what with being (selectively) quoted in The Mail AND called “Sapphic author” (heh) and they’ve somehow (from where? I don’t think I’ve ever seen that pic!) got hold of a picture of me that is at least 12 years old, while also (heh again) calling me best-selling, literary AND chick lit. splendid.
brilliant piece of Mailism.

Of course I didn’t say there were no mainstream lesbian protagonists in fiction … what I always say is that there are very few mainstream fiction lesbian protagonists, those that have done best tend to be in period costume (where I think we somehow seem safer to the mainstream), and we still rarely see ourselves in fiction/onscreen/anywhere in our multiplicity, our diversity. Not least because while those of us who are LGBT reserve our right to write about what we want – any gender or sexuality of characters – most straight writers tend to write about straight characters.

Oh, and Calender Girl wasn’t rejected by loads of agents. It was rejected by two – Darley Anderson who was (as quoted) very kind and said he’d happily look at it again if I could make Saz straight (this was 17 years ago, I wasn’t capable of such a big re-think/re-write at that stage – this might well have been cowardice or stupidity on my part, but I still think it was right to be true to the story – I was clearly never in this ‘merely’ for the money!!) and another agent who wrote to say how much she liked it but she was about to retire. And then First Agent took it on, and all was good.