Getting into the heads of new characters is like putting on new shoes. No matter how often you’ve seen them in the window or even handled them before, when you first slip in, they feel stiff and weird and alien. It takes a few miles of walking in them before they’re comfortable.

Same with characters. Even though these two have popped up in the previous book, writing them as POV characters is different. I have to consciously think about which way they would think/feel, and what they would do. It’s like a naggy tag in the neck of your shirt. Not actively painful, but ‘there’ in a way that’s distracting. It makes for slooow writing. Over the years I’ve learned to just write it anyway. That’s what rewrites are for; by which time the characters have become a second skin. Can’t wait for the feeling.

The muse hates edits, too, btw. Possibly even more than me. She went on vacation somewhere and told me to call her when I’m ready to continue writing BWB. Screw her. I can at least take the weekend off. It started as a bit of procrastination, but actually, turning the brain off and playing with wood and drills and the circular saw (No, I’m not dismembering my editor, just building a deck planter.) gives me just enough creative juice back to think up solutions for some knotty problems.  There are the clear demands of the letter of edits (more of this, less of that). But there are also murkier thoughts and the uneasy weighing of the demands of the story against the demands of the market. It can feel a bit like Indy trying to make it through the Temple of Doom. I’m sure there’s another, longer blog post in that, but that one needs a bit more detachment and percolation.

So, for now, the printout sits on my desk along a pile of edit notes awaiting Monday, a long sigh, a self-motivating kick in the posterior, and buckets of coffee.

Thank you to all of you who bought and loved Santuario, who gave it away as gifts and told others, and especially those of you who took the time to write a review. I appreciate every single one of them.

2013 has also seen the muse and me hard at work to continue the story of Bengt and Alex, which brings me straight to our resolution for 2014: Get that second book out into the world and into your hands. It’s looking good so far. The first draft is done, the rewrite is almost on track (I just have a dying motherboard to replace, and we’ll be back in the saddle, so to speak).

Apart from that, my head is full with stories and characters banging against the inside of my skull, so we shouldn’t run out of books to write any time soon. I want to try a few strategies to work on my writing speed, but only as far as they don’t compromise quality. We’ll see where that goes.

Love you guys. Thank you for making 2013 fantastic. Hope you’ll stay around for the next 365.

1. LGBTQ+ main characters
2. In romantic relationships
3. That have a happy ending. (No Brokeback Mountain here, folks!)

When something like a Queer Romance Blog Hop pops up in my Twitter feed, there’s no way I’ll say no. In fact, I distinctly recall the muse elbowing me in the ribs rather forcefully, going, “That’s us, Dude.” Let’s see if she’s as enthusiastic when it actually comes down to answering the questions that Heidi Belleau thought up for us.

1. Let’s start off with the getting-to-know-you stuff: How do you identify, and what does that mean to you? Whatever level of detail you’re comfortable with, of course!

I identify as bigender. If I could make my body go back and forth, I’d be most happy, but I’ve learned to live with its innate disability. And the internet with its opportunity to live out different personas suits me quite well. (The muse would like me to point out that she’s okay with that, too.)

As for the rest, I’ve known that I was interested in more than one gender pretty much since my age hit the double digits. At the time I wasn’t aware of more than two, and I identified as bisexual for quite a number of years. That awareness has been widened by the amazing people I’ve had the privilege to know and love, so I guess that, of all the labels out there, the one that says ‘pansexual’ comes closest.

It means that, as long as I keep my mouth shut, it’s easy for me to ‘pass’. But it also means that I ‘pass’ as someone I’m really not. The pressure to come out to new acquaintances is relatively lower, which means coming out to anyone always carries with it the whiff of having an agenda. Double-edged sword and all that.

2. What’s your preferred “flavour” of queer romance (e.g. trans*, f/f, m/m, menage with queer characters, etc.) Why?

My preferred flavour is well-written, hard, fast, and ‘real’ (which by no means excludes sf/f – au contraire) with lots of chemistry and soul. I honestly don’t care about the plumbing. For the time being, the sheer numbers out there favour M/M, but I’ll read anything that gives me my fix.

3. Do you write/read/review? Do you think being queer affects your participation or platform in romancelandia?

I write and read. Being queer definitely affects both the what and the where. I don’t think it changes the human condition.

The book I’m currently working on is M/M, the next one will have a transgender protag, and the muse keeps bugging me about an F/F story that sounds really good. To say it with Cole Porter: “Anything goes.”

4. What drew you to queer romance?

I’m always hooked by the books that break molds, the ones that go beyond the narrow matrix established in and by hetero romance publishing, and that take the genre back to a more encompassing definition of romantic love.

5. What do you love about queer romance in general, and/or your specific subgenre?

I love the optimism, the sensuality, the attitude. I love all the fucks not given about restrictive societal norms. And I’m a sucker for poetic justice.

6. What’s your pet peeve?

Hate- and fear-mongering. Always and in any group.

7. What growth would you like to see in the genre, going forward? Any ideas on how to accomplish that?

I’d love to see more LBT in LGBT romance, and more PoC. I’m working on it. I’m convinced the audience is there. Queer publishers specifically asking for it help find the writers.

8. Do you seek out other queer authors when you read?

The story comes first for me. How the author identifies is secondary. But the fact that my social circle tends to be colourful certainly influences the titles popping up on my radar, even if I don’t specifiaclly seek them out.

9. How do you feel, in general, about straight peoples’ participation in reading, writing, and reviewing queer romance?

At some point all of us will read or write about experiences we’ve not personally made. I don’t see that invalidating participation. Wheaton’s Law applies.

10. Rec us 3 titles in your chosen subgenre and tell us why you love them.

I don’t really have a chosen subgenre. (And I’m trying very hard right now to be good and not intentionally misread the ‘chosen sub’ part. We should make the next blog hop about kink.)

• Unhinge the Universe by Aleksandr Voinov and L.A.Witt for the sheer balls with which it defies expectations
• Shattered Glass by Dani Alexander for the brilliant voice
• Portside by Elyan Smith for the haunting, stark poetry (no HEA, but not Brokeback Mountain either)

Thanks for reading and for following the tour! Be sure to use the links below to check out more great posts from our participants!

The Spark
I bet most of us have at one point or another in our lives dreamed about a better world, a perfect world without murder or war or … I’d run out of space long before completing that list. The specific dream that inspired Santuario was related to an incident of gay bashing that made me long (not for the first time) for a world where people can just be who they are without fear. It doesn’t take much to set the gears in my writer brain spinning and the muse scrambling. “What if?” questions are a surefire way to do it. What if there was a world without homophobia? What parameters would I need to change to end up with a society (still human) like that? What existing or historical cultures (if any) accept homosexuality as just another way of life, and how do they differ from those that don’t? What underlying causes–

At this point the muse kicked me forcefully in the shins. “Are you seriously contemplating to write about a perfect world?” she asked.
I was all fired up and ready to go. Of course I did.
“Moron,” she said.
I blinked. “Excuse me?”
“It’s going to tank,” she said, and proceeded to tick the whys off her delectable fingers: “No drama, no tension, no development. Why would anyone want to read that?”
“Because it’s beautiful.”
“It’ll bore people to tears after the first paragraph. I’m not interested.”
“Fine, I’ll do it without you then.”
She smirked. She knows full well I can’t get anything worthwhile done without her.
I caved. “Any ideas?”
“Kaboom,” she said.
“Huh?” I said. I can be very eloquent that way.
“You can have your perfect culture. If I can throw in a scary and cruel one.”
“And?”
“And kaboom!”
“But I want a world without kaboom.”
“You want a story. Kaboom!”

I swear, that’s how it happened. That was the spark that ignited Santuario. We took it from there and ran with it. Of course it was by no means the last clash between the muse and me. She’s opinionated, and a drama queen. Me, I’m perfectly reasonable, of course.

Background
So, the muse and I agreed (sort of) on a perfect society pitched against a cruel, scary one. Now we’d just have to figure out the setting. Right? Needless to say the muse was not that easily satisfied.
“Get real,” she said. “Perfect society. I thought you wanted it to be a human society.”
“Yeees?” I’m slow to catch on sometimes.
“Well, if it’s human, it’s not going to be perfect. It might be better and more egalitarian and maybe even fairer than what we have now (like that’s so hard), but it’s still going to have greed and envy and fear and all those other things humans carry around with them them wherever they go.”

She had a point. And I admit that only grudgingly. So an almost perfect society, then. But where? I confess to being intrigued by the idea of frontiers, a handful of people carrying only the bare necessities, being dumped in the middle of nowhere. There are so many different ways this can play out. I decided it was the perfect scenario for my benevolent society.

“What frontier?” the muse, always helpful, wanted to know.
“Some planet. They leave earth in a generation ship and settle on a world far, far away.”
“Which supports human life,” she scoffed.
“It got terraformed before they landed.”
“That’s some technology.”
“It’s the future. Work with me, here.”
“Hmmm, what about my scary society? Are they on the same ship?”
“Naawww, they come later. My good guys need a chance to develop peacefully first.”
“So, how come they end up on the same planet?”
“Some glitch? It’s not really important for our story.”
“Could be for another one.”
“Yeah, maybe, I’ll work on it. But can we concentrate on this one first?”

Here, she probably rolled her eyes at me. She does that a lot. But at least she agreed with me on background. Two cultures, rooted in a distant earth past that developed separately on the same planet, and–

“Separately?” chirped the muse. “How come?”
“The ones who were there first were afraid and told the new guys they had to settle somewhere else?”
“Wait, the new guys are the bad ones, right?”
“Right?”
“So your good guys kicked them out? Told you they weren’t perfect.”

Did I mention how much I hate it when she’s right? To make matters worse I was starting to get really interested in this idea of how “good” a culture can actually be. Without needs, wants, competition, things to fear, what drives us? Is there a tipping point? Or more than one? Into total control? Or total petrifaction? And if there is, how and where do we keep the balance?

“How giant an info dump were you planning on again?” asked the muse.
“Oh, shush. This is still background.”
“Yeah, but for at least three books, not one.”

I didn’t say anything. I’m absolutely positive that I didn’t. But she must have read something in my eyes, because she started smiling that beatific smile that tells me she’s happy. We just stared and grinned at each other for a bit, and then we started world building.

World building
We were trying to create a (almost) perfect society (mine) and a scary, cruel society (hers). I wanted my guys to start their settlement in a place where they’d have to huddle and rely heavily on each other. So the planet they were trying to settle had its main landmass in one big continent around the north pole, much of it too cold for permanent settlements, but with a more temperate zone along its coastlines (think Finland, Canada, that sort of thing). I was also reasoning that whoever prepared the planet and selected the people for the trip would know that and round up volunteers from the northern countries, like Scandinavia and Iceland, mutual language roots being considered a plus and over time coalescing into the Skanian I use in the book.

The muse started to tap her fingers. An incessant nail on wood noise, designed to break my concentration and drive me bonkers.
“What?” I snarled.
“Aren’t you forgetting something?” She smiled sweetly at me. “Where do my people end up?”
“I don’t care, some rock in the equatorial zone that’s too hot for my Vikings.”
“A rock?” She has a pretty pout, but I mainly wanted to get on with my settlers.
“Fine, an island. Don’t push it.”
“How big?” she immediately shot back.
“Would have to be a decent size, allow for some agriculture and general development. Something the size of Britain.”
“I want palm trees. And beaches.”
“Whatever.” I still had Vikings to get back to. “It’s not going to be Paradise, though. Remember, these are the bad guys. Let’s see, by the time they leave Earth, things have taken a turn for the worse, the terraforming technology has been lost or sabotaged, so they need to be sent to an already prepped planet.”
She nodded. “And since everyone wants to get off Earth, it’s a jumbled mess of nations on the ship.”
“Predominant languages Chinese and English?”
She gave me her best don’t-be-stupid look. “Been done. Gimme your Firefly card back. We’ll take Russian and Spanish, with maybe English as a lingua franca.”
I forgave her. I was starting to get caught up in her fantasy. “They’re used to ‘everyone for themselves’ kind of thinking.”
“So when they land, the strongest hog the valuable resources (the ship) and set everyone else to work.”
“Over time establishing a ruling class.”
She smiled. A pretty scary smile, now that I come to think of it. “Who controls the rabble with access to firearms.”
“A personal army. Like the Savaks.”
“The Securitate.”
“The Tonton Macoute.”
“The Gestapo.”
“Okay, enough. I still have some Vikings to get settled here. Your guys are not coming for hundreds of years.”
She admired her nails. “They’ll be in the book. So anything before they arrive is background.”
“It’s world building. It shapes the people that’ll be in the book.”
“What people?”

Character building
Want to meet the guys? So did I. In that respect Santuario was an out of the ordinary book for me, because it started with an idea. More often than not my stories start with a character, a voice in my head that won’t shut up until they’ve told me everything I never wanted to know about them, and then some. This one was different. I had background (one near perfect, one scary society), I had setting (the planet they both settled on), but I didn’t hear any voices. Now, for most people this might be a good thing. For me it’s a disaster.

In a rare show of agreement the muse and I decided on one character from each of the two cultures (because she wanted kaboom), and that they would both be cops (because I like me a good mystery). After that? Crickets. I put the story idea aside and wrote a whole other book, completely different genre, then tried again. Nothing happened. The truth is, I can build worlds, I can build plots, but I can’t, for the life of me, ‘build’ characters. I tried different character sheets, and filled them all in with eye color, and favorite foods, and all that sugar. And when I poked what I’d made, it wasn’t moving. I’d made a puppet. Dead, Jim.

Characters form somewhere in my subconscious, so deep down that I can’t see anything. They need amorphous influences to form, mood, style, atmosphere. So I got busy thinking about plot and what the muse’s darn island looked like. It was somewhere hot, and she’d wanted palm trees and beaches. I wanted hills and dusty roads, and hovels in villages, and cities like ancient Granada. Just as we’d discovered skeletons in the closet of my perfect society, I now discovered beauty in her cruel one. When I started collecting songs for my playlist (I always write with music) I realized I was picking mostly Son Cubano. And I noticed someone dancing to it. Just a shadow at first, long legs, a wide brimmed hat, definitely male, definitely a man with rhythm in every bone of his body.

I had to clear my throat.
“Shhhhh,” said the muse. “Don’t scare him away.”

He briefly looked over at that, his face completely deadpan; then he looked away again. Over the next few days I noticed more details about him, but he wasn’t talking to me. I got emotions, very suppressed for the most part, except for a strong sense of longing, but no voice. Still, I knew who he was. I knew what made him tick. And I started writing. That was Alex.

Bengt was a lot harder. He talked all the time. I knew everything about his family, his boss, his house. I knew he was this huge, blond guy with a taste for good food and quality clothes. But all the while his talking kept me at arm’s length. I realized he had a secret, and that I wouldn’t know the real Bengt, until I figured out what it was. But *that* wasn’t what he wanted to talk about. That was ‘ancient history’ and ‘none of my business’. He needed a bit more … persuasion. And, let me tell you, Bengt is not an easy guy to wrestle into compliance. But the muse? She kicks ass, even Skanian ones. So we finally got there.

I’d written two full chapters of Alex before I typed one word of Bengt. But once that started, it just kept going. They don’t ever shut up. They’re in my head 24/7. Santuario? Is just the beginning.

Still, I frittered away a week, happily committing to keyboard the film that was running in my head, until the reel jerked to a halt. I gave myself some time-out, did some gardening over the long weekend and came back to my desk yesterday, fully expecting the film to have been sorted out and continue. Nothing happened. The muse had curled up into a sobbing, pathetic little ball in a corner.

So, trying to get her back into the mood, I reread what I’d written. The muse threw up. It was nothing like the original nebula. It sounded trite and hurried. Really, it sounded like exactly what it was — a potentially good idea bent to fit a format it had no inclination of accommodating.

“20.000 words?”the muse retched. “Why don’t you just drive a stake through my heart and be done with it?” (Yes, I think I mentioned at some point that she’s quite the drama queen.)

Now, something you have to understand about me is, I find it awfully hard to resist a good submission call. It’s magnetic and mesmerizing. I wasn’t ready to let this one go just yet. Insert another bout of gardening (What can I say, I think best when my hands are busy with mindless stuff). All morning I tried to compile a list of pros and cons.

I came up with a lot of cons, the main ones being that a part of an epic serial has a completely different dynamic than a short stand-alone. That, for the story to work as a short stand-alone I was compromising style, structure and character development.  And that those compromises would influence and change the rest of the shiny nebula to the point where I neither recognized nor liked it anymore. It just wouldn’t be the story I wanted to write.

On the pro side I had this: Submission call. Shiny!

Yup, this is the point where the muse hung her head, washed her hands of me and started packing. I told her it wasn’t that bad (I don’t lie well.); she pointed a silently accusing finger at the barbie doll torso I’d so proudly produced last week when I was still thinking it could become a classical alabaster statue. She demanded utter destruction of the abomination.

In the end, we struck a compromise. I agreed to relegate the text fragment to a light-less pit until such time as I was ready and able to write the whole nebula in whatever length it called for. I would further return penitently to Bengt & Alex’s story which I should never have strayed from in the first place — and in return, she would stay.

She hasn’t actually mentioned the  words ‘work’ or ‘inspire’ yet. For the time being she’s just still here, nursing an (adorable) pout and letting me graciously worship at her feet. So, for the time being my hands are still wielding a spade instead of a keyboard. I’m feeding her promises and sun-warm strawberries and hope for the best.

Hell I’m one of those peeps who were still adamant about not being able to write creatively with anything but a pen in my hands when LJ hit one million users (remember LJ?). Now I feel really weird with anything but a keyboard under my fingers, fixed or portable (still hate typing on the iPad, btw).

Conveniences have a way of trickling in under the radar and changing the way we look at things. I’m the last person on earth to want go back to the stone age (I’m way too lazy for that), but just to, dunno, lean back, look at the way things are, acknowledge them and how they change your look on life, and make them a conscious decision (or not), rather than be run by them unawares.