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.

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.

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

It's not hard to tell that the College Rose Romances are my baby. College stories that draw deeply from my personal experience as a gay student, gay leader, and a part of a student college gay community for over a decade. When Torquere closed, it hit me hard.

​I was lucky. I got my rights back. But now I had four books with no home.

Over the past year, with the creation of Purple Horn Press, each of those books has gone back online as an ebook available for purchase. From Loving Aidan—my first accepted piece of gay romance fiction, to Becoming Rory, the last of a series of romances that I hope has stirred the hearts of readers, the books are available again at last.

Now that all four are out, Purple Horn Press has started to release paperback versions. I'm over the moon, of course. The delays in the Becoming Rory paperback were my first personal sign that Torquere was failing. I spent much of the following two years certain that it would never come out in paperback. Now, I'm pleased to say, those fears have been quashed. 

Why Becoming Rory first? Part of it is exactly that... my own fears about the paperback. But there are also many readers who invested in paperbacks from Torquere for the series and were never able to get that final book. This is for them. Even though I favor cream paper and matte covers, the paperback for Becoming Rory is a glossy 5 x 8 book that matches the size of the original Torquere paperbacks. 

Now that Becoming Rory is out and available, Purple Horn Press will be releasing the original three books in paperback releases. Loving Aidan in July, Steven's Heart in August, Andrew's Prayer in September.

By offering the books exclusively through Amazon, we're going to keep the price down to about ten bucks for each of those three books. Obviously most books we can't do that with, but this is a special case, with books that were previously released in paperback. By making the early books available at a very low cost, I hope some folks may be willing to get paperbacks who previously had not, some may complete their collection, and others may find the story an entry point to gay romance.

If all goes well, shortly after that we'll see the release of Forgiving James, College Rose Romances Book 5. I love redemption stories, so I'm really pleased to bring you that complicated story of love, faith, and conflict.

The Tendire Gate is obviously a departure from most of my published works. Unlike the contemporaries of the Sam's Cafe Romances at Dreamspinner or my angst-ridden College Rose Romances, The Tendire Gate explores unfamiliar territory. 

I spent most of my youth writing fantasy and science fiction. My first piece of writing was a one page Smurfs fan fiction typed out as a small child on my mom's portable typewriter. But years of rejection slips and frustration as I wrote novel after novel and accumulated rejection after rejection beat me down.

Eventually I rejuvenated my writing. I looked long and hard at what was missing or I'd been asked to change. Realizing what it was, I got so angry that I walked away. 

I was being told to write to market. But while some people meant it innocently, so many more meant writing straight. For a long time I barely wrote anything, keeping my writing muscles exercised only during National Writing Month. Memories of an Imperfect Ghost. Zeriphas and the Bones of the World. The closest to what I write now was probably a novel titled Silent Voices. But while there were fantasy aspects to many of those stories, and even to new ones, Like The One That Feels that I've featured over the past year as a serial on this very blog, they weren't marketable.

When I sat down to write The Tendire Gate, all I had was the cover. The art for the gate struck me hard, and I started this story with frantic creative energy in the cover and the word gate.

It's still not very marketable. Stories where the couple isn't meeting and falling in love are always a harder sell. And maybe that story, where Elijah and Dylan meet, will still get told. But right now, I wanted to tell a story the felt visceral to me. A story about a world collapsing. About wanting desperately to find a way out. About a corrupt government on a witch hunt.

I was left with a story about a keeper. A lone young man whose great love waited on the other side of a gate. And he could go, right now, this instant and be with that man, that love, and be safe. 

Except for his duty.

Join us now, at Station Ten—DIRE.