L is for love. It’s a natural that I’d choose this for L. Most of my stories are LGBT romance after all. For that matter, I love what I do. I love books and I love writing, which is a good thing because for the most part, you’re not getting rich doing this. Oddly enough that’s what I found the least believable about Castle, how rich Richard was. For every Stephen King, JK Rowling and James Patterson are thousands of midlisters who can’t (or barely can) quit the day job. And I’m okay with that because I DO love what I do.

But that’s actually not what I want to talk about in regards to love. Last year I was represented in two anthologies with the name Love in the title. Love Wins and Love is Love. While I am proud to be in both, it is a very sad thing that either of them was necessary. Both were a way to help support the victims of the Pulse shooting in Orlando. I find it eerie that as I sat down to write this blog post more information about that shooting surfaced ( See it here ) and in Russian they’re putting up internment camps and/or killing LGBT people. It’s a terrifying thing on so many levels.

And the truth is, as I see it, I can’t do much on a world-wide scale so I concentrate on doing what I can in my own backyard (like steering students to the Southeast Ohio Equality group), or anthologies like this. I might not be able to go to Florida to help (and I did go to school in Orlando so I do have a connection to it, even if I’m so not a Florida fan in general).

Both anthologies give all proceeds to charities in the Orlando area that can help directly. I jumped at the chance to help and maybe it’s not much but it’s what I could do. Love is Love is a poetry anthology and that is a huge stretch for me. I don’t do a lot of poetry. I’m not sure it’s my strong suit but I have always enjoyed poetry. I was going to read it on campus last week but unfortunately the poetry slam was the same day as another event I was obligated to be at.

Love Wins is one of two charity anthologies Dreamspinner put out to help the Pulse shooting (in fact many publishers did similar ones). My story here More Than His Scars is in the Kept Tears universe (see yesterday’s post). On the anniversary of the bombing that cost him his arm, Aaron’s friends, along with his lover, Rhys take him to Kennywood amusement park to help keep his spirits up. In another strange convergence, today a brand-new review of this anthology went up and the reviewer got the humor in the story. I’m happy for that.

Circling back to the main theme here, love is love. To me it doesn’t matter if it’s between a man and a woman, two men, two women. Love is blind to gender, to religion and skin color. It deeply saddens me that not everyone agrees on that. There could be people reading this post who don’t (well not any of my actual friends. I know they do) and I’m prepared for that. I can’t change the hearts of everyone but I will do what I can within my own circle.

If you want to buy either of these anthologies (again all proceeds go to those LGBT charities) you can find them here and thank you.

Love Wins (which is on sale along with ALL DSP titles this weekend)
Love is Love