My Manifesto

I’ve been struggling with a new tagline for my books that will encompass all of them—something Jeff Goins calls a manifesto. I used to use “gay men in love and danger,” but that doesn’t cover my golden retriever books or some of the other miscellaneous things I’ve written.

It’s an interesting exercise, to look at all the thirty-plus books I’ve published and see if there is a common thread that runs through them. Though most of my work has involved gay characters, not all has—so maybe being gay or living a gay life isn’t at the core of what I write, or why I write.

Coming out, and what I call “the pain of the closet,” which often drives people to do dangerous or unexpected things, dominated my early work. The early arc of the Mahu Investigations dealt with Kimo’s coming out process—getting dragged out of the closet in Mahu, making gay friends in Mahu Surfer, finding love in Mahu Fire.

Once he was settled down with Mike, I wanted to explore further dimensions of the authentic life he was able to lead—moving in together, getting a dog, fostering a child, eventually fathering twins. But all of this in the end, is about love—he couldn’t have that life he deserved until he opened himself to the possibility of finding love with the right person.

Of course this is rooted in my own life, and the love that I found once I came out. So I began to see that there’s a connection in all my books between living one’s true life, and the ability to find love.

My MFA thesis at FIU, Invasion of the Blatnicks, became my first published book. Steve Berman has to learn to let go of the expectations that surround him before he can fully come into himself. Steve Levitan, in the Golden Retriever mysteries, has to recover from a divorce and incarceration before he can begin to live fully once more. Rochester helps him with that process, giving him unconditional love and teaching Steve how to love again. (And in case you haven’t figured it out, my middle name is Steven, and these two guys represent big parts of who I am, even though both are straight.)

The same is true for my gay characters. Though Aidan Greene of the Have Body Will Guard series has been out of the closet for more than a decade, loving the wrong guy has screwed him up. And even though Liam McCullough chose to come out rather than remain closeted in the US Navy, he doesn’t get to live a full life until he falls in love with Aidan.

And finally, the Love on Series is all about young guys finding their way after college, and opening themselves up to love once they know who they are and what they want.

I’m still struggling with the exact wording for this manifesto, or tagline. One possibility is “Follow your heart to find your authentic life,” while another is “Living your authentic life leads to love.”

Neither is quite punchy enough—but then, since my writing life is a work in progress, why wouldn’t my manifesto be one, too?

Hydra Barrier

Charlie The Yorkshire Terror

One year, soon after we moved into our townhouse, we had a colossal rainstorm. I drowned my Mitsubishi convertible on a street just outside our gated community and had to trudge home in the pouring rain. By the time I reached the house, the water in our street was so high I had to carry the Yorkie we had then to a safe place to do his business, or he’d have drowned.

A couple of storms ago, we had water come in under our garage door, so my partner and I invested in a couple of Hydra Barriers – the big yellow tubes you can see in the picture of our townhouse, just before we evacuated.

The yellow tubes are the Hydra Barriers

They take the place of sandbags, preventing rising water from getting into your home or garage. Since we’re only a mile or so inland, we’re always worried when the forecast calls for storm surges, so these make it easy to prepare. You just fill them up from the hose and drag them into place, and you’re done.

After the threat has passed, all you have to do is unplug the stopper and the water pours out—often all over you, however. Then you roll them up – they don’t take up much space—and store them until the next storm.

I don’t know if we were in danger of rising water because we evacuated, but we felt pretty confident because we had left these in place. Fortunately, one of our neighbors remained at home, and was able to clear the clogged storm drains. 

With all those storms still brewing out in the Atlantic, I thought I'd share these in case anyone else needs something similar.

Description in Love on the Boil

Description Blog

To celebrate the release of Love on the Boil, my newest M/M romance from Loose Id, I went over the manuscript to look for some good examples of description.

I’m lucky that I was able to head down to South Beach to do some observation, and a couple of the people I saw ended up in the book. In this case I’m trying to showcase the character’s attitude while describing:

“A skinny man in his forties walked by, wearing a T-shirt with one of those motivational slogans and a ball cap turned backwards, as if he didn’t know that it made him look like a douche rather than a young guy.”

I read The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt a while ago and noticed that she always used three things when describing, layering on those details. It's a technique I use now and then-- that business of the power of three, you know, from fairy tales and elsewhere.

“Eddie and I stepped out onto Lincoln Road, past a beauty store specializing in mascara, concealer, and beehive wigs for drag queens.”

Description can be more than just what something looks like. I hope that this sentence conveys some sense of the melting pot on South Beach:

“Next door was a restaurant run by Argentine immigrants featuring kosher vegan cuisine for Orthodox Jewish women pushing strollers and trailed by little boys with curls hanging in front of their ears.”

And this description of food shows the history between my two protagonists, former lovers who now have to work together to make a business succeed. Once again, I’ve named three things on the platter, and used the verb “jumped” to convey action at the same time.

“The antipasto platter arrived, laden with roasted tomatoes, tiny bites of salami, and wedges of focaccia. As I expected, Eddie jumped on the marinated artichoke hearts. I was happy to let him have them as long as I could eat the prosciutto and melon.”

And I often use comparison as a way to get the looks of the first person narrator in-- at six foot, he was almost as tall as I was, and though our hair was originally the same dull brown, his was threaded with more silver than mine.

Or a more general view. “I was the stud, after all. The butch one nobody suspected was gay. I worked out, I tended bar in the evenings. Darren was the queen who made a big deal out of everything.”

Tio Eduardo

Sometimes I look for images on line, like the dapper gentleman to the left, who epitomizes Eddie's Tio Eduardo, and then I just have to describe what the picture looks like.

And finally, an example of how their different living spaces reflect their personalities.

“The more I thought about it, the more his business seemed to suit Darren. He was fussy that way, an elderly man in a young guy’s body. Everything had to be just so. As I looked around his apartment I saw his Japanese fixation clearly. A single futon in the living room, with a Hokusai reproduction positioned exactly above it. His glass-fronted kitchen cabinets were neatly organized and everything was sparkling clean.

“Not the way I lived at all. My studio was jammed with souvenirs, and the posters on my walls hung haphazardly. My kitchen was clean, sure, but not immaculate like Darren’s. And while I did have a couple of different teapots and infusers, they were all jumbled together in one cabinet.”

If you like these examples I hope you’ll check out Love on the Boil.

Writing Cats and Dogs

When I was a kid, we’d occasionally go to visit my mother’s childhood friend, who had an adorable dachshund, I loved playing with. I began pestering my parents to get me a dog, and my seventh birthday present was Pierre, a black miniature poodle puppy. (My mother, who had grown up with a Chow, was determined not to get stuck vacuuming dog hair every day.)

Me and my puppy

Although like every kid, I tried to duck out of some chores, I did walk Pierre almost every day, he sat on my lap on car trips, and he was small enough that I could carry him around. Pierre set me on my path as a dog lover, though I didn’t realize that I could write about dogs until my partner and I adopted a golden retriever puppy we named Samwise, who became my constant companion, just as his namesake did in The Lord of Rings for Frodo.

But dogs weren’t the only animals to show up in my fiction. I am allergic to cats – but that has never stopped me from writing about them. The first significant cat in my life belonged to my friend Vicki’s mother. Rajah was a regal black Persian who owned that house, and I was intrigued by his personality, so different from Pierre’s eagerness to be petted and loved. Vicki and I would sit on her living room floor, calling for Rajah to come to us—and we were usually ignored.

A six-toed Hemingway cat

That wasn’t the case with my friend Pam’s cats, though. When we both moved to Miami, she got interested in Hemingway cats – the six-toed ones that lived around Ernest Hemingway’s house in Key West, or were descended from those.  She adopted a six-toed Abyssinian she named Hemmie, and Hemmie and I became good friends. I used her, and her characteristics, for a couple of short stories I wrote for collections of romantic stories sold at grocery store checkouts.

The cat in those stories is named Pilar and she’s as quirky and inquisitive as Pam’s Hemmie. I admit I used both those cats as the basis for Sheba, the tiger-striped cat in my story “Riding the Tiger,” included in the Happy Homicides 5 anthology. I needed a smart cat, one savvy enough to go out seeking the crime-solving duo of Rochester and Steve. Of course it’s Rochester who first notices Sheba, and takes off after her down the street.

So far, cats and dogs are the only animals who’ve populated my fiction. But a neighbor of mine has a couple of brightly-colored parrots who often stand out on the wall at the edge of his house, and my own goldens, Brody and Griffin, are very interested in those birds. So who knows how my criminal menagerie will expand?

Today (May 26) is the last day that the Happy Homicides 5 collection will be discounted to 99 cents.