M is for Me. I thought this might be a good time to really introduce myself to everyone.

This is the blurb I hide behind: Jana is Queen of the Geeks (her students voted her in) and her home and office are shrines to any number of comic book and manga heroes along with SF shows and movies too numerous to count. There is no coincidence the love of all things geeky has made its way into many of her stories. To this day, she’s still disappointed she hasn’t found a wardrobe to another realm, a superhero to take her flying among the clouds or a roguish star ship captain to run off to the stars with her.

It’s pretty true but I am, naturally so much more. I’m my parents’ only daughter. I grew up in the country outside of Pittsburgh and I remain a country girl to this day. Cities make me itchy. I love popping in to enjoy all the things a city has to offer and fleeing back to where I can see stars and listen to the wind in the trees.

I was the wrong girl in high school, too smart, too weird, too much a loner to fit in. Hell, I AM Lisa Simpson right down to the saxophone. I only fit in with the other Dungeons & Dragons playing SF/comic book geeks. (I’m house hunting now and seriously considering living an hour from work just to be closer to my D&D playing friends). I hate high school and almost everyone in it (even now there are some I won’t friend on FB because of how horrible they were to me in h.s.).

I blossomed in college, working on three degrees at once (chemistry, biology and English. I didn’t quite finish that last one). I was in three bands, in three plays a year, worked three jobs, was an officer in my sorority for all four years and did a massive amount of ghost hunting back in the days before everyoen was running around with gauss meters. I went to podiatric medical school from there. I’ve been a doctor in Harlem and on Pine Ridge reservation. My specialty was diabetic wound kill.

The first time my life went sideways was 1992 at the end of the year. Between October and April of 93 I gained over 150 pounds. No one knew why. I was at the gym every week. I was barely eating because who has time in med school? They blamed the stress of getting a residency. It would be more than a decade before we realized I have Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome. I have yet to lose any weight in spite of medically guided weight loss programs. Much of my hair fell out and I’m severely diabetic as a result.
The second time my life was ripped apart was 2000. A patient kicked me (he was demented, I can’t blame him) and ruptured the nerve in my right hand. My surgical career was over. I fought for six months but I didn’t repair. (Watching Doctor Strange last year made me cry for the first 20 minutes or so. I’ve been THROUGH those horrible PT sessions). Eventually me and my half dead hand went back to school in Florida. I lived with a friend in Cassadaga, the psychic community. That was cool. I do have some feeling back in my hand but it’s often painful, stiff and weak.

From there I moved into being a professor in Appalachia (near the Hocking Hills in OH and Point Pleasant and the Mothman in West Virginia). It’s a challenge. It’s not my dream. That died with one well aimed kick. But I am good at it.

And through it all, I’ve written. It started with Star Wars fan fiction after seeing the original movie when I was 10. I’ve written fan fiction for forty years now (oh, good god). I remain a fan of SF, urban fantasy, fantasy and mystery and that is what I write.

What else can I tell you about me? I love to swim and hike. I love music and books beyond all reason. I love to cook. I’m still a ghost hunter. I travel and I love historical travel and museums. I love to talk and talk and talk and I am LOUD. I make my own jewelry and desperately wish I could draw my own characters (but I can’t).

That is the story of Me. Chapter One at any rate.

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

K is for Kept Tears. Hopefully I can get this uploaded this time as my first attempt to write this corrupted. However, nothing will stop me from telling everyone about my first novel. I still love this one to death and not just because it was my first. I got to pull a plethora of my favorite things together in this.

You got to meet Aaron, one of the protagonists in A is for… He’s a disabled veteran and as I said then, ever since I was a resident doctor at a series of V.A. hospitals I’ve wanted to have a character who incorporated some of the best and some of the worst of my former patients.

Aaron, like me, grew up outside of Pittsburgh in the country and through him I was able to showcase some of the fun things about Pittsburgh (and there are plenty of fun things there). Aaron is a geeky grad student who thinks he might be ready to date again, having come to some sort of peace with his amputated arm and rearranged life. When he spots Rhys at a steampunk party, he thinks he’s found the hottest guy there, a man so out of his league he couldn’t possibly have a shot. When Rhys proves him wrong, Aaron has to rethink the whole ‘I’m ready to date’ thing. With his best friend, Corinne prodding him on, Aaron steps out into the dating world and quickly is swept up with Rhys.

What he couldn’t possibly have imagined is Rhys is something out of the fantasy novels Aaron so loves. Before he knows it, Aaron has a wicked fey, Morcant, Rhys’s ex, after him. Elves, dullahans, fairies and nixes, all the things Aaron has loved as fiction prove to be all too real and potentially dangerous. Rhys is Tylwyth Teg, a crown prince of the fey and he is centuries old (heck even his children are all over a hundred). With a life that long there is baggage and this particularly baggage could be deadly. Morcant wants to make Rhys suffer and if Aaron has to die to achieve that, Morcant is thrilled to do it.

Urban fantasy and steampunk are some of my favorite things and it was fun weaving them into this. People seemed to enjoy the story and it was a Rainbow awards finalist. I’m never not going to be proud of this novel. I love Aaron and Rhys and would love to revisit their world.

If you want to learn more I’ll leave you with the blurb and where to find it. Also, check out Paul Richmond’s beautiful cover!

Blurb
Having left most of his arm and his self-confidence behind in the Afghanistan desert, young veteran Aaron Santori has enough on his plate learning to use his prosthetic arm. Attending graduate school at the University of Pittsburgh makes life both interesting and challenging. Mentally, he’s ill prepared for meeting Rhys Edwards, a young-adult novelist from Wales and everything Aaron could want in a man. Between the scars from the explosion and his PTSD, he’s reluctant to date. Ready or not, though, Aaron finds himself jumping into the deep end of the relationship waters.
What Aaron couldn’t possibly know is that Rhys isn’t human at all. As a prince of the Tylwyth Teg, Rhys is fae, with a list of enemies he’s accumulated over the past few centuries—among them a former lover, Morcant, who is back to make Rhys’s life miserable. An unwitting pawn in their Machiavellian fae politics, Aaron only knows he’s falling in love, never suspecting love might be his death sentence.

Find Kept Tears here.