Category Archives: Romance

I still have no idea what to call it.  I have a bad habit of always naming my stories “The _____”:  The Sacrifice, The Resurrection, The Kiss, The Blind Date, etc.  (The Kiss eventually became Boundaries of Attraction, after an off-hand comment my friend, Claire, threw out during a script meeting, and The Blind Date eventually was renamed Sunny Cafe, after the diner where the action takes place.)  This story has been going by the working title The Bodyguard, which doesn’t indicate that it’s cyberpunk and says nothing interesting, at all.  I’ll have to work on that.

The story also needs some rewriting, of course.  I don’t think it will require much, since my stories tend to be fairly polished, by the time I get to the end.  It’s my habit to keep going back over what’s been written, as I’m working on it, so by the time it’s finished, most of it has been revised several times.  But this one took some unexpected turns near the end, with one character revealing secrets I hadn’t known he had.  So now I have to go back and make sure that’s consistent with what happened earlier. 

The romance could also use some tweaking.  By the last few paragraphs, I think I had the character motivation pretty well figured out, but now I need to go back and make sure all of that is adequately foreshadowed.  I always hate it when two characters proclaim that they love each other for no apparent reason, other than that’s what is supposed to happen at the end of the story.

I’m also in a unique position with this story, in that it’s the first time I’ve written a story that’s too long for the editor I plan on submitting it to, so I’ll have to hack a couple hundred words out of it.  That’s really not much — less than half a page.  I’ll just have to tighten it up a bit. 

I left the ending wide open for a sequel.  In fact, it sort of ends on a cliff-hanger.  The characters are safe and falling in love with each other, but they are clearly heading towards the next phase of their adventure.  I could simply stop writing, right there, and it would stand on its own.  But hopefully the readers will want more!  I have only a vague idea what that “more” will entail, but I think it will be fun to find out.

In other news, yesterday the Senate voted to repeal Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell!  I’m not connected to the military, in any way, but I’m very happy for those in the service who will, someday very soon, be able to talk about their partners/spouses without fear of ending their careers.  Before this weekend, if a gay man or woman in the military was killed in combat, their partner/spouse might never be notified, because nobody would know to tell them.  Can you imagine your husband or wife being killed in Iraq, and you never being informed?  Months later, you might eventually figure out that the person you love isn’t just being moved around and can’t contact you — that, in fact, he or she is never coming home again.  That, in and of itself, makes current policy insane, to my mind.

I’ve written the big, climactic battle (which, it turns out, is more “creepy” than “epic”), and my heroes simply need to make good their escape and then….

Well, that’s the part I’m not quite sure about yet.  Somehow, they have to decide they’re in love with each other — or at least heading in that direction.  Technically, it might be good to throw in a sex scene, at this point, since there was only one in the story, at about the halfway mark, and it was pretty tame. 

A fellow erotic romance author was lamenting a couple weeks ago that the genre dictated that a sex scene should occur at a certain point in her story, but she wasn’t sure if the characters were ready for that.  At the time, I thought that was a bit bizarre, but now I can completely see her point.  I could probably toss in a brief sex scene somewhere, but I’m not yet sure if my characters are in love with each other. 

This story is nearly as long as The Meaning of Vengeance, but that story took place over several weeks.  This story takes place over, let’s see…two days.  Yep.  Two days.  Plenty of time to fall in love and build a meaningful life together.

I’ve always been amazed by this phenomenon in movies and written fiction.  Whenever a lot seems to happen, we expect the hero and heroine (or the other hero) to be in love by the end, and to run off together.  But often, the time period involved is very short.  Time frame doesn’t really matter to the viewer or reader, however, as long as they perceive that these two characters have been through a lot together. 

So, where does that leave my two heroes?  Well, the main character (Connor) has just learned that the guy he hired to be his bodyguard (Luis), and was beginning to trust, isn’t everything he appears to be.  I won’t give away more than that.  But although I don’t foresee this being an obstacle to their relationship, once they’ve worked things out, they haven’t had time to work things out.

Three months later, Connor told Luis, “All right.  I guess  I forgive you now.”

“Great,” Luis replied, pulling the rehead into an embrace, “Does this mean we can finally have sex again?”

The cyberpunk short story is coming along well.  I got about 6,000 words of it written this weekend.  I’m a little uncertain how it’s going to end, but I don’t intend for it to be more than 12,000 words or so. 

I can’t claim that it’s a brilliantly original story, but that’s intentional.  I have a tendency to get frustrated with stories I read (or movies I watch) in a particular genre, because they’re often almost what I’m looking for, but never quite right.  Often, they’ll have one fatal flaw, which mars an otherwise good story.  The film I, Robot is a good example.  Never mind the fact that it had nothing to do with Isaac Asimov’s short story collection, I, Robot (the screenplay was written first, having nothing to do with Asimov, then somebody decided it should be renamed and tweaked to become an “Asimov” story).  It was a well-done mystery concerning robots in the near future.  But it had one totally ridiculous element that ruined it:  the main character had a ridiculous hate on for robots, based upon a situation that would have made any rational adult realize that robots are coldly logical and can’t act irrationally.  Yet, somehow he learned the exact opposite from his experience, and is convinced all robots are psychopaths.  It didn’t matter that he later turned out to be (partly) right in his suspicions.  It was preposterous that he should think that way, to begin with.  And the writers should have fixed that before the film ever went into production.

End of rant. 

Anyway, a number of my stories, over the years, have been what I’ve heard described as post-modern stories.  That may not be the correct term, but what I’m talking about are stories that distill the essential elements of a genre and try to present a “typical” story, but with a slightly new, more self-aware slant.  In most cases, what I’m adding is the idea of a gay central character. 

I’m hardly the only author/filmmaker doing this.  I’m seeing it quite a lot, these days.  But I try to do it well, and hope I create stories worth reading and films worth watching.  I’ve written a gay Victorian Christmas romance, a few gay werewolf stories (which weren’t quite the cliche they are now, back when I wrote them), gay Viking stories, a gay fantasy novel (soon to be a trilogy, I hope) and gay distopian science fiction.  Often these stories make heavy use of what are unkindly called “cliches,” but might be more accurately described as “tropes” — the elements that everyone expects to see in these genres.

For a werewolf story, these tropes involve being bitten by a werewolf, the transformation into a wolf form, often phases of the moon being involved and the character attempting to come to terms with this new double life.  (Werewolf stories make perfect allegories for repressed sexual impulses — sexual, because the werewolf is generally naked — bursting through the more rational, civilized facade a character wants to present, and therefore they are perfect as an allegory for homosexuality.)  Stories which deviate from these tropes too much, in an attempt to be original, are often unsatisfying for fans of the genre.  Movies in which the “werewolf” doesn’t actually turn into a wolf are disappointing, and nobody likes it when the transformation scene takes place offscreen.

In Cyberpunk stories, we have a number of tropes, such as the hero jacking into the “matrix” or “grid” and flying around in a 3-D “cyberspace” to hack into corporate computers and steal data.  Society is generally a form of corporatism or free market economy run amok, so that corporations have become a law unto themselves and can kill whomever they like in their wars with one another, and anybody who doesn’t work for a corporation is reduced to living in squalor.  Again, the element that I’m adding to this is simply that my net-runner is gay and falling in love with the “street samurai” he hires as a bodyguard.  However, I haven’t really seen it done before.