Still checking out the newly redesigned New York Times Magazine – so far, so good. But I was excited to see a page on “shipping” in the column Search Results by Jenna Wortham. And no, it wasn’t a column about Fed Ex.

Shipping is about relationshipping, or a romance between characters who are not otherwise romantically linked, such as Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock Holmes and Martin Freeman’s Dr. John Watson on PBS’ “Sherlock.” (Drawings of them from the Tumblr website are featured on the Search Results page.)

Shipping, then, is the umbrella term for things like slash – gay pairings of characters who were not originally gay – and slash in turn includes male/male romance, which is where I come in. Though the characters in my series “The Games Men Play” – the swimmers and tennis players in “Water Music” and the football players in the forthcoming “The Penalty for Holding” – are entirely fictional, I won’t pretend that I wasn’t influenced by male/male romances I read on the Internet that either used real people (called RPF or real person fiction) or well-known fictional characters. ...

At the end of Sassy Ladies Shopping Night Out last Friday at the DoubleTree by Hilton Hotel in Tarrytown, a vendor approached the table where I was selling my new novel, “Water Music.” She had been by earlier, but our conversation had been cut short by the appearance of customers at her table. Now true to her word, she came back as I was packing up and bought a copy.

She had told me that her son was gay, coming out to her when he was 14, and I could sense all the pain of that reality, not because she rejected him but because no mother likes to see her child rejected by others. She couldn’t quite understand why I – with no such similar narrative – would’ve, could’ve written a novel like "Water Music," whose four gay athletes whose professional rivalries color their personal relationships with one another. I told her that being a man didn’t stop Tolstoy from writing “Anna Karenina.”

“Yes, but at least he knew what it was like to make love to a woman.”

True, but he didn’t know what a woman feels like when she makes love to a man.