Hi everyone! I’m pleased to announce that Sea Lover has a brand new, sparkly cover and a release date of June 25th!
Pre-order is available on the NineStar Press website, and if you pre-order, you get it 3 days early!
Here’s the beautiful cover by Natasha Snow, and the blurb:
Ian is happy with his life in a remote Canadian fishing town, where he has only the sea and his fishing crew for company. People say being alone is terrible, but he’s never had any problems with it. Then his peaceful life is thrown into upheaval when he finds an injured merman washed up on the shore. With no idea what else to do, Ian takes the merman home and nurses him back to health. But as he helps S’mika heal, a bond begins to form, and Ian starts to wonder if maybe there is more to life than being alone…
It’s a cute little hurt/comfort story with a language barrier, so if that’s your thing, please consider picking it up! It’s also an #ownvoices project – the main character, Ian, is trans. I also wanted to do something a little different for a Canadian merman – I figured that merfolk from the area probably wouldn’t have dolphin tails, and they definitely wouldn’t be white. So S’mika is half seal, and First Nations. There is some angst here and there, but overall it’s a pretty light, cute story. It was a lot of fun to write, and I hope it will be enjoyed!
Hello all! Got some exciting news to share! Junior Hero Blues has a brand new cover, and a release date of March 29th! PLUS if you pre-order you get it 3 days early! Here’s the new cover:
I love it! It feels like an upgraded version of the old cover. ☺️
I’ve been having fun with artbreeder.com and came up with portraits of the two main characters:
So much fun! Oh and also here’s a moodboard I did a while ago.
What, you want to know what the book is actually about? Okay, fine:
Last year, Javier Medina was your average socially awkward gay high schooler with a chip on his shoulder. This year, he’s…well, pretty much the same, but with bonus superpowers, a costume with an ab window to show off his new goods, and a secret identity as the high-flying, wise-cracking superhero Blue Spark.
But being a Junior Hero means that Javier gets all the responsibility and none of the cool gadgets. It’s hard enough working for the Legion of Liberty and fighting against the evil Organization, all while trying to keep on top of school work and suspicious parents. Add in a hunky boyfriend who’s way out of Javier’s league, and an even hunkier villain who keeps appearing every time said boyfriend mysteriously disappears, and Blue Spark is in for one big dollop of teenage angst. All while engaging in some epic superhero action and, oh yeah, an all-out battle to protect Liberty City from the forces of evil.
Welcome to the 100% true and totally unbiased account of life as a teenage superhero.
Can’t wait to once again share Javier and Rick with you. This book was so much fun to write, and is really special to me. ☺️ I hope you’ll consider checking it out!
Other news!
Ink & Flowers is now available to download as an ebook on Kindle and Kobo! It’s been out of print for a while, except for the Audiobook so it’s great to finally have it available again!
Ink & Flowers is right now the only contemporary novel I have, and it’s full of coming out themes and anxiety, something that I struggled with a lot in my early 20s. It’s a personal book, but it’s also a little escapist. Here’s the blurb:
About to lose his apartment, and desperate to avoid having to move in with his horrendous relatives, shy art student Luke impulsively agrees to a deal from hell: sex with a man he doesn’t know in exchange for a couch to sleep on.
His new “roommate” Cooper is everything that Luke hates: crude, uncouth, and covered in tattoos, not to mention openly gay. Luke has all but resigned himself to a miserable fate when it turns out Cooper might want something a little different than he expected.
I hope you’ll consider checking it out as well! I think that’s all the news I have today, but I have another big announcement coming soon, so stick around!
Thanks for reading and here’s a picture of my cat looking out the window.
Hello, everyone! Long time, no blog! I’ve been taking it easy, enjoying my new place, intermittently battling the great depression beast, as you do. I haven’t been writing at all, something I hope will change soon, but I have been editing and preparing for a couple of new releases, as well as preparing for GRNW in September! So, to that end, I have a bunch of stuff to share with you guys! Hold on, lemme get my camera.
Okay, so first off, these babies arrived:
They are gorgeous, and I wish I could bring them with me to GRNW, but they don’t come out until November! *pout* But I think I’m going to see about maybe doing an advance giveaway possibly maybe. We’ll see. Anyway, next up is these!
Please ignore the typo on the back. Oh great, now you can’t because I drew attention to it. Go me. I seriously can’t believe I didn’t notice that but… ah well, what can you do? Nobody’s perfect. They are still glorious and rainbow, and I’ll probably be handing them out at GRNW (with candy bribes attached!)
ALSO, I’m going to be on a panel at GRNW! It’ll be Trans Authors on Characters, Stories and Industry. We have an amazing line-up of trans authors, and it should be a pretty great panel! I’ll also be at the book fair selling books and just hanging out, if you want to come and talk to me!
So JUNIOR HERO BLUES is coming out November 7th (go pre-order!) but I also have another romance novella coming out sometime after that! No blurb or release date yet, but I just got the cover, so I have to show it off! It’s by the wonderful Aisha Akeju who like, takes images directly out of my brain and turns them into covers (she is obviously a witch) and this one is no different!
Perfect, right? Sea Lover is a fairly low-key, sweet romance between a seal-merman and a reclusive fisherman who finds him on the beach. I had a lot of fun writing it, and I can’t wait to share more!
And finally, in personal matters, I finally got a new tattoo!
Taking pictures of your right arm with your left hand: surprisingly difficult. Anyway, it’s based off of the designs at Newgrange, and I couldn’t be more in love with how it came out. The placement, the size, even the fact that it looks like it was drawn by a human, and not a machine, are all exactly what I wanted. I actually didn’t know the exact placement I wanted going in, so I let the artist (Deborah at Unicus Studios) decide how it would look best, and she came up with this kind of off-centre position that I think looks so great and organic.
This one hurt like a mother-fucker too. Inside arm, and she had to start with a thin line and then go over it multiple times to thicken them. Ouch. It’s still quite tender and sore today, but it seems to be healing well. You can tell in the picture it’s still at that awkward healing, slightly swollen stage, but I’ll post photo updates on my twitter to show how it comes out!
Thanks everyone for reading! 2016 has been an awesome year so far, and I hope it continues that way. Stay tuned for more info about Sea Lover, and a Junior Hero Blues giveaway.
Oh, and one more thing. No blog post is complete without this face:
This is just a housekeeping blog post, since I’ve been busy lately, and have a bunch of little thoughts that I wanted to gather together into a post. It’s been a pretty crazy week, with To Summon Nightmares being released, and working lots, and dealing with a particularly severe, if short-lived, bout of depression. I think it may have partially been brought on by book release nerves, which is a pain. Something that will hopefully lessen the more books I release. Anyway, onward!
So, if you received an ARC copy of To Summon Nightmares from NetGalley, and were really confused by the ending, it’s probably because you received an early copy that had a glitch in which part of chapter one was pasted onto the end. A few people misunderstood and thought that I had pulled a Stephen King style eternal time loop ending on them, which – really, I’m not that evil! Although, interestingly at least one person said they liked it that way. So there’s an example of artistic value in interpretation for you or … something. Anyway, if you have the glitchy copy and would like the proper, final version, just let me know and I’ll send it to you.
Secondly, if you read To Summon Nightmares and liked Cohen, do your self a favour and listen to this excellent song. It’s Cohen’s favourite, and he can often be heard singing it in the early mornings when Niall is trying to sleep.
.
So, what’s next? Well, Christmas is coming, and I’m super pleased to have been able to write a short story for a Christmas anthology, especially since it meant getting into the Christmas spirit back in June. x) The Anthology is called A Touch of Mistletoe and … well, I haven’t read the whole thing yet, because I’m waiting to get the paperback so I can sit and read it in front of the Christmas tree with a mug of hot chocolate, but it includes some of LT3’s best authors (and me! <–good save) so I’m thinking it’s gonna be excellent. So that comes out December 16th.
Then on January 27th we have Double Take (this is what happens when you decide to write a few short stories in a row) which is part of LT3’s Trans Geek Out Collection. I’m going to share the cover again, because holy crap, I love it so much. If you’re not a fan of incest or menages, then this story is not for you. If you are a fan of misunderstandings, cute genderqueer characters with blue hair and smut, then this story is definitely for you.
As for upcoming projects, I am still knocking away at Skylark Tower. Still. I may die first, in which case, go ahead and publish the unedited draft posthumously, I’ll be dead, so I won’t care. That’s … pretty much how work on this story is going. No, honesty, I really love this story a lot, and I feel really strongly that it’s a story that needs to be told, which is why I’m working so hard on it. It’s sitting at about 53K right now, and I think I might have another 10K or more in me for it, which is good, because I have a problem with my stories being too short. I’m also eventually going to be looking for some more betas, particularly ones who are of Southeast Asian descent, identify as transgender, or who have some academic knowledge of class struggles and revolutions. Yeah, it’s that kind of story. Also, steampunk, if that interests you.
I do have ten days off work coming up (yay!), and I’m going to try to either finish Skylark, or else Witch, Cat and Cobb, which really only needs another 5K that I’ve just been putting off. It’s a fun, light f/f fairytale. I try to contrast my dark, longer works with shorter fluffier stories, to keep myself upbeat.
And after that, I’m not sure! I have quite a few ideas knocking around in my head, but nothing’s really grabbed me super hard yet. I’m thinking of another m/m contemporary because $.$ … ahem, because I’m trying to save up for a down payment, and I’d really appreciate another paycheck like the one I got for Ink & Flowers. But I also want to write more trans characters – I need to write more trans characters. I keep trying to come up with cis characters but they keep ending up trans. Sort of like when I try to think up a contemporary setting and my brain is like “wait, but have you considered vampires? OR they could be on a SPACE STATION. Yeah!” So we’ll see if I manage.
And I have rambled for long enough, I think. I will sign off with a picture of my cat, of course, and wish you all a very lovely week! Bye!
Edit: Oh, I almost forgot! I’m going to be doing some reading on my days off, so if you’ve read any particularly good books lately, please rec them in the comments! (I’m partial to queer romance, of course.)
To Summon Nightmares comes out in just over a month, and I’m filled with both excitement and trepidation.
I’m excited because I honestly believe that it’s a great book, and I can’t wait to share it with the world. It’s probably the best book I’ve ever written, and at the time of writing it, it definitely was. There was a flow to the writing that hadn’t been there before. I knew what I was doing, and although I ended up having to scrap and rewrite quite a bit, I felt confident in my ability to make it better, and to really write something good. I believe that confidence is one of the best tools that an author can have. To make the audience believe that you know what you’re doing, to make the audience trust you, is invaluable.
On top of that I’ve had a couple of people who read early versions go out of their way to tell me how much they liked it, and that it was one of their favourites.
It’s also a subject that is very personal to me, and writing stories with transgender characters is something that I feel is incredibly important. In this story, the fact that Cohen is transgender isn’t just a medical condition from his past (although I think stories that have trans characters without revolving around that fact are important too.) He’s in the midst of the turbulence of transition, dealing with issues of self and self-image, and wrestling with dysphoria. I wanted to get up close and personal with Cohen’s dysphoria, and much of it is lifted directly from my experiences. It’s a story about a turning point, and writing it mirrored and became a turning point in my own life as well.
So the trepidation I’m feeling is because I suspect very strongly that it’s not going to sell well. I shouldn’t care so much, I know. I should be happy if it reaches a few readers who really love it. And it really isn’t about money (although money would be nice, haha.) My last book, Ink & Flowers, did phenomenally well. But hey, it was a contemporary romance with conventionally attractive gay cis boys. That’s what sells. Paranormal fantasy with a chubby trans lead? Probably not so much. I know I’m getting ahead of myself here, and it might end up selling very well. I’m mostly trying to prepare myself for disappointment. But I’ve read plenty of testimonials from authors who want to write more trans characters, but unfortunately they rely on writing for their income, and trans stories, they say, just don’t sell.
I want to become a successful author with a wide reach. But I don’t want to have to sacrifice writing stories that mean something to me. (Not that I&F didn’t mean something to me, because it did, but so does Nightmares.) So what do I do? And I know I’m not the first author to lament this. But I do want to be able to retire from my day job eventually. And I don’t want to stop writing trans characters either. The only solution I can think of is just to keep writing really, really good trans stories, and hope they catch on!
Anyway, after all that, I don’t want to be a huge douchewaffle and start pressuring you to buy my book. Instead I think I’ll link to a few romance books about trans characters by authors who I would love to see more trans stories from. If you would too, consider supporting these books!
If you know of more, please feel free to link in the comments! And of course, you can pre-order To Summon Nightmares here.
And this blog post is now over the recommended length of 500 words, and doesn’t contain anything close to the optimal quota of cat pictures. So I’ll leave you with a photo of my cat and no more words, and that’ll have to do! Cheers!
Like my new website? I love this little guy, although I can’t seem to find him in higher resolution than this anywhere.
Hello, all! I’m coming off an absolutely lovely week of holidays from my day job. It’s been gorgeous and sunny out, and I’ve been relaxing, playing video games, eating, and of course, writing.
It’s a little bittersweet for me, having to go back to the wretched day job. It’s not a horrible job, by any means. It pays well (over minimum wage anyway) it’s relatively low stress, and it gives me medical benefits. But at the same time, for someone who is on good days, an introvert, and on bad days, an anxiety-ridden lump, going to work, pasting a smile on my face and interacting with people for eight hours a day takes it’s toll. This holiday was a little glimpse into what life on the other side is like.
I want to be able to one day quit my day job. I don’t think it’ll ever happen. Right now I’m able to only work 4 days a week and write the other three, and I consider that a blessing even. But I can dream.
Anyway, like I said, I got quite a bit of writing done. I’m about 8K into a new story called Witch, Cat and Cobb, a cute fantasy romance about a princess who runs away and falls in love with a witch. It’s my first lesbian romance, and I’m really enjoying it. I’ve been pushing myself to write more female characters, and confront my internalised misogyny that tells me I won’t enjoy writing/reading female characters as much. I really am enjoying writing this, and I hope others enjoy reading it too.
It’s also a nice break from the 50K story I’ve been working on SINCE THE DAWN OF TIME (since last year.) It’s tentatively titled Skylark Tower and is a steampunk romance with a transgender narrative and also a revolution. It’s very complex, emotional, and has taken it’s toll on me in terms of deciding how I feel about serious issues and how I want to portray them. Right now I’m in the process of completely re-typing the whole thing and editing it as I go, and it’s arduous. I think I’m seeing the end of the tunnel though, and like I said, WC&C is a very nice diversion.
ANYWAY!
I’ve got lots of publishing news too! We’ve got To Summon Nightmares finishing up it’s serial rotation and coming out on November 5th.
Then A Touch of Mistletoe, the Christmas Anthology I wrote a story for is coming out December 17th. My story is called Here For You, and it’s about a blind piano teacher who is convinced he’s going to be alone forever after the death of his wife, until he meets a man who makes him question that, along with his sexuality.
Ink & Flowers is also going to be released as an audiobook around that time! I’m excited, but also not sure I’m going to be able to make myself listen to the whole thing. Especially not the sex scenes. >.< Anyone else get super embarrassed hearing their work read out loud?
Then! (yeah, I’m not done) on January 28th, LT3’s Trans Geek Out collection will be released, which includes my genderqueer twincest menage story (say that three times fast) Double Take! You can buy all the stories individually, or get the bundle (tip: get the bundle) and read all of them!
And finally (at last, I wanted to get this typed up, but I really want to go watch the new episode of Doctor Who) Prince of the Forgotten Planet is in the works to be translated into Spanish and French. Which is brilliant, because I’m sure French and Spanish people really want to read about gay magical tentacle sex and have had a limited selection up until this point. Just hold out a little longer, French and Spanish people!
I think that’s it! Thanks for reading, and have a great week, everyone!
About to lose his apartment, and desperate to avoid having to move in with his horrendous relatives, shy art student Luke impulsively agrees to a deal from hell: sex with a man he doesn’t know in exchange for a couch to sleep on.
His new “roommate” Cooper is everything that Luke hates: crude, uncouth, and covered in tattoos, not to mention openly gay. Luke has all but resigned himself to a miserable fate when it turns out Cooper might want something a little different than he expected.
Ink & Flowers is coming out June 4th!
Wordcount: 40,000
Pairing: m/m
Ebook price: $4.99
J.K. Pendragon 