Blog Talk - Ashavan Doyon

Published on: May 10, 2026

An Overdue Change in the Website

For well over a decade, my website has been hosted on Weebly.

I liked Weebly. A significant portion of my job involves management of a large CMS based website, and that meant that coming home to do editing on my writing website needed to be easy, simple—straightforward in a way that the work site is not. Weebly did that.

Then a few years ago Square bought Weebly. Square is commerce based and while they gave us the option to try their web options, for an author site they were... not what I needed. I deferred. I waited. My cost at Weebly climbed as I was forced into more expensive consolidated plans.

My writing has taken a back seat to the pandemic and an injury that I've alluded to before. I considered just dropping the site. I considered abandoning writing entirely.

But I couldn't do it. I've maintained and maintained and... finally switched to something new. I know, I know, it doesn't really LOOK like I switched to something new. The look and feel of the site is largely the same and except for a few pieces here and there... the dashes at either side of the navigation, the font size for navigation submenus, a few changes in font color and size in a few places... the site doesn't look much different.

It is different. And maybe even if a lot of the changes are simply a new way of doing the same things, it will still mean I'm paying more attention to something I'd let fall to the side. We'll see.

Published on: April 11, 2026

Stalled...

My writing has been stalled.

They say real writers don't get writer's block and that's not really true. We totally do, but usually we have strategies to cope with it. The ones I usually use just aren't working well right now.

I only got the two releases in last year. I did manage to write during Nano. In a terrifying twist... I remember writing but have no idea whatsoever what I wrote. I know that's from depression which is part of my core bipolar illness, and I struggle. I love my writing. I don't want to forget it.

So, I'm trying to find a direction. Find some joy. Some happiness. And focus to write. More later.

But in goal setting, I am going to set a goal of two releases for this year. We'll see if I can manage that.

Published on: March 19, 2025

A new experiment

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!

Published on: January 1, 2022

New Year, New Plan

This has not been a good couple years.

My creativity and heart for writing has been sorely fragmented. Between the market for gay romances, current trends, politics, the onset of COVID-19 my sometimes fragile mood stability has been anything but steady.

Even now, as I sit, vaccinated and boosted, I am watching the numbers for my state climb over one million cases—in a state with less than seven million people. Those are official numbers, certainly low, and sobering in the extreme. While there remains some possibility that I had an early COVID infection, I also live in New England, where that lingering upper respiratory condition could have been many other things. Our state closed down early and relatively completely, and my job at the college was made fully remote until this past fall.

Vaccinated, boosted and employed. I know that all sounds good. But it doesn't reflect the mental state carried forward. My job got harder, and left less quiet time for the voices of my characters to speak. My writing suffered, withered, and quit almost entirely for most of two years. I managed, with difficulty, to pull off my traditional November novel in both years, but I would not call the results of that novel writing effort good.

So, now it is 2022. Over that time, while I recovered rights to stories from one of my publishers, I only rereleased one—The Byte of Betrayal, in March of 2021—and that leaves me in the precarious state of having released only one story last year... and nothing new.

I'm going to try to fix that. In the coming weeks I will rerelease the two remaining short novellas that are not part of a series: The Colors of Romance and I Almost Let You. If that goes well, I will also get Gerry’s Lion, a personal favorite, rereleased, hopefully by summer. As for new? Forgiving James is finally about ready for release. I have no illusions that anyone in the current climate is going to be thrilled with me for releasing a redemption story about a bully, but it was a difficult story for me to write, and James turned into such a brilliant character in the end that he made me cry. So it’s coming out, before the end of the year.

I may do more, but even that, two novels and two novellas, is a big lift for me right now. So we’ll have to see.

Wish me luck!

Published on: April 16, 2020

Some Important Changes

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...

Published on: August 14, 2019

The Long Quiet—a Pugless Writer

I posted something on the Facebook feed a little while after it happened, but, perhaps unsurprisingly, I wasn't able to make that effort transfer here. As some of you may already know, my husband and I have had the company these many years of two pugs. Piggy passed some years ago, just shy of the venerable age of fourteen. It was a long life for a pug, and yet Piggy was my writing mascot, and there was a degree to which I never quite recovered.

It should come as no shock then, that the loss of our grand old dame of a pug, the Lady Dulcinea, who passed in May at the extreme old age of seventeen and a half, has thrown me for a bit of a loop. With everything else going on in the world, it was already hard for me to write... this was too much to bear.

In Memory, Dulcy, Dec 3, 2001 - May 11, 2019. Pictured: an elderly black pug.

Walking around the house without our beloved fur children proved too much for my husband and I. We engaged in the search, and finding a responsible rescue, put in a request for adoption.

I'm not sure a puppy is exactly more work than our dear departed Dulcy, who at the end of her life needed assistance with pretty much everything. But a puppy requires a very different sort of attention, and we've been running ourselves ragged with house training and attempts to save kitchen cushions.

This is all for the good. Our new pup is a wonderful cuddler who, even now, is nestled against me as I type. This bodes well for a faithful writing companion for me. I know when the work is done to get him trained and able to wander the house, it will be well worth it. But right now, endless puppy walks, play, saving household furnishings, and trying to figure out what the cause of the latest cacophony of barking might be have been as effective at destroying a daily word count effort as the other contributing factors.

I hope to be back writing soon. I have the Christmas story to finish up, and I want that edited and released this year.

Perhaps prophetically, Dulcy was already memorialized in that, as the lovable elderly pug Lilah.