Family Time

Honestly, I don't know about y'all, but sometimes, I'm getting book fatigue. Seems like I barely get one project finished before I'm on to the next... My next upcoming publication is Family Time, with Torquere...

You do not need to have read the rest of the stories with these characters, but if you have, Eric and Temple are back!

They were first introduced in the Whetting the Appetite collection, which contains a short story about how the two characters met, Home Inspection. Home Inspection kinda played off a little of what I knew about the Grindr hookup app. One of my friends was telling me about the app, and also his complete disgust for the amount of fat-phobia and racism that went along with the app. 

So, of course, given his complaints, I had to make Temple and Eric an interracial couple. (I also have a short story with a lesbian interracial couple, although that story was accepted for publication, it's also one of the victims of the Cleis-can't-get-its-shit-together issue. The editor for that collection is attempting to publish with a different company, but I don't know the status. We'll see... pretty sure I can find a new home for it if this falls through, but it may be a while before anyone gets to see it.)

I sort of fell in love with Eric and Temple along the way... So last year, I wrote about them again, in Building Us, which was part of the They Do anthology, released by Torquere. When the Family Time call for submissions came out, I knew I had to revisit old friends.

Cascade Failure deals with the issues of "it's never just one thing" which I've found to be really true in life in general, as well as when dealing with children. You just have those days/weeks where nothing goes right... 

Two-Line blurb:

Parenting never even looks easy. When a high-travel job conflicts with raising a family, will Eric and Temple be able to be there, for their kids, or even for each other?

Marketing Blurb: 

The conflict between work and home life has never been greater for Eric Hopkins—trying to make a better life for his children, Eric takes a job with high travel, leaving him hundreds of miles away when his family needs him the most. For Temple Richardson, local employment and more time at home means dealing with school officials, toddler mishaps, and sick dogs, all while trying to plan the perfect birthday for his spouse.

When one mishap leads to another and the whole day comes tumbling down, can these two very different men get their lives, and their priorities, straight? Or will cascading failure finally rip them apart?

Publication Date: June 17th

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!)

Building Us

Sometimes there are characters that I write who just don't want to leave after their story is done.

Eric and Temple are two of them. I wrote their story fairly early last year in the January to June short story writing spurts that Liz and I were doing. I think I wrote it around the beginning of February; it was one of the first, at any rate.

And then I spent the rest of the year not plucking that story out of the collection and taking my boys to bed - so to speak. The story ends with them deciding to give dating a shot, and no one ever gets naked. They don't even kiss, although Eric spends a while fantasizing...

Torquere, one of my publishers, does a collection of short stories every month, on different themes... and one of them is "They Do" which is LGBT wedding stories... groomzillas and wedding disasters and the like. I went a slightly different route - because I always do! - and wrote about Eric and Temple's proposal scene.

I just signed the contract for that short the other day.

So if you read and enjoyed Whetting the Appetite, you're going to want to pick this collection up; or just the individual story, because that's how Torquere is running that show these days; the stories are released as a whole antho, or you can just buy the story you're interested in. Which is pretty cool...

I believe that collection's going to be out in June, so that will probably be my next purchasable title, since everything else has been pushed back and off til at least late summer. I'm not sure. Let you know when I know.