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Author Blog Hop – Writing My First Novel
I am excited to be participating in a new blog hop initiated by author A.E. Radley, along with a host of other lesfic authors. I can’t wait to see what topics this blog hop throws up. The first one is Writing my first novel. A great first topic to break the ice with. Plus, it really made me go back and think about what it was like writing my first novel, which one it actually was and how it all came about. My very first novel, written and published, was Crush, which became the first book in the Girls of Summer series. It didn’t start out as a novel though. It…
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The Invisibility Cloak of an LGBTIQ YA Author
I’m preparing to give my very first author reading in a few weeks, which means I’ve been spitballing ideas on what to talk about that won’t bore the pants off people and maybe, hopefully, even convince them to buy a book or two. After asking for advice from friends, thinking about the books I write, and reading a good friends brand new blog, I settled on my theme for my pre-reading talk. Invisibility. Invisibility is a superpower for those of us who are introverts. It comes in particularly handy for those of us who write in tiny niches, which LGBTIQ YA stories certainly are. On the one hand, we wish…
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How catching a mouse taught me a lesson about writing
My wife yelled out “Got’im!” in the middle of the night a few days ago. No, she wasn’t dreaming. I was though, until that moment. She’d been listening to a mouse run around our bedroom until finally, it found the food we’d left for it in the trap she’d set. She’d heard it go off while I was apparently blissfully unaware until her shouting in her moment of triumph woke me up. Before I go any further, I should explain we purchased a trap that wouldn’t harm the mouse, so we could release it later, which we did, and that trap forms part of the story below. I just wanted…
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Here’s how you can help people find queer fiction
I was procrastinating catching up on twitter news when I saw this tweet by Malinda Lo: It’s becoming ever more clear to me that many books with queer female characters are published with little to no marketing around queerness, especially when those books are genre fiction that don’t revolve around coming out. I want this to change. — Malinda Lo (@malindalo) May 4, 2018 There’s a whole thread and conversation going on over on twitter so if you’re so inclined, head over and check it out. It got me thinking, though, about how hard it still is to find teen fiction with queer main characters. It certainly doesn’t help when authors…
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Sunshine Coast Pride Festival Wrap-up
Sunshine Coast Pride Festival was a blast! I just had to get that out of the way first up because it was an amazing day and I am SO exhausted because of it. In a good way, of course! It was my first time out and about in public meeting people and talking about my writing, so it was hard to know what to expect. It was also the first time the Festival had gone out on its own away from an established market day so it was a big unknown as to how that would translate into crowd numbers. There was no need to worry though because people poured…