What inspires me? The answer to this question is both general and specific to the collection, to each individual story. In general, I find the inspiration for my stories—novels, novellas, and short stories—in such places as myth and traditional fairy tales, in love stories (especially gay love stories), and in the queer experience in a still-homophobic culture. I am particularly interested in exploring the idea that all fairy tales are true, and in exploring the permanent place fairy tales have in our culture. All of this led me to examine gay retellings of traditional fairy tales and to original fairy tales of my own. I am inspired by the intersections of the magical and the mundane. I also find inspiration in my own heart, and in the hearts I love. I am drawn to stories of the human condition in a queer context. Le Guin says in in her essay, “A Citizen of Mondath,” “The limits, and the great spaces of fantasy and science fiction, are precisely what my imagination needs. Outer Space, and the Inner Lands, are still, and always will be, my country” (in Language of the Night 25). In the “limits and great spaces of fantasy and science,” I also found my country, my inspiration.
The stories and novellas in this collection have their own specific inspirations. “Blue Ghosts” was inspired by two different things. Back in 2020, the folks at Queer Sci Fi issued a call for stories for the theme of fixing the world, stories to offer hope, and the possibility that things could be fixed. In the resulting anthology, aptly named, Fix the World, writers “[tackled] problems from community policing to climate change, from overpopulation to deforestation” (Coatsworth, Foreword ix). If only we had universal and unlimited power and energy, I thought. Where would it come from? How it would it change things? Hmm, in my first novel, The Wild Boy, the alien Lindauzi had unlimited power and energy. What if we got our hands on their technology? I went back to that universe and started a story. The story to be submitted for the anthology never got written, but “Blue Ghosts” did.
The second inspiration came from the blue ghosts themselves, a rare species of fireflies in the southern Appalachians. I can’t recall how I came across these beautiful creatures, but the eerie image of a blue ghost colony at night wouldn’t leave me alone. A deep-dive into some research, and blue ghosts found a home in this story.
For one more example of specific sources of inspiration for a particular story, I want to talk some about the title story, “To Bring Him Home.” Spoiler alert here, as a few details will need a closer look. This novella is an expansion and revision of a story, “The Boy on McGee Street,” published in my first collection, The Wicked Stepbrother and Other Stories (which is also a revision of a story of the same name, published in Queer Fish 2, Pink Narcissus Press, 2012). I wanted to know what happened at the end of the Wicked version. Fletcher went through the black door to rescue Sam. Did he, and if he did, how? Will these two gay lovers find happily ever after? As I wrote the expanded and re-named version I found also myself inspired again by fairy tales and the structure of fantasy, by Sleeping Beauty, by the quest.
When did I know I wanted to write? When I was in third grade and read The Chronicles of Narnia for the first time. I fall in love and decided writing stories is what I wanted to do. I even wrote an awful rip-off, with a High Queen and the Plain of Fire (as in the color of the grass) and a Plain of the Moon (silver grass). Instead of centaurs, bucentaurs, humans + oxen (but I used cattle). I was quite proud of finding this species mentioned in Greek mythology and no, I didn’t know about the Venetian barges of the same name. Mercifully, I cannot find this Narnia ripoff. When did I discover I was good at writing? This awareness was an evolutionary process. Winning a few contests growing up, getting stories published in small journals, affirmations from teachers, and finally, getting paid for a story, were all part of that process. So, to answer how long I have been writing, for 59 years, since I was eight years. Or longer, as I drew stories all the time on the back of the used typing paper my mother brought home from her job as a secretary at Duke University.
Was that eight-year-old a voracious reader? Oh, yes. At my father’s funeral, an old friend stood up in church to tell a story Daddy told him about me. I kept missing the bus. Why? Because I was so deep into reading that I failed to notice my bus had arrived at school, loaded, and left. I am still a voracious reader. I would argue a lot of writers read voraciously—as they should. A good writer is a good reader is a good writer is …
How would I describe my writing genre? Speculative fiction is the all-purpose answer. Specifically, fantasy and science fiction, and some ventures in-between, into science fantasy, as is “Blue Ghosts.” “To Bring Him Home” is fantasy, and a gay retelling of Sleeping Beauty. Other stories in the collection are fantasy and science fiction. No ghost stories, like “Seagulls” in Wicked.
How did I choose the topic—or rather theme—for this book? There are two answers to that question. First is the theme of gay love stories—and how? That’s because gay love stories are my stories and I want to tell them, in fantasy, in science fiction. Second is the theme of home. That theme found me, or rather my best friend, Ellen, found it. Yes, she pointed out, all of the stories in this collection are love stories, but then, all of your stories are love stories. These stories are about home. She was right.
How does the world end? When the clock stops, when our time is up.
What am I working on now and when can we expect it? I am working on two projects at the moment. First, revising a novel I wrote some years ago, The Golden Boy, which grew out of a short story of the same name, published in The Silver Gryphon (Golden Gryphon Press, 2003). I hope to send the manuscript to JMS Books sometime this fall. The other project is a sequel to The Werewolf and His Boy (re-released by JMS Books in 2020). This one will take longer. I hope next summer.
We all need a place to call home, a place where we belong, and are safe, and loved. For the lovers in these stories, finding home is easier said than done. Quests must be taken; dragons must be slain. Rocket launchers need to be dodged. Sometimes one might have to outrun the Wild Hunt, and sometimes they have to reimagine and recreate home. But these lovers do find homes, homes in each other’s hearts.
Warren is giving away an Amazon gift card with this tour:
Fletcher knew where to look, upstairs, behind the locked attic door. Through the door he could hear what he had come to call Paul’s favorite music, soft, far away, with harps and wind chimes, and what sounded like the wind, and the rain, storms. and voices singing in a strange language he had never been able to identify. The music sort of reminded him of the wind chimes on Sam’s porch. Of course.
He tried the knob. This time the door was unlocked.
“Fletcher. You’re awake. I knew you’d come up here,” his stepfather said in his cold and dark voice. He sat at a desk facing a door frame standing in the middle of the attic. Inside the door frame: darkness. Around it, Fletcher could see the rest of the attic: the shelves, the file cabinets, the odd boxes. The skylight was open, mid-day sun streamed in. Even so, the room was cold, a cold that was coming through the door, as if blown by some faraway wind. Paul’s black staff leaned against the door frame. He closed a little carved box on his desk and the music stopped.
“What did you do with Sam? Where is he? Where are his parents?” Fletcher asked, shivering and hugging himself against the cold.
“Where they belong,” Paul said, leaning back in his chair. “The dreams have escaped for millennia—even before Her Majesty came to power—into human minds. Fairy tales, myths, story upon story. A few times, the different peoples and creatures slipped through—what was it your hero said?—‘there were many chinks or chasms between worlds in old times’?—yes, I’ve read all those stories, too; they were useful to me. That was before Her Majesty. So, there are people like you and your mother, fey-touched, gifted with Sight that lets you see through glamour. Very useful to people like me.”
Fletcher swallowed the scream in his throat, knowing he had to listen, to understand, not to let this man get to him, break him into tears. “Where is Sam? What kind of a person are you?”
“I told you: There. You can call it Narnia if you like, or what did Tolkien call it? Never mind. The Celts came up with many other names, such as Tir n’Og, the Blessed Isles. Words and sounds can be dreamt, too; echoes can linger. She can’t stop the dreams of what once was, of once upon a time—slow them down, but not stop them. But Her Majesty can and must stop those who escape her winter,” Paul said, as he sorted what looked like rolls of parchment, stuffing some back into tubes, into different parts of his desk. “I am a bounty hunter, a tracker, and you, my dear Fletcher, and your mother, are my canaries.”
My dreams. I dreamed of the neighbor, I dreamed of Sam. Now I know where his music comes from.
“They hadn’t planned on Sam falling in love and having sex quite just yet, which shattered the weak child’s glamour—and I smelled him on you, his magic,” Paul said, his words dripping disdain and scorn.
“Mama’s dead.”
Paul shrugged and Fletcher hated him for it. “I needed her energy to open the gate—I was running a little low. A few days from now, no problem. You want him back?”
Fletcher slowly and carefully nodded his head.
“You think you’re in love. Fletcher! What do you know about love—who have you ever loved or who’s loved you? And when he asked for you, at the moment of peril, you pulled back. Don’t be a fool: you’re not in love.”
“My father loved me; I loved him. My mother—before you used her for food. Sam loves me.”
“Then go get him. Into Faerie. No happy elves, no dancing fauns, no chatty mice, no heroes with magic swords. No performing Lion, just Her Majesty’s winter. No English
children. Your boyfriend’s there, Fletcher. Or you could stay here and help me—starting with finding that sanctuary. Do you know how old I am? Her Majesty rewards her faithful: I am two hundred and thirteen of your years old. I have anything I want.”
I want Sam. “Live that long, be like you? No. I love Sam.”
“You’ve known him a week and you’re in love. That really is a fairy tale. You just think you do,” Paul said, dismissing Fletcher’s feelings with a flip of his hand. “You can have any boy you want, any way you want—like I said, Her Majesty rewards her faithful. Besides, you’re a coward,” Paul added, laughing.
Fletcher knew that Paul would never understand, could never understand, that even the uncertainty was enough, that the brightness in his heart, the geodes in his pocket, were enough, even if the week had been just the promise of what would come. Could have come. Might come. Maybe he was a coward. He certainly was afraid, and very good at being afraid. But life had found him, and being afraid didn’t mean he couldn’t go through that dark gate.
“Find yourself another canary,” Fletcher said and before Paul could stop him, ran across the room, through the door frame, into the dark, into the fairy tale.
Rochelle is the author of four novels: The Wild Boy (2001), Harvest of Changelings (2007), and The Called (2010), all published by Golden Gryphon Press, and The Werewolf and His Boy, published by Samhain Publishing in September 2016. The Werewolf and His Boy was re-released from JMS Books in August 2020. His first short story collection, The Wicked Stepbrother and Other Stories, was published by JMS Books in September 2020.
Both The Werewolf and His Boy and The Wicked Stepbrother and Other Stories, received strong reviews from blog tours in November 2020.
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