Welcome to Christopher Koehler's blog

Latest

“The Advent Calendar” is out!

MRL Press released “The Advent Calendar,” which introduces Toby and Derek and their conflict about whether or not to have children, today. The story started this summer as part of a challenge by MRL Press editor Kris Jacen to “make mud sexy.” I’m still not sure how that screamed Christmas! to me, but it did. Or maybe it was just that Z.A. Maxfield had been badgering me to write a short story for a while. I prefer to write novels and was actually surprised the story came out as well as it did. Or maybe I shouldn’t say that…

Funny story: I actually got Kris’s attention with a synopsis for the story, but had only written maybe a quarter of it when she told me she wanted to see the entire story. Naturally, at the very moment I read that email on my phone, I was sitting at Apple’s Genius Bar while one of the genii pronounced last rites for my laptop’s logic board. So I bought a wireless keyboard and banged out the entire story on my iPad (my fingers are really too big to use the touch screen for any kind of serious typing).

And voila! The first draft of “The Advent Calendar” was born.

The excerpt below captures of the undercurrent of humor to what is otherwise a serious, even sober, story:

Up on the ladder, Derek cringed. He should’ve seen this coming. It happened whenever his nieces and nephews came by for an afternoon or an overnight. Toby enjoyed those times so much that he went through withdrawal when the kids left. Meanwhile, Derek usually had to lay down with a cold compress over his eyes to recover. But not Toby. He knew he had to head this off. “Hand me that string of lights, will you? No, not those, the colored ones.”

Toby dutifully complied, handing them up to his husband, who proceeded to work over part of a tree. “Remember the year we had the animatronic reindeer? Oh my God, was that ever hideous. Remember?”

“Yeah, one fell over, as I recall.”

“Worse, the one that fell over developed some kind of tick in its circuitry and its hind legs kicked helplessly at the air like it’d been shot, like in a cartoon.”

Toby smiled at the recollection. “You didn’t really help matters. You had to go and put up Santa aiming a shotgun at it.”

“Not just put up, Toby,” he said smugly, and really, it was some of his finest work. “I had plywood cut and then painted it myself.”

“All the neighborhood kids screamed at the sight, at least the young ones did. We had angry parents banging on our door for weeks.”

“You have to look on the bright side, Toby. We didn’t have any carolers, either. Total peace and quiet the entire holiday season.”

“You’re absolutely incorrigible, you know that?”

“And you should know by now that your mock disapproval only encourages me. I’m not satisfied with an eye roll anymore. No, it’s a facepalm or nothing for me. Otherwise I know I haven’t tried hard enough.”

“So in other words, you’re saying that debacle was my fault?”

Derek held out a hand for more lights. “You’re an enabler, Toby. Face it.”

Anyway, there it is. I hope you like the story.

Share on Facebook

November 27, 2011 | Categories: Anxious little monkey, Promotion, Writing | Leave A Comment »

The Dead Bird Derby! (or, why I hate Thanksgiving)

Well, here we are, boys and girls and whatevers, another Thanksgiving is upon us. I’ve come to the conclusion that I dislike Thanksgiving and almost all it stands for.

For starters, why do we have to have a special day to be grateful for our blessings? Is that not artificial? OK, cool, here we are, fat, rich, and happy. Let’s drop a box of mac & cheese off at the homeless shelter to feel good about ourselves and re-enforce our position in life. Then we’ll go spend money at the mall the next day. No, gratitude is like New Year’s resolutions. If it’s that important, you shouldn’t wait.

The holiday might commemorate something the Pilgrims did to and with the Wampanoags, but its modern observation is laughably young when compared to the not quite 400 year old incident it commemorates. Lincoln instituted a day of thanksgiving in 1863 while the United States was trying to snuff itself, and wasn’t a federal holiday until 1941. So much for the Pilgrims. But then, I suppose all holidays are pretty much schmoozed together, like Christmas magically coinciding with the Saturnalia.

There’s also something about the food that disturbs me. Let’s start with the main course, the turkey. There’s nothing natural about it. Those poor birds are pumped full of chemicals, and are so overbred they can’t even reproduce without human intervention. My son’s godmother’s grandfather helped develop the technique. I don’t know why poultry that can’t fuck bothers me, but it does.

I’m not sure whether or not it was the time I walked into the kitchen to see my mother fisting the turkey, or watching Dad carve the thing up with some hedge-trimmer of an electric knife and seeing all the bits of meat scatter into the air. I’d resumed carnivory by this time I witnessed this, so the fact that it was a dead bird surrounded by a cloud of meat wasn’t it.

Maybe I just don’t like turkey, a sauce made of innards, and stuffing, which I pray isn’t cooked inside the bird because it won’t get hot enough to kill whatever lurks in the eggs used to bind it together. Hmmm, now that I think about it, perhaps this is the way the chickens strike a blow for their cousins, the turkeys. You want a piece of us? they say. Fine. But the eggs? Those’ll kill you.

Really? This is what the richest society on earth has been reduced to eating? We don’t live the way the Plymouth Colony Puritans did, so why must we eat like them?

I suppose the real reason I dislike Thanksgiving is because it’s one of the few family gatherings I’ve not managed to avoid. It can be very dispiriting to see just how polluted my gene pool really is. Nature or nurture, can there be anything more damning than seeing everyone at one time? There’s the grandparents, who think a jar of “pickled buns” (a jar of full of tiny butts made of panty hose and cotton balls) is the acme of humor. There’re the dead-behind-the-eyes second cousins who, in the amount of time one has earned a BA, an MA, a PhD, and started a family, can’t quite manage to graduate from community college. Or what of the mysterious relatives—no one’s really sure how exactly they’re related—who always manage to find their way to the buffet table, but can’t seem to figure out how to prepare anything to contribute?

Or there’s the utter mind-numbing tedium of a day spent waiting for a meal one doesn’t wish to eat in the first place. Football, you say. If I’m going to watch TV all day, football is not what I’d choose. Puzzles? Cards? Board—or is that bored—games? Save them for the retirement home. It call comes down to the people, and Mom and Dad, if you’d wanted me to spend time with these, we should’ve seen them more than once or twice a year while I was growing up, because now that I’m in my forties? Good luck with that. No, Grandma, I won’t pull your finger. It wasn’t funny last year, or the year before, or the year before that…

I suppose it could be worse. It could be the time a much older relative of my husband hit on him at Thanksgiving dinner. Or maybe that was Christmas. Whatever, it was just creepy.

Share on Facebook

November 24, 2011 | Categories: Cranky cultural mandarinism, damnit | Leave A Comment »

Have you read “Amor Prohibido”?

This entry is part 1 of 1 in the series Book Reviews

Amor Prohibido

Why the heck not? This is a fun, fresh read from another new author on the m/m scene. I never know what the boundaries are between a really long short story and short novella, but AP is in there somewhere. It has chapters, so you can plan to spend some time with appealing characters and a world that I, at least, have never encountered before and I’m betting most readers won’t have, either.

Plot summary:

Jacob Freehan has no job, no man, and no motivation. In pain both from ending a long-term abusive relationship and a severe back injury, he escapes to the sunny seaside town of Puerto Morelos, Mexico for a little yoga, a little R&R, and possibly a place to quietly end his own life.

Pakal is a centuries-old immortal Mayan spirit guide who has been charged with getting Jacob on the path toward healing. Romantic involvement with a spirit charge is strictly forbidden, and it has never been a problem…until now. Pakal sees something special in Jacob, but failure to keep a rapidly growing attraction at bay could result in Jacob losing his life and Pakal being condemned to the Underworld forever…

Excerpt:

Their interactions were so comfortable and easy that Pakal had to remind himself repeatedly that Jacob was his spirit charge, not a friend. Not a lover. Every now and then Jacob’s warm, chocolatey gaze found Pakal’s, and it was as if he were a better man just for having borne witness to that soulful stare. Gods, what he wouldn’t give for them to be just two ordinary mortals. Pakal shoved the foolish longing aside, but it was insistent, like a hungry stray dog.

Eleven hundred years was a long time to be alone.

The gentle breeze playfully ruffled Jacob’s hair while he chatted about his favorite music (techno), his feelings about animal cruelty (con), his feelings about American football (pro), and his favorite foods (Chinese pork buns, and Swiss cheese fondue). Pakal, in turn, discussed the local culture, the history, and the cave formations. Many times he caught himself assisting Jacob in a far too friendly manner, and each time their bodies touched Pakal was overcome by the sensation of their being so…in tune, with each other. He would almost swear their pulses beat in the same rhythm. Yet through it all, Jacob’s posture was still overly controlled. Tight.

They were plodding carefully through a large corridor of stalactites and stalagmites that gave the appearance of a giant shark’s mouth, when Jacob stepped absently and slipped. Pakal grabbed Jacob from behind, just narrowly preventing him from being impaled on the business end of a sharp, vertically jutting piece of rock. Many a tourist had landed at the nearby clinic for such accidents.

“Shit.”

“I warned you to be careful of where you stepped. It’s slippery in here.” Pakal’s breath was heavy, and he was panting right in Jacob’s ear. His heart thudded against the thinner man’s back. Their bodies vibrated together as if they shared the same skin. They were dangling over a great precipice just then, and for the life of him Pakal was too caught up in the thrill to truly care about the consequences. He tightened his grip around Jacob’s naked waist and his light slipped from his fingers into the water. It was stupid. It was dangerous.

It was too late.

The thought was interesting, but fleeting, as Pakal’s hand dipped inside of Jacob’s loose, surfer-style swim shorts.

“Holy, Jesus. What are you doing?” The words held a note of obligatory protest, but even as he said them Jacob’s ass pushed into Pakal’s crotch, and his forearm and head came to rest against the curve of the cave wall. Both men breathed heavily, totally in sync.

“Keep it down,” Pakal whispered. Gods, Jacob’s cock was smooth. Deliciously soft and hard at the same time. “You’re so tense. I’m helping you to loosen up.”

Jacob’s breath hitched. “Someone could come by here any minute.” Yet even as he said it, Jacob’s hard length fucked faster into Pakal’s wet fist. His dick was perfect against Pakal’s skin; it was long and thin, with only a small amount of soft hair at the base. Pakal’s fingers strayed for a moment to roll Jacob’s weighty sac in his hand, and he longed to feel it inside of his mouth.

“Better be fast, then,” Pakal breathed.

Review:

Two things impressed me about AP, the setting and a unique plot twist that I can’t say anything about without giving the whole thing away.

The setting alone is worth reading AP for. A lot of books in a lot of genres have handled mythological themes and elements, like the Percy Jackson books currently burning up the YA magical adventure market. Those books, like most, seem to deal with various Western mythologies. Likewise, I’ve read (or read of) a few that deal with aspects of Chinese or Japanese culture. AP depends on Mesoamerican mythology, and in my opinion it provided a wonderful backdrop against which to tell the story of forbidden love between a mortal man and an immortal spirit guide. In a genre where ‘paranormal’ too often means vampires or werewolves, that Carrington headed in a completely differently direction heralds good things for subsequent publications.

There were a few minor editorial issues, but those aren’t the writer’s fault. This is Carrington’s first m/m publication, and I can tell she’s one to watch for in the future, especially if you like paranormal romances.

Share on Facebook

November 15, 2011 | Categories: Book Reviews, Promotion | 2 Comments »

Updates

Since I managed not to sleep much last night, effectively making writing or any other endeavor more complicated than feeding my pie difficult, I thought I’d post a few updates.

My short story, “The Advent Calendar,” will be released by MLR Press on November 27, 2011. By happy coincidence, this is the first Sunday in Advent.

Blurb:

Toby wants children, Derek doesn’t, and this just might end their ten-year relationship. But will a near-brush with death help them set aside their differences to focus on what matters most?

Excerpt:

Toby wanted children more than anything, and it bothered Derek to see the man he’d fallen in love with so down, but it also made him feel defensive, as if he, Derek, were personally responsible for the other man’s unhappiness and dissatisfaction. Whenever the subject came up, Derek felt torn between comforting Toby and rolling his eyes. Lately, it seemed like rolling his eyes won, and didn’t that just make him feel like a prime, Grade-A jerk?

But every time Toby started mooning on about the pitter-patter of little feet, all he could do was wonder just when it was Toby had been infected with the baby rabies. Symptoms included feelings of vague yearning, elevated levels of sentimentality, and otherwise inexplicable trips to Baby Gap.

The real danger of baby rabies, Derek thought darkly as he climbed down the ladder, was its communicability to those closest to the primary victim. The entire subject made him feel like dirt. He loved Toby more than anything. Was what they had not enough? Was he not meeting Toby’s needs? The idea hurt to think about, and made him feel worse than he already did these days.

Later that night, after perfunctory lovemaking, Derek lay awake, Toby snoring softly beside him. The rest of their evening had been pleasant enough, both of them backing away from the subject, an intricate dance of avoidance and unvoiced recriminations, neither saying what he really wanted or meant.

They were together, alone.

Cover:

The Advent Calendar

I’ll be making a round of blog tours in late November and December to promote the story, so look for links and cross postings to come.

On other fronts, Rocking the Boat and Tipping the Balance seem to be selling well, and that’s always nice.

Work continues well on The Answer To His Prayers, my current work in progress. I may re-title it, First Impressions since that’s a closer reflection of the story. Putting it briefly, it’s a gay riff on Pride and Prejudice. Since I seem to be getting a reputation for telling sweet stories with hot sex, hopefully it’ll be more of the same. Once I’ve got the first draft completed, I’ll post an excerpt here and there to tantalize.

Share on Facebook

November 15, 2011 | Categories: Gratitude, Promotion, Writing | Leave A Comment »

Come out and play

Today’s National Coming Out Day. Tonight, twenty-one years ago, more than half my life ago, I came out to my mother. The entire experience was paradoxical, something I thought would be a mere formality turned out to be a Very Big Deal, something I’d feared doing for years became one of the best things I ever did.

I knew I was gay long before I came out. I was aware of being different from my peers “in that way” from a very early age. I didn’t have a name for it, at least not at first. Despite not remembering vast stretches of my childhood, I remember quite clearly being in the locker room at the pool at the local university. I attended a small private school at the time and the school went swimming for a field trip. I’d never seen naked adult men before, and oh my God. I didn’t want to leave the locker room. I just wanted to look. Even now, I remember the intensity of the feeling.

Another snap shot: I was maybe 7 or so and at a friend’s house. I guess her mother was one of those wacky free spirits you read about, because when she came back from a vacation with her boyfriend, she brought her children smutty magazines, Playgirl for her daughter and Playboy for her son. The Playgirl centerfold electrified me. Yep, that right there. That’s for me. I kept finding reasons to look at it.

This same friend taught me the word ‘gay.’ It meant boys who like boys, and I thought, “Oh. That’s me then.” Unfortunately, she alsop taught me that it was not a Good Thing to be gay. I don’t remember now exactly how she conveyed that information, just that it wasn’t something you were supposed to be.

Snapshot (because that’s all I have of childhood memories–flashes and images rather than concrete stretches of recollection): Around the same age at my piano lesson. The song I was assigned to learn was called “Let’s Be Gay and Play.” The accompanying illustration was of children playing or some such sentimentalized twaddle. I was terrified. If I played that song, somehow everyone would know my secret. I objected to it strenuously. My music teacher, a big ol’ earth-mother of a hippie, was, I realize now, pretty angry at my objection. I remember her scratching out the title and calling it, “Let’s Be Happy and Spend Money.” It was only a few years ago that I figured out she was actually calling me a shallow bourgeois asshole.

Snapshot: I was maybe 9 and at my dad’s place for the weekend. A friend had come over, and we found a copy of Playboy under my dad’s bed. My friend was all over it, but I remember looking at the centerfold and thinking, “Uh…no.” So there I was, nine years old, knowing I liked boys, knowing that pictures of naked women did nothing for me, and already I had The Fear. It would be another decade before I so much as kissed another guy, but only because I was too afraid and dense to realize that the guy in my church youth group on whom I had a huge crush had one right back at me and was trying in his own fumbling way to ask me out. I sometimes wonder how different things might’ve been had I realized what Mike was up to. I don’t waste a lot of time on “what if,” however.

It was in that decade that I grew more and more afraid of being found out, of disappointing my parents. I grew more and more adept at lying to protect my secret, at flying under the radar, at suppressing emotions and feelings that might betray me. That was the decade of the closet. It was a stifling, deadening place. Sure, I felt safe there, but it was the safety of a prison cell or a tomb, and when it comes down to it, I didn’t even feel that safe there. I was always afraid something would betray me, that I would say or do the wrong thing and everyone would figure me out. The safety of the closet is a mirage, and it takes a tremendous amount of energy and effort to maintain it.

But emotions are funny things, and have a way of expressing themselves whether you want them to or not. I was starving for release and for freedom. The closet led to some pretty flaky behavior. I knew I was gay, but couldn’t tell anyone. In this era before the GSA and the knowledge of the existence of homosexuality by society at large, I felt alone. I hungered for contact, any kind of contact, with other people like myself. I grew up in a college town, and had access to the college paper. There were ads in the back for the gay student group. I remember calling the number just to hear the voice of another gay man, even if I was too afraid to say anything and hung up. Those men and women were gutsy putting their number out back in the ’80s. I’m sure that man thought I was just another homophobic jackass crank calling. I actually know that guy now (hi there, Bill!).

By the time I started college, I knew I had to come out. The realization terrified me. I was a very odd combination of unworldliness (what were those holes in the bathroom stall walls for?) and textbook knowledge. By the end of my sophomore year, the strain had taken its toll. That summer, I felt like I was going to break, reading everything I could about being gay (and there are so truly dire books out there), needing and fearing to deal with this. At the risk of sounding melodramatic, I felt like my personality was fragmenting. I knew I couldn’t take much more, and when school started I manned up and went to my first support group for bisexuals, gays, and lesbians. It was freeing and terrifying and it became exactly what I needed in very short order.

I realized that I would only ever be free, truly free, if I stopped letting The Fear rule me and told those I was closest to. I lived at home that year while going to college, which made things easier and harder. I also knew that without a concrete deadline, I’d never tell a soul. Enter National Coming Out Day 1990. I took my mother for a walk in the park near our house to tell her. I figured she already knew. I mean, she had to, right? She was the one who took me to all those musicals and footed the bill for my interest in fashion, after all. It’s not like glitter and rainbows gushed from my mouth when I spoke or anything, but I never displayed any characteristics of straight boys. She just thought I was hygienic, I guess.

Boy was I ever wrong. It’s a good thing I was, too, or who knows how long I might’ve carried on with this nonsense. She was shocked, she was horrified (despite having lesbian friends), basically everything I’d feared all along. She blamed herself. She blamed me. It was a rough time, and given that my teen years under her roof and under her thumb had been pretty rough, this didn’t help. Had I not been financially dependent on my parents, I’ve have walked.

I went to PFLAG meetings with her, but I felt like there was a lot of blaming me for not being as understanding of her drama as I “should” have been. There wasn’t a lot of sympathy for the fact that I had my own emotions to deal with, and that having to bear the brunt of hers was more than just the proverbial straw. It was the whole damn bail of hay. I don’t remember why she didn’t go by herself, but I refused to go back. I’d been blaming myself for this long enough, I didn’t need a bunch of do-gooders blaming me for not going belly up at my mom’s feet so she could pick out my liver at her leisure. Sorry, PFLAG, I’m told you do great work, but I never saw it.

What made the difference was my mom finally spoke to the one the ministers she knew. Fortunately, we belonged to a very liberal Protestant denomination, and gave us both useful information. To me, he said that while I’d had a lifetime to get used to the idea, she hadn’t. I should give her time. Of her, he asked a question, and it was a simple one. Did she like having a son? She affirmed that yes, she did. He then told her that if she played her cards right, she’d eventually have two, once I met someone. If she screwed this up and let her emotions get in the way, she’d have none because she’d have chased me off.

We moved through it. I wish I could say it made everything all sunshine and unicorns in my house, but it didn’t. I still had a very rocky relationship with my mother. Coming out just removed a major barrier and the issues it raised. It also set me free. I was able to be myself, to learn who I really was. I hadn’t been able to do that in the closet because I’d spent so much time protecting my deep, dark secret. It set me free to heal. It set me free to kiss a man for the first time and make dating mistakes and form misalliances with epically unsuitable men. Coming out liberated me to be a real person and not just a pretender in my life so that when I met the man I married, I was capable of forming and maintaining a healthy, loving relationship.

There are other memories, other stories to tell, like how my husband inadvertently outed me to my father, but those will keep for another time. Coming out was one of the best things I ever did for myself, maybe the best thing I ever did for myself. I’m an out and proud gay man, and this is so central to my self-identity I can’t imagine it being any other way.

So if you somehow end up reading this and aren’t out, think about it. It’s worth it. Drop me a line if you want. If you’re out, or aren’t gay, but know someone who’s struggling, pass this on if you think it’d help.

Share on Facebook

October 11, 2011 | Categories: Uncategorized | 6 Comments »

Jumping up and down on the street corner while buck naked

Huh, it hasn’t been nearly as long as I’d thought since I updated this, just late July. That means I only let one month go entirely without posting. I’m such a bad, boring blogger. I’d promise to do better but we all know that’s a lie.

I had two rounds of edits Tipping the Balance, plus galleys, in August, and that absorbed the lion’s share of my discretionary time. Despite my own proofreading, plus that of my two beta readers, one of whom is a professional editor in her own right, there were more typos and infelicities of style than I considered acceptable. So I read the entire manuscript backwards. I forget where I first happened up on this technique–a tweet from another author? Not sure. But it works very well. If the point of a novel is to create flow and catch the reader up in the story, reading a manuscript backwards deliberately circumvents this. The problem with that flow as a writer of course is that your subconscious fills in blanks and corrects errors without troubling your conscious mind. Reading backward deliberately circumvents this, forcing you to realize just how ugly your writing really is. It’s just very time consuming. I hope Tipping the Balance is the better for it.

Here’s the cover art for it. I can’t say I love it like I love the cover for Rocking the Boat, but then, we always have a special place in our hearts for our first, right?

Still, I’m not complaining. I’ve got my name on the cover of another book. Tomorrow, September 12, is the release date, so get out there and crash Dreamspinner’s servers in your frenzied demand for your very own copy.

E-book.

Paperback.

I’m not sure why this one’s different, but I’m not nearly as anxious about this release. Don’t get me wrong. I love the book and I’m proud of the story I told. I’m just not losing sleep or popping acid blockers and benzodiazepines. Maybe because Tipping the Balance isn’t my first novel. This does not, however, mean I won’t be up early downloading my own e-copy.

Currently I’m working on a gay riff on Pride and Prejudice tentatively titled The Answer to His Prayers. Years ago, before my husband and I adopted The Kid Himself, my life resembled those depicted in Miss Austen’s work insofar as life consisted of a variety of social occasions designed to find people boyfriends/husbands, we all knew each other’s business, and heaven help you if you did something gauche.

I also wrote and sold a short story to MLR Press in August. “The Advent Calendar” is a Christmas story (duh) to be released in December (even more duh). More details will follow.

On a personal front, I seem to be moving back into coaching, at least for a while. The big thing around the boathouse these days is qualifying for a seat in one of the team’s boats in the Head of the Charles in Boston, one of the biggest regattas in North America and the biggest in the US. It can be great fun. But the anxiety of it all was a bit much for me. I get anxious pretty easily. In terms of scores on the erg, I’ve got more power than anyone else on the team save for a man who’s thirteen years younger than I am. In terms of applying it on the water…well, that’s another story.

In thinking about it, I realized I have a very complex relationship with crew. It’s a major part of my life and my self-identity. I will always think of myself as a rower, and currently I’m enjoying time in my single, the one my husband bought me when we could marry legally. I wasn’t enjoying practice in the bigger boats much at all, particularly with the build-up to Head of the Charles, because crew is also one of the major foci of my anxiety issues and perfectionism. So something I enjoy very much also makes me crazier than just about anything else, and yet as an author who spends a great deal of time alone inside his head, I need to get out and see people. I get a little weird if I don’t.

Then it occurred to me there was a way to have it both ways. I told my coach that if I don’t make a boat, I’ll run practices for those who aren’t going to Boston so she can focus the majority of her efforts on the Boston-bound boats. I’ve got coaching experience, in fact I have a USRowing level 1 coaching certificate. Granted, it’s been a while, but it’ll come back. It’s just like falling off a bike, right? This way I can contribute to the Boston effort, even if I’m not supplying horsepower. Look at me being a team player. Who knew.

In and among all that, there’s parenting and being a husband. I don’t talk about those a lot here, and that’ll probably stay that way for while. They deserve their privacy, even if I’m jumping up and down on a street corner, naked as the day I was born, and hooting and hollering, which is basically what social media and writing both are all about. “Look at me! Look at me! Buy my books! Buy my books!”

Seriously. Go buy mine.

Share on Facebook

September 11, 2011 | Categories: Anxious little monkey, Promotion, Rowing, Writing | 7 Comments »

First edits for Tipping the Balance

Last Sunday I received the first edits for Tipping the Balance. I don’t want to say I’d forgotten about it, because let’s be real. It’s my second novel and I’m shallow that way. But the email I received when it entered the editorial queue said something about 8-12 weeks, which would’ve put it during my in-laws’ upcoming visit.

I’ve been working on it ever since, essentially dropping both A2HP (My WIP), but also a short story I’m working on in response to a challenge posted on Z. A. Maxfield’s Cyber Cafe a few week backs to make mud sexy. Both are on hold for now, since the edits are due this coming Monday, July 25.

Mostly I’ve let the editor have his/her way. I figure that since Dreamspinner Press bought it, I need to pick my battles carefully. That said, parts of DSP’s house style irritate me no end, but with each manuscript I seem to pick some minor and admittedly ridiculous point about which to take a stand. I should probably grow up a little.

All of this said, I’m trying something different this go around. I forget where I first encountered this idea–DSP’s author’s group? Anyway, I read somewhere that a high effective way to edit a manuscript is to read it backwards. So I started with the last sentence, read it normally, and then moved on to the second-to-last sentence, read it, etc. I’m amazed and appalled at how many typos, dropped words, missed words, and near-miss words (forbidden instead of forbidding, for example), and repeated words and expressions I’ve found. I’m only about 50 pages into it, too. The thing is, I edited the manuscript before sending it to my betas as well as submitting, my two betas edited, and at least one person at DSP has been over it.

This works precisely because it interrupts a key component of a novel’s structure, and that’s the flow of the plot. As a writer, I want people to be caught up in the characters and situations I’ve depicted, and to that end, each sentence should flow into the next. The problem with that as I edit my work is that my brain supplies whatever’s missing or wrong to create a coherent picture. By reading each sentence in isolation, I subvert this and can see the words for what they are.

Unfortunately, it’s very time consuming. I won’t be able to finish before I have to send the edits back. Fortunately, there’ll be another round of edits before I get the galley, or at least there’s supposed to be. I’ll make note of how far I got and start up from there. I’m editing this way from now on, only I’ll do it before I submit, or maybe even before I send it to my betas.

Still no word on when exactly it’ll be published or any proofs for the cover art. I find myself far more patient than I was last time. I know what to expect now. That’s my MO. Early in grad school I’m sure I came across as a needy insecure pest to my professors, but by the time I was writing my dissertation, my advisor actually emailed me to see if I was still alive since she hadn’t heard from me in so long. I was fine, I just didn’t need anything from her and didn’t see the point in bothering her. So it is with writing novels.

So check back from time to time. Who knows, there might be an update.

Share on Facebook

July 22, 2011 | Categories: Anxious little monkey, Promotion, Timesucks, Writing | Leave A Comment »

Newsy!

Quick update: Tipping the Balance has entered the editorial queue. Since I just received the contract three weeks ago, I’m surprised how fast this is.

On other fronts, I’m working on the storyboards for my next novel. The working title is The Answer to His Prayers (A2HP), and it’s a gay riff on Pride and Prejudice. I noticed at one point that my life resembled a Jane Austen novel insofar that it consisted of a series of social engagements among the members of a small community, the purpose of which was to find everyone husbands, and we all knew way too much about each other’s mating habits.

You may notice that this has nothing to do with rowing or the world of the CalPac Crew. This is because I’m utterly stymied by the plot for book three. So that’s on hold for the time being. It’ll happen, but not yet. I refuse to write a book just to get it written. I have to have a story to tell and I have to fall in love with my protagonists, the way I did with Nick and Morgan or Brad and Drew, or as I am with Henry and Cameron in A2HP.

Share on Facebook

July 3, 2011 | Categories: Promotion, Uncategorized, Writing | Leave A Comment »

Foaming at the mouth

I just got a Google alert. Apparently Rocking the Boat has just appeared on a pirate site. I knew it would only be a matter of time as many of my fellow authors have experienced this same dubious honor. In fact, not long after I joined Dreamspinner Press’s authors’ group piracy was a one of the topics that people discussed in depth.

Can open, worms everywhere.

Piracy constitutes a real concern with digital publishing. For one thing, it’s easy. Just upload a file. For another thing, it’s apparently victimless. I mean, it’s just digital signals, right? No one’s really hurt by. I imagine that’s what these brave new digital cowboys tell themselves as they trample all over my intellectual property rights. I mean, they took down the recording industry, right?

Except that they didn’t.

Or maybe they think they’re striking a blow against the Man. Yep, an author’s sure the Man. I’ve made a whopping $106 off Rocking the Boat as of the last royalties statement. That’ll sure keep me in…lattes, maybe? Well, at around $5 a pop that kept me in 21 lattes. My publisher is a small outfit with a similarly small profit margin. Writing and selling these books makes no one rich.

Piracy is the only real con to e-publishing I see. People are free to duplicate their copy of my book as much as they want to. Technically—and I hope it’s that people don’t realize this and not that they don’t care—when they download a book, it’s more like it’s being licensed to them, rather than if they went down to their local independent book seller and bought a book. Read the fine print before you download.

If they went to a book store, or bought a copy off Amazon, they’d have a physical copy of the book to do with as they pleased, like loan it, give it away, or re-sell it at a used bookstore. People think that’s what an e-copy is, but from the standpoint of intellectual property, it’s not.

As a writer, I’m interested to see how this develops. I don’t know if we’ll evolve towards some kind of common license, or how copyrights will change, if change they will. The legal foundation for patents and copyrights and things like that is in the Constitution, and that’s hard to change and deliberately so.

Don’t like the fact that you can’t share my book infinitely? Too bad. Lobby Congress to take up a Constitutional amendment. In the mean time, pirates are nothing but petty thieves.

For remedy, I think we can look to the music industry, since it’s so much further along with digital-rights management, even prosecuting people who’ve downloaded pirated music. I don’t know if that’s the right approach or not, to be honest, but I don’t have a better suggestion, either. And right now, I’d love to see a few book pirates strung up by their short-and-curlies.

As a reader, I buy books and I read them on my iPhone. It’s fantastic. I’ve got a whole library in my pocket, and as a…I’m not a soccer dad, a karate dad? Anyway, I’m away from the house a lot, and it’s very convenient to have a choice of books on my phone. My husband’s similarly enamored of his Kindle. While there’ll always be a warm place in my heart for the aesthetic of a book in my hands, and the peace of a library, I live by the convenience of digital media. This isn’t some neo-Luddite rant about new-fangled technology and get the hell off my lawn, you damn brats.

This is about someone’s flagrant disregard for the law and what is morally right.

So what did I do? As soon as I got the Google alert, I complained the host under the DCMA link, and since it was the Kindle edition of my book, I let Amazon’s copyright infringement office know, too. There’s a not a lot more I can do, I guess, although if I get any pushback, I just might hire an attorney.

Share on Facebook

June 12, 2011 | Categories: Anxious little monkey, damnit, Media | Leave A Comment »

Why I row

Wake Up and Row

People ask me why I row. This video, shot my by one of my teammates, describes it very well. It really is that magical out on the water.

The Port is sometimes not much to look at, and I’m convinced that the tugboat operators are the minions of Satan, but the water is usually fantastic.

But it’s more than that.

At it’s best, rowing reminds me to stay focused on the moment, not the past, not the future. It’s the stroke right now that matters. The last stroke is history. I can’t change it. I can’t do anything about it. If it sucked, I can do this stroke differently. If it was good, I can try to duplicate it. The next stroke hasn’t happened yet. If I worry about it, I’m not focused on the present stroke.

Pain is temporary, but the pride of accomplishment lasts a long time. There’s also a difference between pain (your body’s way of telling you, Knock it off, fool!) and discomfort, which can and should be tolerated on the road to growth. No one every promised us an entirely comfortable life, and learning to tolerate discomfort comes with maturity.

Share on Facebook

June 12, 2011 | Categories: Media, Rowing, Timesucks | Leave A Comment »

Guest blog spot and why rowing is better than sex

I’m up as a guest blogger on the wonderful Rie McGaha’s An Author’s Tale with a piece on why rowing is better than sex.

Seriously.

It’s (ahem) up.

What? You thought I was saying rowing was really better than sex? I suppose you’ll have to go see to find out.

Share on Facebook

March 20, 2011 | Categories: Promotion, Rowing, Writing | Leave A Comment »

Sally Field moments

Hi, everyone,

Here are some updates on various things.

Author’s chat

First all, I apologize to anyone who went to find me last Saturday. The chat on Facebook lasted all of about ten minutes and consisted almost entirely of me frantically communicating with Dreamspinner’s social-media boffin about just why exactly it was that I couldn’t post anything, then about where the page had gone. She didn’t know, either.

So yeah, I managed to kill off DSP’s Facebook fan page. Apparently my powers are growing. Everyone has one special skill. I once thought that mine was to find barcodes that wouldn’t scan at the supermarket. Without fail, every week when I do the marketing I find at least one item that doesn’t show up no matter how many times the clerk waves it over the scanner.

But no more. I’m unsure, however, whether this superpower applies only to Facebook, which would be cool enough, give its creepy privacy policies, or whether or not with a little effort and a can-do spirit, I might be able to take out other, more objectionable webpages. I’d explore the issue but when you boil it down, I’m really pretty lazy. I mean, there’s a reason I’m a writer: too lazy to work, too anxious to turn to a life of crime.

Reviews

Amos Lassen posted the first review of Rocking the Boat, and definitely liked the book. I won’t reprint the whole things, but a few choice snipets are in order.

“Rocking the Boat” is the first thing I have read by Christopher Koehler and he is off to a wonderful literary beginning.

I will…tell you that the characters that Koehler creates are wonderfully fleshed out and real and the writing is excellent. I could not help be reminded a bit of Patricia Nell Warren’s “The Front Runner”.

It is great fun discovering new writers and I have a feeling we will be hearing more from Christopher Koehler so keep him on your periscope.

Blushing!

To be honest, I’m not sure how I feel about the comparison with The Frontrunner. I mean, it’s flattering, don’t get me wrong. I just feel like Warren’s book is such a classic that there’s no way my little confection could equal that.

It’s also a lot to live up to. Not to jinx anything, but people’s whose freshman efforts receive nothing but laurels tend to produce sucky sophomore efforts. I’m aiming for a sustained writing career, obviously, and not a flash in the pan. See above statement about laziness and crime.

I also wonder about The Frontrunner’s relevance anymore. When it was published, it was a big deal, an early positive depiction of gay characters, gay athletes in particular. Like The Best Little Boy in the World, it’s classic work that every well-read reader of gay fiction needs to have at least glanced at. But in this day and age, LGTB people are well represented in the media, and there are many (nonporn) webpages devoted to gay athletes. It’s a different world, and I’d like to think, a better one. It’s that change, however, that turns critical works into classics that no one reads.

On other but related fronts, I’ve received my first responses from readers. People I don’t know, I mean. They’ve liked it. So here’s a shout-out to Brian and Rachel and Ami!

So yeah, I’ve already had my own little Sally Field moment.

And speaking of reviews, there’ve been reader reviews published on Goodreads. Okay, one review, one that seems to consist of someone duplicating the number of stars he or she gave me with keyboard characters. I’m not complaining. It was a 4-star review.

I’m not quite sure what to make of Goodreads. I’ve no complaints with the reviews, including and especially the one that let me know I adequately addressed the biggest fear I had about RTB’s reception, namely the fact that a coach’s involvement with an athlete could be viewed as predation. Is viewed, in fact, by pretty much all the appropriate regulatory bodies governing sport. I think I covered the reasons for this pretty well in the book, given that Nick’s prone to gnawing his guts out.

But I won this reviewer, a former teacher, over. After all, Morgan’s an adult, and as he pointed out to Nick, he has agency, too.

That said, Goodread’s policy about reviewing/rating a book makes no sense to me—you don’t have to have read the book because to require that would be “censorship.” No joke. It is not, apparently, censorship, however, to require authors agree to not engage reviewers.

I can understand that. Writers are notoriously thin-skinned, and the temptation to “correct” either factual errors about the book or rebut a negative review overwhelms some of us. For the record, I don’t think engaging someone who wrote a negative review is a good idea, and I don’t plan to do it unless it’s a point I hadn’t thought of, or if it is and I have specific reasons for writing what I did. But we shall see.

Anyway, reviews are readers’ opinions, no more and no less, no matter how ill-informed…or positive and glowing.

This reminds of the review policy of the American Historical Review, the premier journal for academic history in the US. Only those who’ve written books review them, the logic being that only authors understand the frankly arduous process of constructing a narrative that makes sense. I’ll avoid going into my pet theories of text and the construction of a story, but suffice it to say a novel is an unwieldy thing that at times fights its creator’s attempts to impose his or her structure on it.

This is totally unworkable with fiction, of course, and even more undesirable. The whole point of fiction is to reach a comparatively large audience, not just the small world of one’s fellow authors. Talk about a circle jerk. But just how does requiring the reading a book before posting a review constitute censorship?

Actually, writers aim not only to reach, but hopefully engage with a larger audience, and not everyone will love you. It’s an important lesson to learn, and not just for writers.

Share on Facebook

March 16, 2011 | Categories: Gratitude, Promotion, Writing | 3 Comments »

Guest blogger at Dreamspinner tomorrow!

I’ll be in charge of Dreamspinner’s Facebook page from 12:30 to 4:00 PM tomorrow, so come visit me so I’m not all by myself. I’ll post excerpts from Rocking the Boat, as well as teasers from my work-in-progress, the follow up Tipping the Balance. There’ll be trivia contests, too, just as soon as I come up with questions. Although now that I think about it, in order to answer the questions, you’ll need to have read the book, so if winning a copy of the book is the prize…hmmm.

Anyway, here’s the link: Please don’t leave me there all alone.

Share on Facebook

March 11, 2011 | Categories: Anxious little monkey, Promotion | Leave A Comment »

Listed on Amazon!

Rocking the Boat‘s now listed on Amazon.com. This is the digital equivalent of walking into Borders and seeing my name on the shelf, but better, because Amazon’s not in bankruptcy protection.

Yeah, I’m that shallow.

Share on Facebook

March 2, 2011 | Categories: Promotion, Writing | 2 Comments »