Top Tips for Loving a Lizard is one of two novellas in WIZ-4.
Editors Roz Clarke and Jo Hall described Top Tips as
“funny, raunchy, romantic and satisfyingly twisty.’
Your favourite story is like your favourite child. You can’t have one and if you do, you must neither show nor say it. In fact, I’m proud of all my work. But this story is a serious favourite.
Here’s seven reasons why I love it.
- Why Top Tips for Loving a Lizard is “the story of my heart”
All my work tries to be this, but Top Tips is my funniest story. As the world got worse, the books get funnier. Go figure. - My vengeance on my upbringing
This is the exactly the sort of book I needed – emotionally – in the late 70s at school. I was fat, smart, priggish and the bi. I read voraciously, but there was little or nothing about queer people or relationships that was faintly positive or accurate. Certainly, almost no books you read showed happy ever after. HIV and the Thatcher backlash made my first adult decade an Ice Age. I devoured SFF where I found the odd contemporary gem, but there wasn’t much there. Oddly the classical novels of Mary Renault gave me m-m romance in a near-fantastic setting. In my twenties and thirties I grew – a massive hookup of poetry, struggling with sexuality, opening up more generally, and returning to writing fiction as an adult. - Career starting
“The Lamb Chops”, the first chapter, was published over a decade ago; it’s my first professionally published short. The journey of a thousand days editing starts with that first acceptance. Because the story was warm, funny, and domestic, some critics thought it ‘slight’. Can these two guys in love stay together, with two civilisations against them? Seems big to me. - For me, a straightforward write
Top Tips is my first successful novella. Back in those distant times, I thought Harry and Aiden deserved far more but I struggled with a novel and put it aside. It kept percolating. Faced with a 40,000-word limit, I centred on what really mattered, the relationship, and I found I had a cracking tale at that length. It was a joy to write, the edit was mostly painless, and it just sings to me. “Joy joy joy”, it trills. “We can have good things.” I have written lots of m-m relationships, but this one really goes big. - Nice to be right
My first agent described it as “career ending” to publish a novel with inter-species sex. Now romantasy stalks the land like Godzilla, each clomping foot another container ship of books sold. And why not? Perhaps the time wasn’t right a decade back. - Writing about sex how I want.
I am enormously interested in writing about relationships including sex, but not so much writing the act. Harry and Aiden have a relationship with sex in it and that is part of their delight in each other. Myself, I don’t need a book to give me a lengthy blow-by-blow account. As a creative, the more specific the writer is, the more likely the reader might be indifferent or puzzled. Hair pulling? Clearly arouses some people. And baffles others.
I’m interested in the who and the why – the before, the after, what’s said on the pillow, what’s truly in your head but not spoken. Oddly, sex not working out seems more interesting to write than ‘wow, another great shag!” Briefly I touch on the question – what if the bits aren’t evolved to work together? But the big question in the book is not “do they shag?” but “can they make their relationship work?” - The personal is political
I’ll be blunt, there are lots of stories about interspecies lovers getting it on. Plenty of space to do it again but better/different. I needed a wider danger. The secret alien conspiracy could be real, and complicated. Benign at the species level, dreadful for those who break the rules.
And 8th, I love the goofy cover, which is explained in Chapter 1.
