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. 

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.

I'm not going to belabor what has been going on at Dreamspinner Press. For eight years, they've been partners in this writing adventure, and for the majority of that time, they were the shining gem of partners in this genre. I hope Dreamspinner can pull themselves back from their current predicament, and do the right thing for their authors. In fact, I am confident that they are making every effort to do so. As an author who has lost contracts to failing magazines, and struggled to regain rights to books when I waited too long to request the rights back from publishers, I couldn't take the risk this time. The books at risk included Gerry’s Lion—of all my writing, it is my husband's favorite. Also at risk was my cherished Chessmaster Chronicles collection, including my very first published work, The King’s Mate. 

My books were at the end of their contract cycles. This made the decision to request the rights back both easy, and difficult. In the end, I made the request. Despite reports that I've heard to the contrary, I can speak only to my experience here, and the rights were promptly released, and the books promptly taken down (at least as far as I can tell so far).

As a result, there are a number of missing covers, and some missing purchase links, on my website today. I will be working to get these reformatted, and at least some of them will be re-released through Purple Horn Press. I'm so sorry that for now none of you will know the joy that Gerry felt, bringing Leo with him to the Easter egg hunt. But maybe by the Fourth of July, you can experience a different joy with him... ​

Obviously, the website is changing a bit. Most of the changes are minor and meant to move to a responsive template that better reflects the reality that many of us no longer consume the internet on a desktop computer anymore. The old template was okay, but some of the screens struggled, and it was beginning to look dated. So, we have a new template. I hope folks like it, because these redesigns are a PITA. And not the good kind.

I've been mulling lately whether to return to an old story that I started a couple of times some years ago. Like most of my attempts at fantasy romance it went nowhere, and yet still stirs something when I read it. I never got a great response from The One That Feels, and I'll admit that makes me hesitant, both for this story and another--Lost—that is nearly complete. But there's that stirring thing, and that's not to be let go of lightly. Here's a snippet. Interested? Let me know in the comments.

So, what is it like going to a meeting of an LGBTQ+ student group?

With a character like Rory, who has been thrust into a leadership role in one, this was a question I knew we'd see the answer to. Student organizations are often run haphazardly, with partial executive boards, missing officers, and on the drive of what can be only one or two dedicated people.

How do I know?

As a student, I was the political chair of the LBGA, the co-chair of the Disability Action Network, and served on the cabinet of the student government for a student body of 25000 people. I also spent fifteen years of my career in student affairs working with and advising students in exactly those roles.

Smooth operations among the student organizations exist, but usually only for a time, and often—so very often—the load eventually falls on a few.

In Becoming Rory we see Rory struggling in that role. Alone he is trying to pull together a community, and he's got a hard one to manage. Because the religious right can say all they want about the gay agenda... there isn't one gay community. And that's just the GAY community, when we're talking about the LGBTQ+ community.  Doing it alone can't be easy. An organization like that should have at least two and probably three other people sharing that responsibility. At my school, the executive board was an eighteen person monstrosity... except that three people were holding down fourteen of those roles.

When I wrote the Queer Alliance meeting, I wanted it to feel right. From the fearless Cian showing up in a skirt to the terrified first year student Ian whose courage was all in just walking through the door, to bisexual Eric who expected showing up and talking about being bi to be easier than it turned out to be. I stood in Rory's shoes. I can't begin to think how many young men like Ian I talked to. How many like Bethany. I hope that it's gotten easier to make them less afraid when the fearless Cian characters walk through the door—they're totally based on a first year student I knew with perfect legs, who, yes, often showed up for meetings in a skirt. And just as often had to run to the meeting because they were chased (in heels) on the way.

They were heady places. Accepting and terrifying and hot... because they were the one place on campus where you might just make a connection. And while that part is less important now (because of the internet), I hope the community and the atmosphere still shines through.

Maybe a kid like Ian will read my story. Maybe they'll realize it doesn't have to be terrifying. And if they do, it'll all be worth it.

Becoming Rory
Ashavan Doyon

​Rory Graeble returns to college determined to reinvent himself. Too many years have been wasted with masks, but becoming a student leader is a step Rory isn’t sure he’s ready for. A new identity takes more than just a new nickname, and Rory knows he has to take the chances that his old self would never risk. When that chance is a party that ends with an anonymous hot skater’s tongue down his throat and a phone number in his pocket, Rory knows what he has to do.
 
Danny Smits never expected to see stuffy lit geek Rory Graeble trying to be out, trying to be proud, trying to be… Rory. It’s damned sexy, and too much for the entrepreneurial skater to resist. When Rory calls him back the day after the party, Danny knows Rory has changed. But will Danny’s haunted past deter Rory? Or will Rory embrace the chance to experience everything the closet had stolen away? Danny believes in keeping things real, in a brutal honesty he knows means Rory will run screaming.
 
But this time Rory isn’t running.

Published by Purple Horn Press (only $3.99 until the end of April!)
Becoming Rory is also available from Amazon

I write a lot of contemporary.

There’s plenty of reasons for that, from the old ‘write what you know’ adage to the fundamental goal of writing gay romance for me—putting happy endings out there. Oh, I know I don’t make it easy. I write a lot of angst. But my boys get their happy endings.

Lately writing contemporary is hard. I’ve thought a lot about why that might be. Part of it, surely, is that the future seems less rosy, less hopeful than before. My husband sometimes will get upset at me, because I do write angst, and that means that often in my stories the characters will experience the realities of homophobia in our culture. He likes that sweeter more hopeful vision.

I stepped away from my usual stories. I set aside The College Rose Romances and The Sam’s Cafe Romances. Both of those have sequels that need airing, from Cian’s story—the purple rose—to the missing stories of chess master Brian’s brothers. Instead I’m working on a short, and unlike my last one which was very much a contemporary, this one has a dystopian sci-fi feel. It is intended as a romance, and I’m struggling sometimes to find that balance, but it is also, I think, rather different than my usual stories.

Mostly it came to me as a title and then a cover and went from there. I think I’ll be sharing it pretty soon.

The Tendire Gate.
​

This past year has been awful.

I know I'm not alone in thinking that. A lot of advice for writers talks about that struggle, where inspiration fades into despair and how important it is to burst through that fog and share your art... because art, make no mistake, is resistance. Especially when you're writing gay love stories in a society that has, according to most recent news, for the first time in recent memory become less accepting.

So there's a been a fog. It's not been without light. Through Purple Horn Press I released my short, American Pride, and managed to get three of the four College Rose Romances back in print. The final one will release before the end of January. That's not the end of the story for our college students. Jim Puffton, the resident bully, is our next reluctant hero, and I wonder if part of my hesitance in getting that story out is tied up in my worries for the state of the union: because why should I shine a light on a bully?

But Jim, as you'll hopefully discover, is so much more than that. Redemption stories are never easy, and maybe it's important to show that sometimes bullying is also coming from a place of pain that we don't see, that people are more complicated than that. That story, Forgiving James, will come later in the year.

In the meantime, Becoming Rory is coming out. I adore the transformation of Lawrence/Rory, and we've seen a peek of it in Andrew's Prayer, as the timeline of the books overlaps. We finally get to see Rory's hinted at mysterious boyfriend, and their relationship is really intense. We get a love interest with a mental health issue, and that's not something we often see. It was really important to me to put that into the story and deal with it honestly—something that cost me in reviews. But I stand by my portrayal. This can be hard to read... mental illness is so difficult in a relationship, and both characters are young college students, but really, mental illness makes everything about a relationship hard. Rory finds out how hard, and what he's willing to do to keep his love.

I know a lot of us are still in that fog. I find it a little strange that the first release that I had in this era was titled American Pride. Because that story is really about a character who has had a lot of loss, and it's his pride in his country that has defined him. But that loss makes him doubt that pride, and it makes him question everything. But this is a character who has lost so much, and at the end of the day, it's the ideals of the United States: Liberty and Justice for all. Freedom and equality that keep him steady. And even with his questions, he still keeps his flag lit at night, so it can fly even in the dark. Dustin is very much lost in the same sort of fog I know so many of us are feeling. But some days, I hope that I can find that bit of optimism that I wrote into the character. 

Purchase American Pride at Purple Horn Press.
Purchase American Pride at Amazon.