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Unlucky draw on the prompt. This was meant to be action adventure but turned rather contemplative. Perhaps I should rewrite it, but the topic was too close to home for me and I'm just glad to have gotten it done. (prompt is pg 139) Next week might get skipped (or I might write it this weekend so I can just post it when the time comes). I have a medical procedure Tuesday that is going to wipe me out for most of the week.  Judgement in FearHe hated being in the public eye. That wasn’t his place. Jerome Evans preferred quiet contemplation to the world of conspiracy and money that his position on the international criminal court lent itself. That the quiet isolation and invisibility of a man in a business suit reading a newspaper gave him a measure of safety was a false comfort. The list was in his inside jacket pocket. His was not the only name, just the one that made his trust in law and order falter. That he had been assigned the case was premature. Everyone knew it. Everyone wanted something to be done. They wanted an order. They wanted it known and loud. Jerome understood the drive. How could he not? The Americans had burned up their democracy with the same frantic brashness that they’d wielded with such desperate fervor to free themselves when they’d declared themselves independent. Now they were not, and the world bore witness. It was a heartbreaking testimony to witness remotely. More, he was sure for those poor souls trapped there, helpless to do anything against the war machine of the traitor president. The international court didn’t yield to threats. Even the sort of pressure to act that had gotten him assigned to the case was rarely acceded to. The world wanted action in the face of crimes it had seen too often before. More to the point they wanted to bind the country before it withdrew. Only member states were subject to the court. And for all that it was burning, that formal withdrawal hadn’t happened. It was useless of course. The threats had already started. Attempts to stop the process before it was even public. The wiretap on his phone. The list in his pocket. They were just the beginning. They were trying to hold a man to task who knew nothing of grace or forgiveness, and who wallowed in the delivery of revenge. He lived for vendetta and the checks on his power failed, one by one. Already the world feared him. He didn’t have any great skill. His oratory was inconsistent. But there were evil, skilled people behind him. That was the other reason. They wanted it public—the accomplices named. Not just the ones people knew, but the quiet dangerous ones that were always in the background in these cases. Jerome had stood in judgement over depravity before. He’d seen awful abuses before. He’d never thought to see it like this. Not from the Americans. Not from a country that had, in his youth, brought such hope to the world. Now there would be a race. It wouldn’t be a comfortable one. Not for him, however invisibly he tried to live. The assassins would come. For him. For his family. And even if they didn’t and the threat was empty, just the man’s words would set certain elements of terror at work to push him into a life of worry and terror. His verdict could not come soon enough. So another story and another 500 words with the title. Seems I will continue with that trend for a while yet. No graphic this time, maybe I'll come back with one later if I have time, but my back was bothering me this week, so I'm just glad to get the story up.
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This week the randomness gods have given me a cruel task - a science fiction story. Let me know if any of you can guess the prompt! [Updated - note I forgot to put that this prompt is from Create a Story, pg 179]  Sequence of the DoctrineWhen people think of the resistance, no one expected it to be them. There were the expected groups. The leftist, vocal, organic food fanatics. The ones who saw conspiracy in every additive. But when the revolution happens in a laboratory, it was exactly those groups who were watched. Because they made noise. Because to activate their matrix, the doctrine required certain foods in sequence. That was essential. Even with the control noone had known they had, food was precious and there were workers to monitor. For poisons. For toxins. Not to detect what was really being done. But in that search much tampering could be undone. So the people who might avoid the deliberate true nutrient sequence, as required by the doctrine, the organic farmers were tracked. A registry created. Not just those who farmed but those who partook in the foods that might lack a crucial implant. It was impossible to implant everything without being discovered. That was the purpose of the matrix. The purpose of the sequence. Enough common foods. Enough that eventually the sequence must be hit, whether by doctrine or happenstance. Slowly, person by person, potluck by potluck, the sequence was spread and the mind unfurled into the world of that tiny group of masters who had created the doctrine on our behalf. The registry had been made. The enemies tracked. That weakness was easily dealt with. The misfortune of those poor deluded souls whose own search for purity in their foods had killed them was simply an object lesson. A directive. Listen to the doctrine. Follow the sequence. Strengthen the matrix in your mind and in the minds of those who break bread with you. It seems like it should have taken a long time, but the food chain had become too monolithic for it to fail. The masters were happy. Even the smallest pockets of resistance were quickly squashed, either as organic examples of the need for the doctrine, or quiet disappearances. Because the implants created a hive controlled by the nexus of masters, even those who might have resisted were unaware until it was too late. The patterns of behavior of everyone they knew would change, one by one. The last one would end up at a potluck, being fed the crucial implants, one at a time, in the correct sequence, because somehow they had managed to avoid the sequence. Maybe they always ate their cookie first. But they still ate it, and so, in the end, they were still susceptible to the suggestions of their friends at the gathering. It was only a few who ran. Who were quietly lifted from the streets. No one expected it to be them. The adult picky eaters. They weren’t even part of the equation. No one thought about people who only ate fries with signature seasoning that no one even made anymore or thought about how they got it. But they were blissfully immune. And the nexus never saw them coming. Once again just 500 words. Maybe I'll just keep to that? Or maybe I'll get a prompt that demands more... or less. We'll see. Next week then!
The experiment continues. This is week three and I am continuing with random prompts from the Create a Story book. This week’s prompt is from life experience (pg 67), and appropriately draws a little more on my personal experience than I am entirely comfortable with. I’d intended for these to be somewhat random lengths, but it seems they are running fairly consistently at 500 words a piece. Maybe that will continue. Maybe I will hit something that keeps me writing for longer. We will have to see.  Moments of Perfect ClarityIt’s always the small things. Perhaps, had I been looking, I would have seen myself on the verge of this cliff, where it waited, intense and deadly and terrifying all at once. Instead, I felt it, deep in my gut, with half my innards en route to the equator and the other half determined to find the North Pole. And just like my poor ill-used stomach and its proliferation of butterflies, I was balanced on a fence where I’d been unknowing and unseeing and yet influenced, ready to tip over. It should be something big, to derail the force of destiny and reshape the path of a life forever. All the checkpoints of my life would change. It should be big. There was no decision. How could there be any decision? The direction of my life had changed. I had dragged the anchor of normalcy over the boundary and found clarity. And such clarity. Did other people feel this? Did such a small thing affect others as it did me? He was popular. He had dark pretty eyes and long lashes that failed to make him feminine. But it was the drape of the blue shirt, the white tank, the chain falling over that deeply bronzed olive skin along his clavicle. It wasn’t just my stomach. It was my heart and my head and… well, yeah, that too, uncomfortably and too obviously so. Thankfully I was at an age where even that expression of horniness could be handwaved to teenage hormones. And I did. But his neck, that chain, were like the links of bondage tying me to a remorse that would not go away. It was always there. Too many classes together and I ached for each one, hoping to arrive early enough that I could see him come in. Hope his powder-blue shirt would be open and loose or at least unbuttoned enough that I might glimpse that bit of him that never failed to make my heart race. So, I could hold it and store it and keep it in my memory to play over and over again in my head. As if somehow my guilt would be less if I obsessed more. Each time my heart raced my mind couldn’t help but grow closer to an answer. Clarity might be ignored for a time, but not forever, not when the reminder was there, class after class, day after day… dream after terrifying dream. I knew at night when my hand made its inevitable journey that I’d crossed the line. I’d sought pleasure in the offense of my desire as any boy might. As terrible as the guilt could grow, as much as I might some nights wish to end everything, still, I indulged in it. I could not return these feelings to where they grew. They had a life of their own. And Heaven help me, I wanted them. A glimpse of a young man’s perfect neck. It’s always the small things. As I mentioned, 500 words. Checkpoint, if anyone didn’t guess, was the really difficult word to fit in, though there were a few others that probably managed to be awkward. Any guesses? Thoughts on the prompt and what it might have been?
Week two of my story prompt experiment using Create a Story, a prompt book I got in the discount section of Barnes & Noble. I'm doing this primarily as an exercise to keep myself writing, and to do some writing that’s perhaps a little different than what I normally do. For this prompt, I selected a page from the historical section (pg 9). To be fair, I'm not really selecting, like any good gamer, I role a die for the genre (there are ten), and then another which I add to the page number for the start of that genre to get a random pick from that section. As a plus, I get to use my dice! 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. Sometimes a word just won't make sense for a particular story and I may skip one here or there, but I will always try to include them 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.  Closing the LidThe pharaoh was dead. What was left was ritual. Established. Though he had passed young, the child King Tutankhamun had shaped what was to happen next, restored many temples and much of the old rites. Thutmose had heard stories of that tomb. Some said there was a curse and even some of those whose work was to preserve the ka, the soul and spirit, for the afterlife had been said to suffer for their work on the boy king. Thutmose didn’t believe that. Perhaps this time the tomb was no pyramid, but their pharaoh was destined for an immortal life—a life that required a great working that the ka recognize it and return. Every part of their work was important. A scribe had worked with the vizier on the announcement to the people. By the time it was read to the people, the work to embalm the body, to wash it and prepare it, had begun. He’d helped remove the organs to be dried out and placed, lungs, stomach, liver and intestines, in the prepared jars. They worked upon a pharaoh. Preservation was so imperative that the jars had been made long ago, to be ready for this. The heart remained. The ka lived there, and so it must remain. But the body itself too had to be dried out. Thutmose had been waiting. It was hardly possible to be patient. To wrap the body was a great honor. If it was done wrong, the body might not hold together when the ka returned to it. To his hands this honor fell. For all the many days the body spent drying, Thutmose agonized over it. He’d wrapped bodies before. Many, even. But to be the hands to wrap a pharaoh? To someone in his place, those were the true riches in life. Not jewels or gold or servants locked away that the afterlife be a place of comfort. The knowledge that his hands were trusted. That his skill was trusted. Of course he was subject to the ritual. A tool of a priest wearing a mask of Anubis. To the priests, perhaps to the pharaoh too, his job was less important than the endless stream of words and ceremony that surrounded what seemed every moment. But when the time came, and the others had finished stuffing the dried out husk that had been their pharaoh with linen to hold his shape, it was still Thutmose who held the bandages and wrapped, slowly and meticulously, inch by inch, limb by limb, layer by layer, covering the body in linen and amulets until it was so safely and meticulously wrapped that the pharaoh’s immortality would see him covered in linen forever. The priest in his mask never stopped speaking. Privately, Thutmose wondered how he managed that in a mask with no way to drink, but said nothing, wishing not to speak a heresy that might undo his careful work. They lifted the mummy into the coffin. It was done. Once again 500 words with the title. Anyone catch the more awkward instances of trying to fit in one of the words? Any guesses as to what the prompt was? Hope it was interesting at least. Onward to next week, where the category for the prompt is life experience.
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.  Missing the North StarJulian leaned against the counter. The bright light of a beautiful day from the kitchen window did nothing to clear his mind. Even the air inside the house felt heavy, clouded, like a pea soup fueled by thought. Just moving through the tiny distances from kitchen to office to bedroom in the tiny cabin he’d meant to have rented for a week and had been in since fall sapped his drive. He’d spent the winter here. It’d been a thought. To wander the woods. Searching the beauty of the wilds. To seek direction in nature, where the heart of wonder grew. Every day was vibrant—the cascading color of the leaves edging to the frozen cold landscapes of snow and the hooting of the owls in the night. Julian felt only betrayal. On this day, like so many others, he tore himself from the tiny cabin and drove the long twisting route into the nothing of a town that was the closest hint of civilization. Here in the middle of nowhere, the town was nothing. Not even a stop light. There was a general store, a gas station, a small diner—and a bar that was busier than any of them, at least after work hours. Once the drive out might have brought Julian some satisfaction. Instead, he wondered about his feeble path in life. The store keeper greeted him warmly. His supply needs were known and gathered—the bags waiting. He paid the man and started packing the bags into his truck. This place had been his everything. Like a dream. He’d drawn it that way, painted magnificent landscapes. It was like the beauty around him stirred his soul, painting wild, like a dervish, with the brushes making strokes more eloquent than a poet stirring the soul with verses. Those paintings meant he could afford to wallow for six months or more. But it grated. He’d been young and filled with inspiration. Where had it gone? Julian gripped the edge of the truck. He could feel the energy sapping away. He knew where the inspiration had gone. He might have translated it through this place, but the real heart of his artistry had been a person, not a place. A person he’d neglected. A person he’d taken for granted and left alone until they felt unwanted. A person who left him for someone else. It was his fault. “Hey mister.” A firm hand gripped Julian by the arm. “You okay?” Julian spun, pulling his arm from the grip, and his breath caught in his throat. Stunning. It was a young man, perhaps twenty three. His bare chest was smooth, in the fashion of the day, and marked, over the heart and toward the shoulder with an elaborate tattoo of a compass rose. Julian looked up from the tattoo into sinking depths of sparkling blue. He could feel the weightlessness of drowning as he grew ever more lost. Was it a sign? How did one find their way? “Hi.” 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.  Fortune’s Pawn (Stouten Duet Book I)
Fortune As an heir to the Stouten family fortune, Brandon Stouten had anything he could want. But the girl his parents tried to foist on him for his birthday was a bit much, especially given that she had no idea she was being offered as a suitable bride. When Brandon balks at the unwilling gift, it causes a fistfight with her brother, and he escapes the party in the company of a tall, willowy angel of a man—a stranger who recognizes Brandon’s hesitance for what it is. When a night of comfort and wisdom becomes an ache in Brandon’s heart, he goes to the only man he knows will understand—the brother who walked away from the family fortune. Taylor Simmons has dressed celebrities and business moguls, but none of them ever filled out a pair of slacks quite as well as Brandon Stouten. Seeing an achingly beautiful and hurt young man, Taylor offers him insight and clarity that becomes a morning filled with passion—and regret. Famously conservative, the Stouten family would never give up one of their own to the demon they see in Taylor. Unfortunately for them, Taylor has no intention of letting Brandon go. This story takes place in the same universe as the Sam's Cafe Romances, with Fortune's Pawn taking place a couple years prior to The King's Mate. 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. The King’s Mate (Coming Soon)
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Ashavan DoyonWriter of the mysterious, fantastic, and the romantic. Sometimes sappy. Often angsty. Always searching for the sexy. Stories about men who love men. Categories
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