Matthew Lang's Blog, page 13

Get Your Geek On!

Calling all geeks and lovers of geekery! Matthew’s first foray into the realms of non-fiction writing will be launched as part of Vignette Press‘ Geek Mook launch on Friday the 13th of July. For everyone who doesn’t know, Vignette Press is and Independent publishers sepcialising in Mooks, which are a hyrbid of magazine and book. Previously publishing Sex Mook and Death Mook, and currently putting together Fat Mook, the next launch is in celebration fo the geek!

Date: Friday 13th July, 2012 Time: 6pm, for 6.30pm start Venue: The Bella Union (Trades Hall), cnr Lygon and Victoria Streets, Carlton VIC 3053

Costumes are optional, and as of yet Matthew has not revealed any plans to dress up. We hear he’s considering going as Inspector Gadget though. Frankly, we think he should go as a Torchwood Weevil.

Watch this space for a geekstastic launch line up, and there’ll be free entry to Mr McClelland’s Finishing School, a retro and indie dance party afterwards if you stick around!

IDAHO 2012: Where was the Teletubby?

For the blog hop against homophobia I posted stories from the people not typically heard in the fight for equality: our straight allies. Of course, once I started filming at the Equal Love rally in Melbourne, there were a lot of other people who spoke and I believe that their stories too should be shared. Plus, no one found the elusive Tellytubby. Also, I promised everyone I’d post Kendrie’s full story. So here it is:

Kendrie Coonan’s Full Story

Photo by Ali Bakhtiavandi 2012

Challenging homophobia is something I am very passionate about. As a mother of two small children I want nothing more than for my children to grow up to be accepted and respected regardless of their nationality, religion, or in this instance sexual orientation. As parents we try our hardest to bring up well balanced, caring individuals and we want them to be judged always and only for the people they are, not their circumstance.

Both my husband and I have a long history in theatre and dance and have from an early age been immersed in a culture where homosexuality is prevalent and warmly accepted. In theatre, people are people, you are judged more for your talent than anything else. I suppose not everyone has had the open and honest experiences we have been lucky enough to have, but those experiences, those interactions with fabulously lovely individuals of many different walks of nature have shaped our ideas on many things in our adult life and most importantly our parenting.

The stories I have heard of gay friends struggling to come out, being confronted by closed minded family, frowned upon and feeling the need for secrecy has always saddened me. People deserve love and acceptance, they should be encouraged to be themselves and live the life they are internally pulled to live. In our family it is important that our children know that we love them for exactly who they are.

Our kids know that when they grow up and fall in love, that person may be male or female. They understand at 5 and 2 years of age that, that is their choice and either way is more than fine with us. When my son is snuggling me on the couch and I jest that in years to come some little girl or boy will be snuggling him instead of me he giggles. Having homosexuality and heterosexuality both viewed as normal and natural in our house is paramount. I will not have my children ever question my support of them or be concerned for my acceptance. They will know from small daily interactions that our love and support is a given.

A proud moment occurred when out for dinner with some extended family recently. A member of Gen Y in conversation exclaimed “That’s so gay!” and before I even needed to say a word my 5 year . . . → Read More: IDAHO 2012: Where was the Teletubby?

The Words Less Spoken: IDAHO 2012

Being invited to write a blog post for the International Day Against Homophobia aroused a large number of conflicting emotions within me–there’s just so much to talk about. There’s the attempt to make homosexuality a crime punishable by death in Uganda, our straight brothers and sisters being jailed in Russia for supporting the cause of equality, the still entrenched racism in the Gay community itself or the evils of religions still peddling their so called ‘gay-cure’ remedies.

All of these are serious issues, but there’s one story that we often forget to talk about–those people who are outside the GLBT (or LGBT or GLBITQA or whatever alphabet soup you choose to use) community who are championing the cause of equality. Some of them do it loudly, some not so loudly, but a lot of them do it without a lot of recognition or thanks. And some of them do it in the face of being told by their religious or cultural leaders that they shouldn’t, and quite often their faith or beliefs can be demonised by the GLBT community. So I thought, for today, in addition to giving away an ebook copy of The Secret of Talmor Manor, or my short story, Mr. Perfect, and directing you to other amazing blogs around the internet, I wanted to bring you stories and experiences from our heterosexual allies, because it’s often too easy to forget that we are not alone.

So I put a call out for people to share their stories with me, and I got a few amazing responses, some of which I hope to share with you today, as well as some video footage from the Equal Love Rally from Saturday the 12th of May. So enjoy, be inspired, please share your stories and take inspiration from the people who are all around you–all you might need to do is reach out and maybe have a cup of tea with someone you wouldn’t ordinarily talk to.

Oh and before I forget, simply leave me a comment (and don’t forget to fill in your email address) to go into the draw to win one of my ebooks–and if you can correctly tell me which Teletubby was at the May 12th Rally, you can get an additional draw in the competition!

Kerrie Bietzel of PFLAG Victoria speaks at Equal Love, May, 2012

Kendrie Coonan’s Story: Kendrie Coonan is a married mother of two with strong links to the Amateur Theatre scene in Melbourne, Australia. Although we share a number of friends in common, we’ve never met.

I want nothing more than for my children to grow up to be accepted and . . . → Read More: The Words Less Spoken: IDAHO 2012

Obama backs Marriage Equality

In what is probably going to be the biggest news of the week, US President Barack Obama has officially declared his support for marriage equality in the USA, evoking responses such as the picture you see here.

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So far the best analysis of this has been at The New York Times, who note that this comes after 2 years of Obama’s ‘evolving’ stance of marriage equality despite the widespread belief that he personally supported it. Of course, in America the fear is of alienating the strong religious voters, which is fairly obvious if you read between the lines:

“I had hesitated on gay marriage in part because I thought that civil unions would be sufficient. I was sensitive to the fact that for a lot of people, the word marriage was something that invokes very powerful traditions and religious beliefs.” – Barack Obama

However, the NY Times quite rightly pointed out that there’s been a lot of electoral pressure on Obama to evolve and take a stance, especially given his upcoming political engagements:

“On Thursday, Mr. Obama is to visit the Los Angeles home of the actor George Clooney for a campaign fund-raiser expected to raise about $12 million, much of it from Hollywood people active in the gay rights cause.

Mr. Obama is scheduled to give the commencement address next week at Barnard College in New York City, where he will receive a medal along with Evan Wolfson, the founder and president of Freedom to Marry, a leading advocate for same-sex unions. Mr. Wolfson, who had written that he would “whisper in the president’s ear” to support same-sex marriage, said in an interview on Wednesday, “I’m going to shout, ‘Thank you!’ ”

Also on Monday, Mr. Obama is to speak at a campaign fund-raiser for gay rights supporters. And on June 6, he is to return to Los Angeles to speak at a gala benefiting the gay, bisexual and transgender community.” -Jeff Zelen, New York Times.

This, of course, raises speculation that Obama is announcing his newly evolved stance specifically to avoid having to dodge questions on the subject or otherwise avoid the issue, as well as an attempt to galvanise his support in the run up to the US election. On the other hand, does it matter? One of the goals of the marriage equality movement has always been to get enough support for equality that it became politically viable for politicans to endorse change–preferably that it became untenable for them to oppose it, especially in a democracy. Whatever the cause of the change, Barack Obama has decided it is politically beneficial for him to do the right thing and support marriage equality, or at the very least, it is no longer politically disadvantageous to do so. This is a good thing.

So sparkly rainbow unicorns aside, I would like like you all to join me in saying ‘Thank You’ to Barack Obama, . . . → Read More: Obama backs Marriage Equality

Public Transport: The Cost of Delays

One of the things you get told about authors is that the majority of us work at least two jobs: writing, and something else that pays the bills. As an indie author just starting out, that certainly applies to me. So each weekday, I haul myself out of bed, ignore the enticements of my computer and head into the city to work, along with a large chunk of the state’s population. And like a fair number of those people, I take the train.

Anyone following me on Twitter will see the daily fun I get with the amount of delays our service provider, Metro Trains throws my way. To be fair, Metro have inherited an aged system that is in dire need of upgrading and a fairly non-functional ticketing system mess (as well as a culture of fare evasion), but at the same time, there is a rather…large…variability in their actual running times which can make planning your run into work a complete pain. On my particular line, the run time can be anywhere from fifteen minutes without delays, to twenty five or thirty minutes, with the train sitting idle on the track waiting for another to clear a platform, sneak in ahead on a different line, or for some other reason that is rarely explained. The upshot of which is I can be made late for work. Which is something I can only assume affects other people as well, and this lost productivity time must be worth something, right? So I set out to see if I can calculate how much this would be.

Without any clear numbers (that I could find) as to how many people travel during morning peak (defined by the government as between 7:00 and 9:30 AM), I decided to calculate train capacity and work off that. Across all lines, Metro runs 514 services that start between those times, according to the timetibles on the public transport victoria website. According to their fleet information, they also have enough trains to run 36 Siemens 6 carriage trains (max capacity 1584), 93 Comeng 6 carriage trains (max capacity1526), 7 Hitachi 6 carriage trains (Seated capacity of 1072), and 59 X’Trapolis trains (capacity of 794). These are official capacity numbers, which should suffice for calculations, as this should average out, despite the knowledge that as of October 2011, 15.9% of trains in the morning peak hours were overcrowded. This information also presumes that Metro uses all its trains equally and preferences trains with higher capacity rather than lower capacity, giving us a daily total of 697876 passengers across 514 train trips (3 trips for each of the Siemens trains and most of the Comeng trains, and 2 trips for all the others).

Assuming that every passenger is, on average, delayed by five minutes as I was this morning, how much does that . . . → Read More: Public Transport: The Cost of Delays

Writerly Rambling: Repetition, Repetition, Repetition

One of my friends pointed me towards a rather strange sentence recently, and after reading it over and over and over again, I eventually caved and went to see its wikipedia page. The sentence, which makes grammatical sense, reads as follows:

“Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo, buffalo Buffalo buffalo.”

Okay, on the count of three, everyone say ‘huh?’. One…two…okay just kidding. But to give you an idea of how it works, check out this WikiWorld comic:

Cool huh? Says a lot about the cyclical nature of bullying amongst cattle-like creatures (yes, cattle can be dangerous). But perhaps more importantly, as a writer it raises a very important point about repetition. Repitition is confusing, amusing and in some cases tedious. So if you’re going to use it, make sure you have a really good reason to do so.

One of the most obvious words that gets overused with repetition is the humble ‘said’, typically used as a dialogue marker. For example:

“Hi,” Warrick said. “Hi yourself,” Leon said. “Okay, looks like someone got up on the wrong side of bed today,” Warrick said. “There’s only one side of my bed to get out on,” Leon said. “The left. The right hand side is up against the wall.” “Uh, that’s a figure of speech, Leon,” Warrick said. “Is it?” Leon said. “Should I be wearing a sign saying ‘Note Sarcasm’?” “If this is about last night, “I’m sorry okay?” Warrick said. “I just get protective about my things.” “I am not one of your things,” Leon said. “Okay, that came out wrong,” Warrick said. “I meant about people I care about.”

Note how the constant use of “Leon said,” and “Warrick said,” bog down the dialogue and make it drag, not to mention rather boring. What this has lead to is a lot of people trying to find other things to use as dialogue markers. For example.

“Hi,” Warrick waved. “Hi yourself,” Leon laughed scornfully, not looking up from his textbook. “Okay, looks like someone got up on the wrong side of bed today,” Warrick said hesitantly. “There’s only one side of my bed to get out on,” Leon grumped. “The left. The right hand side is up against the wall.” “Uh, that’s a figure of speech, Leon,” Warrick said. “Is it?” Leon scathed. “Should I be wearing a sign saying ‘Note Sarcasm’?” “If this is about last night, “I’m sorry okay?” Warrick apologised. “I just get protective about my things.” “I am not one of your things,” Leon snapped. “Okay, that came out wrong,” Warrick whined. “I meant about people I care about.”

Once again, this is different, and removes *some* of the ubiquitous ‘said’s, but they’re still there, and the actual flow of the piece hasn’t improved. Also some of it just does make sense. While you can wave in greeting, you can ‘wave’ a vocalisation. You can wave and vocalise, but that’s two separate actions. . . . → Read More: Writerly Rambling: Repetition, Repetition, Repetition

On Designing Book Covers: How the Professionals do it.

In today’s installment of Things You Should Know As A Writer, we bring you a talk by Chip Kidd, Graphic Designer at Alfred A. Knopf and responsible for book covers like Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park. Brought to you by the fantastic TED series of talks, we hope you enjoy it.

So You Want To Write Man on Man Erotic Romance

One of the questions that Matthew always gets asked is ‘How did you get published’, to which his typical response is ‘Well I submitted my manuscript and eventually they said yes’. The follow up question is often ‘How do you know when your manuscript is ready for submission?’ and his unfortunately, his typical response so far has been ‘I just do’, although we suspect he’s going to think up a better one now.

Anyway, the point is sometimes you want to get some professional advise, some feedback, some professional advice. Now there are plenty of manuscript assessment services out there, but you never know if the people running them are qualified, give good advice or will even help you get published. What you really want is to get an actual editor from an actual publishing house to look at your work and give you some actual feedback, as opposed to a form rejection letter. But you can’t get that.

Well, actually you can. Just this once.

In support of Brenda Novak’s 2012 auction to raise funds to help cure diabetes, Kris Jacen, Senior Editor of MLR Press is offering one M/M Erotic Romance Manuscript assessment. The evaluation will include detailed feedback, suggestions, and if the manuscript is executed well in Kris’s opinion, an offer to publish from MLR Press. We would like to point out that as Senior Editor, Kris reads every single manuscript before it goes to press, and is one of the two women responsible for deciding what will or will not published by MLR. So yes, she’s qualified, gives good advice, and can help you get published. All you need to do is win the auction, give some money to a great cause, and submit your manuscript to her by October 2012.

So if you’ve thought about writing, and would like a leg up, go on and make a bid. Opportunities like this don’t come along every day.

The Ease of Offending

I was recently given a copy of Glenn Cooper's The Devil Will Come by a friend who works at a literary festival–it was a Speculative Fiction book, which is a genre he typically doesn't read and one I often enjoy. Cooper's book is centred around the Vatican and the Catholic faith, but unlike Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, the Catholics are not the villians of the piece. Indeed the heroine we follow is a young nun, who is tasked with uncovering the mysteries of a secret sect who have vowed to destroy the Catholic faith in the name of money and power, guided by the true power of astrology. Apparently, we've had the symbol for Pices wrong for a very long time.

Initially, the reading experience was very promising. Cooper's text was well put together and the plot was compelling. There was a great drive and flow to the action that kept things chugging along, with enough twists and turns that were neither overtly foreshadowed nor spelt out in great detail before they became relevant to the plot, which has always been my greatest gripe when reading a mystery story. The characters too were well formed, although I still personally wonder if the device of creating a character (or characters) and writing from their perspective for the specific purpose of having them die in an attempt to heighten the emotional impact of their (usually messy) deaths is one that is worth doing. Personally I feel a bit cheated when I recognise the device. Still, the major characters were very well crafted, and I particularly enjoyed the interactions of the protagonist and her family, as well as the look back to the times of the Roman Emperor Nero and Elizabethan England.

**WARNING: THE FOLLOWING TEXT MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS**

However (and you knew there was going to be a 'however'), I was jarred out of the book and the narrative on several occasions, and I personally felt like homosexuality was used in the book as a shorthand for the concepts of 'evil', 'debauched' or 'lesser individuals unworthy of due process', which I personally was unsettled by. It also made me ask if this was a deliberate plot device (given Occam's Razor and that one of the situations involved the historical figure of Christopher Marlowe), and I was being overly sensitive, or whether this is a prime example of latent homophobia. Now as a proponent of diversity, I have to admit it is crucial to accept that there is nothing that prevents anyone in the GLBT community from being a villian, or bad, debauched or just plain evil. I am also hesitant to demand that any story where a gay character is penned as evil must be balanced by one that is not. I suppose what I object to in this particular work, is the idea that homosexuality is given a token treatment in a 'that's so gay' fashion. As a successful author, it is . . . → Read More: The Ease of Offending

Call for Queer Fiction: banQuetpress 2013

Our fantastic friends at banQuetpress are searching for stories and artwork for their Men's and Women's 2013 Anthologies. They're also looking for cover art. banQuetpress is Australia's only dedicated queer publishing house and if you have a short story, poem or piece of art you'd like to see in print, I highly advise sending them your submissions now.

Submissions

banQuet 2013: A feast of new writing and art by Australian Queer Women and banQuet 2013: A feast of new writing and art by Australian Queer Men

These anthologies showcase a broad variety of innovative, engaging quality writings and art by emerging and established queer writers/artists/photgraphers about GLBTIQ sex and sexualities.

Challenge and surprise us. Introduce us to your complex and flawed queer protagonists and antagonists. Take us for a ride on the seamy side of GLBTIQ lives! We'd love to look at writings and images about queers falling in and out of love or bed!

banQuetpress is especially interested in works that overtly explore a diverse range of: • sexual expressions/practices • GLBTIQ cultures (from mainstream gay to queer sub-cultures) • gender expression • relationship types • issues of sex/sexuality particular to the GLBTIQ community

banQuetpress supports community diversity.

Submission Guidelines

banQuetpress will only accept original, previously unpublished material. Please do not submit material that is being concurrently considered elsewhere. Maximum of three pieces per author/artist.

Submission Deadline: Friday, 18 May 2012

Word Length: up to 3000 words Art / Graphics / Images: one or a few cells/photos/images/photostory Short Fiction Guidelines

• Well-crafted, well-written engaging short fiction – short stories, flash-fiction, etc. • A range of genres, erotica preferred for 2013 edition. • Scenarios and themes primarily focussed on LGBTIQ erotica, sexualities.

Non-Fiction Guidelines

• Well-crafted, well-written and accurately researched short non-fiction, personal reflections. • Ideas, issues and information primarily focussed on LGBTIQ erotica, sexualities. • Reviews and academic essays not accepted. Comic Art / Graphics / Photography Guidelines

• One or a few cells/photos, one-page comic strip, photostories • Scenarios, issues and themes primarily focussed on LGBTIQ erotica, sexualities • Material that can be effectively reproduced/published in B/W and/or colour. • Resolution quality at least 300dpi.

Style / Formatting Guidelines

• Please do not submit your first draft. • Submit a 'clean' manuscript – that is, a manuscript that has been edited for accuracy and clarity in communication, as well as proof-read for typos. (Works accepted for publication will undergo a full editing and proof-reading process; however, your submission must demonstrate your professionalism as a writer/artist). • Cover sheet with your legal name (essential), pen name (if applicable), title and word count on it only. • Name must not appear anywhere on manuscript and artwork (only on cover). • MS Word document. • JPEG document for graphics. • Document Filename should include title of the work. • Standard 12 point Arial font. • Double spacing. • No paragraph indents. • No headers/footers. • Use single quotation marks for dialogue. Cover Sheet . . . → Read More: Call for Queer Fiction: banQuetpress 2013