My girlfriend and I technically attended GCLS last year. But it was held in Orlando, Florida, and neither of us had been to Disney before. Basically we ended up seeing a lot more of Mickey Mouse than Karin Kallmaker. So this was the first year that we were really present at GCLS. (Next year GCLS will be in Minneapolis, and Portland, Oregon the year after.)

One of the most fun parts of GCLS was their awards ceremony. It’s like the Oscars if everyone was a lesbian. GCLS runs their awards the same way Lambda and Publishing Triangle do: publishers (or authors) nominate books by paying a fee and providing copies, and then judges winnow the nominations down to a list of finalists. The awards are known as the Goldies. What’s amazing is that there can have more than one winner per category, depending on how many finalists there are.

The Outer Alliance’s own Sacchi Green won a Goldie in the category of lesbian erotica, for Lesbian Lust, although she wasn’t present at the ceremony. Winners in the speculative fiction category were Bourn’s Edge by Barbara Davies, More Than An Echo by Linda Kay Silva, and Nigredo by Alex Mykals. I read one of the finalists, Lesser Prophets by Kelly Sinclair, which follows a group of women through a flu epidemic that decimates the earth’s population but mysteriously spares gays and lesbians, and I thought it was excellent. Outer Alliance member Andi Marquette had a finalist as well, A Matter of Blood. Although I haven’t read that one, I did read the first book in the same series, Friends In High Places, and it had great world-building, intrigue, and romance. OA peeps would also enjoy Shadow Point by Amy Briant, a winner in the debut novel category, which is about a woman who goes to a haunted naval base when her brother dies there and must fight a malevolent ghost. The winners of the paranormal category also sounded intriguing: Rip Van Dyke by Kate McLachlan, a time travel story, and Riverwalker by Cate Culpepper, about a vengeful spirit. I loved learning about the pioneers of lesbian fiction, like Katherine V. Forrest and Ann Bannon. Apparently in the 1950s and early 1960s under the Comstock laws postal inspectors censored pulp fiction for vocabulary and plot, so that all gay books had to end in suicide or a straight marriage to be acceptable. Those early writers had a tough battle. They paved the way for all of us today, and we are truly standing on their shoulders.

The GCLS attendees were hardcore fans. It was bittersweet to hear so many women in the vendor room saying things like, “I lost my job and don’t have much money but I have to buy these books.” They knew classic lesbian books like Curious Wine by Katherine V. Forrest backwards and forwards. I’m afraid I have never read a single word by her or any of those trailblazing writers, although now I feel like I should. Attending GCLS showed me that there is a huge generation gap in lesbian fandom. I have to say that I was outside of my comfort zone at this con. Of course there were a variety of different kinds of people there, but the majority were white lesbians age 45 and up, many of whom live in isolated communities where they don’t meet a lot of other LGBTQ people. It seemed that a lot of women had come to GCLS by way of Xena, and I’m sorry to say I’ve never watched Xena either. What we did have in common was that we were all bookworms who admire lesfic writers at the top of their game like Karin Kallmaker, KG MacGregor, Georgia Beers, and Lee Lynch.

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Nora Olsen, a proud member of the Outer Alliance, writes LGBTQ-themed science fiction. The End: Five Queer Kids Save The World is her debut novel, and her short fiction has appeared in Collective Fallout. She lives in New York’s Hudson Valley with her girlfriend, writer Aine Ni Cheallaigh, and two cats.

Warren is a professor of English at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia. His interest in mythology and archetypal journeys manifests itself in his fiction, which also incorporates LGBTQ themes and explorations of oppression and struggles for civil rights. His first novel, The Wild Boy came out in 2001 through Golden Gryphon Press, and he has since published two more novels. Harvest of Changelings came out in 2007, and its sequel, The Called, came out in 2010. Warren’s short fiction and poetry have appeared in many places including Icarus: the Magazine of Gay Speculative Fiction.

OA: In the alternate universe early 1990s US of your books, people recognize that magic is real and some of the population is part fae, which changes the course of political and social history. How do those realizations affect the history of gay rights in that universe?

WR: That’s a good question.

The realizations that magic is real and that there are folks out there who are part-fae makes things worse–at least for a while–for gay rights. Gay rights and gay people are quickly associated with the fae, in part, because of the tetrads, which form without any particular gender configurations. When those left behind after the Change and the mass exodus of changelings in Harvest and those who manifest their fae-ness after 1991 began to form tetrads and without regard to gender, this draws attention, especially from those already inclined to distrust and fear change (including gay rights). In effect, they become considered equivalent.

As a result, when the fae–or as they are called in this alternate US, changelings–are attacked or persecuted in the years following 1991, so are gay people. As the Ordinary Union (a political movement with its aim a pure and purified humanity) gains power, the accompanying voices in pulpits get louder as well. Changeling children are forced to leave some schools; police look the other way or actively support the persecution, and as it gets closer to 2012, things continue to get worse. There are mundanes (non-magicals) who support magical/gay rights, but theirs is a hard fight. People are scared and are getting more scared.

It’s not pretty.

This is sort of a double whammy of prejudice for the fae and the gay, but I felt it all too plausible as GLBT people are still, for many, the Other, the alien, those people. Nicola Griffith and Steve Pagel write about this in their introductions to their Bending the Landscape anthologies and it had a strong resonance for me. That those opposed to change, such as the revelation of the presence of magicals, would equate gay and fae seemed all too logical.

I also like to think of GLBT people as being somewhat magical, and I like playing the different meanings of the word “fairy.” Here, fairies are fairies–word thus reclaimed and with magical powers.

OA: Harvest of Changelings and The Called take place two decades apart. Do you think you’ll ever write any stories set in that alternate reality in the time between those two books?

WR: Hmm. You know, Julia, I think so, but I’m not sure when. I do have tentative plans for a third novel, as a sequel to The Called, and right now I am working on a novel about a gay werewolf and his lover, who is a descendant of the long-departed old gods. It’s set mostly in and around Richmond (where my partner lives) and in some ways has similar themes, as the 2 young men discover their differences and each other as they fall in love, and, wind up on a quest, fighting evil in various forms.

OA: The fae in your books set up four person marriages called tetrads. How do those marriages work, and what are some of their strengths and weaknesses compared to the current US default of two person marriages?

WR: A complete tetrad has an Air, a Water, a Fire, and an Earth, one of the four kinds of fairies, here or in Faerie. Each has different magical abilities and traits and certain physical traits. Fires tend to be red-haired and green-eyed, and often have more volatile personalities. All fairies can have the power to make fire. But a Fire has far more power in this regard than the other three and can easily do such things (as Russell does) like heat water, recharge cooking stones, make light, and so on. Excessive amounts of water can be draining and he has a bad temper.

Tetrads tend to form in two stages. First, couples, a Fire and a Water, an Air and an Earth, a Water and an Air, or other pairings. They sense a bond; they feel drawn to each other; they bond. Then the two couples find each other–drawn together by their magical energies, their mana. Together they are stronger as four than two.

The bond of the couples is the primary bond; the tetradic bond is secondary. Couples or triads can exist and function–as many did after the Long War in Faerie–but there is a constant feeling of incompleteness. Tetrads can form in any gender configuration. A juvenile tetrad is usually formed first, often in early adolescence. This relationship tends to go dormant at the onset of adulthood. Juvenile tetrads can reform in an adult version, but this doesn’t always happen. In Harvest and The Called, the protagonists are in a tetrad, with one primarily heterosexual couple and one primarily gay couple.

I would say some of the strengths of this four-person marriage, as compared to a traditional two-person marriage would be such things as: a parent or parents are always available to the children; any one member can be as alone or as not alone as he or she wants; support is always there; and they are stronger as four than as two or one.

Some of the weaknesses would be it is not always easy to find one person with whom to bond and it is less easy to find another couple, or another three people. And, in my heroes’ case, when their juvenile bond went dormant and they separated, two going to our universe and two staying in Faerie, their reunion as an adult tetrad was made more difficult when it turned out the Earth-side couple had grown older and the Faerie-side couple had stayed adolescents. Aging in Faerie is at a much different rate than it is here.

OA: You’re currently looking for a home for a novel based on your Spectrum Award nominated short story, “The Golden Boy”. Can you tell us more about that?

WR: There are some similarities between The Golden Boy’s universe and that of Harvest and The Called—mainly in the use of the tetrad as the fae family unit, with an Air, an Earth, a Water, and a Fire. I also had as one beginning premise the notion that fairies would be fairies—gay or bisexual, some heterosexual. Beyond that, The Golden Boy’s universe is a different, albeit with some parallels. There is no US; instead there is the Columbian Empire, founded in a revolution from Britain back in 1776. The Stuarts still rule in Britain; the Columbians have a descendent of Theodore Roosevelt on the throne. Magic is real, but is suppressed in Columbia, with the Rationalist Church, which favors science, the dominant faith. The Fair Folk are sequestered in ghettoes; hybrids, like my hero, Gavin, have to live lives of secrecy. Vampires have been hunted to extinction; unicorns and werewolves are in zoos; centaurs hide deep in the woods. I tried to make the Columbian Empire’s universe echo ours, as sort of a skewed reality.

Gavin is also hiding his sexuality as only heterosexuality is legal in the Empire. Gavin is haunted all his life by recurring dreams of a golden boy, who is meant to be one of his tetrad, Fire to his Earth. The others he meets growing up in North Carolina, but very bad things happen.

The novel has two story lines: Gavin growing up and a week in 2000, when everything falls apart and hits the fan. Columbia is beset by earthquakes, hurricanes, and volcanoes, and rebellion. For Gavin it becomes both a personal and public quest for self and survival.

OA: This summer you’ll be presenting a paper on using autobiography in fantasy at the International Creative Writing Conference in London. How much of your own work draws on autobiographical events, and how do you use them?

WR: Probably autobiographical themes would be a better way to put it, more than particular events. Perhaps, the most obvious are the settings. All 3 of my novels are primarily set in North Carolina, especially in the Triangle area, where I was born and raised and lived until 1998. (Faerie is another key setting and in a way, I have lived there all my life.) I also used the North Carolina folklore and legends that I grew up hearing and reading, such as the Devil’s Tramping Ground (south of Chapel Hill). Supposedly the Devil walks there on a circular path on which nothing grows. I decided that would be a good place for a gate to Faerie. A couple of other examples of settings from my own life would be: In the book I am working on now is set in and around Richmond, which is where my partner lives; and in my first novel, The Wild Boy, the heroes travel to Cartagena, Colombia, where I lived in 1980-82.

I came out rather late in life; I was around 40 when I started dealing with my sexuality. The message I got growing up when and where I did was that everybody got married when they grew up and had children, period, preferably by the time one was thirty. Homosexuals, if mentioned at all, were more than Other and alien; they were evil. I grew up in a pretty strong closet and when I went to college and fell in love with a guy, I couldn’t even admit then what that meant: we were experimenting and it was a dark, dark secret. After that experiment ended somewhat disastrously, there was lots of internal conflict and self-condemnation, trying to be straight, trying to follow what I thought was being normal. Eventually self and truth won out; it just took a while, along with some therapy.

This internal struggle has fueled some of my characters’ struggles, and has fueled some of the metaphors with which I have constructed the environments in which they find themselves. I did this in my first novel, The Wild Boy, without realizing it. I wrote the original draft of The Wild Boy, back in 1990-91 (my MFA thesis at UNC Greensboro), which was before I came out. When I sat down to revise it (post-PhD, 1997), I was in the process of coming out, and as I reread it, I realized I had been telling myself a story then that I wasn’t able to understand: the two male protagonists, one alien, one human, were lovers. Talk about the Other! When I reread an early draft of Harvest after that I realized: oh, Russell and Jeff are gay. Since then I have been using gay themes and characters, drawing from my own life and from the people I know. The story always comes first, but even so, social commentary has become part of my work as well. And no, not all my gay characters have tortured coming out experiences, or live in hostile societies!

Fathers and sons, parents and children, are other motifs in my work and I have drawn upon my evolving relationship with my own parents. Here I can say I have used personal family history to shape some of these relationships, and particular family events, too. I have drawn liberally from Celtic mythology, which is a personal interest that grew as I explored my own Scotch-Irish heritage. No Cherokee blood, but I grew up learning about the tribe as they are the most prominent one in North Carolina and I visited there often.

I think all writers do this, some more overt and deliberate and obvious than others, as we write out of the context of our lives. Our hero or heroine may be on a spaceship, or even an alien, but still we are creating out of who we are and what we know and feel and have experienced.

OA: Speaking of interesting stories from your own life, you’ve got two cats who usually get along, but you’ve had to consult an animal communicator to sort things out before. What exactly happened with that?

WR: Well, I hope folks won’t think I am too crazy, but here goes. I got Alex and Festus from the local animal shelter here in Fredericksburg, VA, thinking they were littermates. My vet set me straight on that: same mother, different litter. This meant their bond was a bit shakier than the bonds of littermates usually are. About 5 or 6 years ago, for reasons I couldn’t figure out, Festus, the older (and smaller, not that made any difference) started treating Alex as if he were an invader, a complete stranger: hissing, growling, and attacking. It was awful. I tried everything and the vet just told me to separate them, which helped, but didn’t stop the aggressive behavior.

A buddy of mine, Suzanne, mentioned she had consulted an animal communicator to help her sort out the behavior of her dog, who was a rescue. I was more than a little skeptical when she told me how it all worked—it sounded like the stuff I make up. But at that point, I was willing to try anything. Suzanne said it had worked for her and her dog amazingly well. I was just about ready to take Festus to my parents to live. So I emailed Patty Summers, the communicator, and set up an appointment, paid my fee. The appointment was by phone.

She called and we talked and then she “spoke” to Alex and Festus. Yes, it was weird. When she channeled (for lack of a better verb) what they “said” back, at first I was struck by how much it sounded like them, their personalities—Festus, more withdrawn, easier to spook; Alex, in your face, love me now. The story came out: a big cat in the neighborhood had confronted and scared Festus through the patio door. The aggressive response he had toward that cat, since he couldn’t get to him (thank God) had shifted to Alex—(the technical term is “displaced aggression,” by the way, and my vet said the communicator was probably right). Festus was afraid he was going to be sent away. Reassurances of safety, promises to help, to give space (yes, from the cats!) were made and she gave some practical advice about how to handle Festus when he turned into a demon.

It took awhile, but her advice worked. Festus still has spells, but they are very brief and are usually solved with a time out in a dark and calm space. They get along now, most of the time.

There’s more. The really weird part. After communicating with Festus and Alex, the communicator said she sensed another cat, this time one in the spirit world. Yeah, I know you are shaking your head. The animal she described—and she had no way of knowing this—was my first cat, Osito, who had died a year after I moved here. He was still around, looking after me.

There you go. I know it sounds crazy.

Thanks, Warren! Join us next Friday for more queer spec fic goodness, and in the meantime, check out The Called.

Mark is a gay horror writer who enjoys putting incidentally queer characters into stories which aren’t about sexuality and orientation. His novellas, Whisonant, and Creatures of the Light, are collected in one volume by Sideshow Press, and his short story collection, Tales from the Midnight Shift, Vol. I is forthcoming from Sideshow as well. His newest book, Asylum, is the first product of Apex Book Company’s new zombie imprint, The Zombie Feed. Asylum departs form Mark’s usual style to take issues of sexual identity head-on–in the context of a zombie attack on a gay dance club.

Mark lives in South Carolina with his partner, Joel. If you’d like to learn more about him, check out his Facebook page or his LiveJournal.

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OA: Asylum is a zombie attack story set in a gay dance club, which you’ve said was something you thought of on your first visit to a gay club. How would you rate your chances for survival if you found yourself in your own story?

MAG: I’d like to think I’d be all heroic and fierce, but I’d more likely end up like Barbara in the original Night of the Living Dead, huddled in a corner tearing at my hair and babbling about finding Johnny.

OA: Which one of your characters would you want fighting beside you, and why?

MAG: Definitely Gil the bartender. He is a man who has seen a lot, endured a lot, and lived through a lot. He is a man I believe would fight to the bitter end, so I’d be happy to have him by my side. A close second would be Madam Diva. A drag queen, yes, but also someone with a ferocious will. I have no doubt she could kick off her high heels and kick some serious ass.

OA: You use the zombie trope to examine some of the homophobia and discrimination LGBTQI people face, which isn’t usually something you explore in your fiction. What drew you to that this time, and why did you choose zombies instead of some other horror?

MAG: Well, the zombies came first to be honest. I wanted to do this zombie tale utilizing characters not often represented in such stories, but in the beginning that was all it was; I did not set out with the intention of really delving into gay issues and themes. However, once I started the tale, dealing with this primarily gay cast of characters and really getting into their pasts and fears and insecurities, it just seemed natural that I would explore things like homophobia and discrimination. Despite the progress we have made in recent years, these are still things gay people have to face in their daily lives.

OA: You like to include queer characters in stories that aren’t about being queer. Can you tell us about some of them?

MAG: As a gay man, I often feel like my homosexuality is just one facet of who I am, a small part of what makes me me. Therefore in fiction I really enjoy seeing gay characters in stories that don’t center around their sexuality. I tend to write traditional mainstream horror with characters that just happen to be gay. For instance, I have a story entitled “Accidents Happen” which will be in my upcoming short story collection Tales from the Midnight Shift Vol. I that features a man dealing with his lover’s belief that he is being haunted by a child that he accidentally ran over. That story would play out exactly the same if it featured a straight couple as opposed to a gay couple. I have been asked before, “If it doesn’t matter if the characters are gay or not, why make them gay?” I say if it doesn’t matter, why not make them gay?

OA: There’s a great scene in Shaun of the Dead where humans fight zombies while Queen’s “Don’t Stop Me Now” is playing. What’s your ideal zombie killing soundtrack? How about the worst song to play during battle?

MAG: Hmm, for my ideal zombie killing soundtrack I’d have to go with some Rob Zombie. A little “Living Dead Girl” or even his cover of “I’m Your Boogieman.” Worst song to play during battle? I’m going to say “Jesus Take the Wheel” just because it would cause me to stop mid-fight to exclaim, “Damn this song sucks!” and I’d get swarmed by the undead.

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Thanks, Mark! Join us next Friday for another Spotlight, and in the meantime, check out Asylum

Before we get started, I’d like to take a moment to recognize Sandra McDonald‘s Rainbow Award for Best Bisexual, Transgender and Lesbian Fantasy. I had this prickly sensation I was forgetting something important when I congratulated OA members on their wins in the second podcast episode, but I didn’t realize why that was until a few days after the podcast went live. So, congratulations, Sandra! Diana Comet and Other Improbable Stories would be an excellent reading choice for the Gender Identity & Expression Book Challenge.

Sally Sapphire is a bisexual transgender gurl, who has spent 5 years maintaining the Bibrary, an index of LGBTQI books in a variety of genres. She also reviews LGBTQI books at the Bibrary Bookslut blog, and blogs about her personal experiences with gender identity at TGirl Revelations. When Sally isn’t busy reading or writing, she likes to go on long, solitary hikes, preferably in really cute hiking outfits.

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OA: You’ve been maintaining the Bibrary index of LGBTQI books for five years now. How did you decide to start that, and what’s the journey been like so far?

SS: The Bibrary index actually came about as a result of some research I was doing for my university thesis. I wanted to focus on how speculative fiction has always proven to be a ‘safe’ avenue for the exploration of ideas, and how it’s been remarkably progressive in exploring alternative sexualities (not always positively, but sometimes even negative exposure is worthwhile for the discussion it generates). The thesis went well, but at the end I had this immense list of suggested reading material . . . and nothing to do with it. Creating a website seemed like a natural extension of the work, and since I had no intention of curbing my reading, there was a built-in incentive to make sure I kept it up-to-date.

OA: Do you plan to expand or change the site in the future?

SS: I’d definitely like to expand the site and make it a bit more functional. The site right now is limited by my own self-taught HTML and Java knowledge, which means it’s likely far more labour intensive than it should be. Ideally, I’d like to invest the time in learning how to make it more database driven on my end, and more interactive on the user’s end. I’d also like to better integrate it with my Bibrary Bookslut review blog, so that the two pieces of the puzzle come together and provide a means for discussion, rather than just a static list.

OA: Where do you look for sources of new LGBTQI books? If someone wants to suggest additional titles for your index, can they do that?

SS: Well, I have my usual suspects that I check on a weekly basis – the upcoming releases on Amazon (.com, .ca, and .co.uk); book reviews on AfterElton.com and AfterEllen.com; book news on LambdaLiterary.org; the bookmarks feature at PrideSource.com; and a number of different blogs (including, of course, The Outer Alliance!). A lot of books I just stumble across as well, either by following one link to another, or experimenting with different search terms. As for suggesting titles, I am always open to new books and authors. Most people contact me via email (webmistress[at]bibrary[dot]com) or through the comments on my blog, but I’ve also had several authors reach out to me directly on the Goodreads.com site.

OA: This year you’re hosting a Gender Identity Book Challenge. What do you hope this challenge will do, and how can people participate?

SS: My goals with the challenge are really two-fold: to get those of us within the LGBTQI community talking about books that speak to us and with which we most closely identify (which is the fun and fabulous part); and to encourage those outside the community to take a chance, read something new, and hopefully develop a little more awareness and some understanding of the community (which is the educational part). Literature, especially speculative fiction, has a wonderful power to openly discuss ideas or concepts that most readers wouldn’t otherwise think about. This is my attempt to tap into that power.

I’ve tried to make taking part as easy as I could. The first step is to share the challenge (on a blog, Facebook, Twitter, etc) and then link to that post on the main challenge page. The next step is to start reading, then post a review somewhere people will read it (on a blog, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Goodreads, etc.). Over the next week, I’ll be setting up 2 pages for participants to link their reviews, depending on whether they’re aiming for the Blue level (1 book), or the Pink level (5 books – 1 each from any 5 of the categories listed).

OA: Can you recommend a couple of your favorite speculative fiction books with positive explorations of gender identity to get us started?

SS: Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, Robert A. Heinlein’s I Will Fear No Evil, Tanith Lee’s Biting the Sun, and Storm Constantine’s Wraeththu saga are some classic examples. More recently, F.M. Busby’s The Breeds Of Man, James Alan Gardner’s Commitment Hour, and Carolyn Gilman’s Halfway Human (which was just rereleased in ebook format by Arc Manor) are great examples. On the fantasy side of things, I can’t say enough good things about Mary Gentle‘s Ilario novels (The Stone Golem & The Lions’ Eye), or Lynn Flewelling‘s beautifully haunting Tamír Triad (The Bone Doll’s Twin, The Hidden Warrior, and The Oracle’s Queen).

OA: You mention prizes on the challenge page. What kinds of things might people win, and how can they improve their chances?

SS: Get in on the challenge early, and make sure you post your reviews. It’s really that simple. Depending on the participation, my plan is to do at least 2 prize drawings – one in June, and another in December – so the more reviews you have posted, the better your odds. The prizes themselves will consist of a gift certificate, and hopefully a free book or two.

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Thanks, Sally! Happy 2011, everyone. Join us next week for more queer spec fic goodness, and in the meantime, consider signing up for Sally’s challenge, and sharing some of your favorite gender identity exploring books with us in the comments here.

Sarah writes science fiction and fantasy stories featuring lesbian protagonists. Her Rymellan stories (about space pilots on a distant planet) are available online at the Rymellan Stories website, and she started Norn Publishing earlier this year in order to also put her books out in print and e-book format. The Salbine Sisters, her fantasy novel about lesbian magic users, came out in October.

In addition to writing, Sarah enjoys reading and playing computer games. She’s also the Web Maven for Broad Universe, an organization which exists to promote and support women who write speculative fiction. Sarah lives in Toronto with her partner and four cats.

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OA: The Salbine Sisters is your second book published through your company, Norn Publishing. How did you decide to start publishing books for yourself, and what has the experience been like so far?

SE: When I decided to offer the Rymellan series in print, I published the stories myself because they were already available on the web. When it came time to decide what to do with The Salbine Sisters, the upheaval in the publishing world was well underway, so I decided to do it myself again. Like those who are traditionally published, I work with an editor. I’ve also picked up a few new skills, typesetting and eBook formatting among them. Self-publishing is a good fit for my personality and goals, so I’ve been pleased with the experience.

OA: In The Salbine Sisters, the main character struggles with losing her magical gift. Can you tell us a bit about how magic works in that world, and what particular complications the loss of magic brings to this character?

SE: The Salbine Order is a religious order. Salbine Sisters believe that Salbine, the goddess they worship, bestows upon them the gift of magic, which they call “drawing the elements.” When Maddy, the main character, discovers that she’s malflowed (can’t draw the elements), she feels rejected by Salbine and struggles to make sense of her life. She gave up everything to join the Order and has been utterly devoted to Salbine, so she can’t understand why Salbine has turned Her back on her. There have been few malflowed sisters in history, so when Maddy finds out that another monastery’s library has journals left behind by a malflowed sister, she secures the abbess’s permission to go to that monastery and examine them. As often happens, things don’t go according to plan.

OA: Your other big project, the Rymellan stories, which you publish quarterly online, has enough material to fill two books now, though only one volume is actually in print so far. How much more do you plan to write in that world?

SE: I hope to bring the series to a satisfactory conclusion at the end of Rymellan 3. As you mentioned, Rymellan 1 is already available in print, and Rymellan 2 will be available in early 2011. I expect to reach the end of Rymellan 3 sometime in 2012, so I’ll stop publishing quarterly at that point. After that, I might publish stories about significant events that take place later in the characters’ lives, but not quarterly.

OA: You’re an avid computer gamer. Has gaming ever helped with your writing? For instance, have games ever inspired world-building, plot, or characterization in your fiction? What are some of your favorite games?

SE: The seed for The Salbine Sisters was planted when I was creating a backstory for a game character. I like role-playing games, and one of my favourites is a series of sandbox games called the Elder Scrolls. The series has a tradition of starting the game character off in prison, which can make it a challenge to come up with a backstory for a law-abiding character. In The Salbine Sisters, Maddy is thrown into prison. My imagination ran with the prison thing and grew the story from there.

Other games I like: most games from BioWare, Guild Wars, Grand Theft Auto (another sandbox series), Divine Divinity, Lord of the Rings Online–basically anything with role-playing elements or a large world to explore. I’ll also play the odd shooter and adventure game.

OA: You’re on the Motherboard for Broad Universe. How did you get involved with that organization, and what kinds of things do you do for them?

SE: I don’t remember how I found out about Broad Universe. Somehow I ended up at its website, and when I saw that it’s an organization for women who write science fiction, fantasy, and/or horror, I immediately joined. When a call went out earlier this year for a new Web Maven, I stepped forward, since I have experience administering websites. So I’m the Web Maven now, which means I receive all the email at the main email address, and I sort out any website problems and work on new features. We’re pretty excited right now because we’re on the verge of unveiling a redesigned website.

OA: If you had 30 seconds to convince someone to join Broad Universe, what would you tell them?

SE: For women who write science fiction, fantasy, and/or horror, it’s a great way to network with other writers and provides opportunities to promote your work. We have an active Yahoo group, where members post submission calls, writing advice, comments about genre-related news, and promotional opportunities. You can participate in our podcast and submit to our online publication The Broadsheet. Our online catalog lists books and stories by our members, and every year we print a new works booklet to distribute at cons. Membership is only $30/year, so it’s worth joining to see if it’s a good fit for you.

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Thanks, Sarah! Join us next week for more LGBTQI speculative fiction goodness, and in the meantime, check out The Salbine Sisters.

This week:

Dan Savage’s It Gets Better Project took off on YouTube. The It Gets Better Project is a quest to collect videos from LGBTQI adults who want to let high schoolers know that life does really get better after high school. There are, unfortunately, a lot of queer teen suicides, and this project exists to give teens who might be thinking about that a tangible reason to hope for a better future. Dan and his partner Terry made the first video for the project. They talk about their high school experiences, how they met, and how great their life is now. If you want to participate, there are instructions on the It Gets Better Project YouTube Channel. Please also tell us if you make a video for this, and we’ll link to it in a future Spotlight!

Sandra McDonald‘s novel, The Stars Blue Yonder, came out in paperback this week. To celebrate, Sandra made an amusing video tribute to Australia (where the book is set).

And, Bart Leib announced that the queer issue of Crossed Genres is going away at the end of this month. It’s been up for eleven months now, and expires after twelve. If you haven’t read it, now’s the time!

That’s all for this time. Join us again next week, and please share any news you might have (or links to your It Gets Better videos!) here in the comments, on the Outer Alliance google group, or via Twitter (mention either @omgjulia, or @outeralliance).

News & Notes

*This week marks the inaugural issue of Stone Telling, the magazine of boundary-crossing speculative poetry. Rose Lemberg has done a great job of seeking diverse voices for this issue. It’s full of excellent work, including some queer content.

*Tomorrow, the 18th, Connie Wilkins (AKA Sacchi Green) will be reading at the Strange Horizons fundraiser reading event at Pandemonium Books in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I’ll also be there as a member of the audience. Do say hello if you see me (I’ve got blue hair, so I’m hard to miss). If you’re on the other side of the country, there’s another Strange Horizons reading with some West Coast authors in Portland, Oregon on Sunday the 19th.

*Bookview Cafe has just released a charity anthology to benefit Gulf Coast oil spill relief efforts. Breaking Waves is available as an e-book for $4.99, and includes a story by Sandra McDonald.

Interview with Bill Tucker

Bill Tucker works as a civil servant with law enforcement officials by day, and writes and edits speculative fiction by night. He grew up in Pennsylvania and New Hampshire, but now lives in Boston,  Massachusetts. He’s currently seeking stories for an anthology of LGBTQI science fiction and fantasy. Rockets, Swords, and Rainbows is open to submissions until the 21st of November, and will be published by The Library of Fantasy and Science Fiction (an imprint of The Library of the Living Dead).

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OA: You do a lot of work with The Library of the Living Dead. You wrote one of the letters in Letters from the Dead, and you edited another anthology of zombie stories (The Zombist: Undead Western Tales) for them. What is it about zombies that has so much appeal?

BT: I think zombies are scary and appeal to me for many reasons. I like the apocalyptic nature of zombie stories and the human reaction to them. Zombies are a great metaphors on human nature as it is people who become zombies. They are monsters that are not necessarily supernatural and can grow in numbers like a virus.

OA: Submissions for Rockets, Swords, and Rainbows are open until the 21st of November. What kinds of stories are you hoping to receive? Any things you’re tired of, or would prefer not to see?

BT: I am keeping my mind open to everything… Though romance is fine, I am not looking for extreme erotic stories. Even as submissions are coming in I already have an artist named Ken Cain working on the cover and it looks fantastic so far. It is a celebration to LGBTQ science fiction and fantasy.

OA: What made you decide to put together an LGBTQ themed anthology in the first place? Do you have a personal interest in LGBTQ topics?

BT: As a gay man I enjoy and want to read more LGBTQ fiction – especially sci fi, fantasty, and horror fiction. I believe there is a large readership who wants this type of book and that there is a need to not only have the work of LGBTQ writers represented, but to expose society to LBGTQ ficiton in general.

OA: Other than Rockets, Swords, and Rainbows, do you have any projects out now or coming out in the near future?

BT: There are two books that I expect to come out in the near future. The first is Doomology : The Dawning of Disasters, which I co-edited with Wayne Goodchild. The book includes 23 stories about disaster and apocalyptic events from different perspectives. This book is also being released under the Library of Science Fiction and Fantasy and will be a great read for science fiction fans. The second book is Zombiality : A Queer Bent On The Undead. This book includes 28 stories that blend the zombie and glbt genres in a way that has never been done before. Not only do the stories range in their take of GLBT themes, but also on what zombies are. I believe that this book will appeal to a diverse audience and I am very excited about its release.

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Thanks, Bill! That’s it for this week. If you have any news about publications, events, or anything else related to LGBTQI speculative fiction that you’d like to see featured in the Spotlight, please let me know by leaving a comment, or talking to me on Twitter.

At AussieCon 4, you might catch up with Sumana Harihareswara, Cheryl Morgan, and Catherynne M. Valente (and there are several other LGBTQI friendly people there, too!).

Sumana offers the following suggestions of panels which may be of interest to Outer Alliance members:

Academic Panel: Fantastic females: reworking feminism in women’s fantasy — Saturday 1630 Room 203
Delia Sherman (mod), Catherynne M Valente, Gail Carriger, Alaya Johnson, Glenda Larke, Tansy Rayner Roberts
Is fantasy the new vanguard of feminist politics in specfic? Fantasy authors discuss the role of gender issues in their work.

The case for a female doctor — Sunday 1200 Room 204
Tansy Rayner Roberts, Carolina Gomez, Kerrie Dougherty, Catherynne M. Valente, Paul Cornell
He’s transformed from an old man into a young one, so why not from a man into a woman? Doctor Who remains one of the most imaginative and open-ended science fiction programmes ever produced, but can the format extend to include a female Doctor? What other elements of the series are necessary? Does he/she have to have a TARDIS? Does there need to be a companion? Must the series be British? An examination of how far you can stretch the world’s most stretchable science fiction series.

The future of gender and sexuality — Sunday 1600 Room 219
Cristina Lasaitis, David D. Levine, Erika Lacey
What does the future hold for our ideas of gender and sexuality? How will we understand these concepts in 10, 50 or even 500 years? How have science fiction texts already predicted our understanding of gender and sexuality in the future – and how accurate do we find those predictions?

AussieCon 4 also marks the launch of Cheryl’s new magazine, Salon Futura! The first issue has just launched, and you can get it here.

On the other side of the world, in Atlanta, Georgia, there’s a bunch more LGBTQI friendly stuff going on at Dragon*Con. If you’re there, you might catch Outer Alliance founder Natania Barron, who just launched the new Geek Mom blog. Look out for Lee Martindale, C.D, Covington and Racheline Maltese, among others.

C.D. and Racheline will both be reading as part of Broad Universe Rapid Fire Reading on Saturday at 11:30.

Lee will be on the Beyond Binaries 101 panel on Saturday, and Racheline will be on the Beyond Binaries 201 panel on Sunday (both exploring alternatives to m/f gender pairings in spec fic).

There are several other LGBTQI themed panels on the Dragon*Con program, and Outlantacon is hosting a Rainbow Flag party on Saturday night in the Sheraton Ballroom.

Happy Con Weekend to everyone in Melbourne and Atlanta! And for those of you playing the home game, don’t forget to check out Salon Futura #1!

Karen Romanko is a poet and fantasy writer, who loves the sun of Los Angeles and Malibu. She edited the speculative fiction webzine, Raven Electrick for several years, and has edited two previous anthologies, Sporty Spec and Cinema Spec. Her poetry and fiction and have appeared in many places including Strange Horizons and Ideomancer.

CD Covington is a fantasy and science fiction writer who also enjoys tai chi, crochet, and European football (she is particularly interested in the German Bundesliga).  She maintains a twitter feed in addition to her blog. “U* Alexanderplatz (1989)” is her first publication.

Leonard Richardson is a writer and computer programmer. His programming books, RESTful Web Services and The Ruby Cookbook were published by O’Reilly, and his story, “Let Us Now Praise Awesome Dinosaurs” appeared in Strange Horizons. Together with his wife, Sumana Harihareswara, he edited the anthology Thoughtcrime Experiments in 2009.

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OA: Retro Spec is your third anthology (the first two being Sporty Spec and Cinema Spec). How did you get into the themed anthology idea in  the first place, and how do you choose the themes?

KR: I published e-zine Raven Electrick for nine years, but started to feel that something was missing. There was a kind of unity there, but not the feeling of having created a WHOLE that I get from editing and publishing anthologies on a theme, where I work hard to achieve cohesion. That feeling is also reinforced by being able to hold the finished products in my hands, something I couldn’t do with the e-zine. (Yes, I’m aware that I moved backwards in terms of current publishing trends.)

As to the themes, I’ve chosen ones of personal interest to me because I think that editorial enthusiasm is important. At the same time, I’d like to sell some books, so I’ve tried to stick to themes that authors will find inspiring and that readers will want to see treated.

With Retro Spec, I called upon my long-ago history major and my continued interest in retro popular culture. The most interesting aspect of submissions was that the most popular decade was the 30s–I’d expected something more recent.

OA:  As an editor, how do you encourage diversity in submissions to your publications? Are there themes or stereotypes you see too much of? What about things you’d like to see more of?

KR: I like to encourage submissions from women, because they’re underrepresented in the sf/f/h field (and in most professions). That’s one of the reasons why I joined Broad Universe.

In general, my submitters tend to be an enlightened group. (I do request in the guidelines that they not submit anything sexist or racist.) My main complaint is that too many horror writers tend to ignore my caveat about “no gore.”

OA: Are there more Spec anthologies in your future? What else can we look forward to from you?

KR: I hope so. I’ve selected the theme for the next one, but I’m keeping that a secret for the time being.

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OA: Your story is set in East Berlin just before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Why did you choose to write about that particular time and place?

CDC: The last decade of the Cold War influenced me as a child, but its end and the collapse of the Soviet Union were really the first politics I was *aware* of. I started studying German in fall 1989, when I was in 8th grade, then before Thanksgiving break, Germany had changed. Every year on November 9, I watch the video for the Scorpions’ “Winds of Change” with footage from 1989 and 1990. (I feel like I shouldn’t admit that in public, but there you go.)

My first trip to Berlin was for three days in 1997. I remember taking the train across town and being able to discern where the Wall had been. The style of building changed a bit, and there was a lot more construction, but the difference was palpable.

I went back for a week at Christmas 2007. The division line wasn’t nearly as noticeable, but construction hadn’t stopped. (In Berlin, there’s always construction.) This time, I went on a guided tour, and the tour guide was a student of Cold War history, so we got onto that topic fairly often. He asked if I’d heard of Geisterbahnhöfe, ghost stations, and I said I hadn’t. He directed me to more information, which I picked up gladly.

Brief explanation: The city of Berlin wasn’t divided strictly on a north-south line. The Soviet sector had a slight bulge into the western sectors. Transit lines that had been built thirty or forty years (or more, in the case of the street-level trains) before that connected the northern boroughs with the southern now went from West to West through the East. The ruling party in East Germany couldn’t allow trains to stop, because people would be able to escape easily. So they barricaded these dozen stations on three lines, and made the Friedrichstraße station a border crossing point.

I’ve always been drawn to abandoned places and ruins. I knew there was a story in there, but it took me a while (and a lot of false starts) to find it. I wrote about a pair of guards stationed in the sealed-off U8 track at Alexanderplatz, one of whom keeps seeing trains and passengers who shouldn’t be there.

Since Karen bought my story, I’ve spent a month in Berlin, for a refresher German course. I worked on a translation of it, and my teacher really liked it. She’s lived in Berlin since the 80s, and she remembers the guards stationed in subway stations.

OA: As an Outer Alliance member, you support and celebrate LGBTQI themes in speculative fiction, but that doesn’t always mean writing queer lit. Part of being a supportive ally is simply reading, enjoying, and recommending good stories. Can you recommend a favorite or two to us?

CDC: I’m a fan of (fellow OA member) Lynn Flewelling‘s work. The lack of queer SF on my shelves is kind of embarrassing.

OA: What’s next for you? Are you working on anything new and exciting?

CDC: I just submitted a short story to an anthology of military sf starring women, and I’m working on revisions to my novel. The main character of the short is one of the POV characters in the novel.

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OA:  Your story is an alternate history piece about Alan Turing, an important figure in queer history, and in computing history. What led you to write this particular story?

LR: I was vacationing in England in 2009 when the British government issued its apology to Turing. A genuine apology is a kind of alt-history story: there’s this alternate timeline where I didn’t do this, and things are better in that timeline.  There’s also something alt-history-ish that’s stuck with me from The Enigma, Andrew Hodge’s biography of Turing: how arbitrary his death was, how much flowed from one small action. There seems to be a causal chain from Turing reporting a burglary to the police in 1952, to his outing, his chemical castration, and his suicide in 1954. It’s difficult to imagine the British government of 1952 behaving differently than it did, but it’s not difficult to imagine Turing deciding not to report that burglary.

That’s where I got the jumping-off point. I wanted to explore how the world might have been different if Alan Turing had lived out a normal human lifespan, but also what the effect on him might have been of keeping that secret, keeping it even after it was okay to talk about the wartime secrets, and then wondering when it would be okay to give that last secret up.

OA: As an editor of an anthology yourself, how did you encourage diversity in the submissions you received? Is there anything you learned during the process of reading for Thoughtcrime Experiments that would change the way you solicited submissions if you were to do it again?

LR: I can’t really improve on what Sumana said in your interview of her. For detailed analysis I’d point people to that interview or her blog post on the topic. I’ll second her statement that we didn’t do as much as we could have to recruit nonwhite and queer authors by announcing the anthology in relevant places.

OA: Do you think you will ever put together another anthology? Have you got anything other exciting projects on the horizon?

LR: We don’t have any plans for another anthology, partly because our lives are way too hectic right now. But I think we could do another one, testing some other hypothesis about the market. Like “send in your latest ready-to-submit story” or something.

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Thanks, Karen, CD, and Leonard! Retro Spec is available now through Barnes & Noble and Amazon. There will be an official Retro Spec launch party at the Flintridge Bookstore and Coffee House in La Canada, California on the 25th of Spetember, and CD Covington will be reading from her Retro Spec story next weekend at Dragon*Con.

Debra Killeen turned to writing only as an adult. In her non-writing life she works in the pharmceutical industry, but her fiction remains firmly in high fantasy territory, not science fiction. The first book in her Myrridian Cycle, An Unlikely Duke, came out in 2007, and was followed by three more volumes: A Prince in Need, Legacy of the Archbishop, and Priestess Awakening. The fifth and final volume is scheduled to come out in 2011.

Debra is a straight ally, who believes that people should take love where they find it. She counts among her friends and relatives people from all across the spectrum of sexual and gender identity, and supports LGBTQI acceptance in her life and in her fiction.

If you are in Raleigh this weekend, you can find Debra at NASFiC, where she will be reading this evening at 8:00 with the Broad Universe group, as well as sitting on a few panels, and signing autographs. If you’re not near Raleigh, you might be able to catch Debra later this year or next at Darkover, OutlantaCon, StellarCon, RavenCon, or ConCarolinas.

Debra lives in North Carolina with her sister, who is also a writer. They share their home with several cats, who are all very helpful with the writing. In addition to her personal site, Debra maintains a Twitter feed.

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OA: The fourth volume of your Myrridian Cycle books, Priestess Awakening, is out now and has some queer content. Can you tell us more about that? And do readers need to have read the previous 3 books in order to understand what’s going on in this one?

DK: Certainly. The queer content in Priestess Awakening involves a lesbian romance storyline as part of the plot. I didn’t realize when I was writing the first book in the series that one character would develop into a lesbian, but she let me know before I’d begun the manuscript for this volume. I knew the other woman was a lesbian from the outset of this volume.

While I would encourage readers to read the previous books in the series, of course, it’s not absolutely necessary for the enjoyment of this one. The plot of this novel stands alone, but the main characters’ back-stories do develop over the series.

OA: Myrridia seems to be heavily influenced by Christianity, but magic works there, and you dovetailed magic and religion in the books. As a pagan yourself, how did you come to that decision, and how do you feel about magic and religion generally?

DK: When I was first developing the initial book in the series, An Unlikely Duke, I knew religion would be playing a role. However, I’d read so many fantasy series back in my high school and college days where religion and magic were in opposition that I started with the premise that the dominant religion in this world at this time, Christianity, would not just condone magical practice, but control it. This decision was independent of my own paganism – heck, I was raised in the Baptist church, but I knew from my teen years that the Baptist church didn’t have all the answers for me. I’ve joked for many years that I would see “God” in nature. It took a little time to figure out exactly what that meant for me, but once I figured out that whole “divine feminine” concept, it was only natural to realize I was pagan.

I have always believed in something that I think of as magic – whether it came from reading fairy tales in my childhood or other influences – and I still believe that there are many things in our world which can’t be explained by science, at least not yet. I find both magic and religion to be fascinating subjects, and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the chance to combine the two in this series of novels.

OA: Together with your sister, you designed some Myrridia inspired tarot cards. Are those available for sale (or even just to admire)?

DK: I wish! As of now, I’ve determined which Myrridian characters seem to personify the individual tarot cards. I think what surprised me the most is how little time it took me to figure out most of them! Apparently I’ve got a quite a few characters who are close to archetypes, and I never knew it while I was developing them! My sister is working on some draft text for the accompanying book, but unfortunately the artist who was going to start working on the designs has too many other obligations at this time. However, if there are any artists out there who might be interested in this project – they can feel free to contact me. My publisher is possibly interested in this project as well.

OA: Your four cats made their way into your fiction as well as your real home. How true to life are the cats that appear in the Myrridian books?

DK: Most of the scenes in which the cats take part have come from observing my cats. I’m sorry to say that a couple of the feline inspirations are no longer with me, but they live on in the books. The scene where two of the cats disrupt the wedding banquet in Priestess is based on typical behavior. While they never interrupted a banquet, they had enough feline fights in their time.

OA: What can we look for next from you? Any exciting projects coming up?

DK: More projects are coming, rest assured! The final volume of the Myrridian Cycle, Kingdom in the Balance, will be released sometime early next year. I’m currently revising a manuscript which I hope will be the first novel of a new series, about a twelve-year-old apprentice witch, Morgan, living near Chapel Hill, NC, who encounters a fairy clan living nearby. The fairies are dying and need Morgan’s help to save them. There’s an environmental message.

There’s another series in the Myrridian universe planned as well, with many of the characters going on crusade, about 10-15 years after the close of this series. The original idea came out of my frustration with the Iraq war, and I keep hoping that by the time I get the series written, the war will be over. Maybe just optimism on my part. But there will be more queer content and lots more religion and magic. And probably magic carpets…

Another series, which may end up a collaboration with my sister, is a spin-off of the Myrridian stories, but will be set in our world – paranormal mysteries. I don’t want to give too much away for folks who haven’t read the Myrridian cycle, but a character from Myrridian comes to our world, and will have to adjust to modern life after being born in the 10th century. I’m probably going with young adult in age, so while there won’t be a lot of gruesome murders caused by things natural or supernatural, we do hope to use create some spooky situations and hopefully have some fun, with some of the causes as explainable, but some not.

OA: Most writers are avid readers, too. What are some of your favorite books?

DK: So many excellent choices out there! I’m a big fan of Ray Bradbury and Terry Pratchett, to name two greats. I’ve read all the Harry Potter novels, and thought Rowling did a wonderful thing – getting kids to read who might not have picked up a book. Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy, Douglas Adams’ Hitchhikers series, John Dickson Carr’s locked-room mysteries, Jeff Smith’s Bone graphic novels, Hellboy, Sandman. (I love graphic novels, too!) I’ve enjoyed the first two installments of Candace Havens’ Carruthers sisters series and I’m about halfway through the Harry Dresden books. Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Mists of Avalon, which I hope to reread one of these days, Mary Stewart’s Arthurian series, and Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain series.

OA: You’re going to be at several cons in the coming year, including NASFiC this weekend. Where can people find you in person this weekend and beyond?

DK: Yes, I’ll be at NASFiC this weekend, and joining you and some other fabulous women authors on the Broad Universe Rapid Fire Reading Friday evening at 8pm. I’ve got a few other panels over the weekend and two autograph sessions. I’ll be around and about the con and am always glad to stop and chat with folks, or else I’ll be in the dealers room (uncertain at this point). Later this year I’ll be at DarkoverCon near Baltimore on Thanksgiving weekend.

Next year looks to be fairly busy, with StellarCon, RavenCon, OutlantaCon/GaylaxiCon (a first for me, and looking forward to it!), and ConCarolinas so far. DarkoverCon and CapClave are two more possibilities, and I may see if there’s something promising in Florida, to join my publisher there. And maybe Dragon*Con.

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Thanks, Debra! Join us next week for another Spotlight, and in the meantime, check out the Myrridian Cycle! And if you’re in Raleigh, come see Debra read tonight along with me and fellow OA member, C.D. Covington!