Guest Author: A.T. Weaver
We’d like to welcome sci-fi and contemporary romance author A.T. Weaver to the Land of Make Believe!
I am a retired accountant, the grandmother of eleven (I always say nine came about the usual way, and two are extra), great-grandmother of one. I have no problem with telling people I’m 76 years old. I live with Kiyah, the devil cat, in downtown Kansas City, MO.
When I was growing up in the 1950s, the word gay meant happy and carefree and homosexuals were called queer or ‘one-of-those’. However, I guess I was sheltered from a lot of things, because I never heard those terms until I was married and a mother.
In the early 1960s, two men moved into the mobile home court where my husband and I lived, and he had to tell me they were (excuse the term) ‘queer’. I didn’t know what he meant.
In 2003, through a TV show called Boy Meets Boy, I ‘met’ over 3,000 gay men in a Yahoo group. These men educated me as to the inequalities suffered by the LGBT community and I became a staunch ally. I visited one of the men in San Francisco who lived just up the street from the Castro. As he showed me around, we stopped in front of what was once Harvey Milk’s camera store. My question, “Who was Harvey Milk?” started my education into Gay history.
At the end of that visit, Steve said he’d like to read a story where the boy gets the boy and they ride off into the sunset together. I’ve never been one to ignore a challenge, and decided to try my hand at writing.
I knew very little about gay sex except what I’d learned watching Queer as Folk. Every sex scene I wrote, I’d send to Steve and Fred and ask, “Does that work?”
After a few books in which I wrote somewhat descriptive sex scenes, I decided that my readers could imagine better scenes than I could write and started ‘fade-to-black’ scenes.
My first sci-fi book came after reading several shifter books by other authors. I asked one of them what rules I needed to follow, and was told, “It’s your world; your rules.”
People often ask authors where they get their ideas. I worked for an accountant who, when she was asked where she got those numbers, she’d say, “I found them on my ceiling.” I think that’s where I get a lot of my ideas, on the ceiling.
My aim is to move my reader in some way. Whether you laugh or cry, love it or hate it, I welcome all comments, whether good or bad.
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