Notebook

Welcome to My Blog

Notes from the research and writing of Where All Your Attempts Cease — the sources, the surprises, and what four books of queer fiction taught me about writing one without the words for it.

The Distance Between: What Nineteenth-Century Letters Taught Me About Writing Where All Your Attempts Cease

Where All Your Attempts Cease follows a wagon train leaving St. Louis for Portland in the 1840s, and like everything I write, it comes back to one question: the distance between who we are and who we're becoming, and what closes that gap. Three things from the research reshaped the book more than anything else.

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The Word We Didn't Have Yet: Writing Backward from Stonewall to the Overland Trail

Every book I've written so far has lived in a world that already had a name for what my characters were. That's easy to take for granted until you try to write a story set before the name existed at all.

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About the Author

Robert McDiarmid

Robert McDiarmid writes about the distance between who we are and who we're becoming — and the people, places, and hardships that close that gap. He is the author of “The House of Wolves,” “Milton and the Morning Monk,” and “The Do-It-Yourself Guide to Getting Over Yourself,” novels that chart the romantic queer experience in America, as well as two collections of micro-fiction, “Brief Moments” and “Esoteric Minutiae.”

Robert resides in Palo Alto, California, with his husband David and their rescue pup Orca.