Queereaders discussion

Hi all -
I saw Nancy's request for authors to introduce themselves, and figured I might as well. My name is Adam J Nicolai, and I'm working on a lesbian horror novel titled Rebecca.

It's still a work in progress (and my final, professional blurb isn't done!), but the basic theme is this: Sarah, a closeted lesbian high-schooler being raised in a strictly religious family, is in severe denial about who she really is. She gets a boyfriend in an attempt to gain distance from it, and ends up pregnant. Her daughter, Rebecca, transforms her life (as children will) and the sudden pressure to marry and/or conform to her family's wishes forces her to come to terms with her sexuality in a much more abrupt and destructive fashion than she would've preferred.

Forgive me the clinical description; like I said, my polished blurb is still just a twinkle in the eye. My first novel, Alex, was published last year and is doing really well - it's actually the #1 top-rated novel in Kindle Horror, Mystery, and Thriller right now. Rebecca has been a much harder novel to write, though, because the main character is female, lesbian, and young, whereas I am male, straight, and 35. It is really important to me to do her justice. I'm pretty good at putting myself in the heads of characters whose circumstances and personalities are nothing like my own, but I don't want to make some stupid "straight guy" mistakes that drag the book down for my target audience.

I have quite a few lesbian friends and family members (including my own mom), but the more overtly sexual elements of the book are never something you want to discuss with your own mother, no matter how old you get. :P So I'm here to kind of steep in the culture a bit, ask some questions that will make me look like an idiot now so I don't look like one later, and maybe make a few friends in the process.

See you around.

Have you considered another title for your book? The reason I ask is that Daphne du Maurier's suspense novel "Rebecca" (also a popular Hitchcock film) is filled with its own lesbian undertones.