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So this is a first for me. Tomorrow morning I’m holding a casting call for the cover model who will be featured on the cover of my February 2016 novella for 1,001 Dark Nights. The novella is called DANCE OF DESIRE, and it’s hero is a cowboy. A very tall, very hot cowboy. I’ve even bought the cowboy hat the potential models are going to doff as they pose for a test shot. (No, it’s not a Stetson. Stetsons, as I recently learned, are expensive. About $200 a pop! This is because they’re made of fur, and they’re made of fur because it lasts longer. And they need to last longer because normally it’s actual cowboys who are using them. Not models who are only going to wear them for the three hours it takes to complete a photo shoot.)

Whoever ends up being right for the part will also end up accompanying me to the Romantic Times Booklover’s Conference in Las Vegas in April of 2016. They’ll be on hand at both the giant signing as well as the “sparkler” we hold each year for the authors included in 1,001 Dark Nights. So we won’t just be casting for looks, but for personality as well.

Speaking of Romantic Times Booklovers, or, more specifically, Romantic Times Magazine, a great interview just dropped in which I describe DANCE OF DESIRE as a “crossover novella” between my existing series The Desire Exchange and a new, non-paranormal universe, a quaint but eccentric town in the Texas Hill Country called Chapel Springs. That’s sort of true. Which is to say the information I gave my lovely interviewer is now a bit outdated given that I finally finished the novella in question a few days ago, and while there’s *mention* of The Desire Exchange within its pages, it turned out to be it’s own freestanding little piece. Full of steamy, forbidden romance – of the FM variety this time- but no magic. Just the magic of true love. Yes, I really said that. And yes, I was being sincere. Deal with it.

I’ll have a full report on the casting process once it’s complete. Until then, allow me to also state that I’ve heard some complaints about the yellow-on-black theme of this current blog and I’m working on it. We’re going to work on better mobile compatibility as well. But first, hot cowboys!

 

Today, Tom Hardy was questioned about comments regarding his own sexuality which he made on the record to a gay publication at the beginning of his career. These comments apparently do not serve the career path on which he now finds himself, despite the fact that in his latest film he plays an openly gay historical figure. So instead of providing an answer, he unleashed a series of reactions most would have described as bullying and hostile had the subject been something other than his potential bisexuality. As a result, he publicly shamed a reporter for asking him a legitimate question about comments he had previously made on the record. Worse, he was largely enabled in this endeavor by fawning Internet headlines praising him as having “expertly shut down” the reporter in question, as if any inquiry into his sexuality from the press was on par with his having been falsely accused of a crime.

Enough of this. Enough of allowing actors once they reach a certain threshold of fame to act like they’ve been violated or shamed by any question that suggests they might not be one hundred percent heterosexual. Asking a handsome young male actor if he’s gay is not in any way indecent. To pretend as such deepens the stigma around homosexuality on a vastly public level, in a manner that does damage to gay people who don’t have access to media platforms and who aren’t regularly provided with a press conference in which to air their views.

Trying to protect one’s stardom is a far different thing than trying to protect one’s ability to work in a creative profession. Openly gay actors work all the time. Striving for a spot on the A-list, however, is a much more complicated endeavor, entailing enormous compromises and personal sacrifices. People on such paths are asked and encouraged by their handlers and employers to present drastically altered versions of their personal lives to the public and to either silence or moderate their true political views.  If this is the path they chose, then so be it. But when questioned about those parts of themselves they’ve chosen to conceal, these actors should learn how to navigate the process with some level of humility and class. To do this is to accept responsibility for the compromises they’ve chosen to make as they strive for an extraordinary level of recognition and success. At they very least, they should practice some graceful dodges to those questions they know they won’t answer.

Instead we’re now being greeted with bristling false outrage and brittle sanctimony, like what we saw just last year from How to Get Away With Murder’s Jack Falahee, and now from Tom Hardy, (and too many actors before them to even mention), a reaction that pretends that it is the question (and by extension, the questioner) that is the real problem and not the actor’s unwillingness to answer it (or their fear of answering it). There’s no way around it. This reaction advances the idea that to be considered gay or bisexual remains a shameful thing, as utterly and deeply personal as an extramarital affair for which one tried to make amends or a colonoscopy gone so wrong the recovery process required years of physical therapy, something never to never be spoken of in a public setting by respectful people, and it does this solely to protect a single actor’s personal ambition.

This doesn’t seem like an acceptable trade off to me, but if most of the Internet’s reaction to Tom Hardy’s behavior this morning is any indication, I’m alone in that belief.

Fine. I’m kind of a loner anyway.

So am I the only who one who listens to music from the 40’s, 50’s and even 60’s and feels like I’m in some sort of dark thriller where the director intends the tune in question, no matter how cheerful, to convey an ironic sense of dread? That’s how I felt when I queued up this Frank Sinatra ditty that also serves as the title of this late night post. Like an assassin was on his way up to my apartment. Or nuclear missiles were streaking through the night sky towards Los Angeles as I tapped my foot in time to the beat.  I went hunting for the song on You Tube because I thought I’d put together a few thoughts on solitude, the good kind and the bad kind, (I guess the bad kind is what we call loneliness…?) and lo and behold, I was reminded once again that my only frames of reference for just about anything are movies, T.V. shows and novels.

At any rate, I like being alone. I’m not talking about my relationship status. I’m talking about the act itself. The act of being by yourself. The act of communicating with your friends entirely through text messages you can chose to ignore for ten to fifteen minutes with excuses like, “Sorry. Was driving”, “Sorry. Was walking.”, “Sorry. Was jerking off,” when the truth is you were eating by yourself at California Pizza Kitchen and you got lost in a chapter of a romance novel written by this talented woman. Recently I took a business call while sitting alone at the bar in a crowded restaurant. When I told the person on the other end of the line that we were free to talk because I was eating by myself, she let out a small, plaintive cry, as if eating alone were a punishment on par with house arrest or having a breathalyzer installed in your car. I didn’t get it. We were both readers, so I explained that solitary dining was when I did some of my best reading. But that only made it sound worse. I mean the questions just hung there in the silence between us.

Questions like, why didn’t I read at home alone like normal people? Was my public reading merely a ruse meant to distract everyone in the restaurant from the fact that I’d be sentenced to dine alone? And if so, who had meted out this sentence exactly? Had I been abandoned at the threshold to the restaurant in question by an irate lover who just couldn’t listen to me agonize over whether or not to order the salmon or the steak one more bloody time? Had a friend just stormed out on me after a terrible fight over whether or not Bernie Sanders has a shot in hell at the presidency and had I swiftly responded by popping open my Kindle as if I’d been reading a gay cowboy romance all along?

The answer to all of these questions is no, but just the fact that they would be asked in the first place* is evidence of the extent to which our society pathologizes being alone. (I love that word, ‘pathologize’. I’m not actually sure it is a word, but the way I define it, it means to make give the  illusory appearence of disorder and disease to an inherently harmless act. People do it all the time to stuff other people do that they don’t like. Stuff like having a strong opinion that differs from their own, or getting naked and sweaty with someone of the same gender. Or expressing public affection for Madonna’s last album. ) Maybe this tendency to exalt always going everywhere with a loud group of drunk people you sort of know baffles me because I’m an only child. An imaginative only child. A dangerous combination when it comes time to develop actual social skills. I have cravings for human contact, but only to the extent that it inspires me to imagine a better version of you.

If that sounds superior or cruel, rest assured, I’m constantly trying to imagine a better version of me too. And I do it while I’m – you guessed it! – alone.

Granted, this personality trait is not without its consequences. Intimate relationships can be hard. As Eric Shaw Quinn once said to me, “Christopher, you’re looking for a boyfriend who will turn into an end table right after you have sex so you can set your drink on him.” (We’re starting an all new season of our Internet radio show next Sunday, September 13th, by the way, during which I’m sure Eric will say similarly cutting things on a wide variety of topics.) While I’ve gotten better in this regard, I’ve also run out of patience with the idea that I should fill my time with meaningless social interactions with people I don’t know or like very well just because I’m afraid of what other people will think of me when they find out I spent Saturday night – gasp! – alone. And if this rambling post has a point this is it.

If you’re one of those people who considers themselves a bubbly extrovert, take a minute to ask yourself if you’re really just a disingenuous psychopath whose terrified of being alone with your own thoughts and desperate to trick society into believing you’re well adjusted.

OK. Maybe that’s too harsh. Let me work on the phrasing.

If you’re one of those people who must be around people all the time, ask yourself if you actually like any of those people, or if you just don’t like the *idea* of being alone. And by *idea* of being alone, I mean ask yourself if you’re afraid of what other people will think of you if you do what you really enjoy doing, which is sitting alone at the bar at California Pizza Kitchen reading a gay romance novel.

I’m trying to globalize this post here. I really am.

Here’s another try. I like being alone. If you don’t, ask yourself if you truly enjoy being always in the company of others, or if a certain, pervasive social stigma around solitude sends you running straight into the arms of people you don’t know well, about whom you don’t really care.

How’s that?

Whatever you do, do NOT ask yourself why I’m writing this just a day after posting that I was in the home stretch on my latest Dark Nights novella. I’m allowed to take breaks. And you get more writing done when you’re.………………….!

Also, HOW DID I NOT KNOW THIS HAPPENED?

(*Granted, no one actually asked me any of these questions in the moment. But I’ve been asked versions of them before so I think it’s reasonably fair to insert them here even though I run the risk of making my concerned associate seem like a jerk when she wasn’t.)

 

 

So I had a dinner with a close friend last night who shall remain nameless. (M.J. Rose) I was telling her about how this rock star used to have an apartment in my building. He also used to keep a large boa constrictor as a pet. While the rock star was barely ever there, the snake, apparently, always was. I was expressing relief that I didn’t learn about any of this until long after said rock star and his snake had moved out when M.J. said, “Maybe the snake had babies.” Cut to 5 AM, me staring wide-eyed into the darkness of my bedroom, convinced every sound I heard was a now fully grown python, whispering to its friends, “Dude. That M.J. lady blew our cover. Our moment is at hand. Ferdinand, you take the toilet. Gertrude*, to the underwear drawer! I’ll take the spot behind the bed.” After tossing and turning for a while, I finally decided to get up.

Which brings me to the real topic of this post.

Local morning news.

I hadn’t watched in a while. It was very informative. For instance, did you know that people who wake up early in Southern California need to see the weather report about twenty times in fifteen seconds? They’re drowsy, I guess, and so they require repeat viewings to truly absorb the fact that it’s going to be clear and sunny for the next 40,567 days here in Los Angeles. Also, on the news front, did you know that teenagers still hate taking the SAT? I couldn’t believe it. I’d heard they’d all fallen hopelessly in love with it somewhere around 2005.

At any rate, this is really just one disclaimer that if when the book I’m working on right now is finally published and you get to a page that’s either written backwards or mostly the letter Q, it’ll be because I wrote it later this afternoon. You can thank M.J. Or blame her, depending on how you feel about the letter Q. (*If you own a snake, or any pet, named Gertrude, email me privately and I will send you a free Yugo. Do they still make those? I waqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqq

(This rant originally appeared on my Facebook page, but I’m preserving it here so it doesn’t get lost under a series of posts about my latest haircut and/or strong feelings about a new T.V. show.)

So my naughty, twisty, suspenseful erotic romance ‘The Surrender Gate‘ made this list of recommended reads from some of the top erotic romance authors in the biz. I’m thrilled. The whole romance thing has proved a risk and a challenge after years of writing books in which plants ate people or parasites gave people strange powers or your sexy college roommate was trying to seduce you or kill you. For me, it’s much harder to write something with a happily ever after. As an author, it makes you vulnerable in a lot of ways. For starters, it sets you up for ridicule from those who dismiss all romance novels with one big sloppy brush. Furthermore, large groups of readers tend to grant anything that’s inherently pessimistic and dark with automatic “literary-ness” or “cultural legitimacy”, regardless of how it’s actually written, especially if it’s a memoir or is marketed as carrying the whiff of one.

Romance requires an author to expose their fantasies, their deep and abiding desire for how they’d like things to work, to the world, an act that’s often greeted with incredible condescension and disdain no matter who performs it. My personal belief is that honest and consensual exploration of erotic and romantic fantasy is essential to the healthy mental development of any adult, whether it comes from reading the fantasy, writing the fantasy or acting it out with other willing partners. That’s the theme that runs through The Desire Exchange series and ‘The Surrender Gate’.

That said, if I read one more purported “think piece” about how romance novels “damage people” by setting up unrealistic expectations, I might vomit. This is sexist nonsense that seeks to depict fantasies of brave sexual intimacy as a toxin swimming through a superior landscape of stereotypically male destruction and violence, the strange cultural supremacy of which is largely unchallenged in popular culture. It also furthers a bogus image of the largely female romance novelist population as a bunch of delusional ninnies suffering through a string of broken relationships because of their purported “unrealistic expectations” and “dangerous fantasies”. The majority of successful crime novels streamline the realities of the criminal justice system in an unnatural way to deliver a nice, tidy, bad-guys-go-to-jail resolution, and yet there’s no concerted effort to constantly wage the accusations of “dangerous fantasy” against them with a barrage of sanctimonious, finger-wagging news articles and blog posts. And when was the last time people accused a male crime novelist of harboring secret fantasies of being a serial killer?

All genre fiction works with a baseline of reality and then departs from it to convey difficult emotional truths within a safe space that feels comfortably detached from our everyday lives. Its depictions of human behavior are largely aspirational, no matter what genre you’re talking about. And depending on the genre, the dial is often tuned to one emotional level with a severity that can’t be called “realistic”. Sometimes the notch on the dial is heightened eroticism, sometimes it’s heightened terror. The point is, if you turned the dial in one direction, you don’t really have any business accusing someone who turned the dial in a different direction of producing work that’s “unrealistic”. I realize a rant like this is a strange way to celebrate recognition from my peers, but it’s been an interesting and eye-opening two years in the romance world and I’m not done yet, apparently.