They Do Release

They Do 
( Amazon | Torquere )

There's nothing like a wedding to make things interesting, for the grooms, the wedding party, the family, the friends, and even the caterer!

Sean Michael's Hammer Club favorites Billy and Montana are back in "Put a Ring On It", a tale that begins with the celebration of their best friends' first anniversary. In "Building Us," by Lynn Townsend, Eric and Temple discover that, for want of a nail, a ring is lost. In "Hold Your Peace" by Lazuli Jones, Terrence's best friend (and best man) Michael makes a confession hours before Terrence's wedding. In "Tony's Tiara" by Berengaria Brown, Tony's sister's wedding is a neverending saga of disasters, but Josh is there to support Tony through them all.

In "Having His Cake" by Genna Donaghy, Matty Strauss is about to cater the biggest wedding in his career, but the last thing he expects is for the groom to be his former one night stand. In "Always a Groomsman" by M. Durango, best men Doug and Garth have to keep a wedding-day disaster at bay. In "Lake Effect" by Erin McRae and Racheline Maltese, Kyle and Daniel return to their hometown to get married only to find themselves facing an obstacle course of family drama and small-town misadventure in their quest to make it down the aisle.

Building Us
( Amazon | Torquere )

As a construction foreman, Eric knows how to build a house. What he's uncertain of is how to build a life, now that he's finally found the man he wants to spend his with. Temple, a university professor with a stack of erudite publications as long as his arm has always played the single's game, until he meets Eric. 

Will a roof-top proposal lead to “I do” or will the whole thing fall apart when Eric can't put a ring on it? 

Torquere Specials for this week only

Need to catch up on a short story or novel that I've written? Right now Torquere is running a special on Roll and Blood Cries Up for 20% off normal price. Still not enough of a discount for you? Add the June special code "PRIDE" to save an additional 20%. 

PRIDE code applies to any Torquere novels and short stories (including the They Do collection and Building Us!) throughout the month of June. Roll and Blood Cries Up on sale this week only.

(I suggest you use the PRIDE code and buy the entire collection; if you haven't added Sean Michael to your reading list, you don't know what you're missing... )

~~~

I wrote Home Inspection originally last year. Liz and I did a challenge where we each wrote one short story per week for six months. When we finished, we collected the best of these and published them with JMS Books in Whetting the Appetite. 

It may or may not have been inspired by my very sexy next door neighbor. (I get some great scenery around here and I'm not just talking about the swamp...) I went outside one day and he was painting his door. Which would have been fine, except he was doing it wearing a pair of boxer-briefs and an open button down shirt. So, it was fine+. 

The finished product (Home Inspection) didn't really turn out how I originally anticipated - which is actually okay, because I ended up later that year writing Full Frontal Neighbor (which will be out in September in the Sexy Librarian's Big Book of Erotica) that deals a little more with accidentally getting an eyeful of a sexy neighbor and I don't want to copy myself too much.

Given the nature of the challenge that Liz and I did (we were supposed to write micro-shorts, less than 1,000 words each) I wasn't able to delve into Temple and Eric's relationship as much as I would have liked. It was also one of the very first stories I wrote for that challenge... and I spent the rest of the six months trying not to yank it out of the collection, expand on it, and submit it elsewhere. It's not the only story that went like that, Liz's Zach's Man is one of the best things she's ever written... in my opinion.

But we persevered. And the collection is lovely. (you should buy it!)

Still, I kept coming back to Eric and Temple. I like mismatched couples; Temple is a university professor. Intelligent, educated, posh. He's also rather wealthy. Eric is a roofer. Brawny, tall, good at his job, and smart, but not witty. Not to mention that they're from racially diverse backgrounds.

I wanted to do something else with them; what would their families think (mixed race couples often have a hard time to start with, adding homosexuality into the mix!) and how would they manage a relationship with so very little common ground? 

When I saw the call for They Do, I thought - well, that'll be a good way to have a further look at them... I certainly didn't have time for another full novel (altho I will admit that they probably deserve one!)

Basement Beauty – blog tour - Carmilla Voiez

"Carmilla Voiez is more of a singer than a writer. She tells her compelling story in a hypnotic, distinctive voice that brings her eerie world vividly to life." Graham Masterton

While her imagery harks back to the writings of Clive Barker and H P Lovecraft, her voice is uniquely female. Starblood was, perhaps, the first true female horror story ever written, dealing with both sexual violence and the struggle of a woman trying to make sense of a senseless world.

Basement Beauty leaves the Crowleyesque world of magic and demons behind and takes us to the city of Glasgow where a serial killer leaves a trail of victims like statues, while a group of assassins hunt for a rogue vampire who is kidnapping human women for his own perverted pleasure. In the midst of this Amalthea and her friends try to scratch a living while negotiating their way through everyday sexism and violence. Basement Beauty is being unleashed on Friday 13th June and there will be a radio show and a Facebook based party to celebrate this, followed by an interview with the author on Zombiepalooza radio.

Carmilla grew up on a varied diet of horror. Her earliest influences as a teenage reader were Graham Masterton, Brian Lumley and Clive Barker mixed with the romance of Hammer Horror and the visceral violence of the first wave of video nasties. Fascinated by the Goth aesthetic and enchanted by threnodies of eighties Goth and post-punk music she evolved into the creature of darkness we find today.

Living in North East Scotland, she finds inspiration in the wildlife, castles and desolate places which surround her. She lives with her two children by the sea.

Her books are both extraordinarily personal and universally challenging. As Jef Withonef of Houston Press once said - "You do not read her books, you survive them."

Signed to Vamptasy Publishing in 2012 three books in the critically acclaimed Starblood Trilogy have been published both as stand-alone novels and as a complete trilogy and she is currently working on an erotic-horror anthology called “Bloody Sexy” and a graphic novel of the first book in the Starblood series. She has also edited and compiled a collection of psychological horror from the best new talent in the world of horror writing "Broken Mirrors, Fractured Minds". Carmilla Voiez is a name to watch.

You can find Carmilla's full bibliography at Amazon – http://smarturl.it/CarmillaOnAmazon

her blog can be found at http://carmillavoiez.wordpress.com

and her Facebook page is at https://www.facebook.com/Author.Carmilla.Voiez

to find out more about Basment Beauty check out http://smarturl.it/BasementBeauty

Excerpt from Basement Beauty -

Amalthea stood outside the unlit entrance to “The Pit” and breathed in the cool, pre-dawn air. One hand brushed wild curls from her mouth and tucked them behind her ear. They sprang back across her cheek immediately, untameable.

As her skin acclimatised she drew jacket sleeves over her rich, honey-coloured arms. It was her post-work ritual: the time when she metamorphosed from a human doing into a human being.

A movement at the edge of her vision attracted her attention and she turned towards the shadowy alley where the night club bins were stored. Her direct gaze didn’t reveal any ghoul, goblin, animal or person skulking in the darkness, watching and waiting for her to leave, but her mind created a sinister shape anyway. For the past six weeks the evening news had continually hinted at unnatural deaths city-wide and rumours of a modern day Jack the Ripper were rife. Now every alleyway had become hostile territory and every shadow a killer, preparing to strike.

With her meditative moments, of simply being, stolen by fear of the impenetrable darkness, Amalthea decided to button her coat and get moving. Home wasn’t far away, a mere ten minute walk and at four am most of the drunks were already home, sleeping it off, or standing, unsteadily in taxi queues, waiting for chariots to return them safely to their beds. In fact, that was one thing that could be said about fear of the dark - it was good for the economy.

Some questions and answers -

Could you tell the readers a little bit about yourself?

I am a Goth, a horror writer and an all-round nut-case. I live in Scotland with my kids and cats and write horror stories from a female point of view, merrily turning tropes on their head and fucking with the gender binary one paragraph at a time. Well it keeps me happy.

Who are some of your favourite authors?

Clive Barker, Storm Constantine, Sarah Waters, Iain Banks and Haruki Murakami.

What’s the most important lesson you have learned about writing?

To let the creativity flow unhindered when writing the first draft of anything and worry about editing it later.

What aspects of writing to do you find the most difficult?

I love editing, but I find it very difficult to know when a story is as perfect as it’s going to be. I tend to hold onto them for a while, waiting for the perfect sentence structure to surface.

Current Events

It's been a busy couple of months for me, and there's really no end in sight... my writing schedule puts me for - and this is just stuff I have planned, contracted, or verbally agreed to with publishers - booked up mostly solid until 2017.

Yikes!

But, in the meanwhile...

Building Us will be released by Torquere Press on June 18th.

Antho blurb: In “Building Us,” by Lynn Townsend, Eric and Temple discover that, for want of a nail, a ring is lost...

Two-Line blurb: Construction foreman, Eric, wants to build more than just a house with his steady boyfriend, Temple. But can Temple convince Eric that it's the relationship, and not the ring, that matters most?

Marketing Blurb: As a construction foreman, Eric knows how to build a house. What he's uncertain of is how to build a life, now that he's finally found the man he wants to spend his with. Temple, a university professor with a stack of erudite publications as long as his – arm – has always played the single's game, until he met Eric.

Will a roof-top proposal lead to “I do” or will the whole thing fall apart when Eric can't put a ring on it?

In case you don't know, and because I do this publishing bouncehouse thing I often can't advertise publications at one house in publications from another house, "Building Us" is the sequel story to "Home Inspection" which can be found in my collection Whetting the Appetite. The two stories have the same lead characters and Building Us picks up with Eric and Temple about a year after they first got together.

This story also contains some of the hottest m/m I've written thus far.

Thing(s) Two:

I've had some guest spots around the blogosphere, first stop was with All Romance cafe as part of their LGBT pride month, where I talk about being the silent B....

Then I dropped in to raise up interest in an older story, Synchronous Rotations, on Guys Like Romance, Too...

And I've got a full length interview coming up June 18th with SSLY Reading Room (Smile, Somebody Loves You!)

Thing Three:

I took a two-week vacation during the middle of May to seriously hate on my story. That happens, sometimes. Which sort of sucked, since I wanted to be done with Howling Bitch's first draft by June 1st. On the plus side, I did some plot work with Elizabeth Brooks (Honestly, if she and my husband didn't spark on each other wrong after about 12 hours, I'd just marry the girl and get on with my life, because I don't know how I'd live without her. And that would be easier if she was in the same house. Oh well.) and managed to get past the hurdle. Yesterday, between the morning where I got in about 3 hours of work, then in the evening, I tapped out another 2 hours, I finally finished the damn thing and wrote The End.

So, Howling Bitch is finished. Which is GOOD because it's contracted already with Vamptasy, and will be published March 17th? 18th? I'd have to check my contract, but it's mid-March of 2015. Which seems like a long time, but to me, it was just March '14 like 10 minutes ago!

I'm going to let it sit for a week or so, then go back and poke some of the plot issues that need to be massaged into place, add a bit in the middle, and then I'll send it out to my beta readers.

Thing Four:

Which means I'll be getting back to Chicago and the Rainbow Connection boys. Blues was written and finished back in Dec/Jan ish, and has been with my beta readers for a while now. I've gotten some good feedback. This novel has not been hit by the "god, I hate my own work" bug - the boys still talk to me regularly. Well, Vin actually yells at me a lot.

The plan is to edit Blues for the rest of this month and then send it in... eh, maybe mid-July?

At which point I'll be ready to start writing Book Three, Classic. (writerly aside, I've already written the opening chapter because I seriously cannot get people to shut. up. And the first chapter of Punked Up has ALSO been written. At the MOMENT, All That Jazz and Punked Up are still looking like 20 - 30,000 word novellas and I'll release them as one book.) And I may write a bonus short story, because right now, there's a scene in my head - and it's important! - that doesn't fit in the timeline of any of the novels.

And that's ... mostly it, that for the time being.

I've got a writer's retreat in September (not a fan/marketing event, but a networking/chat/drinking/writing event) that I'm looking forward to.

And then as fall starts, I have several short stories that will come out; Fair Game in Kristina Wright's For Love of a Soldier, Full Frontal Neighbor in the Sexy Librarian's Big Book of Erotica, and Living Proof with Antimatter Press's Local Magic.

Somewhere in there, I also need to edit and do another word cut of Marked Man, my fantasy romance - I have tentative interest from one of my publishers with that, provided I can slice out another 20,000 words or so from that monstrosity... I may take another look at the rough and see if there's a "good place" to split it in half, because it's currently around 130,000 words, give or take, which would make 2 novels, and maybe we could release them 3 months apart, or something... I dunno, something to think about.

And then I'll want to write Sins of Angels, which is Book 3 of the Demoniac Codex series...

Yeah, busy writer is busy...