As part of my training as a psychologist, I completed pre- and postdoctoral internships. One pre-doc internship was at a student health center at the University of Southern California. The other was at the Gay and Lesbian Community Center in West Los Angeles. One of the post-doc internships was at USC/LAC Child and Adolescent Hospital. The other was at a private clinic that specialized in working with incest perpetrators and child molesters. My clinical practice focused on adolescent boys and men of all ages struggling with various life issues.

I do not think of myself as a novelist but rather as a storyteller. What is important to me when writing is character development, relationships, conflict, and conflict resolution.

My writing process:

I start by sketching the story’s plot from beginning to end. Oddly, the stories never end as I thought they would. I then populate the stories with various characters who are in relationships and in internal and/or external conflict.

Typically, I anchor my stories with minor characters who are people who have graced my life. An example of this is Joshua Walker’s mother in A Brother’s Promise. I was raised by my Italian grandparents who came to this country in the early 1900’s. They were hardworking, uneducated immigrants who raised five children and learned English from their children. Josh’s mother has a master’s degree in literature. However, her voice is my grandmother’s. She is protective, a keeper of secrets, empathetic, accepting, and loving. Josh’s father is fashioned after an uncle I had – judgmental, critical, and physically abusive with his children.

With these two anchors, Josh and his brothers come into being, and relationships and conflicts unfold in various situations.

I’ve tried to let the creative juices flow while sitting at my computer. It doesn’t work for me. I live on two acres of land and in an area that lends itself to long walks. Characters come alive while I am gardening or on a six-mile hike. I then spend the evening writing. In Soul Murder, John is a serial killer, but I didn’t want him to be a two-dimensional psychopath. How do I add depth to him? How do I get the reader to understand and empathize with him and his journey? Long walks, a veggie garden, and caring for sixty rose bushes bring the answers.

When deciding on my next book to read, I scan the first few pages. I need to be pulled into the narrative. What does that mean to me? Is it a character in action, or a situation that needs attention? In David Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon, Mollie wonders if something has happened to one of her three sisters. In his The Wager, a vessel nearly smashes into a reef. In Percival Everett’s James, the little bastards were hiding out in the tall grass. In Ken Follett’s The Armor of Light, the first sentence is, “Until that day, Sal had never heard her husband scream.”

Once I have lived with a couple of major and minor characters. (I once read that you have to know your major characters so well, you know if they would fold or crumple their toilet paper), I focus on how to introduce them to the reader. In But For Hope, Adam is in dire circumstances – show don’t tell – I show him racing to his part-time job, fearing that he will be fired. Soon, we see him digging through the garbage for a half-sandwich he placed there while busing tables in a restaurant. Josh is terrified he will be ‘outed’ to his family. He is caught in a naked embrace with his boyfriend. In Soul Murder, John is in the process of leaving the scene of one of his murders.

What I believe are some of the hoped-for outcomes of psychotherapy inform the direction these characters take. Passivity and/or aggression are opposite sides of the same unproductive coin. What’s productive is assertiveness. Victimhood, not taking responsibility, lying to oneself or others, keeping secrets from significant others, inability to tolerate and resolve conflicts, etc., are unproductive. Integrity, empathy, the ability to trust oneself and significant others, transparency, etc., are productive. With these issues in mind, I quickly put my characters in situations and relationships that create conflict and show their coping skills and how they work or don’t work for them.

It used to be said that twenty percent of women have been sexually abused before the age of fourteen. End of story. Now it is said, and I believe the estimation is low, that twenty percent of both men and women have been sexually abused. In the case of the men I worked with, many had experienced childhood sexual abuse, and it was never reported. It’s a tragic event for either a boy or a girl. However, women are more comfortable discussing the subject than men. Why is this? One reason is that it is men who most often abuse. (A study was done at the University of Edinburgh. Hundreds of men in the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, and the USA were asked if they were guaranteed anonymity, they would have sex with a boy or girl younger than fourteen years old, that’s elementary and middle school children; five percent of the men answered in the affirmative. A heterosexual man I worked with said he stopped counting the number of middle school boys and girls he had ‘sexual relationships’ with after one hundred. He had been caught and was awaiting trial.) Another reason is uncomfortable discussing child sexual abuse is more complicated. A man being molested puts him in the role of being passive, which goes against his gender role. Also, since the molester is another man, it means the boy had a homosexual experience, which puts his sexual identity in question. Soul Murder addresses the issue of child sexual abuse. A male friend of mine read it and told his wife that it was too intense and disturbing for her to read. She read it and told me she loved the twists, turns, and surprises, and wished it were longer.

When trying to have But for Hope and A Brother’s Promise published, I was told that they were too triggering. Except for Ian Henzel and St Sukie de la Croix at Rattling Good Yarns Press, Soul Murder was deemed too triggering.

My first, very rough draft is usually 50,000 words long. Then it is more long walks and gardening. My world has always been rich in conversations. I had an Italian grandfather who loved to tell stories, and then the years of listening to clients and thinking about how best to respond. Those hours of conversations are buried somewhere in my subconscious. So the first draft is mostly conversational. Then comes the work of the narrative: bringing the reader into the world I created through descriptions of persons, places, sights, sounds, smells, and tastes.

By this time, the second draft is twice as long as the first. Then comes the complex process of editing, making each chapter crisp and to the point.

Typically, I set it aside for several months, then read it through and make additional changes. I then try to divorce my ego from the manuscript and find the courage to have a beta reader look it over and provide feedback. I do this by padding my ego with the knowledge that I was trained to write non-fiction – The Process of Gay Identity Formation, which started with a quote from Soren Kierkegaard – and not fiction.

After digesting the beta reader’s feedback, I worked through the manuscript and made the suggested changes. Then it is off to an editor for much-needed grammar and spelling corrections.

And then there is the part I hate the most – trying to get an agent or publisher to look at it.