Outed! Hide, hide, hide

I'm not out, dear friends.  I write as though I'm fearless, and don't give a damn.  But that's because I write under a pen-name; people who actually know me only know me as a weird recluse, and not as a lesbian, let alone a lesbian author of lesbian romance.

Well, this changed over the weekend!

I have a lady friend, of whom I'm very fond, and she had visitors over the weekend.  One of them was a man, whom I knew from previous visits.  He sat me down, and wanted to know what I did all day long (as I'm sure many of you would like to know too).  I hedged for as long as I could, and then revealed that I read.  What do you read, he asked.  In a moment of foolishness, I said I'm a writer, and I love to read my own books.

He was now very interested, thinking he has just discovered an author--well, I suppose he had, really--and he wondered whether I had written anything he would like to read.

The answer, of course, was no; not unless he was into lesfic.  I mean, I don't write porn; but just like I cringe at the thought of two guys cuddling in bed (though I probably shouldn't, at this point), I assumed this guy would be uncomfortable reading about lesbian intimacy.

So I thought furiously, and happened to mention that I had written a 255-thousand word piece of science fiction (Galactic Voyager), and presently he was looking at my Smashwords page, with all the titles, most of them offered for free.  He was amused that I wrote under a pen name, but then lunch was announced, and the conversation moved on.

Man, save me from inquisitive men.  I should have said something like: I'm sorry, but I'm unable to satisfy your curiosity on that point; or I could tell you, but then I'd have to kill you.  I would not have so much trouble with a woman whom I didn't know.  It just struck me that I didn't have to reveal that I had written Galaxy, but only that I was reading it!!  I had got flustered.

Anyway, as soon as the visit was over and I was back home, I opened up Galaxy, and examined it from the point of view of what a guy who knew me slightly would think of it, and now I'm in the thick of reading it yet again.

Kay.

Another Look at Galaxy, and Other Stories

Hi, readers!

(Edited to insert 'so'.)

So I've often discussed some of the true novels within my opus, but this is from a slightly different point of view.

To explain it, I have to start by saying that I watched Lightyear, the movie about Buzz Lightyear, who first appeared in Toy Story.  Contrary to some of the harsh evaluations of the movie by fans of Disney, I found the movie quite watchable.  The character of Buzz had the usual types of shortcomings that a cartoon hero would have been expected to have.  But the story was given a surprising degree of depth from a surprising source, namely Izzy, the grandchild of Buzz's fellow astronaut.

Às you might have expected, the overall story has plenty of masculinity from Buzz.  From Izzy came, more than femininity, a lot of enthusiasm, warmth, optimism, spirit, and a little hero-worship.

One interesting fact is that Izzy's grandma was a lesbian.  Quite apart from the problem of conceiving a child that has the genes of the two women (all finessed in the movie), we have to admire how Pixar approached the challenge of relating to this diverse, and, er, woke generation.

So I began to think about my own fiction: are the characters representative of the genders that readers might want to find in the story?

The situation in Galaxy is a little troubling.  The main characters, at the outset, are Cass Hutchinson-Holt, and Alison McCormick-Warren.  In earlier drafts of this story, these two were far more intimate, but I felt that all that intimacy did not move the story along very much, and the first version I published had all that stripped out.

Once Helen is revived, she has several encounters with women, which are a little more intimate than a completely platonic relationship would be: with Daisy, and with Lucy, the Dropout girl, and later with Sissy, Cass's granddaughter.  All these women are bisexual (or at least we would call them so).  The story is, interestingly, set in a culture in which strict gender roles are beginning to break down; subconsciously my own attitudes were beginning to loosen up.

I was also reading Helen's Concerto, and two things struck me: firstly the small number of men in the story; it's wall-to-wall women.  Secondly, most of the females are lesbians.  The exceptions are Gena, who is in a trio with a girl (Kristen) and a man (Marcus); Trish was in a lesbian relationship, and is now married to Lalitha's son Suresh; Marissa, Helen's long time partner, leaves Helen to marry Larry, the oatmeal man.

In both these books, I have to accept that the first third or so is, in the case of Galaxy, very slow moving, and in the case of Concerto, boring and redundant.  I shudder to think how many readers might have gotten bogged down in this earlier part, and never make it through to the more exciting, and better-written latter part. 

[To be continued. ]