One of the cool things about having a book coming out is being interviewed. I enjoy the process so much more now that it takes place mostly online. Back in 2003, when The Concrete Sky was about to be published, a friend who wrote for one of the gay magazines interviewed me. Earlier that same day, my then partner and I had just moved chaotically from Portland to Seattle. We were a half step away from being homeless: the owners of the company I had worked for in Portland were in dire shape financially and were paying only a half or a third of what I was told I was supposed to be earning. Once it became clear that I had burned through my savings and maxed out my cards, our bills were going to become impossible. We put our shit in a storage unit, moved into my ex’s cousin’s extra bedroom, and basically had to start over. If I’d had any presence of mind at all, I’d have suggested we wait a week. Lacking it, I proceeded. And after I hemmed and hawed my way through questions that ought to have been simple, my friend said in exasperation, “Be articulate!”

Mercifully, my circumstances are better now.

Bookish.asia has interviewed me in my role as publisher at Signal 8 Press. You can read it here:

Publisher Interview: Signal 8 Press

Also, the guys at Camphor Press have set a pub date for Inhospitable, May 17. That’s about two months away! Kind of hard to believe.

And the next book is going to be the memoir I’ve been chipping away at for what feels like centuries. The working title (which I doubt will change) is I Wouldn’t Normally Do This Kind of Thing (yes, I stole the title from the Pet Shop Boys song), and it focuses on my horror show of a life up until I graduated from college. I’m pretty much done with a very rough first draft and am now tidying it up to make it readable enough to show other people. I’ve also been reaching out to various friends and relatives whose names are in danger of appearing in it. Eventually I will write another novel, but for now, this will be my next book.

(Still no word on the two edited/co-edited academic books at the proposal stage. Fingers Everywhere Are Crossed.)