Author of Contemporary Gay Romance
Most of you know I’m from Atlanta, though I don’t come out of my hidey-hole often. There are many very talented LGBT authors in Atlanta and the surrounding area, and this is just a handful. If you know of an author not listed, please leave their name in the comments so readers can check them out. ~ B.
Listed in no particular order. [Read more…] about Atlanta’s LGBT Authors
Blurb:The beautiful young bride of the town’s wealthiest man has been missing for several months and rumors of her whereabouts are rampant. Some speak of murder at the hands of her husband. Others claim that the young beauty died at the hands of a jealous ex-boyfriend. She could have run away, but why would a woman throw away a life of luxury? When a group of friends begin to search for her, they quickly discover that their lives are in danger by those determined to keep the woman’s whereabouts unknown.
This is one amazing YA mystery!
An excellent Ya mystery!
I recommend this book as a great Saturday night read.
A.J. Raven is a writer of mystery/paranormal/crime books who also likes to read and write stuff on the internet. He has a B.Sc in Bio-technology and B.A in Psychology and is currently working on a M.Phil in Bio-technology.
A.J. has written six books which make up two mystery series. Learn more on Goodreads.
Welcome Rainbow Award Winner Lewis DeSimone to the blog. I’ve been wanting to get him here since 2012, but our schedules have conflicted. He’s here today to give us a little of the story behind his novel, The Heart’s History.
Writing is a lot like love: it’s all about your degree of commitment.
For me, poems are basically one-night stands—capturing a moment in time. Short stories, requiring a longer gestation period, are more like boyfriends. But a novel is a husband. A novel is a ball-and-chain. A novel takes years off your life.
And as with a man, sometimes you fall in love with your book at first sight.
That’s what happened with The Heart’s History. It was the late 80s, and I was fresh out of the closet. I was working at a publishing company, and one of my colleagues was a gay man in his thirties. I didn’t know him well. I wasn’t even sure he was gay until I learned he had a lover, and that his lover had died of AIDS. Several of us from the office went to the memorial service. It was the first time I’d ever attended a service for someone who wasn’t a relative, let alone someone I’d never met. [Read more…] about The Old Ball and Chain
I asked acclaimed gay novelist Elliott Mackle to stop by and tell us about his Captain Joe Harding historical romance series. Several of my own fans pointed me in his direction and nominated the books for a 2014 LGBT Book Gem so, here he is, as requested.
I’ve said elsewhere that my Captain Joe Harding series is based on four years of Air Force service during the Vietnam era. That’s essentially true, but with reservations. For instance, each of the three novels includes at least one fatal plane crash. During my time in uniform I never witnessed a crash or even a serious mishap. I was a food service officer, not a pilot or air traffic controller.
But most officers, then and now, are assigned what’s called ‘additional duties.’ Among mine, at a Strategic Air Command bomber base in California, was occasional duty as a Disaster Control or Safety Officer. My tasks included driving down three miles of runway, and twice that of taxi way, sometimes at night, checking to make sure no parts had fallen off an aircraft. The potential to damage another plane was real and serious–as happened later, in 2000, outside Paris, when a Continental airliner shed a piece of metal engine cowling that damaged, and doomed, an Air France Concorde taking off right behind it.
I was trained to inspect flight lines, missile sites, maintenance areas and alert facilities, and to investigate and report on problems such as outdated fire extinguishers or incomplete training records. If an accident occurred, I knew to take charge of rescue operations until a higher-grade or better-qualified officer arrived. [Read more…] about Hot n Horny in the days before Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell
Now here’s the question for you: What was life like for a gay man in 1720? Morgan Cheshire‘s book, Solemn Contract helps us explore and answer that question. Her book was nominated by readers as a 2014 LGBT Book Gem.
Solemn Contract began life as an image I had of a young man in his thirties; he was handsome in the Celtic way with dark-hair and blue eyes, wearing a white shirt. Nothing unusual in that except he was a blacksmith and spent his day with smoke, soot and fire, shaping metal like Wayland Smith of legend.
I had no idea about his background, when or where he lived, or anything about his character – was he good or was he not so good – so I ignored him and wrote about something else instead. However, he kept bothering me so much I decided to work on his character. He acquired a name, William Middleton; because of his work he was physically strong and I decided he was a good guy, fair-minded and intelligent. To make William’s life complete I now needed another character with as strong a personality but a different set of skills and so Jem Bradley came into being – teacher and an amateur botanist. A complete contrast to William, Jem was slightly built with brown hair tending towards auburn. [Read more…] about Homosexual Life in New Hampshire 1720
Readers nominated Me and Mine by Sarah Goodwin for a 2014 LGBT Book Gem. I asked her to stop by and give us some background on the story. ~B.
I wrote the first version of Me and Mine while I was in my second year of university, doing my Creative Writing degree. At the time I was only just starting to receive treatment for depression, and because I wasn’t able to focus on assignments, I began to write a lot of fanfiction. I’ve always read fanfiction, since I was about thirteen, but I’d never really written any before. This was the first time I’d read slash fiction, and writing it threw me in at the deep end.
Once the fanfiction version of Me and Mine had accumulated and I’d finished it, someone, just one person, messaged me and said that it should be a novel. I think it was just a throwaway comment, but as I’d been writing ‘novels’ since I was a teenager, I thought it would be a good project to keep me busy. So in the summer break I converted the original text into a more novel-like format, and changed the names. I also ended up adding about 40k to what I’d already written. [Read more…] about Being Gay Didn’t Mean I Was Wrong