R.A. Thorn's Blog, page 2
March 7, 2016
Latest work and what’s next
My short story “Another Saturn Monday” is now available in the Simmer anthology, at Dreamspinner or Amazon.
This story is a sci-fi fantasy, but I am more at home in historical fiction, and that’s the genre I’m working in for my next novel. And I am working on a new novel. It’s just taking a while mostly because I’m also in the middle of writing my dissertation. But I also do care about getting the history right, and that requires a lot of research.
The new novel–untitled as of yet, because I’...
January 25, 2016
New short story to be released soon
My short story “Another Saturn Monday” will be released February 24 as part of Dreamspinner Press’s Simmer anthology. All of the stories in this anthology revolve around food–although don’t be fooled by the banner as my story does not feature chocolate-covered strawberries but cabbage.
Cabbage forms the basis of the Hirculian cuisine, so when Interstellar Parking Authority employee Theo is forced to have breakfast at a Hirculian stall in the Saturn space station food court, he knows he’ll b...
May 9, 2015
Charity and Sylvia
This looks like a good book: Charity and Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America by Rachel Hope Cleeves. It tells the story of Charity Bryant and Sylvia Drake who lived in Vermont in the early 1800s. Their community recognized them as a couple but accepted them because the women were modest and active members in the community’s social and religious life. Charity and Sylvia lived during the Second Great Awakening and both experienced a spiritual rebirth. They often struggled with the sexu...
April 11, 2015
P-51 footage
Interesting WWII propaganda film produced by the US Army Air Forces that has footage of many of the things described in Untethered such as the P-51, P-47, pilots on airbases in Britain, and combat footage.
April 8, 2015
Shipping 19th-Century Style
A photo of some miners setting out for the goldfields. I ship the two on the right.
(From the Library of Congress’s public domain photo archive)
April 6, 2015
Blog Release Party on April 8
On Wednesday, April 8, I will be doing a blog release party on the Dreamspinner Press blog to celebrate the release of Untethered. It will start at 12 PM EDT and continue through the afternoon. I’ll be posting excerpts, more about the historical setting of the novel, and behind-the-scenes glimpses of my writing process. I’ll also be giving away two free ebooks to participants, so come join the fun!
April 5, 2015
3-candle Floor Lamps
I think one of the most challenging aspects of writing historical fiction is finding out all the mundane details of daily life. It is also one of the most fun. A little detail from the 1920s and 1930s that I find particularly charming is that instead of using watts to describe the power of an electric light bulb as we do today, people used the term “candle power.” So in 1931 you could buy a 3-candle floor lamp for $7.75, for example. Although “watt” as a unit of measurement existed, the use o...
April 4, 2015
“Another Female Husband”
Just finished an interesting article, “‘What, Another Female Husband?': The Prehistory of Same-Sex Marriage in America” by Rachel Hope Cleaves (full citation below). Cleaves provides an overview of the many examples of same-sex marriages in American history, which disprove the recent assertions that same-sex marriage represents “a radical break from the past.” Cleaves argues that the history of these unions has been erased by what she terms the “logic of impossibility.” Whenever contemporarie...
March 15, 2015
Setting the Mood
Some of the songs that the characters listen to in Untethered:
“My Buddy” is one of those songs that comes across as very homoerotic today but wasn’t intended so at the time. Of course, queer men would have been able to interpret it in a romantic way.
“They’re Either Too Young or Too Old,” which contains the immortal lines: And flying over Egypt, your heart will never be gypped
March 9, 2015
Coming Soon
Untethered will be released on April 6 by Dreamspinner Press. You can read the full synopsis here. It’s about Frankie Norris, a young pilot in the U.S. Army Air Forces during World War II. Besides telling the love story of Frankie and his crew chief, Jim Morrow, I wanted to show how WWII enabled gay men and lesbians to form a community of unprecedented scope and influence. The Armed Forces brought millions of men and women from all parts of the country together, providing countless opportunit...
