HAHAT 2014: Writing what I want to be. Being what I want to see.

Be sure to leave a comment  below, as one lucky winner (drawn by random name out of the sorting cup method) will win a $10 gift card to their choice of B&N, Amazon, or ARe, (these are booksellers), and a print edition of  the Lost and Found anthology. LEAVE ME A WAY TO CONTACT YOU OR THE PRIZE GOES TO THE NEXT NAME MY KIDLET DRAWS OUT...
Have fun on the hop. Visit places you'd normally not go. Approach strange things (to you) with an eager mind, ready to learn about someone else's reality. That's how homophobia and transphobia really end. When we all *see* one another.

Also, don't forget to check out the International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia page.
To write you look deep inside, to write well you just look around…

Two dear friends of mine, Randy and Brent, wrote those lyrics. I don’t know at this point which one actually penned the lines that still resonate in my soul. I repeat those words to myself often as I write the stories I now write more frequently than the songs I too penned when we all played in smoky little rooms in San Francisco. I still love music, but lately I’ve found a deeper love.

What's that, you ask?

M/M romance. 

See, I adore writing about people of any ilk falling in love, and I especially like to write stories where I can take all the things that are wrong in the world and fix them. There are a lot of odds stacked against those who fit in to the alphabet soup of LGBT-QUILTBAG. I don't even know what everyone of those letters stands for. Eh, mostly because I've forgotten due to a brain injury, but that's another story. For now let's focus on the fact that people fall all over the spectrum of sexuality and gender, and there is no ought to should be that really means anything. 

Look around. You'll see it. And just as quickly you'll see someone who is scared of people being different than them, and chooses to express that in hate. It gives me instant high blood pressure. Cause hey, those people getting hassled? Their my friends. My loved ones. Sometimes it's me. But I have a mighty weapon at my disposal. A pen. 

Yeah, it’s pretty damn therapeutic to take someone who was a complete shit to me in real life, put them in my shoes after they, as the character have been so nasty that you, the reader are ready to write them off. And then I make magic. I let them grow, let them transcend the squashed ugliness of their hate and fear… and they become beautiful.

Pretty Pollyanna of me, I know.

But I have my reasons.

I’d love to live, and have my daughter live in a world where that was commonplace. Where people so routinely got over their prejudices, their small mindedness and fear that we would only find it strange to meet a person who was unable or unwilling to do so. Hell yes, sign me up for that world.

Oh, I get that I can change me, and perhaps be a positive influence on a little piece of the planet, right? Yeah. So I try. I put in the hours. I walk the walk. Sometimes I get burned—sometimes we all get burned. That’s just the way this messy world works. But in my writing, both the published books and the works in progress?

Marriage Equality is already nationally recognized.

People look to the quality of a person’s character rather than the gender of their significant other.   

Men and women are equal. Different, yes, but equal in stature as far as what they can achieve in the world.

Children are loved for who they are, not who their parents think they should be.

And oh, best of all, love flourishes.

The world is hard, and dirty, and mean sometimes. But it’s also full of kindnesses, and acts of love. When I started writing I thought all my characters came from, I dunno, the ether, or some magical recess of my own psyche. But then, just like in Randy and Brent’s song, I started to realize the best characters, the one’s I loved like real people, the stories that shook me right down to my soul, were the ones that came from writing what I saw around me, but letting things come to the most positive conclusions.  

Now I like to look around, tease out the best in people, the best in the way they love and care for friends, family, and strangers. I write that into being on a grander scale than I see in everyday life, because if I can imaging it, couldn’t someone else live it one day? Maybe if I dream it hard enough one day the world can be what I want.

What, you may ask, do I want?

I want a country, indeed a whole world where any parent, when confronted with a child who is baffled and upset because their insides don’t match their outsides would never question what to do. Where the immediate response would be all about making that child comfortable. And perhaps, one day a world where inside/outside didn’t matter, because we wouldn’t be hung up on what either one was supposed to mean. I want a world where there is neither fear nor shame in being other than straight, a world where acceptance is the norm, and the shape of one’s character is the only measure taken of a person.

For now, as we struggle and toil toward that goal, as we blog to raise awareness and march to show solidarity, I’ll keep writing, pointing my words and characters toward those days.