On writing...

My partner asked me yesterday what I would write about if I didn't write about bisexuality. [I do write about other things, especially when I am paid to do so, but bear with me here...] He was partly being wistful, because no one ever got rich - or even enough money for a good holiday - by writing seriously about bisexuality. Although I did hear rumours about mega spondulicks going Marjorie Garber's way for the book Bisexuality and the Eroticism of Everyday Life. Still, she is a famous academic I suppose.

My main subject, what preoccupies me in both fiction and non-fiction, is "otherness". I don't mean in the academic sense of The Other, or indeed The Others that Nicole Kidman starred in, but otherness as in being an outsider.

Bisexuals are outsiders to both gay and straight worlds, never entirely accepted in either. I think it's true to say that we - and certainly me - feel that being bisexual gives you a view of the world that is unlike those of people who are only interested in one gender.

I am also interested in all sorts of other "outsiderness" but as bisexuality is the one that affects me most profoundly, it makes sense that I write about it.

But also, this blog is specifically about bisexuality because it is covered so rarely elsewhere. (Indeed, until Mercy (link) started her Bisexuality Revisited site recently, I don't think there was another non-personal bi blog out there at all.) At least, this gives me a way to disperse my ideas to the world at large.

Because of that, though, many readers will not know that I also write fiction - which was what obsessed me through my youth. Indeed I had a novel published by no less than Hutchinson. And may (you never know, fingers crossed) have another published by them. Even in this lifetime.

I write psychological thrillers - maybe slightly literary or experimental, perhaps a bit like Barbara Vine when she started. In my fiction, all my main characters bear the weight of their otherness - by not fitting in, by feeling they are on the borders of sanity, by experiencing the wrong sort of sexual desire or lack of desire at all, or simply by being outsiders. That all sounds very heavy, but I'm not sure it really is, except in the sense that psychological thrillers have to be. These characters are also often bisexual - although none of them ever uses the word - and not usually in a Good Role Model way. Often they are tormented by their desires. My interest is in making them three-dimensional, unique, plausible characters rather than having them as representatives of The Good Bisexual.

Still, bisexuality per se is not the focus of my fiction; distorted perceptions of reality, the harm (and good) people do to each other, a rattling tale - those are what I try to write.



I might post up some fiction here at some point. Otherwise, you can still buy my novel Death of the Family here.