Recommended Read

Well, it seems some people really do like InDescent. Following is what Satyr Vael at Literary Nymphs Reviews had to say about it. (I've eliminated the synopsis portion of the review, even though SV did a superb job of conveying the gist of the novel. You can read the entire review by clicking on the post title.)

The book's rating was 5 Nymphs and a Recommended Read.

"The sequel to Obsessed, InDescent is another foray into Jackson Spey’s world of sex and magic. Once again, I found myself falling utterly in love, all over again, with Jackson and Adin. They are both beautiful but flawed men, and together, they are breathtaking.

"K.Z. Snow paints an amazing picture of the magical inhabitants of the Prism and expertly zips Jackson through the demons in his own soul. The end result is more than I ever expected, and it only shows how strong Jackson and Adin’s love truly is. If you read Obsessed, then I absolutely must insist that you read InDescent."

Madame Butterfly, aka Leah, also did a very thoughtful review here. Although Leah had a few issues with the book, they were completely valid, and I took them to heart (as all constructive comments should be taken). By the way, Satyr Vael and Leah also reviewed Obsessed, available at Changeling Press, and were equally kind in their assessments.

I'm really grateful for their views. (And many thanks to Jeanne Barrack for pointing out the Nymphs posting to me. Homies got my back!)

The Aisle of the Forgotten

Establishments that sell used books mean one thing to me as a reader and something else entirely as a writer.

I've been a bookstore habitue since high school but didn't discover used-book shops (or is it shoppes?) until college. Now I can't stay away from them. No other type of place in my experience has offered excitement and tranquility in equal measure. No other type of place has so transported me.

The thrill of discovering a beautifully written, bound, and/or illustrated book is a thrill with shimmering edges that never go dull. Add to this the unexpected, occasional joy of easing the covers apart and finding an old bookplate or bookmark, a flattened four-leaf clover or rusty rose, a Victorian calling card or WWII ration coupon. The crispness of the text in a seventeenth-century volume is astonishing. Each letter has visible depth. The yellow brittleness of some twentieth-century paper is poignant. Leaves flake at the touch.

When I started writing, I saw older books -- some of them, anyway -- in a different light. Because I haven't lived in or near a large city in a while, I've been getting used books at resale shops and library sales. It's at the former that I've found row upon row of the Forgotten.

The Forgotten are usually novels with modest bindings, missing dustjackets and, often, the former owners' signatures scrawled on the inside front covers. (Sometimes, on a rear flyleaf, you'll even find a penciled grocery list.) They were written by women with names like Helen Constance Wiggins and men with names like J. Henry McElroy--names sturdier than the authors' books and reputations turned out to be.

Every time I see one of the Forgotten, I feel a drizzle of sadness. And I smell the unmistakable odor of kinship. I imagine how Mary Kelmsford Johnson must have felt when she got that letter of acceptance from her publisher -- how her pride swelled, how her future suddenly blazed with brilliant promise. She'd become an AUTHOR. People would read the words that flowed from her heart and take those words into their hearts. She would leave her mark on history . . .

How seldom it turns out that way. For every William Faulkner or even Louis L'Amour, there are untold hundreds of Bertram R. Youngbloods and Margery D. Pilsmeyers. Their legacies are books with cheap, scuffed brown or blue bindings, sans dustjackets, languishing on resale store shelves. Not a single shopper is willing to fork over a dollar, or even a quarter, to read their once-precious words.

So here we are, a whole new crop of hopefuls, wondering if we should make book trailers and invest in refrigerator magnets to help our stars shine brighter. Here we are, waiting with crossed fingers and bated breath for our accolades, our five-somethings reviews and bestseller rankings, each time our words appear before the public. And when that recognition doesn't come, we feel the breath of Helen and Bertram and Margery stirring the hair on our napes as they whisper, "Don't worry. Someday your work will be welcomed. We've reserved a place for it in our aisle."

What a profoundly humbling adjustment in perspective.

M/M Fiction Elements that Piss People Off - Update

Elements in M/M romance fiction that infuriate readers and writers alike -- gotta be a million of 'em! I first posted this list on September 3, 2008, when I'd just begun venturing into the genre. Time for an update.

Wow, the stuff I've learned over my nine-month gestation period! There are far more pisser off-ers than I initially realized. So here's the original list, with an addendum below in color.

(And the picture? That's for all the pastors who secretly desire Adam Lambert. You know who you are. Now get back to your stalls in those rest-area and park bathrooms. And say hi to Bill O'Reilly for me.)

• Emo characters (The term emo has become WAY more inclusive than it should be.)


• Exceptional endowment (The pink torpedo is out; the pink Twinkie is in . . . as far as it can go, that is.)


• Too much sex


• Too much swallowing of the salty snowball during sex


• Too little sex


• Too little swallowing of the salty snowball during sex


• "Odd" positions during sex


• Too much talking during sex


• Too little talking during sex


• Too much BDSM


• Not enough BDSM


• Blue eyes (!)


• A history of abuse as a child (Guess that's old news. YIPPEE! Child abuse no longer exists!)


• Tension or plot conflict that involves homophobes (Guess they're old news, too. YIPPEE! Vicious, mindless sexual prejudice no longer exists!)


• Love at first sight (Well, yeah, that's baloney--eHarmony be damned.)


• Arousal at first sight (Come on. Denying there's such a thing as arousal at first sight is like denying there's such a thing as stupid or ho-doggy presidents.)


• "Gay for you," i.e., protagonists who claim to be straight and only get bent with and for each other. (It's the "I swear I have always been and will always be straight" part that makes this oxymoronic. But I don't know of too many writers who try to peddle gay or bi heroes as hardcore het's.)


• The deep end of the sensitivity pool: too much crying, too much schmaltz, too much angst (Where's the line and when is it crossed?)


• The shallow end of the sensitivity pool: too much hard-nosedness, too much glibness and flippancy, too much insouciance (Ditto the above comment.)


• Too many cops/detectives/cowboys/firefighters (For me, at least, they are getting stale. I have a hard time being engaged by characters who remind me of the Village People, although some authors can pull it off.)


• Lack of alpha traits and a plethora of "womanish" traits


• Too much cussing (See above.)


• Unrealistic dialogue (See above.)


• Obligatory HEA (I agree with this one.)


• Too much pondering of emotions


• Too little attention to emotions


• Lack of chemistry (How published authors can produce a lack of chemistry between two protags in a romance is beyond me.)


• Use of animal similes/images/metaphors/sounds (Kind of difficult to steer totally clear of them, especially when it comes to dialogue tags . . . those repetitive buggers.)


• Menages that involve two gay men and a woman (I must admit, this plot device does bewilder and annoy me.)


• Pointless drama (I'm not entirely sure what that is.)


• Female characters who are a.) villains/foils, b.) goddesses/Earth Mothers, c.) ignorant of their men's true sexual preference or orientation, d.) you name it.


• Infidelity, for any reason


• Various terms for the prostate, including "prostate"


• Various terms for the glans
• Self-lubricating anuses (I had no idea such a thing existed in m/m fiction. But I read about it on a blog -- Emmy's, of course -- so it must be true.)


• Too many public displays of affection between the protags


• No public displays of affection (thus implying shame)


• Not enough older heroes


• Promiscuity


• Promiscuity treated as a moral or emotional deficiency


• Too little incorporation of real-world gay issues


• Sexual activity involving women -- any sexual activity, regardless of context


• Too much world detail


• Too little world detail


• Twincest, or any kind of incest (I'm all with this one.)


• Twinks


• Meddlesome female friends, usually of the "fag hag" variety


• Yaoi derivation (Guess it's related to that emo objection listed above.)


• Heroes who are rotten bastards


• Heroes who are sugar cubes


• Handicapped heroes (not because they're handicapped, but because this device has become overused)


• A whole bunch of stuff relating to historicals (Somebody more versed in the subgenre than I am can ferret out and address those points.)


• Female authors of M/M fiction (Yup, every single last one of us, because we're clueless.)

I've added a whole separate category, which I call "Erection Objections."

• Erections with feelings (No, I don't mean emoboners; I'm referring to physical sensations, like aches and pains.)


• Erections that "leak" (Hey, you know the fuckers do. Maybe they don't weep copiously, but they do leak. I've seen it with my own eye. Uh, eyes.)


• Erections that appear too fast


• Erections that go south too fast


• Erections without protections
• Erections that are referred to as . . . erections (WTF? From now on, I shall refer to them as filing cabinets.)


• Erections that are unusually active and move in unnatural ways


• Erections that are far too large to allow for a recipient's physical comfort, even if he's anaesthetised


• Double/triple/quadruple -- well, hell, let's go for the whole bunch of bananas! -- penetration

Any others? Come on, I hate incomplete lists!

Bastards and Pretty Boys has a publisher!

Thrilled to announce that my contemporary m/m romance, Bastards and Pretty Boys, has been accepted by Liquid Silver Books. This will be my second book with them. (InDescent was the first, but the two stories are not related.)

I'm really growing fond of this company. Its incredible staff practically radiates professionalism combined with personal warmth, and they're all so very, very helpful. LSB is a real boon to the e-publishing community . . . and that ain't no bull.

Too many "unworthy" writers getting published?

Emerald Jaguar, aka emmyjag, offered up an interesting question recently about who's to blame for published books that are riddled with errors. Is it the author's responsibility to put out polished work? Or the editorial team's? The discussion (a good one, too, accessible through the post title) resurrected a question I've occasionally tossed around in my mind.

What's the publisher's role? What's the reader's role?

It seems to me, the final arbiter of quality is the publisher. That's where the buck stops. It's the company that sets the standards for its product; it's the acquisitions editor(s) who, in accordance with those standards, must decide whether or not to give new material a chance. I can't help but wonder how, if a submitted manuscript is dreadfully written (loaded with spelling, grammatical, and syntactical errors; lacking in plot consistency; burdened by wooden dialogue and leaden characters), the damned thing gets accepted in the first place!

And the damned things do get accepted. All the time. For electronic and print publication. I suspect we've all read the output of verbally challenged writers. I don't mean people who have an essential but occasionally flawed command of their craft, I mean those who don't seem to realize authorship is a craft.

So maybe they have active imaginations capable of churning out plot devices like there's no tomorrow -- say, dragon-shifter ghosts that haunt the British Isles, looking for reincarnations of their former soulmates . . . or whatever. Maybe they have a real flair for dreaming up kinky sex scenes. Both of those capabilities are just dandy, but they don't amount to trail of rat turds if the writer doesn't have a sound command of both the language and the fundamental elements of fiction.

To quote comedian Ron White, "You can't fix stupid." Were I an editor who had some corned beef hash of a story thrust at me, I sure as hell wouldn't know how to turn it into New York Strip. And the author sure as hell wouldn't know, either, because s/he thinks that hash is New York Strip.

Ergo, it's publishers who must bear the brunt of responsibility for what kind of product they put before the reading public.

But . . . but (and here's something else to consider) what's the role of consumers? If the reading public gobbles down the hash without complaint, publishers have no incentive to improve their menus.

Whaddaya think?

Results make a mockery of American Idol.

And Kris Allen knows it. After being announced the winner, this nice man yet clearly inferior singer muttered, "But Adam deserves it."

/rant

(I truncated this thing because it's served its purpose -- to help me vent. Hate when I feel that way, and hate even more when the feeling seems justified.)

Throwing the Perfect Wankfest II

An ongoing (for now, at least) dustup here http://tiny.cc/JXSDy made me think of how important it is, when throwing a Wankfest, to wax eloquent. Garden-variety name calling and reptitive back-and-forths impress nobody and do little to make one's point adhesive.

Some seasoned curmudgeon from Washington, D.C. posted a brilliant example of what I mean on Craig's List, February 2009. Learn from him or her. Following is merely a paragraph plucked from this epithetic sea. If you wish to view the whole glorious thing, go here: http://www.craigslist.org/about/best/wdc/1051162624.html.

"I cannot believe how incredibly stupid you are. I mean rock-hard stupid. Dehydrated-rock-hard stupid. So stupid it goes way beyond the stupid we know into a whole different dimension of stupid. You are trans-stupid stupid. Meta-stupid. Stupid collapsed on itself so far that even the neutrons have collapsed. Stupid gotten so dense that no intellect can escape. Singularity stupid. Blazing hot mid-day sun on Mercury stupid. You emit more stupid in one second than our entire galaxy emits in a year. Quasar stupid. Nothing in our universe can really be this stupid. Perhaps this is some primordial fragment from the original big bang of stupid. Some pure essence of a stupid so uncontaminated by anything else as to be beyond the laws of physics that we know. I'm sorry. I can't go on. This is an epiphany of stupid for me."

Now that's a wanker!

Welcome a new generation of hags!

Tonight, the two finalists were announced on "American Idol." Eighty-eight freakin' million votes were phoned in or texted by people with a lot of time on their hands and fervor in their hearts. Next week is the big sing-off for the crown.

On any other season of AI, this wouldn't have been a

noteworthy occasion. At all. Guaranteed some
country-western warbler or rock screamer or r&b boomer with gospel-music roots would've been in the finals. Not this year, though. Nuh-uh. This year, the stage will be taken by the exotic creature you see on the left -- but not, sad to say, quite the way he looks there. ("Idol" hasn't come that far!)

That's right, he. Adam Lambert: gorgeous gay man, sometimes drag queen, and musical-theater performer extraordinaire. As well as the most astonishing vocalist in the show's eight-season history (he has something like a zillion-octave range, expressive at all levels; perfect pitch; clear and even vibrato). And . . . he can dance!

Anyway, the top three contestants all made "triumphant" returns to their hometowns last week, camera crews in tow. Kris Allen went back to Somewhere, Arkansas. (Oh, the salacious fanfic that's cropped up involving him and Adam!) Danny Gokey went back to Milwaukee. (No, Jackson Spey wasn't in the crowd. Neither was I, although I was born and raised there, too.) And lovely Adam flew to San Diego.

It tickled me no end. Shrieking females run amok. Hordes of them, from the age of seven to seventy. Reaching for him, grasping at him. One even ripping off her halter top for him (clearly an exercise in futility if ever I saw one). Between giggles I said to JLA, "Poor guy probably hasn't had to endure so much estrogen since he was in the womb!" In spite of my amusement, as I watched this outpouring of adoration I couldn't help thinking what a very good thing it was.

When Adam Lambert becomes the next American Idol a week from today -- for there should be no "if" about it -- America will be idolizing a gay man. A man who's made no particular secret of his sexuality and has pictures of himself from pre-Idol days all over the Internet, including photographs of him in flamboyant costumes, sometimes kissing guys.

Maybe I'm making too big a deal of this. Many bloggers and columnists have said, essentially, "Eh, so what? Like anybody cares? This is the 21st century, and there've been plenty of queer celebrities in recent decades, especially in the music world." Yes, but how open were they? And did they ever get this kind of press? And were they associated with an iconic entertainment institution? More to the point, there's still plenty of gay bashing going on in this country -- verbal, physical, and political -- and maybe the well-deserved popularity of one individual can help change that.

I love this dude. I love his extraordinary talent and his easy, good-natured grace and his absolute comfort with himself. The only regrettable thing about the AI situation is that Lambert can't, I assume, declare himself to be gay and speak about it openly. The show likely has some "don't ask, don't tell" policy. But at least he's not bending over backwards to pretend he ain't no damned 'mo. (Hell, he even changed the phrase another girl to somebody else when he sang "Tracks of My Tears" for Motown week.)

Now I'll indulge myself in a bit of pettiness. To all those people who ever voted against Adam Lambert simply out of bigotry, and all those prayer groups that've been begging Jesus to rinse the sodomy out of Adam's soul and turn him into the wholesome chick-banger God obviously intended him to be . . .

New Interview Up

At the Gay Erotic Romance blog. (Click on post title.) Really nice site. Easy to navigate and loaded with great excerpts. If you're a fan of m/m romance, check it out!

The Long and Winding Road to InDescent

When writers weave new tales, they often behave like birds in nest-building mode. A scrap from here, a shred from there, a bit of bling and string that have been used before in some other capacity. I've been watching wrens, barn swallows, and bluebirds doing their spring gathering all over our property.

I'm no less a scavenger, except that I try not to lay eggs. ;-) Characters, places, and relationships that had their origin in previous books turn up in InDescent. It isn't necessary to read all of the novel's source material -- not if I've done my job properly -- but some people have expressed an interest in "what came before." So here it is.

• Adin Swift. Now Jackson's lover, Adin first appeared (and both men first appeared together) in Plagued, from Ellora's Cave. This book details Adin's personal history, including the course of his relationship with Celia, his live-in girlfriend. The men reappeared in Tormented (Changeling Press) on the occasion of Adin's 30th-birthday party. Next came Obsessed (also from Changeling). Each book marks a significant stage in their relationship. If, however, you're only interested in getting the gist of their backstory, read Obsessed. It's a good but not necessary lead-in to InDescent.


• Angelina Funmaker. Jackson's best female friend, the biracial Angelina was born a hermaphrodite (intersexual person). Thanks to Jackson's financial support, she secured the drugs and medical procedures necessary for her to become a "complete" female . . . and a stunning one. Angelina makes her first appearance when Jackson makes his -- in Hoochie Coochie Man, from Double Dragon Publishing. Angelina also appears in other stories.


• Ivan Kurtz and Bothu. This self-styled "mage" and his occasional sidekick, the creepy necromancer, also made their first appearances in Hoochie Coochie Man. Ivan was every bit the envious, profane, self-important blowhard in the first book that he is in InDescent. Although he aspires to villainy, he never quite makes the grade. He and Bothu seriously crossed Jackson in HCM, and they both suffered for it. But egotistical Ivan never seems to learn his lesson.


• the psychic medium, Sophie Alanca; her boyfriend, Sonny Brock; her spirit guide, Esme. All three characters had their own story in Cemetery Dancer, a 2008 EPPIE finalist from Ellora's Cave. Jackson helps Sophie out of a dire situation and, in the process, incurs Sonny's (unwarranted) jealousy. They've since become good friends.


• Fog Cliff Cemetery and James Newman's mausoleum. These, too, are integral to the Cemetery Dancer storyline. In fact, a BIG clue regarding who caused the break in the Prism of Nezrabi is in Cemetery Dancer.

As I said above, it certainly isn't necessary to be familiar with all these novels and novellas to grasp what's going on in InDescent. This post is simply meant to illustrate how three-dimensional certain characters become after a while, and how what went into the making of them isn't much different from what goes into the making of any living adult.

You're right. We're weird.

My Dumb Ass & Another Free Story

It started out like this. Kris, at her blog Kris 'n' Good Books, decided to mess with authors' minds. She obviously knows what flippin' divas we are. So a little while back, she threw down the gauntlet -- a really silly one, hung with all kinds of nonsensical bling -- and Sean Kennedy was the first to rise to the challenge. What was that challenge? To write a super-short story (1k-2k words) incorporating a hodgepodge of key words and concepts or "prompts." Sean, being a fabulous author as well as Kris's countryman (one of those demented Aussies), did a great job with "Drive Safe."

Then Kris tapped me. I still don't know what I did to piss her off. But I also tried to rise to the challenge, however droopily. My prompts were downright sadistic. I had to write a somewhat coherent tale based on the following:

• a nudist colony coupled with some kind of checkpoint or customs/immigration station
• were-kangaroos
• a twink as a secondary character
• some drama involving fruit
• the phrase Live long and prosper
• a romantic futuristic crime fantasy

That's right. All this crap wadded into the space of a few pages. You can access "The Amazing Fruit of New Hope," if you dare, by clicking on the post title. Just remember to cut me some slack. I wrote this thing in a day.