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I was recently interviewed by Kaleidoscope Romance. If you’d like some insight into how, why and what I write, this is a good place to look.

My good friend Cecilia Tan says that the two main complaints she sees in reviews of her books are:

1. Too much sex
2. Not enough sex

I’m on a mission to write books such that nobody ever complains about item 2.

Some of you are probably wondering, “Why? Censorship is a constantly-moving target. Readers seem to like sex in their books, but book distributors, payment processors and Patreon allow it grudgingly, if at all, and it’s about to get worse. Next year you may be in jail in Oklahoma.”

I blame Aunt Ruth. Under the name of Rebecca York, my aunt has written over 150 romance novels. Ruth once told me that writing is lonely work, difficult and boring work, and that the only way to make progress it is to write what gets you going. As she’s read a couple of my books, I occasionally wonder if she wishes she’d given me different advice.

I also blame the internet–more precisely, I blame USENET, one of the precursor networks from before the internet was really a thing. Back in the 80’s I joined these completely uncensored exchanges before they were ruined by spammers and commercialization and read the hot stories that college students and employees of defense contractors were writing (That’s where I met Cecilia Tan). I quickly concluded that my ideas were no weirder than anyone else’s, and that I could spell better than at least half of those people. I once read a post on USENET by someone who had been stuck at work babysitting a sick computer and called his girlfriend to tell her he’d be home late. He sat down to read the stories on alt.sex.bondage and found one of mine. Then he called his girlfriend and told her, “I’m coming home right now.” Now that’s feedback I can use.

While we’re at it, I blame all of those ancient history classes that taught me to think critically about things that were rarely talked about in polite company. Sex and sexual attraction are neither natural nor universal. You’re programmed by what you see around you to find one person attractive and another person not worth a second glance. After a few such classes by thoughtful professors, I started to find the books I was reading a bit frustrating. Why write a book set in a different time and place, on a different planet, and have people with the same relationships that they have during a very narrow slice of time and space out of human history?

I set out to play around and see what I could write differently. Let me know how I’m doing.

I have a new short story up on Theoreads.com.

The Doors of the Year is a paranormal shifter story about sexy things that go bump in the night around Halloween.

Samhain approaches, and an uncanny presence has arrived at Meg’s little farmhouse. Her husband, Elias, disappeared a year ago. She faces the unknown armed only with an iron poker and a passion to understand.

Readers have asked me many times whether shih-aan looked more human or more animal. I’ve always told readers “Shih-aan look as human or animal as makes you happy.”

Nevertheless, I’ve had it explained to me at length that it’s important to give people who are thinking of reading my books something nice to look at. I’ve worked with artists before with excellent results. But in most cases, I’ve had reference art to hand over. There is no reference art for shih-aan, because they don’t exist.

I needed an artist to create the reference art. This would not be a small job. And I knew that once I had a picture in hand, shih-aan would always look that way to me.

I spent some time evaluating artist portfolios, emailing artists, and not hearing back from artists before a mutual friend put me in touch with doodlebloom. Doodlebloom did the very difficult job of digging in my head for ideas and rendering them into this beautiful portrait.

I hope that you, whoever you are, will still feel free to use your imagination when you read my books. But now you know what Styrax looks like to me.

If you like doodlebloom’s work, here’s where to find more information.

https://bsky.app/profile/doodlebloomm.bsky.social

https://www.tumblr.com/blog/doodlebloomm

https://www.instagram.com/doodle.bloom1

Did you read Wishbone and Names of My Beloved and wonder what happened next?

I don’t deal well with finishing books. I do not get a warm feeling of accomplishment. I get post-partum depression. After I finished Names of My Beloved, I spent some time writing outtakes that examined various characters’ lives in an attempt to start the next book. I ran into two problems with this.

Whenever you write a prequel, some of the events are predetermined, and the story takes on the aspect of a tragedy. Plenty of writers pull this off just fine, but I didn’t feel that I was one of them.

The other problem is the Age Issue. If the poorly-specified rules for erotica are that there are no minors, I couldn’t write something that happened when a character was growing up.

So I went forward, and I chose to follow Styrax. What happened to him after he left the scene in Names? At the same time I got some feedback from a beta reader. She asked me a quite reasonable question: how does the other half live? Shieh Yeras, Styrax, and the rest of the named shih-aan characters are educated upper class types. What is it like to be a low-class shih-aan laborer with no rings, an obligate carnivore who has trouble affording meat? I could write that book and welcome readers to explore more of Feras-aan.

The problem was that Styrax is, well, speak as I find, a vanilla. It’s even built into his name.

Styrax is the name of a genus of shrubs and small trees from which humans have harvested aromatic resin since time immemorial, just like frankincense and myrrh. If you’re looking to buy the solid resin or the sticky essential oil, you should shop for benzoin, which is the proper name for the stuff. You can buy a small container of benzoin resin for under $10 on etsy. You’ve undoubtedly smelled benzoin before as it is a very common bass note in quality incense. Its fragrance is dreamy with prominent vanilla notes. Like frankincense and myrrh, which were special enough for gifts for an infant god, it has been assigned therapeutic properties.

If you read the Thousand Night and One Night, you’ll recognize benzoin immediately:

[I]t was a lady of tall figure, some five feet high; a model of beauty and loveliness, brilliance and symmetry and perfect grace. Her forehead was flower white; her cheeks like the anemone ruddy bright; her eyes were those of the wild heifer or the gazelle, with eyebrows like the crescent moon which ends Sha’aban and begins Ramazan; her mouth was the ring of Sulayman, her lips coral red, and her teeth like a line of strung pearls or of camomile petals. Her throat recalled the antelope’s, and her breasts, like two pomegranates of even size, stood at bay as it were, her body rose and fell in waves below her dress like the rolls of a piece of brocade, and her navel would hold an ounce of benzoin ointment. –Arabian Nights, Vol. 1 (Chap. 4) Burton trans.

And because it’s a trope, you’ll see it over and over, either because it recurred in the original text the way an oral formulaic recurs, or because Burton was lazy (and a humongous perv; he also translated the Kama Sutra for the titillation of the British Empire).

Both Names and Styrax contain some homage to the Thousand Nights and One Night, because it’s the fount of all stories.

But if Styrax was a vanilla, I’d already written him asking Wishbone not to be nice to him. At all. Perhaps there would be an opportunity to turn him kinky if he met the right person. That’s what I set out to write. And after four years and 250,000 words, I believe I succeeded.

Styrax the Scarred is now being serialized on my Patreon.

My new project, Fraternity Alpha, has the first chapter live and free on the new platform Theoreads.

What’s it about? Here:

Amy is a woman in her thirties, working in human resources and dodging attempts by family members to set her up on blind dates. But she dreams of being initiated into masculinity at the hands of a ruthless, paddle-wielding frat brother.
After meeting an old acquaintance at a disappointing kink convention, Amy goes home with the business card of a professional dominant who can help her realize some of her fantasies. All it will cost her is money.
There’s only one catch.
The dominant is a gay man, and sex is not on the menu.
But Amy will take what she can get while she dreams of so much more.
Fraternity Alpha is a high-kink, high-spice romance about gender identity beyond the binary.

Rock music is heresy. It has a unique ability to slide ideas into one’s soul through the ears. Coming to you over FM or over the internet, rock is a worship service for the god Dionysos; the guitar is one aspect of the thyrsos, his phallic wand that gives milk and honey and sustains his worshippers in the wilderness. Unconstrained by mortal notions of proper behavior, the god changes genders onstage and in our heads. Ecstatic music is a gift from the spirit of drunken frenzy to humanity—a compensation for the inescapable fact that we will all die some day.

Rock music changes the world. When Pat Benatar’s song “Hell is for Children” hit the airwaves in 1980, thousands of suburban kids looked up and realized they were not the only ones ordered to lie to grandma and say they fell off the swing. And they learned that what was happening to them was not OK and never would be.

If you grew up thinking that “gay” was nothing but a terrible word to call other children, rock educated you otherwise.

I was ten when “Renegade” by Styx charted. I remember hearing that song and feeling…something when JY’s guitar wailed and crunched on the bridge and Tommy Shaw screamed at the top of his lungs that he didn’t want to die on the gallows. I didn’t have a word for that feeling until later. But I saved my allowance and spent it at the record store in the mall.

The pre-Shaw Styx album Cornerstone had a song entitled “First Time For Love,” which was the slow-dance song in middle school. I remember reading the tiny lyrics in the fold-out album cover. And there, right below that song—in the tiniest font ever—were the words, “For Paul.”

I kept reading, over and over, the words that meant that someone loved a man named Paul, and that—most importantly—everyone else in the band was OK with this.

If you’re paying attention to the lyrics of Cyndi Lauper’s song “She Bop,” you know what it’s about. But it takes a certain level of 1980’s cultural literacy to place Blue Boy Magazine. Ms. Lauper was, apparently, not reading a soft core gay rag for the articles.

And then there was “The Belle of St. Marks,” which Prince wrote for his good friend, the percussionist Sheila E. Prince never said what the song is about. We’re left to guess why Belle uses masculine pronouns. Why is he wearing his dad’s clothes? Doesn’t he have his own? Unless all of his clothes are dresses. No wonder he cries. Despite—or because of—his tears, the Belle is a hot man, and Sheila will die if she can’t have him. Doesn’t she sound like she’s singing with her hands down her pants at the end? Well done, madam.

Joan Jett covered a male vocalist to sing us a honey-dripping song, “Crimson and Clover,” about her love for a woman. And, by the way, she’s not ashamed to say that love is pain.

Fast-forward to 1998. Brian Molko of Placebo jumped off a London building in the video for “Pure Morning” and did not fall. The song has music-of-the-spheres guitar riffs and lyrics that would make Molko nauseous later; he’d have re-written them if he knew that the song would be Placebo’s highest-charting hit. “Pure Morning” might not have got quite so much attention if someone hadn’t decided to slap a self-harm warning on the video. Controversy ensued. Once more, thousands of isolated suburban kids took notice, this time of the androgynous rock star with the bare shoulders. Some of them went out, bought black nail polish and painted their toenails as the first tiny step towards figuring out who they were.

For a while, music was out of the closet. Now it’s feeling less and less safe to celebrate queerness with the joy that love and pleasure deserve. But pay close attention to those lyrics. Dionysos will be looking out from between the lines, laughing and changing genders without warning.

See you on the other side.

* * *

Are you interested in reading the sequel to Wishbone, Names of My Beloved? The book is being serialized on my Patreon. You can now use the discount code DD75A for 60% off your first month. This discount is good through December 20, 2024.

Answer: He’s eighteen at the start of his eponymous novel.

Why? Because characters in erotica are supposed to be eighteen and up. Except in Nebraska and, I think Alabama, where they must be nineteen. Presumably fictional characters are completely asexual until they get close to eighteen, at which point they, I dunno, sprout genitals?

But the main character of Kushel’s Dart is old enough to be initiated into sacred prostitution the moment she turns sixteen. Why? Because Kushiel’s Dart is not shelved with the erotica. It’s fantasy. No, this doesn’t make a bit of sense. Certainly there exists erotica with younger protagonists. And sometimes there is trouble over it. There was a huge kerfuffle many years ago on LiveJournal over erotic Harry Potter fan fiction. Yes, someone went and deleted a bunch of blogs about fictional characters to protect real children.

Furthermore, fiction with gay characters will be scrutinized in ways that fiction with purely straight characters is not. If you don’t believe me, you’ve never struggled with Amazon “dungeoning” your books, even books that are not erotica, because they have queer characters. The bots that look for questionable content automatically categorize the love that dare not speak its name as, well, unspeakable.

Most authors know about this, but readers do not. Thus if you read the reviews of Wishbone, you may see people assuming that Wishbone is thirteen and being disturbed by this. I don’t blame them.

So why didn’t I come out and say that Wishbone is eighteen?

Because it feels really awkward to write, “Once there was a character who was eighteen.”

In real-world fiction it’s easy to handle this. A character is either old enough to drink legally (twenty-one in the US), or isn’t and has a fake ID. Or there are other cultural markers, like whether the character has attended or finished college.

In a secondary pre-industrial world, someone’s exact age isn’t important. They’re either functionally an adult–working for a living and capable of reproducing–or they’re not. They’re going to be married off as soon as there is a possibility of them having children. By the way, did you know that puberty for women is controlled in part by body fat? In a world without fast food, accumulating enough body fat to support ovulation is a huge struggle and takes longer. A woman is unlikely to get pregnant before she’s sixteen or so.

Wishbone was functionally an adult at thirteen or fourteen. He looks young for his age due to hard living and lack of regular meals, and is working in a profession where looking younger is a marketing feature. On top of this, he has lost track of his age because the number is not relevant, and because calendars are things that only rich people with secretaries use.

You can see me attempting to address this in Names of My Beloved. How’d I do?

I don’t travel well (except inside my own head). All of my writing is done sitting at my desk in front of a 2020 vintage iMac with a 27″ screen. The large screen allows me to use large fonts so I can still write even with the blurred vision and negative scotomata that are facts of life for me.

I type using a Kinesis Freestyle 2 Mac split keyboard and sit on an extremely decayed Aeron chair.

For writing software I use Scrivener, which is excellent for my pantser-style writing process. I don’t write character sketches. I keep files of quotes that I imagine characters saying and build the scenes where these quotes would be said.

I also use LibreOffice, especially for final formatting. In a few cases I’ve used Sigil, a free ebook editing application, to tweak an existing ebook.

As I said, I’m a pantser, not a planner. I was the kind of schoolkid who wrote the essay first and then wrote the outline because the assignment demanded it, not because it was going to help me write. Writing for me is largely a subconscious process where I have to fold away my thinking brain and connect my messy back-brain to my fingers and let the ideas flow out.

I have a cat who tries to help me write but isn’t all that good at it. She is very furry, though.