As promised, I'm starting my story prompt experiment using Create a Story, a prompt book I got in the discount section of Barnes & Noble. This is just an exercise to get me writing regularly again, but maybe it will be interesting for folks. In any event, it's got to be more joyful than any of the terror that is passing for news these days.

For the first prompt, I selected a page from the romance section (pg 59). The prompts are very brief, and for an additional challenge you can include a handful of specified words. I will be trying to include all the words recommended for each prompt, since it's meant as an exercise. 

The prompts are the whole content of the book, so it's not really fair to print the prompt itself... but I encourage people to guess in the comments. 

500 words with the title. Not so bad. I hope people enjoy it. Did anyone suss out the prompt? What do you think? Let me know and I'll post a new one next week.

There's a lot of negativity in the world right now. For someone like me, there comes a feeling of helplessness with that. Instead of focusing on what I can't control and what I can't do, I'm going to let my creativity loose. I'm going to allow fantasy and romance and love and fun and creativity to bubble up to the surface and make something great.

But there's a problem. I'm woefully out of practice. I got hurt a few years ago... badly hurt. And the recovery has been very slow, a recovery not of weeks or months, but years. Writers exercise by writing, so getting my writing back in shape means writing more. I got a prompt book (I'm using Create a Story) and I'm going to go through it and try to do one prompt a week (somewhat randomly and not in order, though I'll identify the prompt for anyone who wants to follow along). Maybe some weeks the prompt will lead me on a longer adventure and it will take a few entries. We'll have to see how it goes.

I'll be posting those entries here with the tag "prompts" (I may use that for other prompts as well, eventually). Maybe it will be a silly exercise I abandon in a month or two. Maybe I'll like it and prompts will continue for weeks or months at a time. I'm breaking a classic content rule here, in that I don't have a bunch of these done in advance, because part of the prompt is the staving  off of the darkness, and for that I need to do them in real time. I will, when I can, try to produce one or two in advance to use for weeks where I simply don't have bandwidth or work is too busy—or heaven forbid, I'm on vacation.

In the meantime, I think it's always useful to have a prompt solution, and this one is cheap and easy (I got it for $9 at Barnes and Noble). 

Eventually I may branch out into using something like the Story Engine Deck for these instead, but for now, I think this should work fine. Hope to see you at the first prompt by the end of this week!

Very excited to have out this month the first book of the Stouten Duet. Fortune’s Pawn will tell the story of missing brothers of our enigmatic chess master Brian from the Sam’s Cafe Romances. 

We know little of Brian’s family from the Sam’s Cafe Romances—only that he walked away from a fortune and left behind two brothers.

Two gay brothers, each of whom dealt with living in the finance weaponized environment of Stouten wealth in very different ways. While Brian walked away, Brandon and Brice both remained. The Stouten Duet is their story. Brandon appears, briefly, in The Rodeo Knight. His story comes first—a prologue to our larger series, taking place before the bitter accident that leaves Russ so broken in The King’s Mate. Brice’s story will follow as a sort of epilogue, wrapping up the story and the world after the events of The Rodeo Knight.

I hope everyone enjoys them both, and I’m thrilled that the first, Fortune’s Pawn, is now available in print and e-book from Amazon.

I’m so pleased that A Wounded Promise is now out, both as ebook and paperback. I love this story, because I think too often our romance leads are these overly perfect people, and we have heroes who are fragile and hurt and trying to find a way to be whole in themselves and realizing that can be hard to do in a relationship. The story still has happiness and love and carries forward the romance, but because each character has some real hurt to deal with, it does it in a way that feels very visceral. 

To close out the series we have The Rodeo Knight. I had so much fun writing this story. I love Sylvester as a character a lot. The idea of an insecure kid who grew up hiding himself and is thrust into a need for reinvention... I think a lot of us have no idea what we’d do if we had to reinvent ourselves, and exploring that made for a story I didn't expect. There is just so much unexpected in this story, so much that is terrifying and wonderful and I love that. I hope that you will too. The Rodeo Knight should be out by the end of October.

Excited that The King’s Mate finally got released at the very end of July. Even more excited that we were able to do a print release of what was the very first story I ever had released in the gay romance genre. I got my copies in the mail on Friday and they look gorgeous. 

I truly hope everyone else will think so too. This story was special, and getting to revisit it and expand it for the collection made it more special. When we were trying to get everything rereleased through Purple Horn, it was this series that was the outlier. They needed to be done comprehensively somehow, and I wasn’t sure what to do about the fact that I wasn’t doing a collection in the same way.

Work and new procedures to try to help me recover from my injury just took up too much space in my life to handle getting the series back out there. While I did my usual November writing, it wasn't coherent. I felt a lot like I had lost all my mojo. 

This July I did a secondary writing exercise. That one wasn't writing a novel, but it was concentrated, sustained writing.

The injury is still a problem, one I'm still working on (with yet more, new procedures). But it went well enough that I was comfortable doing the work to get this done. I decided that I would also put out a print edition—individual volumes this time—for those who like to hold books in their hands.

I will work as expeditiously as I can to get the remaining two books out before the end of the year, starting with A Wounded Promise. That story is close to my heart and I look forward to getting it out. 

Hopefully we will see it out by the end of September, and The Rodeo Knight by the end of the year.

My first several attempts at getting published with gay romance were rejections. It’s easy to look at my early success and miss the rejections in the realm of fantasy that spanned years from 2000 to 2008 or so. And it’s easy to miss the early submissions to Samhain and others that were rejected with one line rejections. “This story does not meet our publication needs at this time.” Whichever spin on that was popular at the time. In the intervening years, I’d had some success in writing for gaming companies, which gave me a lot of insight into what those words could mean. I credit an editor for Dragon magazine, with whom I was friendly on Facebook - they were more free about that then—for taking the time to really talk to me about what editorial rejections meant, and what those terse emails might really mean.  
 
Changes in the landscape for game writing shifted my focus, and for a while I only wrote during National Novel Writing Month, a habit for which my little brother wholly deserves the blame (and the credit). I got into a fanfic community, and started writing very regularly. Prompts. Challenges. Eventually, a friend who had moved from that to writing for one of the small gay romance presses suggested I write something. They all knew I wrote stories outside the narrow fanfic world.

So I did. And got rejections, just as I had in the past. It was crushing, even knowing what the words meant. But I remembered the words of my editor friend, who had told me to always insulate myself from the rejections by having more things submitted and waiting, so it was never the last thing waiting to crush me. 

Loving Aidan got rejected, and promptly resubmitted to Torquere Press. I worked on a anthology submission for a sports anthology, taking a sideways take - chess. 

Torquere accepted Loving Aidan. The King’s Mate, my chess story, also got accepted for the anthology. Because of how publication schedules work, The King’s Mate was published first... my first published gay romance.

Now its coming out again. New cover. I’m very excited.

I've been busy. American Pride. The Tendire Gate. The Byte of Betrayal. I didn't stop with those. Most of my catalog has been rereleased at this point, including all four volumes of the College Rose Romances.

Loving Aidan was the first book I ever had accepted by a publisher, so the series that sprang from that story is particularly special to me. Every one of the main characters has been able to surprise me, though never, perhaps, as much as Steven in book 2. 

But none was as difficult to write as Jim Puffton in book 5.

I've been promising this for what feels forever (and really is probably since 2018, which is still a really long time. People are going to start thinking I'm George R.R. Martin with these delays!). But it's here, releasing this Wednesday, July 26.

Forgiving James
College Rose Romances Book 5

James Puffton knew this day would come. As a fallible young man, he’d made all the wrong choices. He’d cheated on his girlfriend with a guy. More than once. And he’d used her—a shield, keeping his perfect image safe. Now that she knew, Jim’s life turned upside down. Faith has always been Jim’s guide, but when it leads him to the most flamboyantly gay freshman he’s ever seen, he wonders if God is punishing him. He can’t deny his feelings, but when people find out, will Tyler be in danger?

Tyler Montgomery was terrified to come to campus. An incident last semester made clear the school wasn’t as safe as officials liked to pretend. When he passes out drunk after making a pass at a handsome young jock, he discovers that he was taken care of by school bully Jim Puffton. Tyler freaks, but Jim doesn’t push. He walks away. Then Jim does something profound that makes Tyler want to ignore all Jim’s terrifying history and trust him, sealing that trust with a kiss in front of everyone. But all Jim’s old friends are homophobic bullies. For Tyler, campus is suddenly a dangerous place to be. ​

I've had several chances to just glimpse success on the horizon and need to start over. Part of that is needing to redefine success. Another part is the uncertainty of life as an author—changes in audience, genre conventions, expectation, and the one hot thing. A large part for me has been press closures and rights recovery. When you combine that with a pandemic, a severe and traumatic physical injury, and a the need to cope with a mental health condition that puts me solidly in the "measures energy with spoons" category (if you know, you know), you end up with everything grinding to a halt. So, with my rights reclaimed from Dreamspinner during the pandemic, and a dearth of those books having been released even while I still had the press, I have been left in a position I hate.

For six months all of my romance books have been out of print.

The College Rose Romances have been waiting on their fifth entry since 2018. The Sam's Cafe Romances slid into obscurity when they went out of print with the rights recovery from Dreamspinner. And of all my miscellaneous shorts published at Dreamspinner, only The Byte of Betrayal had made it back into the world - with a new cover! (and like all the others, it went out with Purple Horn at the end of 2022). 

Getting started again carries with it costs. Some monetary, some energy and time based. With an ongoing struggle to write at all, I have debated for a long time giving up my lifetime dream. Just considering giving it all up was making me miserable. So I catalogued the costs again... and delayed.

The delays are done.

This past week, I worked to figure out the logistics - ISBN numbers, a bank account, a kdp account in my name, and so forth. And I put out The Tendire Gate. And because some things have gotten smoother and there's a whole lot to rerelease, I put out American Pride for good measure. A hefty dose of angst too, with The Byte of Betrayal.

These are all old stories and I know I'll need to release new ones too. There's a plan for that. The College Rose Romances has a volume five, Forgiving James, which is complete, but I can't release it until the rest are back out. Sam's Cafe Romances has a spin off... two novellas telling the story of Brandon and Brice, Brian's brothers - The Stouten Duet. Those are also written, but need editing. And I have a costumed hero story too. 

Stuff is in the works. There's a new dawn. I have a plan. The stories are coming back out. 

There will be new stuff too, I promise. 

Having gone through this before, I can't express how painful it is to watch my books slowly disappear from one site after another. 

As of today, my College Rose Romances are the holdout and are still available. I expect them to go this weekend. 

I know I've done this before. It's still hard for my heart to see it.

This year has been hard fought. And that's saying something after the last few we've been through. The day job is a struggle in a way I'd long thought had been left behind. COVID remains a constant worry. My mom's husband passed suddenly, and though it was after long illness, the adjustment has been difficult. I broke my back in a fall on the ice in the early days of March. The struggle just to do ordinary things has been ceaseless and painful.

Add to that feelings of failure: at my job, in my writing, in my hopes for recovery. The costs to keep the doors open at Purple Horn Press have simply gotten too high, and that means a likely move to straight out self-publishing if I even put my books back out at all.

I think writing those words hurts almost as much as breaking my back. 

Life is full of lessons. The hard part is figuring out what it was I was supposed to learn.

​I'm still not sure.