Let me be clear from the outset, I am probably the last person who should give advice to an aspiring author on how to get published. I am at the midpoint of my 67^th year, and my first book, Tales of the Lavender Twilight, has just been released. I am not sure if you can be a late bloomer after the bloom has opened, closed, and fallen off the plant.

This is not to say that I have not been writing for 40-plus adult years. I have – mainly as a journalist in free-circulation weeklies, paid-circulation community weeklies, Catholic weeklies (at the Catholics weeklies, we felt guilty about not publishing daily), and finally at two daily newspapers in New Jersey.

There were three novels written in my youth – one a spoof of detective novels, one a grand opus with religious undertones, and last, a comic novel about the Catholic Church in Los Angeles, where I once worked, and more notably, where I came out.

The three unpublished novels live in a closet; I do not.

That exposition brings me to the now, as a gay man of a certain age who is writing primarily about gay men of a certain age. What that age is varies among gay men over 60. I have a friend who has yet to turn 60although he has been partnered with the same man for nearly 50 years. Do the math. And I would add to anyone considering a paying career as a writer, please do the math and the science. Stem is more than the lower region of a tulip.

While I have not given up on writing the Great American Novel or even co-opting a rather popular acronym of the moment into “Make America Gay Again,” I am more interested in small stories about the people I have known and know. The gay men in my life were not going to circuit parties in their youth. Since most were and are middle class like me, they went to Circuit City or, if you grew up in New York as I did, Crazy Eddie, to buy a VHS machine and look for gay-themed videos in the back of a Blockbuster store.

The adventures we had were not drug-fueled, but the personalities were huge and as gay as the Pines and Cherry Grove. As a closeted young man, there were no gay trailblazers who looked like me. And since I was not ready to blaze a trail of my own, I waited until I was.

Much to my surprise, I learned there was no one way of being gay or queer. The men I met in bars became friends, even if the friendships rarely extended beyond the confines of the bar. These characters have stayed with me, and many have found their way into my stories. They may be thinner, or funnier, or have more hair – in places men of a certain age still want hair to grow – but they are, at their core, average people who just happen to be gay.

Years back, I was writing an article on the 40^th anniversary of Stonewall. And I was told to get a quote from Barney Frank, the openly gay U.S. congressman from Massachusetts. It took some doing to get him on the phone, and he was not exactly happy to chat. At the time, he was Chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, so I asked him how it felt that more people disliked him now over taxes and not because he was gay. He laughed hard and the interview went well from there.

Famous or not, I don’t think anyone wants to be known solely for being gay. There is a lot more to all of us. But the gay part matters – it matters a great deal. My characters are comfortable navigating a changing world as aging gay men.

The challenges are changing as our bodies change with age. And the fear of what lies ahead as we move past our twilight into evening is omnipresent – even for men who are married and partnered – because, at some point, all of us are alone.

But this stage of our journey does not have to be all about endings. It can be about creating as many beginnings as possible, and maybe even taking a long-forgotten, unpublished manuscript out of the closet and see what happens if it gets a chance to become more authentic than it was 40 years ago.

Authenticity is key. It is key to writing. It is key to living. So, anyone looking to write a novel or a collection of short stories should be true to their own voice – your hair color, not so much – but your voice is everything.

The best writing advice comes from the playwright Arthur Laurents: “Sing out, Louise!”