Today’s Pride 2020 Interview is with author Jeff Baker
Hi, Jeff! I hope you’re staying safe and healthy during the current pandemic lockdowns. What are you doing to stay creatively motivated in these unusual times?
I have to remind myself that I actually have the time to write and I shouldn’t waste it. I turn sixty years old this summer, and I keep remembering that some of my favorite writers (like Lovecraft and Henry Kuttner) didn’t make it to fifty! So, I just knuckle down and write. It helps that I’ve been doing this a while and also that I’m posting progress reports on my blog for all to see.
Since June is Pride Month, I have to ask: how has being bisexual influenced or informed your art/craft?
I’m Bisexual, and while I write about Bi/Gay characters, I am a writer first, not just a Bi writer. But being Bi does give me a voice of authority when I do stories like the science-fictional tall tales set in Demeter’s Bar, the fictional gay bar I write a series about. Also, I write a supernatural series about a Gay teenager who calls himself Bryce Going, who runs across the country, not wanting to be a gay kid in a boy’s home in 1976, after his Mom walks out on him, so I get to have a little historical perspective as well as this guy’s Gay sensibilities in stories where he runs into strange and spooky things along the way. In one he wanders into an abandoned diner and talks with the ghost of the victim of a gay-bashing from the 60s, who warns him (vaguely) about AIDS. (“There’s something coming. Something bad. You have to—take precautions.”)
I didn’t realize when I started that series that I was emulating Manly Wade Wellman, a writer I love, but like I said, I’m a writer first.
You’ve been publishing a lot of flash fiction on your website, and you’ve also had work in a number of anthologies (the most recent of which was The Necronomicon of Solar Pons, from Belanger Books). What inspires you? What does your creative process look like?
My creative process is a well-controlled mess! I get an idea and I sort of plot it out and then I start writing on it! I work from a sort of “half-assed outline.” To give you an idea: I write the weekly flash fiction from a picture prompt; the current one is of a big house on the tip of a mountain, which reminded me of something I used to muse on in bed looking over at my radio with the lit station tuner and it reminded me of a big house at night on the edge of a dark cliff and I wondered about a long stairway inside the house just beyond that big lit window, and how it’s a long way down from the edge of the cliff. In other words: sometimes I let my mind ramble and I grab ideas from everywhere. Figuring out what happens next can be the tricky part!
What are you working on now and what do you have coming out soon?
I’m actually working on a mystery story that I should get back to! I have to do some fact-checking, as the mystery is set several centuries earlier. I’m also working on a pulp-adventure-type fantasy set in this world I’ve used before which is a sword-and-planet world with a vaguely Middle-Eastern culture and a pro-LGBT attitude. I figure it was settled by colonists from Earth several millennia earlier (in our far future) and blends science-fiction with some supernatural elements. I’ve written about this World of Three Moons in some of the flash fictions and in a few unfinished stories. The only thing coming out is an interview I did on the Two Gay Geeks podcast which will be up sometime in the near future. Oh, yeah, and I have a column “Boogieman in Lavender” up on the Queer SciFi site around the thirteenth of every month.
That’s part of the process: I’m always working on something.
And finally, where can people find you and your work online?
Besides the Queer SciFi site for the column, I regularly post stories and the like on my blog which is authorjeffbaker.com , and I link everything to my Facebook page: Jeff Baker, Author.
Oh, and, If you’re interested, there’s a fine reading of my story “Something In The Dark” on the December 25, 2018 posting on the “Monsters Out Of the Closet” webpage.
The writer of the “Boogieman in Lavender” column for Queer sci-fi, Jeff Baker is the product of a misspent youth reading comic books and watching TV shows like “Bewitched” and “Night Gallery.” He worked as a “sandwich jock” in a food court, a stand-up comic and a deliveryman before moving to full-time writing. His stories have appeared in Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine and the recent anthology The Necronomicon of Solar Pons among other places. He lives happily with his husband Darryl Thompson in Wichita, Kansas.