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My gay, 80s, cinephile ghostly horror novel is now rounding the corner and racing down the stretch as I work on the final revisions hurtling towards the climax.

This has been a very interesting voyage on the writing ship. My first novel written without a guiding outline, my first period novel — albeit a period I lived in and in locations I knew quite well — and a novel that is sounding more and more literary as I grapple with the themes that organically emerged from the crisis and the characters.

The poor thing has had an identity crisis as I struggled to find a suitable title for my creation, but unlike Victor Frakenstein, I did eventually give it a name, Outrageous Fortune. Now, Shakespeare was not in my head when I started writing the text. Very little was in my head aside from certain aspects and things I wanted to play with as a writer, ghosts and a cursed motion picture film on dangerous nitrate stock, but when one of the characters announced that she was unwilling to suffer ‘the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’ I knew I had stumbled across the title.

Thematically, my gay horror novel has delved into an existential question about morality in a cold and indifferent universe. If reality has no intrinsic morality — show me the particle that carries the ‘good’ or ‘justice’ between elements of matter — then the only morality that exists is the morality we conjure by our actions and our thoughts. But if we perceive a moral quality to our actions then that becomes something we cannot un-perceive and it is the knowledge of the meaning we have prescribed upon an indifferent universe that binds us.

Outrageous Fortune is quite unique among the novels I have written, the most thematically complex and with the most explicit sex scene of my writing history, only time will tell if I can find a market for it.