My latest novel, A Globe Granite Underfoot, part of the anthology, Comin’ Down the Road: Gay Science Fiction on the Highways and Byways, is now available for purchase!
To mark the occasion, I asked a friend of mine with a background in journalism to have a conversation with me about the novel’s composition and themes. I’ve transcribed it below (and cleaned up a lot of my hemming and hawing).
In a conversation we had a few weeks ago, you told me this was the first book you’ve written using a writing prompt. Maybe first explain what a writing prompt is.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. A lot of writers really hate having to face a blank page and create something from nothing. Some people tend to be good self-starters. Others need a little nudge. A writing prompt can do that by suggesting topics or routes to explore.
In the creative writing workshops I teach, I provide writing prompts in a number of ways. In the more structured classes, a memoir-writing seminar or something along those lines, I’ll give prescriptive prompts for everyone to follow. Like: write an essay about a time in your life in which you were absolutely monstrous, the very worst version of yourself. Everyone participates in this kind of assignment, so we can all compare how we describe ourselves in a moment of extreme stress.
For my more general, free-for-all seminars, for each upcoming week I’ll provide several short prompts in case anyone needs them. They’re entirely optional. A majority of these writers are working on their own short stories or novels and use their time to get feedback on those. But some like a little nudge, so I’ll give it to them with a prompt like, “Here’s a first line: She walked into the room, conscious that every eye was upon her. Keep going from there.” Or I’ll give them something like, Write an account with plenty of sensory detail about what trick-or-treating was like when you were a kid.
Do your students use these prompts? Or are they mostly interested in their own ideas?
Sometimes they do! I’m always astonished when it happens. The trick-or-treating one came to mind because one of my writers took off with it and wrote this really poignant essay about the Halloween they realized she was too old to go out begging for candy, yet she went through with it anyway because she knew the experience meant a lot to her newly-divorced father who didn’t get to see her that often…it was a little heartbreaker of a story.
So yeah, I give these prompts, and sometimes the writers use them and come up with something much grander than I ever had in mind when I sat down to write them up in the weekly seminar email.
Your first question was about how this novel arose from a writing prompt. If we want to be picky, though, all my erotic novels have come from prompts. My publisher, Peter Schutes, will reach out to me from time to time and say, Hey, if you have any interest in any of these topics, I’m creating anthologies for them. Then he’ll list, I don’t know, college athletic teams, guys who do dirty jobs like you’d see on that Mike Rowe program, truck drivers, that kind of stuff. The novels I did before were from broad suggestions like, vintage college dorm hookups, hustlers. He wanted one about gardening and said maybe write about a fussy old orchid collector, and I turned that into The Most Dangerous Flower.
So what was different about the prompt for this story?
It was the first prompt that Peter Schutes gave me that had me saying, no, absolutely not, this is the most irksome request I’ve ever heard. What happened is that last year I was scheduled to appear on a podcast about my previous science fiction novella, Journey’s End. I loved that book, loved writing it, but my stomach was in knots at the prospect of the podcast. Then, at a moment of peak stress, Peter Schutes emailed me and said, Hey, if you’d like to write another science fiction novel, could you write one set on a highway?
I was in a mood, so my first response was, fuck no. Then I spent the rest of the afternoon stomping around in my mind in a high dudgeon, thinking, what the hell kind of science fiction story takes place on a highway? Dumb writing prompt. I’m definitely turning this one down. Then my brain started to think, what kind of science fiction story would take place on a highway? Did the highway have to be on Earth? Where was this highway going? Who was traveling on the highway?
There’s a mental game writers play where they ask themselves questions about a scenario to create a story, and I didn’t even realize I was playing it until I had a fully visualized image in my head of two men on a silent planet, treading carefully along a broken, ancient stone highway, underneath a purple sky. And it was from that image that I wrote A Globe, Granite Underfoot. I told Peter that afternoon that sure, I’d do it. I was in, whole-heartedly.
That title of yours sounds like something Heinlein or Asimov would come up with.
Yeah! I agree! About a chapter in, I wanted to find a title, so I started looking around for literary quotations about journeys. The one that struck me most was by Robert Louis Stevenson, who talked about how he travels specifically to endure hardship, to feel the globe hard and granite underfoot, basically because it reminds him how good he has it otherwise at home. And that fit.
And Stevenson wrote adventure books like Treasure Island, which I know had a big influence on you as a kid.
Absolutely. The discovery seemed very, what’s the word? Propitious. I loved books like Treasure Island growing up. Those big adventures. And that’s what this story is. A tale about two men having an adventure they didn’t necessarily ask for.
With fucking.
With a lot of fucking.
But the Stevenson thing. I can intuit how it influenced the language of this story, which is…I don’t want to say old fashioned, but…
The language is definitely more old-fashioned than in my other stories. High toned, you might say.
Let me explain what the story’s about, so I can address that a little more in depth. A Globe, Granite Underfoot is the story of two men from an archaeological expedition who have been stranded on a planet that’s called Plum. An entire team of people landed on the planet expecting it to be deserted of everything but plant life. They’re researching an ancient, extinct race known only as the Salix, who once occupied Plum and built a big stone highway on it. The researchers want to know why.
Then, their first night, someone dies. The team hears terrible sounds that tell them they’re not the only living beings on Plum. Our two heroes, Ayden and Amodeo, undertake a scouting expedition. When they return to camp, they are confronted with evidence of a bloody massacre and a hasty retreat: the rest of the expedition has taken the shuttle and returned to space, abandoning them.
The rest of the story is about what they do to survive, and how close they become during their ordeal.
Ayden, that’s the younger one who narrates the story, has a background that’s almost straight out of the headlines.
Ayden grew up in a large terrorist cell that’s taken over a significant portion of North and South Carolina. They call themselves the Carolina Free States. They’re extremists, yes, based on today’s ‘sovereign citizen’ conspiracy theorists. Some years before the story, the Carolina Free States activists bombed the sitting state legislatures and most of the large cities in the Carolinas, drove out most of the population, and exist by moving from bunker to underground bunker until the United Settlements government finally rousted them out, when Ayden was in his teens.
Ayden’s the youngest member of his family, so while most of them are sentenced to hard labor for their crimes, he’s really done nothing wrong. Someone takes pity on him and offers to enlist him in the Scholastic Brotherhood, a group fascinated by ancient ruins and civilizations. They’re monks, but have no religious connections. Secular monks. They offer him a chance to start over, give him a new temporary name—Brother Sorrowful—and really give him an opportunity to find out what he can be when he’s not overshadowed by his family. The idea is that when he finally figures out that, he can rename himself for good.
By the time Ayden goes on the expedition in the story, he’s in his mid-twenties and is desperately trying to behave and speak and write like the other monks, which is why the story uses the language it does.
The older Amodeo is supposed to be the leader of the expedition, so as a reader, I expected him to take the lead in everything. But Ayden’s got a skill set of his own that makes him Amodeo’s equal, though there’s two or three decades of difference in their age.
Amodeo has a lot of book learnin’. Ayden has a lot of practical survival knowledge born of years evading government enforcers. They make a good team together.
I laughed at one part where Ayden’s trying to suggest solutions to their problem and says something like, “Everybody knows how to make bombs!” and Amodeo has to patiently explain that no, everybody does not know how to make bombs.
Ayden grew up way, way on the fringes of everything and has insights that so-called normal United Settlements citizens don’t and can’t have. Now he’s trying to make his own connections, order his own life the way he wants, make his own family. His whole perspective is queer.
Yes. The romance between the two men is very sweet, and doesn’t follow the traditional daddy/boy trope because in this scenario, they’re equals. Also, I wanted to ask: is this the first serodiscordant relationship in your writing?
Thank you for noticing. Yes, it is.
Let me just say that a serodiscordant relationship is one in which one partner is HIV-positive and the other is not. Thanks to PrEP and a growing awareness that U=U, this type of pairing is less fraught and feared than in the past, though we've still a long way to go.
I basically had this entire story mapped out in my head within a day, after I gave into that writing prompt. If you go back to that podcast I did last year, you can hear me enthusing about it with the excitement of a kid with a new toy. But I had one problem in that I needed to provide Ayden and Amodeo a reason for urgently wanting to reunite with the crew who left them on the planet. It wasn’t until midway through that I realized Amedeo carried an infectious disease much like HIV that could be treated, but not cured.
While in the story's timeline he might be all right this week and next week and for the weeks after that, they can't hunker down and stay on this isolated planet indefinitely. The longer he—I mean Amodeo—goes without treatment, the more prone he is to secondary infections. Amodeo’s trying to be stoic about it, but Ayden realizes that it’s urgent they be evacuated. It lights a fire under his butt.
I don’t think Amodeo has actual HIV. I would hope by the time in the future when this story is set, that virus would be a thing of the past. Whatever future infection he has might as well be HIV, though. I was glad not only to have the opportunity to help normalize a serodiscordant sexual relationship within the context of a science fiction story, but to assure people that there are far, far scarier things out there than a positive partner.
Before I leave the story altogether, I want to comment on the ending: was it intended to be so ambiguous?
Yes. Without giving anything away, even though I wrote it, I find the ending is immensely satisfying…
Yes.
…but it doesn’t answer every question.
A sequel, maybe?
Maybe! There was actually a lot I had to leave out of this story that I wish I could expand into a full-length novel. I had ideas about Ayden’s role in the Carolina Free States leadership being betrayed, how his survival skills accelerated his acceptance in to the Brotherhood…all kinds of avenues.
I’m going to make you wrap up with a statement about why you were inspired to donate all proceeds of this printing to The Trevor Project.
In the current political atmosphere, I think it’s important for the LGBTQ+ population to support causes that look out for our own. Particularly those looking out for the most marginalized and for younger people. Ayden is in his mid-twenties, but the feel of this particular story is similar to a young adult novel. That is, of someone with not a lot of life experience who’s thrown in over his head and finds he has the resilience and smarts to survive.
So I declared my intention to donate my advance and royalties for this edition to The Trevor Project, the nonprofit that focuses on intervention and suicide prevention for LGBTQ+ youth. The current US administration had just removed funding for suicide prevention options for our population when I started the story in mid-2025, and The Trevor Project became more necessary and relevant than ever.
Peter Schutes agreed that the idea was a good one, and declared his intention to match my donation with one of his own. So every purchase of a copy will fund a good and essential cause.
I think that’s an excellent way to tie this up. Thank you.
No, thank you for the questions! It’s easier for me to respond conversationally about a work with someone who’s read it, than it is to muster up an essay about Why You Should Read This Thing I Did.
Comin' Down the Road is available from bookshop.org, a site that supports local, independent bookstores, Amazon, and Barnes and Noble, or you may ask your local bookstore to order a copy for you.
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Hey! If you've made it this far, chances are you enjoy my sexual memoir pieces. May I suggest you invest in one of my works of sexy erotica?
If you enjoy vintage-style collections of hot, retro-themed gay fiction penned by some great authors of man on man erotica, please consider supporting me with a purchase of either Dirty Dorms & Fresh Men (which features my story Sleazy A), Hustlers, Hoboes, & Outlaws (which features my story On the Block), Same Sex: Gay Science Fiction Clone Erotica (which features my story Journey's End), Come Young and Old: Gay Age Gap Erotica, (which features my story The Good Dad), Mowing & Blowing: Gay Sex in the Garden (which features my story The Most Dangerous Flower), or Comin' Down the Road: Queer Science Fiction on the Highways & Byways (which features my short novel A Globe, Granite Underfoot).
Sleazy A is also available in epub format from Smashwords and in Kindle format from Amazon.
On the Block is available as an ebook from Amazon and Smashwords.
The publishing house for these projects can be found at Peterschutes.com . There are already many vintage-style pulps on sale over there, with more to come. If you sign up for the site's newsletter, you’ll be eligible to receive a free eBook.
Supporting my erotic fiction helps me maintain this blog and the erotic memoir pieces I've produced here for over a decade.
