Jeffrey Ricker's Blog, page 30

The Kids Are All Right

Actually, I hesitate to call them kids. Last Friday I gave a talk at Parkway North High School after being invited by the faculty advisor for the Social Justice Action Team. He’d seen the article on me in the St. Louis Business Journal and—

Hey, did I mention that? I was in the Business Journal last month. They run a weekly feature call St. Louis Character—yep, I’m a character.

Anyway, one of the things I said in the article stood out to him, in response to the question What attracted you to the young adult genre?:

“When I was a kid there weren’t any books that had characters I could identify with. I think when you’re a teenager, at least in my case, I read to make sense of the world. You look for characters you can identify with or relate to, and there was always something missing.”

Which means I didn’t see any gay characters in YA back when I was a teen in the ’80s. There were more of them in grown-up books, but even then I had to hunt for them—and let’s not even discuss how nerve-wracking that was for a not-even-out seventeen-year-old.

Anyway, that led to an email, which led to a conversation, which ended up with me standing in an auditorium talking to thirty or so high school students about being a gay writer.

Of course, when I was standing there waiting to get started I was thinking, Me? What do I know? And then I thought, well, maybe I know a little bit, and if I know just a little bit, I’ll at least share that little bit and then we’ll open it up and ask questions. I shared a story from my friend ’Nathan about the casual homophobia that you run into just going out to dinner, and then talked about feelings of alienation and isolation and how reading and, later, writing were ways I dealt with that. Then we traded questions back and forth, me as well as them, about representation and reading and what difference it makes whether there are representations of queer people in literature. They were a smart bunch of students, and I hope they learned at least half as much as I did.

And as a thank you, they gave me Parkway North swag!

Missing in action, or “Bears of Winter” audiobook giveaway

(For the giveaway, skip all the way to the bottom. But why would you want to do that? Am I not witty and engaging? Yeah, don’t answer that.)

What on earth have I been doing lately? A lot of scrambling, and I don’t mean eggs. (Oh, suddenly I’m hungry. I’m writing this before breakfast. Hang on.)

Okay, that’s better. What was I saying? Oh, right. Scrambling. Anyway, this past weekend was Lit in the Lou, an inaugural book festival for St. Louis—and I’ll just go on record at this point as not liking the nickname that’s been chosen for this city, “The Lou.” Frankly, whenever I hear it, it sounds to me like “The Loo” and I think people are equating the city with a toilet.

Mind you, given how the city is showing itself to be a cesspit of racism lately, so you’d be forgiven for thinking the comparison is apt.

But anyway, the festival was fun, even if the weather (it was cold and cloudy) kept people away from an outdoor event like this. I took part in a panel on queer writing (which we kinda hijacked and talked a lot about queer YA at the end) and another on what makes a great short story. I talked about the late Grace Paley, because she’s completely awesome. Read “Wants,” if you haven’t before. I was also really stoked about that panel because one of my former writing teachers, Murray Farish, was on it. He’s got a book of stories out called Inappropriate Behavior, which is worth it for the title alone, but it’s also dead good.

Speaking of short stories, as you know I have a story in the gay anthology The Bears of Winter. Did you know there’s an audiobook version? Well, now you do. And I’m giving away a copy! Leave a comment here between now and Saturday, October 18, for a chance to win (obviously, this means you can’t leave an anonymous comment). I’ll pick a commenter at random and pretty soon you’ll be listening to hot stories about cold fuzzy guys.

How I went from Grace Paley to bear fiction in the same post, I’ll never know….

I’m on People You Should Know this Friday

Just a reminder: This Friday (October 3) I’ll be talking with David-Matthew Barnes on his podcast People You Should Know on BlogTalk Radio. I’m excited. What will we talk about? Probably a lot about writing, but I’ll see if I can’t get a mention of poutine in there somewhere.

You can listen online or you can subscribe via iTunes. I’ll be on at 11:30 Central Time, but tune in at 11 to hear his conversation with Jove Belle.

The writer tag and blog hop

As you may know, I’m a sucker for talking about process. I’m always tinkering with the way I approach my writing, whether it’s switching from computer to typewriter to pen and paper (stone tablet can’t be far off at this point), outlining using notecards or flying by the seat of my pants. So, when my friend Sierra Skye Gemma tagged me for a blog hop about process, naturally I said yes.

If you don’t know Sierra, she’s pretty darn awesome. Clearly, I’m not the only one who thinks so, because the Vancouver writer has won awards, like the Edna Staebler personal essay competition and a National Magazine Award for best new writer for her essay, The Wrong Way. She also made my entry into graduate school much less traumatic and angst-filled than it might otherwise have been. She’s a good friend.

I’m tagging another good friend, the writer Ruth Daniell, who was also valuable life support during graduate school. She’s a writer and teacher in Vancouver, creator and host of the Swoon literary reading series, and winner of the CBC Books Shakespeare Selfie contest. Oh, she’s also an artist, did I mention that? She is multitalented. I can’t wait to read what she has to say about her own process.

Right. On to the questions!

1) What am I working on?

I’m glad you asked! I’m working on a lot of things at the moment. I’ve finally started on the sequel to The Unwanted, which I’m tentatively calling The Flesh Trap. We’ll see how long that sticks. A couple of people have asked me “How are you going to write a sequel after [SPOILERS]?” There’s always a way.

So, that’s going to be a YA novel, obviously. What else am I working on? I have a noirish novel set in St. Louis that features the detective from my story “Murder on the Midway,” which appeared in Men of the Mean Streets. It also features Michael from the story “Lifeblood” which appeared in Blood Sacraments and Lisa Weiss from my Untreed Reads-published story “Maternal Instincts.” I like mashups, so I figured I’d make my own.

And I just had an idea for a novel about a homebuyer who falls for his real estate agent while they get drawn into solving a string of murders where the bodies have been dumped in the agent’s real estate listings. I’m kind of pleased with the title I have in mind: Closing Costs.

I’m also working on a bunch of short stories, and there’s that middle grade science fiction book I need to get back to….

2) How does my work differ from others of its genre?

This is not something I really think about a lot. Nor am I convinced that there are any “new” stories, just different ways of telling them, and that is different for every story. Plus, like Sierra said, hoo boy doesn’t this question sound just a teensy bit arrogant? So yeah, I just write the stories that stay with me.

3) Why do I write what I do?

Because if I didn’t, my head would explode.

That’s not literally true, but sometimes it does feel like the stories are just itching to get out. (Other times, of course, they have to be dragged with great protest from my head, like trying to get a reluctant child out of bed and off to school—not that I was ever like that as a child.) There are two things that I’ve said in the past which are still pretty good explanations of why I write at all, much less why I write what I do: first of all, to make sense of the world. Or at least, to make sense of my world. In my current project, my protagonist is finding that he’s come full circle and is right back where he started, as if nothing in his life has changed. And I’m feeling the same way in my own life a bit. So it makes its way into the story of my character, and I don’t see how it could not. This, by the way, wasn’t a conscious decision on my part. My understanding of that came after the writing of it, not the other way around.

Second, I write fiction with queer characters (and in particular, YA with queer characters) because I didn’t really have much luck encountering them in my own reading as a teenager.

4) How does my writing process work?

This implies that my process actually works. Also, it implies that I have a process.

I guess I do, and that process would be defined as “whatever works.” Or maybe it would be more accurate to say that my process has evolved over time and is usually specific to the project in question. (Also, that makes me sound way more intelligent than I actually am, so I’ll go with that.) My process for writing novels has certainly changed. I spent eight years, on and off, working on my first novel. It went through three major drafts and countless other minor changes. When I say “major drafts,” what I mean is I rewrote it from third person to first person (which resulted in cutting 40 percent of the manuscript in one fell swoop—that was an exhilarating day), then I moved the ending to chapter one after discovering that I’d made the classic rookie mistake and written my way to the beginning. The second book also had three major revisions but only took three years. The book I wrote for my thesis took a year.

Hey, at least I’m getting faster.

When it comes to the writing itself, I’m neither a plotter nor a pantser, but rather a mix of both. I think we all are at various points in the process. That said, I’m trying to be more plan-oriented with the YA novel at this stage, since I know there’ll be a third book following it.

On a mechanical level, I hop back and forth between a laptop, my phone (yes, really), a Remington typewriter, and a reliable old composition notebook and pen. I work on multiple projects at a time so that when I get stalled on one or just a bit bored, I shift over to another. Most of the time, though, it does help me to keep focus on one project in particular. Once a draft is finished, it gets set aside for a period of time—a month if I have that luxury—and then I take it out and start rereading. It can get pretty brutal at that stage. My first drafts can be loose and ragged—I operate by the motto “Let it suck” when it comes to first drafts. You can make anything better with revision, except for a blank screen or page.

Finding happily ever after in Seattle

So, last weekend I was in Seattle (though not sleepless) for the Gay Romance Northwest Meet-Up for readers and writers. It was fantastic: a day of workshop discussions, panels, and lectures with writers from all over the Pacific Northwest and, in the case of people like me, beyond. There was also a free book fest at the end where people could come in and buy books and chat with authors and get them signed. The evening rounded out at a club called Rendezvous with a series of short readings, “Five Minutes in Heaven,” where I read a bit from the first chapter of Detours.

Although it was only the second year for this event, the turnout at the Seattle Public Library was fantastic, where attendees filled up the auditorium to hear panel discussions on connecting with the community, the evolving queer romance genre, and the publishing landscape.

I remember when I encountered queer characters in literature for the first time. I don’t recall how it came to my attention, but the first book I remember was The Swimming Pool Library by Alan Hollinghurst. I was around 18 or 19. It was eye-opening and not just because of the frank depictions of sex. (Okay, maybe mostly because of that, but it was also a really good book.) From there it wasn’t long before I found Edmund White and Armistead Maupin, and off I went.

Those first books I read wouldn’t be called romances, of course; in fact, most of the time love didn’t work out for the protagonists in those stories. There’s something reassuring, though, in picking up a book where happily ever after is possible for people like yourself. So seeing all of the people who turned out in Seattle because they love happy endings for queer characters was fantastic.

And a special shoutout to Tracy, who was the fantastic ringleader/driving force behind the event. It was definitely a group effort, to be sure, but she just radiated passion and enthusiasm. I’m looking forward to next year’s event!

I didn’t take a whole lot of pictures at the Meet-Up, but I did get a few:

Click to view slideshow.

On Sunday we were down in Olympia at Orca Books for a reading organized by Dena Hankins, whose novel Blue Water Dreams is out now. I’m currently reading it and really enjoying it. David Holly and Eric Andrews-Katz also took part, and the reading was small but a lot of fun.

As you can imagine, I didn’t take many photos. But! I did get this picture of the audience:

You might recognize some of these people….

Michael also took some photos. Here’s one of me reading. That’s Dena on the right.

I miss the Pacific Northwest already….

If this is cabin fever, shouldn’t we have a cabin?

Is this what it feels like to be a shut-in?

I haven’t been out of the house all that much since the dog bite. Apart from the reading last Wednesday (which was probably overdoing it, as my ankle swelled up after that), a doctor’s appointment last Friday, and brunch on Sunday, I’ve spent most of my time parked on the sofa or shuffling back and forth to the kitchen. On the bright side, my leg is feeling much better, and the swelling went down a lot after they took out the stitches on Friday (a bizarre although not quite painful sensation).

I have taken a ridiculous number of photos of my leg over the past week. Mind you, “a ridiculous number” is any number over zero.

Additional bright side: new Ace bandage! Velcro makes everything easier. I never want to see one of those pesky little metal teeth clips again.

You would think I might be getting a lot of work done, and I did for a little while. I applied for several jobs, submitted stories to about five magazines, revised a sixth story, and made a little progress on a seventh, as well as work on my next novel.

That was all in the first few days. Since then, I’ve entered the phase of recuperation that’s called “climbing the walls.” The main reason I tend to ride my bike to the library or coffee shops to work is so I can get away from the house. I’ve barely left it in the last 12 days and it’s making me a little frazzled. I used to think that when I was old enough to retire and I could do nothing but sit around the house and read and maybe do some writing, I’d be so damn happy. This episode has made me realize that if I don’t get a regular change of scenery, I will lose my mind.

Thankfully, my cooped-up-in-the-house phase is coming to an end. Yesterday I did get out—for a doctor’s appointment, but I’ll take what I can get. On the bright side (three bright sides in one post! It’s so bright, let me put on my sunglasses), things are healing. I also managed to get to the gym in the morning—all upper body, obviously—then out to dinner last night. Today, I’ll be getting out for the first meeting of my YA writing workshop at Meramec.

Nervous? Who, me?

(Yes, me.)

It’ll be good to be doing something productive though, not to mention gainful. I’ve been applying for work for the past three months without any luck, which does of course mean I’ve had more time for writing and revising. Which is productive, but doesn’t immediately put money in the bank. And as much as I’d like that not to be a concern, well, it is.

Video of my reading at Left Bank! Watch me stutter and reach awkwardly for my water!

As promised, here’s the video from last Wednesday’s reading at Left Bank Books, along with the Q&A, which starts around the 30-minute mark.

Yes, it’s like a 40-minute video and I don’t know who’d want to sit through the whole thing, but during the Q&A I discuss what I’m working on at the moment, how awesome my MFA program at the University of British Columbia was, and how I’ll be teaching a YA writing class at Meramec’s continuing ed program starting this Thursday.

Yes, really, I’m going to be teaching. Me, of all people. I know, right? I’m also doing a short story workshop later in the fall. Click the picture on the right and download the flyer if you’re interested in signing up—or even if you’re just curious.

I’m excited! And nervous. But I’m hoping mainly that it’ll be fun and productive for people. The best thing? The assignments I have laid out for the YA class are things I’m doing myself right this moment. (No, really. I have a Scrivener window open and I’m working on my outline for the sequel to The Unwanted when I’m not writing this blog post.) So by the end of the class, if I’ve done my job right, I’ll have an outline and first chapter completed too….

New (old) story, “The Visitor”

A long time ago (2009—it seems like so much longer), I wrote a story for a litmag called Collective Fallout titled “The Visitor.” It appeared in the Vol. 2, No. 1 issue, which doesn’t look like it’s available from their LuLu store anymore. It’s a story about a guy visiting his out-of-town friend and falling into a fling with the man upstairs—who may not be exactly what he appears to be:

It’s the firsts with Dale that stand out in my mind: The first time he smiled at me; the first time our hands accidentally collided when we both reached for the sugar at the South City Diner, how Dale had withdrawn his hand and let me have the sugar, and how I’d wished I’d let go and taken Dale’s hand back instead. How we stood outside Dale’s front door while I hemmed and hawed until, after a silent, awkward moment, Dale asked if I’d like to come inside.

Other firsts, I remember those too.

You can read the rest of the story over on Wattpad. Let me know what you think!

Pictures from the reading at Left Bank Books

This was so much fun! Even with the gimpy leg, I managed not to fall off of my high chair during this Wednesday’s reading at Left Bank Books. First of all, thank you to everyone who showed up to hear me read from The Unwanted and to ask questions. It felt really good to see so many people there. And thank you for supporting our hometown bookstore! Thanks to Shane and Cliff at Left Bank, who put the evening together, and thanks to Kea and Kris, who set it up.

My friend Leah Givens from Writers under the Arch was there, and she took a few photos. Thanks, Leah!

Thanks also to my partner, Mike, who videoed the reading. I’m hoping to put that up soon.

Click to view slideshow.

“Snowblind” in BEARS OF WINTER out now

You may recall my mentioning that a story of mine, “Snowblind,” was going to be published in the Bear Bones Books anthology The Bears of Winter. (Or maybe you don’t recall. That’s okay. Things come up; I get it.) The print edition isn’t due until November, but guess what? You can get the digital edition right now. Go to Goodreads and add it to your to-read shelf. Then, head over to Bear Bones Books to buy the ebook or pre-order in print.

It’s kind of funny, but even as a contributor, I can’t wait to read this anthology. It’s my first time writing a bear-themed story, and I did stretch the theme a bit with my story. I can’t wait to read how others tackled the concept. It’s one of the things I really enjoy about writing stories for Jerry Wheeler-edited anthologies: he comes up with some off-the-beaten-path themes and is open to interesting twists on that theme. For him, I’ve written about love on a train on Mars, grief and romance in a restaurant kitchen (along with some magical bread pudding in an homage to Like Water for Chocolate), and now romance with a bearish man on an ice planet at the edge of explored space (or, as we called it in emails to each other, “BEARS IN SPAAAAAAAAACE!”). I hope I’ll get the chance to write something “out there” for him again.

UPDATE: The Bears of Winter will also be available soon as an audiobook at Audible.com. More info on that when it’s live. Also, there’s a Facebook page set up for the book, which you can check out here if you like.

Lastly, look what arrived in the mail today!