Month: June 2017

Pen to Pen: Coping with Rejection by K.S. Trenten

A person's hand using a pen to write in a notebook

Welcome to Pen to Pen, a new weekly feature on my writing blog where authors stop by to talk about things they’ve learned along the way. Kicking the series off is K.S. Trenten, a wonderfully creative author of queer fantasy that I met when we both were publishing with the now-defunct Torquere Press. Today, she has some advice for those of us who have experienced rejection. And since that’s pretty much every writer who’s ever tried to get a story published, what she has to say will help a lot of people. … Read more

Rainbow Snippets: A Excerpt from “Darling Proktiphallus”

This week for Rainbow Snippets, I’m sharing again from “Darling Proktiphallus,” which appears in the new Lethe Press anthology His Seed: An Arboretum of Gay Erotica. In “Darling Proktiphallus” we follow JD, a horticulturalist whose fascination with a unique garden plant goes beyond the intellectual. In this week’s snippet, we’re introduced to JD’s sometime-lover, who works with him at their city’s public garden. We also meet a couple of the toys JD enjoys when he doesn’t have a lover. (Yup, there are sex toys in this snippet. You have been warned.) … Read more

FAQ on Russian LGBT Network and gays in Chechnya

rainbow flag—photo by Benson Kua

This FAQ is a revised version of a post I wrote in April about the persecution and killing of gay men in Chechnya and efforts to help them. A message I received today reminded me that there’s still a lot of education to be done. The message was along the lines of “Russia is full of hackers and scammers, so we can’t trust things based in Russia. Therefore Westerners should only support Western charities.” If everyone followed that reasoning, we’d have 40 more dead gay Chechens on our hands right now.
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Guest author: Jodi Payne talks stoned neighbors, flooded condos, and true love

Sexy to Go Gay Romance cook cover with photo of two men kissing

I interview my fellow Sexy to Go Gay Romance author Jodi Payne about “Handyman,” the sometimes-hilarious, sometimes-poignant story of Danny, who is haunted by memories of his ex who moved out six months ago. He recognizes just how bad off he is when he wakes up to a flood in his condo, a problem his ex would have adeptly handled. His day starts looking up, though, when the workman Ken shows up to handle the drywall. But can Danny handle Ken?

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What are simultaneous submissions? How are they different from multiple submissions?

Hands on Apple keyboard

“Simultaneous submissions” and “multiple submissions” are bits of jargon that have distinct meanings in the publishing industry. I break them down in this article.
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Author Interview: Sam Thorne on Tarzan’s sex life and Edwardian humor

His seed book cover

Sam Thorne is a brilliant writer with an encyclopedic knowledge of both WWE wrestler stats and the frequency of gerundial phrases in Victorian speech. Here she talks about her Tarzan-inspired short story “Lord Greystoke’s Greenery” in His Seed: An Arboretum of Gay Erotica.
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Rainbow Snippets: Six Sentences from “Darling Proktiphallus”

His seed book cover

This week for Rainbow Snippets, I’m sharing an excerpt from “Darling Proktiphallus,” an erotic short story about a professional horticulturalist who develops a fascination with one of the newest specimens to join his public garden’s plant collection. It’s part of the new anthology His Seed: An Arboretum of Gay Erotica from Lethe Press, which features homoerotic stories of men and the plants they love. I’m tickled by the reviews that have been coming in, most of them along the lines of this one from an Amazon reviewer: “This is without a doubt one of the most original and well-written gay erotic anthologies I’ve read in a long time.”

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