Tiny Grievances by Robert Thomson

Tiny Grievances by Robert Thomson

Tiny Grievances is a collection of mostly gay-themed short stories and a novella, Inside The Scar Circle. Thomson returns to familiar, fertile ground with these stories about troubled and failing urban lives, fractured families, broken friendships, community, questioning the status quo, belonging, ageing, and the search for love in a world geared toward quick fixes.

At turns uproariously funny, poignant and genuinely moving, these stories take you deep into the souls of everyday people trying to survive. Accomplished, assured and gripping, Robert Thomson's Tiny Grievances tears apart the hilarity, humiliation and tragedy of human tribulation. From a genteel aunt exhibiting odd behaviour to a man stalking a former lover even as he knows he shouldn't, Thomson's characters are real, biting and very memorable. (Jared Mitchell, author of Mayhem and Becky Chan)

The Ballad Of Aunt Stabby chronicles a disastrous dinner party as two pretentious hosts try to distract their misfit guests from an opinionated aunt who arrives beaten and bleeding.

I'll Wait Here. Two friends with benefits find themselves at a casual crossroads when one man loses his job and the other, surprisingly, is empathetic and supportive about the situation.

Smoking. It's about the urge that makes you want to smoke.

Three Words Away is about lost love and regret. After more than a decade, a man spots an ex-lover and gets caught up in an imaginary reunion.

Hide Everything details the ripple effect caused by a gay man's failed suicide attempt.

Stalking Harold Greenbaum is a dramatic comedy about how the friendship between two middle-aged women is shattered when one of them renovates herself in order to win the love of a co-worker.

In This Functional Family an introverted gay man must stand up against his conniving sociopathic sister when the two reunite after the death of their step-mother.

A long-distance S/M relationship is on the rocks and Platform reveals the inner workings of the slave as he contemplates ending the relationship with his Master.

Tiny Grievances. Two childhood friends are reunited; both are raw and broken and neither one of them is in a position to help the other.

Stopping Quitting chronicles one man's attempt to stop smoking by exploring semantics and undergoing a spiritual awakening.

Inside The Scar Circle is a novella about friendship, community, alienation, and which cocktail goes with what outfit. After a failed relationship, a loner, on vacation in Puerto Vallarta, finds himself part of a clique and begins to examine his identity as a gay man.

Robert Thomson is a Toronto-based writer and editor. In 1993, he published his debut book, Secret Things. The next year, a redesigned edition was released. He began working as a journalist, editor, and managing editor at a number of local periodicals around this time. Robert's short stories appeared in anthologies such as Queer View Mirror, Brothers Of The Night: Gay Vampire Stories, Quickies 2, Best Gay Erotica 1998, Queer View Mirror 2, Happily Ever After: Sexual Fairy Tales for Men, and Quickies 3 from the mid-to-late 1990s.

Need, his second collection of short stories, was supposed to be released in January 2000, but the publisher's US distributor went bankrupt the same week the complete print run arrived at their warehouse. He left the publishing field long after due to a variety of other personal and professional disappointments. Robert began experimenting with video editing software while working as a DJ, VJ, and poet. For the next few years, he planned, wrote, filmed, directed, and edited a number of short films, including Text and Last Visit (Ultima visita), which was nominated for Best Short at the 2011 Barcelona GLBT Film Festival.

Both of Robert's books were re-released in extended e-book editions in 2014. Hidden Things was released in June, honoring the twentieth anniversary of its publication. Need was released in December, on the fifteenth anniversary of its release. Now..., a free taster of his work from HowNow Media, was released for a short time.

Where had I been? Robert's first collection of all-new short tales since 1999, Little Grievances, will be released in June 2016. Robert is a resident of Toronto, Ontario, Canada.