Writing Queer 3: Editor's Feedback and Real Life

 We hit the third post this Pride Month, where I delve into my seemingly both slow and fast journey through the world of "well, I'm writing queer characters now so I need to do it well/properly". I've previously chronicled my own internal journey and my early fictional stumbles. Now I'd like to go more detailed and nitty-gritty. This time, through the story of writing the book that got me to publication, I'll show I had to confront a final odd hurdle within myself and push back at that little bit of myself that was still stuck in the past.

Be warned, this article will contain references to and discussion of a storyline that involves assault and its associated trauma. There will also be spoilers for one of my books.

My debut novel, Starborn Vendetta, is in broad strokes a reimagining of story elements from Count of Monte Cristo, Faust and Macbeth. But in particular, there was a character who starts off the story and forms a core part of how things progress. That character is Gaspard Atarex, a member of the Feles people in the Cluster who starts off as a guard within Prison Station d'If, where protagonist Mercedes Solari is sent. Within the first chapter, I wanted to show Gaspard as bitter, hollowed out by his duties, detached from any real passion. He is gay, has a preference for human males, and due to the prison environment has an outlet without needing another person. When Mercedes appears, her magnetic personality awakens a wish to protect her from the vindictive warden, and the only way he can do that is through someone he loathes.

The root of that became another character, a Feles prisoner dubbed Echo. Later in the story, it is revealed that Echo found Gaspard trying to help prisoners, which would've gotten him into huge trouble, and blackmailed him into a relationship. Echo is a predator, plain and simple, and Gaspard is his victim. Things happen, the d'If is exploded, and both Gaspard and Echo survive. Echo tracks down Gaspard and essentially stalks him. At the end of their combined story, Echo is killed by another character. But here's the kicker; in the original draft of the story, Gaspard never resolved this core issue and...kinda made...peace with Echo? I'm getting embarrassed remembering it.

I see that this may be interpreted as a form of internalised homophobia. We'll come back to that, but I will say it reflects a passive acceptance of behaviours and ideas of redemption that not only queer media, but other media had been pushing for decades by this point. The Beauty and the Beast trope taken to one of its logical extremes, the deeply toxic "it's okay, they're fixable" or "see there was good there" attitude which is unacceptable in real life. The odd thing is that when I was writing it, I didn't think of it in terms of them both being men. I wanted a character suffering from that kind of trauma, and either could easily have been gender-swapped. Equally the fact that Gaspard was gay didn't feel like a factor related to this, just an aspect of how Gaspard was in the world.

My editor at the time called this conclusion out immediately, saying that Echo's actions didn't merit any kind of forgiveness. They didn't ask me to do a gender flip, but they did say I needed to show this wasn't a good thing, which I hadn't originally due to how dark my original tone was. I looked through, and had to agree with their stance. I'd gone through some more writing by this time, and some more media and real-life encounters that reshaped my ideas.

The most basic change I made was that I removed any forgiveness Gaspard originally met out to Echo. Instead he very actively broke away, and when Echo died, he declares that he hates him and doesn't forgive or forget. Gaspard's emotions are still confused and he's still traumatised, but he is on the path to breaking away from that and finding a life beyond that. I also rewrote some bits to show that Gaspard's emotions towards Echo were extremely confused, influenced by being placed in a vulnerable position and taken advantage of; at his core he hates Echo, but some part of him believes Echo's statements that he actually desires the connection. I did further research into the accounts and treatment of sexual abuse victims during this rewrite (I know, I should've done that from the first), and incorporated some of that into his personality and actions. I'd like to think I managed to make him a more nuanced figure in the final draft which made it to publication.

Reading back through this, I'm thinking "What the hell?!". And maybe you've got similar reactions. I wrote Starborn Vendetta during a pretty dark period of my life. My maternal grandparents where in the final stages of their lives, my father unknown to me was also dying and only had months left, and I was struggling with other things in my family and coming to grips with my own mental health and identity. This included not being embarrassed by my tastes in media, finding my own style of clothing, and asserting myself as an individual within the family.

Prior to the revisions, several things happened. First, my father died a few months after I finished writing the initial draft of Starborn Vendetta, which required something of a mental reset for myself. Second, I became more fully aware of how many queer people were actually within my own family, which opened me up to the realisation that what I was writing needed to be respectful not just for nebulous others I hadn't yet encountered, but people within my own family.

So going forward, I was. By the time the dev edits for Starborn Vendetta came in, I'd already written or part-written the next two entries in the Cluster Cycle and it brought me face to face with elements of how I might've ended up writing elements of the next few books. Suffice to say, there was course correction, and that correction was necessary. Since then, I've always been very careful in whether or not to consider incorporating that kind of story, and what I should be researching when portraying it in a respectful and empowering manner.

For more information on the kind of pitfalls I half-fell into or nearly fell into, see Emily Inkpen's article "Writing Sexual Assault - Things to Remember".

So where do we go from here? I've talked for the past weeks about my writing journey relating to queer characters. Next week, the final Sunday of Pride Month, I'll be giving what have become my guiding principles for when I include and write queer characters. Until then, stay fabulous, stay safe, and if you're writing a story based around assault or trauma, remember to do your research. And sometimes, there can be no forgiveness.

Writing Queer 2: My early fictional attempts.

 Last week, I looked back my early exposure to queerness before I came to accept my own bisexuality. This week, I'm looking at my early attempts at writing queer characters. I won't bore you with many, since I didn't really attempt anything like that for a long time.

Many of my first attempts came from the first extremely long story I wrote, and something I initially attempted to self-publish. That was The Leviathan Chronicle, a story set within a heavily-fictionalised version of the Crusades in a separate world, where two opposing supernatural factions (the Seraphim and the Powers) used humans marked by their power to fight the holy war as a proxy conflict. And out of the five lead characters, three had some level of queerness relating to their stories or personality.

To briefly summarise; the titular character Leviathan was intersex/gender queer, and standing as an outsider to the conflict. The other two were Elathan, a spy who loses his lover Paimon and is revived after being executed once found out; and Mastema, one of the faction leaders who suffers from trauma due to a certain kind of abuse from his father. All of them live to the story's end, don't worry, but...let's just say I wasn't being very tactful with how certain aspects of their stories were handled excepting Leviathan. It goes without saying, this was my angsty era, and I was working through some stuff in my mind at that time that needed a dark outlet. The fourth lead was Astarte, a woman driven by revenge to the exclusion of all else. But I hardly consider my need to be dark that as an excuse.

Basically, because of some elements of my media exposure at the time, many of my stories were and are tragic in tone. Not completely depressing, but still tragic. A different story, which was written as a tragedy from the outset following eight reincarnated people in a fantastical Medieval Europe, had a central subplot where one was reincarnated as twins, with another seeing the surviving twin as her soulmate when he in this incarnation is gay. He survives right to the end, and isn't persecuted because of his sexuality, but the fact that the female lead isn't able to rekindle his initial incarnation's love for her is the main issue in the story. I don't want to dwell on this longer than necessary, mostly because I feel queasy knots of embarrassment twisting round me when I think about my early writing, plus this is a story I'll likely never revisit. But it's still worth mentioning, because it sums up something I was doing at the time; I wasn't being violent to LGBTQIA+ characters, but I wasn't exactly putting them in happy scenarios.

I think you can see through these examples that I was going through a stage of...how do I put this? Standard angsty storytelling? War, suffering, religious questioning, the tragedy of reincarnation, all that stuff. That didn't always focus down to specifically queer issues, but I'm sure people will see how queer characters can be magnets for them. I know this from personal experience writing. It wasn't until my earlier experiences of less problematic relationships that my own writing began to change. As I said last time, I was a sheltered type, and I was also shy of asking about those subjects with anyone close to me.

I also lacked emotional maturity. I hadn't known truly deep emotion, either for real people or fictional characters. I hadn't cried at media in any form. It took that kind of emotional connection for me to think "I want to create something that moves people and even saddens them without falling into the usual traps I'm seeing in popular media." There's enough sadness in the world of people on the spectrum, and while those are valid experiences, I wanted to create experiences that weren't built on heartbreak and abuse, tainted by sorrowful memories. I want experiences that are built in simple love, innocent happiness, the kind of thing straight love stories have held onto like vices for decades. Things are changing for the better, especially when you take a step back and look at the broader range of stories outside the narrow mainstream bubble, but there's still steps to take. And I'd like to live and see a day when both counterculture and mainstream can exist side by side, as equals.

So how did I get past this hang-up that I've outlined in both struggle and result? How did I manage to create worlds and universes that I was able to write more realistic and less tragic examples of the wonderful spectrum of existence? Well, you'll find out next week.

Writing Queer 1: unpromising beginnings

 The first of my four Pride Month posts, and it's on a personal note. It's how I began experiencing, and then writing, queer characters and story themes. I may have become relatively well immersed in that side of my writing these days, but it took some time and a few dud starts.

Coming to terms with my own bisexuality was a longish process, but in hindsight that feels like nothing compared to my journey getting myself to properly representing people in the modern world, where diversity of gender and sexual identity is something that is important to acknowledge. I've still got some way to go, and things have continued to get either better or worse depending where you live. But here's how things started. Beginning with...my own external experience of queerness.

My awareness of LGBTQIA+ in media was...lacking, for a lot of my life. Not because I didn't have exposure or tolerance, I had both within my immediately family, but just because a lot of my awareness came from media. I wasn't much of a going out and interacting with people type for a number of reasons, so I wasn't exposed to that spectrum. I also wasn't being exposed to standard society-level homophobia, so you could say I had some advantage in that I was able to look at something without any early filter of stereotype.

I guess it's best to start with my 'awakening', even if I didn't become fully aware of my sexuality until the last few years. A lot of people in my social circle have pointed to Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weitz in 1999's The Mummy as their bisexual awakening. More power to them, but honestly Fraser isn't my type, and when I saw the film I wasn't developed enough in that direction to understand. I now realise in retrospect that my own bi awakening was with Angelina Jolie and Gerard Butler from the not-very-good 2001 film Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life. I didn't know why this film was stuck in the recesses of my mind for years until recently. A: the leads' chemistry surrounding their characters' tragic rivalry made up for shortfalls in the story and script, and B: ....I found both of them physically attractive.

So...that's a start.

My first exposure to anything explicitly queer within a story was...the 1985 film Red Sonja. I've voiced my opinions on an aspect of the film, and I don't think it's very good. It's just a bog standard 1980s fantasy film based on a fantasy tradition that today feels very dated. But Red Sonja was also my first exposure to a lesbian in the form of Queen Gedrun. A pretty dodgy example, and one I didn't clock. To me it just seemed like someone who took people as servants and trophies rather than as unwilling companions. As I said, I wasn't that aware. And so we've gone from one poor movie to another, and from standard awakening to 'YIKES!' representation.

I didn't keep much of an explicit track of my awareness of LGBTQIA+ in fiction, or in real life, until I was well into my 20s. There were a few bits and pieces that surfaced, such as short films which I tended not to like as they were just depressing (finding LGBTQIA+ media that isn't depressing was like finding hen's teeth until recently). And there were some creators coming out with what I found out was called 'Word of Gay', which I've come to look slant-eyed at because... I mean, if you wanted them to be on the spectrum, just say so. Show it in a way that doesn't require you to come out from behind the curtain and address the audience in an "oh, by the way" style.

At that point, I discovered video game romances, and exploring them found several queer options. I admit that includes BioWare, as cheesy as they can be, but role-playing these characters gave me a solid sense of what I liked and didn't like. Years later as a fully awakened bisexual I played Dragon Age Inquisition, and I ended up romancing first Cassandra as a man, then Iron Bull also as a man. I also have to commend both as the most entertaining romances since they both play in good ways with genre tropes; Cassandra was played as the nervous young woman without losing her badass aspect, while Iron Bull's BDSM relationship is based firmly in reality rather than...whatever Foofta Blegh of Blegh does.

A few years after that I'd also run into...yaoi and bara. It was almost inevitable that I would do that since I enjoyed anime, and was interested in stuff beyond the obvious mainstream. For those who don't know yet, 'Yaoi' is a Western term for Boy's Love media that is often written by women and has a reputation for being slightly trashy, while 'Bara' is a subset of Japanese manga that is primarily written by LGBTQIA+ authors and frequently NSFW.

I admit, here and now, that my shelves are a little bare of LGBTQIA+ content. Partly because I'm terrible at finding things and need to be selective due to budget, but also because many of the experiences I get recommended are also depressing. It's been the reality for queer people for a long time, particularly the last two centuries, that being queer was dangerous or depressing or to live in an oppressed state. But when I read a story, I don't just want to be depressed, I want to laugh and be enlightened and see a vision of how the world could be.

My own experience with being queer hasn't been depressing and oppressed, I've been allowed to mature and experience myself. I now have a full awareness of my self and my sympathies, and while I have occasionally run into homophobia in this wild place called the internet, I've never felt any push to engage. I just turned quietly away, blocked, didn't even say goodbye, and walked on ignoring them. That, for me, is the sign of strength for my own queer experience. I also don't feel the need to broadcast my sexuality on a personal level, as I'm overall comfortable with who I am. I fully realise that's not a universal experience. But neither is misery.

And it's with that strange combination of isolation and personal certainty, and growing frustration of a fictional norm of heartbreak and misery over happy endings, that I truly started putting queer characters into my writing. Next week, I'm planning an exploration of my journey to writing my own brand of queer representation in my writing. Its rocky beginnings, and its currently and hopefully much smoother reality.

If you want to know more about my general writing journey, I created a podcast/video on the subject, including me reading out some of my less cringy early writing to show how my style and approach evolved. It even includes a sample of my upcoming novel The Murderer's Lament, now expected to release in 2027.

The latest Author Talks: M. R. James

 It's the first Sunday of the month, so it's the day when I release the episode of my one-person podcast Author Talks, guaranteed no AI included. This time, it's a look at an author I've recently delved into both in his fictional writing, his life, and analysis of his work. That person is M. R. James, a father of the modern folk horror and maestro of the ghost story. Not only do I look over his work and what makes his work appealing, and how aspects of him and it haven't aged that well, but I also give an abridged reading of one of his stories. That story, 'The Mezzotint', is possibly one of the best introductions to the M. R. James short story.

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