Welcome Rainbow Award Winner Lewis DeSimone to the blog. I’ve been wanting to get him here since 2012, but our schedules have conflicted. He’s here today to give us a little of the story behind his novel, The Heart’s History.
Writing is a lot like love: it’s all about your degree of commitment.
For me, poems are basically one-night stands—capturing a moment in time. Short stories, requiring a longer gestation period, are more like boyfriends. But a novel is a husband. A novel is a ball-and-chain. A novel takes years off your life.
And as with a man, sometimes you fall in love with your book at first sight.
That’s what happened with The Heart’s History. It was the late 80s, and I was fresh out of the closet. I was working at a publishing company, and one of my colleagues was a gay man in his thirties. I didn’t know him well. I wasn’t even sure he was gay until I learned he had a lover, and that his lover had died of AIDS. Several of us from the office went to the memorial service. It was the first time I’d ever attended a service for someone who wasn’t a relative, let alone someone I’d never met. [Read more…] about The Old Ball and Chain
In July 2012, with an early draft of my debut novel tucked under my arm, I pitched the story to agents interested in crime fiction at ThrillerFest in New York City. I always began the same way: “Amsterdam. Summer of 1995. I’m homeless, living in my jeep with my dog, Calvin. True story.” The rest didn’t seem to matter so much. “You were actually homeless?” they interrupted. A flicker of excitement appeared in their eyes. Could be a strong marketing tactic. Homeless author pulls himself from the gutter… But when I told them the homeless protagonist in the book was a young gay man, interest appeared to diminish. The agents politely asked me to send a submission, and several weeks later I received a series of encouraging rejections. 
