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Wacky Wednesday: Interview With Altimexis

Renee Stevens

Entry posted by Renee Stevens in Author Interviews

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I hope everyone is having a wonderful week so far! On Monday we had a review of "Love In A Chair" by our Signature Author: Altimexis as a part of "Signature Week" here in a the Gay Authors News Blog. "Love In A Chair" was chosen for the February Background, if you haven't already downloaded your copy of the background, you can still do so by visiting the blog entry. To continue the "Signature Week" I sent Altimexis a few questions about "Love In A Chair" and he was kind enough to answer them for me! I hope you enjoy his answers as much as I did!

Interview with Altimexis

 

What made you originally decide to write “Love in a Chair”?

 

As I suspect is the case for many if not most readers, my first introduction to gay-themed literature was the Nifty Archive. Of course I found the quality of the writing to range from abysmal at the worst to mediocre at best, with a few exceptions. In my reading, I came across a handful of stories that included characters with physical disabilities and although some of them were actually well-written, by and large they all portrayed those characters as helpless. I recall quite well that one story in particular had a gay paraplegic kid in the story who seemingly was incapable of propelling his own wheelchair! He had to be pushed everywhere by the other kids in the story. Yet he had perfectly functioning sexual organs. It was sickening.

 

I grew up with an autistic brother and my best friend in college had a congenital defect that confined him to a wheelchair, and when it came to choosing a career, I chose one that involved working with people with disabilities. Seeing stories on Nifty that portrayed gay kids with disabilities as being helpless made my blood boil, and so I decided to do something about it. I'd always enjoyed writing and so I decided to write a full-length story about a kid with an acquired spinal cord injury.

 

In reading through your forum, it was made clear to me that you wanted this story to be as realistic as possible, did you find it hard to write at times?

 

Actually, writing about a character with a disability was the easy part! I have been writing professionally about people with physical disabilities for decades. I teach medical students and residents about many of the things that were in the story - things such as how to manage bowel and bladder function, and alternative means of achieving sexual satisfaction. These are the sort of things that are never brought up in a clinical setting, yet these are the things that bring the most distress to people with disabilities, even more than the loss of the ability to walk. I wanted to convey all of this in my story, yet make it uplifting in the end.

 

Is there anything about “Love In A Chair” that you now wish you had done differently?

 

Oh God yes! LiaC was my first stab at writing since I was a kid, and my first full-length novel. I almost can't stand reading it now - it's just so sappy. I'm probably my harshest critic, but I definitely could have made the characters more realistic, given their love more time to develop and given them much more depth.

 

You seemed to have gotten a lot of feedback while writing your story, did you change anything you had planned for the story based on the feedback you received?

 

I know there are some authors who write a story and don't even read the feedback they get while writing the story. Quite a few authors won't change anything in the story, even when a reader points out an inconsistency or an outright error. I have never seen a story as a static art form that must remain as originally written, no matter what. When I posted the first chapter on Nifty, I had no editors and I did my own proofreading. That very quickly changed. I started getting feedback right away and I even went back and revised some of what I'd already written.

 

My original outline for LiaC did not include the accident scene investigation, nor time spent in jail. One of the people providing feedback, however, was a lawyer and his insights very quickly made me realize that these things were needed to make the story more realistic. There were other additions too.

 

What was the easiest part of writing your story? The hardest part?

 

The easiest part was writing about the clinical aspects of living with a spinal cord injury. As already stated, I do that for a living. The hardest part was writing about a serious suicide attempt. Most people with major disabilities think about it, and some think about it often, but very few actually carry it out. A few years before I wrote LiaC, however, I was approached by a man who'd been a quadriplegic for more than thirty years and wished to be taken off his ventilator. In the end he got his wish and I was with him when he passed away. I still have nightmares about it to this day.

 

How did you feel when you finally finished writing “Love In A Chair”?

 

I felt a tremendous sense of accomplishment. I'd never attempted to write a novel before and would have never thought I could do it before. LiaC gave me the courage to continue writing, and I've now written several novels and novellas, and more are on the way.

 

Unless I am mistaken, you posted “Love In A Chair” as you were writing it, did you wish you had waited until it was finished to start posting it?

 

LiaC was a special case. It was my first attempt at writing a novel and I wanted to get it right. There is nothing I hate more than an abandoned story, however, and so I adopted a paradigm I still follow to this day - I will not begin posting a story until the first draft is done. That doesn't mean I won't make revisions as I receive feedback, however, and I will always correct outright errors, even after they have been published. With LiaC, however, there were major revisions along the way. Nothing I've written since has undergone such significant revision once I started posting.

 

Is there anything else you’d like to share with your readers about your experience while writing “Love in a Chair”?

 

I want to thank my readers for their support and for their invaluable feedback. I also want to thank them for putting up with all the over-the-top sappiness in LiaC - it was my first serious attempt at writing and it shows. Still, I think it is a good story and it is by far the most accurate portrayal of a gay teen with a disability that I am aware of. I hope my readers enjoy it, and ask them to check out some of my more recent stories at
GA
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Andy78

There is the old saying to write what you know,  Though lately I have heard people say that authors can write outside of what they know.  Clearly though his day job Altemexis was able to bring far more character realism to his story.

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shyboy85

Great to see an in-depth interview with an author I greatly admire.

 

Being a physically disabled gay boy myself, as well as "suffering" (for wont of a better term) from Asperger's, I've looked all over the internet for stories about people even remotely like me.

 

I hadn't known Love in a Chair was Altimexis's first try at a story and I'm hard pressed to believe it even now. I can see where his later stories carried more realism, but to me, for the aforementioned reasons, Love in a Chair was the most important story I ever read.

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