May 9, 2019

Today is the 10th anniversary of the release of Where YouBelong, the first book I ever released for Kindle.

To this date Where You Belong is still the book that’s sold the most individual copies.  I think that is a testament to marketing.  I mean I did a blog tour, ads, a website, and so on.  I really pushed it and in the end it probably did come out a bit ahead on what I spent.  But it’s not something I would do for every book.  And as the marketplace is a lot more crowded than 2009 I’m not sure it would work as well.

To revisit the story, Where You Belong was the ahead-of-its-time opus involving gay marriage.  In 2008-2009 when I was writing it only a handful of states or cities allowed gay marriage; it hadn’t been legalized by the Supreme Court yet.

But to say it’s “about” gay marriage would be a misnomer.  It’s about relationships in general.  The message wound up being pretty simple:  it doesn’t matter where your genitals are so much as what’s in your heart.  Compatibility in spirit is far more important than compatibility in biology.

The story focused on a guy with the unlikely name of Frost Devereaux.  He was born in Iowa in 1973 to a mother who got knocked up one snowy night by a low-rent card shark.  When his mom finds out she’s pregnant, she drags the father back to Iowa from Vegas, though they don’t really live together. 

When Frost is 3 his mother is killed in a car accident and part of his face is badly burned.  His father can’t deal with that and so runs off, leaving him in the care of an aunt who spends most of her time watching TV and talking on the phone about it.

Most of his time Frost hangs out with redheaded twins Francis and Frances.  (Or Frank and Frankie.)  Being rich and new kids they were almost as outcast as Frost.  Growing up it’s Frankie that he’s infatuated with.  She doesn’t really feel that way about him until she gets lonely and desperate enough to marry him.  They spend a few years together before Frost finds out Frankie is cheating on him--with a woman.  So they get a divorce.

After a few years of making a living as a writer (though never a popular one), he and Frank finally hook up.  Frank’s had a crush on Frost his whole life, but Frost was focused on the sister.  Frost goes to live with Frank in a posh Manhattan apartment and things are OK. 

When a town in upstate New York allows gay marriages, Frank talks Frost into going there to get married.  But it soon turns into an ugly scene with protesters and counter-protesters including Frankie.  An important friend to Frost is murdered.

Eventually Frost starts to realize that Frank doesn’t really love him; Frank just loves having control of him in large part to spite his sister.  And so Frost decides to leave him and be on his own for a while.

The moral of the story:  never marry.  Or never marry redheaded twins.  No, really it’s that if you marry someone for the wrong reasons, things won’t work out.  It’s more important than whether you’re straight or gay or whatever.  A simple message and I think far less preachy than saying whether gay marriage is “right” or “wrong.”  The reality is that any marriage can be right or wrong depending on who’s involved.  That’s why 50+% of marriages don’t work.

The story was largely inspired by the works of John Irving, one of my favorite authors.  I used the similar cradle-to-grave structure, though not as far as the grave part.  There are a lot of oddball characters and locations and so on.  And the main character is a writer.  Though there’s not enough wrestling, Vienna, or bears to be a real Irving novel.  If you’ve followed me for a while then you probably know I sent him a copy of the book and he sent a nice letter back.  A real letter, not some boilerplate thing.  So that was nicer.  (Nicer still would have been if he’d passed it on to his agent or publisher, but you can’t have everything.)

I haven't really toyed with the idea of a sequel, though recently I was thinking of the area one might go in.  I've seen this PSA on Pluto TV approximately 200,000 times in the last 18 months:

It's about a lesbian couple who take their baby to a pediatrician who refuses to see her because her parents are gay.  Religious freedom!  Like the PSA says though, you're denying service to the baby, so it's her you're hurting, not the lesbians.  And for fuck's sake you're a doctor; you should be above thinking lesbians--and those related to them--have cooties.  It's so fucking stupid, which was pretty much why I decided to write Where You Belong.

And really it'd make sense since at the end of the book Frost goes off to DC with his reporter friend and her baby.  And with the Maguire twins and Frost getting older, families would make sense, right?

So maybe first Frankie comes to Frost and asks him to make a baby with her--not necessarily with sex.  Eventually Frankie gets pregnant and has a baby.  Then there's some incident like in the PSA.  Meanwhile Frost's reporter friend maybe has her own issues with her baby.  Maybe Frank decides to adopt a kid for himself.

And the end message would be pretty much the same:  it's not the genitals of the parents that matters so much as the love and care they provide.

But I haven't sold a copy or even had any pages read on Kindle Unlimited since January 2017 of the first book so it’s not like people are clamoring for a sequel anyway.

Maybe if I’d put as much effort into other books as I did that one I’d be a small-list author like some of my “friends” on Facebook.  Probably still would never have gotten to be a household name with movie or TV deals.  I think Where You Belong could make a good movie, but you’d need to cut out some stuff so the book would probably still be better.  But if anyone from Hollywood reads my blog, let’s do lunch!