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I’m chugging along at the gay Australian romance, which is a request for an anthology. I’d like to note that this is the first time I’ve ever written a gay Australian romance, and this may be why I’m not going terribly well at it. It’s the romance and the Australian parts that are really screwing me – I’m just not that romantic, and aside from Harmonica + Gig, I really don’t write about Australia.

Anyway, I’ve set the story in the convict era, added zombies, and am using the following characters from Actual History:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Governor_Macquarie
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Blue
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Caesar
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Pearce

I’ve already realised that some of the dates I’m using aren’t going to fly. I’ll need to justify, for example, while Macquarie is around and looking after the colony in New South Wales in 1824, when in reality at the time he was a) not in Australia and b)dead. Still, some of the research I’m finding is pretty interesting, particularly the high incidence of gay relationships in convict colonies. Who knew? Certainly not me, but school never taught me about awesome historic fictures like Alexander Pearce or Billy Blue either. School sucks. But I digress.

Note I didn’t say I’m no good at writing gay stories. I didn’t think I wrote a lot of GBLT themed fiction, but I’m about to sign a contract for Signs over the Pacific and other stories which is a collection of all my Sky Pirate short stories. I was looking through them the other day and, well, they’ve virtually all got GBLT elements. Really. The contents are:

• Propagation – an AI that’s trying to work out (among other things) its gender.
• Signs over the Pacific – bisexual protagonist.
• Faceless in Halukan – it’s just one long gender-bend, really.
• The Bad Thing – heteroflexible protagonist.
• Ma-Ma – lesbian protagonist.
• Greenwich Mean Time Plus – gay relationship.
• The Future of Lole San Paulo – gay protagonist.
• How You Make The Straight – amusingly straight. (Although this wasn’t originally the case, I just flipped the protagonist’s gender before I wrote the final version.)
• Mother & Daughter – the only one with non-specific content.

I don’t remember this at all, to be honest. But there you have it. So I guess if you’re looking for books with GBLT themes that also include sky pirates*, you should grab this anthology when it comes out.

* Think Somalian or Indonesia pirates, rather than fun happy people in flying steampunk airships who “fight the man”.

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