Where do you get your ideas?
Just about everywhere. Maybe the strongest source of ideas is photographs. I can look at a photograph of a man, and I can begin to imagine a story that seems to come from the expression on his face. Two men, and I can get a feeling for the relationship between them.
Are you influenced by any other writers?
If anybody, probably the short story writer, Raymond Carver. I'm always amazed by his matter of fact way of describing the lives of ordinary people and how he reveals so much with a few well-chosen details and words of dialogue. I even wrote "Two Men in a Pickup" in the present tense, something he often did.
Has anyone ever compared your stories to Annie Proulx?
Now and then, and I'm always surprised by that, because she's at least fifty times the writer I am. The Shipping News is a wonderful novel about ordinary people living in an isolated environment. Her Wyoming stories, Close Range and Bad Dirt, have a nice wry, hard-bitten quality that I admire.
Had you read "Brokeback Mountain" when you started your stories about Mike and Danny?
Yes, and it probably inspired me to write about rural men the way I do. There's at least one idea that I stole from it for "Two Men in a Pickup," and I would have disguised it more if I'd known the story would become a movie and so widely seen and talked about.
Are there any characters like Ennis and Jack in your writing?
I don't think so. I see Proulx's story as a tragedy, and my stories tend to have happy endings. At worst, there are some bittersweet turns of plot, and you might get a lump in your throat, but I don't want to bum readers out, which "Brokeback Mountain" definitely does.
Why haven't you published your stories?
Well, I consider them published. They're on the Internet, where anyone with a computer can find them and read them.
Do you have a particular reader in mind when you write?
Not consciously, but I make an effort to write for the men who are still out there in the heartland, far from urban areas, where there are no gay communities. I think of them as dealing with isolation, while at the same time being more at home in a rural environment with rural values, because that's what they've always known.
What do you call what you write?
Erotic fiction, I guess. Do we need a label for it?
I'm just wondering, where do you fit in with other gay writers?
I'm not sure. The stories seem to have explicit man-to-man sex in them, so I suppose that makes them gay fiction. But I'm not just interested in the sex. I'm curious about sexual relationships, which last over time and involve other organs besides the genitals.
The heart, you mean?
Yes, and the brain. Emotions and the head trips people take and the humor that can sometimes be found in their situations. All that is part of the mix and makes the sex more interesting - at least to me.
Is that what makes you different from other writers?
A lot of erotic writers are mostly interested in taking their main character from point A to point B. That is, identifying someone to fuck and then seducing them. The story is about overcoming whatever obstacles stand in the way. And they play on the excitement of sex with someone who is still practically a stranger. I'm curious about what happens when two guys stay together after that first fuck and continue to be in each other's lives.
Is that what Mike and Danny are about?
Yes. If you notice, "Two Men in a Pickup" starts after they already know each other and have been living together. How they met and got to that first fuck are revealed later as flashbacks.
Do you consider their relationship realistic?
I've been told that it's not, and my response is that, after all, it's fiction. I would rather readers want it to be real so much that they suspend their disbelief. On the other hand, it's not total wish-fulfillment fantasy either. I try to make the characters and the situations as plausible as possible.
How do you do that?
I've become aware that something I do is put characters together who don't quite fit with each other. They have to make adjustments to each other, and if they don't, they end up going separate ways, and one of them will be less happy about that than the other. Real relationships are like that.
Anything else?
Readers often write to say they like the "detail" in the stories because it makes them more real. As an example, a reader mentioned a scene in which a character looks out the window in the middle of a conversation and sees a dog pissing on a hubcap. As a piece of information it was only something I put in to pace the scene, but it had that added effect of grounding the scene in reality - at least for that particular reader.
Do you appear in your stories as one of your characters?
I used to get asked this question all the time. That and "Are your stories true?" My answer has always been, yes and no. Like any writer, you draw on what you know from your own life or from the lives of others. There's at least a bit of me in all of my characters. I probably wouldn't have been able to imagine them if there wasn't.
Do you have any favorite characters?
I feel closest to Mike and Danny. And I can see how they represent two sides of me - my connection to my rural roots and the fact that I have also been a book-reading academic. Those two sides came together when I was in college and spent two summers measuring corn fields for the federal farm program - and that's how their story starts.
Do your readers have any favorite characters?
Yes, I get requests to write more about certain characters. When I got to writing about Kirk and Virgil for 2-3 months, I finally heard from someone who wanted me to get back to Mike and Danny. Someone else has asked me to write more about Ellis and Deacon.
Do readers have any least favorite characters?
Kirk is the character most readers love to hate, although a few have liked him and obviously identify with him as a kind of hell raiser. Someone else said he was a lot like an ex-boyfriend.
Do you get many complaints about the stories?
All the time. People like to point out errors. I sometimes confuse characters' names, and if I do, I can be sure someone will write and tell me. And there are errors a good fact-checker would catch, like someone who wrote to me that a calico tomcat is genetically impossible. Occasionally someone catches an anachronism - like Rich's wearing a motorcycle helmet at a time, apparently, when they were neither worn nor required by law. People like to correct my English, too, like when I confused the words "faint" and "feint."
Are readers ever unhappy about the way story lines turn out?
That, too. I got a very angry letter once from someone who felt I had copped out at the end of "Two Men in a Pickup" by not having a general clearing of the air about everybody's feelings. It felt unresolved without all the cards being laid on the table once and for all.
What was your response to that?
Well, I didn't rewrite the ending. I think what the reader didn't understand was that these characters, being rural westerners - and men - would never let themselves get that emotional with each other. Emotional restraint is more their style. It gets expressed through humor and other less direct ways. Or in a drunken fist fight.
Anyone comment about the sex in your stories?
Well, I get the occasional references to appreciation at that level - that level being below the belt. Over the months, comments have graduated from the "hot!" variety to "I put up a tent last night and didn't even leave home." But my favorite remark, I suppose, was from the reader in Nebraska who said a story had stirred both his pants and his imagination.
Anyone ever object to the sex?
Believe it or not, someone did once. Said he skipped those parts because all sex scenes were the same. I begged to differ. I think the way two people have sex says a lot about them as individuals and about their relationship. I try to make each one really different and true to the characters.
Do you have many readers in Nebraska?
Gay Nebraska readers write because they so rarely see their home state mentioned anywhere, in straight or gay fiction. Finding my stories with references to places they know, sometimes firsthand, and then characters who are queer to boot just about knocks their socks off. I love hearing from them.
What's your advice to writers of erotic fiction?
Try not to be predictable. That's the big one. Have an ending in mind that is both unpredictable and inevitable, then let your readers think you're going anywhere but there. Another thing, avoid writing in the first person. Unless the narrator is a really clever storyteller, there's a big risk of it becoming a plodding recitation of one thing after another. Third person is more flexible, and it lets you finesse your way around all kinds of narrative difficulties.
Danny's stories are in first person, aren't they?
Yes, and they're the only ones. Danny is a writer, so he has fun with readers' expectations. He can get away with throwing in humor and irony and other twists and turns to keep it interesting. Most of my other characters - likable as they may be - would bore you to tears if I let them tell their own stories.
How long do you think you can keep it up?
Oh, you mean the stories. Right now, I've finished a long sequence of stories, "Stuff Happens," and when I'm not writing, the ideas begin circulating for a new one. It may take a week or two, but each day a few more pieces will present themselves and eventually come together into a kind of configuration that will eventually take a linear form, and I know I've got to get back to the keyboard. It's about like being intensely horny. You can't put your mind to anything else.
Do you ever masturbate when you write?
Actually, no I don't. It would be kind of distracting. The wet spot in the shorts is about as far as I get in that direction while I'm writing.
After?
You're really curious about this, aren't you. In all honesty, I keep writing when I can for several hours, and when I quit it's because I've pretty much exhausted my imagination. I'm more likely to go to the kitchen and fix myself a sandwich and have a beer.
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