With Storm Doris (Doris? Really?!) upon us and the kids all off school, it’s probably a good idea to hunker down with a book and a brew. But first, the news…
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If you’re looking for a new book to take into the storm bunker with you, Ishinnie by SJ Campbell (who also wrote Diary of a Broken Heart and the Strange Adventures of Mavis Street) is fresh off the press:
ISHINNIE. Perfect love in a world where same-sex relationships are expected and heterosexuals are the minority. This is a book of two love stories.
Annie, who falls in love with the beautiful and career-driven Christina, never feeling good enough with her small dreams of a happy family. Annie is haunted by the death of her alcoholic father, destroyed when his husband leaves him for a woman, but Annie believes in ‘Ishinnie’ and that her perfect love with Christina will get her through.
Their son, Jim, tells his story as he falls in love with a girl at school, learning to hide his love for fear of ridicule and bullying. As Jim matures and his passions grow stronger, he has to learn what ‘Ishinnie’ is and take a stand.
Annie and Jim, mother and son, on a collision course because of their love, held together by Christina. Will they learn that the hardest part of love is forgiveness?
You can buy Ishinnie in e-book or paperback from all the usual places.
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If free fiction is more your thing, then The Globe and Mail (no, not that homophobic, bigoted pedlar of shite, but the Canadian one, which should be far more sensible and polite) are celebrating the occasion of Canada’s sesquicentennial by inviting a group of writers – from home and abroad – to celebrate the country’s history in fiction. Stir Fry and Frog Music author Emma Donogue is one of the first to contribute, and you can find her story – The Big Cheese – here.
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Skipping on to blogs now, and AL Brooks has a dual offering for us. First up is her Valentine’s Day piece, The Love of Writing about Love:
Every time I read such a book, I am in awe of the story-crafting that has been employed by the author to elicit such a reaction in me. How did they know which exact words to write, in that exact order, to make my heart beat just that little bit faster, and my stomach do that kind of tightening thing it does when I’m getting the “feels”?
You know what I mean, right? That indefinable combination of emotion and physical response to a scene that has you tingling with joy at what those two characters are sharing. It’s a good dose of empathy (if you’ve been there yourself), maybe envy (if you haven’t), a definite dollop of awwww, a hint of arousal, and an all-round deep satisfaction that you just cannot explain…
To get all squishy with AL, click on the link.
Tying in with the release of her new novel, Dark Horse, AL has also been blogging about her time spent in Australia:
I also spent a few weekends in Ballarat, a country town about 90mins drive from Melbourne. My housemates were from there originally, and still had friends back there they would meet up with for dancing at the (only?) nightclub in town. Ballarat was the only Australian town in which I ever really experienced homophobia – it was pretty redneck back in those days. And when I started plotting out Dark Horse, for me it was a no-brainer to set the main part of the story there, and show the new, grown-up version of Ballarat that is a significantly more tolerant place to visit these days.
Read the rest of the blog here.
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New BSB author Anna Larner is pretty damn chuffed about having her short story accepted for the forthcoming anthology Girls Next Door. Anna’s story – Hooper Street – will be available in the collection, scheduled for a June 2017 release:
Sometimes the most intriguing girls are right next door—BFFs, ex-girlfriends, new girls in town, party girls, study mates, team mates, and sexy strangers. All it takes is a night out, the right moment, or an accidental kiss to discover what’s been there all along—the perfect girl for a love that lasts a lifetime. Best-selling romance authors tell it from the heart—sexy, romantic stories of falling for the girls next door.
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The LGBTQ Arts Review has been chatting to VG Lee, who will be sharing an extract from her new book, Mr Oliver’s Object of Desire, at the WOW Festival Polari Salon on March 8th:
I was inspired to start writing when my long-term relationship broke up. At the time I was devastated and found myself writing sad, angry & self-pitying poems on scraps of paper. When life took a turn for the better, I joined a Creative Writing Class in Hackney and found myself writing quite humorous prose. At a local reading event the Editor of the then Diva Books liked one of my short stories and asked if I had a novel? I didn’t, but set to work on my first novel, The Comedienne, published by Diva Books in 2000 when I was 50!
The full Q&A can be found here.
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And that’ll about do us for this fortnight. Have a good weekend everyone!
UK Lesbian Fiction 
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