Outer Alliance Spotlight #24: Djibril Alayad March 5, 2010
Posted by juliarios in : interviews, queer-friendly publishers, submissions , 1 comment so farWelcome to Outer Alliance Spotlight #24. Each Friday, the Spotlight features an ally who writes, reviews, publishes, or is in some other way involved with LGBTQI speculative fiction. Our guest this week is Djibril Alayad, editor of The Future Fire.
Djibril has always assumed that explorations of sexual difference were key to science fiction, so The Future Fire has welcomed queer fiction since it began in 2004. The most recent issue has a feminist theme, and Djibril is currently reading for a queer themed issue, which should be out soon. In addition to the magazine, The Future Fire also has a reviews blog, which focuses on reviews for small press publications.
Djibril has lived and worked on both sides of the Atlantic, and is currently based in London, UK. He is a formally trained historian with a collection of animal skulls. He maintains a Twitter feed as @thefuturefire.
Outer Alliance Spotlight #23: Catherine Lundoff February 26, 2010
Posted by juliarios in : interviews , add a commentWelcome to Outer Alliance Spotlight #23. Each Friday, the Spotlight features an ally who writes, reviews, publishes, or is in some other way involved with LGBTQI speculative fiction. Our guest this week is author and editor, Catherine Lundoff.
Catherine is a lesbian identified bisexual, who married her partner of 16 years last September. She’s been writing since 1996, and has amassed a long list of queer speculative and erotic fiction sales, including the recent “Great Reckonings, Little Rooms” in Time Well Bent: Queer Alternative History, and “The Egyptian Cat” in Tales of the Unanticipated #30.
She received a Lambda nomination for the lesbian ghost story collection, Haunted Hearths and Sapphic Shades in 2008, and also won the Golden Crown Literary Award in the Lesbian Erotica category that same year for her short story collection, Crave: Tales of Lust, Love and Longing. She is currently reading submissions for a new anthology, Hellebore and Rue, which she is co-editing with JoSelle Vanderhooft.
Catherine is a regular at WisCon and Gaylaxicon, and she’ll also be appearing at MarsCon next week in Bloomington, Minnesota. If you can’t make it out to see her in person, you may find her online on LiveJournal, MySpace, Facebook, and GoodReads. She lives in Minnesota with her wife and two cats.
Outer Alliance Spotlight #22: Elizabeth Bear February 19, 2010
Posted by juliarios in : interviews , 2commentsWelcome to Outer Alliance Spotlight #22. Each Friday, the Spotlight features an ally who writes, reviews, publishes, or is in some other way involved with LGBTQI speculative fiction. Our guest this week is Campbell, Hugo, and Spectrum Award winning author, Elizabeth Bear.
Elizabeth Bear won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2005, and has since written several award winning novels and stories. Bear’s novels often include queer content, and her long trail of award nominations reflects this. Carnival was nominated for the Science Fiction/Fantasy/Horror Lambda Literary Award in 2006 and shortlisted for the Gaylactic Spectrum Award in 2007. New Ansterdam, Dust, and Whiskey and Water were shortlisted for the Spectrum in 2008, while A Companion to Wolves (co-written with Sarah Monette) also received Spectrum and Lambda nominations that year. In 2009, All the Windwracked Stars, Ink and Steel, and Hell and Earth received Spectrum nominations, and the latter two (treated as two volumes of a long novel, The Stratford Man) won.
Bear’s success is not limited to novels, though. She’s had stories reprinted in several Year’s Best anthologies, and two of her shorter pieces have won Hugo Awards: “Tideline” for Best Short Story in 2008, and “Shoggoths in Bloom” for Best Novelette in 2009. She also writes for a fictional television show called Shadow Unit with a team of other authors including Emma Bull, Sarah Monette, and Amanda Downum.
In addition to her website, Bear maintains a LiveJournal and a Twitter feed. Her new novel, Chill, is coming out on the 23rd, and a novella, Bone and Jewel Creatures will be available in March.
Outer Alliance Spotlight #21: Rick Reed February 12, 2010
Posted by juliarios in : interviews , add a commentWelcome to Outer Alliance Spotlight #21. Each Friday, the Spotlight features an ally who writes, reviews, publishes, or is in some other way involved with LGBTQI speculative fiction. Our guest this week is horror author, Rick Reed.
Rick has written several novels, both speculative and not. His novel about reincarnation and love, Orientation, won the EPIC Award for Best GLBT Novel last year, and two of his books are currently EPIC 2010 Awards finalists. Dead End Street is nominated in the Young Adult category and VGL Male Seeks Same is nominated in the Contemporary Romance Category. He’s also got a new novel called Blue Moon Cafe coming out in March from Amber Allure, and a short story in the forthcoming I Do Two charity anthology from MLR Press (proceeds go to the Lambda Legal).
Rick currently lives in Seattle with his partner and their Boston terrier, Lily. He is on Twitter, MySpace, and Facebook, and he maintains a blog at http://rickrreedreality.blogspot.com/.
Outer Alliance Spotlight #20: Hamish MacDonald February 5, 2010
Posted by juliarios in : interviews , 4commentsWelcome to Outer Alliance Spotlight #20. Each Friday, the Spotlight features an ally who writes, reviews, publishes, or is in some other way involved with LGBTQI speculative fiction. Our guest this week is author and bookmaker, Hamish MacDonald.
Hamish has been designing and publishing his own books for a decade, beginning with the Y2K thriller, doubleZero. All of his books feature gay characters, but he’s quick to point out that their sexuality is not the only thing that defines them. “In writing books, I try to create accessible, fun stories that clip along yet deep down ask a fundamental question about some issue we’re facing,” he says. “The homosexuality is always incidental to the story, but it’s something reviewers have singled out and use to describe the books; I think that’s narrow — straightness doesn’t need a warning label, nor is its inclusion taken to be a statement.”
Originally from Canada, Hamish gave in to the desire to live in place where his name would be commonplace, and relocated to Scotland in 2001. He lived in Edinburgh for 9 years, but is currently planning to move up into the highlands. In addition to creating books from scratch, he also passes on instruction and advice for others in his podcast, DIY Book. He keeps a blog on his website, and can be found on Twitter as hamishmacdonald.
Outer Alliance Spotlight #19: Barton Paul Levenson January 31, 2010
Posted by juliarios in : interviews , 3commentsWelcome to Outer Alliance Spotlight #19. Each Friday[1], the Spotlight features an ally who writes, reviews, publishes, or is in some other way involved with LGBTQI speculative fiction. Our guest this week is physicist and author, Barton Paul Levenson.
Barton is bisexual and has been writing queer speculative fiction for 24 years. His latest novel, I Will is due out very soon from Virtual Tales. Two earlier novels, Ella the Vampire and Parole are available through Lyrical Press. Two more novels, Max and Me, and Year of the Human are slated for release later this year through Lyrical Press and Hearts on Fire Books.
As a physicist, Barton writes atmosphere models when he isn’t writing fiction, and spends a lot of time trying to raise awareness about global warming. He is a born-again Christian, a liberal Democrat, and a lover of science. He hails from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
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OA: You’ve written female/female, male/male and male/female relationships in your currently available works. What appealed to you about each of those? Do you anticipate writing more of any one type in the future?
BPL: I’m currently working on a novel which I think will involve two teen girls falling in love with each other. But generally I don’t target the sexual relationships involved from the beginning; they just flow out of the characterization.
What is attractive about each? Hard to say. I think the hetero thing feels good because you’re exploring a cuddly, warm body different from your own and designed by evolution to mate with–also because men and women in most societies have slightly different subcultures and ways of looking at things, so it’s a chance to get close to someone with a (somewhat) different psychology. The homo thing feels good, I think, because it’s reassuring to be with a body like your own, one you know, and it’s easier to know in advance what your partner will and won’t like. And if you’re raised in a heterosupremacist culture, it can be awfully liberating to throw away the demanded gender roles and just do what feels good to you, and the hell with what society thinks. That experience will fade with time as GLBT lifestyles become more accepted, God willing.
OA: I Will was released a few days ago. If you could really visit the space adventure universe in the book, would you want to go? Why, or why not?
BPL: Heck, yeah! It’s filled with all the cool SF stuff I craved as a kid–aliens, interstellar travel, strange planets, and a very comfortable, high-tech environment. Plus Earth in this universe (it shows up in the sequel) has incorporated a lot of the policy changes I recommend. When you’re creating the world, you can make it do anything you want!
OA: Your bio on the Lyrical Press site describes you as a born-again Christian and a liberal Democrat, and says that this combination confuses people. Do you think this confusion is unwarranted, or are there times when you find your spirituality and your political beliefs in conflict?
BPL: It hasn’t been a problem so far, aside from occasional frustration with fellow Christians who embrace politics I don’t, and fellow left-liberals who reject my religion or all religions. I can get along with anybody, but I have had a few occasions when I was told I couldn’t be a “real” Christian if I supported [pick an issue--free choice, gay rights, evolution...]. Also that I couldn’t “really” understand or believe science if I believed in God, and that as a Christian I undoubtedly embraced misogyny, homophobia, racism, creationism, and despoiling the environment. Sometimes it was honest ignorance; sometimes it was just prejudice.
OA: You have two more books coming out in the next year: Max and Me, and Year of the Human. Can you tell us anything about them? When can we expect to see them?
BPL: Max and Me is an SF action-adventure novel with a little speculative philosophy thrown in. The protagonist is Gunnar “Gunner” Dahlquist, a bisexual veteran of Beast War III who now pilots a freelance spaceship out of 1 Ceres. He lives with the bioengineered talking cat Max, who is even more cynical and foul-mouthed than he is. Things get strange when, twelve years after Beast War III ended, people suddenly begin pursuing Max, one faction wanting to kidnap him, another to kill him.
Year of the Human is a young-adult SF novel. Alien teen girl Throsu ka-Hohsh is a would-be astronaut and a nationalist; her planet fought a brief, inconclusive war with Earth years earlier. She is thrown for a loop when her parents inform her they will host a human scientist and her daughter for a year–the daughter to live in Throsu’s room! And soon that’s the least of her worries.
OA: As a concerned physicist, what (if anything) do you think the global community can do to successfully end global warming? If it doesn’t work, what do you think the consequences will look like?
BPL: If we make a massive switch away from fossil fuels to solar, wind, geothermal, biomass, and hydro in the next five to ten years, and stop cutting down forests, we may just make it. Frankly, I don’t think we will. The human pattern is never to prevent a crisis; it’s to wait until the crisis happens and then react. This time that pattern is going to kill us. Global warming causes more droughts in continental interiors and more violent weather along coastlines. 12% of the Earth’s land surface was “severely dry” by the Palmer Drought Severity Index in 1970; by 2002 that figure was 30% and still climbing (Dai et al. 2004). I expect human agriculture to collapse completely some time in the next forty years, and when that goes our civilization will go with it.
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Thanks, Barton! Join us again on Friday for another Spotlight, and in the meantime, check out I Will at Virtual Tales, or other books by Barton Paul Levenson at Lyrical Press.
[1] (Back to post): My apologies for the tardiness of this week’s Spotlight. A series of international travel (mis)adventures left me without internet access on Friday and Saturday.
Outer Alliance Spotlight #18: Kyell Gold January 22, 2010
Posted by juliarios in : events, interviews, queer-friendly publishers , add a commentWelcome to Outer Alliance Spotlight #18. Each Friday, the Spotlight features an ally who writes, reviews, publishes, or is in some other way involved with LGBTQI speculative fiction. Our guest this week is furry author, Kyell Gold.
Kyell has won several Ursa Major Awards for his work, and recently won two Rainbow Awards for his novel, Out of Position. His latest book, Shadow of the Father, is being released this weekend at Further ConFusion in San Jose, California. Another novella, Bridges, will be released next month at Furry Fiesta in Dallas, Texas, where Kyell will appear as the Writing Guest of Honor. Bridges is part of a new project called Cupcakes, which Kyell is launching along with some other furry authors.
Kyell has been active in furry fandom and queer speculative fiction for ten years. In addition to his fiction, he also co-produces (with K.M. Hirosaki) a furry podcast called Unsheathed. When he’s not writing and podcasting, you might find him at cons, or campaigning for gay rights in his current home state of California. He lives in the San Francisco bay are with his partner, Kit Silver.
Kyell blogs on LiveJournal as kyellgold, and maintains a personal website at www.kyellgold.com.
Outer Alliance Spotlight #16: Angelia Sparrow January 8, 2010
Posted by juliarios in : interviews , add a commentWelcome to Outer Alliance Spotlight #16. Each Friday (except for last Friday, when your correspondent was busy welcoming the new year), the Spotlight features an ally who writes, reviews, publishes, or is in some other way involved with LGBTQI speculative fiction. Our guest this week is erotic writer, Angelia Sparrow.
Since 2004, Angelia since written seven novels, ten novellas, and many more short stories both on her own and together with her writing partner, Naomi Brooks. Their latest novel, Alive on the Inside, came out in December. An erotic horror novel about a traveling circus, Alive on the Inside has been nominated as a candidate for Best Horror Novel in the Preditors and Editors Readers’ Poll for works published in 2009.
Angelia and Naomi are planning to release a Western in 2010. Showdown at Yellowstone River will feature a drag king gunslinger and a bisexual sheriff. In addition to that novel, a couple of collections of previously published short stories are on the horizon. Angelia will be making appearances at several cons and events including MidSouthCon in March, Southern Delta Church of Wicca’s Beltane, Hypericon in June, Either Memphit FurMeet or Dragon*Con in September, MidSouth Pride, Summerland Grove’s Festival of Souls in October, and ConTraception in November.
Angelia is a truck driver and mother of four, who identifies as a bisexual, Butch Earth Mother. She grew up in Peculiar, Missouri, but has lived in the greater Memphis area for the past twelve years. She blogs about her writing at http://angelsparrow.blogspot.com/ (syndicated on LiveJournal here), and maintains a personal blog at http://valarltd.livejournal.com/. Angelia enjoys crochet and old movies, and donates both time and money to Memphis Area Gay Youth.
Outer Alliance #15: Jarla Tangh December 25, 2009
Posted by juliarios in : interviews , 1 comment so farWelcome to Outer Alliance Spotlight #15. Each Friday the Spotlight features an ally who writes, reviews, publishes, or is in some other way involved with LGBTQI speculative fiction. Our guest this week is writer and activist, Jarla Tangh.
Her Tangh-i-ness is a Clarion West 2001 Graduate. She owes her pseudonym to a vocalist friend who gave her the first name, a faery godmother of an editor, who told her using just one name is pretentious, and the surname from the Turkey City Lexicon. She considers herself African Descended rather than African American, but will still answer to Black and Colored.
Her Tangh-i-ness is a writer of homoerotic, multicultural, and kinky romance, science fiction, fantasy, and horror featuring people of color as the protagonists. Her work has appeared in Afro-Future Females (edited by Marlene S. Barr) and Mojo Conjure Stories (edited by Nalo Hopkinson). As a straight, cisgender ally, she joined the Outer Alliance because she wants to make sure there are always books with delicious LGBT characters to fall in love with on shelves, eBooks, online, on Kindle, etc.
Her Tangh-i-ness lives in Boston, and maintains a Facebook page and a Yahoo group.
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As one of the contributors to the Afro-Future Females collection, I suspect you’re in a great position to recommend some queer speculative fiction by or about people of color. Do you have any particular favorites?
I’m familiar with Jewelle Gomez; The Gilda Stories are on my to-read list. I’ve lucked out in knowing Nisi Shawl personally. “The Tawny Bitch”, her Gaylactic Spectrum Award nominated short story, is in the same anthology: Mojo Conjure Stories as my sadly unqueer offering.
But I cut my teeth on Samuel Delany’s Nevèrÿon series and Heartspace by Steven Barnes shares the same magical volume as Nisi Shawl and I. Of course, read Cecilia Tan’s short fiction. These are all people of color whose works touch upon queer lives and whom I heartily recommend.
What was your Clarion West experience like? Would you recommend the workshop to other aspiring writers?
Write a lot. Submit often. And go once accepted. I almost didn’t make it in my 2001 class. First, I was candidate number 19 out of 17 slots, but I asked to be put on standby and about a day later Leslie Howle called me to ask what kind of mojo I had because I was now going to Clarion! That year Octavia Butler, Nalo Hopkinson, Brad Denton, Connie Willis, Ellen Datlow, and Jack Womack were the instructors.
Our class brought us six weeks of intense camaraderie, weekly short story writing, and into close contact with more speculative professionals than you could ever get at any convention.
My Clarion West class is a 100% published class and I still keep in touch with them via email, Facebook, personal websites, and whenever they make it into my neck of the woods. We’ve critted each other’s works, congratulated each other on publications, babies, marriages, and other noteworthy accomplishments. I’ve standing invitations to crash with CW2K1 folks in Vancouver, Seattle, and in NYC.
I got a faery Godmother and a Literary Godfather out of it. That sense of community can last outside the actual experience.
Mainstream acceptance of kink has grown in the past couple of decades, but still has a long way to go. Why do you think some people are so scared of it, and are there any resources you’d recommend for promoting more kink acceptance?
The Puritanical element to American culture has its foot firmly on many people’s libidos. I think that’s the number one stigma that accompanies Kink. There’s nothing in the holybooks to say Kink is Good. Lots of people absorb messages all their lives about the sanctity and secrecy of sex. So it doesn’t occur to them that healthy sex includes Masturbation, Sex Toys, Leather, Latex, Rubber, Wet and Messy (thank you for introducing me to this term, Chewtoy!), Cross-dressing, or BDSM elements.
Gloria Brame’s manual springs to mind as a resource along with the transman’s Pat Califia’s. Check out Caryl’s BDSM & Fetish page and Tammad Rimilia has a BDSM Questionnaire that’s useful to both Dominants and Submissives. There’s the Deviant’s Dictionary and read Circlet Press’s pro-Kink collections on a regular basis.
How did you get the idea to start a Yahoo group for all things Tangh-y, and what is your vision for that?
I believe we have the ability to manifest things for ourselves. Say I’m currently living in a literary desert. I’ve dug a ditch and I’m waiting for it to fill with rain, so to speak. I figured once I have an audience, where in the heck do they go to find out what’s up with me and my work? If I could grow up to be the literary version of Margaret Cho, I think I’d used my time wisely upon the planet.
Can you tell us anything about your work in progress? What can we hope to see in the future?
Current Projects:
I’m looking for homes for several queer or kinky short stories that run the gamut from mildly perverse to extremely Not Safe For Work in various milieux. I’ve been collecting non-form rejections, which my writer friends remind me is good.
These are the novel projects that I’ve been juggling since I returned from Clarion West in 2001.
The Nether Concern- a dark urban fantasy series set in 1915 Boston with a Gay, Black hero. Book One I’m closest to soon being at the shop around to an agent stage. I recently became acquainted with Boston author, Lewis Gannett, whose own Gay Gothic inspired it.
World Jumping- a multi-world urban fantasy series set in Boston with a Straight Black heroine. I’m deep in revision on this one. It features talking animals and vanished ancient cultures.
The Society for the Protection of Engineered Creatures- an alternate-world, sci-fi series with an African descended, intersexed, albino hero who is a poly. The protagonist enjoys lovers of both sexes. Mind you, I wrote this before Caster Semenya’s unfortunate ordeal came to light. I have two finished novels from SPEC series in revision and two others with a quarter written only.
The Caldlond Demon series- a multi-generational fantasy set in an alternate Ancient Britain. I wrote three first drafts in the series and am tinkering with these as well.
I’m an organic writer. My process is slower because I don’t plan everything out beforehand. I leave myself plenty of space to connect things in the right way. I’m fortunate in that I have a writing group and family who happily give me regular feedback.
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Thank you, Jarla! Join us for another Spotlight next Friday, and in the meantime, check out Mojo Conjure Stories and Afro-Future Females!
Outer Alliance Spotlight #14: Steven Piziks December 18, 2009
Posted by juliarios in : interviews , add a commentWelcome to Outer Alliance Spotlight #14. Each Friday the Spotlight features an ally who writes, reviews, publishes, or is in some other way involved with LGBTQI speculative fiction. Our guest this week is author Steven Piziks.
Steven is a Michigan native, who currently lives in Ypsilanti. He wrote his first SF story at the age of nine, and made his first professional writing sale (an article about raising rabbits) to Mother Earth News at the age of 13. His professional fiction writing career started in 1992 when Marion Zimmer Bradley accepted his story, “Hoard” for Sword and Sorceress IX. He has since written a variety of short stories and novels under his own name, and as Steven Harper.
All four of his Silent Empire novels (written under the name Steven Harper) were finalists for the Gaylactic Spectrum Award. They are currently available in a variety of e-book formats at Book View Cafe, where Steven also guest blogs each Monday. His most recent story, “The Soul Jar” (written as Steven Harper) appears in the Book View Cafe original anthology, The Shadow Conspiracy.
When he isn’t writing, Steven enjoys playing both the folk harp, and City of Heroes (but he can quit any time he wants). One of his children is autistic, so he also supports the work of The Judson Center. Steven keeps a personal blog at spiziks.livejournal.com.