Demanding more from our magic
Back in 2003, when I was married to a man and thus could not openly explore my growing suspicions about my sexuality, I went to Los Angeles on a work trip and took glorious advantage of being far from home. I rented a car on my own dime, just to drive to West Hollywood and its density of gay bookstores. It turned out that gay really did mean gay: lesbian fiction took up a few shelves in the back corner. (The same corner where video stores used to keep their pornography, but at least there was no red curtain.) This was disappointing, but those few shelves still represented a cornucopia compared to what I had available in my home town, i.e. zilch.
It was so exciting to be able to stand there, unafraid and unashamed, and read the back blurbs on actual paperback books telling stories about women who loved women. They were the first lesbian fiction books I had ever held in my hand.
After an hour of browsing—an impressive amount of time given the tiny selection—I returned to the car with several books in hand. But it was a long drive back to the hotel, and I could not wait to crack open a book. I pulled into the first tree-lined street along the way, parked in the shade, and spent two hours just sitting there reading. It was utterly magical.
I still have that first book. Recently I tried to read it again, and could not. It’s so very, very bad: a total Xena uber with two-dimensional secondary characters, cliches on every page, predictable plot, huge wads of internal dialogue in italics, and angst out the wazoo until the happy ending five pages before the end.
All of my lesbian friends have had this same experience. In the beginning, we read mediocre books and thought they were marvelous simply because they were the first thing we had ever read about us. Such a low bar to pass! As soon as the thrill of these books merely existing wore off, our expectations rose. We wanted better stories. Better editing. Writing that could be appreciated on its own merits, and not just because it happened to be about women loving women.
Our genre has grown so much since then. There are still a lot of thoroughly amateur books sloshing around, but there are also many good authors, a happy number of excellent ones, and a few who produce books so good that I would call them literature.
It was from a desire to join that push, to contribute what I could to women’s reading options, that I began writing. I started with Star Trek: Voyager fan fiction, partly because it seemed so bloody obvious to me that Kathryn Janeway had zero chemistry with the men on the show and tons of it with the women, and partly because I had no faith in my ability to create a fictional world of my own. I needed training wheels, so I borrowed another, ready-made world. Fan fiction is wonderful for that.
For five novels I lived in that world, honing my skills, creating new characters and redefining existing ones, dreaming up new planets, and learning how to “hear” my characters speak. When I was ready, I stepped out of the Trek universe and invented a new one of my own.
The Caphenon, now a Lambda Literary Award finalist!
The Chronicles of Alsea, now standing at three novels with a fourth (and a novella) in the works, is my shot at writing literature. They are not simple books, though they can be enjoyed as such. They are books that can be read multiple times, revealing new details and interpretations with each reading. They hold politics, intrigue, romance, action, consequences, and characters of such depth that they keep breathing even after the book is closed. And it seems they are being recognized for that. The first book in the series, The Caphenon, won second place in the Rainbow Awards and is currently a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award.
I’m thrilled to have a tiny part in the process of changing our genre, pushing it upward and outward and making it better. It’s my hope that readers will continue to demand more quality from their authors and publishers (and stop giving four- and five-star reviews to books that are middling at best). But most of all, I have a dream…
I dream that somewhere, a woman who is just discovering her sexuality will find one of my books on a shelf, take it to a quiet place, and lose herself in it for hours. And when she is done, she will close the book and hold it to her chest with a smile, not because it was a book about women loving women, but because it was a good book about women who have adventures, take risks, live in rich imaginary worlds—and just happen to love women.
