The first book of Jane Davitt’s that I read was “Bound and Determined”. I loved that, so I bought “Drawing Closer” and “Wild Raspberries”. That led me to “Wintergreen”.

I make it a practice to email authors when I really enjoy their work. Call me a crazy fangirl, whatever! I like to tell author's what really works for me. As well as being a great story teller, Jane’s writing style is very fluid. The sort of thing that possibly escapes most reader’s notice, but as a freelance editor as well as a fledgling author, I appreciate well written prose when I see it. So another congrats are in order to Jane (and/or her editor *grins*). This is from the email I sent about a year ago:

Can I just say “Wintergreen” has to be one of the best "sequel" books I’ve read. To me, the anticipation of a couple getting together in the first place is what makes a romance, so sequels often don’t cut it. However, the way you handled the story and the knowledge from the get-go that the pairing would have its difficulties was fantastic. The conflict didn’t feel manufactured and the resolution was well done. I’m not a fan of external conflict being brought in just to create tension in a story. However, in this case, the action in book two had almost been foreshadowed in book one. The tension and conflict still centred around the characters’ past and personalities, with the action being the vehicle to carry that forward.

So, I sent the above to Jane and a discussion followed which I’m blogging here with her permission.  Firstly, her response:

JD: Thank you so much for taking the time to write to me; it’s much appreciated!

I’m so glad Wintergreen worked for you. I loved Dan and Tyler and I wanted to do a sequel and see just how they were getting on a few months down the road. I think there were a lot of pointers in Wild Raspberries that it wasn’t going to be easy to them, yes; just too much dragging at them from the past.

I like to think that now they finally made it on their journey :-)

AB: I’m glad you're not tempted to drag it out further with another book. So many authors do.

JD: I don’t think I could really get into it; one book is usually enough, though Alexa and I did do a trilogy together and enjoyed it.

AB: Though, the next time it would be interesting to be a “fly on the wall” when Tyler gets to retirement age and Dan is at his peak (ie in his thirties). Transitions in relationships are a great source of conflict.

JD: They are! But they’re only, what 14 years apart? When Tyler’s 65, Dan would be 51 :-) ; not that far apart maybe? So, if they last that long, I don’t see it being an issue because they’d have adjusted to it by then.

AB: I’m interested in your collaborative process with Alexa. Do you do it character by character i.e. in role-play or are there elements each adds?

JD: We usually write a character each and tag back and forward, sometimes a paragraph, sometimes more. And we’re not possessive; we often borrow each other’s characters for a few lines. I wouldn’t write:

Would you like a cup of coffee, X

and then send it to her; I'd use her character to answer and pass it over when it got to somewhere more interesting.

With each book, we've become less attached to a single character; in our most recent one, “Room at the Top”, though we each dreamed up a character, when we came to write, we would write long tags, using each other's characters freely until it got to the point where they were jointly owned, really. It made the writing go much faster and the story flow better, I think.

Because, I also collaborate with other writers in an online soap "Redemption Reef", I followed up this question with a couple of other to clarify matters:

AB: I gather you each take a particular character then and write the next scene from that viewpoint by yourself, is that correct? But, that would mean you would have to have some idea about what each of your characters is going to do in that scene, so you must have plotted something out. How much pre-plotting do you do when you're co-writing?

JD: We don't do a whole scene on our own; sometimes it's a paragraph, sometimes even a line.  It's totally dependent on the story. We alternate POVs so if the chapter's from 'my' character's POV, maybe I'd handle anything that added something new to what we know about him or write a particularly emotional bit, but the more we write together, the more the lines blur. We used to add notes, 'hope it's okay, I borrowed your character for a few lines' but we don't now, we just do it and we're way faster and the voice is more consistent, I feel. Think of us as being parents to each character; one of us gave birth to him but we bring him up together :-)

Plotting we do outside the story via email. We'll sketch it out roughly, with a few highlights to include, get started, try to incorporate the highlights -- sometimes the story shifts direction and they don't work -- and plot in more detail as we write. It's a very fluid, easy process. Mostly, the story tells itself.

AB: If you each "own" a character. Which ones are yours and which are Alexa's?

JD: See above :-) To start with, we have a character each and swap their bios, maybe include a photo so that we get a mental image. But once we start writing, these days it's all a melting pot. This is a snippet from Room at the Top, written from Jay's POV (Jay was my character, Austin was Alexa's and we shared Liam). From memory, I'll try and divide it as we wrote it, but honestly, it's hard to remember because we have such a close joint voice so I can't swear who wrote which :-). I'm in italics. So you can see that we're both writing both of them.

“It’s not—” Jay took a deep breath and abandoned the argument before it began. “I’ll be good.”

“If you are, I’ll buy you something special,” Austin said. “It’ll be like Christmas. Really late Christmas.”

“Or really early.” Jay didn’t care either way. He loved Christmas, and the most recent one he’d spent with Austin had been as close to perfect as he could have wished for. They’d had an amazing tree and piles of presents, and Christmas breakfast had consisted of the two of them snuggled on the couch in their almost identical new bathrobes, sipping hot chocolate and eating fresh cinnamon rolls. The apartment had smelled like cinnamon for days. “Too bad there won’t be candy canes.”

“Yeah, I think those are a seasonal thing. Have a good afternoon, okay?”

“Love you.”

“Love you two.”

“Love you three,” Jay said. If he’d heard anyone else say that, he’d have rolled his eyes at the sap overload, but when it was between them, it felt like a joke only they got.

He tucked his phone away and left a scatter of bread crumbs for the ants.

Did they even eat bread? Maybe he’d look it up when he got back to the library. He was going through Dewey numbers in his head as he crossed the road, but he made it to the other side, so he must’ve looked both ways.
end of chapter

Hope that helps!

AB: Why do you collaborate?

JD: Alexa and I both started off writing fanfic (still do!) and worked together on several fics in the Buffy fandom years ago. We enjoyed it so we decided to try co-writing a novel. At that point we’d both had solo novels published. I find it fun, because you get to read at the same time as writing. I once collaborated on a fic with three other people and we posted a new chapter daily for eight months, each taking turns to write it, and we were as much fans of the fic as writers of it. I find that there’s no writer’s block when you’re collaborating; if you’re stuck, you do a short tag and your partner digs you out and then you return the favor. It gives it a very organic feel, especially in the sex scenes; you’re not controlling events and it’s looser, more natural.

AB: Do you find it difficult to write by yourself?

JD: No, not at all. I'm pretty prolific :-) I do find it’s much faster to collaborate, though. Solo, I aim for 1000-2000 words a day; with Alexa, we can knock off 5,000 a day easily.

AB: Do you have other things you’ve written that you are looking for publishers for? Or are you flat out writing for your current publishers?

JD: I have four publishers, Torquere and Ellora’s Cave for my solo novels, Loose Id for the books with Alexa and Total-e-Bound for short stories (it just sort of happened that way) and no, everything I write is usually at their request so I don’t have anything hanging around. I aim for a solo novel and a co-written one a year plus a few shorts.

Recently Jane responded again when I reviewed her book “Hourglass” at Goodreads which also appears in m,y previous blog post.

JD: That is such a great review; thank you! I don’t just mean it’s good because you liked the book either; I love that you really took the time to detail your feelings and responses to the story as you read it. It was so interesting to see the book through your eyes that way.

Emboldened, I asked her some more questions which she was kind enough to answer:

AB:. When you set out to write “Hourglass” did the concepts about the structure come first or did they grow with the story? In other words, was the “how” you were going to write the story always there from the start?

JD: It was, yes. I had the idea of the TV show first and then I decided it'd be fun to not just refer to it in the book, but to plot it out in detail. From there, I got the idea of starting each chapter with a snippet of script or a show-related article. They were masses of fun to write and of course, I could use them to echo something going on in the ‘real’ story (though in some ways, both sets of characters felt equally real by the end).

AB: What prompted that decision? Did something else inspire you?

JD: Nothing in particular. I guess as a fan myself, I know just how it feels when a show is cancelled so I drew on that, and I own many scripts of shows, which I love reading. They came in handy as templates so that the scripts were as authentic as I could make them.

AB:. How much of what I interpreted as being deliberate was, or am I reading into it much more than you did consciously?

JD: Sometimes, I’ll write something and people will read more into than I consciously intended, but with Hourglass I was very deliberately setting up echoes between the actors and the characters they played and structuring it in quite a complex way. It was like someone sitting between mirrors and seeing endless reflections of themselves. There was a story within a story within a story.

AB: Would you ever write something so untraditional again (not necessarily using the same methods but other more deliberate devices)?

JD: If an idea comes to me that would fit that format, sure, why not?

AB: How did Torquere receive the story?

JD: I don’t recall any issues at all. I sent it in; my editor, Vincent Diamond, liked it, and we worked together to polish it up.

AB: Do you have an editor there who encouraged that style or was it more of a case of “Well you’re a well-respected author of the genre so people will forgive you for your untraditional story telling style?”

JD: I work with different editors there but I’m sure whoever edited it would have been supportive. To be honest, it never occurred to me that it WAS all that untraditional or out there. I thought the concept with the chapter headings telling a parallel story was interesting but I’m sure it's been done before (what hasn’t? :-)). Ben introducing and ending it, well, I liked Ben and I didn’t see why the story had to be solely about Ash and Lee; there seemed room in the story for him. They were actors; they needed to be directed, if that makes sense.

AB: Do you regret that m/m romance particularly is becoming formulaic?

JD: I read a fair bit of it now that I have an e-reader, and I don’t know if it is or it isn’t really. The genre of romance itself does have a framework that readers like because it’s reassuring and that goes for m/f, m/m, or f/f romances. I definitely like stories to push the boundaries, but I’d be pouting if there was an unhappy ending so maybe I don’t want them pushed too far!

AB: What would you like to see more of in the genre?

JD: Nothing comes to mind. There’s a huge variety of settings and heat levels as it is, plus crossovers with SF, horror, mystery and such. I think it’s a vibrant, growing genre, especially with the surge of interest in e-books and I’m proud to be part of its growth.

AB: Any other comments you’d like to make on reviewers, readers and your future writing plans?

JD: I’m currently writing a solo novel for Torquere that’s my first novel not set in a contemporary setting. It’s a pre-industrial fantasy world, no magic, no dragons, but definitely not our world, with a theatrical background. An actor sees a young man fresh from the country in trouble and steps in to help him only to find he's unable to walk away once his good deed's done. I’m having a lot of fun (in a vaguely Hourglass way!) in having the actor quote from plays that I invented, and coming up with dozens of titles.

And to reviewers and readers alike, I have only one thing to say which is : thank you! Thank you for reading and for being interested enough to comment. It’s much appreciated.

"Room at the Top", Jane's most recent collaboration with Alexa is now available from LooseID.

A big thank you to Jane for so patiently answering my questions. I do enjoy knowing more about the why and how they write.

5 stars

Before “Hot Head” by Damon Suede was published, there was a lot of buzz in virtual space. This was a “first” book by a man who describes himself as growing “up out-n-proud deep in the anus of right-wing America, and escaped as soon as it was legal. He says he has lived all over: Houston, New York, London, Prague, with a few long stretches in New Orleans and Vienna. Along the way, he’s earned his crust as a model, a messenger, a promoter, a programmer, a sculptor, a singer, a stripper, a bookkeeper, a bartender, a techie, a teacher, a director... but writing has ever been his bread and butter.

For the most part his book has received unqualified praise, however there are some pretty damning reviews out there which I want to address rather than review the book per se.

Now, I have nothing but respect for the people who made these comments, however I feel that the issues they raise are worth addressing.

It is very difficult for an author to “discuss” reviews of their own book and most publishers recommend that authors don’t get into an argument with people who pan their book, so I’m going to do it for him, lol.

I’ll probably be accused of being an apologist who wants to deny reviewers the right to write negative reviews. So, to start with, Damon has no fucking clue who I am, or that I am doing this.

I have also written my share of negative reviews and will defend to the end my right and every other reviewer’s right to do so. I have also had negative reviews written about mystories and will likely cop more in the future. Probably deservedly so.

However, some of the points used to justify the low ratings beg discussion.

The two main bones of contention with the plot are: the coincidental “Gay for You” theme and the fact that fire fighters risk their jobs doing porn videos.

Linked into that are queries about the way the book references the tragedy of 9/11.

To sum up, words like contrived, far-fetched and crazy were bandied about the plot.

The other major issues are to do with the lack of emotional tension and romance in the story and the part porn plays in the story.

Alongside these are craft issues such as pacing and point of view and finally the depiction of minor characters and the ending.

Before I start commenting, I’d like to add what my expectations were when I read the book as, to me, “expectations” not being met are at the root of a lot of this criticism.

I deliberately hadn’t read any blurb beforehand, or excerpts although I had seen some discussion about the book before it was released.

PLOT: Fire fighters and Porn

Before I opened the book, I assumed the main plot would revolve around their fire-fighting duties. I actually felt a bit ho-hum about that. It’s been done to death. So, when I started reading and found the porn angle was so crucial, I was immediately relieved, hooked and interested. Real fire-fighters do appear on calendars in various undressed states. Porn stars dressed as firemen appear in photos and videos. They say they’re fire-fighters, but everyone assumes they’re lying, right? So, what if they really were firemen? Far-fetched possibly, but not impossible.

Taking the first major criticism then, I didn’t have a problem with the plot. Most romances have contrived plots if there is a plot. Many romances are character driven and only cover a few days, thus escaping the need to have gay men in the real world with real jobs and real problems like where to live and the need to earn money. In a world where the reality of being gay still has repercussions and not just in being bashed.

PLOT: Gay for You = Out for You

The Gay for You “problem” was beautifully answered by Damon himself as he quotes the better term is that used by Marie Sexton:” "Out for You”. As Damon says, "Out for You" is how most gay men figure themselves out sexually, at whatever age they come to terms with their sexuality. They meet someone who arouses feelings that makes them question their self-image.”

This is what the book was all about and to dismiss this as contrived or not working is short-sighted. Maybe in the majority of couples in real life, one of them has come to this realisation a lot earlier than the other and helps them “through it”, but there must be cases where this “coincidence” happens.

Perhaps the bond that brought them together in the first place was more than “brotherly love”, and they dared not put a name to the underlying physical attraction, but it may have been there all along.

I would guess that “Out for You” happens more often than not. It must still take a lot of guts today to admit you’re gay because of not only society’s and family expectations but what doing so actually means. Many men never “come out” simply because the thought of missing out on family and kids is too much to give up. Everyone wants to feel “normal” and until society and family see them as normal when they are gay, many will continue to deny their feelings.

Would it have worked if one was knowingly gay and pursued the other? I don’t think so. It would certainly have been a different story.

PLOT: Firefighters and 9/11

Perhaps too many readers expected this book to be different and felt cheated when it didn’t conform to their expectations. Some commentators thought the plot would have had more impact if tied closer to 9/11. They wanted the fire-fighting to be the main theme of the book. While that might make for a lovely angsty/emotional book, it’s not this book.

This book is about the men who fight fires, not the fires themselves. They are a special breed. There is a certain defence mechanism fire fighters use to cope with the reality of tragedies like 9/11 and the many we never hear about. Guys in these situations often find the only way they can deal with it is to “trivialise” it in their mind. Damon has said in interviews etc that he spent a lot of time getting the feel “right” so perhaps, once again, the problem is in reviewers’ preconceptions. I know a few Aussie firemen, and they are the most laid back, ironic, brash people you’d like to meet and would fit in very well with what Damon has described.

LACK OF EMOTIONAL TENSION

OK, I’ll buy this to a certain extent, but how many people generally can and do express their emotions? Male or female? I like reading stories where two people learn to be happy together. They don’t have to tell us why or even show why. Not everyone is able to express themselves emotionally in real life and fire-fighters who learn to put huge walls around their emotions are the least likely to do so.

Emotional tension comes and goes in relationships. I feel it’s a female thing. I wonder how many males would say that’s what they want? I will admit that this probably sums up why I will never be a writer. I have difficulty putting emotion down on paper.

Criticism was also levelled at the way misunderstanding was used to build tension. The characters themselves were guilty of expectations. Both Griff and Dante assumed the other would reject/hate them for having these feelings. If you aren’t comfortable with the fact you’re gay, you’re hardly likely to expect another person to feel the same way. Admitting the truth to himself was hard enough for Griff.

The emotional tension comes from the guilt Griff has over loving Dante. Damon describes it thus: “I think that Griff uses the idea of brotherhood to defuse his early desire and affection as they grow. (This) is one of the only accepted ways for men to show affection to each other.”

So this “love” isn’t going to have great ”emotion” attached to it. It’s claps on the shoulder. Doing things for the other person without being asked. Griff does eventually want more, but society’s expectations prevents it from being more.

Some guys work 24/7 at denying they have any feelings. Emotions are for wusses. Anyway  I would expect many emergency response workers are usually emotionally drained after pulling dead kids out of burning houses or seeing comrades die. That to them is emotion. Loving someone who is your best buddy and having that turn into a sexual relationship is possibly classified under a different heading.

A couple of readers noted the rough, masculinity of the males but some felt this was overdone. Criticising men for being men (when there are no females around) makes me shudder. No wonder they like to escape from the finger wagglers. Perhaps they are this way deliberately to show they’re men just like women get false fingernails to appear more feminine?

PACING ISSUES and POV

Damon commented: “I tend to like introspective protagonists.” Funnily enough, a lot of females who read m/m romance do too. This introspection is a natural reaction for someone who believed being straight was the only option. There would have been non-stop questioning going on. Griff wanted to talk about it with someone else, but didn’t know who he could confide in.

If Dante was straight he felt letting him know he was gay would ruin their friendship. So of course he angsted by himself a lot.

One critic also felt that the one-sided POV didn’t make Dante engaging or logical or help build the romantic tension. I have a big problem with this attitude, especially in a book where “misunderstanding” was such an important element. If we had been in Dante’s head, we would have immediately known he lusted after Griff. The whole point of the story was that Griff didn’t know what Dante was thinking.

I hate it when the reader is told things in these sorts of stories that the main protagonist doesn’t know. You want to kill all tension?

NOW WE GET TO THE KILLER EXPECTATION – NOT ROMANTIC ENOUGH

I note that Damon referred to it as a gay romance not an m/m romance. However, reader’s expectations are turning the genre into a farce and in the process are actually belittling gay males and males in general.

The ultimate put down for m/m romances is that one or both protagonists were “chicks with dicks”. It’s not making the protagonists beer swilling, burping males or giving them stupendous physical attributes or have them being aggressive or violent that makes them male. It’s the unwillingness to bare their souls and pour out their emotions except as a last resort.

Emotionally constipated is a common and apt description. Men often prefer to show their love in what they do, not what they say or even think. This is where I really feel females are doing a disservice to the genre and gay men, by demanding they pander to female needs for emotional expression of their feelings for each other.

The romance aspect  is becoming derivative and predictable as the readers demand that they be written to a formula and tick certain boxes.

Griff and Dante loved each other before they had the sex. For them, the sex was part of the equation, an important part, but the connection was there to start with. Therefore, you’re never going to get the “Some Enchanted Evening” style romance. Which itself is often one protagonist being in love and the other not willing to recognise it. In this case it was two guys too scared to recognise and identify what they felt.

One critic felt the book would have been better with a more sensitive guy in the mix. A “sensitive” guy wouldn’t have lasted ten minutes as a fireman. Not that these guys aren’t sensitive. They’re probably the biggest wusses of the lot, but they lock it up inside. The clues were all there in the writing. They just don’t show it or express it openly. A skim through read might miss these.

Many comments dwelt on what readers want in their “romances”. Just remember, not all readers are the same.

PORN

Which now brings me to the porn aspect of the whole story.  Again I’m going to quote Damon in full here as it’s relevant: “As for the porn, it actually was included for the unsexiness. LOLOL The thing is, porn isn't sexy on the inside. I've dated people in the industry and still have a lot of friends who perform in it. For me the porn addressed falseness and emptiness and dishonesty that had sprung up around all that unspoken desire as the two of them found a way to each other. It's the fakeness and the pose of normalcy that made it essential to the story. Porn is a pose of desire, which people knowingly misread as their own desire. It's only sexy if we submit to the explicit lie of it. Those performers are earning a living and trying to survive as best they can. When I was still stripping, there were times in clubs or in a cage when men would be touching my legs or gazing up with a weird hybrid of lust and anger and I'd realize how disconnected we all were, how artificial the fantasy needed to be to survive. Pretending to engage so that we never actually engaged.”

Having watched a fair bit of gay porn (purely in the name of research LOL) I felt what was described was pretty accurate.

In the story, the porn shots were a necessary stage in the whole process. Yes, maybe the fact that Dante knowingly used it as a ploy to reach Griff was far-fetched. He could have just done it without knowing why. It was this progression from straight brotherly affection through the almost “acceptance” in men of porn to the realisation that it was more than porn that is the journey they make.

I’m glad Alek turned out to be a “good” guy. He reminded me of what Corbin Fisher comes across as. Someone trying to encourage males to explore their sexuality. Sure they make money out of it, and possibly have a hidden agenda to turn all good looking straight men gay <winks>, but if it gives guys the feeling that, hey, the world isn’t going to end if I have sex with a guy, then isn’t that a good thing?

Given the number of porn sites that have “straight” guys learning the joys of man-on-man sex, a lot of guys need this “permission” to explore this side of their sexuality.

For female romance readers to criticise a book that has porn as its main theme is again putting female “expectations” onto gay romance, in much the same way they demand male monogamy as being the only expression of love.

Damon admitted this himself when he said: “I'm writing a gay romance for a specific audience with very firm expectations and a very wide disparity of tastes.”

Again this is as much a reflection on females demanding males write m/m romances for females exclusively.

THE ENDING

I won’t go into the Peter Jackson “Return of the King” style ending. It could have finished earlier, but I feel the author wanted to make a couple of points. He wanted to avoid the cliché stereotypes by showing people what they could and should be like.

What I didn’t like? And I’m not dropping a point for it as a decent editor would have red penned it: The vanity adjectives. Griff keeps noting things like the redness of his hair, the massiveness of his thighs or shoulders, also his red-headedness was harped on a couple too many times.

But, I still give this book five stars. I didn’t lose interest. As a wannabe writer, there were many scenes Damon did brilliantly and his characters lived and breathed. He is one of those writers that make me want to give up writing as my efforts to do similar things pale by comparison.

Sure the book is not perfect, but it dares a great deal. It’s brave. And the fact it doesn’t meet up to some reader’s expectations probably says more about the readers than it does the writer.

WHY I WROTE THIS

Why didn’t I just accept that everyone has the right to their own judgement and point of view without taking issue with it?

Two reasons:

Firstly for the author’s sake. Reviewers wield more power than they realize. The majority of authors sincerely take on board well thought out constructive criticism and by and large the negative reviews were well thought out. Authors try to see whether there is a kernel of truth in the comments. This can be a two-edged sword.

I would hate for any author to feel they had to change the way they write to conform to the majority of reader’s expectations or the ones that “shouted” the loudest. The charges levelled at Damon were pretty intense when they start listing lack of emotion and lack of romance as reasons for giving a book a very low rating and not justified in this reviewer's mind.

To me, the restricted range of emotion and romance matched the characters perfectly. Authors should not be limited to just writing characters or have a plot to fit reader’s expectations. Many times I’ve felt with popular books I would have resolved the plot differently, but that’s my problem, not the author’s.

The second reason I feel justified in speaking out is because reviewers' expectations can quickly become publisher’s guidelines.

Dreamspinner Press was brave in publishing Sean Kennedy’s “Tigers and Demons” without any graphic sex scenes.

DSP actively promote and foster gay men to encourage them to write what they want to write.

If publishers are only interested in books containing a prescribed amount of romance, sexual tension and emotional tension then they will miss out on a lot of books about gay men falling in love and/or finding a loving relationship. Which after all is what this genre should be about.

If not, the genre risks being split into two separate groups: books written for a gay male audience and books using gay males as protagonists that are written for a largely female heterosexual audience with their expectations of what standards should prevail.

Should gay guys add romance to their sex scenes to pander to female readers?

Wouldn’t it be better for females to read books that are honest and true to how gay men are and learn to understand them a bit better rather than forcing them to think and behave as females want them to?

Damon has been writing in one form or other all his life, even if not in m/m romance format. I hope he continues to write the sort of books he wants to read and not just the ones to appeal to every female reader.