Veronica Arch for GLBT Promo: For those not too familiar with yaoi, what can you tell us about it? What drew you to it?
S. A. Payne: Yaoi is a genre of publishing focused on male/male relationships. The term itself is an acronym of the Japanese phrase *ya*ma nashi, *o*chi nashi, *i*mi nashi which means loosely no point, no peak, no meaning. In Japan, it started when fans took published characters who weren’t pairs and paired them up. Similarly in the states fans were ‘slashing’ characters in the same way. With the surge of interest in Japanese anime and manga there has been an import of Japanese yaoi fiction. The great thing is that this has made a somewhat hidden genre far more accessibility.
Today the term has grown broader but some things remain. Yaoi is fiction or art featuring a romantic relationship between two men. What splits yaoi from gay fiction is that yaoi tends to be written by straight women for a straight female audience. There are differences between a yaoi erotic story and a gay erotic story. For example, most of the men in yaoi are pretty or handsome and you’ll only rarely see hairy men, older men or overweight men featured in a story. Yaoi is a fantasy of romance the same way a heterosexual romance novel is pure fantasy about a relationship between men and women. So while several of my readers are gay men, a few lesbians too, the vast majority are straight women.
What drew me to it? Well, I like men. Two hot guys into each other? That sounds like a good time to me. I never connected to the heroines in traditional romance novels. I don’t have a desire to read about heaving breasts or women that need to be saved. I have my own breasts, thank you very much, and I can save myself. I never connected to that. Yaoi fiction simply cuts out that aspect and doubles the hot guy factor. In my book, doubling the hot guy factor makes everything better. .
GP: You have a fabulous calendar available for purchase on your web site. The calendar stemmed from reader demand for the artwork from your stories. How important is the yaoi artwork for you when you are crafting stories?
SP: Thanks for the kind words about the calendar! It’s our second year producing one and we’re already working on 2009. Because yaoi came to the U.S. via Japanese anime and manga it’s always been a more visual medium. The stories are like any other fiction, but it’s nice to see them illustrated. I’ve been really lucky to work with some amazing artists. As a writer, I see the characters in my head. When I turn the stories over to an artist I try not to cloud them with my vision. It makes me so happy to see how my written words paint pictures inside of other people’s heads.
Is it important? It’s pleasant and pretty and nice. I am very grateful that I’m able to have the website and the stories complimented with the artwork, but the bottom line is a good story is it’s own form of artwork. I try to write so that every reader sees the story with me.
GP: Your subscription web site is wonderful. How different is this form of publication different from more traditional publishing for you as a writer? What are its advantages? Are there any disadvantages?
SP: I am out on a limb a little bit, publishing as differently as I do. I tried standard publishing for a while. You know, the whole, send out your stories and wait forever for a rejection letter. I gave that up years ago, I don’t think I have the attention span for it. I had the skill set to create the website and establish it as a subscription, figured all I had to lose was a lot of time and energy so I gave it a shot. Publishing this way is different and new. I’ve had to learn a lot of things the hard way by trial and error because there is no handbook or model to follow. It’s a massive amount of work just to code and maintain the website, create banners, place advertisements, manage subscribers, all the paperwork outside of actually writing. The upside is that I get to do what I like. If I want a new piece of art, I commission it. If I want to write a short story I write it and know it will be published. I get instant feedback from readers and everything I do stays current. I’m not promoting a book I wrote five years ago. It makes things very now and that is, for me, quite gratifying.
GP: Currently, your site says you are posting new chapters weekly for three different stories. Do you write the whole manuscript out before you post or do you write as you go, i.e. post new chapters as you write them? If you are writing as you go, what is the process of working on three novels at a time like?
SP: Wow, that’s a good question! Right now, yes, I’m working on three novels at a time. Generally, I have two going on with two chapters a week in one and one chapter a week in the second. I’d like to be able to say I write everything out and am stories ahead of what is being updated, but the truth is real life happens. I’m posting close to ten thousand words every week, so even when I have a good head start on a story all it takes is one real life emergency or crisis to eat up that lead. I try to be at least one chapter ahead of what’s posted but that doesn’t always happen.
Right now, I am a few chapters ahead on 'A Summertime Storm', but the other two stories, 'If I Lay Here' and 'Is Yet', are being written as they’re posted. My father in law recently had a stroke and that’s made time a valuable thing. I’ve literally been sitting down a few hours before the chapter has to be posted, typing as quickly as I can, to get the story ready.
Which sounds insane but really I’m just transcribing it. How do I write three stories at a time, under such tight deadlines? I don’t know. I’m always writing inside my head. I let stories play out like privately shown movies only I can see. When I sit down and write it’s all right there, waiting to be typed out. I try to focus on the next story with a chapter due. Like from Sunday to Wednesday I think about 'Is Yet', from Wednesday to Saturday I think about 'If I Lay Here' and when I get bored with those two I think about 'Summertime Storm' because I would really like to stay ahead on that one!
That’s kind of deceptive because inside my head I’m actually working on close to a dozen stories. The worlds and stories are very real to me. They’re my friends. It’s where I go when I’m bored or when I’ve had a bad day. I generally have a pretty good idea of the entire story when I finally get around to sitting down and writing it out. Not always though, I like to be surprised as I write. I like having the stories lead me instead of making them fit to what I think they should be.
GP: How early in your life did you know you wanted to be a writer? How did your life change (or not) when you started to write?
SP: I think I’ve always wanted to be a storyteller, which isn’t necessarily the same thing as a writer. I ran into problems because I have a form of dyslexia where information goes into my head but gets scrambled coming out, especially through my hands. In grade school I was reading on a post-college level but couldn’t write basic words like ‘the’ and ‘girl’ or my own middle name. I confused letters like ‘c’ and ‘s’, ‘b’ and ‘d’ and even today I scramble numbers. Unfortunately, I grew up in a very rural area and was told by my teachers I was faking all this for attention. There was never any offer of special help or tools to work around my troubles. It caused a tremendous amount of heartbreak.
But I had these stories in my head. I was ten years old with no friends outside of books I was reading and I desperately wanted to live in those worlds. I started writing my own stories in notebooks as a means of looking busy to avoid being bullied. When I misspelled a word I’d look it up and underline it. Each time thereafter when I had to use the word again I would find it underlined and repeat it. Which is why I can spell ‘the’ and ‘girl’ today.
So I was very young when I wanted to tell stories but I had no means of getting those stories out. Even as I was filling notebooks I was painfully aware of how badly they were coming out and with that was an awareness that being a writer was out of the question. I kept writing, privately, and struggled to find some work I fit in doing. I even went so far as to take a personality job placement test, it told me to be a priest or a writer. Now that wasn’t overly helpful. I’ve tutored, worked in retail, in offices; I’ve done web design; I am a fully trained certified massage therapist and about a dozen other things and didn’t fit anywhere.
Oddly enough, a few years after I’d given up the ‘pipe dream’ of being a professional writer is when it happened. I came to the conclusion that the creation was what mattered. You don’t have to sing like a bird to find joy in it. Your art doesn’t have to hang in a gallery to have it speak of your soul. I didn’t have to have anyone read my silly stories for it to mean everything to me. I wrote for myself, tried to find my place in life and somehow I turned around and found myself writing full time. There isn’t a day that goes by where I’m not painfully aware of how blessed I am to do what I love everyday.
GP: What’s the best part of writing?
SP: The easy answer is the one you’ll hear from almost any writer. I can tell you about creating worlds and people or about making a point or sharing an idea. It’s all very serious nonsense. The best part about writing is finding the thing I can do and being able to do it. Everyone has their thing. It can be fixing cars or fixing broken bones, making numbers line up or putting bad guys into a line up. The beauty of being human is we all have our thing we’re meant to be doing. I don’t care if it’s wiggling your ears or knitting. We all have our thing we find happiness in. For me, it’s writing. I write thousands of words a week, sometimes a day, because it’s what I love to do. I’m just grateful that I’m allowed to do it for other people’s amusement.
GP: And now for the truly burning question...why is smut better with boys?
SP: I could do my best Paris impression and say ‘cause that’s hot’ but I will spare you. 'Smut’s better with boys' is one of the websites catch phrases. I showed one of the pictures from the website to my mother and she assumed the one with long hair was a flat chested woman. Nope, no girls allowed. My stories are good, solid stories on their own with plenty of smexy smutty sexy goodness mixed in and since they’re all male… for my stories, the smut is way better with boys. A far more simple answer is that the phrase amuses me. I try not to take too many things too seriously. It amused me so much our publishing house is named Better With Boys Press. We’re producing the first, and right now the only, yaoi themed magazine for the global market, titled properly enough Yaoi Magazine and our long term plan has us not only placing my novels into a print format but also publishing some of the unsung wonderful people currently creating amazing yaoi, both in fiction and in manga. The other catch phrase slogan of the site is ‘love will prevail’ because that’s an underlying theme of any romance story. A theme to life as well I guess, do what you love, let the details work themselves out.
GP: How would you describe yourself as a person?
SP: I think I’m a dork. I’m socially awkward, introverted and spend way to much time inside my own head. I’m a scattered, flaky, gnatfish (someone with the attention span of a gnat and the memory of a goldfish). I can remember stupid senseless facts about things I’ll never need and I almost never forget a book or movie I’ve ingested. I catch and release spiders and swerve my car to avoid running over caterpillars when they’re crossing the road in the fall.
GP: If you could change three things about the world, what would they be?
SP: Three things huh? One would be to have a non-polluting source of energy that would be affordable and accessible. Something that doesn’t cause us to kill each other for or go broke over or destroy our future for. Two would be to turn the dial up on tolerance. I wouldn’t ever want the world homogenized into one bland blah thing but if everyone would just agree that it’s okay to be different things would be so much better. I don’t understand prejudice, hate and intolerance. If I don’t like what you say, I don’t listen but I won’t gag you so you can’t speak. The world would be better if we’d all agree to disagree and just be glad we have the space to be who and what we are in our own corner of it. I have readers in countries where they would face serious legal threats if they’re caught reading about two men that love each other and that sickens me. It’s our differences that make us beautiful. And for the third change… ah… naptimes and snacks for everyone at three in the afternoon.
GP: One of the great features on your web site is the posting fans’ artwork inspired by your stories. What or who inspires you as an artist?
SP: I have my zune filled with music, everything from Marilyn Manson to Jimmy Buffet to Mika and Gaia Consort. Music sets moods without being too distracting. Really, though, everything feeds into my head from stories, movies and television to being outside with the wind in my hair and snow melting on my face. Everything has something to say, some input to offer, the trick is looking and listening. I try to toss everything into the same pot inside my head and let whatever floats up move freely. I try not to think about it too much. Inspiration is everywhere, the trick for me is not sleepwalking through my own life.
S. A. Payne's WEBSITE.
GLBT Promo Interviewer - Veronica Arch.