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In Love with Autumn
 
When I was in my spring,
I didn’t care for autumn much.
 
The aspen would turn gold
for a week, letting you know
It was time to buckle down
for another hard winter.
 
Now that I’m in it, I’m falling
in love with autumn.
I see differently in its weightless
light, in this clear air.
 
Today I bask in soft forgiveness
of an effortless sun.
 
Today I’m given thankful calm
to savor my life in peace, far-reaching peace,
a balance of light and dark
that has its own sense of humor.
 
Today I feast on harvests of ripe fruit
grown all summer long from blossoms
that fell away in spring.
There are seeds in the fruit I eat.
 
I don’t believe in life eternal.
I know it, like bees know,
who fill cells with honey
for sisters they’ll never …

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The CompanionJuly 23, 2014 — release day for The Companion, coming to you today from Dreamspinner Press. You can read the first two chapters here.

Well, I’ve got a great cover, an interesting (I think, anyway!) story, promotional blog posts organized. Hopefully some review sites will pick up the book and say nice things about it, causing millions of eager readers to buy their own copies.

I’d like to say that the project is now out of my hands, but in current-day publishing the burden of ongoing publicity sits in the author’s lap like an eight hundred pound gorilla, and he’s there for the life of the book.

Okay, maybe that’s an exaggeration. More like a friendly five hundred pound gorilla, very into hugs, sharing bananas and checking my hair for lice. For me the gorilla, friendly as he is, takes a lot of attention and energy, even …

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It’s been a strange couple of years for all of us since I last posted: not just because of COVID, but more importantly, the profoundly destabilizing, disorienting force the pandemic has been in our culture.

What do I have to show for my two-year silence?

Well, without going into all the detail: life-threatening diagnoses, two life-changing surgeries for me and one for my hubby, writing a 120k word fantasy, traumatic estrangement from a beloved family member, finding a literary agent, parting ways from said agent, pulling my books from a dishonest publisher, getting said books ready for indie release, querying agents until I saw Query Tracker in my sleep, selling our house and moving, music lessons, radiation therapy, and diving into a new writing project that I’ve carried in my heart for years, and falling more deeply in love with my wonderful husband as we approach the 20-year mark in …

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While all of us love a good romance, I’ve come to the conclusion that we read them for different reasons. One reason is no better than another, but I’m going to suggest that it’s important for an author to be aware of what basic reason they seek to serve when setting out to write a romance. Through that authorial choice, we extend an invitation to a reader as to how we expect them to enter our story.

I’m not claiming to be encyclopedic about this, (so let’s assume my list is incomplete) but I’ve identified three primary emotional invitations to a romance reader—that is, three distinctly different reasons why a reader might want to read a romance starring two men. I’ll be brief about the first two, because I want to spend more time on the third.

  1. Reader as Stand-in. 

The first is the most obvious—the traditional romance invitation, inherited …

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I’ve been writing winter solstice poems for close to fifty years. Not every year, but this profound solar event seems to present itself to me over and over as a moment to take seriously, in reverence. It’s become my year-end, and the morning after my new year’s day.

I haven’t written a solstice poem for a few years, and with all the discordant forces at work in our world it seemed a good time to ask if there was one this year, to close out a year that has been filled with creativity, growth, pain, loss and disillusionment. This poem pretty much wrote itself in a few hours.

Winter Solstice 2016

Time to strip naked again,
be empty and innocent.
Pile actions, belief, hope, vision
onto the Solstice fire.

Trusting the furnace is hard.

Burning the wreckage
of insufficient dreams is easy,
pieces of broken furniture
not worth mending, discovered

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Happy Holidays! Join me in welcoming my friend and fellow author Ash to my blog today with his newest novella, Heartifact. It sounds like a fascinating story!

heartifact-cover-401x609By the way, net proceeds benefit the The Trevor Project in the US, le Refuge in France, and Arcigay in Italy

Heartifact is available from Men Over the RainbowAmazonAmazon UKAll Romance eBooks, Barnes & NobleSmashwords

 

THE MYTH OF ATLANTIS

A very special thank you to Lloyd for hosting me today. It’s great to be here!

The myth of Atlantis (Greek, Atlas) stems from two Dialogues written by Plato in 360 BC, Timaeus and Critias. The dialogues speak of an island utopian society destroyed by a cataclysm of some sort. It is correct that these Dialogues represent the written record of the myth of Atlantis, but it is incorrect that they are …

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A week ago I returned from a trip to Argentina. I’d never traveled to South America before, and since it was the only continent (not counting Antarctica) I had yet to visit, I was excited. Even though I know South America has far more to see and experience, Iguazú Falls will remain the highlight of my trip — a profound spiritual experience.

On landing in Buenos Aires we took a shuttle to the other airport and flew directly to Iguazú. In planning the trip we’d learned there was a moonrise trek every full moon to the Devil’s Throat, the most dramatic section of the falls, and we managed to get tickets our party of ten. After a briefing by a park ranger we took a little train to the beginning of the walkway across branches of the river. The moon rose, and after a kilometer or so we came to …

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If you’d like to read the opening chapters, I’ve got Blood and Dirt excerpts sprinkled around the internet, plus a few blog interviews. Here’s a map to get around:

August 21st with Clare London – Interview and first half of Chapter One

August 22nd with Jon Michaelsen – second half of Chapter One

With more to be added! You’ll be able to read at least the first two chapters this way, maybe more.

Next stop, August 28th with Elin Gregory

Blood & Dirt 02 -Ebook FinalIt’s been a long time coming (because it took months longer to finish than I had originally planned), but the digital version of my new Russ Morgan mystery Blood & Dirt is scheduled for release from Wilde City Press on August 19th! The print version will follow within days. I’m happy to say it will include Enigma, the first Russ Morgan story, which was too short to have a print run of its own.

I’m thrilled it will be out in time for UK Meet 2015 in Bristol. Thanks to Wilde City Press, I’ll have print copies there to flog. Um, I mean, sign.

I’m also grateful that readers spoke up about Enigma, which I envisioned as a one-off story, never imagining that Russ might have more stories to tell. Sometimes the author really is the last to know that a story might be the beginning of a series.

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In 2009, Arsenal Pulp Press published a collection of essays framed as intergenerational advice to queer youth, called Second Person Queer, edited by the inimitable team of Richard LaBonte and Lawrence Schimel.

I was glad to have an essay in the collection, “Letter to a New Generation of Gate Keepers”, in which I sought to address what I see as the sacred, spiritual gift of same-sex wiring. It was the first time I’d raised these thoughts in public, and they helped clarify my sense of purpose in writing fiction: to explore the power and beauty of same-sex attraction, and the possibility that gay men hold a particular responsibility within the spiritual ecology of humankind.

It would be presumptuous of me to speak on behalf of those wired differently from me — I’m a cisgendered gay man — but I can speak up as one such. I do hope others will …

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