Six Sentence Sunday

Welcome to my SSS! For the month of September, I'm highlighting sentences from a short story that released two years ago, a contemporary gay erotica piece called Yesterday's Names. Jonathan has traveled to Italy to visit Nettuno, where his hook-up from the night before has surprised him by showing up to keep him company for what he knows will be a long, hard day. I'm skipping slightly ahead to that evening, after Jonathan has returned to Rome, his purpose for coming to Italy fulfilled.

...The images that filled my head weren’t the ones from the club, though I doubted I would ever forget the taste of his mouth on mine. No, I remembered him in the sunlight, the slight pressure of his hand on my back, the lyrical cadences of his voice as we talked more about our families. I had learned he had three siblings he hadn’t seen since he’d come out, and nieces and nephews he’d never seen at all. He’d told me about moving to Rome, and his first boyfriend, while I talked about how excited I’d been the first time I’d been able to kiss a guy without worrying Pastor Grant was going to catch me and renounce me for a sinner.

I didn’t want to spend the night with a stranger. I wanted Davide.

To check out all the other six sentence contributions, head over to the official website.

Dean on Dean

I discovered James Dean my sophomore year of college. I was working at a video store and plowing through my obsessive list on Oscar-nominated movies, when I decided to give East of Eden a go. I'd loved the book when I read it in high school, which had been prompted by my earlier love for the miniseries with Jane Seymour (does anybody remember that? Man, I feel old). I knew the movie version would be different, but I didn't know by how much.

I fell in love.

Okay. I fell in obsession.

Do you know how hard it is to be obsessed with a dead actor from the 50s who only did three movies in a day and age before the Internet was widespread? I had to rely on finding books to fill in the gaps of my knowledge. In Michigan. Before Amazon. I did, of course, because I was just that determined.  At one point, I had such a huge Dean archive, I had to hide it from my then-boyfriend for fear of looking crazy. And it's weird, but neither of his other two movies got to me the way East of Eden did. For whatever reason, that one hit a chord at just the right time.

My love for Dean waned over the years. I broke up my Dean library before moving to the UK to get married (because there's nothing like evaluating your pack rat tendencies like paying for overseas shipping on your belongings), and my obsession became just a happy memory.

But I still smiled like a schoolgirl when I saw this gallery of Dean pictures from Life magazine. Some of them are cultural icons. A couple I'd never even seen before. All of them made me nostalgic, for my more carefree college years, for the young man whose life was cut too short, for simpler times gone by.

Getting involved

I always start writing a book hoping readers will fall in love with my characters. That they'll feel for them. Cry with them. Smile with them.

Then I read someone else's book that I have those feelings for, only to get the rug yanked out from under me because of a plot twist that feels like betrayal, and I think, "Why on earth would I inflict this on anybody else?"

I was asked when I finished the book this afternoon and was ranting about it if I was going to bother continuing with the series. My response: "Oh, hell, yes. I did not come this far not to find out how it ends."

And you know what? I keep thinking, The author better fix what she broke.

But that means she did her job, doesn't it? Over the course of this series, she's made me come to believe/love/trust in the characters and world she's built. So much so, that it felt like I got my heart ripped out as I devoured the last fifty pages of the book.

I guess I have to respect her for that. And continue to wish that my readers might feel a fraction of it for my stories.

But...

...she still better fix it.

A Bad Lip Reading

Generally speaking, I don't read YA. It's just not a genre that interests me enough to add to my TBR repertoire. However, like everything else in life, there are exceptions. The biggest is The Hunger Games trilogy.

I only read the first book because my  twelve-year-old daughter begged me to do so before I took her to see the movie last March. Only...I didn't do it before we went. I enjoyed the movie enough, though, to pick it up that week. I then devoured the next two. They're not perfect--the choice to use 1st person narrative forces information dumps in the last two chapters of each book in order to get all the information out that Katniss isn't privy to, which is extremely annoying--but each one gave me an emotional wallop when I finished it. I just love the characters, and the world, and its rawness, and...well, I loved them enough to see the movie six more times over the next four months.

All that being said, when I saw this video on YouTube yesterday, I giggled like a ten-year-old. The humor in it is childish and a little stupid, but, well, yeah, I still laughed at it. Maybe you will, too.

Unbranded

The most consistent piece of marketing advice given to authors is, "Brand yourself."

Guess what I refuse to do, lol?

I understand the reasoning behind it. It makes perfect sense. Write the same genre/type of story, with a consistent voice, and build a readership who just might follow you into other genres when you're ready. However, for me, there's a problem with that.

If I had to write the same genre or type of story over and over again, I'd go nuts.

The only brand I can give myself is romance writer. I just can't--and frankly, refuse--to limit the romances I write to a particular sexuality. Yes, it's been primarily m/m recently, but that's because I've been satisfying my het needs in stories I'll never sell. That'll change soon, I know. I'm starting to reach my m/m limit. But the thing is, I'm not interested in the specific body parts. I fall in love with the people behind the facades. Those are the love stories I want to do. How can I ignore entire segments of the population, just because of their orientation?

Barring limiting myself by sexuality, I know I could always brand myself in a specific genre, but here, too, I run into the same problem. I get bored. I finish one kind of story, and the last thing I want to do is write another one like it. I can't even read in a single genre. My TBR books are separated out into eight different categories, each equally interesting and entertaining for me, and I never read the same genre consecutively (except when I'm stuck in a series, but that's another issue entirely).

Don't get me wrong. I admire those authors who excel at this. I also recognize everybody is different, their writing needs are different, their goals are different. My one and only goal has ever been to create imaginary worlds. I spent years in theatre and film, performing, shooting, editing. I can't remember a time in my life when I wasn't living in imaginary places.

These stories are my havens. Each one has to be unique, because each serves to satisfy some need of mine. When I'm feeling buoyant, I'll write bantery contemporary. When I'm contemplative, I tend to do historicals. I write a lot of paranormals because I get tired of having to restrain myself to the physics of the real world. The list goes on.

So no matter how much I know I should, I just can't brand myself. I'm not an m/m writer. I'm not a paranormal writer. Sometimes, I even wonder if I'm necessarily a romance writer.

If I'm anything, it's a storyteller.

Now that brand sounds right.

Folsom Street Fair

I'm currently losing a battle with what I suspect is a sinus infection, so my coherency is minimal today.

With that in mind, I'm just going to direct people to the San Francisco Chronicle, and their article about the Folsom Street Fair this past weekend. There's a slide show of what I know are some of the tamer possibilities that abounded at the fair, too. Events like this, the fact that they even exist, are just one more reason why I love living in the Bay Area.

Life should be about embracing differences, not condemning them.

Six Sentence Sunday

Welcome to my SSS! For the month of September, I'm highlighting sentences from a short story that released two years ago, a contemporary gay erotica piece called Yesterday's Names. Last week, the distraction Jonathan was searching for culminated in a hook-up with Davide and a sweet good-bye. Now, he's off to Nettuno for the purpose of his visit to Italy, where he is surprised by Davide showing up, to be there since he believes Jonathan needs a friend.

Within two minutes, we were back in the sunshine, a map of the cemetery with the grave I wanted clearly marked in hand.

Not all of the crosses bore names. I tried not to look at them too closely as we walked by, but when we passed the third one with the same inscription, I pulled my glasses off to scrub at my eyes.

Davide immediately stopped. He waited patiently for me to pull myself together, silent and present, the only two things I needed right now.

If I was losing it over, “Here rests in honored glory, a Comrade in Arms, known but to God,” how did I ever think I was going to make it with a grave I actually recognized?

To check out all the other six sentence contributions, head over to the official website.