I have just uploaded (published?) the very first book I ever wrote on Amazon as a kindle ebook. I had a working title for it of "A Tale of Two Boys", but I ended up calling it "Loki's Children". Is this a spoiler? Only if you never get to page 50, so not really, and it's a simple, not very satisfying spoiler. There is much more to the problems these two guys have besides having Loki for a father!

I wrote this book many years after reading "Dragon's Egg" by Robert Forward, and "Ventus" by Karl Schroeder, and a series by Joel Rosenberg called "Keepers of the Hidden Ways". These books formed the germ of what I wrote about in "Loki's children," and I recommend them to you as excellent and in some ways seminal fiction for their time. And when I was stuck, I channelled Lois McMaster Bujold and wondered what Miles would say about being stuck in such a situation. But don't blame Lois, I think I found her evil twin instead.

Perhaps when you are in your sixties and you are a guy who likes the fiction of his twenties and thirties, you must seek stories like those, or write them yourself. It does not seem derivative to me, but that is for the reader to say. I do know that when I started to write this story, gay marriage was a different creature than it is today. I find it far more difficult to conceive of a young man looking at his best friend as a potential husband, than I do any 10 thousand year old metahuman or van neumann device.