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So, about Colin Jeffries…

If you’ve read the description of my first published novel, Human X, it probably hasn’t escaped your notice that the protagonist begins the story dealing with the end of a committed relationship with a man named Ted. If you still need someone to connect the dots for you, the hero of the book is gay.

So what possessed you to write a book with a gay hero?

The story for Human X began life about seventeen years ago, and the original concept was just “a guy discovers he was the product of genetic engineering and now people are trying to kill him.” That’s still the same “elevator speech” I use today to describe the book. The second thought was that the main character would be the son of someone important, so the senator father was born.

Then my muse leaped up from where it lay in ambush, and piped in with, “Why don’t you make him gay?”

Okay, it wasn’t quite that random. Continue reading “So, about Colin Jeffries…”

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Self-publishing: The Why

The decision to self-publish Human X was simple. Perhaps it was born of a little impatience. The normal procedure for publishing a book with a traditional publisher is long and the obstacles are plentiful. Not the least of which is the simple fact that publishers frown on authors who submit their work to more than one house at the same time. You can spend months and years just getting an editor to take a serious look at your work, and still not see it in print.

Continue reading “Self-publishing: The Why”

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Rekindling the Fire…

As I mentioned in my first post, I recently unearthed one of the last things I completed, a short story entitled “Passing Sentence.” My file dates tell me that I wrote the thing back in the year 2000. It’s genuinely depressing to realize that a whole decade passed without me writing anything meaningful. (Computer manuals, while hopefully useful, do not exercise one’s creative jones).

So what was the problem? Continue reading “Rekindling the Fire…”

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Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011)

Christopher Hitchens was an angry man, no doubt about. Even though, cosmologically speaking, he and I agree more than we disagree, even I could say “come on, now!”

But he was, above all, a brutally honest man. Agree with him or hate him, he never told you anything but what he really felt. That’s a rare quality. He will be and should be missed. The world is poorer tonight.

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So here is what happened….

Late last year submitted a short story to Asimov’s Science Fiction. It’s called “Passing Sentence,” and I wrote it quite some time ago. I’m not sure exactly how long it’s been, but I found files in the same folder with dates reaching back to the year 2000. That can’t be right, because this is one of the last things that I completed before this year, and that would mean that I took nearly a ten-year break from writing.

Continue reading “So here is what happened….”