De-blog

The people in my life know very well that I...tend to rant. Most of the time when I'm online or in public, I tone it down to avoid conflict. If I see injustice, I'll speak out (I try not to when it's trolls because that's what they want), but the rest of the time, I sit here at my computer, so outraged I'm lost for words. But there are some...complete and utter d***heads in this world, and sometimes, I just want to shake them warmly by the throat. So, here's a bit of what I think about the UK and the EU. I'll go on the record here as having voted to remain in the EU. Note: this is what I think . It's opinion, and I'm not writing it here for people to tell me why I'm wrong. I'm not. My reasons are many, but here are some of the more salient ones, in brief: 1. Democracy If the problem we (the UK, not the bunch of crooks with too much money and power who led the electorate to a poisoned, though thankfully empty chalice) have with the E...

I ignored my calendar nag to post on Monday, so I figured, rather than let the week pass by (again), I'd throw out a snippet from Reunions , which is kind of going well. It's currently a little over 74,000 words, which, my dear friend/editor Andrea tells me, means it's a quarter of the way to finished. I'd laugh, but she's got a point! Anyway... I'm going to post two snippets, the second being a bonus because Caraway Carter tagged me for a first three lines thing (technical term) on Facebook. Snippet #1: This is from chapter two. If you've read the series, you'll know the characters, if you haven't, well, I guess you won't. :D It had taken almost ten years, and a great deal of campaigning, but the improvements were there for all to see and enjoy: full streetlighting, road resurfacing, speed control measures on every road, kids’ play areas, and new apartments for the few who had stubbornly remained in the condemned tower block, whi...

Every Monday, iCal nags me. De-Blog...De-Blog...De-Blog...every half an hour until I either dismiss it (which defeats the purpose of me having set it to nag me in the first place), or I write a blog post. Today. I have so much to say, and I don't know how to make the words. So. I'm going with factual, probably a little bit rambling, and heavily edited to leave out the ranting. Last Monday evening saw the 28th Lambda Literary Awards ceremony take place in NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts. Seeing as it was in NY and I am in the UK, for me, it was the early hours of Tuesday morning when the awards were announced. I watched them via the @LambdaLiterary Twitter feed. I actually shook Nige awake to tell him. I won! My historical romance, When Skies Have Fallen , won the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Romance, which IS exciting. I'm still in a daze, but it's sinking in. I think. I added the medal to my cover, and my lovely author friends pestered me to ...

A little teaser trailer for Reunions - Season Seven of the Hiding Behind The Couch series.

How do we authors know if we've succeeded? Is it based on reaching a certain number of sales? Seeing our book on a bestsellers' list? Being adorned with copious five-star reviews? For many authors, these are precisely the measures they use to gauge their success. In capitalist societies, the accumulation of material wealth is the measure of success, and whether a book is a bestseller right then and there doesn't matter, so long as it's still generating revenue. Published works have a precarious half-life, subject to any number of factors, including, first and foremost, reading trends (currently popular genres, book sales in general), as well as the success of the author's latest published work, genre (literary fiction never dies), whether it's part of a series, and (the one factor we authors can control - I'll come back to this) the author's behaviour. But they do have a half-life, which means authors, potentially, earn some of their living from...

Father and daughters, at the pub, no doubt When I was in my final year of university, I had a major run-in with my lecturer. It began with me submitting an essay about the ways in which the postwar British welfare state maintained women's oppression and ended with him shrieking at me, "You don't know what it's like to lose your eight-year-old son because the courts are biased in favour of women." Past and present rescued canine chaps It went on for a good deal longer than that, but that's the gist of what he said. According to him, he had been the primary caregiver since his son's birth, and when he and his female partner broke up, she was given custody of their son. The outcome for me, which is inconsequential in the grand scheme of things, was that he refused to mark my essay and told me it was barely a pass grade. I took the essay to another social policy lecturer and asked him to look over what I had written. He did so, and in his opinion, ...

Cover Design by Decorous Anarchy Studios I'm writing! Woot! And as 'The End' of the novel is tantalisingly nigh, I decided it was about time for an excerpt from Those Jeffries Boys - the next instalment of Hiding Behind The Couch . Those Jeffries Boys is a 'character special', and it follows chronologically from Two By Two (Season Six) , but as always, I'm trying to write in enough back story for the novel to stand alone (as far as is possible with a series), whilst at the same time not including so much back story as to set existing readers' eyes rolling. Who are Those Jeffries Boys ? Readers of HBTC will already know Andy and Dan Jeffries very well. Tall, dark and handsome (of course), they're the younger two of three brothers. Prior to Season Six, their older brother Mike only appears occasionally - usually not on page, and rarely in a good light, because, as his brothers would tell you, he is a knob. A what? OK, so here's the ...

A while back, Hans Hirschi sent me a set of questions about my ongoing series, Hiding Behind The Couch . He used snippets from it in his review of A Midnight Clear , but, of course, I write long. I thought I’d share the rest of my responses, as they offer insight into where the series came from, my favourite character(s), the best order to read, and so on. So, without further ado… What is Hiding Behind The Couch? Hiding Behind The Couch is the ongoing story of nine friends from high school/university and the important people in their lives. The stories are about life, so there’s love and romance, births, deaths, marriages, murder, industrial espionage, accidents, affairs, successes, failures – it’s a fictional micro-social study, and it’s inclusive. People are people, and I don’t distinguish by superficial differences, but to clarify, there are LGBTQ and heterosexual characters, as well as characters from some of the different ethnic groups that make up the rich culture of...

If I didn't run a publishing company, and if I wasn't an author, today would be the day I'd leave GR. It's not that I've been naïve until now about how many spiteful, full-of-their-own-self-importance trolls reside there. Nor have I ever thought GR could or should do something about it. Freedom of speech and all that... But actually, no. Freedom of speech is not a licence to verbally bully others, particularly when those others are banned from defending themselves. Freedom of speech is the right to speak up for your beliefs, to be free to say whatever you want to say, but the freedom of one should not come at the cost of another. And herein lies the problem with GR (or any other site that allows posting of reviews, for that matter). Readers can say what they like about books. They can justify reviews that are attacks on the author by claiming they are offended by the author's views, as expressed in that one particular book. Authors have NO freedom ...

One surefire shortcut to understanding the poverty of language is to become a writer or an editor. Better still, become an editor of people who write in your native language even though it is not their first language, because no matter how gifted the linguist, they will, sooner or later, come up short. This particular issue recently arose when I was editing a story by an author whose grasp of English is superior to some of the students I have had the dubious pleasure of teaching during the past seventeen years, and I'm not necessarily referring to those for whom, like this author, English is a second or additional language. Fluency is not the same as competence, not even for a native English speaker, and competence is sorely overrated. I consider myself very competent in both my understanding and use of English. I would even go as far as to say I have a gift with words, inasmuch as I'm able to successfully bend them to my will, and in so doing create stories narrated in t...

Typically, I was out of the house when the email came with a link to the announcement of the 28th Lambda Literary Award Finalists .  I am delighted and a tiny bit gobsmacked that my novel, When Skies Have Fallen , is a finalist in the Gay Romance category. Congratulations to all! And thank you to the Don't Read in the Closet team - this book was made possible because of you. Beyond that, I'm speechless, so I'm going to post an excerpt and leave it at that! (p.s. the ebook is free - paperback also available: Purchase/Download Links on Beaten Track ) * * * * * “Good evening to you, Corporal.” His voice, a slow, deep rumble, startled Arty from his remembering. His breath caught in his throat as he fought to reply. “A good evening to you also, Sergeant…Johnson, isn’t it?” “Sure is.” The man held out his hand for Arty to shake. “Technical Sergeant Jim Johnson, at your service.” Arty reciprocated: “Corporal Robert Clarke.” The palm against his was big, rough ...