Author Guest Blog – Page 9

From Activist to Author, and Back Again

By Vee|2020-03-28T13:42:39-05:00September 29th, 2014|Categories: Archive, Author Guest Blog|Tags: Activism, Small Press|

by Andrew J. Peters Note: Suicide content warning Writing fiction started out as something I did privately as an outlet for self-expression. For most of my career, I worked at an LGBT youth organization. I think that certain values have always been a part of my writing, such as a belief in the essential dignity of everyone. But when I used to sneak away to write, it was mainly a pleasurable escape from day-to-day realities that were hard to leave behind in the office. It has gotten better for LGBT teens since I started as a social worker [...]

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Guest Post from Author KE Payne

By Vee|2020-03-28T13:42:39-05:00September 26th, 2014|Categories: Archive, Author Guest Blog|Tags: lesbian, Queer Girls|

Originally published on the UK Lesfic website. I did a Q&A on another author's blog a while ago, and I was asked what one message did I hope readers took away from my books? My answer was short and sweet: I wanted readers to know that it's okay to be gay, and that assertion was at the forefront of my mind when I started to write my latest Young Adult novel, Because of Her. I didn't want it to just be a let's run around and tell everyone how fab it is to be queer, I just wanted [...]

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How Ideas Evolve

By Vee|2020-03-28T13:42:39-05:00September 23rd, 2014|Categories: Archive, Author Guest Blog|Tags: Trans|

“Where do you get your ideas?” is a question that gets some pretty interesting responses from writers—but an even more important question is: “How do your ideas evolve?” When you read a good book, it can feel like such a seamless whole that it’s easy to assume the ideas were there from the start. Sure the writer had to pretty up the words and put in some foreshadowing, move a chapter around, get rid of that character whose name no one can remember and all that, but the way we talk about drafting often makes it sound like [...]

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The Magic of Rhyming Words (And the Agony of Titling Books)

By Vee|2020-03-28T13:42:39-05:00September 15th, 2014|Categories: Archive, Author Guest Blog|Tags: publishing, Religion|

By Juliann Rich Choosing a title is one of the hardest parts of writing a book for me. Seriously, I’d rather write thirty additional chapters than one word or a few words for a title. TOTAL AGONY. A good title needs to communicate the core of the book, catch readers’ attention, and leave them wanting to dive in to see if the book fulfills its promise. Easy-peasy, right? Wrong. It’s bloody hard to do well. In fact, I thought I’d never figure out the title for the sequel to Caught in the Crossfire (originally titled in my mind [...]

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Girl Sex 101

By Vee|2020-03-28T13:42:41-05:00September 8th, 2014|Categories: Archive, Author Guest Blog|Tags: lesbian, Queer Girls, Sex, Sex Ed|

Editor's Note: There are NSFW text and images in this post. How did you learn about sex? From health class? Your parents? Your first time? Porn? It’s hard to learn about sex at all, even harder if you’re on the LGBTQ spectrum. For that reason, many of us have to seek out info on our own, leading us to the internet or that more experienced friend. Sometimes that works out well. Other times, not so much. As a reader, I looked for books, finding a dark corner of the library where I could surreptitiously flip through pages. I [...]

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Wait! This novel has GAY people in it!

By Vee|2020-03-28T13:42:42-05:00July 14th, 2014|Categories: Archive, Author Guest Blog, Book Club|Tags: censorship, lesbian|

Molly Beth Griffin I didn’t start writing my first novel assuming that it would actually be read by anyone but me and my graduate school advisor, and maybe the memory of my teenage self. It was an experiment in longer-form fiction taken on by a self-defined picture book writer. But the project took flight, and after years of hard work, *Silhouette of a Sparrow *hit shelves in hardcover in 2012 and then again in paperback in 2013. Which was terrifying. Aside from the usual trepidation of a debut novelist, I had some added fears. Why? Because although the [...]

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Sexy Girl Sex! (and Why it’s Important)

By Vee|2020-03-28T13:42:42-05:00June 14th, 2014|Categories: Archive, Author Guest Blog|Tags: New Adult|

Female sexuality in young adult and new adult fiction is a topic that has interested me for many years, and something that I’ve been wanting to write about for just as long. I’m glad I waited until now, because last month was a gold mine for arising issues relating to the topic. On twitter, social occurrences and media treatment of said occurrences sparked the trend of #YesAllWomen and #WeNeedDiverseBooks. While the events that initiated both hashtags were either disheartening or devastating, women used social media to prove that their opinions mattered. I also had the opportunity to attend [...]

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The Cross-Dresser in YA Literature

By Vee|2020-03-28T13:42:43-05:00June 12th, 2014|Categories: Archive, Author Guest Blog, Book Review|

First let me say that I’m very happy and honored to be writing a blog post for Gay YA. What I’d like to talk about today is the representation of cross-dressers in YA literature. Though transgender characters are becoming easier to find, cross-dressing characters are not. Why is this? I think it represents our prejudices as a society. I truly believe that cross-dressers are one of the most marginalized and misunderstood segments of the population today. I’m thinking specifically of teen cross-dressers. Gay and transgender kids have support groups, but CD teens have very few if any resources. Representation of [...]

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The Intersection of Art and Advocacy

By Vee|2020-03-28T13:42:43-05:00June 2nd, 2014|Categories: Archive, Author Guest Blog|

My son came out to me at the age of 15, and I remember feeling totally overwhelmed with fear. Though I could provide safety and acceptance within our home, I felt powerless to protect him in a world I knew could be less than kind to him. So I became an advocate as well as a mom. Let me take a moment to make an important point about what advocacy is and what it is not. True advocacy is walking beside a person engaged in fighting for equality. It does not assume that the people we support are powerless or weak, for that too is [...]

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Stereotypes

By Vee|2020-03-28T13:42:44-05:00April 7th, 2014|Categories: Archive, Author Guest Blog|Tags: LGBTQIA, Stereotypes|

It wasn’t long ago that you’d be hard pressed to find a YA book with a gay character in it all. We’ve come a long way. Yet there’s still a long way to go. While gay characters are represented in YA fiction, far too often they are stereotypes, there to provide an appearance of diversity without actually being fully realized characters. How often does a female YA protagonist have a quirky, funny, gay best friend? This is a great character because it’s a male presence, but one without any threat associated with him. Then there’s the sporty lesbian, another stereotype [...]

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