Author of Contemporary Gay Romance
I know you’ve been waiting, so here it is!
I’m over at Smashwords with thousands of other authors and ALL my books are 50% off for the entire month of July (but only at Smashwords). Enter the code SSW50 during checkout and you immediately get 50% off. How great is that?!
Friend and author, Xavier Axelson is doing what few authors are brave enough to do – pulling a published story apart, rewriting it, and bringing it back to life. I asked him to stop by and talk to us about his horror novel, Lily, and give us a bit more information. (I’m nosy like that.) ~B.
Lily is the first of my books to be reissued, and while I am eternally grateful to Seventh Window Publications (it’s my favorite story) I was skeptical to revisit a world created two years prior. After all, the story was over, there couldn’t be more. I was wrong. Immediately, Lily’s story came back with unexpected urgency. Lily had much more to say. Through revisions, cover art debates, and re-reads it was Lily’s voice that resurfaced, and in listening, I realized things were not settled.
Lily is the same story it was in 2012. A little girl is dragged into the woods by a wolf, only to return a year later, “different”. Her father mourns his child to the point of madness, but finds hope in new love and the belief his daughter will return. [Read more…] about Revisiting Lily
After meeting the talented Michael Rupured at RainbowCon 2014, I asked him to stop by and tell us a little about his books. Don’t let the titles fool you, these aren’t just seasonal tales.
Thanks so much, Brandon, for inviting me onto your blog to introduce myself and to share a little about the kind of books I write. Meeting you was one of many highlights of the recent RainbowCon in Tampa. It’s nice to finally have a face to go with the name.
After coming out in 1979 at the age of 21, I have lived what many consider to be an “interesting” life. Thinking I was going to hell for loving another man—as I believed for years after coming out—was oddly liberating. Since what I did no longer mattered, I did everything I was big enough to do…and then some.
Despite my reckless salad days, I’m one of the lucky ones. Many gay men I knew took their own lives—most before graduating from high school. Several died in car crashes, from drug overdoses, or as a result of other accidents. More than a few were stabbed, beaten to death, or shot. AIDS killed too many to count. Somehow, I survived. [tweet_dis]Because so many of my friends didn’t survive, I’m compelled to tell our stories.[/tweet_dis]
My first novel, Until Thanksgiving, is a thriller set in Washington, DC in the fall of 1996. The serial killer is a gay man with anger issues and a dishonorable discharge from the Marines. Josh Freeman and Thad Parker are out to everyone, including their employers, and they can eat together in “straight” restaurants without worrying about anyone beating them up or harassing them.
Josh Freeman knows his best days are behind him. After his partner of seventeen years has an affair with a younger man, Josh buries himself in takeout boxes, half-smoked joints, and self-pity until his best friend gently kicks him in the ass and encourages him to try out a new job in Washington DC—at least until Thanksgiving. [Read more…] about Telling The Stories of Lost Friends
It’s about love, and music, and grief.
It’s about a miscarriage and how a man is expected to stuff his anguish inside, as if he was never a part of the process, nor mourned for the loss.
It’s about marriage and society and how we fall into the roles we are assigned by each.
It’s about two men and a woman, and what it means to be human.
cover design: Aeternum Designs
More than a few readers nominated Jameson Currier’s The Wolf at the Door for a 2014 LGBT Book Gem. I asked him to give us readers a little of the story behind the novel.
The Wolf at the Door, my novel set in a haunted gay-owned guesthouse in the French Quarter of New Orleans, was begun in 2003, after several visits to New Orleans, including participating in the annual Saints and Sinners Literary Festival and taking innumerable walking tours throughout the French Quarter, Garden District, and local cemeteries. At the time I started writing the novel I was also writing several ghost short stories, all with gay characters, gay situations or gay themes. I read more than 1,000 ghost stories to understand the craft, technique, and style of literary ghost stories and to sharpen the themes I wanted to present in my own. What I liked about New Orleans was its rich sense of history in its everyday life. I finished my final draft of the novel on Sunday, August 28, 2005, the evening before Hurricane Katrina landed ashore in Louisiana. It was apparent to me in the ensuing days that this would be a manuscript that I would have to put aside because of the unfolding tragedy and aftermath of the hurricane. I continued to work on other ghost stories set in difference locales and these stories were collected as The Haunted Heart and Other Tales. By 2010, when I launched Chelsea Station Editions, a small press devoted to gay literature, New Orleans was back on its feet and I decided the first book the new press would publish would be The Wolf at the Door. [Read more…] about The Wolf at the Door
It is my pleasure to inform you that Listening to Dust has been nominated for a 2014 eFestival of Words Best of the Independent eBook Awards – Best Novella.
As many of my readers know, Dust also won a Rainbow Award for Best Gay Contemporary Fiction in 2012, and it continues to be the book I receive the most email about.
It is not an easy story. It was never meant it be. It is about love and loss. As one reviewer wrote: This ain’t Brokeback Mountain. It will rip your fu*&ing heart out without apology. I think that sums it up pretty well.
I have also made Martin Davies ‘short list’ of writers who make “gay literature and literature with homoerotic themes great.” What a honor to be listed among these writers. I urge you to check out the post and the books listed there. I assure you that you won’t be disappointed.