Hello!

It’s been a while. Let me pick up where I left off.

Due to some personal and family reasons, I had to postpone my upcoming PhD. I still have every intention of going through with it (and studying bandom/fandom!) but this will hopefully happen in September 2014. I’m very pleased with the program, the profs, and everything else – but this small delay is exactly what I needed. I finished and defended my MA not even two months ago, and everything went smoothly there. I even had a big piece of paper worth a lot of money to prove it! My final thesis was entitled “Flesh Made Real: The Production, Reception, and Interpretation of Transgender Narratives.” The whole thing clocked in at around 51k with definitions, three appendices, and about 150 sources. Lots of fun there. I have plans for adding a chapter or two and then turning it into a proper book, but that will probably wait. Right now, I have a small part time job editing and a LOT of other projects I want to get off the ground. I’m going to attempt to summarize them as succinctly as I possibly can.

Publishing:

I’ve been publish now. Several times. Yay! :)  This summer, after talking to some of my students and colleagues, I realized it was ridiculous that I haven’t started to send out work. So I drafted and updated a few of my short stories and poems and got them out the door. A list on my tumblr page is a pretty good start (also – follow tumblr if you want writing updates or random things I find online, plus a ton of Hannibal stuff) and I’ll be updating the website to reflect a better list.

Right now, I’m pretty excited over my Halloween story The Collectors which Black Treacle published (and paid! so rare in the online magazine business and I want to express thanks once again for that). You can find the issue here. I would recommend checking the rest of the stories out!

The Dream Team has also just come out – for which I was the runner-up for the Christopher Hewitt Literary Award. Neat! Also, I like telling people to go read The Sea, since it was the first story I had published online. Go go!

Thanks to Kat, by the way, who has been doing some really sweet and beautiful (especially with the images she picks) for some of my short stories. Her blog is here and mostly in Polish, but she writes in English too.

Upcoming Stories:

I’m just going to drop two covers here, because I say they pretty much speak for themselves:

Cover by Meredith Russell. Anthology editor by RJ Scott.

Cover by JMS Books.

The first one is a Christmas anthology by R.J. Scott (lovely writer from Love Lane books) and will be published very soon. The anthology will be given away for free and is meant to help establish emerging writers in male/male romance. Slash stories, basically. And fun ones at that. There are a lot of really great writers of male/male romance out there – RJ being one of them. I’m particularly fond of Michael Thomas Ford right now, but it varies. Some people may be wondering if there is a different between male/male romance and gay fiction, and yes there is. It can be quite subtle in some cases (like with Ford’s books), but it really depends on formula. At least, this is how I categorize it. Romance formula remains pretty standard with their lengths, depictions, and also endings! Most romance has a HEA (happily ever after) or HFN (happily for now) requirement. Most of you who worry about me getting carried away with character death or ~sad things~ need not fear too much with these anthologies or publishers.

The story in Love Lane’s book is entitled “Mistletoe and YouTube” and is a nice, quick read. Check out my new “Francis Gideon” page on here for more details about that.

The other cover “Tertium Non Data” is from JMS books and is a short ebook (7,800k) of a historical male/male romance I wrote this summer. I’m very pleased with JMS and their work so far. Really nice people and quick response times. I plan on sending some of my manuscripts there in the future, but for now I have this story coming out in November. Here is the write up on the page. I also have a Christmas story coming out with them, but I will give updates on that when I know a little more and have a neat cover to share.

You’ve probably noticed the name. Yes. Francis Gideon is me and I’m going by yet ANOTHER pen name. I’ll add some details on the site about this soon, but for now, know that I use Francis Gideon whenever I write male/male romance. Easy enough, yes? :)

Writing:

I have several works in progress right now, which makes me infinitely excited. I have vague notions of producing at least five books while I’m off this year, but we’ll see. So far three (two previous ones I’ve revamped, and one new one) are at publishers. No guarantee they’ll be published there, but we’ll see.

One of the stories I’ve been working on this summer has been Driving Without Seatbelts. Some of you may remember this – it was a half-finished manuscript from before. I rewrote what I already had in the beginning (turning about 140k into 70k) and then added the end to it. It turned out to be a 220k beast, which I’ve cut down into three stories of about 50-100k. I’m hoping to get at least the first one professionally published and then see where the rest will take me.

The other books at publishers are a crime genre piece with a lesbian couple at the centre and a romance/drama/comedy piece with two gay male protagonists. I’ve been writing more crime fiction lately, which I’ve really enjoyed – along with some horror, too. (My story at Black Treacle was horror and one of my forthcoming ones with a Canadian based publisher is a dystopian future about a plague).

Fandom:

Speaking of crime and horror:

Okay, so I kind of became addicted to NBC’s Hannibal over the summer. I loved the initial movies/novels, but my appreciation grew so much when Bryan Fuller (of Pushing Daisies and other too short TV series) became involved and gender swapped so many of the characters. He’s done a dynamic job writing the series and is one of the best TV creators I’ve seen interacting with fans. The show is great and I probably reblog way too much stuff on my tumblr. I also wrote a few fan fics in this fandom and posted them on AO3. I have one full length story, which I hope to be posting a sequel to soon.

Fearful Symmetry by Gabi.

I’ve also been making a lot of fanmixes for the Hannibal fandom and the stories I’ve posted. I’ll be updating my 8tracks with some more mixes, since I have a tendency to make soundtracks for each piece I work on.

Editing:

Other than my paying job, I’m also the poetry editor at Prosaic Magazine right now. This basically means, if you submit poems on their wonderful website, I’m the one that sees them and reviews them, along with the head editor. I’ve also been contributing to the issues as well, with poems and interviews. There themes for each issue, so if you decide to contribute, be aware of them.

Why contribute to Prosaic? It’s free to do so and this is still a beginning magazine so we don’t get as many subs as some other huge ones yet. It’s a non-paying publication, so it’s perfect for someone just starting out and still trying to figure out the system.

Prosaic Magazine: Beginnings.

Academic:

I’m taking a small break from actual course work, teaching, and everything that comes with grad school – but I’m still working on a small project. My partner is helping me out with this, but stay tuned for updates about our ongoing transcription process and online journal archive for the medical journals and other ephemera from times spent in institutions. Right now, it’s been tentatively called The Diana Prince Project (using Wonder Woman as a code name, naturally), but it could change.

Right now I have a few forthcoming poems in zines and other online mags that deal with the creative side of this project. We’re both working on getting a website up by December, where people can use it as a resource data in addition to informative posts.

Publishing (again, yes):

Right now, I’m shopping around for some publishers and trying to get a better idea of the business. My MA is in something called “public texts” which basically means that a lot of the issues I looked at in my work involved publishing, copyright, the history of the book, and the industry as a whole. I have a good theoretical perspective to go into publishing and I’m taking a lot of this year to figure out how exactly it all works. The editing process, cover making, etc. I want to take this knowledge and eventually open up my own publishing house. I would be publishing my work – but I also want to get other people involved too. I’ve done a lot of interviews and partnerships with some really wonderful artists people over the past two years. And if they’re not published by someone, then I want to get it done for them.

Right now, I’m soliciting some people to help me create a really good opening array of titles for when the publishing house opens (at LEAST a year from now). But I’m also excited to take submissions from other people when the time comes, too.

I also want to work on getting together an online magazine (tentatively called Jonra, after this really common misspelling from twitter) where I would accept poetry and flash fiction related to a genre publication. Again, this would not be for a while (less than a year, but about that) but it makes me very excited to think about. In the next little while, this website will be turned into a platform for my own creative writing, but those other side projects as well.

Okay! I know I can get long winded, so I’ll point you to the too long, didn’t read version of this blog post:

Exciting things are happening!
New stories and new novels and new pen name and new publishers.
Hannibal!
Possible plans to make own publishing house and/or magazine.
I’ll keep everyone updated and this website will undergo revision soon.