Gentle reminder for anyone who might be thinking of purchasing books for their significant other(s) this holiday season: take a photo of their bookshelf.
I promise you the bookstore clerk will be able to use this to good effect.
It amazes me when people toss around scary percentages around youth identifying themselves as queer as proof of anything other than increased awareness leading to younger people actually finding out there are words they can use to describe themselves.
It's like left-handedness. Look at that spike! OMG! It's an epidemic! People are making other people left-handed! We need to stop it somehow!
Or, y'know, we stopped demonizing it and people got to be themselves. Could be that.
Hey #Ottawa folk—sidewalks are lethally icy, roads aren't much better, and a few of the beg buttons don't work, so drivers, be aware pedestrians can't always ask for a crossing light, and might be on the road because the sidewalk is unwalkable.
"We have been giving you those voices, and what I am learning is that you do not want to hear them. You want a story, a hero, a villain, a click, a controversy. We live and die in the spaces between the words."
So, it's almost Valentine's Day, and if you're a lover of romance, and February has you looking for low-angst romance, may I point you in the direction of the "Candy Hearts" anthology? Because not only do you get sixteen low-angst queer romances, the proceeds all go to the Transgender Law Center and the National Center for Transgender Equality.
I wrote a Village novella for this one, "Valentine's Dave."
So, the whole of my #QueerYA writing are these four (so far):
"Leap," is a short story in the first, in the collection Boys of Summer; Exit Plans for Teenage Freaks was my first YA novel, "Hope Echoes" is a novella included in the tree-novella book Three Left Turns to Nowhere, and then the aforementioned Stuck With You, my hi-lo novel.
So, once again #Ottawa, if you're a driver, prepare for pedestrians to be walking in the road (there's no sidewalk) and for the beg buttons at intersections to be crusted over to the point where they can't request a walk light.
Once again, #Ottawa, if you're a driver, be aware a crap-tonne of sidewalks aren't plowed, so you'll probably see pedestrians in the road/crossing where they can because of piles of snow, etc.
One of my favourite things about being edited is how every single time, I learn some new thing about a word.
This time it was finding out it was never forté. It has never been forté. It's not a French loanword we stripped of an accent, it's an Italian word that never had one.
Being in Canada, and hearing the way it was pronounced, I'd just assumed it was French and should have an accent.
Hey all! I'm 'Nathan Burgoine, and I'm a tall queer guy who writes (mostly) shorter queer fiction—though a few novels have indeed happened. I tend to live with one foot in Romance, and one foot in Spec-Fic (often both), as well as YA.
My latest was a Hi/Lo Queer YA rom-com, Stuck With You.
#WritersCoffeeClub Do you have advice for other authors that you haven't heard from different sources?
Every time you get edited, take a second to add things to a general list that have come up in the editing process. I call mine my "Foible List" to feel a bit better about it.
That way, post-draft, you can pull out that list and check all the things on it before you hand it to your editor. Saves time—and lets them find new mistakes you make instead of old ones! ;)
Since we so often talk about the limits of automated technology/scripts/robots/AI, I present to you, this, what happened on Facebook when I mentioned I might need to "kill a darling" in my manuscript.
I cannot tell you how many actual homophobic, violent, racist, awful things pass my timeline. But this? This they flag.
Once again, #Ottawa, no sidewalks seemed to be salted this morning, so drivers, expect people walking on the roads because the sidewalks are deathtraps. Also, beg-buttons at intersections can be iced over, which means we pedestrians can't even beg to cross the road like the lesser beings we are.
#WritersCoffeeClub Dec 3: What writing advice would you give your younger self?
When that Creative Writing Prof rips you to shreds, he'll have a novel in print, so you'll feel like he's got the weight of experience and knowledge behind him.
He'll still have that one novel in print when you're on short story number thirty-six, four novels, a collection, seven novellas, and three YAs.
So... don't let him derail you for those years, huh? Pretty sure he just didn't like you wrote queer stories.
Today's Star Trek Adventures is with my USS Bellerophon group, and they're warping off into the Shackleton Expanse. This adventure is right out of the Modiphius Shackleton Expanse Campaign book. I spent a season creating some set-up using a mix of mission briefs and my own noggin, but this time it's entirely from a pre-printed adventure.
One of my least favourite things, picking names for characters.
I'll often finish an entire draft with placeholders like [Name] or [Friend] or [Sister] in square brackets and then do a find/replace thereafter once I've chosen a name for them.
One solution is to use them as hat-tips for people who've been awesome to me in my life. So many of my characters are named for people that way; fellow authors, co-workers, etc.
Fun Story: when writing "Old Age, Surrounded By Loved Ones" for the second Machine of Death anthology, I misread the deadline. I was checking how it was meant to be formatted for submission and realized I only had hours left, not another week, to submit it.
Not one character had a name.
Every single character was then immediately named for a current co-worker in the bookstore where I was working at the time.
When I was younger, the gay guy died. In freaking everything. It wasn't until I got to the bookstore as a bookseller, got access to Books in Print (on microfiche, yes, MICROFICHE) that I started finding queer dudes in books written by queer dudes and—guess what?—we got to live, and breathe, and enjoy our lives and go on capers and be heroes (and villains but not always villains) and...
Look, it was lifechanging. Best Gay Romance anthologies from the 90s! THE 90s!
