If you write fiction, your characters will ask you that at every turn. Of course, I don’t mean they will step off the page and literally put the question to you, unless you are smoking something especially potent.
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…”
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.