It was more an act of survival than a choice. So why a suspenser for my first outing as a novelist? I was in such emotional turmoil when I began that I grasped at anything that comforted me as I made the leap.
And by the time we landed I felt like I was a whole person again. She witnessed me write “The End” to my first novel. And the less I cared a fiddle about…who? Four and a half months later I nudged a complete stranger sitting next to me on a plane returning from Paris to New York, beaming from ear to ear. I was writing my self into a healthier state of mind, and loving it. And that’s when I started constructing the rest of that skeleton, and then fleshing the body out, sentence by sentence. Never been that low and dark before in my life. I got as far as the lower half of a skeleton of plot before the heat between us turned icy and rather poisonous. But first, he told me, I had to write a book. I was rather hot and heavy with a man who is now a successful M/M romance writer, and this beautiful man filled my head with a glorious fantasy of ripping it up together at some annual event he called GRL. No, I was led by my lower anatomy toward writing The Next. Aside from my general literary ignorance, I’d always been a slow reader let alone a slow writer.
Truth is, I’d never even known that M slash M defined a genre of fiction at all. I’ve a confession: I didn’t start writing because I was enamored with M/M fiction. The second biggest difference is that I don’t shy away from the eroticism. The most dramatic difference is that the protagonist in The Next isn’t bound to his apartment by a broken leg in a cast, but rather by a self-induced, torturous psychological handcuffing, and the novel, of course, chronicles his journey to this freedom as much as the capturing of the bogey. It’s less a whodunit and more of a suspenseful how’s-he-gonna-get-‘em plot, slathered with a large, creamy dollop of romance. A man who is stuck in his Manhattan apartment gets to looking out his window and thinks he’s identified a gruesome crime across the courtyard. Those who’ve read The Next thus far have dubbed it “the gay Rear Window,” and they’re spot on. Rafe Haze here, rapping on my debut novel, The Next, hitting the public April 23rd.
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