News — own voices
Point of View: What lesfic has meant to me
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The first LGBTQIA+ book I read wasn’t gay literature or MM romance.
That might come as a surprise to people. Most of my books thus far have had relationships between men (and occasionally between men and nonbinary folks). My publishing career started with a book that included a romance between two men.
MM Romance and other gay fiction are pretty prominent in LGBTQIA+ publishing. One might assume the reason I wrote my first novel was an extensive history of reading and writing about men.
One would be wrong.
All of my firsts have been books about...
What If We Do Wait?
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Recently, I shared the above meme. The text of the main point reads:
Some people took this to mean hetero-washing or...
Profit, #OwnVoices, and supporting LGBTQIA+ people
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I’ve come under fire before for speaking about allosexual/alloromantic (i.e., not asexual/aromantic), cisgender, heterosexual people writing about LGBTQIA+ people. So I’m prefacing this with a couple of important points:
- I’m speaking specifically about those who identify themselves as not being part of the LGBTQIA+ community, not “people we think must be allocishetero"
- I’m not calling for any kind of limit or ban on what people can read or write or publish
- I’m not in any way suggesting that #OwnVoices books are inherently better written or better quality, only...
Author Spotlight: Lara Zielinsky
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In honor of the release of her latest novel, We Three: One and One and One Makes Three, we chatted with Lara Zielinsky about the book, writing, and life in general.
Is there a character in your work you feel especially connected to? Why?
My girlfriend Lisa (yes the same one I co-dedicated the story to) asked me this same question when I sent her the submission draft of We Three for her opinion before I submitted to publishers. Because of the situation, a married...
Write what you know
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It's one of the oldest and most common pieces of writerly wisdom: Write what you know.
At a glance, it seems easy to pooh-pooh. After all, science fiction writers have (presumably) never met an alien from the planet Zork, and to my knowledge, no one has personal experience becoming a werewolf. In real-world terms, everyone writes things outside their own lives, even if it's only the main character's age or career or home town.
On the other hand, there's something to that when it comes to certain things, particularly the emotions that ride...