Pen to Pen: Selling your Special with Sonni de Soto

group of smiling friends covered in body paint

Guest author Sonni de Soto argues that the key to success is to publishing success is emphasizing what makes you different. Sell based on what makes you special. Your stories are one-of-a-kind, and that’s what readers are looking for. … Read more

Pen to Pen: Five Essentials For Your Author Website

photo of smartphone with definition of "design" on its screen

This week in Pen to Pen, I’m happy to have Mary Caelsto, author of Perfect Author Newsletters, coaches other authors in improving their websites and newsletters. Check out her list to make sure you’ve got all five of these must-haves on your website. … Read more

Rainbow Snippets: Playing with Plants in “Darling Proktiphallus”

His seed book cover

This is the last week I’ll be sharing from “Darling Proktiphallus” for Rainbow Snippets. “Darling Proktiphallus” appears in the new Lethe Press anthology His Seed: An Arboretum of Gay Erotica. It follows JD, a horticulturist who works at a public garden in the Midwest, as he works with a new plant from an unidentified species that was sent to the public garden by a university botanist.

JD and Robert, his co-worker and occasional lover, have been trying to figure out the plant’s ideal growing conditions. They learn that it needs not only sunlight and water to thrive, but also touch. (There are lots of evolutionary explanations for this that I get into in the story, but since we’ve only got six sentences, I’ll have to skip over them here.)

As JD spends time each day nurturing the plant, he begins to develop not-so-professional feelings about it—feelings that interfere with his sleep. … Read more