When I first started writing, I wrote in third person omniscient. AB Gayle read my slash fanfiction and my cinderfella and left so many comments all over the documents that I was completely overwhelmed. I had never heard of point of view or head hopping and didn't know what to make of her comments. The strict use of POV and the insistence that only one person's thoughts and opinions could be accessed at a time seem to be constructs of the romance genre. It took me quite some while to wrap my head around just what could be considered an infraction of the unwritten rules regarding POV.
Alison was invaluable in all this. She would find my latest offense against the powers that be and explain to me why my character couldn't tell that someone felt that way, instead he seemed to feel that way. The whole thing made no sense to someone who had never read romance before. I noticed that some on the m/m authors followed one character at a time, but I had assumed that was something the author did for effect not because of some all encompassing concept.
Inspiration Photo for "Sex, Love and Video Tape"
I was fortunate that my first original piece, "Sex, Love and Video Tape, only featured one character. I guess you could say that the other characters were virtual characters. Even with what should have been an easy situation to keep in POV, Alison found several places where I wandered back and forth over that line in the sand.
Alison was patient with me and after the next short story, "Over-Exposure," I had pretty much figured out the rules and only made the occasional mistake. She continued to work with me to hone my skills and it seems to have taken me from the ranks of slash fanfiction writer and helped me enter the ranks of published m/m author.
So I would like to say a big thank you to my first editor, AB Gayle.
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