The Book

I wrote many stories as a child, but I have a very clear memory of the first novel I ever wrote. Ever finished. I was immensely proud. Flash forward a couple years and I took my first stab at a rewrite. And another. And another. And another.

I think I rewrote this book ten times, but I never really finished it and I was never really happy with it. It became this sort of monster always waiting to suck me back in for another go. I never seemed to have a handle on what wasn't working. Why I couldn't finish it.

I'm a believer in the idea that with some stories, there is a right time for them to be written. There are books you keep in your drawer that you never really abandon. The ones you know have problems but...you can't really let them go. This one of those books. I wasn't really self-aware enough as a teenager to write this book. I wasn't educated enough to write this book.

More importantly, I hadn't really figured out who these characters were. I started rewriting it more recently, something started to click. Plot details I'd never considered started to emerge. Character betrayals. Shifts in attitudes. Name changes. Physique changes. The more things changed, the closer I seemed to get to what I was missing.

I kept writing and I kept digging and then--I hit a wall. I was still missing something. Something important. Astrid was missing something. I was sort of just screwing around on Tumblr, as one does when they're supposed to be writing, when I a post caught my eye. I knew what I missing. I knew what I'd gotten wrong with Astrid.

In my teenager years, I didn't write gay characters. I didn't have any books or TV shows that had gay characters. It wasn't a conscious choice. There just weren't a lot of them around. The landscape is certainly changing now, but back then it didn't even occur to me that Astrid could be gay. We talk about a shortage of YA fiction with LGBT MC now, it was a desert then. Especially at a school in the middle of a corn field.

So when I realized Astrid wasn't straight, it was like a damn light bulb went off. This book that I had been struggling with for so long suddenly came together in the course of a few days. The pieces fell into place. I'd been looking at Astrid as one thing for so long and to finally have this book finished. Sometimes, writer's block isn't just about a lack of ideas. Sometimes, it's because there's something just wrong in the story and until we find it, we can't move forward.

I'm just glad I figured it out. I'm glad I found the right way to tell this story and I'm glad I can move on to the next thing--like Astrid's second book. 

A Confirmed Bachelor: Writing Queer Characters

I make no secret that I publish what some would refer to as m/m romance. I don't actually consider that to be my genre, as the sexuality of my characters has always been secondary from the actual story. I happened to write about a detective, and he happened to be gay. He happened to have a love interest, but that was secondary to the murder mystery.

But, when one writes such books, inevitably one gets lumped to m/m romance, as the genre-makers don't seem to realize that gay characters do not a genre make.

That said, I have a lot of experience writing LGBTA characters, and everything book I write tends to have diversity of sexuality, race and culture because of this. Today though, we're going to focus on sexual diversity in steampunk fiction.


The estimable Gail Carriger gave us delightful creatures in The Parasol Protectorate like Lord Akeldama and Biffy...and Lyall, and lest we forget, Madame Lefoux. These characters were not ashamed of who they were, and no one really seemed to mind who they chose to be bedpartners or lifepartners with. After all, it would be rude to ask about such things.

As such, Charlotte's world went a similar fashion without any prompting really. You are introduced to Lord Niall Rathbone, whose students whisper about being a confirmed bachelor in teasing tones, and who later does take on a partner of the same sex. Except, that's just a piece of who he is. Niall is also commanding, intelligent, tricky and petulant. Charlie is actually a bit afraid of him when they first meet, though the two do become friends later.

Niall is a complicated man, a cousin to the queen, commander of a regiment and head of the Lochlan Officers Academy. Him being gay doesn't change any of that.
As of yet, there have been few other queer characters introduced, as much of the story has been internally focused, and teenagers can be rather self-involved. As I continue to work on the series and Rule of Steel, I am making a conscious effort to include more characters. There's a certain lady with a bit of a pining for our leading lady--though she doesn't know it yet.

It isn't difficult to introduce this sort of thing. You don't even have to be explicit. A casual reference to someone's partner, or former partner is more than enough to establish interests. There's no reason to stop there either. There are few enough asexual characters in fiction, and if you're writing during the sexual oppression of the Victorian era, it's not as though a man or woman with no interest in sex or romance or both would be looked upon with any more oddity than any other spinster/bachelor of the time. We can't forget about bisexual characters either, and a case could be made for Alexia (The Parasol Protectorate) being bisexual, though she is firmly married when she realizes this about herself.

I've written one transgender character in my career, and tried to do so with as much sincerity and care as I could. If you're going to write a transgender character, you have to treat them as you would any other. Make them genuine and don't back down.

I think there are authors out there that shy away from this kind of diversity because they are afraid they'll do something wrong. But really, you should try anyway. Let people from the community you are writing about do a read-through, listen to them when they tell you what they thought worked and what didn't work.

The bottom line is, diversity makes a story richer. Don't be afraid to let your characters be themselves.