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.

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OA: The Future Fire is putting together a queer themed issue right now. Can you tell us more about that? Is it already full, or are you still looking for new pieces? Any stories you’ve accepted that you’re particularly excited about?

DA: The “Queer-themed” issue of TFF is basically a spin-off from the Feminist Science Fiction themed issue that we advertised about a year ago and published in January, which was also our 5th anniversary issue (though I forgot to make a fuss about that). We buy stories depending on how excellent each story is individually, and we don’t have any quotas or maximums, so we ended up buying too many stories that fit the “sex, gender, sexuality and gender identity” theme that we’d specified–more than we would normally include in a single issue, anyway. So we decided to divide them into two categories: the first, sex and gender and women’s issues generally; and the second, focussing on sexuality and gender identity, will be the “queer issue”. We’re still very much open to submissions on this theme, up to about the end of the month to get into this issue; but as we say, there will never come a time when queer stories are unwelcome in TFF.

Beyond that I can’t say very much more about what we’re looking for. TFF publishes speculative fiction with a focus on social and political themes (think 1984, Island, Fahrenheit 451, anything by Le Guin, Dick…), and would like to see more cyberpunk than we do. We have always valued the cosmopolitan, stories that address diversity and tolerance, stories by underrepresented groups (including non-Anglo scifi). This issue will be no different, except that it will further narrow that focus to stories that address issues of sexuality and gender identity, which have always been a key part of science fiction, I think.

In the stories we’ve taken on already, there are two main approaches: either there is a queer protagonist whose difference and difficulties reflect other differences or forms of alienness/alienation in the same or other characters; or queer protagonists only represent the queer struggle against very real repression in a dystopian, slightly exaggerated world. These approaches are both fine, of course; maybe there are others.

OA: What made you decide to start The Future Fire, and what are some of the upsides and downsides to running an online magazine?

DA: The Future Fire was set up kind of naively by a small group of SF fans some years ago–of the five of us there were two left within a year, and we’re still the core of the team. I’m not sure we really had any idea why we were doing this, or what we were letting ourselves in for; between us we had no experience of publishing either traditional or digital. I’d often imagined publishing a small print ‘zine, but I guess it was only ever going to happen when we had the possibility of doing it online. We were most inspired by the trippy paranoia of Philip K. Dick and the postmodern hoaxes of Jorge Luis Borges–imagined writing fake book reviews and event reports and all that sort of thing. It was only after a couple of years that we realized that what we really wanted was to focus on the social and political aspects of speculative fiction, things that we care about, things that can (or should) change the world.

As for the advantages of running an online magazine, the most obvious is just that it’s much less trouble–marketing and distributing a print magazine would be a *lot* of work (less so now I suppose that we could use POD to actually print and distribute, but still having to worry about marketing to make the magazine profitable would still be prohibitive for a volunteer-run venture). The down-side is the flip-side of that coin: because TFF is free, and we’re not interested in running crappy ads, it makes no money. The donations we receive cover less than 10% of our costs, and the rest comes out of our pockets. For a small ‘zine like this that’s fine, I think it’s worth it. The time is actually a much bigger cost than the money.

The correct answer to “what are the upsides of running an online magazine” ought to be that it removes certain restrictions of space and medium, and potentially attracts a much wider audience. If we buy a story that is 20k words long rather than the 4-6k average, we don’t have to worry about how that’s going to affect the page count of the next issue. (We do worry about how long a reader is willing to stare at a screen hitting page-down over and over, so we serialize longer pieces.) We ought to be able to say that we can publish stories with a visual element, animation, audio, interactive features, hypertext fiction, stuff that’s impossible on paper. That is true, but we’ve yet to be offered anything like that. I’d love to see it, but I don’t know what it would look like.

OA: The Future Fire holds mini-cons in the summer in London. What are they like,  and who may attend?

DA: We started out holding joint mini-conventions with Whispers of Wickedness, a British small press magazine of dark and atmospheric fiction, to which typically a dozen people would come, read or perform some of their work, and generally chat about speculative fiction on a Saturday afternoon in a pub in London or Swindon. It’s a lot of fun. Since WoW stopped publishing a year or so ago, we’ve carried on with the TFFcon. Anyone and everyone is welcome. We often see a sample of TFF authors, artists, reviewers and editors, along with friends, fans and assorted randomers. Other magazines or small presses are sometimes represented, or sometimes just send promotional materials or freebies (especially if they’re not based in the UK). For the last couple of years we’ve tried to have a story competition, with entries voted for on the day, and prizes donated by various publishers present.

We don’t have a date for the 2010 TFFcon yet, but it will be announced on our website and in all the usual places. Would love to see some Outer Alliance representation there this year.

OA: How did you come to have a collection of animal skulls, and do you have any favorite, or unusual ones?

DA: I’m not sure any of them are particularly unusual, but perhaps the most random is a stag skull set on a shield, which used to adorn the wall of a zoologist at a Scottish university, and which mysteriously turned up at my door encased in cardboard and polystyrene. I’d like to be able to say that having samples of animals skulls are essential to my archaeological research, but I’m very much an armchair historian, not a fieldworker. I can’t remember the first skull I acquired, but the barn rat is one of my favourites. The jawbone of a shark is also pretty impressive–it’s the only part of the head that isn’t cartilage, so technically I guess it is a skull. For the record, the human skull is a replica, and the goat was not sacrificed.

OA: You say that explorations of sexual difference are the key to science  fiction. Do you have any recommendations on this theme?

DA: I cut my teeth on writers like Ursula Le Guin, Marion Zimmer Bradley and Michael Moorcock, so I guess I’ve always assumed that a genre like science fiction that explores difference, alienness, xenophobia and other prejudices, and social norms different from ours would be full of sexualities and gender identities that push the boundaries as well. Now that I think about it, I’ve been surprised by how much speculative fiction adheres to modern, western notions of heteronormativity and cisgender. Are we really that conservative a genre?

Beyond the above, and equally obvious authors like Samuel R. Delany, James Tiptree Jr., Poppy Z. Brite, Joanna Russ, I suspect that your readers can suggest me more good queer science fiction than I can them.

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Thanks, Djibril! Join us next Friday for another Spotlight, and in the meantime, check out The Future Fire.

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.

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OA: You’re co-editing a new anthology, Hellebore and Rue, with JoSelle Vanderhooft. Can you tell us more about it? How long will the submissions window be open, and what kinds of stories are you looking for?

CL: For Hellebore and Rue: Tales of Queer Women and Magic, we’re looking for stories about lesbian magic users of all varieties. The definition of magic is pretty open to interpretation; we’d like to have everything from witches and sorceresses to stage magicians. We’re also open to historical settings and science fiction, and would love to see stories about non-Western magic. The submission window is open from Feb. 15 – May 15, 2010 and optimal word count is 3-8K. We are asking writers to query with their ideas first in an effort to make the process a little easier for everyone. The full guidelines and contact address are here.

OA: Erotica has been a mainstay of your writing career so far, but lately you’ve been turning more toward speculative fiction. What prompted this change, and what do you love about both of these genres?

CL: I’ve always written some speculative fiction so it’s not a completely new thing for me. What has changed for me as a writer is that I’ve said much of what I wanted to say with erotica at this point. I’ve really enjoyed writing erotica and erotic romance and I don’t expect that I’ll ever completely stop writing it, but my emphasis is changing. None of my current projects have much erotic content and I don’t expect that to alter in the immediate future. I’d say that what I love about both genres is that they both bring the opportunity to tell unique stories in unique ways, to be able to step outside of daily reality and play with something new and unusual and stretch the boundaries of story.

OA: You got married in Iowa not too long ago, though you live in Minnesota. Has this changed any of the practical aspects of your life? If not, was it worth it for the emotional significance?

CL: Back in September, 2009, I legally married my partner of fifteen years in one of the few locations in the United States where we can do that. A number of friends traveled in for the wedding, as well as the reception a few weeks later and it was a lovely, lovely experience. We felt very supported and were pretty thrilled about the whole thing. Probably the biggest impact on our daily lives has been that my wife’s family of origin, all of whom are members of the Church of the Latter Day Saints, has become a lot more accepting of our relationship. I will say that the change in attitude came as a pleasant surprise. Apart from that, we’ve made a public commitment to each other and I think that always changes a relationship. And we’re grateful to the Iowa Supreme Court for giving us that opportunity.

OA: Sapphic Shades and Haunted Hearths was nominated for a Lambda Award in 2008. Any chance of a second lesbian ghost story anthology somewhere down the road? Are there other themed anthologies you’d like to put together?

CL: A second ghost story antho is certainly a possibility, though there’s nothing in the works at the present time. I’d like to do a queer steampunk anthology at some point and maybe an anthology of swashbuckling women down the road apiece. I’ve got a thing for women with swords. JoSelle and I have kicked around a few ideas for future anthologies so we’ll have to see how things look after Hellebore is done.

OA: In addition to editing, you’ve written a lot of original fiction. Do you have any personal favorite pieces or characters? Any place you’d recommend as a good start for new readers?

CL: It’s hard to play favorites with the darling children but I’ll give it a shot. One of the stories I’m proudest of is “Great Reckonings, Little Rooms,” which appears in Time Well Bent: Queer Alternative Histories edited by Connie Wilkins. It’s a story about Christopher Marlowe, the gay Elizabethan playwright, Shakepeare’s lesbian sister, Judith, with a tip of the hat to Virginia Woolf, and the authorship of the plays. I’ve also got a story called “The Egyptian Cat”  coming out next month in a magazine called Tales of the Unanticipated. This one is comic Lovecraftian-influenced pulp with lesbian protagonists. I’d say either of these would be a good introduction to my speculative fiction. For my erotica, Crave: Tales of Lust, Love and Longing (Lethe Press, 2007) has remained my favorite.

OA: What can we look forward to in the future?

CL: Right now, I’m working on a novel called Silver Moon. It’s about a woman who turns into a werewolf just as she enters menopause. She’s also coming out and falling in love at the same time so it’s a sort of multi-level coming out novel. Reader response has been very positive thus far and I’m hoping to start shopping it around later on this year.

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Thanks, Catherine! Join us next Friday for another Spotlight, and in the meantime, check out Time Well Bent, or consider submitting to Hellebore and Rue. And don’t forget to stop by MarsCon next week if you’re in the Twin Cities area.

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.

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OA: Chill is the second volume of the Jacob’s Ladder Trilogy, which takes elements from Arthurian legend and re-imagines them in space. Where did the idea for this trilogy come from, and can you tell us a bit more about it?

EB: It’s funny you should ask. I am a great fan of the Matter of Britain, mostly in its weirder aspects (Lancelot and Gwenevere don’t do much for me, but I am a total sucker for Perceval and Gareth Beaumains and Viviane and so forth), but when I pitched Jacob’s Ladder, the email I sent my editor was pretty much:

Amber:Gormenghast::Upstairs:Downstairs

Inspired by the Writers of Color 50 Book Challenge, the Queer Authors 50 Book Challenge has been created to encourage reading books by queer authors. The FAQ includes links to lists of queer sf authors and to zahrawithaz’s list of More than 50 books by Queer People of Color for inspiration.

Richard Norton, a scholar of gay history, has a website of essays on Gay History and Literature – there’s a particular focus on the 18th century (including a sourcebook of hundreds of primary documents from 18th century England) but the essays range from centuries BCE through to the 20th century.

Writing Gay Characters by Megan Rose Gedris covers topics including:

• Why write gay characters at all?
• “Gay Characters” vs. “Characters Who Just Happen to Be Gay”
• Avoiding cliches.
• Romance: How Much is Too Much / Not Enough?
• Gay characters in children’s/ young adult fiction
• Books with Excellent Gay Characters

For more regular linkdumps, please let me know of any interesting links in comments, by email, on the Outer Alliance forum or bookmark them on delicious or diigo with tag “outeralliancelinks“.

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/.

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OA: Blue Moon Cafe is set in your current home city of Seattle. Did you use any actual places as background for the events in the book? Is there perhaps a real life inspiration for the Blue Moon Cafe?

RR: There are many real places in the book, including having my main character live in my own neighborhood, Green Lake. I also use many locations in the gay neighborhood just east of downtown, Capitol Hill. And I have a werewolf mauling take place at night in the Washington Park Arboretum. There is no real life inspiration for the Blue Moon Cafe, although I have since heard of such-named establishments. I was just after the werewolf connection and thought it sounded romantic, as well.

OA: You’ve been involved in AIDS-related causes in the past, and one of your books features a character who finds out he’s HIV positive. If we can’t eradicate AIDS entirely within our lifetime, how much hope is there for more happy endings like the one in NEG UB2?

RR: HIV and AIDS awareness is a cause that’s very important to me, for many reasons. I have lost friends to the virus, though you don’t hear about that as often these days. But as in NEG UB2, I think that everyone who has HIV or AIDS has just as much right and expectation to happiness as anyone else. We live with all kinds of illnesses, diabetes, cancer, AIDS, and it doesn’t stop us from seeking the same kind of happiness as anyone else, so I don’t think AIDS needs to be “eradicated” in order to find happiness, but I would love to see that day come. What a happy day that would be!

OA: Do you have any advice for people who’d like to help, or recommended resources for people who are HIV positive?

RR: Advice? Most major metro areas have AIDS-organizations who help people out and I would recommend checking into what volunteer opportunities are available in your town, since these places are usually low on funds and in need of help. So even if you can’t afford to help out financially, perhaps you can afford to give a little of your time. Poz.com is a great place to go to find resources and information.

OA: Dead End Street and VGL Male Seeks Same are up for the EPIC 2010 Awards. Can you tell us a bit about them?

RR: Dead End Street is my young adult horror novel from Amber Quill Press. It’s about five misfit teenagers who band together to tell stories in a notorious abandoned house in their small town, but the house may not be as abandoned as they think. It’s my only young adult work so far. VGL Male Seeks Same was my first foray into writing romance, and it’s the prequel to NEG UB2. It’s the often funny story about a gay everyman who goes online looking for love and when he doesn’t find it, creates a more appealing persona to draw others to him. Of course, complications arise.

OA: Will you be at EPICon in New Orleans when the EPIC Awards are presented, or are there other events you’ll be attending this year where readers can meet you in person?

RR: I am going to New Orleans in March for the conference and awards and I’m very much looking forward to it. I went to EPICon last year in Vegas and had an amazing time meeting other writers, editors, and publishers…all united by their interest in ebooks. So far, that’s the only conference I have planned. Believe it or not, I’m kind of a shy person, although I hide it pretty well most of the time. So a lot of my “networking” takes place online.

OA: As a reviewer for Dark Scribe Magazine, you read a lot of new books. Have you got any recommendations for us?

RR: Oh yes…here’s just a few titles I’ve recently raved about that are well worth checking out: Alive on the Inside, The Monster in the Box, The Birthing House, Hater, Shatter, and The Suicide Collectors. All of them have that wonderful quality of making it next-to-impossible to stop turning the pages.

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Thanks, Rick! Join us next Friday for another Spotlight, and in the meantime, check out VGL Male Seeks Same.

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.

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OA: Finitude is set in a time when climate change has reached a crisis point. How well does your fictional portrayal of this scenario match your actual opinions and worries?

HM: In order to have complete freedom to explore a lot of extreme scenarios, I set the book in a fictional, parallel world. This also meant I wouldn’t come across as finger-wagging or blaming any nation in particular.

What I tried to do in writing a piece of fiction was give a ground-level point of view, a few characters with whom we could contemplate what this kind of outcome might really mean for us as individuals, something we can relate to, rather than dwelling on the Celsius scale or particulate carbon parts per million.

For instance, there’s one bit where they’re faced with a conundrum (one I can’t answer for myself): If it turned out that air and sea travel were too damaging, and we could only take one last trip somewhere — to have a “Last Flights Day” — where would you go? For me, living in one place, working with a client in another, and with my immediate family in two other places, it’s wrenching. But what if? And that question is really what fiction is for, I figure.

I started off trying to write a funny story, just to avoid all the heavy-handedness this issue is generally treated with. Sure, it’s the most serious issue we’re facing, don’t get me wrong, but I tried to keep the characters out of it, in a way. They’re bumbling about, trying to survive, while behind them the machinations of bureaucracy and a generally apathetic public are making things very bad.

Unfortunately, I think this is our collective weakness, too: Our politicians are geared toward creating a society that’s conducive to business, not life, and the rest of us are just too damned comfortable to want to change. Especially when we keep being told “You’re worth it,” “Treat yourself”, and such things by an industrial system that needs us to be constantly dissatisfied yet hopeful for material bliss. Suggesting people undergo a drastic change of lifestyle like the one they made here [in Britain] during World War II today comes across today like an insult.

In some ways, I believe story and metaphor are better tools for achieving awareness and care than constant, belligerent argument. And my job was to try to make this novel clip along, because I don’t feel I have the right to challenge anyone to think about an idea until I’ve honoured the free time they’ve loaned me and rewarded them with something fun.

That said, we can go too far in that direction, resulting in a candy-floss forest like Avatar, which is an amazing, fun spectacle, but is ultimately a closed loop: You leave the theatre having had a complete experience, so you’re finished; meanwhile, that story trades on our three most serious issues (which are all really the same thing): the ecosystem, trade justice, and corporate sociopathy. Yet none of us leaves angry about our complicity in the parallel, real things happening in our world. For instance, mining the coltan in our mobile phones (“unobtanium”) leads to abuse and slavery of a group of people (the “Na’vi”) in the Congo (“Pandora”). It’s the same damned thing, but we’re too busy to notice, being wowed by blue cat-people living in a cosmic bowling lane of a jungle.

While researching Finitude, I lucked upon a website called SciTalk.org.uk. It’s a resource, searchable by speciality, that teams writers up with scientists, so our work can be a more accurate reflection of their disciplines. I guess they’re also tired of all being portrayed as clip-board toting brunettes wearing white coats and glasses, just waiting for a dramatic moment to take off their specs, shake their hair out of a bun, and suddenly be sexy. So, out of gratitude to the climate scientists who gave me their advice, I’ll say that scientists are sexy all the time.

OA: Do you have any suggestions for the global community about how to mitigate the problem?

HM: Despite my ranting, I’m really not a political person, and I don’t pretend to have any answers; I just like playing with ideas, always trying to climb higher and higher to get a clearer view for myself. Conflict is story, and it’s pretty easy to be in conflict with the horseshit our society gets up to.

In fiction, I guess I keep trying to dig under issues, ask what an issue is really about. In thinking about Finitude, it occurred to me that none of this is actually about light-bulbs or shopping bags or Swiffers, but about our fundamental relationship to life — our own and that around us, and it seems like we don’t want to think about it.

Someone once said that fiction should ask questions but never answer them, and I agree with that. There are far better-informed people with real, workable visions we can turn to — if we’re moved to.

OA: You’ve self-published from the start of your novel writing career in 1999. Why did you choose that path, and what do you love about it?

HM: My first book, doubleZero, was about Y2K. Yeah, oops! That topic had the shelf-life of yoghurt in the sun. But when I started, I had no idea what I was doing, then I finished, I had a novel, and there was no way I was going to just let it sit in a drawer!

So I sent out the manuscript, and I received some serious interest from a publisher in Toronto who kept saying yes, yes, then finally said no: They were concerned about having to recoup all their investment before the end of the year. So, since I was doing graphic design at the time, I laid it out myself and hired a small press to print it.

The result got me in with the vibrant ‘zine community in Toronto, and I learned a lot from them. I suck at self-promotion, though, so I was just happy to sell out the run of books.

I wrote a second novel, but submitting it was a similar story: “Love it… Love it… Cut it in half.” That kind of thing. The responses were good, but everyone wanted someone else to be the first to choose me.

Then I up and moved to Scotland, following my heart and gut when they kept saying I should come over here — which has been great, absolutely the right thing to do life-wise, but meant I had to start my career as a novelist over.

My next book, Idea in Stone, was a magical realist story about Edinburgh, and I spent years sending that around to various publishers in Scotland, most of whom were too busy fighting for their continued existence to take on any new work that wasn’t by a celebrity, or they were in the process of being bought out by a multi-national corporation. One was interested in going ahead with it, but then the press stopped printing fiction, choosing instead to make coffee-table books about whisky and hillwalking, along with some Glaswegian joke-books to read in the bathroom. What can you do?

It was all enough to make me decide to leave the industry to itself and focus on creating books and finding readers. So this time, rather than pay a truckload of money for someone to deliver boxes of books, I decided to make them myself.

The DIY Book process I’ve set out for myself is work, but it’s a helluva lot of fun. And it means I’m creatively free to dream up and print anything I like without asking anyone for permission. I think this is a really important freedom, especially for an LGBTI person who might be tempted to censor or stifle themselves after spending time trying to woo that corporate world — where the aim becomes trying to be as unobjectionable, as unrejectable, as possible. But of course, in my case, I’ve come to see that the bits I feel apologetic or shy about, the bits I would cut, are the things that my readers say they love the most.

Indie publishing seems to, coincidentally, be a hot topic these days, with traditional publishing in such trouble, and e-books on the rise. So I’d love to spare potential self-publishers having to learn everything from scratch as I did. And with so many business springing up to predate on writers’ ambitions, I’d like to show that there’s a third path for entering the field — not traditional publishing, nor Print-on-Demand (which is usually presented as the only other option), but a true DIY effort that anyone can start at any level of complexity and expense they’re comfortable with, starting with some pretty cheap and easy methods. I’m sharing this information via a free podcast on iTunes.

Rather than cutting off options, I think this is a great way to bypass a lot of hassle and heartache, learn loads about what’s involved in publishing a book, retain complete creative freedom, and just do something while waiting for the limelight to hit — which, honestly, is a bit of a lottery, and doesn’t happen for as many of us as the contests and talk shows would suggest.

OA: You’re not keen on people assuming queer stereotypes are true (you describe yourself as gay, but a crap decorator, for instance). How do you combat this in your work? Do you have any particularly non-stereotypical gay leads?

HM: I write fiction in which one or more of the characters is incidentally gay, alongside other characters. It’s not “gay fiction” — though some people blindly lump any story with a gay protagonist into that genre — because the story is about something else. I write stories I’d like to read, that I could relate to — stories about made-up times, places, and people alongside real ideas and questions.

At the risk of offending anyone, I never want to read another book about a young American kid from the heartlands who goes to Manhattan and becomes a hustler who dies of AIDS. Or a story about a clutch of gays who shop and giggle and drink with their drag-queen best friend. Or a book with a shirtless model on the cover and pages filled with wank stories, labelled “Gay Literature”.

There are a million other stories, and while we’re not finished securing equality and understanding, the LGBTI spectrum is a lot more varied than our own culture tends to acknowledge.

OA: The DIY Book podcast is full of information on how to make books, which is awesome, but I’m wondering if you have any advice for people who want to make podcasts of their own. Are there any resources you’d recommend?

HM: Oh, cheers! It’s fun, though admittedly it takes a lot of work. But I get excited about the prospect of helping other people get their own book out into the world.

At the risk of sounding like a Mac zealot, the Apple program GarageBand makes it easy for me to produce a rather complicated piece of multimedia. It hadn’t occurred to me to make a podcast until I switched back to a Mac and found this amazing studio program just sitting there, for free, in my Applications folder.

I’m sure there are other ways to do it, but this is mine. I try to remember, though, that the computer is just a creative tool, and what matters is what you create with it, not which name or fruit is on the lid.

OA: What’s it like living in Scotland as a foreigner? Do you ever feel homesick or out of place?

HM: People are always a bit surprised when they’ve heard my name then hear me speak. I’m not from here, and I’ll never be from here, and I’m aware of that. I thought my Canadian accent would have changed more by now, but it hasn’t. Maybe I’m too old, or maybe it’s been a factor of living in Edinburgh until now, which is a real crossroads for students, visitors, and other people from everyplace else. This city can be a bit hard on the surface, and it took a while to meet real Scots!

Of course, now I’ve been in a relationship with one for a while, I’m getting to experience what it’s like to be taken into a family.

OA: How has the move affected your writing?

HM: The gravity and beauty of Edinburgh overwhelmed me at first, and I can still just take a walk around and be in rapture. That inspired me to write a book about the place, but I didn’t know enough about the place for it to be historically accurate, nor could I authentically write in the voice of local people, so I opted for a magical realist story about someone discovering the place and falling in love with it just as it’s starting to vanish because of redevelopment. (Am I sounding like a crank? It’s actually a love story!)

So I got a book out of this city. And now it looks like I’m moving to the north Highlands. Like, north north. So we’ll see what I find there!

***

Thanks, Hamish! Join us next Friday for another Spotlight, and in the meantime, check out Hamish MacDonald’s bookstore and podcast.

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.

***

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.

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.

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OA: Shadow of the Father takes place in Argaea, a fantasy world you’ve written about before. What keeps you coming back there, and do you plan to return in future books?

KG: Whenever I write a story, it involves a host of secondary characters, and the lives of the main characters obviously extend beyond the scope of the story. After writing my first story in that world, I was intrigued enough with the characters to write a “before” novel and an “after” novel. I think one of the appeals of the medieval/Renaissance world is that it is simpler and starker than our modern world. The stakes in any conflict can be higher: literally life and death. Because survival was much less assured than in our contemporary world, because class distinctions were so much more important then, the stories that we write about can be more visceral. The story of Shadow could not be told in a contemporary setting: even a mountain city would not be isolated, with our modern communications; assassination would not be as credible a threat.

I do think the lack of a communications infrastructure is a big part of what I enjoy about that world. It increases the characters’ reliance on each other for information, which lets me explore their motivations in more detail–lies carry more weight. I’m definitely returning to that world–I have a story started that takes place there, and doesn’t involve any previously written characters.

OA: Furry fandom is the butt of many jokes, even amongst other geeks. Why do you think people are so wary of it, and how do you cope with negative reactions?

KG: I’m certainly aware of that reputation, though I’m not sure where it comes from. I think partly it’s partly due to one of the unique aspects of the furry fandom: that the fandom has no media source material. Star Trek fans, Star Wars fans, Harry Potter fans, with all those people you can look at the TV shows, the movies, the books, and you can understand the appeal that drives people to band together around them. Furry fandom is harder to understand because there is no TV show, no movie, no book that is the focal point of the fandom. Even generic “science fiction” fans have Clarke, Asimov, Heinlein, Card; “fantasy” fans have Tolkien. Furry fans tend to create their own source material, tailored to their tastes, and that can be a bit hard to understand from the perspective of an outsider looking in.

Additionally, you can’t ignore the fact that the fandom is more openly sexual than most other fandoms. Most of my work is adult, and it’s had a good reception in the fandom, even from straight people who are happy just to skip some of the explicit scenes. There are people in the fandom who avoid anything sexual, and a great amount of non-sexual work, but of course when outsiders are looking for something to represent the fandom, they’ll pick the thing that looks strangest to mainstream society.

That said, I think that negative reaction is not as widespread as perhaps people think. Loud people in any group can affect the perception of that group, and a few loud people mocking furry fans on the Internet does not mean that that attitude is in the majority, nor even widespread. My experience has generally been that people who don’t understand furry fans usually just shrug and leave them alone. I’ve been quite happy to see my books getting some appreciation outside the fandom among gay readers, in Elisa Rolle’s journal, for example, and in her Rainbow Awards (which was a huge surprise), so I haven’t had to deal with a lot of negative reaction at all. When I do, I just ignore it. The need to create our own source material has made the fandom astonishingly creative–mostly, as you note, in the realm of visual art, but writing and music are catching up. There’s even two furry musicals, though neither of them has had much play, and there are about a hundred furry podcasts now. It may not be to everyone’s tastes, but I’d rather focus on all that positive work than on a few critics.

OA: Are there any particular stories you’d recommend to someone who is new to the concept of furry fandom?

KG: Sofawolf Press publishes a journal called “New Fables,” which collects literary-quality furry stories of many different types. That’d be a great place to start. There are a few other books that are close to the fandom: Michael Payne’s The Blood Jaguar (Payne attends furry conventions and is familiar with the fandom) and iBooks’s Furry! (a collection previously published by Sofawolf Press as Best In Show, an anthology of the best stories published in fifteen years of the fandom).

Mainstream books and movies that relate to the fandom–Richard Adams’s Watership Down, Disney’s Robin Hood and The Lion King, Alan Dean Foster’s Spellsinger series, Cordwainer Smith’s Underpeople stories.

OA: You’ll be launching a new novella called Bridges at Furry Fiesta next month as part your new Cupcakes project. Can you tell us a bit more about Bridges, and the basic concept behind Cupcakes?

KG: Bridges started as a short story about an unusual sexual experience. It’s set in a world contemporary with ours, starting by following a young man (a fox) looking for a date, approached by a flirty fellow named Hayward. Hayward becomes the central character of the story–the whole “quiet, shy person approached by attractive, outgoing person” is a popular romantic fantasy, but it made me curious to build Hayward into a real person, to figure out what his motivation would be for the things he does. The more I wrote about it, the more I became curious about his life, and the wider and more far-reaching the story grew, until it ended up as a novella. So I didn’t want to just post it online, as I do with a lot of my short fiction.

I participate in a writing group, and one of the things our group has noticed is that some of our stories have settled into a novella length, and there are very few outlets for that. We are friends with a couple publishers in the fandom, and it turned out that one of them, FurPlanet, was interested in publishing some shorter works. Novellas fit perfectly. But we wanted to establish a brand associated with our novellas, something that would be kind of fun and would allow our fans to follow our work and discover other people. Cupcakes are a big trend right now, and a favorite of my partner and myself, and we thought that was a perfect description for a shorter, snack-sized story that still had enough substance to it for people to really get into. It also has a bit of a “treat” association with it, something special, and we liked the way that sounded. As a bonus, it gives us an excuse to have cupcakes at the release party.

Mine’s the first to come out; there’ll be info about the other projects and the other authors at www.furrycupcakes.com.

OA: Furry fandom tends to involve a lot of artwork. Are there any artists or individual pieces that you think we should check out?

KG:There are a ridiculous number of talented artists in the fandom. As I mentioned, the unique nature of our fandom really encourages creativity and artwork. I can’t possibly give a rundown of all the ones worth watching, nor even all my favorites, but I’ll highlight a couple that would be good places to start.

Blotch is a friend of mine, and one of my favorite artists. “He” illustrated my novel, Out of Position, and the cover is one of my favorite pieces of his. All the work at his online gallery is great, but a couple of my favorites are “Laugh at Life” and “Fly By”.

Sara Palmer and John Cooner have been kind enough to illustrate my books, and have extensive bodies of wonderful work. Sara has a lovely soft touch with marker and colored pencil; John is an excellent cartoonist, a former animator who really understands how to bring characters to life.

oCeLot also does terrific work with color and design. John Jay Doggett does adorable old-timey cartoony pics. Katmomma has great style as well. If you’re looking for more, you can venture to the furry-only art site furaffinity.net and look for some of the above artists (Blotch, oCeLot, John Jay Doggett, Katmomma, Sara Palmer, John Cooner) as well as a couple other of my favorites, Kenket and Kamui and check out the other artists they like and follow. There’s a lot of great work out there.

***

Thanks, Kyell! Join us next Friday for another Spotlight, and in the meantime, why not check out some of Kyell Gold’s books, or even find him in person at Further ConFusion? If you’re not in San Jose, but are interested in meeting other allies at cons, be sure to check the Queer Friendly Cons page, which has been updated a few times in the week since I first posted it. Please keep those suggestions for further additions coming!

January

*First, a convention that’s happening right now: Arisia. This Boston, Massachusetts area con is queer, pagan, poly, and kink friendly, and has a few Outer Alliance members on the guest list. If you show up, you might run into Rose Fox, Jennifer Pelland, and Cecilia Tan. Arisia’s Fan Guests of Honor this year are a queer couple, Kevin Roche and Andy Trembley, and there is even a Queer SF&F panel on Saturday at 2:00 pm.

*Coming up next weekend (22-24 January) in San Jose, California, you can catch OA member Kyell Gold at Further ConFusion, a Furry convention.

February

*In Boston, Boskone 47 is happening on 12-14 February.

*If you can’t make it to Further ConFusion, you’ll have another chance to see Kyell Gold in Dallas, Texas over the weekend of 19-21 February. He’ll be appearing at Furry Fiesta as the Writing Guest of Honor.

*On 26-28 February, Gallifrey One is happening in Los Angeles, California. This convention is devoted to Dr. Who fandom. (Thanks to LJC for the tip!)

March

*OA member Catherine Lundoff will appear at MarsCon 2010 in Minneapolis, Minnesota on the weekend of 5-7 March.

*Last week’s Spotlight subject, Angelia Sparrow will be a guest at MidSouthCon during the weekend of 12-14 March.

May

*OutLantaCon is an LGBTQ SF convention in Atlanta, Georgia happening on 1-3 May. Nicola Griffith and Cecilia Tan will both be guests there. (Thanks to Catherine Lundoff for the tip!)

*WisCon is a feminist SF convention that takes place in Madison, Wisconsin. This year it will happen on the weekend of 27-31 May.

*That same weekend in Baltimore, Maryland, Tanya Huff (whose books have been recommended by multiple OA members in Spotlights past) will be the Guest of Honor at Balticon.

*Imaginales is a book and original illustration fair in Epinal, France, which will also take place on 27-30 May. The chair, Stéphanie Nicot, is one of France’s leading trans rights campaigners. (Thanks to Cheryl Morgan for this tip!)

June

*Angelia Sparrow will be appearing at Hypericon in Nashville Tennessee on the weekend of 4-6 June.

*That same weekend in Dallas, Texas, Catherine Lundoff will be a guest at A-Kon.

July

*CONvergence is happening on 1-4 July in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Catherine Lundoff will be there, too!

*ReaderCon is yet another Boston Area convention, but this one eschews media other than books. Jennifer Pelland usually turns up at this one, and Cecilia Tan has in the past as well.

*Finncon is happening 16-18 July in Finnland, and will feature Ellen Kushner and Pat Cadigan. (Thanks again to Cheryl Morgan for the tip!)

August

*Diversicon hasn’t put up its 2010 dates yet, but this Minneapolis, Minnesota convention exists to celebrate diversity in SF fandom.

*Au Contraire is the New Zealand National Science Fiction Convention for 2010. It’s happening the weekend before this year’s WorldCon, so that people can go to both in one trip. 27-29 August in Wellington, New Zealand. (Thanks to Anna for the tip!)

September

*Memphit Fur Meet 2010 will be happening on the weekend of 3-5 September in Memphis, Tennessee. This is another small, Furry convention, and Angelia Sparrow may attend it if she isn’t traveling to Atlanta, Georgia.

*Dragon*Con (3-5 September in Atlanta, Georgia) is one of the larger convention in the US, and full of elaborate costumes.

*That same weekend, but on another continent,  the 68th WorldCon, AussieCon 4 is happening in Melbourne, Australia.

October

*Gaylaxicon, a con devoted entirely to queer speculative fiction, will take place in October in Montreal, Canada.

November

*OA member Elizabeth Bear will be the Guest of Honor at Darkover XXXIII in Timonium, Maryland on the weekend of 26-28 November.

This is just the tip of the convention iceberg, so please tell us about your favorite queer friendly conventions in the comments, and about which ones you plan to attend (I’m personally planning to attend Boskone and ReaderCon). I’ll be sure to update this page with more convention links if you tell me about them. With any luck, maybe we can all meet some of our fellow allies in person this calendar year!

The Chronicles Of Jack Primus by Michael D. Griffiths is set in a contemporary world, but one far different than ours. Evil is not a concept for philosophical debate, but rather a strong force, made tangible and real, when it Darkens and corrupts killers and madmen. These Chronicles document Jack’s attempt to not only keep his life, but also his sanity as he delves deep into the realm of the foul Xemmoni who seek to increase their own ends by draining the life force of their Human victims.

Jack discovers far more than how stay alive. His journey exposes him to terrors no man should be forced to witness, but unlike some poor victim in a traditional horror story, Jack not only fights back, but also takes the battle to his enemy. Armed with only the small weapons he can fit on his motorcycle, what was once a man fleeing for his life transforms into a hero out to save whomever he can from these foul creatures that few ever realize exist. Travel with Jack as he embarks, not only on the road to
survival, but also struggles to unravel the foul mysterious of the evil race know as the Xemmoni. Just released by Living Dead Press, this is Michael D. Griffith’s first published novel. http://livingdeadpress.com/