Larry Benjamin. Wordsmith. Writer. Author.

This morning at 2 am EST, after eight months, 61,000 words and eighty-three drafts, I sent my newest book to my editor at Beaten Track Publishing . I’m romantically inclined to say writing this book was a labor of love, but the practical me says it was just labor. Eight months is pretty good for me. Usually it takes me a year to write a book, though Unbroken only took nine months. I am amazed I wrote 30,000 words in the last three months so essentially half the book was written in three months. Reading it though a last time this week before submitting it, I realized once again that the story I tell isn’t the story I sat down to write back in August. And months into the writing of it, I realized I had to restructure it because the way I envisioned telling the story—in flashback, starting at the end and working forward—just didn’t work for the story. At first the idea of writing a different book and structuring it differently to my first idea, scared me, but this is my fifth ...

I had one of the most productive writing weekends in recent memory. 2,772 words between Friday and Sunday. Friday night, around midnight, I sat down to write. My husband had gone to bed, and Riley with him. Toby stayed with me in my office on the third floor. He never leaves my side. When I stopped writing, it was 1:30 a.m. Saturday, the dogs needed walks, and I had errands to run and laundry to do. By the time I sat down to write it was after 4 p.m. The dogs, tired from our afternoon hike, fell asleep as I sat down at my desk. Everything fell away as I typed. The dogs woke and started whining. It was then that I realized I’d been “in the zone” for two hours and I’d missed their dinner time. I’m not a very disciplined writer. My writing process is... chaotic . But it works for me. I don’t outline or create character bibles. My stories are more organic. I’ve heard sculptors say they didn’t create the sculpture, they simply freed what was already inside the stone. That’s how I...

Once again, inevitably, Thanksgiving is upon us. Now, I know common wisdom has it that Thanksgiving is a day to bond with family, and express thankfulness for the past year’s bounty. But to be fair, Thanksgiving isn’t without its pitfalls. Relatives for one (c’mon now, I know you’ve at least once looked at your family members and asked yourself, “How can I possibly be related to these people?”); politics for another. And let’s not forget football, which doesn’t even promise the relief of a half-time show! We don’t do a full family thanksgiving anymore—the reasons for which are a whole other blog post; another time maybe. So, it’ll just be us, the dogs, my brother and his wife and their son, our good friends who used to live across the driveway from us, and my old, old, old friend Daniel. It’ll be nice. It always is. And for that, I am grateful. Let’s face it Thanksgiving can be a difficult holiday—especially if you’re LGBT. So, to honor the day and the difficulty of family,...

Yo, yo little brother, what you out here trying to discover I’m working on my new book and as I was driving and thinking through a particularly difficult plot line, this song, “ Yo Little Brother ,” from the mid 80s came on the radio. (1984 to be exact and it hit #57 on the Billboard Hot 100.) It caught my attention—of course I remember when it came out. Now it resonated perhaps because at that moment, listening to that song, I was that little brother, out here trying to discover…what? I suppose the short answer is I am trying to discover my characters—what their thoughts are, their passions, what drives them to behave as they do. What secrets do they hold, and keep from me? And I wondered, what, as I do with each book, writing this one, I would discover about myself . I checked every place I thought he might of gone Until I came across a house with something going on I looked in the window there was brother and his crew And he was doing everything a little brother...

In my Father's house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. — John 14:2, King James Version Having discovered I was gay at a time when gays didn’t have much visibility, by the time I got to college, I was starved for stories about men and boys like me, books that’s showed me what my life could be. I discovered Patricia Nell Warren’s The Front Runner in Penn’s campus bookstore quite unexpectedly freshman year. I read it in a single weekend while my roommates were away at a track meet. Next I read The Fancy Dancer , also by Nell Warren. Then came books by Gordon Merrick, and others whose authors and plots I have forgotten. I remember I was dissatisfied though, because nearly a decade after Stonewall, after gays first appeared on the cover of Time magazine, the movement was still pretty much whitewashed, especially in gay fiction, which was rife with pretty, slim, slutty whiteboys drinking, partying and having lots of se...

The death last week of Maurice White, who founded Earth,Wind and Fire , made me, like a lot of people sad. The music of Earth, Wind and Fire marked the beginning of my journey to adulthood. Their music is also inextricably tied to my relationship with my freshman roommate Yone, the first friend I ever had. For me, listening as radio stations played their songs back-to-back was more than a tribute to Maurice White, or a celebration of their musical canon. I was listening to part of the soundtrack of my life. This realization got me thinking about the role of music in my life and writing. In my books, I use music—to locate the story firmly in time, or to express something about the characters, or their emotion or mood. In What Binds Us , the signature song for Matthew and Thomas-Edward is Randy Crawford’s “Where There was Darkness,” which describes the gratitude they feel for having, unexpectedly found each other; the song’s lyrics express what they cannot yet articulate to each o...

I did a reading at the Bureau of General Services - Queer Division on Friday night. My friend and fellow author David Swatling , invited me to join him, Daniel W. Kelly , and J.L. Weinberg , at the reading featuring horror and suspense fiction in recognition of Halloween. When I arrived, late, after a nerve-wracking and slow moving drive down the Henry Hudson Parkway from the Bronx, I discovered my third book, Unbroken , would be on display along with my allegorical Vampire novella, Vampire Rising . I immediately recognized I faced a two-fold challenge: how to present a horror novel that really wasn’t a horror novel at all, and, two, how to tie to very different books together. I read third. While awaiting my turn, I wrote an intro for myself and pulled a reading from Unbroken . What follows is an excerpt from my reading. “For me, when I think of horror, I think the true horror is how we sometimes treat each other—especially those who are different from us. “I’ll ...

In honor of ‪‎National Coming Out Day (which also happens to be my birthday),‬ my ‎LGBT‬ coming of age/coming out novel, Unbroken is just 99 cents! If it's been on your To Be Read list you may want to buy it now . Coming out for me wasn't hard--I was never "in," by which I mean closeted . I could never see the point. I mean what was the point--you just had to look at me to know; I've discovered that people see what they want to see so if someone didn't know, it wasn't my fault. I didn't see the point of hiding. I mean, sure people might dislike me because I was gay, they might even try to hurt me, but the same could be said of me being black—just look at the number of black people being hurt and killed by the police—the very people they are supposed to look to for protection . So was I supposed to hide myself away? never leave the house lest I walk into a store and be followed as a potential shoplifter? Or wrestled to the ground and tasered for ...