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I've had a few months away from writing for various reasons, but I'm slowly getting back to it. Today I've been putting the finishing touches on a new gay male story called Other People's Houses that I'll be submitting very soon.
This one started out as a short, heated single scene, but as I was writing it I discovered that what it really wanted to be was more like a romance.
Often the themes of a story reveal themselves to you as you’re writing. I’m a “pantser”, so I don’t always know where my stories are going when I begin them. I let my characters take the lead, and follow them to see where they end up. An easy way to reinforce theme is to hunt for an image at the beginning of the story and call back to it at the end. This is often something that’s done in drafting, but sometimes you come to the end of a story to find that it’s already perfectly set up for you. This is one of the most magical parts of the process, and possibly my favourite thing about writing. And it’s something that happened here.
Here’s the opening of the story:
I’m standing in someone else’s empty house with Marcus, waiting for the estate agent so that we can again pretend we actually intend to buy the place. The agent isn’t here yet. That suits us just fine.
We’ve been doing this six weeks now. Every Saturday, a different house. Different postcode. Always expensive enough that they take us seriously. Always empty enough that we’re left alone “to get a feel for the space”.
This one’s in Dulwich. Four bedrooms, period features, “needs work”. Everything at this price point needs work, it seems.
And here's where it all ends up:
As he drifts, I think about estate agents. About their endless optimism. About potential. About how they always say the same thing about places like this. Places like us.
Everything at this price point needs work. But some things are worth the effort.
Perhaps it’s a little on the nose, but I like it, and I had a real sense of closure as I came to the end of writing this piece. I hope that you enjoy it once it goes live.
I realised earlier today that the file I uploaded for my most recent story was the unedited version, so I'll be submitting an updated version tomorrow once I'm able to get to my PC and grab the correct version.
I've just submitted a new story called Special Collections. This one was a commission, and it's the first one that I've done. It's a little less explicit than my other stories and a little more on the romance side of things. I like it a lot though.
I've just learned that Fools Rush In came second in the April Fools Contest. Thank you to everyone who read and rated it. I'm still very new to publishing erotica and this was a very nice surprise to wake up to!
I don't get many comments or messages from readers generally, which is fine - I'm more than happy to look at numbers and see people generally giving my work good ratings, and honestly I'm a fairly reclusive person who enjoys being left alone anyway. But occasionally someone does get in touch with nice comments, and it always makes me smile. Here's an email I received from a reader yesterday about Room Service, which I'm sharing with permission.
"This went to a pretty dark place! Very raw, vulnerable and intimate in the direst sense possible. Your prose is excellent at getting the reader into the mindset of our not-so-innocent protagonist; I had chills as I read it.
I'm impressed, but also a little rattled (which I assume is at least partly by design, given the subject matter)."
This story was my first foray into non-consent, a genre that I have complicated feelings about, and it was a little uncomfortable to write in places. So it was nice to see that it landed for at least one reader.
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