gay love story

The Awkward Conversations of a Gay Romance Writer

July 13, 2014 By Brandon 8 Comments

A lot of my posts are on the serious side, so I thought we’d have some fun and asked fellow authors what kind of reactions they got when someone they knew found out they wrote gay romance. These answers come from both male and female authors alike. Feel free to add the nuances of your own ‘outing’ in the comments. We can always use more lols.

1. You write M/M? Isn’t that like…gay smut?

Not necessarily no, some of it is highly erotic; some of it is based more on love and passion.

[An awkward pause.] Have you had the kind of sex you write about?

[To mom/other relatives/kids]: No, I’m a paragon of Southern gentlemanly virtue.

[To a really hot man-hunk]: You want a test run? That can be arranged. Let me call my agent.

2. OMG, what if your boss finds out?!

Tears, Therapy, or Hot Gay Romance?

July 4, 2014 By Brandon 4 Comments

As with most authors, potential readers contact me and tell me they’ve just discovered my books. Often, they’ll ask which book they should read first. Usually, I’ll forget to ask how they found me (which is important) and get right to the point.

What kind of book are you looking for? What are your tastes like? Do you want sad, happy, smexy, sweet, or downright tear-jerking?

I wrote this post to make it easier for readers to decide which book they wanted to read.

Note that I typically don’t follow genre conventions, write PC, or scribble comfort reads. So I have to be careful when I make a recommendation. Readers looking to me for those types of books are sometimes disappointed. I don’t like disappointing readers, but the reality is you can’t please everyone. You have to be happy before you can even attempt to make someone else happy, and I am partial to following my own path when it comes to writing. I like to explore faults and frailties and prejudices. I like to challenge opinions and assumptions, especially when they conform to a cultural dogmas posited by our society, our media, and our politics.

So let’s get to it. Here’s the breakdown with the conventional ‘wisdom’ I’ve tried to challenge. Only readers can decide if I’ve achieved these goals, so I make no promises. You must decide for yourself.

(Click the covers for more info.)

The tear-jerkers

Grief is such a highly personal emotion that it’s hard to encapsulate in words. In the West we talk around it, we avoid it, we steer our children’s eyes from it. But do we ever really face grief head on, or acknowledge what it does until it’s actually upon us? I tend to think that we don’t.

CHALLENGING: The false idea that male grief is subordinate to the concept of masculinity, especially when it comes to the loss of a child through stillbirth.

I get more email about Dust than any other novel. This book is about love and loss and how homophobic violence shatters people. It is also dedicated to a friend I lost through homophobic violence, so it is probably the most personal of all my books.

CHALLENGING: The idea that tragedy can’t display the true depth of love. We want shine and glitter. We want pretty packages and forever loves and HEAs. But life isn’t like that. This book is for readers who aren’t afraid to cry.

Summer Book Sale – 50% Off

July 1, 2014 By Brandon 4 Comments

I know you’ve been waiting, so here it is!

Celebrating Summer Book Sale

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?!

Brandon Shire on Smashwords

Homosexual Life in New Hampshire 1720

June 27, 2014 By Brandon 1 Comment

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

Revisiting Lily

June 13, 2014 By Brandon Leave a Comment

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

Being Gay Didn’t Mean I Was Wrong

May 30, 2014 By Brandon 1 Comment

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