I had never been to New York. I had never hailed a cab. I was enough of a country bumpkin to think making a reservation at the Travelodge conveniently located across the street from Grand Central would be perfect.

I had also never been with my own kind before — other writers of gay male fiction. At the time, it was all I wrote; it was how I handled not yet knowing enough to understand what was up with my gender identity and sexuality, so it took up more of the creative brainspace than it does now. I had no idea whether I would be overtly snubbed, prodded for explanations, or simply ignored.

What happened was so much better than any of that: I was simply accepted. Sean, Velvet Mafia’s publisher/managing editor, seemed to recognize my terminal shyness and expertly introduced me around. Although the response was often “wait — you write for Velvet Mafia?”, what followed was universally either a question about which story had been mine or an utterly unconcerned acceptance. It might not seem so mind-blowing now, but this was years ago, and I was being ripped apart by the twin tyrants of conforming to the only community I had ever known and my burgeoning awakening as an author. For me, right then, that was huge.

Nothing outrageous really happened. We walked from the reading to a bar, where Sean bought me a drink when he found out it was my birthday. We shot the shit, as authors do. It was a couple of hours of like-minded people hanging out. That’s how I would describe it now. At the time, though, it went like this: I walked down a New York City street in a pack of gay authors! And then we went into a gay bar and they let me in! And my publisher bought me a drink! And other authors talked to me! There was red velvet everywhere and fish in light fixtures and a giant video wall!

(Yes, Velvet Mafia, I still remember the light fixtures in that bar. It was that important to me.)

By now, you see how such a little event, by someone else’s standards, could have been life-changing for me at the time. And it was. At the end of the night, I went back to my Travelodge room — which I had to get to by walking across the roof, and which had a permanently open window with a pillow stuffed into it that was only slightly ameliorated by the space heater (it was November) — and called my then-girlfriend. I cried. I slept for about three hours. I got on a red-eye flight back to Boston and sat through the day’s conference sessions on administrative business with a huge grin on my face and drank enough caffeine to vibrate the entire cross-country flight home.

I wasn’t just coasting on a travel high, either. I didn’t get a full night’s sleep for over two weeks. I slept with a notebook in the bed to capture the ideas that would wake me hourly. The simple act of acceptance and the taste of what it would be like to actually have a social circle and a set of colleagues that were appropriate to my creative life busted my head wide open.

A lot of wonderful things have happened in my artistic life, but most of them wouldn’t have happened without Velvet Mafia. I completely understand and fully support the decision to shutter the site, and I will always smile when its name pops up in pixels in the years to come (as it surely will).

The site is up until the end of May. Please hop in my time machine and enjoy some of the very first pieces of fiction I got published. Let me know what you think of them!

Banging — Issue 11
In The Trenches — Issue 15
The Belt — Issue 21 (reprinted in Best Gay Romance 2008)

I’ve also set up a blog post there specifically requesting book recommendations, so please share!

Here are a few of the things you can find around here:

–A complete list of my works which have appeared in anthologies and collections. (I’ll be making the list more complete soon.)

–A new blog post (one of many to come).

–Broken tags, slightly wonky CSS, and other bits of tattered code lovingly handcrafted by someone who knows more about writing fictional robots than understanding chmod, FTP permissions, and config files. Hopefully, my doddering will be entertaining at best and only mildly annoying at worst.

Until I get some more content up (which will be starting soon and recurring frequently), you might want to check out an unconventional essay on gender, a tongue-in-cheek essay about robot sex, or some free erotic cyberpunk/biopunk fiction set in Las Vegas.

Comments about the new site are welcome (please be gentle). Heck, comments about anything at all are welcome, as long as you aren’t a Nigerian prince seeking assistance to access your funds or passing along a great deal on male enhancement medications.

Thanks for stopping by, have a look around, and come back soon!

Predictably, I was immediately deluged by retweet and favoriting notifications. Unpredictably (to me, anyway), I then received a constant ongoing wave of replies — most of which were negative. Few approached it like a debate; most just offered up variations of “you’re wrong.” I was even called an “unamerican ignoramus.” At the same time, a smaller but still vocal contingent thanked me, praised me, or otherwise offered positive feedback.

I found myself quickly falling into the trap of placing more weight on the negative replies, especially the angry ones and the single tweet that called me names. I started second-guessing what I had tweeted in the first place. Never mind that I had really thought about it before I sent it on to Mr. Olbermann, knowing he might pick it up. Never mind that I wasn’t second-guessing myself based on any facts anyone had offered. Never mind that favoriting and retweeting were most likely positive and far outnumbered the cranky responses. It was intensely uncomfortable to be disagreed with so vigorously and often angrily, and that obliterated rational thought at first.

I immediately decided not to reply to anything. While a few tweets did offer reasonable dialogue that would have been rewarding, I felt far too overwhelmed by the response and didn’t trust myself not to reply to the asshats once I got started. So I just sat there and watched the replies roll in.

Within just a few minutes, I understood how otherwise-reasonable celebrities trolled on Twitter could lash out. I was already struggling with how to even use Twitter while under such a deluge. I can’t imagine what it would be like to suffer such an unpredictable reply feed constantly. No wonder celebrity discourse often dies out swiftly there.

Since I’m not a celebrity, though, the twitstorm was over in less than an hour. Occasional comments trickled in for another day or so, and…that was it. Nothing horrible happened. I didn’t pick up trolls eager to prod me with sharp sticks daily for weeks or months or years (don’t think this doesn’t happen — some trolls are awfully long-lived beasties, and like STDs, you don’t have to be famous to pick one up). More than the lesson of “be careful who you tweet at, lest they boost you to a level of notoriety you’re unprepared for,” this was the lesson for me: People yelled at me on the internet, attacked me, called me names, and then a new day started and nobody, including me, cared.

You’ve probably figured out by now that I’m shouldering some pretty heavy baggage into cyberspace. While I like my discussion and debate the way I like my sex — vigorous and free of constraint* — there’s still a part of me that withers and wants to die when confronted with non-fact-based, character-questioning arguments. Before K.O. unintentionally K.O.’d my Twitter notifications, I’d been thinking about how I could balance blogging with keeping myself perfectly free of conflict. But I knew it was the keeping myself perfectly free of conflict — innocuous tweets, bland webpages — that would keep you utterly uninterested in anything I had to say. Sanitizing my content constituted lying to you. That, I could not uphold.

I am not an uncontroversial person. I am a fairly radical free-speech advocate, particularly in art; I don’t believe that it should be forced to scrub itself of intentional or inferred sexism, racism, immorality, et cetera. I’m omnisexual, pangendered, and polyamorous (definitions on request, or check out an upcoming blog post about all of that). I’m into every letter of BDSM and I am, in many ways, old-school Leather. I’m a spiritual atheist with a healthy respect for all faiths. Socialism doesn’t look like the end of the world to me. I don’t like olives in my martinis and I sometimes like Coldplay.

There. Now you know! Fire away!

Being unexpectedly deluged with angry tweets was not pleasant, and I doubt my heartrate would stay at fireplace-and-a-good-book levels if it happened again, but what this one little experience with retweeting taught me is that vicious disagreement is not as bad as it once was for me. I grew up, metaphorically, in LiveJournal forums; I lost many personal friends by taking stands on issues they not only disagreed with but ridiculed. It’s the way of fandom sometimes. And for me, at that point stuck in a small town and aware that, truly, my online social network was all I had, the bitter endings of those relationships cut very deeply indeed.

But that’s not me anymore. Somehow, I’ve become known in my household as “not conflict-averse,” which confused me at first until I remembered that “conflict” doesn’t always mean “arguments where your stomach hurts” — at least, not to me. Not anymore. Sometimes conflict is downright fun. More often, conflict is absolutely necessary.

I have things to tell you. I want to hear what you have to tell me. Those two things are vastly more important than the slings and arrows of my past. Therefore: Welcome to my blog. Please have a look around and comment on whatever you like, however you like. I’m excited to see what we make of each other.

*That’s not to say free of restraint, necessarily — but that’s another post.

Therefore: Here we go! A full retooling of this blog/website is underway. April will bring complete information about all my publications, a regular blogging schedule, and story prizes for two very patient contest winners. This blog will be swapped over to kalcobalt.com proper, replacing the old website infrastructure completely. Then, over the summer, I’ll be adding multimedia content, more contests (with faster prize fulfillment…), lots of freebies, and general mayhem.

The subheading of this blog still remains true — I’m just a geeky author sorting through the intricacies of WordPress, armed with nothing but the codex, an O’Reilly guide, some very helpful friends, and a few minutes here and there. I promise that there will be some bumps along the way, but I also promise to make it worth your while to see what I can manage around here from time to time. Your interest and your patience will be, I hope, amply rewarded!

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Site updates:

• “Pretty permalinks” now work! Check it out as you navigate the site: the links look kind of like you’d expect. I grew grey hair making this happen (see the subtitle of this blog for details about that).
• On the downside, this has somehow broken my tag clouds in weird and inconsistent ways. I’ll get right on it during my next down-the-rabbit-hole programming excursion. Send beer.

New stuff to read:

• Another tale of robot love from yours truly, “The Digital O,” is now out in Circlet Press’s Best Erotic Fantasy in digital and physical formats.
• There’s new nonfiction from me fortnightly at Sexis Magazine for your free and instant reading pleasure. If you fancy sex-related tech and/or the intersection between the sexual and gastronomic appetites, check it out!

Coming soon:

• Contest stories! Two winners of customized ficlets will see their tales in this space soon.
• Whatever you want. Comment on what you’d like to see here and I’ll see what I can do!

To non-Coyotecon attendees: Welcome! I’m glad to have you here. If you’re curious what this Coyotecon thing is all about, feel free to head on over and take a look. It’s all online, it’s all free, and registration continues throughout the month-long conference.

To everybody: Sorry about the dots in the blank lines. I’m still learning WordPress… Fixed!

It seems like almost every writer I run into is a cat person, and why not? Well, there are problems in this relationship, to be sure: stinky litter boxes throw us out of our reveries, “play with me NOW” moments happen just as we’re resolving that troublesome plotline, and…ahem…”digestive problems” threaten the technological tools of our trade daily. With all that interference, what’s the use of having feline companions? Here are five invaluable lessons my furballs have taught me over the years.

When you feel it, do it! When my cats ran like crazy all over the house at top speed, my parents called it “thunder and lightning,” thanks to the sound and the occasional destructive nature. Now my household calls it “the rips” – look out carpet, clothing, or anything that might get shredded. We writers call this behavior “in the zone,” and cats are masters at it. We should all be so lucky to find our writing sessions as engaging and exciting.

If you’re too tired to go on, sleep. I’m a night owl by nature and a morning person out of necessity, so the urge to stay up until two even if I’ve been up since six is often a strong one, especially when I’m placating the muse. Every so often, when it’s real inspiration striking hard, it’s worth stumbling into walls the next morning – but more often than not, it’s guilt and responsibility keeping me awake, and you know that’s never given a cat insomnia. Ever.

Ask for – no, demand – what you need. I’m not sure “wants” exist for cats. Whether it’s the need for water or the need for water out of the kitchen faucet at a slow drip, you and I both know a cat pursues it with a singleminded zest most authors could only wish to train upon their career. This goes for relationships, too: if a cat isn’t given what it needs, it walks away, even if that means being a much more solitary animal. I’ve been guilty of trying to make relationships work that didn’t support my writing because writing is so solitary, but taking the cat approach and only engaging the people who give you what you need is much more rewarding in the long run.

Exploring rules! Sure, it enrages me when one of my cats plays “the floor is lava” and proceeds to walk all over the top shelf of my bookcase where my contributor’s copies are kept – you know, the shelf I didn’t think any feline could possibly reach no matter what the gymnastics. But in the end I have to admire the intensity of the desire to check out everything, everywhere, sometimes at great risk to dignity and household peacefulness. A cat curious about how something smells will not be easily deterred, like a good writer with a niggling idea.

Imagination is way more important than reality. When a cat decides that not only does the sparkleball need to die, it is actively getting away and must be caught again and again and rabbit-kicked for good measure and rolled upon and thrown into the air and batted into submission, that cat is being the best kind of Method actor. I’m a Method writer, and you can be, too – putting your whole self into what’s on the page can result in a much higher-quality page (and sometimes a higher-qualty self).

Oh, and one last bonus tip: Snuggling cures all.

Writing and Selling Short Works: May 2, 1PM Pacific – transcript
Artificial Intelligence and Sexuality: May 9, 1PM Pacific — transcript pending
Gust Blog — What Writers Can Learn From Cats: May 15, right here
Method Writing: May 21, 4PM Pacific in Anasazi — register here
Gust Blog — Anger As Fuel: May 22, right here
Writing GLBTQ Fiction: May 22, 4PM Pacific in Loki — register here

1. I will be updating around once a week. More, and I’ll blow up your RSS feed; less, and it won’t be worth the blood, sweat, and tears this wanna-be programmer put into installing WordPress while learning about FTP on the fly.
2. There will be lots of free stuff. Fiction! Nonfiction! Contests! I’m happy you’re here, and even happier to bribe you to come back. It won’t just be text, either; video, photos (both documentary-style and artsy), and whatever other shiny things I can think of will all show up here.
3. There will also be lots of up-to-date info. Eventually, the website will stay nice and current too, but for now, this is where it’s at. Stalkers, take note!
4. Plenty of discussion and interaction. I hate just posting information into a void. (That would be why the website itself is so slow to get updated…) I’m not a delicate flower, either: disagree with me. I like it! I live by a little creed King Whedon once wrote: “Viewpoints other than yours may also be valid.”
5. Eventually…the unexpected. Once I get this thing up and running smoothly, there will be hidden stuff all over. Don’t knock yourself out yet — just getting the blog going has taken all my geek power for the foreseeable future. I’ll post a little warning once I have a few things tucked away for the curious.
6. Finally: suggestions are welcome. Wanna see something here? Let me know! I’ll take it under advisement. Just as soon as I figure out these comment thingies…