Here’s another awesome post made a gay teen blogger. This time, it’s about romance fiction and why in heck can’t guys read them without having to take some flack for it?

I see romantic prejudice every day. Whenever I buy a book, the first response I usually get from one or both of my parents is that it’s girly. And that’s when it’s a young adult book. I can’t even imagine the reaction to buying a romance novel. Oh, wait, I can. The last time my mom caught me with one she freaked out, checked EVERYWHERE for any more I was hiding, and made me promise I would never again bring a romance novel to school. I was being asked to hide myself. Living day in and day out protecting what I have every right to read is tiresome. I’m tired of feeling shame for reading and loving romance in all of its genres. I’m a guy, sure, but that doesn’t mean anything. Guys, gay and straight, get into relationships and fall in love, so why the hell aren’t we allowed to read about it? Read more

Go check out John’s post and give feedback. If you’re a romance enthusiast, even better. If you’re gay, a teenager, and a romance enthusiast, you rock. :) So trundle on over to John’s blog and chat away.

People keep asking this question with regard to fiction geared toward teens, but who answers it? Adults — writers, librarians, readers — but not teens. Until now.

I’d always enjoyed reading, but my passion for it really solidified when I realized I was different from all of my friends. I felt comfortable with books, with the characters. I knew that they didn’t care whether I was different or not. They were just characters, after all, and they were too busy telling me their story to care whether or not I was gay. Reading was my escape. I felt normal while reading. (In most books, the characters’ problems were greater than my own, so it gave me a chance to say, “at least my life ain’t that damn bad.”) Read more

Okay, granted that’s one teen’s response, but that’s what we need, isn’t it? Adults have kids’ best interest in mind when they sound off on the subject, but to what extent do they really know what teens want? I write fiction for them, and I’m still in the dark as to their preferences. I simply write what inspires me the most, making sure that the young hero is LGBT without making his sexual orientation the focal point of his story (because that’s the kind of story I want to write), and then toss my books out there for whoever wants them. It’s a hit-and-miss game that I play again and again and again. With all the attention and laurels heaped upon what I call literary fiction for LGBT teens, i.e., contemporary problem novels, to what extent do we really know that our target audience is hungry for stuff outside coming-out fiction?

And after Brent’s guest blog, I hope to see more LGBT teens sound off on this subject, whether or not they prefer realism or escapism.

Unplanned watching of Transformers tonight. Lots of great funny moments and funny lines, but it’s annoyingly shrill. I think only around a third (maybe a quarter) of the film didn’t unfold with people screaming at each other in addition to all the explosions and gunfire.

For a dull night’s worth of entertainment, it worked okay. Too bad the autobots didn’t shoot down all the dumb “Meg Whitman fer Gub’ner (‘cuz Mitt Romney an’ Condaleeza Rice say so)!” commercials. You ain’t getting my vote, dearie. Oh, and I also continue to wonder what in heck Megan Fox’s purpose really was in the movie. She was useless, other than carjacking a tow truck and driving it through downtown traffic in addition to looking like, you know, Megan Fox. Total fanservice for the Maxim crowd.

< /couch critic >

And since we’re on entertainment, I find myself running low on genre LGBT YA fiction. I’ve got a small — and I mean small — stack of books, all of which are published by PRIZM, that I want to lose myself in after I finish Magic’s Pawn, but beyond those, nada. I’ll probably go back and reread some old favorites while waiting for new titles to come out, but it’s a bummer that this remains a largely ignored market by almost all publishers. Well — all the better for PRIZM, I guess, but for readers who’re constantly hungry for stuff outside realistic fiction or problem novels, the wait for new books can be excruciatingly long.

Recent (and ongoing) controversy regarding Facebook’s privacy policies aside, I decided to delete my two Facebook accounts. To be honest with you, like Twitter, I don’t understand the point of these networking sites.

I think I’m just too spoiled by blogs. When I get online, I love reading not just online publications, but also individual blogs, where people sound off on anything and everything in more than 140 characters or more than one line. I tend to be more inspired to engage in conversation that way as opposed to commenting on stuff like, “I smell cat pee in the pantry!”

Now I’m not putting down those who thrive on one-liners, but it’s just not my thing in the end. I can see that they enjoy the quick back-and-forthing that follows these brief and spontaneous updates, and that’s cool. Having jumped into several of these conversations on Facebook before, it can be a damn lot of fun, but it’s small talk, and I suck at small talk, which can be painfully wearing after a while. So I now realize that I’m nothing more than the old fogey who prefers to sit back with a cup of tea and immerse herself in longer posts.

The only other networking site I’m on is Goodreads, and while I haven’t gotten around to updating my profile or adding friends (beyond the whopping three that I have right now), I think I’ll stick to that one if only for the sole purpose of keeping up with small press books from my niche as well as in gay fiction.

Speaking of books from my niche, I’m starting to fade with Magic’s Pawn. I’ll read the book all the way through, but it’s not holding my interest as much as I’d hoped, which is a bummer. Maybe the novelty of reading something outside historical gay fiction has worn itself out after the first half of the book. I don’t know. I might have to hold off on picking up the rest of the series after I’m done with this.

My mini-vacation is over. I’m back to work tomorrow, so I’m clinging to as many seconds left of my free time as possible.

After not touching the book for a few days, I got back to reading Magic’s Pawn, and while I’m still enjoying the book, something told me that things aren’t going to end up well. Then I made the mistake of looking up information on The Last Herald Mage trilogy — i.e., I read up on spoilers — and ended up banging my head against the wall.

Minor spoilers — if you haven’t read the trilogy yet, don’t go further.

Okay?

Okay. Here we go.

Well, buggrit. :S Then again, I’m an old fogey, and I survived tragic Victorian fiction from Victor Hugo and especially Thomas Hardy without slashing my wrists. I can survive Mercedes Lackey’s trilogy with my soul in one piece, though I know I can’t say the same about my heart. Hopefully my ribcage is small enough to be able to keep the tattered bits from finding their way into other parts of my body.

Buggrit, buggrit, buggrit. Well, you know, I’ve lived on this earth for 41 years now. I’m over the whole tragic stuff. I embraced (and reveled in) fictional angst and every kind of emotional torture in my teens and twenties (and tapered off in my thirties). Nowadays, though, I want to be entertained all the way to my twilight years, or if I’m to be made to think about the state of the world or of humanity, I prefer to do so through satire. That’s not to say that Lackey’s trilogy isn’t worth reading. It is, judging from what I’ve absorbed so far, and I’m not about to give up on the series just because it’s a tragedy. But my initial reaction to the spoilers was revealing, as far as I’m concerned.

I’m not repulsed by tragedy or angst; I can read it and appreciate it, to be sure, but I try to avoid it as much as I can in my reading. I guess my deepening preference for satire is more reflective of my changing world view. I’ve always been into it, really, but my appreciation for it’s enjoyed a pretty dramatic surge in the past decade, and maybe my growing awareness of my surroundings and the ongoing shifting of my beliefs helped facilitate that change. The psychotic obsession that the media tend to have for bad news, melodrama, and all kinds of negativity that are hyped up and blown way out of proportion makes me not only hate the media with a passion but also turn more and more toward laughter as a way of dealing with the screwed up state of this world.

And, you know, books are my last refuge. When I want to tune out the world — and God knows, I find more and more reason to do that lately — I want to laugh and to forget about recessions or environmental disasters or people who proudly wear their bigotry on their sleeves. Though, to their credit, bigots gave me ample material to explore in Curse of Arachnaman.

At any rate, I look forward to plowing through the rest of Lackey’s series. And like I said, here’s to hoping that my ribcage does my heart some justice.