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.

When I first started looking at publishing my gay romances, I struggled to find a publisher, as any unknown author does. I submitted Loving Aidan to the publisher I felt was strongest, but for whatever reason, it failed to meet the needs of their editorial calendar at the time. Maybe it was the angst level, or perhaps they rightly identified the struggles readers have had between Aidan's dual interest in both Sammy and Steven. Maybe they felt I wasn't ready, or they simply had enough new adult romances on their calendar. It doesn't matter. It was rejected and I fell apart for a little while.

Many of the gay male romance publishers still published anthologies at the time, and I decided to try instead to get into one of those. Unwilling to give up on Loving Aidan, I researched publishers and instead of settling on the strongest, I settled on one of the most venerable. Torquere was small. It didn't promise a lot of sales, but it had a good, solid reputation, longevity. I was seeing a series for these books, and I wanted that sense of longevity. So I took my chance and submitted the story again.

Torquere accepted the story, and the sequel, and the sequel after that. Loving Aidan became the first of the College Rose Romances, a series of new adult gay male romances focusing on the college experience. A series full of angst, drama, trauma, and love. 

It was a series that reviewers either loved or hated. Sales were moderate, but enough that I kept getting books accepted, kept receiving encouragement.

Then the rumors started. There were authors who weren't getting paid. Ridiculous, I thought. I checked my statements, the status of my checks. I bluntly asked the owners about it and was assured that everything was fine. 

Everything was not fine. Earlier this week, Torquere notified its authors that it would begin the process of closing down. I could feel my heart break. My series was going to die. My requests to get my rights back were sitting in mailboxes. The paper copy sent registered mail hadn't been picked up, and I knew from communication with other authors that I was not alone in this. 

When I was contemplating sending my books to Torquere, some friends had recommended Silver instead. I remember doing my research and deciding against it because of a warning sign I'd come across in researching the press. I felt like I'd dodged a bullet. Maybe I had. But I got caught in a ricochet. EC, Silver, Samhain. Torquere. 

My books for Torquere are a series. More than any payment, I needed a piece of paper returning my rights. Without it, the series was dead in the water. James, whose story I've been working on these past months, would never live for readers. Getting my rights back meant losing my covers. But I can deal with that. I can design a new cover.

I am heart broken. The college rose weeps. My dreams are shattered.

Today I received my rights back. The rose is not dead. Just maybe, if I tend it, the college rose will bloom. Peach blossoms will shine and you will all meet James again, and just maybe, you'll forgive him.

(* Torquere retains all rights to the cover of Loving Aidan. The image accompanying this post is separately licensed through 123rf.com)

I've been sitting staring at a blank page for too long. Why is it blank? Well, honestly, it's not exactly blank. It's stuck at about 4000 words. It's a decent amount of text, about a quarter to a third of what I want on this particular project, but it's not enough. Worse, I wrote the last thousand of those words about a week ago, which means I haven't written squat in a week.

Why am I worried?

One word: NaNoWriMo. Yes, I'm cheating, it's actually four words. National Novel Writing Month. Celebrated annually during November, National Novel Writing Month (cheerfully referred to as Nano by many participants) is an opportunity to let loose and write with wild abandon. It's a chance to jump start a project, or finish one. At its best, it's a finished draft in a month, packed with all the support you need.

It means writing 1667 words a day. Every day. For a month. 

I write gay romances. Pictures of hot guys are something that get shared in those circles. Often these are models, and so it's not infrequent to see this on my screen first thing in the morning:

Hot, right? But it's also frustrating. I work and write in medium where I am virtually never represented, after having lived my life and grown up in an environment where I am, again, almost never represented. While no character is a perfect stand-in, most of us growing up have heroes that we can or want to emulate, to resemble, to aspire to be.

This guy with the perfect head of teased dirty blond hair and the hot tattoos and the smooth skin and the glorious abs... so often he is the guy I'm writing. Because romance is fantasy. In my head I always wanted to be that hot guy. The one that looks hot in just his underwear.

And that of course is where this comes from. Because I do shop for underwear online, and facebook somehow knows that. And it delivers this picture to me.

Often.

I don't have the heart to ban the picture in the way I've banned so much political talk from my feed. I like looking. I like dreaming. I like thinking about how hot dirty blond boy would feel skin to skin crawling up me to do unmentionable things. But it hurts. Why? Here's a hint. The picture above is edited to take out this:

It's a shame of course, because in my desperate desire to be that hot jock, I would, as I imagine many do, join that club. Aspire to be hot. Except that an XL in those undies is a size 36. That makes me a full 12 sizes larger than the LARGEST SIZE THEY HAVE. At my size I can't get sexy underwear. At my size I'm lucky to find underwear at all. There's plenty of shame in that. 

A lot of people will go on about how it's all about will power and if I really wanted to blah blah blah. Sure.

For the record, at my heaviest I topped 420 pounds. Possibly more. That's where my industrial strength fatso scale tops out. In an effort to be sexy for my hubby, shortly after I asked him to marry me, I shaved the comb over and went on a full on no holds barred I was not going to fail this time diet. Successfully, as it happens. I lost at least 140 pounds, going to a low of 270. At this weight I was still, by doctors, considered morbidly obese. At this weight I also started showing the signs no person who loses weight wants to see... excess skin. The kind that won't go away even if you lose the weight gradually. 

Mind you, my six foot five frame, at 270 pounds, still had a 44 inch waist. a full 8 sizes away from fitting into the largest size of sexy underwear offers.  I kept the weight off for almost five years.

That bit about you get used to it, you feel better, you don't get hungry. That's all bullshit. For me? I was hungry all the time. I felt guilty if I ate a snack. I subsisted on tiny meals and exercised daily. My knees and back thanked me for the weight loss. The rest of my body waged a full on war. I was cold all the time. I felt weak, even though I exercised. I never developed a taste for the healthy foods I needed to eat, even though I tried an endless variety in an effort to maintain the weight I'd reached.

I've bucked the odds. A full 12 years after losing the weight, I'm still down 50ish pounds over my heaviest weight. But that means I've gained back a painful 100 pounds.

But I'm terrified of dieting. It never made me feel better, and even going through herculean lengths, I never even got close to my goal. Being able to buy XL undies and jeans at a regular store. 

I despaired and I searched high and low for places that sell sexy undies in my size. Like everything else I wear, it IS possible to find such a thing, but the choices are extremely limited, and heinously expensive.

Almost every book I write talks about the underwear the hero wears. About how sexy it makes them look. I think that's because I know I'll never get to feel that for myself.
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Don't forget to check out the ARDOR newsletter. The April issue is out and with it a prelude to the ongoing serial The One That Feels, presented here on the Passion Stroll.

I promised to offer free reads in this space, and I'm going to offer up a favorite story. This one never found a home with publishers, but remains a story that I'm proud of. I'll talk a lot about the characters in later posts, and more, I'm sure, about why I am offering this one. But for now, we'll start with a blurb and a cover.

The One That Feels
Thommas Ashforthe should never have met his ex Brian at the club. Never able to refuse Brian’s pleas, Thommas enters the Realm to seek out the lost spirit of Brian’s dying boyfriend Jordan. The price of travel in that place of magic is steep and oaths spoken in the Realm cannot be broken. With time running out before Jordan’s body dies in the world of the Real, Thommas rushes through the Realm on a hopeless quest.

Nem is a prince of Zaharoth, and Thommas represents a hope of escape from the ruthless authority of his father. But when Nem binds Thommas with an oath as a price of passage through the forests of his homeland, can he dare to hope that the stranger from the Real will be truly bound by it? ​

My life has been a little crazy for the past two years. In the midst of writing and editing, my father-in-law became deathly ill two summers ago. I wish I could say that was hyperbole, but I'm afraid it's not. He declined quickly from the healthy man I'd come to know into a frail shell. We tried to do everything ourselves so that he could stay in his house, but it became too much. He was admitted to the hospital, and the cancer they found was inoperable. Hospitals, then nursing homes, then hospice. Mercifully it was quick and certain in a way that left my husband with few doubts about our choices. I wrote every post for my Steven's Heart blog tour from a vigil beside his bed in hospice.

Since his passing my life has been a whirlwind. We bought a new house. We endeavored to sell not just our own home but my husband's father's also. I missed the Dreamspinner Author retreat last year because I was in the midst of moving. This year I was determined to make it, and I did (There's this photographic evidence with Amy DiMartino, Charlie Chochet and Dani Maas). Authors are a frequently insular bunch, and I'm no exception. If it wasn't for Dani, I'm not sure I would have managed to actually meet anyone. The workshop was jam packed with goodness, time to make new friends and contacts, everything I needed to be energized. There was even a chance to pitch ideas to the editors and I'm really thrilled at the prospect of releasing something from Dreamspinner later this year.

Unfortunately, it also meant returning home to both the impending sale of our former home (and therefore desperate last minute cleaning, bargaining, and endless meetings with lawyers and realtors) and two days missed from work at the college in the midst of spring break housing (which I coordinate) and the implementation of a new housing assignments and lottery system (guess who is on the implementation team). Something had to give and the immediate something was my posts here. My plan was only to be a week late posting. All my good intentions were for naught, and obviously last weekend nothing new went up. 

I hope none of you are too disappointed at the delay, and I promise my next post will be the blurb and cover for the serial novel that we'll be discovering here on the blog over the next few months. 

First of all, this is late. I'm so sorry! My computer had a meltdown. Pretty literally really, it was overheating to the point of shutting itself down randomly. I use a chill pad and the computer was still getting burning hot to the touch. Getting a new computer means endless setup tasks. Coordinating getting MS Office on the new computer, getting Creative Suite installed, and getting my cloud drives synced. OMG. It took FOOORRREEVVEERRRRR!

So now the exciting news. Are you ready?

TORQUERE PRESS ACCEPTED MY MANUSCRIPT FOR BECOMING RORY!!!

That's right, the fourth book in The College Rose Romances will be released this summer, tentatively in June. It will be the orange rose - passion and desire - and will focus on Rory, who will be a familiar character to folks who have read Andrew's Prayer.

Official cover hasn't come yet, and the blurb may still get tweaked, but here's the draft (I'm so excited!):
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One of the difficult parts about writing love stories is that you can't aim for the target. The heart goes the direction it wants, and because of that, the path characters take to get there is often a meandering one. It goes slow when as a writer you want it to go fast. It speeds by when you're begging the characters to slow down. I love that about writing, because I've learned that the characters are the ones in control. And that's splendid -- because when I let the characters loose, they thrive and grow and they live, so magnificently that they can make me cry, and they do.

So where are they meandering and how and what do I think that means? Let's find out together. A blog is practically a requirement for authors today, but I hope I can make this one worth an occasional visit. Unlike my newsletter with its fancy formatting and strict length provisions, my thoughts here will be less guarded, more raw. Sometimes they may be angry or excited in the ways the carefully placed words of the newsletter cannot be.  In my newsletter I explore the characters you've seen or will see soon. Here you'll also get to see the characters half-formed, and the stories as they become. 

I'm going to share a story here. I'm going to do it slowly, and if you read, patiently, you'll get the whole story. And if you're impatient, and you want it NOW... well, once I get far enough into it, I may offer an opportunity for that too. For now, as I get this beast moving, I'll be sharing twice a month for the story. And I'll post a couple more times a month about other things. Sometimes that will be a thought on current events; others it may be about a writing triumph or failure. And yes, there's sure to be a bit of promotion now and then, not just of my stuff, but of stories, beautiful stories -- the ones I love and maybe sometimes the ones I hate too, because people's taste is always different. 

Next week ARDOR, my formal newsletter, comes out with its February issue. I'm still writing the content (furiously, because it needs to get formatted as well as written!), but you can be sure that love and dating and Valentine's Day will all be covered. And there will be a short in that issue as well, connected to something that has already been written. While the editorial content is still being finalized, I do have the cover for the issue, and I wanted to share it with you, because it inspired me. Maybe it will inspire you as well. Enjoy, and I'll talk to you all next week!*

*Yes, I mean talk. If you comment I will always try to answer! Books are one way communication, but this doesn't have to be... it can be a dialogue, if you want it to be.