This might be relatable, so I figured I’d share the story. If you like the type of characters and stories I do, chances are you’re here because you feel like you fit outside of social norms in some way, too. Originally I wrote this in my author’s section, but by paragraph two, I realized it didn’t belong there at all.
FYI: This is a bit personal, so if that’s uncomfortable, look forward to future posts that are less so. No worries.
I started reading gay fan faction, like online male x male relationship stories, when I was fifteen, and it opened up this world of romance that felt more real to me than my lived experience, certainly more tantalizing. So chicken or the egg, I’m not sure whether gender dysphoria was hidden in my tomboy bones at the time, or getting into gay fiction provoked it, but it happened. And I struggled with myself for over a decade in my twenties over it.
I read fantasy novels with guys as heroes and then read these provocative romances online, and of course, wanted to be the hero. But I was a girl. So I started to write. Not that I knew at the time why it needed to happen. There were plot lines and character progression forming in me as a way to avoid living my life in a world that seemed bleak in the hours of my teenage nihilism. I dated, and I feel bad to the guys I dated, because in retrospect I think I had a hard time putting myself fully into it. I felt even more alien until college, when I decided I must be trans.
Writing progressed at that point, paralleling my frustration. There were not many gay heroes in the polished published works of fiction I was reading (I didn’t discover Lynn Flewelling and Mercedes Lackey until later, unfortunately), and as you might also have experienced, the quality of writing in online fan fiction…varies greatly between writers. (To be fair, it’s largely hobbyist writing and depends what you’re looking for in the first place.) I kept reading things thinking “I can do this better,” or “I can marry the world of homoeroticism and legit fantasy fiction; there’s gotta be a way.”
I figured could just write until I got good enough. I could maybe possibly write fiction that was of high quality, had insightful literary merit, but also had more of the representation I wanted to read, and put that online.
Hah, well, I tried. Of course, the early works were cringey, but I had yet to find my pace. I was in the raw beginning stages of self-realization and my attempts were awkward, idealized, and over-sexualized. But this is what practice is for. That writing was for me, not for anyone else. It was utterly unpublishable, but that wasn’t the point at the time. I never dreamed I’d write for another human being, and only my roommate at the time got to see the zesty fantasies I set to paper.
15 years later, I’m finally writing for something beyond myself. I’ve traversed plenty of boundaries since then. Got through college, played in a couple of bands, found an identity that makes me happy, a career in technical writing that is fulfilling, and married a guy that patiently waded through all that with me. My writing has progressed to something I’m proud of now. There was a myriad of tales in my mind within a fantasy world that I wanted to tell, and now I’m in the progress of editing my first complete manuscript. It’s been a decade in the making and has been through many outlines, cuts, and drafts in that time. All that time…I wanted to write something of quality and substance with some gay heroes in it that is good enough to be accepted by the literary world. It’s important to me that I accomplish that without being preachy. And I think I just about managed it.
So in the end, if ten people read my book(s) or a hundred do, I’m satisfied. I wrote it for me…but I published it for you. I hope you read it and doesn’t see any of my beef in it; I hope you see the characters’ instead. I hope you see the Beorn family’s struggle and the lives of imperfect beings in an impossible situation trying to do the right things and sometimes failing. Just like you will as you progress through life, from time to time, because no one is perfect. And see them getting up again; just like you will, because we all must. But there’s great empathy in that.
AJ Reid 