Love, Longing and Loss; catching up too late

The mark of a good writer is prolificity, that is, the ability to get it all written. Fortunately, I've been doing that, elsewhere, leaving the obligatory blogging to wait.

A single theme escapes me, other than the toll of author departures. With so many tumultuous events and losses –and I'm not talking about the Dow– it's time to roll on after a brief review. I have to write something to get the December Christmas tree off my front page.

When discussing literature, it's pretty much turned into a toll of loss. Well, one could do that by consulting a list of all recent writer deaths, but let's not. There is hope.

Holiday Homofun, and Ho Ho Hos

Ah, the holidays. They're almost over, but I feel the need to share the fun as the year winds down to the last few days. Among my new favorites are Christmas book trees, and the guilty pleasure of cheesy straight Hallmark TV movies that always have a happy ending, but require a subsequent dose of 'gay apparel' as a tonic.

First up; alternative trees made of books. They stack nicely, inspire more book gift-giving, and are catastrophe-proof if you've got cats.

My own recent tree proved amusingly autobiographical. You can tell a lot about a person by what they read. Actually, I chose books for their colorful topics and shape and size.

You can see hundreds of tree book pictures online, mostly as libraries. The trick to keep large ones from collapsing is to stack them carefully, in a circular pattern, obviously, but with a large object inside to build the books around it. 

More tips are HERE. Of course, decorated trees precede the Christian holiday, but they've been good at appropriating pagan rites for centuries. Today, (December 21) is Winter Solstice, the original reason for the seasonal festivity.

But let's not get into a theological debate. What of holiday themes in books? Certainly some classics endure, from Charles Dickens "A Christmas Carol" to Truman Capote's "A Christmas Memory."

And for your guilty pleasure, the bafflingly long list of Hallmark holiday TV movies can be depended on for a cinematic consistency: vaguely Canadian accents, a charmingly trite story line, a hunky male lead, and somewhat hunky male nemesis, and a clear thematic repetition of the viewpoint that life in the big city will damage a very white gal's appreciation of the holidays, and only a visit (or being trapped in) a quaint Thomas Kinkaide-esque village or cabin will revive her sense of giving and love, resulting in true romance via a quaint blizzard.

AIDS Literature and its Continued Importance

Does anyone still read AIDS fiction, and what stories remain relevant today? Of course my answers are "Yes," and "All of them." But given the state of things these days, with greater crises upstaging the epidemic, which is still a major health concern worldwide, the need for new stories remains in question for some.

While ruminating on this as a form of commemoration on World AIDS Day, I'll link lists of some of the great works of AIDS fiction, and borrow from other published lists. 

Why? Because while three of my novels include aspects of the AIDS crisis, I'm working on another novel that focuses on its effect on gay men facing AIDS in a different setting. It's too large a life experience to wrap up in just one novel.

Most early and bestselling fiction works about AIDS focus on urban gay men in the 1980s and afterward. It's understandable, given the time and number of cases in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco. (book links are for reference; do buy from independent bookstores whenever possible!)

Days of the Dead: Making Good Art in Bad Times

Puerto Rico hurricane devastation: New York Times

How can a fiction writer continue to work in a made-up world when so many bad things are happening in the real one? Why should we even bother? This has been on my mind as I somehow manage to work on my next novel, despite the daily bad news.

First, a list of the bad things.

The mass shootings in Las Vegas terrorized our nation. But what's more frightening is how quickly people and the media fell into the trope of 'the lone gunman' because he was rich and white. 


By now, it's been forgotten, politicized, de-politicized, churned and turned from empathy to apathy. And the NRA remains as emboldened as ever. Gun sales, including gun shows only steps from the scene of the horror, have risen sharply. Since the, half a dozen shootings killed two, five, or more people, registering merely a media blip.

Only yesterday (October 31, Halloween), a terrorist rammed a rental truck into a school bus of disabled children in Lower Manhattan. Here in San Francisco, while Halloween is no longer officially celebrated in the Castro district because of a shooting rampage, yet another shooting took place nearby that night.

In politics, indictments have finally been doled out to Trump administration lackeys for Russian collusion in fixing the 2016 election, and yet the self-delusions and massive lies continue unabated, from The White House to the wonky-eyed press rep, to their official propaganda arm at Fox "News."