What writer doesn’t like to read as well? As a child I feasted on fairytale stories subconsciously altering the heroines into other boys like me.

In my head I was the handsome prince rescuing another prince from the clutches of the evil queen or slaying dragons so that we could be together.

As I grew older and hit puberty, I became more conscious that the books I was reading lacked characters that were like me. I was about twelve when I first heard the word homosexual, but knew instantly that it meant me. But even before that, I was aware that the books I was reading, mostly science fiction by this point, lacked characters that I could identify with.

I loved the stories of Arthur C Clarke, and it was only much later that I learned that he was gay.

But there are no gay characters in Clarke’s fiction, and now when I read them, they appear so curiously sexless.

Reaching my twenties (and beginning to develop writing ambitions of my own), I discovered that there were books with gay characters such as Genet, Baldwin, and Forster, but within “popular” fiction there was still a dearth of LGBTQ characters. There were still no gay stories.

It would seem there is a now a multitude of MM fiction available, but I still find myself dissatisfied.

Much of contemporary gay fiction features characters that bear no resemblance to the sort of gay man I am, or any that I have ever met. I have never aspired to write “literature,” and don’t ask me to define what “literature” is, but I wanted to write gay stories that real LGBTQ people would recognise and were not just anodyne cartoons whining about some lost love or the other.

Most of what I write is queer fiction with a paranormal twist, but I think my writing is more Scooby Doo than Stephen King.

When I first conceived Ghosts of Oaklight Hall, I half imagined that I would write it as a series of stories linked by characters that go around the country solving mysteries just like they do in Scooby Doo.

I want my characters to have fun, and comedy is a quality that doesn’t seem to feature in much of today’s queer fiction. I have plenty of such gay stories in my head and know that if I don’t write them, nobody else can, right?

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