Hi guys, we have James Comins stopping by with his tour for Fool School, James has a great post about writing gay characters for kids, there’s a tasty excerpt and there’s a brilliant giveaway. So enjoy the post and click that Rafflecopter link <3 ~Pixie~

Fool School

James Comins

In the year of our Lord 1040, fourteen-year-old aspiring jester Tom is en route to Bath to begin his studies in the art of being a Fool, following in the footsteps of his father, and his father before him.

Along the way he meets Malcolm, a fire-haired boy with eyes green as forest glass. A Scotsman who’s escaped from the ravages of the usurper Macbeth, Malcolm elects to join Tom at school. Though the journey to Bath is hazardous, it pales in comparison to what they face at the austere and vicious Fool School, where all is not as it seems. A court jester must aim to be the lowest rung on the ladder of life, and the headmaster will not abide pride.

As they journey through life’s hardships together, Tom and Malcolm find they only have each other to depend upon.

Writing Gay Characters For Kids

by James Comins

Hi there. I’ve been asked to write a guest column for MM Good Book Reviews, and I’m in kind of a weird position.

It’s a kids book, but it got published as romance. This seems weird to me.

Normally I write scifi/fantasy for kids, and often younger kids. It’s odd, then, that my first editor-published novel (and check out my self-published erv at Smashwords [link: James Comins Smashwords] !) is chock-full of sex. To me it’s still as much Young Adult as romance. Romance is a category I don’t know the first thing about, although I suppose Twilight is a romance, too, and an ex once roped me into watching the movie of that, and I read Fallen by Lauren Kate, so there’s some crossover between romance and YA. Still, the fact is I didn’t set out to write a romance.

In my mind, I was writing about religion. For kids.

See, Fool School was my examination about what a culturally Jewish kid is supposed to think about his unexplored Catholic half. That’s what I was trying to do. What’s the Catholic church all about? What’s it, in Stephen Fry’s words, for?

That was what started me writing it in the first place.

The book opens with priestly molestation, the scandal of the new millennium for sure, and, I figure, probably the scandal of the old millennium, too. I mean, it must have been going on, between the Magdalene laundries and the absolute authority of powerful men and the giant buildings full of secret Dan Brown rooms with hidden doors and whatnot. It must have. Get enough white men in one place, give them carte blanche and unlimited power and total secrecy, and eventually you get fucked-up sex parties. Guaranteed. Goering, priests, Thatcherites, it doesn’t matter. After all, there is a brotherhood of men. No man has ever turned in another for sex crimes.

The book goes on to explore other parts of the Catholic story: What it means to pray the rosary, medieval citizens’ tendency to constantly see visions (probably the lack of television), the presence of angels and saints, and, again, the vae victus attitude of authority figures in a time of the divine right of kings.

How amusingly controversial, I thought! A kids’ book about religion. Told the way I think the story happened, at the time of the Norman Invasion: Nary a glimpse of doubt in the absolute rightness of the Catholic church. None of this pesky hindsight business, no mention of church reform or schism, nobody questioning the supremacy of priests, nobody doubting the Pope, no hipstery every-religion-is-equal crap, the way you read in books that have a modern agenda. So subversive, so historically accurate, I am!

Then stuff started happening. In the story. While I was writing it. The characters, who were supposed to behave themselves and tell a story about Catholicism, started to fall in love. They do that sometimes. Characters. I didn’t have them do it on purpose.

I mean, it wasn’t a problem or anything. The story hurried along. I couldn’t even slow it down. It was just, this was a different story than the one I’d been planning on.

So now it was a gay Catholic love story. For kids. I blame Andrew Sullivan and his Sunday posts on The Dish. He’s the Andrew the book is co-dedicated to, by the way.

As soon as the fact started to become apparent that this was more than just a book about Catholicism, I took five to figure out how the gay part of it should go. I knew right away it was something I wanted to talk about; I’ve known gay guys since I was five, including my daycare provider’s husband. Most were very cool and good friends. On the other hand, I’ve been stalked and (TW) sexually assaulted by gay men more than once. That’s another story for another day. The thing that I’ve found, the one real recurring streak, is that every gay man who came of age before being gay in the U.S. became fashionable or legal is crazy. They are. Decades of repressing your sexuality and identity will do that to you. It’s the one universal.

And I’d been reading a lot about how the priesthood had been a cozy vantage point for all sorts of sexual inverts, most prominently gay men and pedophiles. As gay men have become accepted, the priesthood has become increasingly cleft between these two groups that used to be lumped together but have since become miles distant.

Suddenly, the molestation scene that opens the book became a symbol of this horrible but very important division in the world’s oldest church.

Being gay, it turns out, is normal and awesome, a central piece of human nature. It’s been our culture of homophobia and evasive nonsense that pushed gay Catholics toward the relative secrecy of the priesthood, where pedophiles were also hiding, and, one wonders, who else as well.

What would it have been like to be gay in the Middle Ages? Would the Roman sexual permissiveness have persisted into the time of the Norman Conquest, or had the repression begun against the later heretics like the Cathars already taken hold?

Dunno. Really. I let the story take its course. You can read all the background material you like before you write, but love tends to find a way, and Tom and Malcolm were in love. Sometimes the most important thing for a writer is to keep yer big mouth shut and let the characters live their lives. My gay guys face no Inquisition, find no exposure. Mostly, they’re two boys on planet Earth, and that’s enough for them to be.

Is it a kids book?

I think so. It’s written to show that being gay was tough back then, and is tough today, but love can break through our screwed up society sometimes. It’s written specifically for kids who might have been taught to hate, but are ready to let go of their parents’ or pastor’s dumb ideas. It’s written for girls who want to see through a gay kid’s eyes, and for boys who’ve read so many books with straight cis white male protagonists that they’re in danger of getting stuck thinking that’s the one lens the world can be seen through.

It’s a kids book, although I’d be delighted if grown-ups read it, too. There’s swashbuckling and fistfights and King Arthur and torture and religion and lots and lots of gay sex. I hope you like it.

Excerpt

Malcolm is really struggling as we get through a less-well-rehearsed version of Bird on a Bough. I can see him failing. As the merry song closes, I shout: “Who will offer up a good meal and a pair of mugs of second small to some famine-hungry fools?” My Malcolm gives me a grateful look, and men slide down split-log benches, making room for us, and a pair of chicken drumsticks and bowls of harvest stew with beans and parsnips are handed down, followed by drinks. “To our hosts! May your health always match your generosity!” I exclaim, one of Papa’s lines, he’d use it in response to both kindness and parsimoniousness.

A big beard faces us and the man behind it says, “Did I ever tell you of the time I saw the White Stag?”

Malcolm and I look at each other. We’ve never met this man before. Malcolm is leaning into my shoulder in unmanaged affection, the gypsy cage is turning him into a “J’t’aime” drunk, that’s what Papa calls it. Why do I dwell on Papa’s words just now? So I can overcome them, triumph over them, invent my own in their place. I must eject my papa from my mind. I am not his just now, I’m an inventor of new words.

“Nae, ye’ve not,” says Malcolm through a mouthful of beans.

“Didn’t your mama teach you not to talk with food in your mouth?” a man across the table says with sarcasm, pretend-scolding.

“Me mama was eight foot at t’shoulder and belched gaseous clouds upon us at the breaking of fast, ye professor of iniquity,” Malcolm shouts at the man, getting much sniggering in response.

“The White Stag?” I say.

“Don’t listen to Simon, his head’s full of yoo-nee-corns,” another says to us.

“Nay, listen, if you would,” says the bearded man called Simon. “You know of the White Stag, do-you-not? Found thither,” he throws a hand at the bay. “In the forests of Dean, never in the same spot twice. For ‘tis said there’s only one White Stag, and it steps out from the land of Never-Grows-Old when there’s need for it. Its hide draws a man’s sight away, so that it cannot be seen unless it chooses, and when the hide is worn, the one wearing it cannot be seen. Its hooves make no print, and it leaves no trail. When it’s caught, it can call on the good small men to free it, but if you’ve laid no scratch on it they’ll pay you wishes for bargain. And I.” The man plushes his beard, tousling it from under the chin, strokes it smooth. “I. I saw the one. I saw it meself. For one moment, it was there, standing atop a bit o’ land in sight of me very eyes. I would have chased it but I had a woman on the knee, and in my weak mind, that came first.” He chuckles heavily and pours beer into his mouth through a leonine mustache. “And yet.” His eyes un-focus, he stares out into the morning fields. “Yet I wonder to meself, day to day, how life should have been if I’d heeded the White Stag. What did it mean for me to see? Was I meant to be a man of forests, of mountains-mountains!-and not a poor man? Some days I wake and there, before me, past the sunrise, I believe I see a different land, a land where the sun never sets, where our eyes never need close, a land where one may live and never die. And I shut my eyes, and I can see it so clearly. So, so clearly. I see trees with leaves as wide as this”-He spreads his hands-“and water that falls not from clouds but from a great hand that passes over the sky, pouring from a fine silver ewer. And there’s mists just beyond sight, such that once you’ve seen the Goodlands, you can never leave, for you cannot find the way. And you heel to the good, as a dog to its master, and never more do wrong in the world. And all this the White Stag gave me. A visionary creature, it is. Spectral. Should you ever chance to see it”-His brown eyes roll to me-“follow it,” he whispers through cracked lips.

About James

JAMES COMINS is incapable of writing about himself in the third person. His future autobiography will probably be titled, “The Man Who Groaned His Way Toward Death.” He writes stories for children and adults.

Born down the street from Stephen King, he now divides his time between Denver and Seattle.

JAMES COMINS can be found at:

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