadim Krasnorada of the epic Special Forces series began as a paratrooper character named Sergei, back in 1995, when I wrote one of my first stories with explicit sex. Sergei burst onto the stage, scarred, messed up, clearly traumatized, and in that story I killed him in a restroom in Frankfurt, protecting a man who was most definitely not worth it.

The character has haunted me since then. I call him the "Sergei type", and he feels like somebody I know incredibly well. I used the character in many ways and incarnations. One of my print-published novels was about another "Sergei", in this case, however, he chose love and life rather than death. The main difference? This Sergei was less giving and more taking - but just as stoic as the first one.

One short story and one novel in, I still hadn't exorcised the "Sergei type". There was still stuff to talk about, still things he'd do and I found interesting. When the time came again that I needed a character to write something, I examined the character again and decided to use the "Sergei type" again - but this time, I'd make him a "golden boy", somebody special and admired (the other two Sergeis never were). I also made him very, very intelligent and pretty educated (the other Sergeis weren't - I'd assume one of them was almost illiterate).

That way, Vadim Krasnorada was born, probably one of my favourite characters. The rest is history - one million words of "Special Forces", all free here.

Yet, I *still* wasn't done. In "Special Forces", Vadim is about thirty, and he's already a tough bastard with combat experience and a lot of experienced that have hardened him against the world. He's also aware he's gay, and he's forcing other men to submit to him. He'd an institutionalised rapist when we meet him.

Yet, throughout the book, there's the hint of a different Vadim. One who's softer, more idealistic, who wants to believe in Communism and is all bright-eyed and idealistic. I do love writing idealists, and I do love the conflict between an ideology (any ideology - religion or political identity) and the individual. I can't stay away from exploring themes of honor, identity, duty, and I assume I'll do that for the rest of my creative life.

In short, there was no space to explore Vadim's younger years, his idealism and honor, his struggle with the political system he'd been born into. I wanted to explore those bits of the "Sergei type" - how do we mature and how do we become the people we are?

So, I teamed up with Rhianon Etzweiler (who was starting work on a military novel) and pitched her this idea. She welcomed me as a co-writer, and I brought the "Sergei type", now just "Sergei" - this time young, idealistic, very much still discovering who he is - while she brought Mike.

And this is how "Dark Edge of Honor" was born. I hope you enjoy it.

A fractal of images

2011-07-19T15:25:00.000+01:00

Of course I've been writing. I've been writing another short story with the characters from "Dark Soul", and I'm increasingly realising the shape of this project. It's less of a series of shorts and more something "fractal" - while time progresses, it doesn't actually have an overarching plot and is more looking at one aspect of the main character. Which brings with it all kinds of potential issues about publishing them.

I can't WAIT for "Deliverance" to go out of contract at Noble Romance largely because I want to fix a continuity mistake I've made there. (Well, which means that'll get fixed in late 2016 - hey, just five years now!) In this case, I feel like holding back all these stories until they are all written so I can treat and fix them like one unit. Because in a way, they are.

Of course, writing 13k in 4 days or so has its disadvantages (like a hundred more emails in my inbox that need dealing with) - it's also 13k I didn't pour into the two birds book. As I did pretty much nothing else (that includes the research for the short story, which saw me revisiting, at least in spirit, one of the most beautiful places on earth - Tuscany, Italy), I'm way behind and will have to re-start the two birds book.

As it's reporting season at the bank (meaning, the analysts are writing their little hearts out), I'm pretty busy at work, and fully expect to pull some serious overtime due to the catastrophe about to happen in one of our continental offices, where a big report is heading towards an, as yet, impenetrable wall at breakneck speed, its drivers unwilling to listen to any frantic shouts of warning from London.

We are all foreseeing a prime opportunity for We Told You So, but we all wish we weren't first in line to fix the crash. Lovely.

Anyways, the 13k short is done, just needs editing, and I'm now back to my birds and working out in my head what I want the other short stories to look like.

The time, the time

2011-07-15T09:53:00.000+01:00

Currently I'm tied up in the massive Sekret Project that we can hopefully announce pretty soon - which means all the grey matter in my head is engaged, leaving very little space for things like socialising (I AM socialising a lot with my co-conspirators, of course).

But I'm still there.

It's 4 weeks until the launch of "Dark Edge of Honor", which I'm pretty excited about. I read the file on my e-reader the other day and actually couldn't stop. It's rare that my own books develop such a "pull" on me. After all, I still kinda remember what's going to happen.

Then three months until the launch of "Counterpunch", and four months until "Break and Enter".

And that's the year done (and we still have five months to go). Which means, basically, I have to get cracking on the marketing, the "promo", but I try to think of it not as advertising, but as telling all my friends about my new book. Marketing itself is soul-crushing for many writers, but these days part of the package.

In my real life, we've had some excitement - the financial markets were going/are going through some jitters at the moment, focusing on Italy. As the bank I work for has been caught up in that, last week at work was interesting and actually really quite stressful. I don't believe I'm losing my job, but senior management has announced "changes". Banks are slaves to the markets, and the markets don't behave in a rational manner. The more I know about the financial markets, the more I'm in favour of much, much harsher controls and some practices actually outlawed. We'll see if politicians ever grow enough balls to do that... I'm not positive.

Last week, we also got new windows and doors installed at Casa Voinov. We used to have really badly converted Victorian wood-framed box sash windows in a few places (one of which was really badly rotted underneath the paint) and two doors (garden and front) that were basically just a pane of wood and single glazing - the kind of door a vigorous child could kick down. Well, that's over now - with all the additional locks and bolts (all inside the door), we're locked down pretty tightly now.

The last remaining single-glazed windows were replaced with PVC windows that actually open (hence you can even clean them - I know, the marvels of progress), and which should prove a lot warmer in winter that the others. With last year's "cold snap", some of the rooms in this house were so cold that I didn't actually want to stay inside them for a long time. Which is unfortunate if you're talking about the study where I write or the library where I do my research.

Meanwhile, the "two birds" book is continuing - slower again, and slowed down by a short story I just need to throw onto the paper and hope to finish this weekend. I've taken today off to do that. There's also an editing project that needs doing by Monday, and a novel to feedback next week.

Life's busy, but that's good.

"Counterpunch" - the cover

2011-07-11T08:19:00.000+01:00

I just received the final cover for "Counterpunch" from Storm Moon Press, so let me introduce you to Brooklyn and Nathaniel. One's a slave, the other a lawyer.

What do you guys think? Awesome, y/y?

More shelves, new windows and doors

2011-07-08T17:33:00.000+01:00

For months, the inhabitant of Casa Voinov have been pouring money into the shared account that we use to pay the mortgage. I guess you're really "partnered" when you have a shared bank account and low six figures of debt together.

Watching the sum grow nicely, I then realised that we should actually start putting some of that money to work, so I got a windows/doors sales guy in a couple weeks ago.

Well, the Big Day has almost arrived, so on Monday, we're getting two new doors (kitchen and front door) and two large new windows installed. The possibility of being really fucking cold next winter too has diminished considerably (the roof seems to have some insulation). I'll also have a fire escape from the top floor.

Also spent two mornings in the company of "Simon the Carpenter", who replaced two busted floor boards and installed two sets of bookshelves into the recesses of the study. All tailored, exactly to spec, and they are brilliant - I hope to spend some time on the weekend rearranging my books by theme/topic/time period.

In case you're curious, the main categories in my flat are: fiction (classics), fiction (contemp), gay history, generic military history, ancient history, medieval history, modern history, locations (especially Afghanistan), espionage, encyclopedias, WWII, and creative writing books & books on writing. Smaller category: trophies (author copies of books I've written and those I've edited/feedbacked), friends' books, and medical history. There are also shelves and shelves and SHELVES of roleplaying books which I should really sell as I'm not doing anything with them.

The idea is to sort them by theme (they mostly are, but the system's not *perfect*) and then by proximity. The books for the "two birds" book should be nearest to my desk, whereas books I bought for books I want to write at some point in the future would be correspondingly more distant. This would mean reshuffling with every finished book, which would actually help with closure.

The carpenter also fed me ideas about nailguns as weapons (he said Hollywood's Doing it Wrong).

In writing-related news, the "two birds" book has progressed to just under 16k. Any hope that this is a short story has been soundly shattered, so I might just as well live with it. I don't believe I'm halfway in the plot. It's more like a third. Or will soon be a third. We're quite possibly looking at another short novel - in the area of 50-60k. On the positive side - I do believe I know where it's going, or at lest I have an idea for an ending/resolution and several important scenes that might just get me there.

On the negative side, the book's been devouring my brain completely and all other projects have stalled (apart from the secret project, which continues, if slower than I'd like). I'm on the line to write a short story for the group over on Goodreads, and not a word is coming. I have half an idea, but it's only half an idea and it would need way more research, and I don't have the time - or headspace - to do it. Next time, I won't sign up for that kind of thing. My own muse demands 100% obedience and won't have it any other way.

With Monday taken off work, I'll have three days to do stuff. Not that I expect to do any writing with the builders taking out and putting in windows and doors. I do hope to get a little bit of work done, but right now, I've beta-ed and edited mostly. But that's mostly because while I can edit when work's slow at work, I really struggle writing emotional scenes while at work.

In any case, I'll post some photos - before and after. :)

Hope everybody has a great weekend!

A book of three birds

2011-07-04T17:18:00.000+01:00

I've been joking that my current book is the tale of three birds: a nightingale, a hawk, and the albatross of an author trying to get the thing off the ground.

For weeks, I've been writing 300-500 words per day, and some days nothing at all. Well, yesterday I wrote 3,700 words in one day, which, I guess, is my Muse's way of apologising or ensuring I'm not throwing the towel.

The story now stands at just under 13k, the pieces are mostly in place (I'm missing one major character), and, to stay with the albatross image, the bird is hobbling along and seems now to have moved on from ungainly running to a hint of sailing. Ideally, there will be an uplift or a cliff or something that should help with gaining altitude.

I assume this will end up at 40k+, so definitely novella length. The related research is fun and never ceases to amaze me.

Today, work at work is extremely slow, so I did some fact-checking and very light-touch editing. The beginning will need some rewrites, but I think the overwhelming majority of this is as solid as can be. I really would liket o finish it this month, or maybe August. And after that - more historicals.

On a sidenote, I watched "Cabaret" yesterday, which is three years older than I am. Very surprised to see a m/m/f menage in there and a bit bummed that it didn't work out. Loved all the nods and winks to other stuff, like Otto Dix's paintings. Well worth watching, with an awesome Liza Minelli.

Dirty fans - or why I'm a Klitschko guy tonight

2011-07-02T12:14:00.003+01:00

Tonight I'm going to watch the world heavyweight title unification fight between Wladimir Klitschko and David Haye.

I'm between the chairs here. I do like Klitschko more as a person (by all accounts he seems a nice guy, is big in charity projects for kids, and I kinda like big, stoic guys - like you wouldn't have guessed). What I didn't like was Klitschko punning on Haye's name, turning it into, yeah, "gay".

Thanks, Wladimir. Way to make me go "thanks for that piece of homophobia, Wladimir, your gay fans pay for your tickets and merchandise too, you know."

David Haye is a bit of as loudmouth, but without the personality of Ali (I read he called his son Cassius - yeah, there's a Cassius Haye growing up, nevermind that Ali disowned that name as his "slave name" - he just couldn't resist. David, that is).

Arguably, Haye's almost hysterically claiming he'll do nothing that Klitschko wants him to do seems pretty juvenile to me. But all that can be discounted as "trying to sell tickets". Nothing sells more tickets than us, the audience, believing that those modern gladiators actually do hate each other.

So, I'm between chairs, as I said. Haye is the more exciting and interesting boxer by far. And he's right, Wladimir is "robotic" and uninspired and thanks to the Klitschkos, heavyweight boxing has never been so dull.

So, I was watching the weigh-in on BBC just now. Here's the video.

If you listen to the end, you'll hear a song. A song you'll hear anytime a British team/sportsperson is facing a German opponent. You can make out the words towards the end: "Destroy the dam, destroy the dam, destroy it."

This would be slightly puzzling (for me as a German it was), before I did some research.

It's the Dam Buster Song, a song from the film The Dam Busters, which in turn is inspired by Operation Chastise, the bombing of a number of German dams and subsequent large-scale flooding that killed almost two thousand people, among them Soviet forced labourers, but most definitely women and children and civilians - and strategically speaking, not very efficient, either, let alone a "death blow" to the Third Reich's war economy.

Let's really savour that thought - English hooligans and "fans" sing a song glorifying the death of civilians WHENEVER they face a German opponent. It can be football, or boxing (nevermind that the Klitschkos are Ukrainian), or really anything - and a horde of asshole fuckwits shows up, singing "destroy the dam! Destroy it!"

I'm from the area that was flooded. My family was subjected to aerial bombing - both in Dresden (father's side) and in the Ruhr area (mother's side).

And I can't think of anything similar that the Germans would do. We don't have a "Dunkirk" song (then again, Dunkirk involved no civilians), or a "Blitz" song.

I can see the uproar if we HAD a Blitz song and dared so much as think of singing it. The British media would be on that like a pack of hellhounds.

It's this fuckwittery of David Haye's fans that makes me want that Klitschko wins tonight. (It won't happen, Haye is an amazing boxer, and he bought down bigger guys.) But I won't be able to cheer him on for that, like I can't cheer on the English football team, either - regardless of their opponent. I'll be able to cheer for them on the day those fucknuts stop singing about civilians getting bombed and drowned.

This is the effect of dirty fans.

Blog post and a funny

2011-07-01T11:43:00.000+01:00

I blogged over at Slash and Burn about inspiration (specifically about Counterpunch).

And this is something that came through Twitter: stuff people say in bookshops.

Me, I've taked half the day off work to celebrate my/our end of our probationary period - my partner's been three months in his job, and me six months. We're heading out to a restaurant in North London that serves Afghan food (the alternative was Russian, but I wasn't in the mood for that).

The "two birds" book is moving along just fine. Only 150 words yesterday, but that's OK. I do expect to write a bit more tonight and over the weekend - I should hit 10k at least.

Maurice Chevalier on inspiration

2011-06-30T09:27:00.002+01:00

"Inspiration comes unawares, from unaccountable sources that have nothing to do with planning or intelligence. Let it cool ever so slightly, and you are left, pen or brush in hand, with no inspiration at all. Gifted people need not, therefore, make a song and dance about being or supposing themselves superior. They simply happened to be born with that fortunate, subconscious equipment of theirs, and the mystery exists independently of intelligence or ambition." - Maurice Chevalier

Maurice Chevalier on the artistic process

2011-06-29T15:06:00.001+01:00

"It all boils down to instinct, good or bad. Artistic creation must be spontaneous. It comes from the heart; it has to pass through the brain; and still one needs the guts, and good old indispensable technique, to bring it to the light of day. That at least is how I see the process, not that I have ever been able to pin it down very exactly in my own case. You hear a voice inside. You obey it, and produce whatever it told you to produce; and then you wait and see. And oh! The trouble you're in for."

(He's part of my reading for the Two Birds book.)

I'm behind on everything

2011-06-28T18:20:00.000+01:00

I'm behind on everything and will never catch up - but at least the heat and humidity have given way to - much more pleasant - grey and cold and wet outside. At least I can now focus a bit more after barely getting any sleep last night.

The Paris novel is eating my brain. I don't actually care much about anything else right now - even though I should, and I want to. Maybe what I really want is two weeks of holiday to completely devote to my book (and the secret project).

Writer Beware: Do NOT sign non-compete clauses

2011-06-27T20:36:00.007+01:00

(I'm returning - briefly - from "holiday" for an important public service announcement).

Once upon a time, I worked for a shabby asshole company in London. Since it was a shabby asshole company that was killing my joy of life, I tried to leave after about 2.5 years. After my days with nose to grindstone at the little self-important hellhole, I had some experience in consumer research.

I went to a company for a job - which did something else, but was also active in retail and consumer analysis - and they offered me a better-paid job.

The moment of truth arrives, when Aleks talks to The Old Witch, AKA Head of Human Resources about having been offered a better-paid job.

There are two responses when a valued employee who's been twice promoted does that:

One is: "How much - and we'll pay that, please stay?"

The other is: "MUHAHAHA, FOOOOOLISH MORTAL! You've signed a non-compete! MUAHAHAHA!"

In other words, the asshole company decided that New Company was its competitor and even though I would have done something totally different there, the non-compete clause effectively banned me from using my skills at the new job, for two or three years (too long to just wait it out in any case).

I was fucked. Two-and-a-half years of hardcore learning down the drain.

But where there's a Taurus and enough anger, there's a way.

I declined the job offer (thankfully - the place went bust a year later!) and immediately blitzed EVERY single headhunter and job agency in London. I was barely at my desk, so busy (and pissed-off) was I, telling them about the non-compete and how I needed to apply my German and language skills in some way that had nothing to do with consumers and retail.

That is how I got into financial journalism, and from there into business editing - making a lot more in banking than I would have had I stayed at the hellhole. Much nicer workplace, too.

The only thing that worked in my favour is that I'm not a one-trick pony. While I'd learned to analyse products, I can also write and I have foreign languages. The non-compete clause forced me to think laterally - leading me to a much more fulfilling, much more pleasant and better-paid job.

For once, the non-compete really helped me.

Non-competes in writing are a totally different matter.

There's a rumour that Harlequin, the world's largest Romance publisher has added non-compete clauses to their "new" contracts.

I'm not sure whether Bob Mayer is making this shit up, but what he says is this:

"Which brings me to the non-compete clause that’s also supposed to be in new contracts. Basically once an author signs with HQ, they can’t self-publish under that name?"

If that's true, that would be utterly appalling (and not just for the very good reasons that Bob cites in his article), and grounds enough to turn down the contract. Basically, I've been told by several sources that Harlequin offers a "take it or leave it" contract. There's no negotiation with the 900-pound gorilla in the space.

What's worrying me is that it's the BACKLIST that authors actually live off. My agent made that very clear: You can think about quitting your day job when the books you wrote 5-15 years ago pay your rent, your health insurance, your pension and everything else and you have a little extra.

The front list (aka: the current release) is nice - another step up the ladder. The backlist pays the rent. Now, nobody sells more backlist than the author - a fair chunk of my backlist doesn't make a penny because I sold ALL my right, FOREVER, to a publisher who let it all fall into oblivion. Those books aren't being reprinted, they aren't issued in e-books - for all intends and purposes, they make nobody any money, not the publisher, not for me.

(Yeah, I've been real clever about contracts in my misspent youth, but that one was a "take it or leave it" contract, too.)

Now, the issue I have is that an adventurous publisher could not only keep you from self-publishing under that name (that name = your whole identity and self you've built on the internet, the only thing that helps people find you and your OTHER books). They could try to force you deeper into bondage - you might be unable to sign up with another publisher, or are forced to sell ALL your romance titles to them.

Ooops. Some publishers are already doing that (via ROFR clauses). I'll talk about THAT brand of "WHAT THE FUCK" some other day.

What is so disturbing is that, clearly, some publishers feel so threatened they are trying to shackle the author any way they can get away with.

There you are, thinking you signed a contract to get editing, a great cover and distribution - and meanwhile, you've signed the rights to YOUR OWN NAME away as WELL AS THE RIGHTS TO YOUR FUTURE BOOKS and HOW and WHERE to publish them.

Fucknuts!

Do NOT sign your books or your brand into slavery. My age, I hope I'll be writing for another 40 years. I will not - ever - sign my name away or preclude the idea that I'll self-publish or start my own publisher. The publishing space has changed beyond recognition in the last ten years - can any of us predict what's going to happen in the next forty years? Or, you know, what your kids or grandkids want to do with the brand you've so carefully built?

DO NOT sign your rights away - especially not with a publisher who won't negotiate. Walk away. No, don't walk, RUN.

Edit to add: Bob Mayer has since updated his blog post and says "there is no indication that the non-compete will be included in the contracts."

Edit to add - No. 2: Harlequin's official response.

Which is GREAT news. But even if Harlequin is not doing it - somebody out there will try it. Read contracts carefully. Ask people what shit means. Even get a lawyer. With more and more publishers being squeezed and panicking over both the movement towards indie and self-publishing, there are people trying to pull a fast one. I'm glad it's not HQ, but there's a lot of other nasty shit out there, like the ROFR clause, about which I'll be writing in a future post.

Writer beware: PD Publishing

2011-06-19T20:48:00.001+01:00

Guys, anybody thinking of submitting to PD Publishing, you should read these entries from Anne Brooke in order:

Part 1.

Part 2.

Part 3.

Short version of the story: Anne Brooke wants to terminate her contract with PD Publishing, PD Publishing wants to charge her USD 10k, of which 4.5k is for "lost sales" on an EBOOK EDITION THAT WAS NEVER RELEASED!!!

To put numbers into perspective, Anne made $160 in royalties from her PD Publishing release in 2010. I can state with confidence that I've made more in the same time from "Deliverance", a 7k short story.

What's really extremely classy is that, according to Anne's account, PD Publishing cc'ed Anne's OTHER PUBLISHERS (so far uninvolved) into their email trail.

Because, yes, it makes a lot of business sense to shame an author with the competition. Umh, not. If I were Dreamspinner or any of the others, I'd laugh my head off at the patheticness of it all.

After reading the nonsense that Anne Brooke has to deal with, I'm counting my blessings that PD Publishing turned down my novel I sent them in 2009. I'd have signed that same contract.

Some of the stuff that PD puts out is excellent, like Erastes' "Standish". But I will never submit anything to them again (shit, buying a car is cheaper than getting out of their contracts!), also because their sales stink. I mean, $160 for a full novel (plus a $200 advance)? That's not enough to get out of bed for.

But now I also will never buy a single book from them again. I also won't review any of their books. I'm not supporting publishers that are taking the piss like this. (All this based on Anne's account - I'm happy to link whatever PD Publishing has to say to this clusterfuck).

You know, big changes happened when people started to care how people/animals that produce the stuff we want are being treated - hey, presto, fairtrade coffee and bananas. Hey, presto, organic milk and eggs and meat.

I do hope that readers care about how publishers treat their authors.

In my case, I'm boycotting PD Publishing. You, too, can opt for fairtrade.

One quick blog post

2011-06-17T23:13:00.003+01:00

I blogged elsewhere about a book that won't happen.

On vacation until 1 July

2011-06-15T15:22:00.000+01:00

It's time for an internet break. The muse is singing, so I'm taking 2 weeks off from it all. I'll try to respond to emails, but I won't be on various social networks (I'll check my Goodreads group sporadically).

I'll be back on 1 July, hopefully with new stories.

Have a great time.

The pitfalls of social media (author perspective)

2011-06-15T08:50:00.005+01:00

Recently, my mind has been dwelling on social media for authors (hey, throw in some caps and it's a good title for a paper). Obviously, all this is based on my niche inside a niche and my own experiences, and definitely also by observing other authors and the issues they are facing when dealing with social media. (This, BTW, is not a "marketing" post, but really about networking.)

And as an aside, I love social media and jumped into it full force. I don't believe it's a bad thing. I'm just cautioning that it's not always a Good Thing (especially when people use it to gather a pitchfork-wielding mob when anybody is posting an unpopular opinion - then social media helps assemble the torch-wielders that jump on shit out of peer pressure or the heat of the moment).

But I disgress.

So, with those two things out of the way (that I do love social media and that these are NOT just my experiences but an amalgamation of things I've seen over the last months), here are my humble thoughts on the whole thing.

1) Social Media makes you trackable. Say, you get an email and need some time to respond to it and think things through. If you *are* on Twitter, it's very likely that the sender of that email will send you a Direct Message saying "oy, respond to my email", or, subtler "did you get my email?" (Yes I did, "losing email" is usually an excuse, thank you very much.)

This, very often, is totally counter-productive. Social Media exerts pressure on us to do things immediately and respond to everything immediately. I'm not sure about you, but sometimes I like to think things through and discuss it with other people before I respond. Your Twitter and Facebook accounts make this almost impossible. Basically, people can easily bully you into responding AT ONCE.

2) Being "friends" with somebody you signed a contract with - any kind of contact - is at best a double-edged, poisoned blade. All goes well until you get cut. If you get cut, it's really bad.

I do not friend my RL bosses on Facebook, and have asked them not to friend me. It's too awkward. I might want to say something about work, and I can't, or a minor gripe (you know, just venting) suddenly turns into a Disciplinary Issue. I don't need that kind of shit in my life, so I'm not doing it.

The same holds true with publishers. Say, you've promised them a sequel this month, but then you post on Twitter that, actually, you will now write the three-part fantasy epic. If the publisher is switched on, they'll go "Whut?" and what ensues is drama. Since personally, I'm a very bad liar because I can't keep my stories straight, I don't want to follow my publishers anymore and feel queasy if they follow me. Since the rulebook on internet and social media etiquette hasn't really been written yet, this is very difficult territory to navigate. I've seen enough fuck-ups that I'm wary as hell about it all.

3) Banter changes your relationship. Say, you sign a contract with a publisher, you like each other, you banter. Then something goes really, really wrong in either your personal relationship OR your business relationship with that person.

Result: It makes things really awkward. That's why you don't mix business with friendship. If you really like the person, you might be tempted to let them get away with stuff you wouldn't otherwise take (and might end up getting taken advantage of). If you really like the business side of things, it will still get tarnished if the personal relationship went wrong. Fact is, some absolute scumbags are at the same time very good business people, and some utterly lovely people are atrocious at business.

Choose the side of them you like, and stay away from the rest of it. It makes for a lot more sanity in your life. Professional distance is a good thing. You can be friends with your readers, but I highly doubt you can be real friends with a publisher or editor or anybody you have a legal relationship with - amiable respect is probably the best thing that can be achieved.

4) Very often, Social Media creates the same mood and feel of High School (or the German equivalent of it). People *are* petty and childish, there *will* be bullying, there's DRAMAZ!, there is sniping from the back and, definitely, back-stabbing. I don't know about you, but I hated (the German equivalent of) High School. I've also found that this "storm in a tea cup" drama really, really detracts from my writing time and energy. I sometimes come away from Twitter feeling utterly "meh" about writing. Sometimes, sorting shit out and making things right again take so much energy that I'm losing whole chapters to DRAMAZ.

Personally, I don't think it's worth it - or at the very least, I need to think more and harder about how to have more fun and less stress on SocMedia sites.

Update on Kolya the Kitty

2011-06-12T13:35:00.001+01:00

Thanks, guys, so much.

We've raised a substantial amount of money (1,500 USD) - and the vet says that maybe the cat doesn't need an operation, which means much smaller costs than we feared (original estimate was 2,800-3,300 USD).

So, if all goes well and Kolya can pass the thread without having to go under the knife, the amount we raised will be enough to pay for the procedure.

Thank you so *very* much.

Here's an update from Gil.

Thanks again! The power of the internet is an awe-inspiring thing.

On behalf of a friend

2011-06-11T21:28:00.001+01:00

Okay, I try not to do this as often as it might be required (there's a lot of scarcety out there). But this one's pretty close to the bone.

My very *very* lovely co-writer 's cat has swallowed sewing thread and needs surgery. Since Gil's a poor student, that surgery is like 1/6 of their yearly income. Gil's already selling off their books to pay for it and getting a second job.

If you enjoyed Collateral or The Trick Is (both here), which are both free and co-written with Gil, and if you have a buck left over, please consider donating it to Kolya's surgery fund. You'd be helping an immensely talented author and a close personal friend of mine who went above and beyond the call of duty to help me through some rather unpleasant times back in 2007.

More info and a photo here.

Thank you very much.

Trust issues

2011-06-11T13:36:00.000+01:00

Following up from my piracy post, I am reporting piracy links to my publishers. And I'm only publishing with publishers who send the DMCAs on my behalf. That's why I'm giving them a big chunk of my money: for cover, editing, and maintenance of my rights (and our income streams).

I will not publish with publishers who will not take an active stance there. Which, incidentally, will see me team up with some new players this year and next, and discontinue sending submissions to others. It's as simple as that. If the publisher can't be bothered to defend its (and my) rights, I can't be bothered to submit to them and give them 75-50% of my money.

I have 3 hours or so a day to write. I know authors who spend a lot of their writing time fighting pirates. I prefer to let somebody else deal with it so I have my head free to, you know, actually put words down.

Now, I get sent a lot of piracy links from fellow authors. But one incident shocked me a little. A fellow m/m author sent me a link with a note that basically read "I thought you might be bothered to defend your work" and added "oh, and by the way, your friend X of Facebook is a known book pirate. You might want to rethink your "friendship"."

I emailed "X", asking her very factually and calmly, I think, if she was pirating books. She responded shocked and dismayed. I then didn't follow that one up, but it got me thinking.

Here's what I have arrived at: It's entirely possible that some of my friends and readers pirate my books. Basically, I can't know what people do in their bedrooms at night. Just because I send them free books or wristbands or whatever doesn't mean they are incapable of sharing my book with a few thousand of their closest friends and show their love and support by taking away my revenue and even taking the work for free that I charge for. (I'd think that more than a million words in freebies would be enough, personally.)

After thinking it all through a few times, and I admit I really struggled with writing while fighting my very emotional responses and the knee-jerk reaction of "fine, I'll stop publishing, then and write for myself and fifty or so of my own friends" (yes, that's always a possibility, and I'm not the only one who considered writing only for themselves and their friends) - I got over it. I got over my ego and hurt feeling and trust issues. In the end, nobody but me gives a fuck about my ego, and I better live with that. The stories need to come out.

Also, I simply can't live in a way that makes me automatically mistrust everybody. I can't look at my couple hundred Facebook friends, wondering who might be a pirate. There's no way for me prove who is a pirate and who isn't. Some people might pirate some books and buy others. I can't live my life in mistrust and fear - and anger, never forget the anger.

Writing is hard enough as it is, and complex enough. I can't lose sleep over pirates or fretting over people sending their PDF of one of my books to their friends. I have friends who can't afford my books. Some are frail and poor, others are students and poor, others are jobless and poor. I'm giving a lot of books away to them - because, hey, they are friends. I'm not charging a close friend, who's shared their work and life and writing with me. I'm not a penny-pinching asshole, and I can't imagine a world where I see thieves and pirates everywhere. I can't worry about it, because it would severely hurt the writing.

I can't listen to the paranoid who denounce other people, either. I can't peddle in suspicion and mistrust. It's not why I'm here. I'm here to tell the goddamned story as best as I can (and I leave the piracy issue to my publishers).

/End rant.

Not so generic thoughts on piracy

2011-06-11T12:54:00.003+01:00

I've mentioned several times that I have fairly complex responses to the whole issue of piracy. I used to make mix tapes of music, for example. As a student, I ran a fair amount of "handed-down" software and never asked where it came from (but then, Microsoft was "uncool" and the big evil, and I guess I felt a bit cool not giving evil Bill Gates money I didn't have). Hey, we're talking early to mid-nineties here.

My appetite for music certainly exceeded my budget - I still spent more money on music and books than on food, which, BTW, is pretty much a pattern of my life. Granted, my music expenses have gone down since I subscribed to Spotify... I was one of those very heavy users that was "cannibalised" into the subscription model. Basically, the music industry is losing money because I'm on an "all you can eat" plan via Spotify that costs about the amount of one CD a month.

In terms of software, once I had regular paychecks, I went strictly legal. In terms of music, I've bought a lot of CDs I had "ripped" files of, and I'm still buying my favourites. You could call me a reformed pirate, but I grew up in a day and age where the actual industries creating the content I wanted weren't threatened.

Now, true, the demise of the music industry is a lot more complex. One reason why their sales are down is because they were calculating from the very high levels of the years when everybody replaced their vinyl with CDs. It was, basically, unsustainable levels that then went back to normal. We "know" that a lot of musicians were treated badly by those who sell their music. Thankfully, all that is changing. Indie musicians and indie authors are increasingly taking the stage...build "fan bases" and thrive.

Well, "thrive" in the author space being a relative term. As an "insider", I know how many m/m authors have holiday homes and yachts. Pretty sure the number is about zero, unless they work high-flying corporate jobs, and *those* have the tendency of eating a person up so much that there's no fiction coming from that mind. Juggling a corporate career and writing is not easy. I've moved out of journalism because it was damaging my writing. And because working for a bank pays me 60% more, but bottom line, because I want to be a writer and need a job that doesn't kill my writing.

Unless with many other m/m writers, I can actually eat (or get my teeth fixed or buy a couple nice steaks) even if I sell no book at all. (For the record, my sales appear to be steadily growing, but at a fairly slow pace. I'm curious if "Scorpion" and "Dark Edge of Honor" will have an impact, one because it's universally well-received, and the other because it's from Carina Press, which has an enormous reach that not many publishers can offer).

I have friends who need the royalty payments to eat. To buy a new (or a better used) computer. Where selling books means the difference between having a roof over their heads and not.

To me, sales are basically validation... the only way I can "track" if I'm successful. Being ambitious and proud of what I do, sales is the main way for me to see if it's "working", but, bottom line of it all is... for me it's a game and not a matter of life and death. I will admit, freely, that I'd like to draw some writing income when I retire, and I hope I can retire before I hit 67, or whatever the retirement age is going to be for Britain. Dragging my 60+ year old carcass through the London commute is not very enticing. Yes, I'd like to retire on writing, but I'm not asking for a free lunch, and I don't believe the m/m genre will ever pay enough to match my corporate salary (with pension, and private healthcare). Also, I can see the holder of my mortgage, HSBC bank, get twitchy about the very uneven income stream of a small fry author. And nothing would give me more serious writer's block than actually *having* to pay off my house with the bucks I make writing.

Lastly, I can't ask my partner to subsidise a writer. That's not how my idea of a relationship works. Everybody is pulling their financial weight. Life as DINKS is pretty sweet, overall, and we can save towards retirement.

What annoys me about piracy then? For me it's a respect issue. It's crazy-making to read on a pirate forum "I love his stuff, he's so talented, can anybody upload everything he's written?" And a few hours later, the "complete Voinov" has 700 downloads. (No, no exaggeration, that's *exactly* what happened a little while back.)

I'm not sure how *you* express your respect and love for an artist, but I don't think stealing from them would be on the list.

Respect cuts both ways. I will write like you guys out there have a brain and can deal with morally ambiguous characters. I'm here to make you squirm, to sometimes challenge assumptions, I'm here to put a smile on your face, but not with a cheap joke. For you guys/gals, I'm writing my little black heart out. I respect you. I'm not dumbing down, not selling out. I'm not getting lazy. I'm working hard to edit, because I respect you enough that I know that a wrong comma or a badly chosen word grates on you as much as it does on me when I'm the reader.

I'm killing books that are not good enough. I will never write cookie-cutters, even though they are easy and fast. I'll never copy and paste my sex scenes from one book to the next. I'll always reach for the heart (and the throat, and the balls). I do that because I respect my readers. All I'm asking is that my readers - and that pirate was clearly a reader - respect me in turn.

Because it's easy - another "Scorpion" review

2011-06-10T13:15:00.000+01:00

I wrote 450 words on the "two birds" book. And in my head the "outline" has taken an interesting turn. I think we have a love triangle (which shatters my hopes of telling that story in 30k or so... Godsdamnit).

Anyway, here's something that made me smile at my desk today.

"Scorpion is an outstanding alternate history novel, rich in scope; one that is presented so comprehensively and is written with such authority that it feels as though it might be a historically factual piece. It is a tale peopled by characters who, regardless of how well drawn they are, still have undercurrents and backstories to them that made me want to delve deeper into their lives and their thoughts."

Read the rest of the review here. Thanks, Lisa!

(And I just received a delivery of my wristbands for "Counterpunch" and the "Kampfgruppe Voinov" - both are pretty awesome.)

Scorpion reviewed at Jesse Wave Reviews

2011-06-09T21:24:00.000+01:00

Got a shiny new review for "Scorpion" at Jesse Wave's review blog.

"I was excited and curious to read this story because at some point I considered myself a huge fun of this author. However I then realized that while I have read a lot of titles which he co-wrote with others, I was actually not familiar at all with his individual style outside of one short story by him (and that story was actually my least favorite out of all his works). I was looking forward to see if I liked him as much as when paired with someone else.

I did. I could not put this book down. It is a twisty action/adventure, which takes place in the well-drawn fantasy world, and I thought the world building was awesome."

Read Sirius' review here.

And just because it's happened today, too, "Dark Edge of Honor" has been chosen to become an audiobook on Audible.com. We don't know when it's going to happen, but, yeah, it's been chosen. More when I know more.

Now I'm gonna talk a bit to Yves.

Quick update on "Scorpion 2"

2011-06-09T17:10:00.001+01:00

I just had a rather panicked email from a reader asking me if "Scorpion 2" was, quote "happening at all".

Short answer: Yes, it will happen. Promise.

Long answer: I was sidetracked. I have around 15k useable words at the moment and I have a ton of ideas, and I'm almost sure I know how it ends, but the Muse is still very much in "discovery" mode. That's when books slowly solidify out of that diffuse mist of "ooooh, I want to write" and actually take shape. This is a critical stage that cannot be rushed. There's no way to shorten that period. Basically, it's still incubating. While I have the general "set-up", or the starting situation with most major players in position, I need to get to the main developments/main plots, and while I have a ton of material, I have no real clue yet how the pieces fit together.

What does that mean?

It means that the book will be written. A book will only *not* be written if there's not enough material to write it. If I have no ideas and no passion. For Scorpion 2, I actually have both. There are a lot of secrets that I want to tell and reveal, and I do love my characters (I can't wait to share Runner, Blood and Graukar with you, and shock you with the demise of the high priest - because that'll certainly shock the hell out of me).

Now, what has sidetracked me?

Around a week ago, I had a sudden flash of inspiration. I was finally working on "Scorpion 2" again, and suddenly I had this idea that is about WWII and Paris. And I had the movie. A voice (his name is Yves). I fretted and freaked out, and then my partner said: "Hey, you're not living off writing, follow the energy - do what really excites you."

A-fucking-men.

(It is, BTW, the thing I tell young writers asking me for advice what they should write... I tell them to write the one that keeps them up at night.)

Now, I wanted to be all dutiful and serious and hardworking and give you guys "Scorpion 2", but basically it's not *quite* ready yet, not quite ripe, and I'm being selfish and rather than push "Scorpion 2" through, I really want to write the new story, which I call, affectionately, the "Two Birds" book.

I hope you'll forgive the delay, but I promise you a better sequel if I can play with this one first.

Anybody joining me in licking this guy's neck and throat?

2011-06-06T20:39:00.000+01:00

Generous writer that I am, I'm sharing my (and Rhianon's) guys with you. The book is "Dark Edge of Honor" and it'll be out in August from Carina Press:

Ah, just what was missing from the day.

After the war

2011-06-04T23:58:00.000+01:00

I'm still "between books". I've been playing around with "Scorpion 2", but it's still in the teeth-pulling stage. It's moving slowly, 3090-800 words at a time, and some days not at all. I'm writing, kind of, or at least going through the motions, adding words to other words on the page.

Does it grab me and refuse to let go? Not really. Not yet. It needs a lot of faith and momentum to get there. And it's hard to muster the faith if you don't know what shape it is taking. IF it will take a shape. With every book, that's a big bet of dozen of hours of work. Much of the stuff ends up unfinished and with hundreds of hours of work wasted.

My brain is incubating a new, fresh idea, unconnected to anything else. I think I'll let the muse play with that, before I finish the other projects. Right now, it's more important than ever to find that passion and energy. And that's what I keep telling other writers: to follow the energy.

So, I'll start on this pretty soon. These slow periods are times when I plan and plot and think, and do otherwise very little.

Three day weekend (redux)

2011-05-29T11:21:00.001+01:00

It's easy to lose a book. Something doesn't go quite right, the book is set aside, suddenly, two years have passed, and by now, you're a lot more interested in other books (like the one you're currently writing or the one that's coming up). Years pass. The characters turn into strangers. The book's gone.

I have a ton of books in the drawer. There's the financial trilogy which will likely never happen the way I imagined things in 2008/9. I think I have a novel and a novella there, and both need HUGE amounts of work. There's the menage and its prequel, there's the historical WWII novel (still around, still kicking, and still unfinished) and some other projects that are "cool ideas" at this stage and nothing more. I tend to be drawn towards the new over the old. Research books for the "new" are piling up all around me. You'd have to see it to believe it.

But above all, I'm putting work in to finish with the past and move into the future without guilt constantly dragging at my feet. I think I would be able to move faster that way. I might even tackle ROI again, the first book I did after "Special Forces". While "Collateral" saved me from burnout and from hating writing, ROI was what Germans call a "Befreiungsschlag" - a (violent) move to free oneself (usually from a superior enemy force). For that alone it deserves to be finished up properly. As it's not a romance in the conventional sense, I figure I might have to go down the self-publishing route, but that's OK. I'm done with conventional publishing, anyway.

I'm just no good

2011-05-23T23:01:00.001+01:00

My last update was more than a week ago. Now, received wisdom is to blog every day - and most people expect to see at least 3 or 4 updates a week. I'm seemingly incapable of it. My life's not *that* interesting. Sometimes, big things go on behind the scenes that I can't talk about because they are dirty laundry, or are in the process of getting resolved, or just very emotional, and I rather wait and calm down and think things through before I go on record with anything.

Also, the last week has been spent "promoting" Scorpion. Reviews so far are looking good. I'm still in the stage where I check my reviews every day, but I know that once the next ~~brain parasite~~ book takes hold, I'll stop caring. I sometimes make fun of people who run around like excited chicken, squawking "I LAID AN EGG! OMG, IT'S AN EGG! IT'S ROUND AND WHITE/BROWN AND IT'S HARD ON THE OUTSIDE AND SOFT ON THE INSIDE! I'M THE GREATEST CHICKEN EVER! I LAID AN EGG!"

You know, that's what chicken do. We lay eggs. I deeply care about the current book, and I probably am like any other author in that I love to talk about my work, but at the end of the day, the process is natural and perfectly normal. Writers write. Chicken lay eggs. It's nothing special. And I much rather invest the energy and passion into the next one rather than running around telling people "BUY MY BOOK!", because firstly, that doesn't work, and secondly, I much rather write another book.

The proof of the writer is in the writing, not in the marketing, the blog schedule or how excited we're getting about what we're doing. The excitement is a given, but I'm a workman, I write one after the other, loving every one of them (of course, otherwise I wouldn't sacrifice every free minute to a pursuit that pays less per hour than slinging lattes at a coffee shop), but really, the worst part of writing is NOT writing. (The one thing worse that NOT writing is that gut-wrenching feeling of "it's no good, it won't come together, the whole thing is doomed to fail!" - that terrible, terrible angst I'm getting about 40% into a book. EVERY book.)

Compared to the Mid-Book Crisis and the I'll Never Write Again angst, nothing any reviewer can say can hurt me. To get a book out, I have had to overcome both. Reviews don't figure on my list of things I'm scared of. Sure, it's a bummer if a reviewer who is clearly intelligent and insightful ends up hating my book, but, really, by the point reviews roll in, I'm already two books ahead. Getting criticized for a book that has just come out feels a bit like reading your assessments from Middle school. ("Alex is a clever kid, but he loves getting distracted".)

For example, I started "Scorpion" in June 2010. To me, it's a very special book, because it's the only thing I wrote while getting my soul eaten by financial journalism for six months, working long hours every day and most weekends, travelling a lot and freaking out over learning an industry that could just as well have been happening on an alien planet, with my career (and mortgage) depending on providing insightful commentary that the practitioners would want to read.

Scorpion is my "fuck this, I WILL write!" book. Defiance in the face of exploitation - if having a cushy, high-profile white collar job can be called "exploitation" (well, certainly how THAT company did it). "Scorpion" happened despite everything. It's the book that lived, even though I tried to kill it a few times, even though it hit the brick walls so hard I could feel my teeth rattle.

These are the "book" stories few authors share, because every book teaches us something different about writing and about ourselves. And saying "hey, I was nearing burn-out, I realized I'm not a journalist despite more than four years in the field and all my scoops and features and all the hard work I put in, I realized that I'd hit the wall of my own lofty ideals and expectations and I was about to be eaten alive and have the joy of everything - writing, living, breathing - sucked right out of me" is not sexy. It's not even very interesting for anybody out there. I'm not holding a pity party. The book has to stand on its own, and so far, a fair amount of people like it and enjoyed it. So, yeah. for me, it's going to be a special book because of the stuff I was going through and still wrote.

But that doesn't matter, either. Once the book's out there, it's out there. The egg's done. Hopefully, I've learnt in the process how to lay better eggs. I've written another novel in the meantime.

Right now, I'm in the "post-book slump", which is one of the two phases of writing that I hate. While I have ideas, they really struggle to get on the page. Low energy, low drive, my famous discipline is faltering a little. I work, but at the end of the day, I have 650 words, which is almost nothing for a whole weekend.

Doesn't matter, though. All that matters is that there's a new book at the end of it. And all the little crises that happen in a writer's life are just seasoning to keep things interesting.

Spring greetings from my garden

2011-05-15T16:22:00.000+01:00

When we bought Casa Voinov, we inherited a neglected garden. The back is largely taken over by an ancient, totally out of control rose tree/bush. I've done some research on roses and what's good for them (even though my mother was a florist, I don't have the first clue what to do), and realized it's basically too big.

In a first step, I cut back everything that was afflicted with that black m old you tend to get on roses (skinning some fingers in the process). Today I went back into the garden to see how the massive white rose bush/tress has responded to the surgical cuts. I discussed how to address the remaining issues - which means some serious pruning once I have the tools to attack all that old wood - the central stems are arm-thick, so I assume the rose is fifty years old or older. But it responded well to the first pruning - if anything, it's more vigorous, and I honestly think cutting about half of the major stems will result in a much happier, much healthier plant. Right now, the right side is collapsing under its own weight, so there's some serious shaping & pruning action required to get stuff under control.

I also did a round of deadheading (cutting off spent flowers). They are palm-sized floribundas (I've learnt), classical white English roses, like my mother loved them. Me growing roses is really a way of honouring her. She'd have been fussing over the roses a lot, so I kinda remember her through that.

Anyway, while I was cutting the spent flowers, I got some flowers for the house - one for my partner, some for the living room table, and one next to the computer. The fragrance is very delicate. And nothing in the world is as beautiful as a rose. There, I said it. I guess I am really a romance author. :)

Far shot of the area left of the keyboard.

Close-up in the Turkish tea glass.

Even closer, with flash.

Authors are just like lawyers and doctors

2011-05-15T13:35:00.001+01:00

I probably never told the story, but I studied law for two semesters. Well, really only one, because after one semester I realized how soul-destroying law was for me, and in my second semester, with the big decision looming (If not a lawyer, what else do I want to be?), my mother was in the final stages of cancer - not the time to make big decisions like that. I also didn't want to distress her. She thought law would at least make sure I get a job and am "independent".

The decision to study law had the full backing of my family. I thought they were proud of me. But the opposite was true. Once my grandfather said: "Excellent, you can represent us all for free", I knew what the real motivation was. I was about to save my family of four uncles and three aunts, which all have a talent to get into tight spots financially and legally, A LOT OF MONEY. Whoot, Aleks is going to take care of all that. We can have MORE TRIALS, and we can threaten our enemies with the ultimate weapon forever and ever: a lawyer in the family.

(Thankfully, I left before that nightmare could happen - at which several of my kin and blood relations told me "I don't have any respect for you anymore, because you're a quitter!" - but I think they were mostly bothered by not being given all my education and resources to use as they pleased, obviously for nothing, because, hey, "we're family".)

Now, of course that is something lawyers face every day. Doctors, BTW, are the same. At any party, once people come out as doctors (I've even witnessed it with dentists), people will tell them about the consistency of their poo, the rash on their dicks, and ask them for a consultation on hair loss. Obviously for free. Here's a doctor at the same party, he sure likes to work for free. It's probably even worse for family.

Authors face the same issues. I can't count how often random people felt I "should send them a book" - because we've talked in the past, or because we crossed paths somewhere and I came out as a writer. "Oh, you can give me one of your books." Often said in a tone as if they were being generous. I'm allowed to give them a paperbook.

I can. But I won't.

Firstly, my publisher contracts (contract = legal document) very often state how many ebooks I'm allowed to give away. It might be 5 or 20, but not a hundred. And I easily know a hundred people. If my book's out in print, I get usually around FIVE print copies. Of those, I keep one for myself, one is for my partner. The other three are for the beta readers/proofreaders/cover artist.

The ebook copies I'm allowed to give away go into quizzes, giveaways on blogs. I also tend to give at least five copies away to the people who had a serious hand in the writing and editing. It's the betas, the crit partners, the people that helped me solve problems with the book. In short, these people *worked* for it in some way.

I also give away a lot of books to people who really can't afford them but are clearly "fans" (hate the word). Basically, if you're on food stamps and freaking out over where to get the next rent from, the gift of a book is a small thing for me and makes a huge difference to those friends.

Interestingly, these people - who really can't afford my books, because it's the difference between eating and not eating that day - NEVER ask for free books. Ever. They are way too humble, and often so grateful I get all tongue-tied. Here are people that really deserve those freebies. They never come with any sense of entitlement like "I tweeted you, now send me a free book".

(And I know once I save it, several of them will email me, thinking I think they think they are entitled - no, guys, if you think this is about you, IT's NOT...)

Funny. But then, my family could afford a lawyer, too, but still wanted to push me into a career that would have destroyed me just to save some cash. I'm just amazed how many random strangers believe I (or other authors) like working for free. Well, it beats getting pirated, I guess.

It's a book!

2011-05-09T22:50:00.000+01:00

Today was the official release of "Scorpion". Have a look at that cover:

It's awesome and I'm very pleased. (And at the moment, Dreamspinner sells everything at 20% off, too.

This is the link to the ebook.

And this is the link to the paperback.

The website has the whole first chapter online. You can also read it on my website here.

And over at Amara's Blog, we have "Scorpion Week" with giveaways and interviews and fun stuff.

(If you read this post via Goodreads, the links in this post might not come through, so just click on the link to the blog and get the rest of the entry, too.)

So, if you want to win stuff head over to Amara, and we're talking about the book in my Goodreads group.

Meanwhile, I'll start work on the next one. :)

After birthday, recounting

2011-05-06T23:10:00.000+01:00

Thanks, guys, for the literally *hundreds* of personal messages, Twitter greetings and Facebook posts for my birthday. I can't hope to catch up, but you've made my birthday pretty damn awesome - thank you for that!

We went into London and had lunch at the very excellent Veeraswamy, which is fast becoming one of my favourite "expensive" restaurants. It's one of those places where I at times like to blow a royalty payment (or three). Yeah, that's about all the "conspicuous consumption" I indulge in.

The buzz from my birthday, invariably, gives way to introspection, as 5 May is my mother's birthday, and the day I prefer to remember her at. November is already depressing as hell - I don't need to remember her death (of course I do, usually during the last two weeks).

Anyway. In the night of 4-5 May, Storm Moon Press sent me the acceptance for "Counterpunch", my boxing novel. I have very high hopes for this small gem of a start-up publisher. People there bent over backwards to accommodate my every whim, including cover, marketing, editing, and one of the touchiest subjects: British versus American English.

Before I submitted the novel to them, I approached a number of other editors informally and asked "Will you make me rewrite my London-based novel full of British characters to American English?" (The concern comes from the fact that British characters rewritten to speak American to my brain sound like they are doing "funny accents" - I can't help it).

I received a mix of answers (and thanks, guys, to listening to my concerns, much appreciated), but one press said "hell no". Then Storm Moon Press also showed me their royalties and contract.

To whit: royalties are a multiple of what I've been making of my writing at other places. And after several long exchanges with the people behind the press, I was convinced of their sense and business acumen. No "First Right of Refusal Clause", no nonsense. The contract is more than fair to both sides. Also - "Counterpunch" is perfect at that place, because basically, it's part of a world, and that world, ideally, will be placed at one publisher - those people, if all's going well.

So, I'm saying all this because I'm basically eating my hat here (NOM, NOM). I always cautioned other writers not to sign up with publishers that have been in the business less than 5 years (Dreamspinner is just celebrating its fourth birthday, with lots of good offers, BTW). HOWEVER, I'm personally making an exception in this case, and am genuinely excited about working with SMP. I know that's one of the phrases that people use in press releases, but based on what I know and my gut instinct, the SMP people have something excellent there and it's great to be part of it.

Depending how things are going, there should be more books, but it's too early to tell. And I'm in great company. Rachel Haimowitz has just signed her second book, Crescendo, sequel to Counterpoint, with Storm Moon Press. Another of my friends has submitted her novel there, too.

I'm also coming back up from the crash after Counterpunch, slowly getting back on my feet. I've been writing short pieces of story that didn't make it into the finished novel, and currently write a little, but it's all playing. Story ideas are springing up like mushrooms after the rain, and I struggle to make up my mind what to write next. (Yeah, normal people rest, I just keep working. It's what I do best. That way, my life makes sense and my reality tallies up.)

There are some related stories that need to be written, two of those are in search of a plot, others have no plot but are very poignant. I have some excellent characters there.

Possibly the sanest thing right now is write 2-3 more short stories to cleanse the palate, package the whole thing, then put out a short story anthology. My brain baulks at the idea of yet another novel. Novels are such a commitment, I'm not immediately ready for another whole novel, not right away.

This year, I'll also start on the "Lion of Kent" sequel, and most likely, I won't have to do it alone, as I'd feared (it's a novel).

So, lots of things lined up. The main aim is to get some releases for 2012 lined up. I hope "Iron Cross" will be one of them.

Gearing up for the birthday

2011-05-02T14:43:00.000+01:00

Hope everybody had a great May Day. It's a bank holiday in the UK today and I also have tomorrow and Wednesday off - Wednesday's my birthday, so I kinda liked having plenty of time off work. I can definitely feel the tension leave me. While, of course, I'm turning into a speed-editing freak to catch up with stuff, as usual. One day I'll run before the wave of work rather than behind it.

Anyway, here's an excellent review of "Lion of Kent" at Speak Its Name.

Great way to start a sunny, bright day (with oddly cold winds).

And whatever I'd have to say about Osama bin Laden being executed would be too controversial, so I'm keeping my gob shut on that count. Some people in the Guardian and various reputable newspapers have said some very intelligent things about it. The repercussions of this can really fall both (or at least three) ways. Two of which would make excellent thriller plot material - and one has a somewhat apocalyptic bent.

Oddly, I think the Vatican has an interesting angle on it. Thankfully, as a writer, I don't have to pretend I have the answer, but today marks a departure from the status quo in several ways, and I'm quite curious what's going to happen next, current affairs nut that I am.

My goal for today is to finish a 37k edit, start another one, and read what I have of my historical novel, and slowly find my way back in, too. Possibly even writing a little, or doing some preparatory work that I should have done, oh, nearly two years ago.

Like being left by a lover

2011-04-29T20:18:00.000+01:00

Finishing a book is like being left by a lover. Of course, that's where the metaphor falls flat on its ass. You never enter a relationship with the aim to finish it. Or get paid for handing your lover over afterwards.

If anything, writing a book is like traveling. Discovery. Unexpected chaos. And then leaving, feeling like a part of you has been left behind (and not just the toe nails and hair and skin flakes).

Sometimes, finishing a book feels like that old superstition. That you "lose" part of your soul when you get photographed. Writing is forming emotional energy. You have to get the stuff from somewhere. You have to be passionate enough about it to keep it going for anything between six weeks to two years. Then release it. The relief that comes with the release - is also a loss. Your hands are empty. You lose purpose. You don't come home thinking "I Need To Get This Scene Written!" - you come home to laundry and dirty dishes and a carpet that needs hovering. You begin to notice dust specks. Begin to actually see that the garden is overgrown.

You update your blog twice in one day.

I know I'm a workaholic. That trait serves me really well, actually. I do get a lot of shit done, especially in writing. I just wrote a - pretty good - novel in less than three months. Whoot! I must be doing something right.

Finishing the novel - the act of racing towards the ending, knowing it's maybe just 5-10 pages now, is glorious. By that point you know whether it's any good. The quick edit after that is already anti-climactic. You have no idea if it's any good, but you begin to see all the stuff that has piled up in the meantime.

Not writing is misery. At least I know this time there are more novels (it's far worse if there are no others lined up - I've gone through the "oh noes, I'll never write anything like this every again! WOES IS MEHHH!" phase so often that it's become something of a running joke).

I know I should be unpacking my bags and sleep and sort through the photos and memories, but I really cannot wait to be travelling again.

Spit'n polish (or: Counterpunch is done)

2011-04-29T10:49:00.001+01:00

I need to keep better track of when I start books. But I'm reasonably sure that I started "Counterpunch" in about February. That's a 55k novel in three months. Writing four novels per year can be done, but I'm personally aiming more for 2-3 plus some small fry, because I don't want to burn out in a year or two.

In the last three days, I've applied a spit'n polish edit to the manuscript, which is the quick read-through and typo-fix and continuity check that I do on my own before things go out to betas. In this case, as it's a story set (mostly) in London, this went out to two Brits. Once I have their opinions/edits, the manuscript goes to a friend who'll rip it all to shreds. Once that's done and fixed, the manuscript gets submitted to the small press that has offered me the best deal for it in terms of royalties, cover, and a paper edition. Also, the place is owned by very switched-on, enthusiastic people. So, if Storm Moon Press wants it, they can have it.

I'm now in the post-book slump. It's a weirdly calm place (no voices in my head), but also very low energy. I struggle to do more than make coffee or get dressed. Getting catapulted from one "reality" into the other is jarring, and part of me desperately wants to escape back into a different book world. But at the same time, I know that's not good. I need to regather, regroup, and recover. Sleep, rest, read, research. While I'm in the throes of writing, all that feels like wasted time to me, but I really need some rest.

So, I figure I'll finish the three books on boxing that I acquired, to be ready for the rewriting. And after that, I'm off to WWII.

Ironically, "Thor", as weak as it was (especially all the stuff in Asgard), has triggered an idea for a book. Since that idea isn't really mine, I need to get in touch with a friend of mine who has an unsold manuscript. I'm figuring I might be able to convince him to hand the idea over to me. It's suitably "high concept" and generally awesome, but he won't be able to sell it in Germany.

And once I'm done with that time period, I'm returning to the crusades and William Raven. (And that other templar I haven't talked about yet.)

Meanwhile, the taxpayer-sponsored spectacle of two nice young people getting married unfolds. And here I thought the Windsors had enough spare cash to pay for all that themselves. Silly me. I'm assured the influx of a few million tourists makes it all worthwhile, and they may just have saved the London-based camping industry.

Me, I'm haunted by the memories of Diana. The nicest, sanest people have to get damaged under all that public pressure. And Kate, while apparently incredibly nice and sweet, is far removed from a "modern queen-in-waiting", as she's been called. We're looking at a woman who has no other ambitions in her life but her prince and to look good on camera. I've seen that model of womanhood fail so often in both my family and those of my friends that I cringe inwardly when I see women submit like that.

And let's not forget that only her male kids can become kings, whereas even a first-born daughter has no rights to the throne. The whole spectacle is so anachronistic. At least we're having a day off... but I rather suspect that the London infrastructure wouldn't be able to cope with people trying to get to work while the inner city is full of watchers.

In defense of pseudonyms and a layer of protection

2011-04-27T17:27:00.003+01:00

There are possibly a handful of people out there (in the area of 3-5) that both know my so-called "real" name, where I work, and where I live. Everybody else knows these things to varying degrees. My publishers know all this, of course, since it's legally pertinent.

I've recently encountered an attitude where people say they "respect" somebody more if the name they write under is their "real name". Using a pseudonym, is, according to these people, equivalent to cowardice.

There are several writers out there that put their faces on their websites. All power to them, if they are comfortable with it (I imagine some might not be but feel it's the "done thing"). All power also to writers who don't look anything like weavers of dark and majestic sexy novels, and still put their faces out there.

Within the last two weeks, I've acquired a second stalker (a first stalker reared her ugly head about three years ago and I'm pretty sure she's still out there somewhere, and quite possibly reading this), and another stalker/obsessive "fan" (and you guys know how much I hate the term "fan"). And I've also encountered some people that faced negative consequences because they allowed the wall between their "public" and "private" lives to be breached. Or breached it themselves, feeling they don't "need" the protection, or frankly trusting the wrong people.

There's even been a case of a publisher breaching that wall, as some person at a publisher outed the writer's "real persona" in public.

This here is another case of a romance author facing - potential very very serious - damage due to the stuff that she writes/has written.

We are *not* operating in a safe space.

Hence I am *not* going to conventions, don't give out my photo, don't do anything that attaches my face to my books (sorry, big hot shot agent/publisher, that means NO booktours and no signing), don't even give live interviews via radio/phone or anything else. If I meet readers, I meet them on my terms and after several years of personal correspondence, or if I know I can trust them. And even then I got burned.

I hope my colleague Judy Mays makes it out intact. I'm definitely keeping my fingers crossed for her.

The greatest thing ever

2011-04-26T13:29:00.001+01:00

Yesterday, late, at night (okay, it was really morning, technically speaking), I finished a book. It's my boxer book, tentatively called "Counterpunch" and it stands as a - very - rough draft at 54k.

And it's a thing of beauty. Of course authors are supposed to say that. Partly because we'd never admit to ourselves (or anybody, for that matter) that some books are better than others or that we have doubts if something works. In a way, admiting to doubts makes stuff real. Denying them is a bit like "if I don't see it, nobody will!" and then reviewers don't pick up on it and we go "whew, s/he missed it", and relax, until a better reviewer or a less polite one points out exactly that and why the king is naked.

But regardless of "what's done" and "not done" as a writer, I think "Counterpunch" is the best thing I've ever done, hands down. In part it's because I'm now a better writer than I was even last year. In part also because "Counterpunch" came out in one piece and it's almost perfect. The structure works, the pacing works, the individual scenes work, and the characters work. It's not what I expected it to be - it's what I hoped it would be.

I pushed Brook and his story away a few times and had a rather unpleasant two weeks where I didn't do anything on the text. I hemmed and hawed and freaked out over things like British stories at American publishers (I struggle hard to rewrite something into "American" that's set in Britain and hence written in British English), then I freaked out over royalty rates and release schedules, which led me to partner up with a new publisher who basically makes a lot of effort to please me. Royalties, cover, editing, and "red carpet treatment" inclusive. Contract terms look very favourable to this writer, and I've signed a fair few contracts by now.

The idea is to try several models, several publishers and then narrow things down to the places I really love (and pay me good royalties). More once I've actually submitted the story and have signed the contract.

Back to the book. Currently I'm mentally and emotionally completely drained (and should have taken the three days between the long weekends off, really, to recover from my 16k-in-four-days writing binge), but I'll look into making the usual changes and begin editing.

That means typos and "line editing" stuff, then a Brit check (because some of my phrasing is pretty American, and that's just wrong for this book) - I already have two volunteers lined up for that), and then a final line edit and style check from a seriously hardcore beta.

Then submission, wait, contract check, signing on the dotted line. I'm looking at a November release, hopefully. But in the meantime I'll bask in what I think is a job well done - and I'll hope you agree with me once you've read it.

Fascinating interview on celebrity, fame, and the media

2011-04-23T20:59:00.000+01:00

i'm not a fan of Russell Brand, and it took him a while to get me even in this interview. But this is utterly fascinating.

Click on the Boing Boing video here. And do take the 14-15 minutes to really listen to him. Utterly fascinating, and very true.

I think, in a small sense, all this applies to writers, too. Of course, we are far more in charge of our public persona. Because basically we wouldn't help the Daily ~~Hate~~ Mail to sell copies. However, some of that instrumentalizing can be seen on some of the big blogs. There are people "making" and "breaking" authors' reputation.

The second main point of Brand gels very much with what I've seen, time and again, in author circles. The moment when authors believe their own press, they lose themselves. They turn into caricatures of themselves and begin to chase fame for fame's sake. Wise words, and a great warning for everybody stepping out into the light of public perception.

I blogged

2011-04-22T21:48:00.000+01:00

Happy Easter! I've restarted work on my boxer novel and get warmed up to resume work on my historical WWII novel.

And I also blogged about fear over at Slash and Burn here.

Live in the Amazon.de Kindle store

2011-04-21T21:12:00.000+01:00

Yay, great news, Germany has its own Kindle store now, and my books went live today here.

If any of you Germany-based guys know my books and liked them, reviews would help make it look less bleak. :) Thanks!

The same obviously goes for the UK Kindle store - still no reviews there.

Thanks guys, and happy Easter!

The three-day short story

2011-04-21T09:04:00.002+01:00

Whenever I'm quiet, it means I'm writing. This week, I've been writing. I've been writing despite being on the ohmygods early shift, which sometimes happens when I get trained to do something. It means getting up at 4:30 and getting picked up at 5:00 by a bank-paid driver, and then starting work at 6. This kind of shift involves large amounts of strong coffee and a complete collapse of all nervous functions at around 13:00, with nothing remaining but the desire to go to sleep and take a week off.

(They do pay me well for it, though, and there's something fascinating and beautiful and dejected about London at dawn.)

So, yeah, on Monday, while I was feeling sorry for myself and my biorhythm, an Idea Happened. Before that, I'd been pointed at Storm Moon Press' gun kink submissions call. I While I've used weapons a fair amount in my previous stories, this was interesting because immediately I tought that this time, the weapon really needs to take center stage. Which was an interesting challenge.

The Muse agreed.

I ended up writing a 9k story in three days. Now, I'm happy with my wordcount if I make 1,000 words/day. 500/day is better than nothing. 1,500/day is what I call a "good day". 2,000 is noteworthy good. 3,000 is more like a weekend output, realistically speaking. Keeping that level up for three days while sleep-lagged is nothing short of miraculous. If Storm Moon Press likes it, it should come out in January 2012, so that's my first potential release for next year.

Downside of writing that hard? I didn't write at all yesterday and my brain is in that weird hazy state where it tries to work out what project to work on now. Or whether it can be bothered at all.

What I did do was help a friend who needed to cut 18k from her manuscript -by cutting the final 2k and wrapping things up on that side. Still a sense of accomplishment, and one item off the big pile of Things to be Done.

But boy, I'm ready for the four-day Easter weekend before me.

"Scorpion" just around the corner

2011-04-15T16:29:00.000+01:00

It's real and becomes more and more real now. I have a cover, so the time of denial is over. "Scorpion" is coming out. (Yeah, books are real while being written and then when they are coming on - in between they fall in a state of "not quite real", when I tend to forget all about them.)

Anyway, the amazingly talented Reese Dante has created no less than 8 covers, three of which were totally different drafts and the others were variations on those.

I'm very happy with what she's come up with (go, have a look).

It's spot-on. My cover spec (always an exercise in helpless frustration about trying to translate an emotion into an image... I'm not a very descriptive writer) told Reese that Kendras was black and big and has blue eyes (that's what Jaishani look like in that world). And that he looks like a "mean motherfucker". Yup, exactly the words I used.

So, we can all agree that Kendras on the cover looks like a mean motherfucker. Or, as one reader put it: "Wouldn't want to meet him in a dark alley, but happy to meet him in a hotel room."

Hah. EXACTLY.

In my "real life", I've come out to my team in the bank. They were great about it (*waves in case they are reading*). Even offered feedback on the eight version of the "Scorpion" cover. I think that calls for a mini office celebration on release day. :)

Also, my eyes are fine. After LASIK, I have to admit that I didn't like reading and pretty much avoided it where I could. After editing 8 hrs/day in the day job, my eyes felt tired, worn out, and I had lots of blurriness at the short distance which made reading actually hard work - like consciously focusing on words. So I stayed away from reading. Thought and watched and observed during my commute rather than read. (Hence no book reviews and a huge pile of work I need to get through becouse I promised - sorry guys, I literally didn't see this situation coming).

I noticed these issues less and less, though, so I'll go back to reading. It's three weeks after LASIK, and my eyes are doing really well. Sometimes a bit of a dry/blurry feeling early in the mornings, but far less issues with near-vision blurriness. Thanks for bearing with me while I was healing.

Now back to work.

I blogged at Slash and Burn

2011-04-08T14:03:00.002+01:00

I blogged over at Slash and Burn about my research into boxing.

Here's the entry.

Merchandise, merchandise

2011-04-02T19:00:00.001+01:00

I've always wanted to open a Cafe Press store, but I just didn't have any excuse to do so. Well, now I do.

Ladies and gents, I present to you The Voinov Online Shop.

Despite the hefty price tags, I make onmly a "profit" of $0.50-1 per item, which I'll reinvest into more merchandise and the cost of running the store. I don't expect any riches anyway, but if anybody is desperate for merchandise, there's the place to go. I think I'll grab a couple T-shirts and coffee mugs, just because. :)

LASIK - one week later

2011-04-01T18:56:00.000+01:00

I've had my one-week check-up with the opticians and my eyes are healing "well". The flap (the bit they cut open) has "sealed itself well", I can now rub/touch my eyes and if I get water in the eye (from, you know, showering), it won't be the end of the world.

This means that the most vulnerable time is over. I can relax a bit now (after hearing horror stories of scarred corneas). And I don't have to use any eye drops any more - which leaves me with the stuff against dry eyes, which I'll likely need a little bit longer.

Doc said my vision would continue to become clearer. Long-distance, I'm way better than 20/20 (two lines more). Short-distance, I have moments when my vision is really sharp and crisp, but it's temporary at the moment. However, if that level of quality becomes permanent, I'll be shocked in a very very good way.

May do light sports, no full contact stuff for another three weeks. That's OK. I can hold off on the boxing for another three weeks. :)

The "Great Soul" might have been bisexual - sparks outrage in India

2011-04-01T15:13:00.001+01:00

The NY Times has an interesting article on Mahatma Gandhi, arguably one of the key figures of modern history. Specifically, it's about a biography about to be published - and that's already being banned in some parts of India.

According to the biographer, Gandhi was bisexual.

I need to get my hands on the book - not just because I'm more than happy to welcome Gandhi into our family (of sorts), but I'd be curious to simply learn more, and we seem to live in an age where biographies have stopped censoring anything that isn't cisgendered and straight, or marginalise this part of our lives.

One gay soldier they can't kick out under DADT

2011-03-31T21:24:00.000+01:00

This is a very moving testimonial of the parents of a gay soldier who died in Kandahar, Afghanistan. The sooner the military catches up with the rest of society, the better.

I've been reading with shock and horror about the "Kill Team" that randomly killed Afghan civilians. I mean, I *knew* shit like that was going on (yeah, I have my sources) - I just didn't know it was so systemic. That "Kill Team" made a lot of baby Talibs, congratulations.

Those two stories are almost impossible to bear right next to each other, but that, for me, is war. We see both the very best in people and the absolute worst. And the latter is *not* the gay soldier.

Call me Eagle Eyes

2011-03-28T20:12:00.000+01:00

Friday I had LASIK - Wavefront-guided, because they promised me that my view might end up better than "good", so I figured what's good enough for snipers and astronauts is sure good enough for me.

One day after the operation (and the day *of* to operation was essentially a write-off), my vision was better than 20/20. One eye lags a bit, but the other more than compensates. I'm on a "three different eyedrops, four times a day" regime, and one of those drops need to be kept in the fridge (putting fridge-cold stuff in your eye is... special). But so far I'm following all the orders.

Things are still healing, and I have the "halo" effect, which means that sources of light blur in the darkness - but I'm not nightblind (another possible outcome post-operation), and I don't have "ghosts". However, my short-range vision (the area from here to the computer screen) is a bit hazy. Apparently that'll fix itself once the brain has recovered from the shock of no longer dealing with short-sighted eyes. Also, my ability to focus fluctuates a bit. Sometimes, things are clear, then they are hazy again. But the far distance is great, so I'm perfectly entertained looking out of the window, noticing all the little details.

It'll take a few weeks or even months for the eyes to completely heal, but I'm in no rush. I can write, I can work, my eyes just heal at their own time. So far, money very, very well spent.

On the writing front, I'm making good progress on the boxer story, which is more than 30k now and might just turn out to be 40-50k. Writers not updating their blogs means they are writing more stories.

Congratulations to Stevie Carroll

2011-03-22T13:32:00.000Z

I just got this email:

"I found out today that the winner of this year's James Tiptree, Jr. Literary Award has been announced over at http://tiptree.org/, as well as those books that made it to the Honor List and the Long List.

And look what's on the long list: Stevie Carroll, “The Monitors” (Echoes of Possibilities, edited by Aleksandr Voinov, Noble Romance Publishing 2010). Much thanks to Jill and to Aleks for having faith in my story. I'm still writing: I just tend towards longer stories in general and they take a while when you're as much of a perfectionist as I am.

I am seriously chuffed that my little piece of SF erotica made it so far in such a big award, against stories from the big publishers.

My story, 'The Monitors', in Echoes of Possibilities isn't exactly your standard m/f erotic romance. Here's the blurb so you can see why:

Echoes of Possibilities: Four unconventional m/f erotic romances set in very different futures. Including a trans character, a cyborg, an alien, a female ex-president of the United States and their equally remarkable lovers."

Congratulations, Stevie. I loved the story and hope it gets all the sales it deserves.

Finding sea shells and running dogs

2011-03-22T13:25:00.002Z

I'm in the happy place. The place they call "Flow". It's a mystical place where words just appear on the screen, and you write 3,100 words a day (like I did yesterday). My brain's vision has narrowed to the world of Nathaniel and Brook, and no excuses.

I don't see anything else, I don't really care about anything else (what, they are talking openly about assassinating Quaddafi - who cares?). I'm swept up in the irresistible force that is a New Book in Full Swing. This - when the book just flows through you from somewhere and goes somewhere, leaving traces of black on white as it passes, it the Best Thing Ever. It's the closest to a mystical experience I ever get. Minus a few creepy moments...but that might be for a different blog post.

Authors love sharing. I do. I love talking about the new book, I love sending people my various WIPs. There are some people that think that I do so to show off. ("Look how awesome I am, I've written MORE WORDS THAN YOU YESTERDAY!") Others don't know how to respond. If I send them the current WIP - what do I want from them? Feedback? Praise?

The thing is, none of these are true. I share with other writers because they are my friends (and it's not a competition - anybody entering a competition with me is like a kid racing a dog to "win". The dog just runs for the fun of it, which is exactly why I write. I write to write, not to compete).

I share with my friends and some readers because I'm all excited myself. I'm walking along this beach and there's this beautiful seashell. It's unique, and it's all mine, and I'm full of a sense of wonder and I'm like "wow, look what I found". It's not about my ego, it is, really, about that sea shell. I used to need the praise and ego-stroking, but I'm big now, and I get my self worth from myself. I've gotten most of my ego out of the way, really. I still read my reviews, maybe twice a month, and a good review is great, but none of that has any bearings on looking for and finding the sea shells.

No feedback, no one-star review, no snide remark can get to me when I hit the Flow (or rather, it hits me). The story demands it's written. Nobody can pay me to write, nobody can pay me not to write. No amount of praise or jiggling will get me to write anything long if I'm not feeling it.

So, yeah, the boxer story has reached that critical momentum now at 26k where nothing I could do would stop it. Where I'm racing time because I'll have the LASIK procedure on Friday and fully expect to be blind all weekend and in pain, and part of me wants to push the story out before I lose my sight, if even for a few hours. Getting interrupted in my Flow is really tough. But there's no way I can write the remaining 20k in three days.

As to LASIK itself, I'll just face in head-on. I'm nervous about it, but by comparison, I assume going to the dentist for something major is by far worse. And then it's sorted for the rest of my life.

Meanwhile, I'm "eating miles", as the adapted German expression goes. Just getting out as many words as I can, while I can. Work at work is slow again today, so I may at least manage another thousand words or so.

No, I'm not serving the wank & Scorpion news

2011-03-14T08:39:00.000Z

There was a rather hilarious show of sock puppetry/fans/authors behaving badly (you choose) over at Speak its Name over the weekend.

With fans like these, who needs an enemy?

But that's not why I'm here. I have the blurb for Scorpion. This was re-written about four times and the collaborative effort of seven people.

-------------------------------------------------
You learn your wisest lessons from your enemies. Assuming, of course, you survive the encounter.

Kendras is a casualty of war: injured, penniless, and quite possibly the last surviving member of the only family he's ever known—the elite fighting force known as the Scorpions. When a
steel-eyed stranger offers him medicine and shelter in exchange for submission and a secret task, Kendras has no choice but to accept. He is a Scorpion; he’ll do whatever it takes to survive.

But his true goal is to rebuild the Scorpions. Neither Steel’s possessive nature nor Kendras’s shattered foot can keep him from finding the last of his brothers... or the mysterious leader of the Scorpions, a man who held Kendras’s heart long before Steel tried to take it for himself. The goal is simple, the situation anything but. To rescue his leader and escape from Steel for good, Kendras must fight through a morass of politics and intrigue, where enemies are
allies and even allies have hidden agendas.
----------------------------------------------------

Cover, map and other stuff forthcoming once I have it.

In other news, I managed to get 800 words out yesterday. I have a plot for the boxer story and I have another idea for another historical, but I'll write that later - possibly next year.

I also have a bunch of stuff to edit for friends and some for money, and hope to make some serious progress on those, too. All that editing and rewriting has thrown my schedule out of whack a bit, but I'll catch up with the rest of my life, too.

And I bought presents for my partner (birthday on Friday). I hope he likes the Kinect. Me, I just love tech wizardry like that. And I noticed that Gears of War 3 is due 20 September. I can't WAIT.

For the first time in months, I'm caught up

2011-03-12T22:37:00.000Z

Subjectively speaking, this is the first time since the beginning of the year that I have time on my hands. There's no urgent "needs doing yesterday" stuff on my desk. Nada. I don't have any of my own novels to edit for publication. (Doesn't mean I couldn't grab one from the drawer and rework it for submission - but no, I'm not going there.)

So, everything's off and gone. I finished the final line edits of "Scorpion" last week. After that, it was the "sanity check" for "Father of all Things", and I still found stuff. We also had to fill in cover spec sheets for both books (submitting artwork and ideas). And the last couple days, I've agonized over the blurb for "Scorpion". The final version of the line edits of "Father of all Things", went out this morning. The "Scorpion" blurb went out today, one day late.

I have loads of email I need to respond to. Royalty statements to organize (tax year ends in April). I have several ideas for new novels/stories. I bought a pile of books for research. I have three advanced works in progress, two of which need research.

I've fallen behind on blogging. Fallen off the face of the earth while wrestling with a pile of work. I have a contract to sign. A brain to recover. A desk to clean. More than six hundred THOUSAND words to edit for "Special Forces".

Part of me wants to go to bed.

On the way to London today (I managed to meet a friend in Foyles and not acquire a *single* book), I read what I have for the boxer story and "Scorpion 2". And there's some very good writing going on there. So, I'm hoping to do some work on either Scorpion part 2 or the boxer. Iron Cross still needs more research.

That's really the plan for the rest of the year - finish those three. It might even work out.

Three day weekend

2011-03-04T10:49:00.000Z

I've taken today off to have enough time to tackle the edit of "Scorpion", which is due by Monday. I just sent off the cover specs for the book, which is always a bit of a struggle. All the images in my head don't translate well into actual visual images. Clashes are inevitable.

In this case, I had a very good visual model for Kendras, which I sent in. And the title, "Scorpion", really lends itself very well for at least one image. :) I don't know if my artist will roll with it, but a real life block or Emperor scorpion should play a prominent role.

In an y case, the next three days will mean a lot of knuckling down and working in the suggestions of my two betas to improve the book. I think I'll add a few thousands words in total so it's really smooth. I've also noticed some "pet words" and "pet expressions" that somehow sneaked into my style. These need to go.

The "danger" of this is that it'll give me a lot more impetus to write the sequel (and possibly a prequel, too - I don't feel like I'm done with that world, or the Scorpions). The "memory" they are using gives me a good excuse to keep writing about them, for one. (Like I need an excuse).

I'm in research mode for the boxer story. I finally wrote an outline two days ago (at work, a very quiet day). But I cant' read as much as I want to. Edits to do, books to finalize. Editing tends to get in the way of writing. I sometimes wish I could just write a book and hand it over for everything else - final edits, covers, blurbs, marketing. But of course that's an illusion. I already have so much help from my "test readers" and "feedbackers", I'd feel ungrateful if I was asking for anything more than that. (But maybe that would be the only incentive to really land a bestseller or five - the team of people that takes care of the nitty-gritty for me... hmmmmm, will have to consider that).

Other than that, nothing. I'm spending the free time at work editing and outlining creative work, which, as far as my boss is concerned, is editing and all editing is practice. So, yeah, I'm spending the time writing style sheets and learning more about copy-editing. There are some additional qualifications that I might go for, but that has another year or two. Right now, I'm in the perfect place, especially for the writing.

Right. Now off to edit/rewrite 70k words in three days. Should be fun.

The unfocused focus group

2011-02-20T12:25:00.002Z

The focus group yesterday reminded me why I deplore meetings at work. Thankfully, we have a "team chat" at the bank and no real "meetings" - these are just about updating us on how the procedure has changed, since it's very much in flux. I consider meetings a cardinal waste of my time. And they were, in 95% of all the cases. I'm much better solving my own problems or finding a work-around that allows me to function.

Yesterday, I ended up in a group of self-professed "experts", all of which were tremendously self-important. So self-important, in fact, that they spent 95% of the time talking about how great they were and what museums they were trustees of - rather than tackle the exercises we were supposed to tackle as part of the focus group. My complains about the museum - namely that military history was slanted very much towards vaguely nationalist "rah-rah" patriotism (quote: "The British Expedition Force was the best military force in the world." - I DON'T THINK SO) and the way the - embarrassing and ludicrous - mistakes at Gallipoli were brushed over. Oh my, I assume the Turks were so hardcore and somehow, those 200,000 Anzacs just kinda died. Ooops. No idea why or how. Oh, look, SHINY DIORAMA.

So, while the National Army Museum has a very impressive collection, the way it's presented in the WWI and WWII galleries is incredibly weird (this time, I actually stopped and read all the descriptions - which have typos and a TON of passive tense and lots of jargon and cross-references that nobody gets or cares about). And to the fringe nationalist element in the focus group: "Fuck you." And to the guy who said "I bet in Germany, they're saying the German army was the best in the world, too." - Fuck you. We may not have much military history left, but at least we look at it from a critical POV. Asshole. The British Empire is over, ok? And talking about why so much space is devoted to "non-English" soldiers - hey, you were shipping in colonial soldiers from half the world to fight YOUR enemies, the very least you can do is RESPECT their contribution. Look around - contemporary London is a very white, English place, innit? Idjit.

To sum up, I got paid nicely to look at WWI and WWII stuff and to be a smartass about it. I think the Saturday couldn't have been more perfect. I was still too ill and croaky to tell the self-important idjits in my group where to stick their trusteeships and planting patterns, but otherwise, I had a good time. Authors always have a good time, even in the company of obnoxious people. That small smile we wear? Means "you just made my book, buddy".

Then I spent most of the money in the museum bookshop (two histories of WWII) and donated the rest. Six hours well spent, overall. But also another reinforcement why me and "the general public" don't mix well. Especially when I'm ill and barely able to speak.

On towards the weekend

2011-02-18T20:57:00.001Z

I did show up for work on Thursday, which was also the busiest day of the week. Editing back-to-back for eight hours while kept upright (mostly) by Lemsip and a box of cough sweets is an interesting experience. Don't ask me what I edited - I'm sure I could find out, but I don't remember.

I was invited to attend a "focus group" of one of the military museums in London tomorrow. I *assume* they invite carefully-chosen "members of the public" to ask them questions about the collection and presentation. I'm selling myself as an "expert" on military stuff (which I guess is not overselling), and I fit into the categories they were looking for. I'll get paid for my time, too, but I'd feel weird accepting cash from a museum, so I'll likely invest that in a "friends of the National Army Museum" membership and donate the rest. I'd feel too weird having *them* pay *me*. Museums, libraries and all other noble causes can have my services for free.

The cough has broken, and after a pretty rotten day yesterday, I'm actually a lot more lively today and more together. I can also breathe deeply, which is nice. You take too many things for granted. My voice is husky, though, so my partner addressed me all day as "hey, Croaker", which is funny in a Black Company kinda way.

My team in the bank keeps digging about my writing. The geek factor in the team is much higher than I'd have expected. They know a fair amount, but I'm still keeping the pseudonym under wraps. However, it might be the first workplace I come out to while still working for the place. (I tend to tell my chosen few friends in any team after I've left.) It's not like they can fire me for it - it doesn't affect my work performance and I have three levels of superiors who are extremely reasonably, human and simply *nice*. I've rarely worked for a more grown-up, mature and pleasant place. No back-stabbing - if there are any politics, it's us against the research analysts - and only the assholes there (of which there are very few. But those that are unpleasant, all regard us like a utility... somewhere on the same level as the toilets. Mildly distasteful, a bit of a hassle and generally not something you'd respect.) However, 97% of all analysts are nice, and we have ways of dealing with those that aren't.

I shall meditate on the risks and boons associated with it. I'm not ashamed of what I'm doing, and they know about the genre and even that I'm a sex writer (when the situation calls for it, anyway). It might be interesting to see how they react. Maybe I'll come out with "Iron Cross", which may be the most respectable of all my books. I'll see. Or, as I keep telling people when they ask what the attraction of London is, "it's very hard to be a freak in London."

The boxer story is at 12k.

And Rachel is back from her crusade...errr, cruise. Welcome back!

I'm not ill, I just feel rotten

2011-02-16T11:23:00.000Z

I'm in denial about my health at the moment, but when I got up and my vision greyed for a moment I thought, "okay, maybe I do work from home today". I don't want to go into graphic detail, but I seem to have the cold from hell. Blood is involved, too. Headaches. Woozyness. It's not the "clutch blanket, hide in bed" kinda cold, but it's bad enough that the last thing I want is to commute, cattle class, into London.

So I'm working from home, surrounded by Lemsip, dressed in several layers of clothes I can strip really fast when I get too hot, and also food so I remember to eat. (Last thing I want do to with a raw throat is eat - also, my body goes "Uh, no, don't give me food, can't you see I'm BUSY fighting those virii/bacteria, idjit.") At least I'm mostly coherent.

On the writing front, "Father of All Things" went back to Carina on Saturday (12. Feb). It got a completely new ending, and rewrites of about 6-7k of text. Which sounds easy, but trust me, it isn't. That book will be out on 15 August.

Then Dreamspinner has just emailed me to tell me that "Scorpion" in now in the editing stage. I expect the whole manuscript to come back to me in the next 4-6 weeks. Working on that will kick-start "Lying with Scorpions", the sequel.

My boxer story (the fist fighter, not the garment or the dog) hit 10k yesterday. It might grow to anything between 30-60k, but I expect it to be in the mid-range of that, so around 40-45k. I'd love for it to turn into a novel, of course, because I love the main character, as random and bipolar as he is. Working title of that is "Untouchable", but I may yet change that.

Then I got a very insightful, well-written review from Book Utopia for "Lion of Kent". While I respectfully disagree about the relative quality of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" and "Lion of Kent" (DADT is four years old and I'd be shocked if I hadn't developed as a writer in the meantime, plus, Kate Cotoner is hugely talented and really made the novella shine), there's a lot of food for thought in the review.

"This historical does what not very many in this genre really do for me – made me forget I was reading a historical. It’s not because of the lack of detail to create the setting. It’s the opposite. The story is just so well-realized that it never feels intrusive, never feels like I’m being reminded page after page that this happened a long time ago. It rings of authenticity, which is a credit both to the rather seamless prose and the meticulous structure of its presentation. There aren’t awkward information dumps, or pages of facts that have nothing to do with moving the story forward. I sank into this story as if I was a squire within Sir Robert’s household already, a natural extension of the world the authors created."

Read the rest here.

I'm apprehensive about writing the sequel to "Lion of Kent". It's not just the amount of research or the fact that, most likely, I'll be writing it alone, it's above all the extremely high expectations I have for that book. I'd hate for it to be any worse than "Lion of Kent".

Research for "Iron Cross" continues, but I'm slow on the word count. While I consider 1,000 words written on any story a good day's work, for "Iron Cross", 100 words is good work. I keep wondering if there's something wrong with my outline or plot that it moves so slowly, or if I'm lazy or procrastinating, but I don't think it's that. I may still hit my deadline with that - May.

Slow week

2011-02-12T11:49:00.000Z

It's been a very slow week at work, which enabled me to get a lot of research done and a fair amount of reviewing. My bosses (at least the first two - no idea what the ueber-boss thinks) let me do whatever I want in the quiet times between editing assignments. I've been reading, editing, answering emails, surfing, and doing research. So, very productive time, really, in terms of writing and research. I'm catching up with my email and I'm getting better about my reviewing assignments.

Getting out of journalism was the best thing I've ever done. Apart from getting out of Germany, of course.

I just updated my website with some info on FOAT, which Rhianon and me are still pushing over the finishing line. The things gets a complete new ending, and that's been keeping my attention lately.

I've said before that this year is going to be slow. I'm already antsy about new releases. The last one was in November. That's four months! Feels like a lifetime now. But people have been wanting "more novels" - and novels simply take more time. I may throw in a few shorts just to keep my hand in, but largely, I'm concentrating on finishing my novels. Okay, there might be a novella in there, too.

Reviews, a new computer and progress

2011-02-06T16:32:00.000Z

Recently, I reviewed "The Glass Minstrel" by Hayden Thorne and the full review is online here at Speak Its Name.

Also, I (and Barbara Sheridan) was reviewed over at Elisa Rolle's blog - she reviewed "Risky Maneuvers", which tends to be more hated than loved.

In computer terms, I went out yesterday and bought a new computer. The last one was named "Nero", this one's called "Muse". It's a dual-core, 3GB RAM, 500 GB harddrive + nice shiny graphics card desk top. I needed to get a Logitech trackball mouse, because my previous mouse didn't have the right plug attached, and I acquired a new "dongle" to log into our house LAN. All set up and ready in a few hours. Using it feels like using a real computer. I'm also proud because I managed to NOT buy the triple-core ACER. That would have been excessive for what I'm doing with my machine.

I've pulled all my writing files from my online update service Carbonite, and the files I was working on from Dropbox. Installing the rest of my files from Carbonite took the night, but it's all set up now. I'll have to reorganize everything into folders and stuff, but everything else is done - and looks and feels amazing. Powers up and down really fast, and NOT running iTunes, which has been choking my computer with millions of enormous updating files, feels like my computer lost 30kgs of weight.

Talking about weight, I shed 7lbs in the last 9 days, but I still have one supermodel's worth of weight to go (we're talking heroin-look era supermodel). This so far only means the new food regimen works for me. Exercise is just fast walking, dumbbell exercises and squats/push-ups at the moment, but I'll be soon back in the gym, too.

And that's really it. I'll have to do some work on FOAT today and for the rest of the week or three or four (there are some quite serious rewrites necessary). But so far, the weekend's been a success.

Working on other things

2011-02-03T21:59:00.002Z

I'm still writing and researching - it's slow, but moving ahead (and not terribly exciting). Had my first encounter with an analyst parading as human, but the situation has been dealt with. I'm amazed how somebody who cannot write an English sentence can earn so much money - but anyway, it's done.

I've been reading about boxers (for a novella) and radio/newspapers in the Third Reich. Again, lots of excellent detail for "Iron Cross". More importantly, though, I've been addressing another issue in my life. Desk-bound as I am for most of my waking hours, and a stress-eater by nature, there's no longer any excuse for me to stay lazy and gain even more weight. So I'm diverting some of my energy and time toward trying to stay around for a little longer and stay healthy for as long as I can, which includes the shedding of a not insubstantial amount of weight. (I'm telling you this like I'm telling everybody - mostly so people can hold me accountable.) I'll let you know how it goes, but I'm eating a lot of fruit and vegetables these days, and so far I'm feeling good. I should have shed the weight by mid-September, if everything goes according to spreadsheet.

More shocking is that my remaining colleagues at the magazine have been made redundant. That's how the old company rewards loyalty... and I'm relieved that while leaving there was hard, I *did*, in the end, leave, despite promises I'd make the same kind of money in journalism "in a few years". Well, yeah, but probably while tearing myself apart, under constant scrutiny from the asshole publisher who, I know now, has only been brought in as management's hatchetman.

Why anybody on the planet does journalism under such conditions I don't understand. I'm pretty sure it's the hardest job out there in terms of skillset and hours-to-pay. No wonder most journos I know are/were alcoholics, four times divorced, accomplished cynics or worked themselves half to death for a pittance (or a combination of any of those). I respect the profession (if done right) enormously, but it would take a dozen wild horses to drag me back.

At work today, I completed some financial regulation training we're all getting (after money laundering comes insider trading). Slow day at work, though, so I ended up reading and drafting some stuff for the writing, to be better prepared for the weekend, when I'll actually have time to put some productive hours in. Which will go towards re-writing some scenes for "Father of all Things".

Most importantly, it's time for a new computer. My aging dinosaur is taking forever to start up and power down, and I think I can get on boat with Windows 7 after ten years of misguided and buggy development from Microsoft. Then I'll get the new Scrivener for Windows and work on my historical novel.

Egypt

2011-01-29T23:38:00.001Z

I followed the Iranian uprisings with hope and trepidation. Now, I've been remiss in my news watching. Getting out of journalism meant no m,ore constant monitoring of a million news sources. I went on a diet, lived in my little bubble, de-stressed from the world.

But what's going on in Egypt is incredibly beautiful. It's not a country I understand (I can tell you more about the pharaohs than Mubarak), not one I have ties to, but if I were the praying type, I'd be praying for the Egyptians, who are out on the street, fighting for their rights right now, protecting their nation, their neighborhoods, their museums. I'm not sure I've seen anything as beautiful as the human chain around the National Museum for years.

And this? "We will have our rights, one way or the other - and we will not be silenced!"

More as it develops here on Al-Jazeera.

I do hope the western world does what it can to help free the Egyptians from their military dictatorship. The moral right is very very clearly with the people.

Sleeping in the fire

2011-01-29T12:34:00.000Z

I've had a boxer rampage through my head during the last few days (but I didn't actually write much more than 1,300 words recently). He's inspired by Rachel Haimowitz's "Belonging" world (to recap: it's today's world, added with pretty brutal slavery). I'm just giving the whole thing a bit of a spin, see what happens. It's not yet anything I could talk about in any kind of length or detail. The muse is currently busy fitting the ideas into one plot arch, so I go from "three cool scenes" to "story". It's a pretty critical phase, during which the story continues to shapeshift.

I'm still reorganizing my life to fit with the new job. Since I'm mostly on the late shift these days, I'm home at around 20:00 (when I leave the house at around 9:15), I'm attempting to get more stuff done during the day and in the morning and have food and stuff set up for when I get home. Over the next few days, I'll have to make some changes to make my life easier, but overall, I've rarely, if ever, been so relaxed in terms of work. Even yesterday, while I was in charge of a Big Important Report and had Big Important Analyst constantly at my desk to make last minute changes, things were going well. If that's the worst the new job can throw at me, I'm not worried. Plus, I got my payslip a couple days ago, and that's a shiny number there. I think I'll use the windfall to get my eyes lasered in due time.

I'm also listening to a lot of WASP (hence the title of today's post) - it works well with the boxer idea I'm carrying around in my head.

Other than that, not much else. Life's settling into the new routine, I keep pushing my various projects. "Father of all Things" is moving forward, with edits now with Carina Press. Since the Royal Mail lost the contracts, I just posted them again.

Expecting the edits of "Scorpion" pretty soon, and we're waiting for acceptance of "Break & Enter", the CP story that went out about 2 weeks ago. In the meantime, I'll just keep pushing stuff forward.

Yet more good news

2011-01-25T14:27:00.000Z

My partner just got the offer from an investment bank, which means a 30% salary increase. He's pretty chuffed. So am I. Making grandiose plans of taking over the world after London, too. But in the end, it's all going towards the house and the pension. We're already doing nicely, everything extra is now for financial planning. I did not plan to work until I'm 70 or whatever the age will be at that time.

Thanks to uneven workload (feast or famine, at the moment it's famine), I'm done with my first major research book for Iron Cross (covering German history from 1870 to 1933) and have gathered some ideas for the characters' background. Questions such as "when did the American press began to report on Nazi atrocities commited against Jews" and "where could Richard have attended university" are answered. The answers are: as early as Jan/Feb 1933 and "Heidelberg or Marburg" (personally I tend towards Marburg, since I know that city). There are also many details I hadn't considered, and things like "un-Germanic art" and the bookburnings are put into perspective.

I do like reading those sweeping histories and start tell before my book's set. To write Vadim in "Special Forces", I read a 600-700 pages history of the Soviet Union, starting well, well before 1979, when "Special Forces" starts. The idea is to understand what issues and events shaped the characters growing up and getting to where they are. In Vadim's case, the relationship with his father and the way the totalitarian system twisted his character, even though, strictly speaking, 1979 was not in the teeth of the red terror. Nevertheless, people living in 1979 would remember - or have friends/family that would remember - the terror and the purges and the enforced uniformity. Fascinating stuff.

In Richard's case, the book burnings would have an impact. He'd notice the drop in quality of literature. He'd agree that Expressionism is ugly, but I think he likes modern literature and some of the discourses playing out in the twenties and thirties would have made an impact. He'd agree that the Communists need to be suppressed as they were clearly going to overturn the Weimar Republic. But if it had been for Richard, he'd have opted for a proper military dictatorship under Hindenburg. He'd largely agree with Kurt vom Hammerstein, for example. Very interesting - that'll give me enough of a foundation to not make the mistake of making the "good guy" into a democrat, because for all intents and purposes with his background and class, there's just no way he could have been.

If I've learnt anything about "Iron Cross" it's that it, like "Special Forces", very much dictates its own terms on which I can approach it. And that's really how historical novels should be, I think.

Winners of free books

2011-01-23T21:17:00.000Z

Rachel's blog tour has ended, but she's putting up more prizes at her blog. Go here.

Two commenters on my blog have won prices:

Tracykitn (swag bag)

Zarkina (free ebook)

Thanks for playing, and I'd suggest heading over to here and comment with your email addresses to get your books and stuff. Thanks for playing. :)

That's when Odin walks in

2011-01-23T15:13:00.000Z

Thanks guys for all the great comments on the interview with Rachel. I'll respond, too, but first I have to tell you about the weird little thing that happened to me today.

Today, I went into the city center with my partner (not London, I can only take so much of the Big Smoke during my off time) and we ended up in one of the various coffee shops for breakfast. While we were chatting away about charity and some article's I've recently read about development, charity and the so-called Third World, my reality shifted.

That was such a weird moment there. Like reality was tilting sideways. The closest I can compare it to was an effect in a movie. Something weird going on about resolution and camera angle. Suddenly, reality was not what it had been. I was at the same time strangely hyper-aware of myself and reality was blurred. Less real. (I was neither drunk, on drugs, and very rarely pass out, although it has happened once on a commuter train when I got stuck with no oxygen and without breakfast for half an hour.)

It felt like a brush with an alternate reality, like some other world got very close in that moment. Like something outrageous could happen. Like I could just get up, leave my body sitting and chatting there and go somewhere else. If I were writing paranormal, I'd expect something weird to happen there, like, you know, Odin walking into the coffee shop, telling me something about the end of the world and Valhalla... or whatever. (Knowing my luck, it would probably be Loki, anyway. Not that I'm saying Odin is a nice guy.)

Anyway, for a moment I got the whole Buddhist thing about everything being an illusion. I really got it. Somehow I think writers are better equipped to deal with this particular illusion.

Then everything went back to "normal".

Yeah, my sanity is a tenuous thing.

Rachel Haimowitz blog tour

2011-01-21T21:06:00.004Z

I have the honour to host Rachel Haimowitz, author of "Counterpoint" and "Anchored: Belonging" on my blog today.

Hi Rachel, welcome to my blog. I wasn’t quite sure whether I *want* you around, since you attempted to put me up for sale here, but now you here ~~and you can let go of my arm~~. What’s your poison? I have milky tea (heh), vodka, Italian coffee, water or juice?

Definitely coffee. I’m not quite Kari Gregg, but it’s close . . .

There you go, fresh from the Baby Gaggia. I’ve finished “Anchored” (and “Counterpoint”), which had me on the edge of my seat. Here’s my review. Talking about Anchored, it struck me how real the whole thing is. It’s our world, but some people are slaves. You don’t explain, and I just accepted it and was itching to read more about that world. Do you have more planned?

I do indeed! Three actually, plus some shorts. I’m already hearing quite a bit of demand for a sequel, so that’s probably the story I’ll write first. We’ll see Daniel and Carl (and Jane and Dave and Tim, of course), about a year down the line from the end of Anchored. I don’t know how well their situation lends itself to HEAs, and as with most of my books there will be some real darkness, but hopefully things will work out for the boys in the end.

The second story I’d like to tell in this world is actually a prequel that takes place a few years before Anchored, right after Daniel and Victor are separated. I’m not sure I can find the romance in that, though, so it’s possible it won’t get written. What I like about this one though is that it takes place almost entirely abroad, and exposes the reader to other cultures where slavery flourishes as well . . . and to the one culture in the world where it doesn’t.

The third story involves a completely new cast of characters: a very young man who’s just inherited a lot of debt and the guardianship of his two younger siblings. He does some desperate things to keep the family out of slavery, but something tells me life will work out just fine for them in the end. This one in particular will let the reader learn a lot more about the world, about how slaves become slaves and why.

You’re quite unpleasant to Daniel, and at the same time, we’re in his head all the time as he suffers. How do you cope with that? Do you ever hit the point where it’s too much? Ever feel anything like pity?

It may be hard to believe, given the obvious glee with which I abuse the hotties, but I really do feel for Daniel (and for Ayden, and for any of the other characters I put through the wringer). I become as attached to my characters as the readers do, probably moreso—they’re my babies, so to speak—and making them miserable is tough sometimes. But what happened to Daniel needed to happen to move the story forward, and I’m undeniably fascinated with the darker underbelly of humanity. You see the real raw person beneath the makeup and the bluster when you run them ragged, and sometimes what you find under there is quite surprising.

I’ve read pretty much everything you’ve published (and a couple things that aren’t published) – and what’s hitting me there is that you are just as gruesome and dark as I am (or even more so). Now a question people ask me: why on earth are you so dark? What’s so fascinating about extreme situations like humiliation, torture, and the biggest romance no-no of them all, rape? Or, as a reviewer asked me recently, “what the hell is wrong with you?”

ROFL! I’m actually a very sweet person in real life, and god knows I’d never hurt anyone who didn’t actually enjoy being hurt; I find it just as difficult to watch someone suffer as any sane person does. But writing allows us to explore and indulge the taboo, to give in to darker desires without worrying about pesky things like a conscience—which, quite fortunately, gets in the way in real life all the time.

And just as sexual orientation is an inherent thing, so I think are sadism and masochism, dominance and submission. I can’t ever remember a time when I wasn’t fascinated by these things—even as early as five or six I was rescuing the brutally injured handsome prince when I played make-believe with my sister—but of course it took a while before I learned there were others out there like me, and before I realized how inherently sexual these desires were. By early adulthood, I’d come to realize that—like a really surprisingly large amount of women—I had rape and abuse fantasies. Mine were just the other way around; I didn’t want to be the victim, I wanted to be the victimizer. (And now I feel I must reiterate again that I would never, ever do this in real life, and that I abhor all acts of violence—against women or otherwise.)

Fortunately, fiction is a nice safe place to explore those fantasies, both for myself as a writer, and for the many readers who share those fantasies or at least have a curiosity about them. And—as I said in answer to your last question—there’s actually quite a bit of literary and exploratory value that can come out of putting your characters through such situations.

Excellent. I'll take that as inspiration when people ask me those hard questions. What strikes me about you is that you aren’t really the typical gay romance writer. And your books certainly don’t read like your average romance. Do you find the genre constricting? *Are* you a gay romance writer?

I think mostly I’m a storyteller who happens to like gay romance. Counterpoint was very much a traditional high fantasy story that just happened to have a gay romance at the core of it. Even Anchored is really much less about the romance than it is about the situation in which Daniel and Carl find themselves; that a romance (or something like it) develops at all is coincidental and very much due to Carl’s endless patience and kindness. There are many stories I want to tell, and to be honest, not terribly many of them are romances at all, although I do have a tremendous fondness for this genre and will probably write gay romances—or at least my version of them—for a good long time to come. But I’m also trying to strike out into other genres where I can still play with that element of darkness without working to fit a romance in around it.

Ah, yeah. You spend a lot of pages doing exactly that in the (unpublished) thriller I've read of you. Now a much fluffier question: You get to host a dinner party with 3 historical/real/fictional people of your choice. Who’s at the table, and why? How does the evening go?

I actually have no idea how to answer this. I mean, I wouldn’t even know where to begin with all the fictional characters I’d love to meet. If I were to restrict it to real people, I’d say Kurt Vonnegut, Douglas Adams, and . . . and again, I don’t know how to assign that last slot—too many amazing choices. But whoever I chose, I suspect the evening would be full of laughter at the vagaries of humanity, and a fair share of serious philosophy. Also bad puns.

Who are the authors you admire? What’s the book you would have wanted to write which was written by somebody else?

From my answer to the last question, it’s probably pretty obvious that Vonnegut and Adams are two of my biggest literary heroes. I’d have loved to have written Sirens of Titan. There’s so much about that story I’m simply in awe of. So much about the man who wrote it I’m simply in awe of. I’ve read it probably a dozen times, and it never gets stale.

Best and worst piece of writing advice you ever got?

I honestly think one of the worst pieces of writing advice you can give to an author who wants to make a career of it (or at least get published) is “Write for yourself.” That’s ridiculous, because if you want to publish, you’re not writing for yourself; you’re writing for your audience and you must never forget that. Of course you need to follow your heart and your passion or there’s a good bet your book will suck (and really, this is a terribly difficult way to make a not-very-good living, so unless you’re writing out of love, there’s no reason to do it), but it’s very important that you not self-indulge too much in your writing, or nobody will care about your book but you.

And the best? I dunno, actually. Probably “learn grammar.” You can’t break the rules with flair until you know them inside and out, and even the best stories can be completely derailed by someone who doesn’t know how to use commas.

Thank you, Rachel.

If you want to read more about Rachel, she's also stopping at Brita Addam's blog over here, where she posts an exclusive deleted scene.

Yesterday's Stops: Secondary character interviews at Amara's Place (including the immortal "Does anybody like you?"), and a Reader Q&A at Rick Reed's.

Tomorrow's Stops: Brand new video book trailer and review by Kari Gregg (), and a character interview with Daniel at Desert Island Keepers.

Here's more information about the Blog Tour. And yes, you can win something. :) To be precise, two commenters on this blog post will win something (so make sure you're leaving a - working - email address).

Three weeks in

2011-01-21T17:51:00.002Z

I had a week of early starts. Yes, I got up at 4:30 and 5:45 and began work early. While I'm not at my best at 6 in the morning at work, I do like going to work by taxi (paid for by the bank). London is very different early in the morning, and I strangely enjoy watching the sun rise across the city's glass towers.

Next week I'm starting late again, which means lie-in, and coming home late... but that's OK too, because I'm rested and tend to be productive when I can stay up late. M y first paycheque (due next week) makes it all worthwhile. And more importantly, I have broken the circle of OMG STRESS! STRESS! STRESS!

I haven't worked long and I haven't brought any work home. I know, shocking.

Instead, I've managed to read a lot at work and edit a novel, so in terms of productivity, this is a clear win so far.

I'm also getting investigated by a Background Checking Firm "with a sinister name" as my new boss put it. Since they couldn't get in touch with my professor, I've had to point them today to one of my co-writers. I saw the form she's supposed to fill, and it's all about my personal integrity and honesty. Funny, how those old-fashioned virtues get investigated in a banking environment (which, we all agree, attracts a certain type of psychopath).

The other interesting little development is that the team did a collective Meyer-Briggs test. And the supposedly rare type INTJ (1-4% of the population) isn't rare in *my* reality. Three of my colleagues (that's 50%), my partner and one of my co-writers is an INTJ. (No wonder I like my team so much, most of them are introverts and one of the two extros is very calm and silent). Anyway, as you might be able to tell, we do have fun.

And as I'm still addicted to the newsflow, here are some cool links:

African Huts Far From the Grid Glow With Renewable Power This is about how small renewable energy sources are making a huge difference in the Third World. I've read a lot of similar stories about the mobile phone, which helps Indian fishermen/farmers to get good prices for what they bring to market.

Plastic adorns the nests of birds fit for a fight. This made me laugh: "It is a symbol of success, apparently - the biggest collections of plastic are displayed by the black kites with the most chicks and the best territory." - same with humans. Just look at all the bankers/traders with a bag full of gadgets/iPads/iSomethings. It made me think of the Sennheiser-headphones wearing asshole next to me on the train to Dover Priory today.

And finally something for all the sci-fi writers out there (and me): Two Suns? Twin Stars Could Be Visible From Earth By 2012, reports HuffPo. Well, I'm slightly less optimistic about time frames, but Earth post-nova could be an interesting setting.

On a side note, FOAT is back with Carina Press (talking about stars, heh).

And due to Carina's author marketing workshop two days ago (where my website was critiqued), I'll be changing my header on the blog and website. The website especially is now changing again to make things "even easier", as a PR company would put it. While my structure is good, it can be better.

And I just got the very good news that writer friend Cat Grant sold the novella I read (really only for a couple typos) to Ellora's Cave. Congrats, Cat! (Apparently my name has inspired the name of Aleksandr Petrovsky in her book - and that guy is pretty hot. The menage he's involved in is extremely hot. Title is a bit in transition at the moment, but it's set in the opera world.)

Right. Off to write some - or talk to another writer friend about her novel.