This rant has been brewing for a few weeks now and I just can’t hold it in any longer.  A few weeks ago a well loved and respected cyber friend wrote that she was having to pull the plug on her m/m writing career because her family had found out she was writing gay romances. She said she was pulling the plug on all work, her website and anything wholly associated with her gay romance pen name. Her reasoning was that her husband and child could be adversly affected by the extended family if she continued to have anything to do with m/m literature. My first reaction of course was WTF? How dare anyone force a writer to NOT write what they have in their heart waiting to be written.  My friend pretty much said her goodbyes that day to all the gay friendly groups she belonged to and I haven’t seen hide nor hair of her since.  I’m still very angry about it but until this blog have kept my opinions to myself.  The new boyfriend councils me by saying not everyone has the cement spine I have or the inner strength to walk away from family if they don’t approve. He’s right. I do forget sometimes that not everyone has my conviction to push forward no matter the cost. That not everyone can stand up in a room and say “I write gay fiction” without fear of reprisal.

I’m saddened for my friend and wish there was some way to help her but I know deep in my heart there isn’t. I would jump on my soapbox and rail at the moon if it would help change peoples ideals about gay fiction but it isn’t going to help so I won’t. For now all I can do is keep writing and hope to prove to those lackwitted nitwits that gay romance  is about romance and nothing more.  You don’t want to read about two men kissing – then don’t buy the damn book! You don’t want to see two men hugging on a book cover  then DON’T go trolling thru a gay publishing company’s coming soon section.  GAH!  Sorry…rant over.

TTFN

Aeryn Traxx

I came across these and picked out the one I liked best. Really just wanted to show off some of my photos today.

Steven Wright’s Humor.. If you’re not familiar with the work of Steven Wright, he’s the famous erudite scientist who once said: “I woke up one morning, and all of my stuff had been stolen and replaced by exact duplicates”. He also said “I went to the store to buy some batteries, but they weren’t included – so I bought them again”

His mind sees things differently than most of us do. Here are some of his gems:

1 – I’d kill for a Nobel Peace Prize.

2 – Borrow money from pessimists — they don’t expect it back.

3 – A conscience is what hurts when all your other parts feel so good.

4 – A clear conscience is usually the sign of a bad memory.

5 – If you want the rainbow, you’ve got to put up with the rain.

6 – All those who believe in psycho kinesis, raise my hand.

7 – The early bird may get the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.

8 – If everything seems to be going well, you have obviously overlooked something.

9 – Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm.

10 – When everything is coming your way, you’re in the wrong lane.

11 – Ambition is a poor excuse for not having enough sense to be lazy.

12 – Hard work pays off in the future; laziness pays off now.

13 – I intend to live forever… So far, so good.

14 – If Barbie is so popular, why do you have to buy her friends?

15 – Eagles may soar, but weasels don’t get sucked into jet engines.

16 – What happens if you get scared half to death twice?

17 – My mechanic told me, “I couldn’t repair your brakes, so I made your horn louder.”

18 – If at first you don’t succeed, destroy all evidence that you tried.

19 – A conclusion is the place where you got tired of thinking.

20 – Experience is something you don’t get until just after you need it.

21 – The hardness of the butter is proportional to the softness of the bread.

22 – The problem with the gene pool is that there is no lifeguard.

23 – The sooner you fall behind, the more time you’ll have to catch up.

24 – The colder the x-ray table, the more of your body is required to be on it.

25 – Everyone has a photographic memory; some just don’t have film.
                              

It is easy to be grateful when everything is going our way—your bills are paid, affairs of the heart are in order, and you’re healthy.But, when you don’t know how the bills are going to be paid, your love-life is a mess, and you’re dealing with a difficult diagnosis about your health…

‘Thank you’ most probably isn’t the first word to come to mind.It is so easy to fall into the black hole of depression and worry when life isn’t going our way. In order to stay ‘centered’, especially in difficult times, I must completely change my focus away from the negative, to all that is good in my life.To help me do this I keep a journal in which each night before I go to sleep, no matter how hard the day was, list three things I am grateful for.

When I first learned about keeping a gratitude journal, to say I was sceptical would be putting it mildly, but I promised a friend I would give it an ‘honest’ try for one month.

Looking back, I have to laugh when I see an entry like…

‘Today I am grateful I didn’t completely lose it when talking to tech support on the phone for TWO FRICKING HOURS!’

‘Today I am grateful I could plunge the toilet to flush ‘before’ I called a plumber.’

‘Today I am grateful there are no men allowed in my house.’

You get the picture? Over time I’ve learned there is so much more than I ever imagined to be grateful for…

‘I am grateful for hearing a song that touched my heart.’

‘I am grateful for the loyal, loving companionship of my dog, Chachi.’

‘I am grateful for the sense of pride I felt after re-reading the last chapter of a book I am working on.’

I challenge you to try this for one week. If nothing else, it will change your focus before you close your eyes at the end of the day.

So what do you have to be grateful for today?

Short flyby post here – we’re three thousand miles from home on holiday  in sunny (although not today) Massachusetts. So you can take the title of the article to mean holidays, or you can take it in the context of our adventures last Thursday.

It was carnival day in Provincetown, where (as a charming man we met said), “You can just be yourself”. So straight and gay, families and singles, children and old folks, me with my biological kids and other people with their adopted ones, just mingled and had fun. Nobody minded if two blokes or two women (or even a man and a woman *g*) walked down the street holding hands or with arms around each other.

We saw lots of things we liked:

(not just the nice scenery). This was good:

I can identify with that. I also got a really nice badge which sort of sums up how I feel about what some parts of the church are doing with my faith: “Jesus called – he wants his religion back”.

Longer and more coherent post next month.

When I read a book I love learning about new places. It’s important to me as a reader that an author paints a vivid picture of where their characters live, work, and play. I don’t need a lot—not pages and pages of description, but I do need a little flavoring added.

Reading about New Orleans has always been a fave of mine. Anything Southern gets to me really. We Southerners are pretty colorful people in general, and it just stands to reason that where we live is just as colorful. I was driving down a main highway a few weeks back and spotted two white toilets sitting on either side of a driveway to mark the entry. Yep, toilets. Lol I’m serious.

I’ve also seen tires painted all kinds of colors then buried into the ground half way to form a wall for a driveway. Last week I saw this gorgeous wrought iron gate with a beautiful scenic drive stretching out from it lined with Bradford pear trees and on the brick pillars framing the gate? Concrete gargoyles. Passed a manufacturing plant for brick the other day and there were two concrete pig sculptures out front on the lawn. Yep, pigs. I swear, I just could not make the leap from pigs to bricks.

I know you’re thinking, “She’s visiting Redneckville quite a bit, isn’t she?” Well, yeah, Redneckville is all around you in the South. But that’s part of its charm. You can visit a fancy spa that charges you obscene amounts of money to pamper you two blocks north of where you can drive down a country road and let your main squeeze check you for ticks.

I love my sweet South. Wouldn’t want to live anywhere else. From the palm trees of Florida to the pine trees of Carolina, it’s all good. There’s nowhere else like it in the world. Big, bustling cities. Small, just-a-stop-in-the road towns. Roads that lead to absolutely nowhere, turn you around, and take you back to where you started. Exquisite cuisine ranging from the spicy flavors of New Orleans to the famous seafood of the Atlantic Coast’s town of Calabash. Grits are a plenty. Salt-cured ham and barbecue that will melt in your mouth. Succulent fruits and vegetables you can fry, boil, broil, grill, saute, or just plain eat raw.

Then there is the way of life. If you like it busy—go for it. But if you like it slow—sit back and enjoy. I remember sitting on my granny’s front porch with a little fan made of white lace, listening to the whippoorwills–still do that sometimes too. I remember an electric fan she had that oscillated and had a very distinctive hum. I remember the corner drug store that had the soda fountain with dark wood floors and ceiling fans that stirred the air just enough to make you think you’d landed in heaven on a hot summer day. And you can still find some of those corner drug stores here today.

But the South is progressive too. Home to major corporations like Coca-Cola down in HOTlanta. We have beaches from the Gulf of Mexico all around and up the Atlantic Coast. Mountains that go on forever. Hot springs, caves, gem mines. The South has everything. It’s worth exploring. Whatever you’re looking for, you’ll find it in the South. It’s a vacation heaven and a wonderful place to live. Exotic and yet so simple.

Where is your heaven on Earth?

I caught an article the other day that said Amazon believes within the next year, ebook sales will overtake sales of print books. Interesting news but then, I don’t think it’s all that shocking to those of us who write and read ebooks and tend to keep up with this topic. It was only last year that everyone discussed which kind of ereader was the best value for the money. The Amazon Kindle was around $500 and wireless. Other readers were entering the marketplace at the speed of light. Barnes and Noble introduced their Nook right before Christmas and sold out quicker than you could grap your credit card to purchase. Obviously these handy dandy readers were popular.

A flash in the pan? Many said so but I never believed it. In this age of instant gratification, being able to download a book and then carry your entire library in your purse has a definite appeal. Just a few months ago, I graduated from an old ebookwise reader to the Nook. At the time of my Nook purchase, I spent around $300 by the time I bought that pretty eggplant-colored cover I’d had my eye on. While reading the newspaper yesterday, I noticed the Nook is now selling for $150. The price of the Sony reader and the Kindle have also gone down making these readers highly affordable. Maybe this is all due to the release of Apple’s Ipad (no doubt a hot commodity)? Most likely.

My children are college aged and I remember not many years ago, discussing with them how cool it would be to be able to load their textbooks on a reader. They scoffed. Yes, they did. They never imagined this would be something of interest to them. My oh my how the worm has turned. Now they discuss Ipads and textbooks and are busily checking online to see if their books are available in e-format. If you have attended college or had a child who does, I don’t have to tell you how expensive these books are, nor do I have to tell you how HEAVY they are! A few days ago, I checked out a post by a college professor who did a study on the price differences between hardback textbooks and e-textbooks. Amazing. A $100 textbook could be purchased for half and sometime less-than-half the price. Some books can be ‘borrowed’ for a small price and disappear from a reader after 18 months.  Let’s face it, most kids resell their books for maybe 15 bucks and have no interest in keeping the book once the class is over. No, not all textbooks are available as ebooks yet but as the school year approaches, I believe we’ll see our kids buying more ebooks by next fall.

In the end, it’s all about options. Plenty of readers love their paper books. Love the smell of them. Love the feel of them in their hands. Others aren’t so enamoured. They want their fix, want it now and demand it cheaper. The way I see it, it’s the best of all possible worlds.

Trouble in a Stetson (book two of the Sequins, Saddles, and Spurs series) is available now at Ellora’s Cave.

Buy it HERE!

Lola Lamont leaves Vegas with two pals, never imagining they’d break down in small-town Texas. So what’s a former showgirl to do when she runs smack dab into the hottest sheriff south of the Mason Dixon line? Why, jump his bones, of course!

Sam Campbell takes one look at the Vegas Bombshell and knows damn good and well she belongs in his bed. She probably has the words gold digger tattooed to her ass but he’s ready to take what the sexy blonde has to offer. Vowing to protect his heart, Sam rocks her world. Too bad she’s rocking his right back. Sam is more than ready to handle some sass, spunk and sex, but is he willing to gamble on love?

Imagine you’re sitting at a meeting/eating at a crowded restaurant/giving a   speech…anywhere, doing anything…and you have the sudden urge to climax. This “hush-hush” syndrome sounds like ecstasy, but can be a living hell.

Just how often do women who have this have orgasms? Everyday? Ten times a day?

Would you believe there’s a woman who claims to have up to 200 orgasms a day?

The idea of being in a constant state of sexual arousal and having to experience the joy of climaxing…while in the most inappropriate places at the most inconvenient times…certainly detracts from the whole concept of relishing that lovemaking thrill.

Possible causes of PSAS:
1. Neurological hypersensitivity (some women claim the syndrome started after taking anti-depressants) or trauma to the pelvic nerves.
2. Pelvic vein congestion.
3. Over-sensitivity to Progesterone.
4. No/delayed release of hormone Prolactin.
5. Deficiency of Oxytocin from the pituitary gland, needed for calming down after sex.

Information is scarce…and treatment on a trial basis…but a good source is:
http://www.medindia.net/patients/patientinfo/persistent-sexual-arousal-syndrome.htm

Can a romance heroine experience this syndrome? And, how would the hero react? An interesting thought to ponder!

Photo: Flickr: Bitchbuzz’s photostream.

http://mariannestephens.net

http://aprilash.net

http://romancebooksrus.blogspot.com

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/romancebooksrus

http://sevensexyscribes.blogspot.com

So I happened to be at a gathering a couple weeks ago and someone I don’t know well (like at all) struck up a conversation with me.  He was talking to someone else and heard that I had published a book or two about “something to do with vampires.”  Uh, yeah.

This (cough) gentleman assumes, of course, that every vampire book is in the vein (heh, heh, pun intended) of Twilight.  Uh, no.

So we moved on (can we please move on, like to opposite sides of the room?)  Where was I?  Oh, yeah, so he then observes that for something like that I pretty much just type whatever I want, right?  I mean it’s not like it’s real or anything.   Uh, no.  That’s why they call it fiction.

So, he concludes, that must be pretty easy.

It’s moments like these for which the phrase, “if looks could kill” was invented.  (We writers know stuff like that.)

That’s right, I wanted to tell him.  The words just trip off my fingers onto the computer screen, fully formed and perfect in every way.  No research involved, no planning, no plotting, no character development.  And then no revising, no editing, no sending my darlings off to be rejected by vicious agents and editors!

No, you ass, it isn’t easy, I thought about saying, as I eyed his pristine white shirt and imagined what it would look like with my Cosmo all over it.  And, no, just because it’s vampires for grown-ups, the entire book is NOT just one big sex scene, like some sort of bad porn flick with cheesy music playing while the characters switch partners for the next round of body fluid swaps.

Some of the best writing I’ve ever read is in genre writing.  Some of the best writers I’ve ever read write fantasy and romance and science fiction.  And good sex scenes are damn difficult to write.  I’d like to see THAT guy try writing one.

Unfortunately, courtesy (not to him, but to our hostess) prevented me from telling him what a jerk he is.  So, I just smiled and moved on, dreaming of red, sticky stains all over his white shirt, and . . . you know, I just might have the character profile for the annoying-guy-who-dies-early-and-bloodily for my next book!

DBR

A few months back, after a conversation with some friends online, I came up with an idea for a novel. A shifter novel, which I’d never written before. A novel with the weird premise of a vegan who became a werewolf, but even in wolf form refuses to eat meat.

An M/M romance novel, which I’d never even dared to try before because I didn’t think I could do it.

For several weeks, I wrote. I’d already written the scene immediately after Kyle’s first shift during the aforementioned conversation with my friends, and on a challenge from someone on another writing loop I wrote the beginnings of a sex scene (involving a bit of fun with whipped cream. Excuse me, whipped nondairy topping, since Kyle is after all a vegan.) I asked questions, fought with the characters about a few things, and mostly just worked and hoped.

Yesterday, I finished it! The first draft, at least. I know the story needs some revisions. Grammatically and mechanics-wise, I write pretty clean, but in my first drafts I’m just trying to get the thoughts out of my head and so I often wind up with sentences that don’t quite make sense, reptitions, minor plot holes, and so forth. That’s what revisions are for.

The story’s finished, though, and on first look I’m pretty happy with it. Pretty proud of myself, too, for pushing the comfort zone and actually writing it.