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About this blog

This blog is a place for my non-fiction writing.

There will be posts promoting my writing, in all its areas. I will talk about my writing in general, the inspiration behind it, my writing process and several of the issues I’ve faced writing. It will also contain essays, reviews and other examples of my non-fiction writing. There won't be any politics here but there will be social commentary and personal stories.

(I have started a book reviewing project, I am attempting to review as many of the book I've read as possible, and I am going to post those book reviews here too)

Entries in this blog

Book review

Book Review: Gay, Straight, and the Reason Why; The Science of Sexual Orientation by Simon LeVay

Gay marriage has been making the headlines recently and there are a lot of arguments for and against it. At the heart of a lot of these arguments is whether homosexuality is “natural” or “unnatural”. Simon LeVay is a neuroscientist and takes an evidence-based approach to his subject. He doesn’t just look at the theories behind human sexuality; he looks at the evidence for those theories, or lack of it. This is what lifts this book head and shoulders above previous books looking at the origi
Drew Payne

Drew Payne in Book review

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Book review

Book Review: Mother's Boy by Patrick Gale

Charles is the apple of his mother’s eye, born in Cornwall just after the end of the First World War. He becomes the focus of his mother’s life after his father dies from TB. But Charles does not want to be a “mother’s boy” and when war breaks out, he leaves his claustrophobic life in Teignmouth, enlisting in the navy as a coder. The title of this novel has a double meaning and Patrick Gale uses both of them with skill and breadth. Charles is a boy raised as his mother’s sole outlet, the so
Drew Payne

Drew Payne in Book review

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Writing

Showtime 2022

My big writing news this month is that my short story “Men Online in the Local Area” has been published in Showtime 2022. It is about Harry, a young man living in East London, who is finding building a new life in his new home difficult. Superficially, it is about the ups and downs of using dating apps, but its real subject is about how a big, busy city can be a very lonely and difficult place to form new friendships in. This anthology, Showtime 2022, is special to me because I am one of th
Drew Payne

Drew Payne in Writing

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Book review

Book Review: Three Ex Presidents and James Franco by John Buchanan

It is 2008 and John, an Irish university student, is spending a year at an American liberal arts college. During that year he forms three very different relationships with three very different young men—the radically gay Jake, Eric the straight jock whose life is turned upside down when he is shot, and Brendon, his former best friend from Ireland. Also during that year he will be involved in a shooting, cause a scandal at a historical monument, meet an ex-president and be complimented by a risin
Drew Payne

Drew Payne in Book review

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Writing

"His Story"

Does the pain stop when the abuse does? My new novella, His Story, asks this question by following six, different events from one man’s life, a man who survived ex-gay/conversion therapy. Though this may sound a depressing read, there is a hopeful ending, and it discussed a subject not often found in literature, how do you survive abuse and start living again. It is available here, on Smashwords, as an eBook only, but is free to download, or you can pay whatever you want to.
Drew Payne

Drew Payne in Writing

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Book review

Book Review: The Machine Stops by EM Forster

It is the future and all humans live underground, each person having their own room, which they never leave. All their needs – food, drink, hygiene, medication and even sleep – are provided for them automatically from machinery within the room’s walls and ceiling. They communicate with other people without leaving their rooms, via a metal disk on which the other people’s faces are projected. They have a book that contains all required knowledge, which is being constantly updated. This world is a
Drew Payne

Drew Payne in Book review

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Book review

Book Review: Miss Marple's Final Cases by Agatha Christie

Miss Marple is probably the most famous female detective in English literature, she was certainly an original character when she first appeared in print, using psychology and character observation rather than searching for physical clues to solve crimes. This collection of stories was published posthumously after Christie’s death and brings together the remaining Miss Marple short stories that hadn’t been published in book form before, plus two supernatural stories that didn’t feature Miss
Drew Payne

Drew Payne in Book review

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With Pride

With Pride, July 2019

Something New Every Year (July 2019)   The other Saturday, I did something I’d never done before. At my age, it isn’t often I get to do something as new as this, but the other Saturday I marched in the London Pride March openly as a nurse. I’ve marched in the Pride March many times before, with friends, with LGBT organisations, but never before openly as a nurse. This year, a group of staff in my Trust’s LGBT Network organised to take part in the London Pride March and we had
Drew Payne

Drew Payne in With Pride

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With Pride

With Pride, January 2017

And Some Things Change and Some Things Remain the Same (January 2017) I started to come out when I was nineteen, more than thirty years ago, and nearly overnight I lost almost all of my friends; I was ostracised just for being gay. It was a shocking experience that has left a lasting impact on me. Today, I am married to my husband Martin and work as a community nurse in North London. Everyone at work knows my husband and no one has a problem with him, I have almost forgotten the l
Drew Payne

Drew Payne in With Pride

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With Pride

With Pride, August 2015

Do Unhealthy Attitudes Ever Change? (August 2015) During my first year of nurse training (twenty-five years ago) I ran into a wall of homophobia. I was told by some of my vocal colleagues that I only wanted to be a nurse to see naked men, that all gay men deserved AIDS, that I was a danger to children, and that God could heal me and make me “normal”.  I endured it because it was 1990 and homophobia was what I expected as a gay man. It's now 2015 and our society has changed so much
Drew Payne

Drew Payne in With Pride

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With Pride

With Pride, January 2015

A Safe Place for All? (January 2015) Freddie Mercury died from AIDS in November 1991. I was a student nurse at the time. One of my colleagues told me that he “deserved it” because of his “lifestyle”. I exploded faced with her homophobia, but I was turned on by others who supported her, saying their views were right because they wanted to be parents and any parent would want to protect their sons from the likes of Freddie Mercury. And I was wrong, they said, because I was defending some
Drew Payne

Drew Payne in With Pride

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With Pride

With Pride, July 2008

Marching with Pride (July 2008)   On Saturday (5th July 2008) it was London LGBT Pride and, with bright sunny weather, my partner and I had a wonderful day there. The highlight, as always, was the Pride March. People were laughing and smiling, enjoying walking through central London together and openly. The march was headed by groups representing many of our uniformed and emergency services. First came lesbian, gay and bisexual members of the navy, army and RAF, all in their
Drew Payne

Drew Payne in With Pride

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With Pride

With Pride

The next six blogs form a short series, which I have called “With Pride” because they were all originally comments pieces, on LGBT rights and healthcare, published in the Nursing Standard magazine, and I am proud of having written them. For nearly fifteen years, on and off, I have written comment pieces for Nursing Standard and a lot of them were on LGBT healthcare. These pieces chart changes in attitudes, but they also had recurring themes and one was responding to a very disturbing piece
Drew Payne

Drew Payne in With Pride

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Esaay

When Joan Met Tommy

My father married the girl next door. My parents met because they lived next door to each other, in post-war Barrow-in-Furness. But saying it like that makes their story sound so simplistic. My parents did not a make big deal of how they met. It certainly wasn’t a family story, brought out at every chance and worn as a badge of pride. I only found out how they met when I was fifteen. My parents had taken me back to Barrow-in-Furness, a car drive up from Liverpool with our pet dog. That trip
Drew Payne

Drew Payne in Esaay

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My Story

What He Said Was Not the Truth, Was Never the Truth and Will Never Be the Truth

December 1984 Dusk had come early that afternoon and by the time of the church’s Evensong Service, all that could be seen outside the windows was black night. The church’s windows only reflected darkness, not even vague shapes or movement within it. In the time before the service began, I sat in my pew and stared at those dark night windows. It was called The Youth Service. Once a month, the church’s Young People’s Fellowship was allowed to take part in the Evensong Service, though not
Drew Payne

Drew Payne in My Story

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Esaay

Five Days and More Days on Top

I was twelve years old when my grandmother died. My father woke me up, early that morning, and told me, “Your Gran has gone to Heaven.” I was confused, no one had told me she was that ill, they certainly hadn’t told me she was dying. I thought that her decreasing health and physical ability was because of her great age, she had seemed so impossibly old to me back then. It was much later that I’d find out what had happened to her. She was the only grandparent I knew. My father’s parents
Drew Payne

Drew Payne in Esaay

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Writing

And Then There Was…

I was an awkward thirteen-year-old (a little under ten years before I was diagnosed as dyslexic) when my mother gave me a copy of A Pocketful of Rye by Agatha Christie. At the time I loved the concept of books but I found them so difficult, my reading was so slow and finishing a book seemed like an impossibly difficult task, a mountain too high to climb. This book intrigued me. The cover was macabre, a black bird’s skeleton surrounded by its black feathers, lying on an illustrated sheet music to
Drew Payne

Drew Payne in Writing

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Esaay

Waiting for My Father

The room was quiet; the only sounds there were small and slight, ones that would not normally have been noticed except for the silence there. There was the mechanical noise of the little pump occasionally leaping into life as it delivered another dose of painkillers. There was the hiss of air escaping as the air mattress slowly inflated and deflated. There was also the sound of his breathing, slow and almost rasping as he drew in air through his parted lips, held that air in his lungs for w
Drew Payne

Drew Payne in Esaay

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Writing

Revenge Is a Dish Best Served Well Plotted and Proofread

I never actually met Hamish (*), but God did I hate him, and that wasn’t from a personal prejudice. Martin (my husband) was working for a previous employer but still as a clinical nurse specialist. I know that I am biased, but Martin is very experienced at his job and he knows his subject. Hamish started working at the same trust. He had no clinical experience or qualifications and was working as a manager for a non-clinical service; he managed the trust’s buildings. But this didn’t stop Ha
Drew Payne

Drew Payne in Writing

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My Story

A Moment after Church

Autumn 1985  At nineteen, my main mission in life was to “fit in” with the world around me. If I kept my head down and didn’t draw attention to myself then people would not guess my secret and not hate me for it, as I feared. It was a simple but very flawed plan, though at the time it was all I could see to do. At that time, most of my world revolved around being a member of my church and being a good Christian because that was what was expected of me with my membership there. It was
Drew Payne

Drew Payne in My Story

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Writing

The View from This Window

My writing desk sits under the window in our front bedroom, though we have rarely used the room as such, and it gives me a clear view of the strip of grass on the opposite side of the road. It is that writers’ activity, doing anything else but write, and mine is staring out of that window and watching life pass by on that strip of grass. Whenever I do it, I stop myself, tell myself I should be writing, and turn away from the window, but so often some fascinating tableau out there will catch my a
Drew Payne

Drew Payne in Writing

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blog post

“Ah, But Underneath”: Words, Music and Character Development

She was smart, tart Dry as a martini— Ah, but underneath… She was all heart Something by Puccini— Ah, but underneath... Ah, But Underneath, Follies - Original London Cast, Stephen Sondheim   Julia McKenzie, dressed in a white silk dress, walked slowly to the centre of the stage, dry-ice swirling around her feet, and picked out by a single spotlight. Then she stopped, looked off into the middle distance, and began to sing “Losing My Mind”. She stopped the s
Drew Payne

Drew Payne in blog post

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Writing

Based on Real People

“I gave you good script,” Ma to Alan Cocktail Sticks, a play by Alan Bennett   The writer Alan Bennett has been very open about how much he is inspired by real-life events. He has written plays and film scripts all inspired by real-life events; he has written several volumes of autobiographical essays, and every year or so he publishes extracts from his diary. I’ve seen and read all of them and enjoyed them so much. In his autobiographical play Cocktail Sticks, about his relations
Drew Payne

Drew Payne in Writing

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My Story

Waiting for the Postman

It was a love affair, carried out by letters and parcels, though the love was all on my side. I would wait, with both excitement and anticipation, for each new delivery, some of which would take weeks to arrive. Aged eighteen, in suburban Liverpool, in the early 1980s, I had little chance of finding any queer literature. The big chain bookshops in the city centre only sold bestsellers and mainstream books. The independent bookshops sold the same bestsellers and sentimental books on local hi
Drew Payne

Drew Payne in My Story

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Writing

Boxing Day 1975 and the Rashomon Style

My latest published book is an e-book version of my story Boxing Day 1975. This story is written in the Rashomon style. This is where the same events are told and retold from the prospective of different characters, two or more. My story is about a family watching the Boxing Day film, on television, in 1975. They all have a very different reaction to the film, reflecting the changings times of 1975. The film they are watching is One Million Years BC. The style/effect is named after the 1950
Drew Payne

Drew Payne in Writing

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