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  • Aditus

    No more Secrets, right?

    By Aditus

    We know who wrote which story and won this year’s contest. Congratulations Gary L. And now? Watching the horizon thoughtfully and waiting for inspiration to strike? Or you could write a prompt story and maybe expand it…. PT Prompt #354 What if you could make objects talk? Heinrich Heine’s quill, for example. (I just saw it at a museum.) Which object would you choose, and what does it tell you?  PT Prompt #355 Five friends are playing a board game. After a while, they roll num
    • 1 comment
    • 42 views
Words, Words and Words

Book Review: The Lost Language of Cranes by David Leavitt

David Leavitt’s strength has always been the drama he finds in ordinary people’s lives. Not for him the lives of the extraordinary, but his characters can so often feel like the most ordinary of people, yet the lives he finds behind their ordinariness are fascinating. This, his first novel, revolves around a cast of characters who are in flux in their lives, small changes that led to far greater ones. It is 1980s New York and Philip, a gay man in his early twenties, has fallen in love for t
Drew Payne

Drew Payne in Book review

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Words, Words and Words

Book Review: The Lady in the Van by Alan Bennett

Alan Bennett has become inextricably linked with the life of Miss Shepherd, the tramp (by her behaviour and attitudes she could never be called anything else) who lived in a derelict van on his driveway for nearly twenty years, but this book is where it all began. Though this is a slim volume it still carries so much pathos. It is constructed from entries from Bennett’s diary that chronicle his relationship with Miss Shepherd. It began when he allowed her to park her van, in which she live
Drew Payne

Drew Payne in Book review

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Words, Words and Words

Book Review: Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

Though this is a classic dystopian novel, the world it portrays is still strikingly original, even though it was first published in 1932. There is an oppressive, totalitarian regime ruling the world, here they are ruling it by creating a hedonistic society where everyone’s sexual and pleasurable desires are fulfilled. This is also the ultimate classist society, here people are genetically engineered for the class they will live out their lives in. Even now this is still a very original dyst
Drew Payne

Drew Payne in Book review

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Words, Words and Words

Book Review: Faggots by Larry Kramer

“2,556,596 faggots in the New York City area.” So begins Larry Kramer’s infamous novel. It is a strange opening for a novel but, in some way, is indicative of this one. It is the late 1970s and this novel is an odyssey through gay New York life. The main protagonist is Fred Lemish, almost a gay everyman, who is just short of forty. He is searching for love, especially the love of the gay hunk Dinky Adams, but all he can find is promiscuous sex, recreational drug use and almost constant disa
Drew Payne

Drew Payne in Book review

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Words, Words and Words

Book Review: Living Confidently with HIV, A Self-Help Book for People Living with HIV by Liz Shaw

Self-help books have become a modern publishing phenomenon, bookshops have whole sections dedicated to them and a large number of them are of questionable value, often being written by people who have little or no experience of the subject. Fortunately, this book doesn’t fall into that category. The authors are four clinical psychologists, all with extensive experience working with people who are HIV positive. The book has been designed as a guide for people newly diagnosed with HIV and cov
Drew Payne

Drew Payne in Book review

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Words, Words and Words

Book Review: Postcards from the Edge by Carrie Fisher

This is Carrie Fisher’s insider novel about the ups and many downs of surviving and living in Hollywood. Suzanne Vale, the central character here and Carrie Fisher’s obvious alter ego, is a Hollywood actress, but not an A list one, trying to survive through a year in her life. The novel begins with Suzanne admitted to rehab following a drug overdose, drugs that she liked too much. The novel then charts the events of the following year as Suzanne navigates a relationship with a film producer
Drew Payne

Drew Payne in Book review

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Words, Words and Words

A Fire Escape Out of Hell but with Too Many Steps

Winter 1984 It was a cold and grey winter’s day. The grey sky seemed to hang heavy over everything, stripping away what little colour was left in that winter landscape. I had travelled across Merseyside, on my own, that morning to make this appointment. I’d needed to change trains in the centre of Liverpool, changing from one metro train onto another one in one of the few underground stations in the city. That second train took me under the River Mersey and out into the suburban area of the
Drew Payne

Drew Payne in My Story

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Writing World

Potpourri - Sometimes we need to mix it up!

When writing a story, we need lots of different tools and techniques.  Sometimes these may include using different styles of writing or even bringing to life challenging or even repugnant characters.  To practice these different techniques, I've given a couple of exercises.     #75 - Use the Passive Voice in a vignette.  For example, "Jenny was a great writer who once won an award.  She had written a story that garnered lots of attention and cause quite an uproar.  That excitement pass
Cole Matthews

Cole Matthews in Prompts

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Gay Authors Archive

Does Size Really Matter?

A couple of questions that come up for discussion frequently here are “How long should I make my chapters?” and “How long should my story be?”.  The truth is, there is no right answer.  My response would be, “Long enough to tell what you want to tell.”  It’s a bit of a glib response, but I’m going to go more in-depth in this blog post.  In terms of the anthology, there is a right answer.  It needs to be between 1,000 and 25,000 words. So how do you decide if your story is going to be a 1k
Valkyrie

Valkyrie in Anthology

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Words, Words and Words

Book Review: From the Windrush to Wapping by Jeff Jones

Jeff Jones has certainly lived enough to fill six ordinary lives. Since growing up in Wapping, East London, he’s been in trouble with the police, been sent to prison, been homeless and been sectioned under the Mental Health Act. But he has also been to university, been a manager in mental health and youth work, met Prince Charles and even passed The Knowledge, the exam for London black cab drivers. This book charts his life in a clear and very readable style, sometimes also at break-neck sp
Drew Payne

Drew Payne in Book review

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Life is worth an entry

Musings on the concepts of romance in gay fiction

After watching my most recent gay Anime binge, Heaven Official's Blessing, and starting on the books in the same series, I've begun to get a bit more philosophical about gay romance, when confronted with such a slow burn gay romance that allows me to deconstruct what gay romance is. My forays into various stories and books revolving around gay relationships from mundane high school boyfriends to intergalactic soap opera power couples has given me some food for thought,  I've also compared
W_L

W_L in Life

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Life is worth an entry

Thinking about my last short story- That is Where You will Find Me

My latest short story That's Where You'll Find Me plays with the concepts of identity, reality, and memory. As many readers know, I am a fan of science fiction and these themes were made famous by authors like Philip K. Dick among others. Yet, I wanted to bring my love of science fiction into contemporary gay fiction. For me, I wanted to create a short story based on the concept of framed false memory from the perspective of an LGBTQ victim, who was traumatized and brutalized into forgettin
W_L

W_L in Writing Stories

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Gay Authors News

Weekly Wrap Up (Aug. 7 - Aug. 13)

We are nearly half way through the summer and you know what that means for North American people... Back to Skewl!!  I guess that is dependent on if you are a student of some level or if you are a working stiff like me  Believe it or not, up to a few years ago I was under the impression that the primary and secondary education all over the continent was basically from the beginning of September until the following June. How wrong I was . From what I understand, some of the southern US they
wildone

wildone in Weekly Wrap Up

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Writing World

Parallels

Parallels You know those moments in a lot of stories or movies where the hero comes up against their main rival, and they always say the same cliché phrase? Hehehe! That part where they say, "You know...we're not so different, you and I..." Hahaha! I've heard it so many times and phrased so many different ways, that it's kind of cheesy and weird now. However...it's a trope that I really actually LOVE to use in a lot of my stories, and do so often. I just don't have them talk about it ou
Comicality

Comicality in Writing Tips

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Words, Words and Words

No Daemons on My Back

Spring 1986   The carpet was patterned, a swirling blue-and-purple paisley pattern of looped tear-drop shapes curled around each other, and I stared down intensely at it. I thought if I focused on it then I could ignore what was happening around me, but that didn’t work. It was impossible to block it all out. I could feel the weight of all their hands pressing down on me, the weight of them on my head, the back of my neck and my shoulders. Those hands made me hold my head forwards
Drew Payne

Drew Payne in My Story

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