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.
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.
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.
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.
Hi, and welcome to the Saugatuck Summer blog tour! First of all, I want to thank Brandon for hosting me again. One of my best memories of RainbowCon last month was the few minutes we got to talk when he extended the invitation. It’s been a while since I’ve appeared on his blog and I’m so happy to be back!
Basically, here’s what happened: One day I was driving along, running errands, and Topher Carlisle whispered one line of dialogue in my ear. Just one. When I asked him what I was supposed to do with that, he promptly took over my brain for fifteen absolutely insane days and at the end I had the first draft of Saugatuck Summer.