Saturday, February 16, 2013

A Duck in the Hen Yard

I have always kind of been the duck in the hen yard. I sure came as a surprise to my mother and her mother. They were both later day southern belles and I was a tomboy from the very start. My biodad's father always swore that the first word I said wasn't 'mama' or 'dada', it was 'horse.' And I began having adventures almost from the start. One of my earliest memories, or perhaps it only seems like a memory because I heard it told so often as a child, is of sitting between the forefeet of a Clysdale at the Kay County Free Fair over in Blackwell. Apparently I had wandered away from my parents and found the horses by myself.
Wandering away has always been both a blessing and a curse for me. I have gone down a lot of paths that are "less traveled by" over the years. Some of them seemed to take me very far afield. But now, as I find myself in the opening years of my sixth decade, it seems they are all coming together and coming back around to lead me home.
My writing has had such a weird history! I am not even sure about the title "writer." I have a book I have worked on sporadically for over 30 years. When I sent the first draft to my agent back then, she said, literally, that it was books like mine that would be the end of Western Civilization itself. She so intimidated me that I put the book in a box and didn’t touch it for nearly a decade.
Yes, I have written other things in that time. And read voraciously. But that book, Bird of Paradise, has cast its long shadow over everything else I do. It is as if, until I can get it finally “finished,” I cannot move on completely to other things. I can, and have, written rough drafts of other stories. They languish unfinished in drawers and on disks, not brought to full birth because of their older sibling.
When I started Bird of Paradise it was a contemporary story and right on the burning edge. The idea that two lovers of the same sex could have, let alone deserved to have, a story in which neither died and were relatively happy at the end, was startling and avant-garde. There were other people that I knew were writing m/m fiction, mostly fan-fiction, and mostly Kirk/Spock. It was almost as if it was okay for them – because Spock was an alien, who knew what he might do, or want, or need?
In fact, at first, BoP was meant to be fan-fic, too. The plot wasn’t, but I added them in to appeal to that readership. The main characters in my novel are fictional musicians, not characters from a television show or a movie, drawn from friends and acquaintances. Oh yeah, Starsky and Hutch were in there, mostly to lure readers from fandom into taking a look at it. In those benighted years, long before personal computers – not to mention the internet, I didn’t know who else would read it.
Now, all these years later, it is at least a “retro” story, if not all the way to “historical.” The two cops in the book don’t resemble Starsky or Hutch in the slightest. They are just two guys who have had an experience and are trying to figure out if it was just the alcohol after a party or if it is something more. The musicians have changed and grown and flourished as they have gotten farther and farther from their original inspiration. And now I think I am producing a much more nuanced and taut, maybe even more mature, story.
Today there are loads of gay light fiction* books being written, published, and extensively read by a vast readership. Instead of being a front runner, Bird of Paradise will just be one more among many. But the message will still be the same: love has no gender, everyone is worthy of love, and everyone deserves to find love in their lives in whatever way it manifests for them.
Do I wish that Bird of Paradise was all behind me, published back then as fan-fic so that I could have gone on and written so much more, so much that I might really be an “author” by now? Yes, sometimes I do. It was written and re-written during a huge transition period in my own life. Maybe if I had done it that way the door on that past could have been closed long ago.
But honestly, no. No, I am glad it has taken this long. I think both of us have benefited from the years between.
It is being finished now, during another big transition in my life. So it comes full circle, and there is something almost fated in that. No, it really is better now. It’s a better book, and I am a better writer because of it. And its message, that love is for everyone, has not gotten old and will not. No matter how much time passes.

*Gay Light Fiction: as opposed to works of “literature.” The moniker includes a wide ranging group of genres, from Romance to Westerns, from Mysteries to Sci-fi.

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