Rainbow Snippets

Happy Saturday! Instead of being out marching with the protesters, I spent my morning volunteering at the kids’ school like I do every week. It’s almost exactly one month until showtime! Meanwhile, we’re on the steady path into winter performance season. The kids just had their school concert, my older one has an audition, then both of my concerts, the school musical, and All-County music festivals. It’s not really all that different from having a family full of athletes, I suppose. 🙂

In other news, I’m just over halfway done (I think) with my edits on Keeping the Faith. This one looks like it’ll be shorter than the other two after all. I’m still sharing from the first chapter. The last few weeks, I’ve been posting snippets of Micah’s visit with his sister-in-law. Some readers correctly guessed the baby’s health issues, but for anyone who didn’t, here you go.

She sighed. “I don’t want to make the same mistakes my parents did, but I’m not sure how else to do things. At least he doesn’t appear to be prone to the same sorts of problems Cat had.”

“Robbie does seem to be generally pretty healthy.”

“Healthy and with the energy of all the rest combined.”

On cue, Robbie wriggled and kicked, so Micah set him back on the floor. He scooted off, and both Micah and LR watched him go in silence. Like his uncle, Robbie had hemophilia, but his brother did not. They hadn’t yet had the girls tested to find out if they carried the gene.

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!

I’m about to go on an adventure: A lock-in with 60+ teenagers/pre-teens (grades 6-12) for the school musical. They’re doing Barnum, the circus musical. Yeah, I’d never heard of it either. We just watched the DVD of the grades 6-9 musical, Elf Jr., from November. I’d forgotten how cute those kids were. They did a nice job.

For my snippet, I’m posting another 6 sentences (well, technically 7, but one is only 1 word) from Keeping the Faith. Micah has gone to see his sister-in-law, and they’ve been interrupted by her youngest child’s tendency to get into mischief. A number of you guessed correctly last week that Robbie has hemophilia, like his uncle.

Micah toted Robbie back out to the living room and kept hold of him when he sat back down, tickling Robbie’s toes and making him squirm while LR examined him for injuries. His tears transformed into giggles. Micah looked up at LR as she sank down next to them.

“Do you ever worry about him?” he nodded his chin at Robbie.

“Clearly not enough,” LR muttered. Louder, she said, “Sometimes. I try not to, but it’s hard.”

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!

A week into 2017, and things are hopping here already. The kids are back in school, and my rehearsals start on Monday. There’s so much happening in our family over the next 8 weeks, between auditions and performances.

Meanwhile, I’m working on edits for the first of my 2017 projects. I’m sure other opportunities will come up over the course of the year, but so far, I’m down for 2 novels and a short story/novella/however long it turns out. My current work-in-edits is the last part of the series which includes Passing on Faith and Walking by Faith. This one’s titled Keeping the Faith.

For my snippet, I’m posting 6 sentences from Keeping the Faith. In this scene, Micah (the main character) has gone to see his sister-in-law. The baby in question is hers, and there’s a reason why it would be especially bad for him to get hurt.

A crash and a yelp from the kitchen propelled Micah to his feet. In a flash, he scooped up a crying Robbie and set the chair he’d pulled over back on its legs. He inspected Robbie head to toe, but there wasn’t a scratch on him. Relieved, Micah turned around with the baby in his arms and nearly collided with LR.

“Thank you,” she said, her shoulders relaxing.

“No problem.”

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!

Happy end of 2016! I’m super excited to see the back of this mostly horrible year. There’s too many negative things to list them all, and I don’t want to spend this post doing so. Instead, I’ll focus on some of the positives. Personally, I had 3 novels this year, plus a novella and a short story (though that one’s a bit touchy right now). I’ve also reviewed dozens of books, between my personal blog and those that I reviewed for the now-defunct Inked Rainbow Reads. If you’d like to check out some of the things I read, you can find them all on my Goodreads page. Lots of great stuff in there. Over my vacation, I read a bunch of holiday books, and you can read my post here.

For my snippet, I’m posting a little over 6 sentences from the final part of my Advent story. It’s a crossover of all my novels, and yes, it’s a bit cheesy. My excuse is that I needed something fun after the horror show of 2016. Here’s the link to all 5 parts. The whole thing will remain up until January 6.

Trevor ended the call he was on and set aside his phone. “That was Irina, checking to see if we’ll be there on Saturday for the private release party in Worcester.”

His girlfriend, Marlie, looked up from the recliner where she was feeding their one-month-old. “What did you tell her?”

“That we hadn’t decided yet.”

She was polite enough not to remind him the reason they hadn’t decided was that Trevor hadn’t mentioned it until about an hour ago. It shouldn’t have been a big deal, and he could easily have said they weren’t able to go. Baby Aidan was an adequate excuse. Except he wasn’t the reason Trevor hesitated.

The real reason Trevor stalled walked into the room and planted a kiss on his cheek. “Who was on the phone?” Andre asked.

Trevor’s boyfriend. But not Marlie’s.

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!

Happy Saturday! I’m feeling festive today. We put up the tree last weekend, and tomorrow I’m baking cookies. We had a good snowfall. Time to cuddle under a blanket and watch holiday movies and drink cocoa.

I’m in process of writing the final two parts of my annual freebie Christmas story. It’s called Light One Candle, and it was a fun way to bring characters from different novels into one place. Yep, it’s a bit cheesy and a bit fluffy. The first three parts are up, and the one I’m snippeting will be live Monday. If you want to know why Cooper (who appeared in Passing on Faith) has gone with Adam and AJ (from An Act of Devotion) up to their hotel room, you’ll just have to wait and see.

[Cooper] shrugged out of his jacket but held onto it, a barrier between him and the two drop-dead gorgeous men he’d come here with.

Adam, the one with the limp, was adorable. He was lithe and fair-skinned with vivid red-orange hair and a handful of freckles across his nose. AJ was a little taller, broader and more muscular with glossy almost-black hair and skin that looked naturally sun-kissed. Plus he had that sexy voice, the one he’d used to call Adam something in Italian when they were in the elevator. Cooper had never been with a couple before, but he’d followed them anyway, well aware they weren’t on their way to play a rousing game of Texas Hold ’Em.

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!

Happy Saturday! I’m still recovering from NaNoWriMo. Every year I say I’m never doing it again, and then the next year I do it anyway. Sigh.

I wasn’t sure what to snippet this week, since I don’t have anything new out and haven’t yet started my annual holiday story. So I’m going to snip from last year’s Christmas story, Noel and Silent Night. It can be found in my holiday anthology (S)no(w) Angels. If you’ve read Passing on Faith, you may recall Zayne is Micah’s BFF. A few people had asked for a story about her, so I gave them one which takes place roughly in the same time period as Walking by Faith (8-ish years before PoF). It opens with Micah taking Zayne as his plus-one to a staff holiday party to meet one of his coworkers. (Micah speaks first here.)

“It’s just a Christmas party. Wear red and call it a night.”

Zayne studied him. Bringing up the event evoked in her the desire to ask questions she probably shouldn’t, even though Micah wouldn’t be angry with her anymore—not after all they years they’d known each other. Things like will there be alcohol and can you stay sober enough to drive us home and are you going to ditch me with your friend for a drunken fuck in the bathroom. She’d asked enough times in the past to know he would be honest with her.

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!