So, what is it like going to a meeting of an LGBTQ+ student group?

With a character like Rory, who has been thrust into a leadership role in one, this was a question I knew we'd see the answer to. Student organizations are often run haphazardly, with partial executive boards, missing officers, and on the drive of what can be only one or two dedicated people.

How do I know?

As a student, I was the political chair of the LBGA, the co-chair of the Disability Action Network, and served on the cabinet of the student government for a student body of 25000 people. I also spent fifteen years of my career in student affairs working with and advising students in exactly those roles.

Smooth operations among the student organizations exist, but usually only for a time, and often—so very often—the load eventually falls on a few.

In Becoming Rory we see Rory struggling in that role. Alone he is trying to pull together a community, and he's got a hard one to manage. Because the religious right can say all they want about the gay agenda... there isn't one gay community. And that's just the GAY community, when we're talking about the LGBTQ+ community.  Doing it alone can't be easy. An organization like that should have at least two and probably three other people sharing that responsibility. At my school, the executive board was an eighteen person monstrosity... except that three people were holding down fourteen of those roles.

When I wrote the Queer Alliance meeting, I wanted it to feel right. From the fearless Cian showing up in a skirt to the terrified first year student Ian whose courage was all in just walking through the door, to bisexual Eric who expected showing up and talking about being bi to be easier than it turned out to be. I stood in Rory's shoes. I can't begin to think how many young men like Ian I talked to. How many like Bethany. I hope that it's gotten easier to make them less afraid when the fearless Cian characters walk through the door—they're totally based on a first year student I knew with perfect legs, who, yes, often showed up for meetings in a skirt. And just as often had to run to the meeting because they were chased (in heels) on the way.

They were heady places. Accepting and terrifying and hot... because they were the one place on campus where you might just make a connection. And while that part is less important now (because of the internet), I hope the community and the atmosphere still shines through.

Maybe a kid like Ian will read my story. Maybe they'll realize it doesn't have to be terrifying. And if they do, it'll all be worth it.

The Tendire Gate is obviously a departure from most of my published works. Unlike the contemporaries of the Sam's Cafe Romances at Dreamspinner or my angst-ridden College Rose Romances, The Tendire Gate explores unfamiliar territory. 

I spent most of my youth writing fantasy and science fiction. My first piece of writing was a one page Smurfs fan fiction typed out as a small child on my mom's portable typewriter. But years of rejection slips and frustration as I wrote novel after novel and accumulated rejection after rejection beat me down.

Eventually I rejuvenated my writing. I looked long and hard at what was missing or I'd been asked to change. Realizing what it was, I got so angry that I walked away. 

I was being told to write to market. But while some people meant it innocently, so many more meant writing straight. For a long time I barely wrote anything, keeping my writing muscles exercised only during National Writing Month. Memories of an Imperfect Ghost. Zeriphas and the Bones of the World. The closest to what I write now was probably a novel titled Silent Voices. But while there were fantasy aspects to many of those stories, and even to new ones, Like The One That Feels that I've featured over the past year as a serial on this very blog, they weren't marketable.

When I sat down to write The Tendire Gate, all I had was the cover. The art for the gate struck me hard, and I started this story with frantic creative energy in the cover and the word gate.

It's still not very marketable. Stories where the couple isn't meeting and falling in love are always a harder sell. And maybe that story, where Elijah and Dylan meet, will still get told. But right now, I wanted to tell a story the felt visceral to me. A story about a world collapsing. About wanting desperately to find a way out. About a corrupt government on a witch hunt.

I was left with a story about a keeper. A lone young man whose great love waited on the other side of a gate. And he could go, right now, this instant and be with that man, that love, and be safe. 

Except for his duty.

Join us now, at Station Ten—DIRE.

I write a lot of contemporary.

There’s plenty of reasons for that, from the old ‘write what you know’ adage to the fundamental goal of writing gay romance for me—putting happy endings out there. Oh, I know I don’t make it easy. I write a lot of angst. But my boys get their happy endings.

Lately writing contemporary is hard. I’ve thought a lot about why that might be. Part of it, surely, is that the future seems less rosy, less hopeful than before. My husband sometimes will get upset at me, because I do write angst, and that means that often in my stories the characters will experience the realities of homophobia in our culture. He likes that sweeter more hopeful vision.

I stepped away from my usual stories. I set aside The College Rose Romances and The Sam’s Cafe Romances. Both of those have sequels that need airing, from Cian’s story—the purple rose—to the missing stories of chess master Brian’s brothers. Instead I’m working on a short, and unlike my last one which was very much a contemporary, this one has a dystopian sci-fi feel. It is intended as a romance, and I’m struggling sometimes to find that balance, but it is also, I think, rather different than my usual stories.

Mostly it came to me as a title and then a cover and went from there. I think I’ll be sharing it pretty soon.

The Tendire Gate.
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