So I’ve been a bit depressed. You can probably tell, because I’m playing with food. When I write food and meals and making meals is often important. I think that’s because in a relationship you spend so much of your time actually together eating. Because even in a relationship everyone is busy. There are always errands and laundry and mowing the lawn and shoveling snow and a million other things. But when you eat, often, you have a moment to slow down, to be together. And there’s often good relationship memories there, because a lot of relationships begin with a date. And what is that date?

Coffee? Lunch? Dinner? So, often, even when it includes something else it’s a meal.

The experiment was a chicken bacon ranch lasagna. It was fantastic.

What good (or bad!) food experiments has a date or a partner tried out on you? Let me know in the comments!

... which was obviously my first mistake.

I'm a big guy. I wasn't always. As a kid, I was big for my age but small for the larger kids I tended to be around, always a bit of a squirt. I love my brother, but he could be a bit of a bully as a kid, though the kind that would still protect a younger brother from everyone else. 

He wasn't always around though, and when he wasn't, I didn't have a good time. A lot of that was my weight, which resulted in my closest friends forming a "pull down pants" committee to jokingly show off my overly robust and naked ass to the school. This lasted for weeks until my parents finally got wind of it and confronted the other parents. 

I was in 4th grade and not even particularly heavy at the time, but it stuck with me. I was fortunate that for most of my youth my frame—both tall and broad shouldered—did the work of minimizing my weight.
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In college I did the usual college things, and my weight went up. But I still had the remarkable frame, and it held up well. Until I got my diagnosis. I went through cocktail after cocktail of meds to stabilize my moods. I don't blame the doctors, really. I was in crisis and that's what I needed at the time.

But when you jump 80 pounds in two months right after getting put on a new medication, I don't think you can chalk that up to laziness. I had gone up over 100 pounds by the time the doctor pulled me off the medication. Now I wasn't in the mid 200s anymore. I was well over 300. Sure, I kept from gaining more, mostly, but the weight wouldn't come off, and eventually a sedentary lifestyle and a deskjob took a toll. I crept up, year after painful year. 

Now hold on! Yes, I dieted. I tried expanding my food options, unsuccessfully. I tried the Atkins diet, among others. Over and over I tried and failed until I maxed out my scale and destroyed my body losing the weight.

Over the last 15 years that weight has slowly crept back up, until this morning I stared at 398 pounds on the scale.

I tortured my body losing that weight. I'm not sure I can do it again. Since I started creeping back up, my body has resisted all the old strategies that worked.

​I'm heartbroken.

Don't miss Ashavan's story Gerry's Lion, on sale in paperback at Dreamspinner Press until noon on Feb 7.

Sometimes when you look back on your life, it's easy to see the crossroads. Places where one turn really mattered. The ones where an angel could have come back and It's a Wonderful Life-ed you.

Eighteen years ago, I had one of those moments. I was thinking about regret and in my life I had two. Both were about relationships that ended in less than stellar ways.

In 1995 I had two miserable breakups. The first was the end to an on-again-off-again disaster. The problem? I was head over heels. People sometimes ask me why I believe in love at first sight stories, and that ex is the reason. We lasted eight months. In the end, he broke up with me. Sadly he didn't even tell me. To say the break up was bad is an understatement.

The second was an older man. I say older, but he was only in his mid-late twenties. It seemed older to me as I wasn't even legal to drink yet. He owned a comic shop halfway between college and my mom's house. We had common interests—a lot of common interests. That summer, while I recovered from the desolate hole in my heart, he slipped into it. We had dinners, went to the movies. He treated me like a prince, but between the distance to school, his work schedule, and a huge unconsolable grief that I wasn't over, it wasn't working. I broke up with him. It was a miserable thing to do. It was also, probably, the right thing at the time.

So, five years later—eighteen years ago—I was graduating and I was thinking about those two very different relationships. The boy I couldn't seem to let go, even though I cursed him every chance I had, and the one I never had a chance to get to know.

I wrote two letters. One was an attempt to bridge that broken relationship with my evil ex. The other an outpouring of regret to the person who I'd never really had a chance to explain why and how and what was going on that I'd chosen to end things.

I tore up the letter to the boy who had ripped my fragile heart to shreds. I sent the one to the man who had always treated me like a prince. Two weeks later we met on a Saturday... Saturday April 29, 2000, and had dinner at the restaurant where we'd had our first date all those years ago. When I graduated in 2001, I moved out of the apartment I shared near the college and moved in with him. We still count that day, today, as our anniversary.

It hasn't always been an easy road.

There was some fractured trust. There was a lot of getting to know one another again. There were dinners and movies and meeting friends and family in a more real and visceral way than we'd ever gotten to in that false start of a beginning.

So many times I think of what I might have missed if I hadn't felt that regret. If I hadn't sent that letter. We started our new relationship with me admitting I'd been an ass. Sometimes I think we still work because when things are hard, I can still admit that.

And sometimes I know it's because for all our faults... my Ron, he still treats me like a prince.

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.

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.
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