Readers nominated Me and Mine by Sarah Goodwin for a 2014 LGBT Book Gem. I asked her to stop by and give us some background on the story. ~B.
I wrote the first version of Me and Mine while I was in my second year of university, doing my Creative Writing degree. At the time I was only just starting to receive treatment for depression, and because I wasn’t able to focus on assignments, I began to write a lot of fanfiction. I’ve always read fanfiction, since I was about thirteen, but I’d never really written any before. This was the first time I’d read slash fiction, and writing it threw me in at the deep end.
Once the fanfiction version of Me and Mine had accumulated and I’d finished it, someone, just one person, messaged me and said that it should be a novel. I think it was just a throwaway comment, but as I’d been writing ‘novels’ since I was a teenager, I thought it would be a good project to keep me busy. So in the summer break I converted the original text into a more novel-like format, and changed the names. I also ended up adding about 40k to what I’d already written. [Read more…] about Being Gay Didn’t Mean I Was Wrong
When I give readings and talks about The Boy I Love trilogy of novels, I am sometimes asked why, as a heterosexual woman, I wanted to write about homosexual men. I answer that it was accidental, a way into a plot: I’d started a novel and it seemed to me that it didn’t have enough drama, there had to be more conflict, more struggle and interest. It occurred to me that if the central character was a gay man then there would be more for him to overcome and therefore more for me to write about.
When I started writing The Road to London, in the very same gay club mentioned in the novel, I was blessed with having no idea about what I was writing: while dancing away, words just started coming to me… I say blessed, because that may have felt like a rather daunting and, at times, ‘spooky’ experience, not knowing where you are going with a story, having no clue about what will happen to the characters and not having a ‘plan’ for her did not give me any control over her birth, on the other hand it gave me the freedom to follow the novel and not force her to fit in with my intentions. The Road to London wanted her freedom from the start. 
The adage is absence makes the heart grow fonder.