So I was a bit cryptic in my last entry, but now that the superstitious period is over I have two very good bits of news to share.

Although it's a tentative date at the moment Tigers and Devils will be re-released in August. I guess this can loosely be termed a 'writer's cut' as there are a few grammatical hitches and one annoying geographical blunder that are fixed, and a few new one liners spread amongst the text. Oh, and the ending has changed slightly. They all die. No, just kidding! The ending is a little different, but it is more a compression of time than anything. I don’t think I had enough faith in myself when first writing it and made it more rom-commy than I would have liked. So a few little events have been taken out. It’s the same book, so really there is no need to buy it again. It’s just I’m more at ease with it now.

But this leads into the bigger news. It’s all in preparation for the release (at this stage, hopefully October) of Tigerland. We come back into Simon and Declan’s lives roughly three years later; things are going well, but well, there’s always a hitch.

I plan to spill a few clues between now and then. I’m very excited. I know I always said I didn’t think there would be a sequel, and I really didn’t. But you just can’t shut Simon up.

I have been staying away from LJ for a while, except this time it was deliberate rather than just faffing about and being too lazy to post anything.

I guess I feel more at home on Twitter, where I can just yell a lot of different things and frequently, all within 140 characters. What this says about me, I’m not entirely sure. Maybe I’m more comfortable being facetious or angry about Aussie politics, and making pop-culture heavy references rather than bashing out some long screed in my journal. After all, that is what my fiction is for.

And I’ve been remiss in talking about that recently, as my good friend Kris keeps telling me. Over and over again. Sometimes with yelling down the phone or slapping me over the head when we meet in a local cafe.

There are some negotiations going down that I really want to talk about, but the superstitious part of me won’t until the contracts are signed. It’s good, big, news though.

What i can talk about is the fact that one of my little (but I really rather like it) stories is going to become the prologue for a series. If you remember “2 Steps Up” was about a teenager trying to get the courage together to go to his first Gay/Straight Alliance meeting. Well, there are a lot of stories that can come from that. “2 Steps Up” will be re-released with some minor changes and then there will be a story that follows the further adventures of Russ and Brian. Their story will become entangled with the lives of the other kids in their meetings, and it will all culminate in one big social event that is important to them. As it is still being written, I am nervous AND excited by how it will pull together. Catt Ford is also writing for the series, and possibly one other author.

And maybe I’ll have something else to tell soon

I don’t wish to go on about it ad nauseum, but there is one thing I’d really like to say.

To the trans* community, I’m sorry for any offense caused. It was not my intent. My issue with Llewellyn and his recent revelations were not to do with what is in his pants – it was about the lengths he went to in misrepresentation and appropriation, including the articles he wrote and the hiring of an actor to pose as him, not to mention the fabrication of a ‘real life romance’ with another author. It was never about pen names. A great deal of us in this community use them – I use one! The Llewellyn issue was one that became murkier and pulled a lot of people in for reasons that they never should have been, and became about something it never was.

Aleksandr Voinov wrote an excellent post here which talks about the fallout from this whole mess, and I really advise you to read it especially as it gives a perspective of those who have been talked over in the past couple of weeks.

In the end, I would like to add my voice to his “Embrace the Rainbow” campaign. If you would like to show your site as being one that embraces all facets of the LGBTQ rainbow, add this picture to your site:

I will be adding it to my proper site once I reacquaint myself with the coding (what can I say, I’m hopeless, as my bare-bones and rarefly-updated pages will attest).

Exit, stage left.

Visit Jordan's store for details.

All of the Petit Morts authors will also be doing a chat at Joyfully Reviewed:

Join Jordan, Josh, Sean and Clare for a chat: about the series, about
their writing—about chocolate!—from Noon to 6 PM Eastern US, on October 26 at Chatting with Joyfully Reviewed. See you there!

Hope you can join us!

With the addition of Clare London to the team, the final stories stretch out to seven instead of five!

I will release the blurb of my second story in a couple of days, but be tantalized with the first release:

Wes Jackson doesn’t believe in ghosts. His Fremantle ghost walk is for entertainment purposes only—right down to the psychic medium (aka his mother) who’s always shocked to find “presences” on his tours…four times a week.

If ghosts were real, the Fremantle Round House would be teeming with them. Australian convicts built the forbidding walls, and after the prison outgrew it, mental patients were locked away its stark cells. But preternatural activity? None. Any trepidation Wes usually displays while leading his tour through the tunnel beneath the Round House is pure theatrics—until the longtime partner he split up turns up, and ghost of their relationship rears its head.

Can Chance help them resurrect the spirit of their lost love?

As usual, Jordan has done superb work on the covers, and it is so refreshing to have them stand out from the pack and not fall into the ‘headless torso’ category. That is actually the Fremantle Round House on the cover!

All seven are available on the 25th of October.

Some questions you may wish to discuss afterwards:

1. In a battle royale, which Irish lass would be most likely to be the last one standing?

2. Judging by the rather dweebish appearance of the lad in the video, do you think it is entirely justified that all four girls would be fighting over him?

3. If you were said lad in question, wouldn’t you be duly terrified of four girls accosting you and breaking out into jigs?

4. It is often said in analysing texts that we should search for the gaps and silences. A mysterious father is referred to twice: Sinead both looks like him, and fights like him. What is the relevance of this to the actual song lyrics?

5. Should we be worried that four Irish girls choose to sing a song incorporating French lyrics, or is this just your typical Irish approach to logic?

But I’m so glad that organisations like Lambda Literary exist to right the wrongs made against the poor oppressed straight people.

Less than an hour after I tweeted a link to it, I received the following response:

You can imagine my reaction. After I picked myself up off the floor and drank a huge glass of cold water to calm down.

Two little words, and yet they caused such a response in me. I guess I wasn’t kidding when I said I was a fanboy.

And it just shows how much extra happiness an author can give to a fan when they take the time to respond to you. I know there may have been times when I’ve missed tweets, or lost emails, and I feel really awful about it. If you’re reading this, and I’ve done it to you, I sincerely apologise and hope you’ll try again.

Dear Margaret Atwood

Where do I begin?

No, seriously. I don’t know where to begin. You have brought me so much reading joy over the past twenty-odd years, even if at times the subject matter of your books has been harrowing, disturbing, insightful but most of all, instilled with the hope that humanity – despite everything it does to itself – prevails. You always give a voice to ‘the other’, and as a young gay guy when first reading your stories I felt in some way that my fears were being voiced as well.

I was introduced to your work by my older sister, and I now think everybody should have an older sister with the taste enough to give them their first exposure to your backlist. She handed me her copy of The Handmaid’s Tale and said, “You should read this. I know you’ll like it.”

When they say books can transport you to another world, I think it takes a special kind of author to not only take you into that world but totally immerse you in it so that you feel what the character feels and it is so realistic that it is like you’re Mary Poppins stepping into one of Cockney Bert’s paintings. That’s what The Handmaid’s Tale did to me. What made it so compelling was that it was a dystopian world that I could believe was only a few steps away from our own, and it has not lost its potency over the years – if anything, it has become even more relevant when the likes of Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann and Mitt Romney are vying for U.S. presidency. If our own world has a female presidential candidate who votes against contraception and abortion, and thinks that gays can be ‘cured’ by endorsing her husband’s speeches when he says things like “we have to understand that barbarians need to be educated and need to be disciplined” – well suddenly your world, where women are stripped of their power over their own bodies and turned into baby factories and undesirables like the gays are shipped out into the radioactive wastelands thanks to the fundamentalist government of Gilead, doesn’t seem so much fiction but a potential memoir of a woman in the not-so-far-off future.

People who love books often have a few that they will test against friends, family and even partners, and it will often have an effect on how they judge their relationship with them. The Handmaid’s Tale is one of mine, and even just recently it led to quite a bitter disagreement with my friend of over twenty years when I finally got her to read it. She now has two strikes against her name, thanks to a 15 year argument over Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. If I ever get her to read Tim Winton’s Cloudstreet and there is a negative reaction I don’t think anything can save our friendship.

I would just like to close that even though your books are powerful in their analysis of the frailty and sometimes evil nature of the human race, they still contain the very essence of our spirit, that makes us fight on no matter what and that there must be something worth saving about us. Whether it’s Elaine fending off her childhood bullies in Cat’s Eye or Snowman traversing the environmental catastrophe our earth has become in The Year of the Flood, there is always hope. And that’s what I always carry away from your books, when I’m thrown back out into the ‘real’ world from the pages, gasping for air, and knowing that it is because of books like yours that reading is as necessary as breathing.

I have a signed copy of Alias Grace that I bought on eBay. Sometimes I am fanboyish enough to trace the letters you wrote in your own hand, wishing that just a fraction of your talent would pass into me via osmosis. If I ever meet you, I may just fall at your feet in an incoherent mess. You can step over me, but please don’t call the cops.

Love,
Sean

The blog crawl continues! Up next is SmexyBooks.

Or in my family, it’s general shit-stirring.

I was reminded of this the other day when I was visiting my brother and his family. My niece, who is generally the most well-behaved girl in school, has started acting up a little and even got a note sent home from her teacher. I was talking to her about it, and before I knew it started telling her that if she didn’t get back on track Santa wouldn’t be bringing her any presents.

In fact, not only that, he would kidnap her and take her to Santa’s Reform School for Bad Girls where she would never be allowed to wear pink again (she thinks she’s a princess, so this is a fate worse than death) and would be forced to wear grey. When she pointed out that she was wearing a grey cardigan that day, I told her it was her mother trying to prepare her for the eventuality of reform school.

She was on the cusp of believing me, her eyes wide and fearful, until my mother swooped in and told me I was being silly.

Bloody grandmothers. As mothers to their own children they spend years tormenting them, then completely mollycoddle the next generation.

After all, this is the woman who used to tell us when we were kids that the wind howling at night was the banshee warning us that someone in our family was going to die.

Yeah, thanks, Mum.