I recently did a free book promotion for my 2015 novel Elsie Street on The Fussy Librarian site after many years… and was delighted to see that for free ebooks at least, it’s worth it. I made back my investment and there was a nice little “tail” on the second and third books in the series. When I thanked the owner, Jeffrey Bruner, he replied warmly and wrote, “Please tell any authors who write LGBT about us — we would love to have more books, especially lesbian romance. That’s one of our top requests from readers.”
I was pleased to see that, and decided to pass it on…
I looked back at my recent review of Molly Giles’s Life Span and realized that I had forgotten to link the book to a sales page on Amazon! I fixed that. It’s ironic, too, that I would notice that sort of glitch during Mercury Retrograde.
Well, August has never been a favorite month of mine, but nothing too disastrous has happened yet. Here’s a nice discovery. I was published way back in 2006 in Sinister Wisdom #68/69; the double issue was called Death, Grief and Surviving, edited by Judith K. Witherow. I checked on the site a few times to see if it was available as a back issue. It never was. But now, it is available as a free PDF here. You just have to scroll down to page 194 in the thumbnail menu on the left side.
The piece was entitled “Gorse Lodge, Greystones,” and it’s an essay about my mother’s unexpected death from breast cancer in June 2002.
Here’s how it starts:
It was the summer of 2002, and my plan was to return to Ireland for
my sister’s wedding. I had originally left Ireland for California at the age of
twenty-one. I was going back at thirty-five as an overweight, stressed-out
legal word processor who identified as a lesbian but who had not been in a
relationship for four years. I hadn’t seen my mother for five years, and the
guilt was beginning to weigh on me.
Despite the sad circumstances and turbulent family dynamics, the essay is somber and restrained and reads quite well, I think.
Gabriella West 