I missed it last week in order to finish Modified & Sacred (the absolutely terrible title I slapped on my Sf story out of pure desperation after like 40 minutes of pain trying to come up with something better.) It went out to the anthology. Here’s hoping.

If nothing else, it’s about 800 words from being a full on novella so if it doesn’t make the anthology, I have very little to do to expand it and try it that way.

My story with Aaron and Rhys (and the crew) from Kept Tears will be in DSP’s Love wins anthology and all the proceeds will go to a charity for the Pulse shooting victims. That makes me very happy.

Soonish, I think I’ll be able to share the cover of Once Upon a Time in the Weird West. There’ll be a big ta-doo for it. I’m looking forward to it (and I’m sure you’ll love the cover). It’s due out in December (as is Love wins).

And I’m one or two paragraphs away from finishing Cassadaga Nights expansion into a novella. It might get done tonight (well if I stop watching Star Trek but since Amok Time, Mirror Mirror & Trouble with Tribbles are on back to back maybe not). I am thinking of just calling it Cassadaga. I don’t like the title and I think the ‘nights’ part of it is half of what’s bugging me. I’ll wing it at my first readers and go from there. I have a couple places in mind to try it.

Now that that’s done, I’m not sure how much new writing I’m going to be doing in the next few months (so maybe this weekly post will go bi-weekly). What I’m mostly going to be doing is revising Blood Red Roulette. If I don’t start that soon I will not get it done. I don’t want that to happen. I’m over being disappointed and that’s the time to get to work before I set it aside and go onto something new and shiny.

And my nano isn’t going to be in this genre this year. It has been the last two years and I promised myself to alternate it every other year so I’m overdue on that.

However, I will still be occasionally noodling around on Behind Blue Eyes and with the contemporary story which I could have sworn I started but a thorough search of my files on both computers and all flash drives showed up nothing, not even the name file and I KNOW I did that. I’ll search the tag for these posts next. Maybe I just wrote up the notes.

So nearly three finished in the last two weeks, that’s good, right?

Okay so I failed to get much read last week, my apologies. I had two deadlines and barely made them so…yeah I was typing til my fingers were numb.

I think I’ll continue one more week on Ryan and Santino’s story. They’re out in the woods around Cassadaga (taking that walk Santino thought might be only for serial killers).

(Colby Lake which is on the walk and features heavily in the story)

Santino’s lips gave a little under Ryan’s, spiced with oregano and peppercorn. He didn’t get aggressive, and Ryan took that as his cue; No tongues, maybe next time. This was sweet, soft, and as first kisses went, right up in the stratosphere. When Santino slid his hand down over Ryan’s, before letting him go, Ryan took a step back and smiled.

“Nice.”

If you’d like to play along, Rainbow Snippets is a Facebook community where we post up 6 sentences of one of our LGBT stories every Saturday. It’s been fun and you can find it here. Be sure to check out all the offers! It’s been a great supportive group!

I can’t overstate how important Star Trek was to me. My parents were Trekkie. I was born just before Season 2 and was probably fairly lucky my name wasn’t Uhura (It was nearly Sheena of the Jungle but that’s another story all together). I grew up on ST reruns. From here my childhood was shaped and in such a positive way.

I learned to accept all cultures, all ethnic groups, and both sexes as equal. I know that they had a fight on their hands having a woman of African descent on the bridge and that they lost the fight to have a female second in command. I know that a lot of the episodes were silly bordering on tacky and filled with the politics of the 1960s.

But I also know it inspired thousands to do better, to be better people. Look around you at your cell phones and tablets and all the other things seen on that show by the dreamers and made reality by the inspired scientists. It inspired me to be a scientist. I wanted to be Dr. McCoy (and later, as I was preparing for MCATS and Medical School interviews, Dr. Beverly Crusher). I have four separate degrees in science and I owe some of that to my love of Star Trek.

I am here today because of the show. I was bullied through much of high school (being a SF geek didn’t help, it was not cool back then). I was depressed. I considered suicide more than once and I would think about two things what it would do to my mom and what would Spock and Kirk do. I know that sounds silly and unrealistic but it did help so very much.

And now I write SF, not exclusively but I do love writing it. (I have issues imagining the tech because that is not the science I loved). I’m not sure I would ever have gotten into SF if not for Star Trek.

I’ve loved this show all my life. I don’t see that ever changing.

Have some articles on it Cast’s favorite episodes.

USA today’s collection of articles.

Me in my lab today –

In my office –

At home playing with my phaser

Yesterday we had a wonderful break from the heat (probably at the expense of all those being plagued by hurricanes, hope everyone is safe). Before Labor Day is over, it’ll be back up to a Floridianesque 95 degrees reminding me of why I fled Florida in the first place. I’ll be spending Labor Day laboring away on a SF short with an incredibly close deadline.

In the meantime let’s go back to Cassadaga FL where the telekinetic, Santino has just asked the psychic, Ryan out for coffee so they can get to know each other better.

Santino would have to keep this first talk a bit general since there were a couple people within earshot but it wasn’t like he could invite Ryan to his home or out for a walk or something. Cassadaga wasn’t made for easy walking with few sidewalks and rutted sugar sand streets in many areas. He didn’t want to say ‘hey, let’s go for a walk in Colby Park.’ Who took a stranger into a sub-tropical jungle in the heat of the day? Serial killers, probably. On the other hand, he couldn’t just segue into ‘want to join a group of psychics, mages, and those who hunt the wicked supernatural creatures?’ in public. Well, he wouldn’t have wanted to breech that can of supernatural weirdness in their first conversation anyhow.

If you’d like to play along, Rainbow Snippets is a Facebook community where we post up 6 sentences of one of our LGBT stories every Saturday. It’s been fun and you can find it here. Be sure to check out all the offers! It’s been a great supportive group!

There is nothing really new here other than I did make strives on my SF story but I don’t like my chances of finishing it by deadline. At least at the end I’ll have something for a future market.

So instead today I thought I’d talk a bit about the erotic aspects of my stories. My last two stories (Corpse Powder and More Than His Scars (which has been sent to DSP for consideration for the Love Wins anthology)) have zero sex in them and that was a conscious decision.

I was reminded of it yesterday when another m/m author switched from romance/erotica to YA because she felt neither romance nor erotica were her strong suit. I feel that way myself. Neither of the above mentioned stories are particularly romantic. Several others I know who DO feel comfortable with the romance feel either less comfortable with the hard core sex scenes, or, like me are just plain bored with writing them.

That is seriously the case with me. I’m just plain tired of writing sex. I don’t feel uncomfortable with it but in many cases I’m bored with it and that goes for reading it. I find myself skimming those sections lately while reading novels in the genre. It might be a hot scene but to me it’s just meh, let me get back to the mystery/demon hunting/alien fighting whatever of the plot.

So seeing several far better known authors than me were also tired of writing the sex scenes, I got to thinking. I did even more thinking after animazement where I saw several readers eyes glaze over when we talked about the plot or another really relating to the LGBT community but spark like fire when we mentioned ‘oh by the way, lots of m/m sex.’ The two warring thoughts I had were 1. if I take out the sex I might lose readers. 2. I am uncomfortable with people reading merely because they think the m/m sex is ‘pretty’ or ‘hot’ (and I could go on here because I’ve seen tons of very unkindly thoughts from so parts of fan fic where that the sex is all that mattered but I don’t want to offend too many people.) I have to say I’m beyond uncomfortable with the idea that the only reason people are buying the books for the sex rather than any interest in the concerns of the LGBT community. It makes me wonder if I’m actually doing something that could be somehow detrimental (I tend to overthink)

So I decided to play a bit with my fiction. Corpse Powder could have had sex scenes. Well if I wanted it not to be in the anthology because it was too freaking long. It ended up novella length and needed cut. There was no way to get it in without cutting more. I decided to do the fade to black instead. I think it works. Time will tell if readers agree.

I didn’t use sex in More Than His Scars because it was a story in my Kept Tears universe and Aaron is dealing with the anniversary of the day he lost his arm in the war. He’s in a bad head space and Rhys (and Corrine) are trying to get him back on his feet. There’s a hint at the end that he and Rhys will have a romantic night but that wasn’t what the story was about. I felt sex would have been distracting, maybe even disrespectful to actual veterans, suggesting a good fuck will take your mind off your disabilities. So I left it out on purpose.

As for Blood Red Roulette which I’m retooling does have some sex but the story is definitely not really a romance. There’s a romantic subplot and some awkward first time sex but I’m trying to take a step toward the non-romance lines that are thankfully cropping up because I’d much rather read those genres personally.

Same for Behind Blue Eyes. I know there will be some erotic moments but they’ll be shorter in spite of this being about a man being sold as sex slave. It’s more about the ugliness of that (as opposed to the BDSM world where someone willingly submits, this is not about that at all!)

I’m not entirely turning my back on the romance side though. I am trying to find time to work in a contemporary romance as I was challenged by the ladies a animazement to at least stretch and try it. I swear I had started it but I cant find any record of it. I’m boggled by that!

As for the SF short I’m working on, I’m not sure where to work sex into it! I did want one scene or at least a make out scene but it’s turning into flat out SF and a sex scene right now would be…awkward from the story telling side of things. Hmmm.