Brandon Shire

Author of Contemporary Gay Romance

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Taking Risks in Lesbian Fiction

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Welcome friend and fellow author, Deanna DiLorenzo, to the blog with this special guest post about writing lesbian fiction. 

Tell Me When I first wrote my novel, Tell Me, I knew it took some risks. There is a certain formula that’s followed in lesbian fiction and it goes something like this:

  • Girl meets girl
  • Girl struggles briefly with inner turmoil
  • Girl two patiently waits
  • Life-changing sex scene happens by page 40
  • Happily ever after is achieved by page 50

My numbers may be off a little but anyone who has read enough lesbian fiction knows this is the basic formula we’ve come to expect, whether we actively seek it out or not.

But what happens when someone shakes up the formula a little? What happens when characters don’t fall into line and do what’s expected of them? Well, that’s when you end up with a book like Tell Me. [Read more…] about Taking Risks in Lesbian Fiction

Playing Superhero by LGBT Author Hans Hirschi

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Hans Martin HirschiAs a young boy, my brother and I would play super heroes. I’d be the Flash, he’d be Batman. We’d save the world with our combined imaginations. That imagination also helped me write stories from a very young age. I had all but forgotten about it until I recently discovered some old writing from my preteen and teen years.

I also kept diaries. I lost those, however, to a “gay purging” fire after my first coming out at the age of seventeen, a few months before I headed west, to America, as an exchange student. There, encouraged by my English teacher, I took up writing again, a journal filled with teen angst and stories about saving the world, centaurs and other mythical creatures.

In 1991, inspired by hopeless love (he was straight), I wrote poetry and published my first book “Moments.” After that, it would take me nine years before I’d write again, and by that time I had gone nonfiction, publishing a book on e-learning in Swedish and in 2010, a management book, “Common Sense” in English. Oddly, majoring in literature had turned me away from reading and writing fiction, and traveling the globe on business for many years, didn’t help either. [Read more…] about Playing Superhero by LGBT Author Hans Hirschi

Interview with LGBT Author Dick O’Connor

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Welcome author Dick O’Connnor to the blog. 
Dick-O-Connor
Brandon: Poking around your social sites I noted that you’re gritty and raw, just like real life. I like that. Tell us a little something about yourself that we won’t find online.
Dick: I am a former model (I got too old and the binge drinking was hell on my abs) and a wannabe socialite. I’m originally from a desert cow town in Southern California and got into the gay club scene when I was eighteen once my best friend spotted my innocence in a club and took me under his wing, boozed me up, and taught me how to detach emotion from sex. Overall I’m a neo-Libertine.
B: Where did Stiff come from and what motivated you to write it?
D: STIFF: Memoirs of a Dick is my attempt to recount the stories to the best of my blacked-out memories in college; unfortunately, alcohol can make things a little hazy. If it didn’t happen the way I remember then it damn well should have.

Rejecting Your LGBTQ Child by Sue Brown

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This is a special guest post by my friend and fellow author, Sue Brown.  She shares my passion, as you can see below. ~B.

Who am I talking to here? Probably not the people who should be reading this. So let me tell you about me. I grew up just outside of London, England. Nice area, nice parents, nice school. Everything just ‘nice’ and ‘normal’. And that’s it. Aside from my mum dying when I was eighteen there was nothing different about my life.

Scroll forward to today and I live about ten miles away, have two teenagers, and live in a pocket-sized house in a nice area. They go to nice schools and everything is just nice and normal.

What would happen if one day one of my kids told me they were gay or lesbian? What if they were transgender? Would it be nice and normal then? Yes, of course it would be. I don’t give a monkey’s who they are, who they love. It just doesn’t matter. I can’t emphasise that enough. I don’t care, and neither does their dad. [Read more…] about Rejecting Your LGBTQ Child by Sue Brown

Interview with LGBT Author Lichen Craig

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 I’m talking with friend and fellow author, Lichen Craig today. Often the interviewer, but rarely the interviewee, I thought it was time we switched the chairs around and found out a little more about her. ~B

 Can you tell us a little about your writing background?

I have been writing for many years – nonfiction up until 2012.  Sometimes I had other professions at the same time.  It all amounts to a lot of experience that helps in setting a scene!  I wrote on wildlife, environment, current events, and politics. I was fortunate to have a stellar education for it: I stumbled into the University of Iowa and the renowned Writers Workshop there. I actually double majored, with journalism, and that was great: the journalism school taught me to write tight and edit.

Where did the idea for Gentlemen’s Game come from?

Gentlemen's GameI don’t really know. I was in a place in my life where several things were haunting my mind. Chiefly was bisexuality. I had a few friends who seemed to be so lost . . . torn between two worlds: on the one hand was the straight community questioning and rejecting them, and on the other was the gay community looking down their noses at them. The idea that, because they were attracted to both sexes they were somehow in denial about their sexuality seemed awfully simplistic, judgmental, and condescending to me. I contacted a national expert on the subject, a psychologist, and learned a lot that was absolutely fascinating.  I had also been thinking about bisexual people in the closet – in heterosexual marriages, and perhaps never giving themselves permission to explore their own sexual orientations. So those things fed into it.  As I wrote, some of my own background in working with crime and abuse victims came into it. [Read more…] about Interview with LGBT Author Lichen Craig