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  • astone2292

    Ask An Author 3.0 #38

    By astone2292

    I hope y'all had a wonderful break from me. Big shoutie-outie for @Valkyrie and all of those who participated in this year's Poetry Anthology!  Onto our next edition of Ask An Author! Yes, yes, I'm sure everyone missed me and my fat fingers as I bring you wonderful interviews. Let's get right into it, shall we? We have an amazing author lined up, so grab your popcorn and a drink while we see what kind of questions we have. • • • • • lawfulneutralmage 2 Stories / 99,604 Words 
    • 4 comments
    • 84 views
Words, Words and Words

Book Review: Strong Poison by Dorothy L. Sayers

Lord Peter Wimsey has fallen in love with the crime novelist Harriet Vane. Unfortunately, she is on trial for her life, accused of poisoning her former lover. Lord Peter, to demonstrate his love for her, sets about to prove Harriet is innocent before she faces a retrial. Dorothy L. Sayers has often been called the best writer of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, but I have never found this. Her descriptive style is certainly better than Agatha Christie’s and Ngaio Marsh’s, but I find her
Drew Payne

Drew Payne in Book review

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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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Writing World

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
My Daily Bread Crumbs

My Daily Bread Crumbs 17 Aug 2022

August 17th 2022 - Holidays and Observances (click on the day for details) Christian feast day: Clare of Montefalco Hyacinth of Poland Jeanne Delanoue Samuel Johnson, Timothy Cutler, and Thomas Bradbury Chandler (Episcopal Church) August 17 (Eastern Orthodox liturgics) Engineer's Day (Colombia) Flag Day (Bolivia) Independence
sandrewn

sandrewn in Bread Crumbs 381

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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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My Daily Bread Crumbs

My Daily Bread Crumbs 16 Aug 2022

August 16th 2022 - Holidays and Observances (click on the day for details) Bennington Battle Day (Vermont, United States) Children's Day (Paraguay) Christian feast day: Ana Petra Pérez Florido Armel (Armagillus) Diomedes of Tarsus Roch Stephen I of Hungary Translation of the Acheiropoietos icon from Edessa to Constantinople. (Eastern
sandrewn

sandrewn in Bread Crumbs 380

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My Daily Bread Crumbs

My Daily Bread Crumbs 15 Aug 2022

August 15th 2022 - Holidays and Observances (click on the day for details) Armed Forces Day (Poland) Christian feast day: Altfrid Alypius of Thagaste Feast day of the Assumption of Mary, one of the Catholic holy days of obligation. (a public holiday in Austria, Belgium, Benin, Bosnia, Burundi, Cameroon, Chile, Colombia, Croatia, Cyprus, France, some states in Germany, Greece, Guatema
sandrewn

sandrewn in Bread Crumbs 379

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Gay Authors News

August Signature Author Feature: Campfires and Starlight by AC Benus

Welcome to our first Signature author feature of 2022! We've been focusing on our Classic authors for a few years, and now we're going to showcase stories by our Signature authors starting with AC Benus. August is a month of many camping trips here in the US, so I wanted to share this great short story he wrote back in 2018 that features... camping! Length: 23,478 Description: Remembering summer nights and lakeside settings, best friends come together to renew their camping trad
Cia

Cia in Signature Feature

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