Christopher Rice

New York Times Best Selling Author

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BLOOD VICTORY, my third Burning Girl thriller, is here!

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BloodVictory_Cover_380x570

It’s a release day around these parts, which means I’ve been surfing my hardwood floors on a tide of socked feet and self-obsessed anxiety. But I’ve also got a nice round up of links that should give you some glimpses into my third Burning Girl thriller, BLOOD VICTORY, which is now on sale.

Have you visited my Bathroom Bookstore? It’s the ongoing video series I’ve been doing ever since the pandemic began, and today’s installment is devoted to my new book as well as an ill-advised attempt at a new Bathroom Bookstore theme song. There wasn’t an old Bathroom Bookstore theme song, and when you’ll hear this one, you’ll understand why.

Sampled the new podcast from yours truly and my best friend, the brilliant New York Times bestselling author, Eric Shaw Quinn? If not, the new episode of ‘TDPS Presents CHRISTOPHER &ERIC’ is available for your enjoyment. As part of a special feature we do called True Crime TV Club, we cover a gruesome Texas murder in a nod to BLOOD VICTORY’S Texas setting.

And a big thank you to the esteemed literary folk over at CrimeReads for inviting me to write this personal essay about BLOOD VICTORY. In essence it’s a letter I wrote to console an 8-year-old version of myself who used to hide under the backseat to avoid the sight of a poster for a terrifying move that once hung in the window of a Texas video store.

I have to return to pacing my apartment now and trying not to check sales figures. Be well and safe, everyone. I’m happy to be back to blogging and promise to generate some more content soon.

What I’m Really Saying When I Say I Want To Bang The Mooch

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Let’s talk about what it means to have bad taste in partners. And no, I’m not talking about business partners. I am searching, rather, for some gender-neutral, all-inclusive use of the more specific (to my case, at least) phrase, bad taste in men. So, in my case, let’s talk about what it means when I say I have bad taste in men. More importantly, let’s talk about about it means when my friends say I have bad taste in men (i.e. not theirs).

Oh, screw that. Let’s just talk about how I want to bang The Mooch.

(FYI, because this is the Internet, let me take this moment to point out that if your answer to the previous question is, “No, let’s not talk about that,” now’s the perfect time for you to depart BEFORE you begin composing a tirade in the comments about how this should have been a blog post about something you find yourself more interested in today. Like the all female reboot of LORD OF THE FILES. Or you.)

It’s true. There. I said it. I want to bang The Mooch. Hard and fast and in a cramped room. A few weeks ago, I tweeted it (not the cramped room part). A little while later I tweeted it again in a thread about something else I tried to hijack. Foolishly, I assumed this “coming out”, if you will, would cleanse me, heal me, purge me of my sinful desire. But then, just a few days ago, I visited the social media profile of an ex whereupon I saw a post from him asserting that if he went into politics, he would, in fact, be The Mooch. And that’s when I decided this was a warped, but deeply embedded aspect of my character and only a village of contemptuous blog comments would be capable of extracting it from my fiber. (And a fair helping of social media judgment, which started trickling in the minute I announced my intentions to write this post.)

But before I get into The Mooch’s Moochness and how I want it to Mooch all over me, can we take a moment to define what it means to have bad taste in sexual partners? In my opinion, there are two different camps of bad taste when it comes to self-defeating sexual attraction. (Note: When you’re writing a reductive blog post about something, there are always at least two camps of everything.)

The first camp is what I call blind bad taste – an overwhelming desire to build a romantic future with someone who is crushingly wrong for you. This desire is often driven by a deep, unaddressed trauma in your past. It causes you to pursue people who are powerful reminders of past lovers or parental figures who wronged you early in life. Because they often bear a striking physical or behavioral resemblance to the person who either failed you or abused you in your past, you do your absolute best to lock them down, convinced that this time they’ll do a better job of showing up for you because this time you will be perfect and get it right and say all the right things.

It’s a serious problem, probably fodder for a more serious blog post than this one, as it often traps people in cycles of abuse. And in the person afflicted, it’s almost impossible to make them see the presence of it without an intervention involving multiple therapists. A befuddling aspect of human existence, for sure, so pervasive that good romance novels explore it in detail, but by all means, please give me another lecture on how your giant mutant bird novel is a superior literary endeavor, dudebro.

Then there’s a second type of bad taste; more manageable, but sometimes more astonishing because it pops up in people who not only should know better, they do know better. I call it filthy bad taste. As in, “I know this dude is filthy, but I want his filth all over me while we call each other filthy names.” It makes people who are usually fairly intelligent and self aware say horrible things they mask with self-deprecating humor. “Yeah, I know he’s a douche bag. But a little douching is good for you now and then, isn’t it?” (This judgment usually applies to straight women and people on the LGBT spectrum for the very simple reason that nobody’s all that surprised when a straight man goes to bed with someone terrible.)

That’s how I am with The Mooch.

Is he a terrible person? I’m not sure. I’ve never met him. But if he really did text his wife “Congratulations” after she gave birth to his son while he was in another city being The Mooch, then yeah, I’d say he might not be a very good person. But filthy bad taste doesn’t lead you to good people. But also – and this is the important part – filthy bad taste does not always lead you to people who are physically gorgeous and oozing sex appeal and confidence and Christian Grey whateverness while also being catastrophically stupid or morally suspect. Yeah. It’s easy for someone to say, “That guy seems like a sociopath, but he’s looks like a Michelangelo, so why not get naked with him, right?” That’s not what filthy bad taste is about. And it’s not about slumming it or just finding some sort of rebellious release either. I’m not some Regency-era aristocrat looking to sow my oats with the stable boy. (The Mooch is probably a lot wealthier than me. He’s also older …I think.)

It’s about an intense desire to get sweaty with someone you believe to be a not very good person because they are a not very good person. Because you believe deep down that the qualities that make them a not very good person are a certain kind of fearlessness, lack of remorse, lack of inhibition and delusional swagger that will allow them to effortlessly treat your body like a Thanksgiving meal. This concept kicked into place for me when a close friend said to me that he couldn’t quite figure out my physical taste in men, but the one thing all the guys I’d been interested in had in common was swagger. Swagger that was in some cases the result of foolish confidence.

This foolish confidence is the lure for those of us who suffer from filthy bad taste. When it comes to The Mooch in particular, the finer points of his ten-day career inside the White House – from his idiotic Steve Bannon self suck interview to the press briefing in which he addressed the White House Press Corp as if they were a college football team – suggest someone who simply can’t be bothered with the rules. And if you’re a grown up with a robust sexual history, you know that people who can’t be bothered with the rules don’t observe the “I did this for three minutes, now you do it for three minutes or ELSE IT’S NOT FAIR” rule that makes for terrible, predictable sex. They just gobble until they pass out.

I will concede that there’s another possibility, not as exciting, which is that people who seem like they can’t be bothered with the rules sometimes turn out to be people who were either too stupid or narcisstic to learn that the rules exist. (Case in point: our president.) And sometimes these people are terrible in bed because they’re afraid sex will mess up their hair.

I don’t think that’s who The Mooch is, but I’m not willing to make a federal case about it because that’s not what this blog post is about and I’m already defensive enough on this topic.

What I’m trying to do is establish a working definition of filthy bad taste by way of my desire to bang The Mooch. So let’s be very, very clear about what a desire to bang The Mooch actually is.

It’s not a crush. Say that with me again. It’s not a crush. When you have a crush on someone, you imagine yourself doing multiple things with them and enjoying all of those things in a giddy, youthful fashion. Sexual fantasy is often the smallest part of a crush, which is why heterosexual men and women are perfectly comfortable proclaiming their crushes on members of the same sex (and then having sex with them when they’re drunk.)

So let’s look at the actual words in the sentence “I want to bang The Mooch”. What other activities are described aside from banging? NONE! No other activities are described. In other words, Judgy Internet Person, if you assume my desire to bang The Mooch is going to involve any form of celebrating or enabling the more unsavory aspects of The Mooch’s character outside of that sweaty cramped room I referenced above, you can take a seat. I never said I want to buy a house in Connecticut with The Mooch, or raise a French bulldog with him. I said, quite simply, I want to bang The Mooch.

No doubt this post will be updated with defensive addendum based on how people respond to it. But I feel somewhat better for having written it. I can’t account for how you’ll feel after reading it….unless, of course, you, too, want to bang The Mooch.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What I’m Really Excited About

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I’m excited about a few things right now, and I wanted to share. For starters, I have two books coming out in the near future. The first is one I wrote with my mother, a sequel to her bestseller, THE MUMMY or RAMSES THE DAMNED. This one’s called RAMSES THE DAMNED: THE PASSION OF CLEOPATRA and it releases this November. (Check out the banner on my Facebook page for info about a fun giveaway.) The second is a thriller I wrote on my own called BONE MUSIC: A BURNING GIRL NOVEL. It’s the start of all new series featuring a kick-ass heroine who gets her hands on a drug that gives her a burst of superhuman strength whenever she’s terrified. (And yes, there will be gays.) That one comes out in February. I’ve just started copyedits on it. At the end of this month, I’m traveling to New York to do a signing at Book Con, the author centric portion of the Book Expo of America. I’ll be signing copies of RAMSES THE DAMNED but *I will be there WITHOUT my mother so don’t be disappointed when you get to the front of the line and it’s just me. I might have a consolation cookie for you just in case, but you’ve been forewarned, OK?* It also looks like I’ll be doing a casual booth signing at San Diego Comic Con this July. Stay tuned.

But can I tell you what I’m *really* excited about? I mean, really, really excited about? I’m not entirely sure of this, but my weekend social media use strongly suggests it and so I’m willing to speculate about it openly, but it’s entirely possible that Nora Roberts takes weekends off. In case you’re unaware, Nora Roberts is America’s most popular novelist and she has one of the most enviable work ethics of any writer publishing today. I’m also a big fan of her work. Her novels are consistently absorbing and filled with places where I want to live and people I would love to live there with. Her dialogue sparkles and sings and the romantic moments in her books feel gratifying and earned. And she manages to maintain this level of quality while writing something on the order of 612 books a year, keeping a massive garden at her home, cooking for family and friends and maintaining a regular exercise schedule. Meanwhile I spend most of Sunday debating whether or not I should go the gym. It’s amazing, when you think about it. Sometimes, when I’m feeling lazy, it’s *too* amazing, and asking myself, “What would Nora Roberts be doing right now?” only to realize the answer is probably, “Writing!” doesn’t inspire me so much as it produces a kind of self-defeating envy in my soul. So imagine my satisfaction when I saw on her blog and Facebook pages evidence that maybe, just maybe, she took the weekend off to organize some boxes in her guest room. This gives me hope that I can manage to lounge on the sofa now and then, rewinding all the Max Riemelt scenes in SENSE8, and still someday achieve Nora’s level of productivity and greatness.

So what are you guys excited about right now?

PARAMOUNT TELEVISION AND ANONYMOUS CONTENT OPTION RIGHTS TO ANNE RICE’S BEST-SELLING SERIES, “THE VAMPIRE CHRONICLES”

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Over 100 Million Copies Sold Worldwide

HOLLYWOOD, Calif., (April 28, 2017) – Paramount Television and Anonymous Content have optioned the rights to 11 books from acclaimed author Anne Rice’s best-selling series, “The Vampire Chronicles.” Christopher Rice, four-time New York Times Bestselling® author and recipient of the Lambda Literary Award, will pen the series and serve as executive producer alongside Anne Rice, and Anonymous Content’s David Kanter and Steve Golin.

“It is undeniable that Anne Rice has created the paradigm in which all vampire stories are measured against. The rich and vast world she has created with ‘The Vampire Chronicles’ is unmatched and sophisticated with 90’s gothic undertones that will be perfectly suited to captivate audiences,” said Amy Powell, President, Paramount TV. “The series is full of compelling characters led by Lestat, arguably one of the greatest original characters, literary or otherwise. We are thrilled to collaborate with Anne, Christopher and the team at Anonymous Content on this epic series.”

“Together with our partners at Paramount Television, we are embarking on a fantastic journey with Anne and Christopher Rice to bring Anne’s unparalleled imagination to television at the moment when the medium is experiencing a global apex in the demand for the most outstanding, exciting and heightened premium dramatic programming”, says Anonymous Content’s David Kanter. “’The Vampire Chronicles,’ in its entirety, is not only a phenomenally complex universe of story-telling, it is also a world-wide readership whose connections to the books and their author are deep and abiding. It is a tremendous responsibility to help bring the books to television, and we are thrilled to have this opportunity.”

“I’m thrilled beyond words to be working with Paramount TV and Anonymous Content –known for extraordinary cutting edge series such as “True Detective,” “Quarry,” and “The Knick,” said Anne Rice. “In this unique golden age of television, I couldn’t ask for a finer or more passionate team to help bring my beloved vampire hero, Lestat, alive in a series of the highest quality. This is a dream come true, both for me and for Christopher and for the fans who have been asking to see the Brat Prince in this medium for years.”

Christopher Rice added, “The first great day for me on this project was when my mother asked me to partner with her on it. The second, is the announcement of this thrilling partnership with Paramount Television and Anonymous Content. For decades now fans of ‘The Vampire Chronicles’ have been clamoring for a long-form television adaptation of this galaxy of content. Just a glance at the libraries of these two innovative, groundbreaking companies makes clear why they’re perfectly suited to granting this wish. Add to that their passion and enthusiasm for the long term vision Mom and I share for this series, and we’re confident this exciting deal will result in many excellent things for Lestat in the universe of television.”

Anne Rice is a New York Times Bestselling® author of over 30 novels. Her first novel “Interview with the Vampire” was published in 1979 and has become one of bestselling novels worldwide and was the basis for the internationally acclaimed 1994 motion picture, INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE, starring Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, Kirsten Dunst and Antonio Banderas.

“The Vampire Chronicles” is the latest project in the continued partnership between Paramount TV and Anonymous Content, which have a first-look production deal for scripted television programming across broadcast, premium cable, cable and online audiences. The competitive deal was negotiated by David Goldman and Erika Kirkwood for Paramount TV, and Creative Artists Agency and Christine Cuddy of Kleinberg Lange Cuddy & Carlo LLP on behalf of Anne and Christopher Rice.

Previously announced projects from Paramount TV and Anonymous Content include “Berlin Station,” a 10-part series airing on EPIX and now in production on its second season; “13 Reasons Why,” streaming now on Netflix, based on the New York Times bestselling YA book by Jay Asher, directed by Oscar® winner Tom McCarthy and written by Pulitzer Prize® winner Brian Yorkey who executive produced along with Selena Gomez and McCarthy; “Maniac,” a 10-episode, straight-to-series to be directed by Cary Fukunaga starring Emma Stone and Jonah Hill, ordered by Netflix; a drama series based on Caleb Carr’s “The Alienist” for TNT, based on the best-selling novel from Caleb Carr, directed and executive produced by BAFTA-nominated director Jakob Verbruggen along with executive producers Emmy Award® winner Cary Fukunaga, Academy Award® winner Eric Roth, Academy Award® nominee Hossein Amini and Anonymous Content’s Steve Golin and Rosalie Swedlin; “Spoonbenders” based on Daryl Gregory’s highly anticipated novel; a series based on New York Times Bestselling book from Rebecca Traister, “All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation;” a series based on 9 year-old journalist and budding author Hilde Lysiak’s book series “Hilde Cracks the Case;” “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: and Other Lessons from the Crematory,” adapted and executive produced by “Nurse Jackie” co-creator, Evan Dunsky, based on Caitlin Doughty’s New York Times Best-Selling memoir; “The Windfall” based on Diksha Basu’s highly anticipated debut novel with Indian filmmaker Shonali Bose (Margarita With A Straw) attached to write and direct the pilot; and “The Silent Corner,” based on the highly-anticipated novel from #1 New York Times bestselling author Dean Koontz.

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ABOUT PARAMOUNT TELEVISION
Paramount Television develops and finances a wide range of creative television programming across all media platforms. Its robust slate of programming with top distributors includes the 5 Emmy® Award winning live musical event GREASE: LIVE (FOX), which holds the record-breaking telecast title with more than 17MM viewers worldwide and is ranked as the No. 1 most social live musical event ever, the Emmy® nominated Nickelodeon hit SCHOOL OF ROCK, Tom Clancy’s JACK RYAN (Amazon), 13 REASONS WHY (Netflix), MANIAC (Netflix), SHOOTER (USA), BERLIN STATION (EPIX), THE ALIENIST (TNT), GALAXY QUEST (Amazon), VARSITY BLUES (CMT) and THE WARRIORS (Hulu). Paramount Digital Entertainment (PDE) has developed series such as BAJILLION DOLLAR PROPERTIE$ (NBCUniversal’s Seeso), HOTWIVES OF ORLANDO and HOTWIVES OF LAS VEGAS (HULU), RESIDENT ADVISORS (HULU), BEEF (Fullscreen) and the one hour special, CRASH TEST (Comedy Central and Vimeo). Paramount Television and Paramount Digital Entertainment are part of Paramount Pictures Corporation (PPC), a global producer and distributor of filmed entertainment. PPC is a subsidiary of Viacom (NASDAQ: VIAB, VIA), a global content company with premier television, film and digital entertainment brands.

ABOUT ANONYMOUS CONTENT
Founded in 1999 by Managing Partner Steve Golin, Anonymous Content is a leading management and Film, TV and Commercial production company. Anonymous Content manages the careers of many of the world’s most renowned and innovative directors, writers, actors and comedians, working closely with them to achieve their goals by both creating and finding opportunities for them, whether in feature films, television, commercials, music videos or brand integrated content. Anonymous Content’s clients have been recognized with Academy Awards®, Emmys®, Golden Globes®, Tony Awards®, Pulitzer Prizes® and other prestigious awards. The company’s award-winning Film & TV division boasts many commercially successful and critically-acclaimed works, including BABEL, WINTER’S BONE, BEING JOHN MALKOVICH, ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND, 50 FIRST DATES, COLLATERAL BEAUTY, THE REVENANT and Best Picture Academy Award winning SPOTLIGHT. The company’s TV slate includes “True Detective” (HBO), “The Knick” (Cinemax), “Mr. Robot” (USA Network), “Schitt’s Creek” (POP), and “Berlin Station” (EPIX), as well as upcoming titles “13 Reasons Why” (Netflix), “The Alienist” (TNT), and “Maniac” (Netflix). Through its Commercial work, Anonymous Content is also the driving creative force behind countless top brands, including Prada, Nike and Coke. In 2016, Anonymous Content received a substantial minority investment from Emerson Collective, the organization founded and run by Laurene Powell Jobs, to allow the firm to expand its production offerings in socially-relevant content aimed at inspiring change. For more information, visit www.anonymouscontent.com.

I’ve finished a novel about a woman who kicks the crap out of serial killers

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The title of the post says it in a nutshell, folks.  Its former title was BURNING GIRL. Its current, official title is BONE MUSIC: A BURNING GIRL NOVEL. If I explain what the new title means, I’ll be giving away too much about the story, so let me just say this. I wrote this book because of a scary movie that shall remain nameless. A scary movie I never saw because it just sounded too damn scary.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m all about suspense, thrills and chills. I love gothic atmosphere and dark, edgy storylines where unsympathetic characters are forced to make desperate choices that may or may not place them on the path to redemption. And I love monster stories, so long as they don’t turn into a lot of gross-out body horror. But I can’t do torture, folks. That’s all I’m saying. I just can’t do it. And a few years ago, it was all the rage at the box office. Back in that blood-soaked era, I was having a chat with a friend about the most recent issue of Fangoria* magazine – no, autocorrect, not Sangria Magazine! Fangoria Magazine! He’d read it; I hadn’t, and the issue had an article about this super disturbing new horror movie that was coming down the pike, and as soon as my friend described one of the movie’s pivotal scenes I….could…NOT…get…the…SCENE…out…of…my…HEAD!

I hadn’t actually watched THE SCENE, mind you. Just the description of it, secondhand even, was enough to plague me for days. Make that weeks. Make that months. Everyone in my life was so sick of hearing me talk about how disturbed I was by THIS SCENE that they started recommending various treatments, like immersion therapy – “Maybe you should go see the movie the second it comes out,” Eric Shaw Quinn advised, “because the version you’re imagining is probably far worse than the actual scene” – and heroin*. (* No one actually recommended this. I just thought I could use a laugh line here.

Ha ha.

Look! Laughter. On a line!

My obsession with THE SCENE  became so bad that during a drive from L.A. to Palm Springs, I found myself imagining my own version of it on a ceaseless tape loop. And then I remembered a little story from my childhood. I remembered how my mother and my aunt had watched a movie called HARVEST HOME. My aunt was so disturbed by the ending, she could only cope with her feelings over it by imagining a sequel in which the most abused character comes back and gets revenge against the entire town that almost killed him. I thought, presto. That’s it. So suddenly, somewhere around Banning, I think – Banning is almost to Palm Springs in case you’re wondering how long it took for sanity to kick in –  I began to extend the bloody little scene that kept playing in my head. My female victim, held captive, bound, forced to watch as she’s prepped for a terrible end, suddenly and quietly began to develop superhero strength. Silently she slipped free of her restraints, and at the pivotal moment, just when her sadistic would-be torturer prepared to go to work on her, she kicked the living shit out of him. And I mean the LIVING shit out of him. Not the dead shit. The only shit that matters is the living shit…when you’re dealing with serial killers.

And that’s how BONE MUSIC was born. Today, I’m proud to say the book will be published in February 2018 by Thomas & Mercer at Amazon Publishing. The source of my heroine’s superhuman strength is fodder for later blog entries on the topic. (I’ve got some promo time to fill between now and when the book comes out.) Suffice it to say, if you’re reaching your limit of films, books and TV shows that keep shoving the gruesome murder of women in your face for shock value, BONE MUSIC will feed your inner shit kicker.

 

 

Intimate Witnesses

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You can only write what you know? Nonsense. Let me translate this statement. There is a certain type of writer (and reviewer) who believes the only legitimate form of fiction is the kind so directly fueled by a writer’s personal experience it’s almost impossible to distinguish it from memoir.

Why these individuals don’t just commit themselves to writing and reading non-fiction is beyond me. But I suspect they want to drag a little bit off fiction’s power – the power to give a complex, messy situation a tidy ending – without finding themselves lumped in with the practitioners of certain genres they resent for not being “literary” or cool.

Honestly, I wish they’d just be quiet. I wish they’d stop trying to clip the wings of aspiring and emerging writers with restrictive maxims that seek to turn their own insecurities into a set of codified laws governing the making up of stories.

Perhaps there’s some truth to the idea that all good stories start with a general emotional foundation with which the writer is intimately familiar.  A story often has a central premise which gets conveyed by a single character’s need – often urgent, often burning – for a specific change in their circumstances. But writers can find inspiration for their depictions of this need from a variety of sources in their own lives. They don’t have to have lived the exact blow-by-blow events they’re describing in their work for their story to resonate with emotional authenticity. To insist otherwise is to dismiss all forms of genre storytelling, from thrillers to romance and so on. In which case, the person doing the insisting should stop hiding behind rules and simply say, “I hate genre fiction and want it to go away. Pass the self-serving memoir, please.” This reminds me of one of my favorite quotes on writing, from Richard Krevolin. “Don’t let anyone tell you can only write what you know. You can write anything you feel.”

But why am I writing about this now? Here’s why.

The topic of romance novels about gay men written by authors who are not gay men recently took flight across the blogosphere. Again. My own feelings on this subject have undergone an evolution in recent years, as evidenced by the fact that some of my closest writer friends are now women who write romance novels about gay men and I am crazy about their books. I wrote about this evolution more specifically (and more snarkily) here so I’ll try not to rehash the entire post.

But here’s the short version: I wasn’t too keen on the idea of women, regardless of their sexual orientation, writing romance novels about two gay men until I read some of them and found them to be very, very good. And by very good, I mean resonant with the emotional qualities of my own experience as a gay person, full of characters who seemed informed by my desires, wants and emotional needs. This experience forced me to reassess my opinions on the subject.

And the problem, as I see it, is “the you can only write what you know” dictum. The idea that that a good fiction writer should do nothing more than vomit up their own personal experiences and shape them into tidier, cleaner storylines causes many of us to view the mere idea of females writing male/male romance with reflexive disdain. It also causes us to lose sight of one of the  writer’s most important roles, to serve as an intimate witness.

That’s the best term I can come up with for it; an intimate witness. And for many gay men, their closest female friends were their first intimate witnesses. They were connected to the pains and struggle of the gay men in their lives, but also – and this is the important part – they were just removed enough to see their struggles with a bit of perspective.

We’ve all been there with people we care about. We’ve all sat across the lunch table from a close friend and heard them go on and on about a situation in which they seem truly and impossibly stuck. And we sat there knowing full well what the best solution to their predicament would be, but also knowing we couldn’t force it on them and that there were areas in our own lives where we similarly stuck and similarly resistant. This “across the table from the one I love” point of view can often make for some very, very good writing, and while it’s not the source of all gay romances written by women, I submit that it’s the driving force behind many of the good ones.

But this is where my own prejudice comes into play. I believe we are often the worst tellers of our own stories. I don’t like memoirs because they often suffer from a shallow, one-dimensional me-against-the-world point of view where the author fails to asses the impact of their own responses to their situation. (And I’m sorry to drag up old dead horses and beat them again, but two of the most celebrated and, dare I say, colorful memoirs in recent memory were both proven to be packs of fanciful lies.) I have more trust in the three-steps-removed quality of the fiction writer to convey truths about the human experience. This perspective allows us to depict characters as interacting with their circumstances rather than being incessantly overwhelmed by them, and this makes for the most compelling fiction.

And no, I’m not saying gay writers can’t tell gay stories very well. I’m suggesting anyone’s writing improves when they include some aspect of the people they love, the people they sit across the table from and want the best for. This connection doesn’t always have to straddle an identity divide to produce powerful, effective writing.

And yes, appropriation is a real thing. But I think there are some steps on “the appropriation wheel” in between the type of connection I’m describing and the kind of lazy writing that steals superficial experiences from a group of people with which the writer in question is clearly not familiar and cobbles them together into some sort of inauthentic hash defined by condescension and ignorance. There’s a big difference between I’m going to write something inspired by someone I care about deeply even thought our identity labels don’t exactly match up, and I’m a white person who’s going to write a novel about Native Americans because I saw some John Wayne films while I was attending boarding school in Connecticut so I should be good because I love headdresses and wore one for Halloween last year. (Yikes!!)

There’s a big difference between an intimate witness and a window licker.

But once I swept aside lazy, writing workshop cliches which don’t actually help writers (or readers), and examined the content of individual books for their own sake, I realized the relationship between the identity of an author and the identities of their characters was more complex than I previously thought.  I hope others will have the same experience, particularly gay men who enjoy romance novels and mysteries, because if you do fall into this camp and you’re refusing to read any about gay men written by women, you are, to put it simply, really missing out.