New release

The long journey

I suppose that title accurately describes both the plot of Tree of Life and the epic saga (ha!) of how the book came to be.

It’s taken six years (and one month, but who’s counting?) to see this published. Five of those were spent in writing it; the last was revising, editing, proofreading, and creating the cover. It all started back in 2016 with the publication of An Act of Devotion.

That book in itself has its own back story. Around the time my first novel, Lower Education, was published, I wrote a number of short works for this blog and for Kindle to generate some interest in my writing. Among them was a story originally published under the title “Fifteen Minutes.” It’s sitting in a virtual drawer, awaiting the right moment to be re-published along with a few other works from over the years, all of which are connected to other books.

That story was about a high school sophomore developing an understanding of his sexuality. It was all right, as my early works go. Nothing that made it stand out as either amazing or awful. I did like the characters, though, and always figured I’d do something new with them.

“New” came in the form of a friend, author Adrian J. Smith, and extraordinarily talented writer of women-loving-women fiction. (If you have not read her work, you absolutely must go visit the link and do so as soon as possible.) Not being an author writing gay/bi men, Adrian asked me to write a story for a character in Memoir in the Making. Trust me when I say I was nervous as hell. When an author you love asks for something like this, first of all, you say yes. Second, if you’re like me, you spend the better part of six months stressing over it and worrying about getting it “right.”

I think I managed all right. An Act of Devotion enjoyed some modest success; not one of my best works, but by no means terrible. I was at that point still feeling torn between trying to write Romance (genre) and being true to my nature as a writer. Let’s just say I could have integrated those things better.

A not-small number of people who read both the original version of “Fifteen Minutes” and An Act of Devotion asked me about a couple of the side characters. I suppose what they imagined was more of a romance, which I’d hinted at a bit in AAOD. Hahahaha…I mean, yes, I did try that. And scrapped it.

Yet somehow, Luke and Connor wouldn’t let me rest without telling some kind of story about them. What happened that left Luke homeless? Why was Connor so angry? I messed around with the story for several years while I published a lot of other things: some short stories, a novella, and four novels. The pair of them were awfully patient with me, given how long I let them hang out in that virtual drawer. Long enough I nearly decided to give up.

The pandemic brought a lot of changes, among them the loss of my drive to write. I started a new career path (hi, I’m still on it) and went back to school. Still, I didn’t entirely give up. I worked on this story until there wasn’t anything else I could do except submit it and cross my fingers.

There are a couple of things to know about Tree of Life. First, it isn’t a romance. I suppose if you squint, you could affix that label, but I choose not to. This is slice-of-life/literary fiction. Don’t judge it based on how much “chemistry” the main characters have or which tropes it embraces. Those are great! But they don’t fit this particular novel.

Second, it isn’t necessary to have read any of the previous works that are associated with this book. There’s enough detail to make sense, but those stories have little impact on the plot at hand. If you want to read An Act of Devotion, be my guest, but that’s closer to a romance than this one and also genuinely isn’t for everyone’s taste.

I’m glad this book is now out in the world. I hope that people read it and enjoy it and that it makes them think. I hope it satisfies the curiosity of those who wanted to know what happened to Luke and Connor. Most of all, I hope that in finally telling their story, I find my writing joy again. If not, though, at least I’ve released this out into the wild and given it wings.

Purchase links:

Note: You can certainly purchase through one of the vendors, but my preference is that you buy from the publisher. This is a small press, and going through them supports the business directly rather than a large corporation.

BEATEN TRACK SHOP:

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Rainbow Snippets: Sleepyhead

Books, Writing

Happy Saturday! It’s been a while. I meant to keep posting, but this summer got out of control. For those who don’t know, I have an autoimmune disorder. We were still playing around with diagnoses and meds, and things happened. There’s more detail elsewhere on my blog for the very curious.

Anyway, I’m glad to be back. The school year has started, and I had a new release! The link is in the sidebar. Minuet is the last book in my Notes from Boston series. I’m hoping that people really enjoy this one, even though it’s different from what I’ve written before. It’s a complicated MMF love story, perhaps a bit outside the box.

In this scene, two of the MCs (Mack, a cisgender aromantic pansexual man, and Jomari, a bisexual biromantic trans man) have had quite the night.

Early in the morning, Mack woke and rolled over. He froze when his arm brushed something, and it took him a minute to remember. Jomari had stayed. No one ever stayed, other than Amelia…Mack withdrew his elbow and lay there unmoving, waiting to see if Jomari stirred. When his breathing was still soft and steady after five minutes, Mack deemed it safe to get up. He shifted slowly so as not to disturb his bed-mate’s slumber.

Rainbow Snippets is a safe and welcoming space for LGBTQIA+ authors, readers, and bloggers to share 6 sentences each week from a work of fiction—published or in-progress—or a book recommendation. Feel free to join in!

New Release: Resolve (Demands #2) by Emily Alter

Books, Featured

About the Book

Title: Resolve (Demands #2)

Author: Emily Alter

Print Length: 274 pages

Publication Date: May 4, 2019

Genre: Gay Romance, New Adult

Goodreads

Amazon

Synopsis

For a relationship to work, it is not just love which is demanded. Resolve is, too.

Cole has his senior year of college and a photography business to worry about, so he could really do without the multiple sessions with physiotherapists his parents force him to go to. It leaves little room to consider romance as a choice for him.
Pool instructor and avid swimmer Justin has always been his twin’s shadow. Where Aaron goes, he follows. He may not have much of a social life outside of his twin, but he loves his job and all the extra swim time he gets. He doesn’t think that he’s lacking anything.

Then Justin’s booked for a photo shoot with Cole. Being together, as right as it feels, also means they’ll have to come face to face with their belief systems. They must find the resolve to be their own person, or they could lose it all –themselves included.

Resolve is the 2nd book of the Demands series. Although they can be read as stand-alones, characters from previous books will make multiple appearances throughout the series.

Trust (Demands, #1) will be on sale this week, so don’t miss a chance to get it for )0.99 on Amazon!

About the Author

Emily Alter is a pansexual author of LGBTQ+ romance. She lives in Spain, although most of her time is spent in an imaginary world with her characters.

A hopeless romantic, and a psychology student, writing characters has always called to her. Writing romance, the kind she is represented in, seems the perfect combination of the three things she’s the most passionate about.

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Book Tour: The Rising Tide by J. Scott Coatsworth

Books, Featured

About the Book

Title: The Rising Tide (Liminal Sky #2)

Author: J. Scott Coatsworth

Publisher: DSP Publications

Release Date: Tuesday, October 30 2018

Length: 115K words

Cover Artist: Aaron Anderson

Genres: sci fi, near future, space opera

Categories: gay, lesbian, transgender, future, generation ship, AI, artificial intelligence

QueeRomance Ink

Goodreads

Synopsis

Earth is dead.

Five years later, the remnants of humanity travel through the stars inside Forever, a living, ever-evolving, self-contained generation ship. When Eddy Tremaine and Andy Hammond find a hidden world-within-a-world under the mountains, the discovery triggers a chain of events that could fundamentally alter or extinguish life as they know it, culminate in the takeover of the world mind, and end free will for humankind.

Control the AI, control the people.

Eddy, Andy, and a handful of other unlikely heroes—people of every race and identity, and some who aren’t even human—must find the courage and ingenuity to stand against the rising tide.

Otherwise they might be living through the end days of human history.

Series Synopsis:

Humankind is on its way to the stars, a journey that will change it forever. Each of the stories in Liminal Sky explores that future through the lens of a generation ship, where the line between science fiction and fantasy often blurs. At times both pessimistic and very hopeful, Liminal Sky thrusts you into a future few would ever have imagined.

Excerpt

Cassie climbed the foothills at the edge of the Verge, carrying Eddy up toward the Anatov Mountains. The horse seemed to enjoy being out there in the wilds. As wild as they could be on a man-made world.

Eddy stared up at the vast peaks that towered above them. Even after six years, Forever still had the capacity to surprise him. It was hard to accept that the world—built on such a grand scale—was the work of the hands of man. Or woman. TheAnatov—Ana Anatov—who had gifted her name to these peaks.

The foothills were sparsely planted, mostly a crabgrass variant that spread on its own, and occasional wildflowers—though to call anything on Forever “wild” was a stretch.

There were only scattered trees up there. The glowing grass had been beaten down along the path of the marauders, creating a dark and ugly stain across the hills.

It was hard for Eddy to imagine anyone doing something like this on Forever. He’d seen enough of the crimes of humanity when he’d fought in the wars that had consumed Earth in her last decade. But his world was supposed to be different.

The world was like an island among the stars. Where was there to hide?

He checked his loop for the time. It was close to nightfall. His circadian rhythms had adapted, aligning themselves with Forever’s days and nights, but he missed things like coldand hot. On Forever, it was always temperate, a side effect of the seed ship’s living architecture. It never snowed, and it was most certainly never hot.

He climbed to the top of one of the rolling foothills and turned to look at the world behind him. From here, he could almost see the South Pole, the wall that marked the end of Forever. Around him, the walls of the world curled up to meet high above, their point of merger hidden by the sky glow.

Micavery was too small to see at this distance.

He’d come all this way on horseback, while traveling inside a ship floating in the void. It was surreal. He supposed future generations would come to see it as normal, everyday even—but he was still an Earth boy at heart.

The grasses around him went dark, as did the glow that emanated from the middle of the sky. Nightfall swept toward Lake Jackson far below, passing the Verge, the ranches and farmlands, and the orchards where so much of the world’s food came from.

At last, the shores of the lake winked out, and he could finally see Micavery Port, the lights of it, anyhow, as they shone in the newly come darkness.

Above, the golden glow of the spindle had diminished to a silver gleam.

He sighed. It was such a beautiful world, but it seemed it still harbored some of Old Earth’s evil. Wherever mankind went….

Eddy dismounted, lit a lantern full of luthiel, and set about making camp.

Purchase Links

Giveaway

Scott is giving away two prizes with this tour – a $25 Amazon gift card, and a signed copy of “The Stark Divide,” book one in the series (US winner only for the paperback). For a chance to win, enter via Rafflecopter:

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About the Author

Scott lives between the here and now and the what could be. Indoctrinated into fantasy and sci fi by his mother at the tender age of nine, he devoured her library. But as he grew up, he wondered where the people like him were.

He decided it was time to create the kinds of stories he couldn’t find at Waldenbooks. If there weren’t gay characters in his favorite genres, he would remake them to his own ends.

His friends say Scott’s brain works a little differently – he sees relationships between things that others miss, and gets more done in a day than most folks manage in a week. He seeks to transform traditional sci fi, fantasy, and contemporary worlds into something unexpected.

A Rainbow Award winning author, he runs Queer Sci Fi and QueeRomance Ink with his husband Mark, sites that bring queer people together to promote and celebrate fiction reflecitng their own reality.

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Rainbow Snippets: Drumbeat is here!

Books, Writing

My latest novel, Drumbeat, is one week old today, so that’s what I’m sharing from. You can read all the details below the snippet, including my wonderful interviewed for the WROTE podcast. We had a great conversation about writing bisexual characters, non-binary representation, and invisible disability.

I’ve been just blown away by how well this book was received. I wondered if people would have issues with the polyamory or the on-page “het sex” (I’ve been scolded for that in the past) or the fact that I (a hearing person) wrote D/deaf characters or the way I wrote Jamie’s eating disorder or the fact that I have a former adult film actor babysitting a small child. So far, none of those things have been challenged at all. Heck, I only had one person say it didn’t read to them as fully a stand-alone (and that’s fair, as well as it being the best “negative” review I’ve ever gotten). If any of that appeals to you, maybe you’ll like Drumbeat too.

This snippet is in Cian’s POV and introduces us to Jamie.

It was too bad Jamie was so standoffish. He was a thousand shades of adorable, and no amount of pseudo-bad-boy-rockstar play-acting could hide it. While making his way to the table after performing, Cian had taken a few minutes to admire him. Jamie was tiny, probably barely five foot five. His brown hair was short and spiked. He had piercings all over, enough in visible areas that Cian wondered if he had some in less public places too. He didn’t recall him having any in his videos, not that he wanted to admit how much of Jamie’s body he’d seen. And those eyes—dark and sparkling, black-lined to give him a hint of being trouble.

Book Info

Listen to my WROTE interview here or follow this link.

You can also read Jayne’s review on the website and my guest post on Jeanne G’Fellers’ blog.

Title: Drumbeat

Series: Notes from Boston (#3)

Date: September 1, 2018

Length: 231 pages

eBook ISBN: 978-1-944591-78-6

print ISBN: 978-1-944591-51-9

Category: LGBTQ Literature, Gay Romance

Goodreads

Purchase Links

Synopsis

Jamie Cosgrove is doing his best to recover from a break-up after years with an abusive boyfriend. All his usual coping strategies have failed, and he’s fallen back on things that make him feel safe: drumming, food, and his friend Trevor. The trouble is, two of those are still secrets, even from those closest to him.

Cian Toomey has it all. He has loving relationships with his partners and a fulfilling, creative career. The one thing he’s missing is someone to go home to at night. When sudden changes occur at one of his jobs, he’s faced with a choice to find something new or move in with his partners in a different city.

Well-meaning but pushy friends seem to think Cian and Jamie are the answers to each other’s prayers. They couldn’t disagree more. A series of random events thrusts them into each other’s lives, and they find they have more in common than they thought. But when all of Jamie’s carefully constructed walls crumble at once, both of them will have to depend on the support of their friends and family to strengthen their fragile bond.

DRUMBEAT: release day & interview on the WROTE podcast!

Books

Happy book birthday to my 8th novel, Drumbeat (Notes from Boston #3)!

As part of release week, I had the privilege of being interviewed for the WROTE podcast, which you can listen to here or follow this link. What a great conversation about writing bisexual characters, non-binary representation, and invisible disability.

You can also read Jayne’s review on the website, and be sure to enter the giveaway below.

Title: Drumbeat

Series: Notes from Boston (#3)

Date: September 1, 2018

Length: 231 pages

eBook ISBN: 978-1-944591-78-6

print ISBN: 978-1-944591-51-9

Category: LGBTQ Literature, Gay Romance

Goodreads

Purchase Links

Amazon | Amazon UK | Smashwords | Barnes & Noble | Kobo

Synopsis

Excerpt

After the class left, Jamie waited for Cian to tidy the stage. He’d been to the Dyer Theater before, to watch Nate. Not that Jamie was a huge fan of opera, but Nate and his co-director, Del, were outstanding at what they did. Whether Jamie liked the music or not, queer opera was unique and fun.

Jamie stood at the edge of the stage, looking out into the empty auditorium. He couldn’t picture himself in such a venue, doing what Cian or Nate did. Sure, he’d been on stage plenty of times, both in school and at the various bars where the Creepy Crullers played. He’d also been a model/actor, but that was a much different set, and they had multiple chances to get their performance right. This was different.

There was a clacking against the floorboards behind Jamie, and he turned around. Cian still had on his jig shoes, and when Jamie looked at him, he showed off a few lively steps with a twinkle in his eye. Jamie had seen tap dancers before, like Izzy when he was performing as TaTa. The sound of the jig shoes was different from the bright clicks of the metal taps. The fiberglass was richer, more full. Somehow, though, it was lighter the way Cian did it, every step paired with a little jump.

His posture was different too, Jamie noted. Narrower, with his shoulders, hips, and feet lined up vertically rather than horizontally. He kept his arms still at his sides and his back straight. After a moment or two, Jamie could tell the difference when Cian switched from tapping only on the balls of his feet to using the whole shoe to stomp.

Want to try? Cian signed after he came in for a landing in front of Jamie. He still had his hearing aids out.

No! Jamie tried to shift away, to make it clear he wasn’t up for such a thing. He couldn’t possibly hope to learn that skill.

Cian grinned. Please? It’s easy. I’ll show you after I change shoes.

Jamie looked at his own feet, thinking it didn’t look particularly easy. Should I change?

You don’t have to. I have extra if you want. Cian ducked into the wings and grabbed his bag. What size?

Do I have to wear the ones with all the ties? Jamie couldn’t picture himself trying to get them done up without getting tangled in the long laces.

G-h-i-l-l-i-e-s? Cian finger-spelled it, and Jamie wondered how it was pronounced. No. Only girls, unless you’re in Scotland. Here. Cian reached into the bag and tossed over a pair of soft black shoes. Try those.

Jamie toed off his sneakers and slipped on the black shoes. They were a little loose, but they fit well enough and conformed to his feet. The thin material felt strange after wearing street shoes. He faced Cian and waited for instructions, his heart beating rapidly and his palms sweaty.

Cian explained the steps and what he called them, then demonstrated for Jamie. He made it look easy. Cian was muscular but not lanky; he wasn’t built the way Jamie envisioned most dancers. Yet he was light on his feet, almost springy. He always looked to Jamie as though he was flying when he danced at Grand Slam. Here on this stage, he toned it down a bit for Jamie’s benefit, the same way he did with his students.

Jamie tried to imitate the pattern of steps. The first one he got all right, but by the second set he’d somehow ended up on the wrong foot. Cian didn’t make fun or chastise him. He showed Jamie again then motioned for him to try. In a short time, Jamie had picked up one of the basic forward steps.

They played around for a bit longer, at which point Jamie’d had enough. He truly wasn’t any kind of dancer, no matter what Cian had tried to tell him. He asked to stop, and Cian praised his effort before accepting the shoes back and tucking them away. He slid his hearing aids back in and sat down to put his street shoes on.

“Not bad, for a first time,” he told Jamie as he laced his sneakers.

Giveaway

Win an ebook set of the first 3 Notes from Boston books!

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