Well, did you find out about the little prince? Just what happened to him? Quite the change in circumstance... but what about fortitude? Share your thoughts in the comments below, but please enjoy this interview (long delayed!) with Georgie first!

Q: Do you eat your fruits and vegetables?

A: Vegetables regularly, mostly every day. Fruits is not my thing or I don’t take the time for it. So it is a banana so every now and then on an incidental basis.

Q: Are you a person who makes their bed in the morning, or do you not see much point?

A: Yes, I do. Being a rather chaotic person, who suffers from creative chaos on a continuing basis during daily life, I bring structure in things and one of these is making my bed. But the same goes for cooking a meal. OK, some days I end up with throwing a pizza in the oven but mostly I make a full meal. And I wash the dishes afterwards, so no stacks of dirty dishes in my kitchen…grin….

Q: If you were an animal, what would you be?

A: Most certainly a dog or maybe its wild predecessor, the wolf. But one of these is a certainty.

Q: What’s something personal about you people might be surprised to know?

A: That’s a tough question.

When I answer it in relation to the stories I write I guess the most personal thing is I was a juvenile care kid myself and had my share of severe mental problems, resulting in psychiatric treatment from my 16^th to my 26^th. But then I was healed and life became bright!

As a result I mix autobiographic facts from my turbulent past into stories. It doesn’t mean a whole story is autobiographic but there are always little parts or even a single sentence that is autobiographic. With the sole exception of Juvenile Care Lovers which is largely autobiographic.

Apart from that,…I really wouldn’t know. Maybe that I used to be singer as well, mostly old blues and hard rock. And maybe that I really like to translate old, even medieval Dutch poems in modern English that appear on line on GayAuthors in cooperation with ACBenus in his Mirror of Same Sex Love-Poetry.

Q: What brought you to GA?

A: I was looking for a way to expand my number of readers on a quality platform and after a tip from an American colleague-author I just joined. I remember it took me some time to understand your computer system.

Q: When do you get your best writing inspiration ideas (morning, evening, reading, images, music…)?

A: Inspiration is a purely intuitive thing with me. Everything can inspire me, something I see, hear, read, smell, touch, no matter at what time of the day… it triggers something or it doesn’t. Thinking it over (or like I usually call it: dreaming it up) and developing it into a story theme is mostly an evening- and nighttime job, mostly when hearing classical music so I can concentrate. It is purely an inexplicable artistic process of free association from the trigger to the story theme. And from the central theme I start researching and writing the actual story.

Q: What’s one location you’d love to go to research for a story?

A: I like to go to Nijmegen, a city in the Netherlands. Although I wasn’t born there that is where my roots are emotionally. It’s the city where I discovered my homosexuality and made my first (and partly pretty extreme) experiences. On top of that: it is not a metropole; we don’t have them in the Netherlands. But for Dutch conditions it is a big city with a population of about ¼ of a million and all the associated big city problems. But it is easy for research, because the size makes the scale of problems manageable to research and transparent. Besides, I have my contacts there to find information.

Q: Was there anything particularly challenging about twisting an old fairytale in The Little Prince That Turned into a Beggar?

A: This question made me laugh. Your question proves to me the disguise was letter-perfect.

Your assumption is very nice, but it is just the other way around. I didn’t turn an old fairytale into The Little Prince That Turned into a Beggar. It was just the other way around.

The challenging and tricky part was to take a real 21^st century sad story of a real-existing boy, who struggles with his homosexuality and his being non-binary and who receives no support from his family but is only greeted with rejection and condemnation. Since I promised him to keep him out of the spotlights, I turned the story into an innocent-looking fairytale by mixing in the well-known and well-proven fairytale ingredients, like the cruel king, the good fairy and of course the prince on the white horse. But if you read it again with this knowledge you might discover the true, heart wrenching story underneath it, including the time in prostitution. Because it is everything but an innocent fairytale. On the other hand: most fairytales aren’t very innocent. They are all based on archetypes representing good and bad, often in very extreme and violent forms.

Q: Is there any particular line or scene you love the best in the story?

A: That’s another hard question. I can’t really choose.

There are two scenes in Dance over the Thunderclouds (another fictionalized story of a real life story, by the way) and they are on a kind of shared first position. One of them is the scene with Rebel, the therapy dog, which shows the intimate emotional connection of trust between dog and man (Rebel was modelled after my own Golden Retriever).

The other is the haunting final scene of building up the harrowing tension of Dominic’s dance, which leads to the climax of his death. To be honest: it took me days and nights to write it but for myself I’m really satisfied with the result. And reader’s comments share this point of view.

And in The Unwanted I really like the scene is which the grandfather sings a jolk, the traditional Sami chant, and then explains its meaning to the boys.

Q: Can you share a little of your current or future work with readers?

A: About current work I prefer not to share too much, since the first 5 chapters of Maddog & The Pope are already up and running. Chapter 6 is in the process of final editing (together with my marvelous editor Luca E), but since everyone takes a break with the holidays, I assume it will be up shortly after New Years Day with the other chapters following after that. Just let the reader read and enjoy the story.

About future work…I’m working on two stories simultaneously. One is camouflaged as a thriller but it isn’t. It is about the dark side of the gay world, the dark side of the human mind into the extremes, about homeless kids and corruption in the police force, all intertwined by an igniting and blossoming love affair between a middle-aged detective and a young boy.

The second one is rather fluid at the moment, but it is for the biggest part situated in the circus world. And being a psychological writer you can expect that they as well will be largely based on emotions and thoughts and not on sex on itself.

But both will take some time to finish so don’t expect them to be on line very soon. Maybe I’ll dream up some short story to fill the gap.