Drew Payne

Simon pushed the last of the sausage casserole into his mouth. It had been full of rich flavours: tomatoes and herbs, and the smoky taste of paprika. It wasn’t just that Niki was a good cook, she was an imaginative one. She would take a basic or familiar recipe and enhance it with some twist or change; the use of herbs or spices, or the addition of a rogue ingredient, something different or unexpected. With tonight’s sausage casserole it had been the addition of herbs, and the paprika, which had

Wow, thanks for this feedback, it means a lot to me. This is all fiction. I am certainly not Simon, but what you say really encourages me. I'd done a lot of research on this story and I've worked a lot creating these characters, they are people I find interesting. I am so glad you feel for Simon, I am really hoping people will follow Simon's emotional journey here.

Thanks for this feedback. I wanted to write about how difficult it is still to come out, even with all our equality advances. I was shocked, when researching this story, at all the problems teenagers still face when coming out. I wanted to write about the homophobia that still infects our society. Having Simon being raised by two women added another layer of homophobia, the fear people will find out about his home life as well as his sexuality. But what I didn't want Simon to be self-hating because he's gay. He's very aware of the homophobia he faces, but not always the bad decisions it makes him make, but I didn't want him internalising that homophobia and hating himself, that is a completely different story, I wanted him reacting him to that homophobia. "Two steps forward and one back" really does sum up Simon's situation, but things do change.

He is only sixteen and has never been the most sociable of children. He only had two friends at school, they weren't the greatest of friends, and he’s found how much he just doesn’t fit in at his college. Plus, only until recently, his home life has been cold and rule filled. He can't get over being gay because he's only just starting to explore being gay, and so far he's made a real mess of it. At sixteen, being gay can seem so huge, the same way many other things can seem huge. The world around is still not welcoming to him, even though we've made leaps and bounds in equality in the last 20 years. But most of all, give him time. He's only finding his feet with being a gay man, he will make some good decisions, and he'll made some monumentally bad ones.

Thank you. That means a lot to me.

Simon sat slumped back on the sofa with his laptop balanced on his thighs. Tonight he had the house to himself. His mum and Niki had gone out on one of their Wednesday night date-nights. They had gone to Niki’s friends, Iain and Will’s home, for dinner. So many of Niki’s friends seemed to be gay men. Having the house to himself for the evening Simon had intended to slouch on the sofa and watch television. For once he was on top of his assignments from college and didn’t have to spend half th

Simon is rather self-absorbed but he is only sixteen. His life so far has been reacting against the things that happen to him but which he has no power of over. He's also still deeply unsure about his sexuality. But he enjoys his relationship with Niki, he doesn't want to lose her from his life, and rightly so (Oops, spoilers). To make Simon saintly good and caring of everyone just won't have been honest, and with his parents he's already developed a very good survival instinct.

Matthew is certainly not handling any of this well, he's lost his job, his home and then his wife. He's also got his awful mother behind him, pushing at him and telling what is right and wrong He is certainly behaving like an A-Hole but he has been scared off by a muscle queen, and this story is set in England were getting a legal hand gun is next to impossible. Plus Matthew is too much of a self-centred wimp to even know how to use a hand gun. Unfortunately, the British police and justice system are only just waking up to the dangers of stalkers, and so far Matthew hasn't done anything to set off red lights, he'd just be ignored as an upset, abandoned husband.

Simon lay on the sofa, his feet actually up on the armrest, as some soap opera played on the television, unwatched. He had slumped down on the sofa, after dinner, to carry on reading the e-book on his phone. He’d started that e-book over a week ago but he had barely touched it since Max had dumped him. He'd not had the concentration or motivation to read it. The book was about a gay, former boy band member, with an eating disorder. The book had held his attention at first, but that had been when

You get it! I wanted to show why Simon behaves like this. His first boyfriend is just using him, he's such a loner at college and he lives with his mother and her girlfriend and isn't out to either of them. I also wanted to explain his dysfunctional family life. So often we can be prisoners to the ghosts of our childhoods, and it’s a subject that appears again and again in my writing.

Thanks for your wonderful feedback. I don't want to give anything away ("Spoilers sweetie," as the Great River Song says), I'm further on with the story, but I just want to say, wait and see. Niki is great fun to write, and I've given her so many of my own views, but I do love her confidence and pure good heart (Which I wish I had more of) which is so wonderful to write. Sometime I hit on characters that are a joy to write, and fortunately this story has several of them.

But it was a very one-side relationship. Max decided what they did Simon followed behind him because Simon was the one who had the much stronger emotions. This was Simon's first relationship and he throw himself into it, but it was with the wrong person.

Simon is at a low point here, but this low point will be a catalyst for him to change his life and build a life for himself. Saying that, this won't be an easy journey and he won't get over Max that easily. The relationship might not have been the best but it was his first and his only contact with gay life. On a technical point, at sixteen Simon isn't underage because this story is set in Britain were the age of consent is 16.

The grandmother is a horrible character, and she certainly picked her church to reflect her awful views. She was an awful character to write, I so wanted to just kill her off, but that would have taken the story in a very different direction. I'm afraid this isn't the last we've heard of Simon's father, but the man has real issues (I am well ahead with the chapters I've already written, and this isn't an easy journey).

See, I can be nice to my characters. Having Simon living with his mum and her girlfriend, Niki, gives a whole different dymanic to the story, and I found the idea of him not coming out to his mum and her girlfriend interesting and wanted to explore it. And Niki just leapt off the page as someone I wanted to write more about. Also, I like exploring different family dynamics, and I haven't written about someone having two mothers before (Though I know several Lesbian couples with children).

His grandmother is rather a monster, I can't say she was fun to write. Wait untill you read what happens after his fourteenth birthday...

After the film, which Simon had loved, allowing him to become lost in a completely different world for nearly two hours, his mum had taken him to the American burger style restaurant next to the cinema. She'd ordered them both two large and very messy burgers, and thick fries. As they chomped through the burgers, his mum had said: “Simon, there’s something I need to tell you.” Simon swallowed his mouthful of burger and waited to hear what he had done wrong now. His mum always used that t

He’d taken his usual seat on the bus home, upstairs and just back from the front. He didn’t like sitting in the very front seat on the top deck, as that was where little kids sat and pretended to drive the bus, and he was beyond that. Again, he stared out of the window as the bus pulled away from the stop. All week, so far, he’d had little interest in reading or listening to whatever he had downloaded onto his phone. He just spent his journeys, to and from college, staring out of the bus window

Thank you Dave. My job does give me an unique prospective, and it is an amazing opportunity for the writer in me. Of course I'm always professional, but that computer clip at the back of my mind seems to record so much of it, from patients, from colleagues, from so many people I meet. So many different things get lodged in my mind and sets my imagination off (Of course I've got to be so careful change any identifies). Please don't think of me as anything special, I just do an unusual job, which I've had a lot of training to do. There are many jobs I just couldn't do, for lots of reasons, but I am fortunate enough to have found a job I enjoy. Thanks for your comments, I does me the power of good to hear that someone enjoys what I have written. Drew

Dave, Thank you for such wonderful feedback. I wrote this story to vent my frustrations at people who dish out those stupid, cliched and completely inappropriate "buzzwords" as advice. I wanted to show how useless they are, especially when the advise-giver doesn't take the time to listen to the person they are dumping their advise onto.

Thank you but I have the actor Russell Tovey to thank for this story. I read an interview with him where he talked about how monotonous being in a long running play was. And that set off my imagination.

I wrote this story back in 2005, and I wanted to look at how denying a person's sexuality can destroy a child/parent relationship, but writing it I realised the child would be complicit in it too, going along with the parent's denial. I don't blame the central character here for doing this, challenging someone's complete denial like this would be so difficult. I hope this story is happening less often now but I fear there are still people who use denial when faced with something they don't want to deal with, but denial can have such a creeping, destructive affect.

He looked out of train’s window as it crawled through the city’s outskirts. It was row upon row of squat red brick terraced houses. They all seemed the same, those little terraced houses, with rectangle extensions sticking out from the back of them, their tiny walled in gardens, with all their woodwork painted in the same bright white paint. He didn’t dislike these houses, in general he didn’t have any opinion about them, but seeing them out of the train’s window meant he was only a handful of m

Of course they did, but also remember Freddie Brockman stood up to those bigots, and he led them out into the college's courtyard were everyone could see how they were behaving. Plus Freddie wouldn't take the blame for the bigots' behaviour. Guess who liked writing about Freddie Brockman.

Thank you. Simon isn't a coward, he's seen the world around him and seen how to keep himself safe. At this point, there's only one person in his life who is positive about their sexuality, and no one has told them that he is good, and accepts his sexuality without any questions (Well he'as only told one person he's gay and that person rejected him). This is only the beginning of Simon's journey, not the home stretch.