Thoughts - Ashavan Doyon

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: July 1, 2025

Measuring Progress

So, I’ve been feeling a bit of a failure.

But in two years, I’ve managed to release, as a mixture of new and old releases, six novels, five novellas long enough to publish as short books, and five shorter novellas.

That can’t be what failure looks like.

I’ve added individual print editions to the Sam’s Cafe Romances.

I’ve published a fifth book in the College Rose Romance series: Forgiving James.

I’ve released the first of two long novellas meant to book end the Sam’s Cafe Romances as a prequel and sequel to wrap up that story.

Even if I just look at this calendar year, I am on track for two to three releases. Fortune’s Pawn, which came out early in the year; Fortune’s Price, which is overdue, but should still release in July, and that leaves me with five months to get another release out before the end of the year.

I’m going to err on being kind to myself. I’m going to remember that this has been a brutal month, and that my dad just had open heart surgery, and that my mind not being on my writing is totally normal. I’m going to get that last novella out this month, and then I’m going to put out something else new. And it will be new, because all the old published stuff has been released.

Wish me luck.

Published on: October 28, 2022

Titles Coming Down

Having gone through this before, I can't express how painful it is to watch my books slowly disappear from one site after another.

As of today, my College Rose Romances are the holdout and are still available. I expect them to go this weekend.

I know I've done this before. It's still hard for my heart to see it.

Published on: October 10, 2022

Lessons

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.

Published on: June 4, 2020

Black Lives Matter

Disclaimer: This post is political. Writing doesn't happen in a vacuum. I live in the real world, and that world affects my writing. If you have a problem with political content in books, you obviously have never read mine, because I write gay romance, and by and large, that's political by default.

I haven’t been loud in my activism this week. I know the value of being quiet and listening when an oppressed community is hurt. But I also know that quiet activism is sometimes seen as silence.

The core message in my community growing up, struggling with an epidemic that was killing people like me, was Silence=Death.

For many Black Americans, for many communities of color in all its diversity, that message, I’m sure, has a different meaning that is no less profound than the one I grew up with. Because our silence is killing them.

As a nation, we have used our power and privilege to downplay and gaslight and sow doubt into the very idea that the pillar of our society, our concept of justice and order and law is and has been tarnished and corrupted from the start. We see that now in the brutality on the streets towards nonviolent protesters, towards journalists, towards children.

Just weeks ago, police were able to ignore almost any provocation from heavily armed protesters who objected to stay at home orders.

Now they react with brutality towards the people they’re meant to serve.

A man was executed on the street by a vigilante wearing a uniform of service. And the good men who are supposed to step in and prove the system works and that all cops aren’t bad cops? They watched and did nothing. And this isn’t an isolated case. The list of names goes on, and in terrifying ways. A young man jogging. A woman asleep in her bed.

People are angry. I am angry. I want to believe this is not my country, that this is some new infection, but the reality is, I’m afraid, that racism is an old disease, the kind that takes root and refuses to go away. The kind that has to be cut out and removed in ways that will be painful and will take a long time to heal.

In times like this, it would be good to have a president. Someone who could lead and drive a process for reform and healing in an already tumultuous time.

What we have is an infantile coward who insists on pouring gasoline on flames so that he can play with the lives of our troops and our people as if they were toy soldiers.

The brutality we’re witnessing can never be allowed to be acceptable. It can never be ignored. It can never be forgotten.

This is what America has become. Our country is on fire, and I am weeping.

Black Lives Matter.

Published on: April 25, 2020

Falling into a Black Hole

I have been avoiding social media, when I can.

Oh, I know—I don't really watch the news, so how else do I expect to know what's going on? It's a conundrum. One I don't have great answers for. My own health requires that I limit my exposure to the negativity, and yet, to remain a good, involved citizen, I need to know what's going on.

But every time I look and find out, I wish I hadn't. It feels like I turn on the TV, or look on Facebook, or Twitter, and then it begins...

A slow and steady spiral (words over image of a black hole)

The Descent

The thing about the spiral—it isn't just about news. It's about the drama that seems to endlessly infect the gay romance community. It's about the little bits of hatred people are willing to spew that even a year or two ago they would have been horrified to have come out of their mouths or to put into type on a screen. It's about the people you thought you knew, friends and family and colleagues, who have galvanized into a only one way is the right way.

Suddenly the only way to fight Trump is to jump into the skin of their particular brand of liberalism, whether that's fighting for the poor, medicare for all, environmental concerns, or veganism. And if you fail, at all, you're as bad as Trump.

Meanwhile, there's friends and family who were maybe a wee bit conservative, suddenly buying into the propaganda machine that is telling them things about immigration, lying about the human rights debacle being perpetrated on children at the border, pretending taking rights hard fought away is somehow defending religious freedom. And to watch family, especially, buy into that is so hard. It feels like you can't get them back.

And then there's me. And I'm not pure enough for the liberals. I eat meat. I think we police words too much, and I think that gets dangerous really fast. I think a lot of the time a very real liberal elite pretty much screw over a significant portion of the just-hanging-on-but-probably-still-middle-class, if barely. I'm not so attached to any one candidate that I'm afraid to vote blue come November.

To me, it's as simple as this: There can be no more judicial deconstruction of the rights I've spent a lifetime fighting for. And if Trump wins again, I honestly believe I'm looking at a short life in a death camp.

And circling... and circling...

And this is why I avoid the news. And social media is a toss up, because I need it, especially right now, to maintain connections, but it is soooo hard.

I write love stories. Angsty, to be sure. And people sometimes ask me why.

Sometimes when we're hurt, when we're injured, when we're full of angst. That's when we most need to know that people like us can find love. That happy endings exist.

So maybe, just maybe, we can escape the black hole.

And maybe, just maybe, that escape will be powerful, and beautiful, and not alone.

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