Category: Publishers

A MelanieM Review: The Oracle’s Golem (The Oracle #3) by Mell Eight

Rating: 4 stars out of 5

Cover - The Oracles FlameOnce Golem was the proud Dragon of the Earth.  Then the Oracle’s plans for him left him broken and despairing.  In his pain and rage, he left the society he was born into, melding in all ways, including physically, with the mountain they live on. And there the Golem hid deep within its recesses, paying little notice to the passing of years or the actions of the people he came from.

Then one day a child falls asleep in his lap …

That child is Lichen, the gifted problem child of the Earth Caste and he is followed Marl, a lowly Earth caste member who is chosen to look after Lichen and keep him out of trouble.  Marl came out of his testing with only brown dirt and a seed on his back, instead of the more impressive and powerful designs that would have boosted his status and gifts.  Marl has been content to garden and use the gifts he has in gentle ways, including looking after a lonely, intelligent child easily bored with his lessons.

Prodded by the attentions of Lichen and Marl, Golem slowly returns to human form and awareness of the struggles of the people around him.  When the truth of Golem is revealed,  it just might make Marl choose between his duty or the person he has come to love: Oracle or Golem?

Once more Mell Eight has delivered an enchanting fairy tale in The Oracle series, an imaginative and wholly captivating universe.  The Oracle’s Golem is a prequel (in a manner) to The Oracle’s Flame (The Oracle #1)  and The Oracle’s Hatchling (The Oracle #2) as the events that take place in this tale start off in the years preceding those stories.  In fact, Golem is the prime figure in the main drama of The Oracle’s Hatchling, something that the reader will easily recognize early on.

Every part of Mell Eight’s enchanting universe is fascinating and fully developed to include rich details and layers of mythology.  Four castes of Elementals, and which caste you belong to is decided at a ritual testing ruled over by the Oracle.  Where a person falls within the  Caste they are ordained for is revealed by a  tattoo or pattern that appears on their back, much like a tattoo.  Only these tattoos change and come to life.  At the pinnacle of each Caste is a Dragon, whether it be the Dragon of Fire (first story), the Dragon of Ether (second story), the Dragon of Water (still to come) and the Dragon of Earth which is featured here.  Then the levels (and people) drop in status and power and are given names accordingly.

Here is another brilliant element of this author’s universe, the names.  The name corresponds to a element of each person’s caste.  All Earth caste members have names that come from the Earth.  Marl’s name (he is a lowly caste member)  describes the clay and calcium deposits that fertilize soil.  Lichen?  That’s a composite of a number of organisms and has many uses so, yes, high on the scale.  I love how inventive this author is when it comes to naming the characters.  And then there is those fascinating patterns that appear on the back proclaiming each person’s gift and future.  Poor Marl…only a field of brown dirt and a seed, a pattern that makes all the others looks down on him with distain or ignore him all together.  If you find yourself a tad gleeful with anticipation when pondering that design, then this is the book for you.    There are so many layers of meaning to be uncovered and appreciated here.  This is a fairy tale universe for all who love champions, worlds in peril, and unexpected heroes.

Mell Eight’s narrative will draw you in completely into this world and Golem’s pain.  You can almost feel the weight of the earth on top of him as he sits, so a part of the mountain that his appearance is that of stone and soil, just another boulder for a lonely, bored child would use to climb and sit on when escaping his lessons.   Which is exactly how Lichen finds him.   We move from past to present and back again easily, sliding through the years and memories of the characters.

I really have only two issues with this story.  One, it felt that the ending came a little too quickly, and secondly, that rushed feeling made it feel a tad incomplete.  I could have wished for a chapter wherein it seemed like only pages, a slight flaw in my opinion.  But the world and stories Mell Eight has created for The Oracle series is far too rich and complex to let such a small issue pull it down.

You could read these stories out of order but you might find yourself saying things like “pirates? where did the pirates come from?”.  That won’t happen if you read them in the order the author has written and released them.  I love this series and eagerly await the next installment.  Pick them all up today, including The Oracle’s Golem.  It’s the perfect present to give yourself for the holidays.

Cover artist London Burden does a great job of branding this series with the stylized dragons on the covers.  Love it.

Sales Links:   Less Than Three Press  (preorder now)            All Romance (ARe)      links to come      amazon             buy it here

Book Details:

ebook
Expected publication: January 21st 2015 by Less Than Three Press
original titleThe Oracle’s Golem
ISBN139781620045152
edition languageEnglish
seriesThe Oracle #3

Book in The Oracle series:

A MelanieM Review: Otter Madness by Winnie Jerome

Rating: 3 stars out of 5:

All I Want For Christmas Otter MaddnessOtter shifter Bryon is not happy.  His terrible boss wants him to work on Christmas and his mage boyfriend has been distant and uncommunicative lately.  What is an wereotter to do?  Get in trouble, that’s what.  When Byron goes snooping around his boyfriend’s workshop, he accidentally unleashes a second Bryon.  Now with two Bryons on the loose, can his boyfriend Lucas handle two mischievous, highly-sexed shifters just in time for Christmas?

Uh…wow.  Otter Madness is a perfect title for this wild concoction of a holiday story.  It contains nothing less than two wereotters ( should I say one were otter and one wereotter doppleganger), a homophobic boss, a mage boyfriend who is also a Dom, and quite a bit of bdsm toys and kinky sex scenes.  Mix that all together in 27 pages and you end up with a wild mess of a Christmas tale with some very funny elements, some sexy kinky bits and some things that are just so discordant that the story goes awry.

For me the best scenes in this story are the ones with Bryon in his otter form.  Jerome manages to convey the playfulness, the joy, and willy-nilly scatteredness of an otter in motion during these scenes.  But for every scene that reveals just how great it must be to be an otter rolling about in the towels, Jerome then gives us something to shudder at. A homophobic boss who is so unpleasant (calling Bryon and his boyfriend the “f” word and more) that you wonder why Bryon still wants to be employed there. . It’s just such an ugly segment, ok that whole restaurant segment is awful, that I can’t begin to understand why it was included.

Then there is the Bryon on Bryon sex, the D/s relationship between Bryon (and eventually Bryon) and Lucas, that  D/s relationship that never quite works because you don’t get enough of the personalities behind it to make it viable.  Otters are smart, playful, inventive, and high energy.  Submissive?  What is it about Bryon that makes that a part of his emotional makeup?  We haven’t a clue, especially when the second Bryon shows up and doesn’t quite seem to have the same personality even though they are supposed to be identical.  The story just continues on its messy way, dilly dallying over the kinky sex through a story that never quite comes to an end.

A wereotter is a terrible shifter to waste.  The mere creation of such a wonderful shifter elevated this story to a 3 star rating.  It’s antics, in his human form, kept it there.  It’s the holidays.  If any of the above appeal to you, then this is the story for you.  Other than that, treat it as the otter madness it is.

Torquere Holiday Sip generic cover is used, the artist is not given credit in this release.

Sales: Torquere Books        All Romance        amazon             buy it here

Book Details:

ebook, 27 pages
Published December 11th 2013 by Torquere Press (first published December 10th 2013)

Barb, A Zany Old Lady Review:The Merchant of Death (Playing the Fool #2) by Lisa Henry & J.A. Rock

Rating: 5 stars out of 5

The merchant of Death coverA continuation of the story started in “Two Gentlemen from Altona”, this story is even better. There’s more humor, more angst, more drama, more complexity in the connections between Henry and Mac and most importantly, more romance.

The story opens with Henry reuniting with his twin sister, Viola, a young woman who suffered brain damage in her teens when she attempted to remove a violent man from Henry’s bed, thinking he was hurting Henry. When he flung her against a wall, she struck her head and nearly died. She didn’t understand what had been happening, but Henry did. He was allowing his mother’s boyfriend to have sex with him for the money the man promised his mother. Because he failed to keep quiet and that caused Viola to investigate, Henry blames himself for her injury. Now with a reduced mental capacity and the inability to care for herself, she’s been confined to a “care home” ever since, at a cost of over $5,000 a month— a cost paid by Henry through whatever means he can find. When Mac ultimately learns a bit more of this story, his attraction to Henry and his admiration of Henry’s inner strength grow exponentially.

Viola claims that a “bad angel” has killed her good friend Mr. Crowley at the home and begs Henry to find the angel and send it away. When Henry investigates, dressed as Viola, It satisfies not only his need to have a viable disguise to get into the facility, but his own inner desire to dress as a female. He finds evidence to suggest that the director and a volunteer have been conspiring to get some patients’ wills changed to their benefit and that Mr. Crowley may have been a victim of this death benefit scam.

In the meantime, Mac has been missing Henry, wondering where he could have gone after Mac had been shot, and he sets out to find him. After all, Henry is his missing witness in the arrest of a known gangster. Mac has also been under pressure by investigators into the brutal force supposedly used when that gangster and others in the past have been arrested by Mac. In addition, there are rumors that Mac may be a drug user and he may be implicated in the recent death of a police informant. He’s happy to take sick leave and just go to find Henry. When he tracks Henry’s sister, Viola, to the care home, imagine his surprise to find that it’s Henry, not Viola, who is in residence there. And when Henry explains his reasons for being there, Mac doesn’t know whether to kiss him or kill him for getting involved in another crazy scheme.

Mac is determined to get behind the façade of Henry Page to the real man, Sebastian Hanes, within. We see glimpses every once in a while, and Henry himself is now struggling to keep Sebastian contained. He’s never put his trust in anyone other than Viola, but he senses that Ryan “Mac” McGuiness is so very different from anyone else that Mac will protect his fragile inner child and keep him safe amid the shitstorm his life has become.

From this point on, Henry gets in deeper trouble at the care home, Mac gets in deeper trouble at work, and neither is aware that there are common threads between them in the form of certain people who have been negative influences in both their lives.

I love the way the authors are taking their time with this romance and the dynamic between Henry and Mac is outstanding. At times humorous, or poignantly romantic, their dynamic is often irritating or filled with sexual tension. And when the two finally do get together, with Henry in the guise of a female, it’s over-the-top, explosively hot. The storyline and subplots are complex and so intricately woven that I’m looking forward to the conclusion of the series so that I can view the finished product as a whole. I suspect that this is going to become one of my all-time favorite series.

Of course, this book does not end on a final conclusive note, but the promise of the next installment is much clearer in this book than in the last and I liked the way the authors left this couple. I’m definitely going to be first in line for the next book.

Cover Art by L.C. Chase depicts a partially full syringe indicating either the drug addiction of Henry’s good friend, Remy, or something far more nefarious. It’s cute and fits with the cover of the previous story.

Sales Links:  available for pre-order at Riptide Publishing now     Other links to follow

Book Details:

ebook, 205 pages
Expected publication: February 2nd 2015 by Riptide Publishing
ISBN139781626492219
edition languageEnglish
url http://www.riptidepublishing.com/titles/merchant-of-death
seriesPlaying the Fool #2

A Special Treat! Journey Into the Past with Amy Lane and The Bells of Times Square (Book Tour and Contest)

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What a feast for readers we have today!  Amy Lane is here with a special blog post on “Dirty Tricks”, an essay about WWII, her grandmother, and special memories.  It all ties into the start of the book tour for one of Scattered Thoughts and Rogue Words Best Novels of the Year, The Bells of Times Square by Amy Lane. 

I have linked our review above, but you won’t need that to want to pick this up.  Just listen to Amy Lane’s thoughts below, read the story blurb, and don’t forget to enter the contest !

The Bells of Times Square by Amy Lane
Publisher:  Riptide Publishing

Hi, and welcome to the blog tour for The Bells of Times Square!  This book is close to my heart– if you read the extra front and back matter in the story, you will see that I drew inspiration from my grandparents and their roles in WWII.  There was a lot of research involved here and also an unusual romance.  I hope you enjoy this stop on the tour, and don’t forget to enter the Rafflecopter below for the giveaway of two ebooks from my backlist and a signed copy of The Bells of Times Square!  Feel free to comment, or to contact me at any of my links below–I’d love to hear from you!

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Blurb
Every New Year’s Eve since 1946, Nate Meyer has ventured alone to Times Square to listen for the ghostly church bells he and his long-lost wartime lover vowed to hear together. This year, however, his grandson Blaine is pushing Nate through the Manhattan streets, revealing his secrets to his silent, stroke-stricken grandfather.

When Blaine introduces his boyfriend to his beloved grandfather, he has no idea that Nate holds a similar secret. As they endure the chilly death of the old year, Nate is drawn back in memory to a much earlier time . . . and to Walter.

Long before, in a peace carefully crafted in the heart of wartime tumult, Nate and Walter forged a loving home in the midst of violence and chaos. But nothing in war is permanent, and now all Nate has is memories of a man his family never knew existed. And a hope that he’ll finally hear the church bells that will unite everybody—including the lovers who hid the best and most sacred parts of their hearts.

About Amy Lane

Amy Lane exists happily with her noisy family in a crumbling suburban crapmansion, and equally happily with the surprisingly demanding voices who live in her head.

She loves cats, movies, yarn, pretty colors, pretty men, shiny things, and Twu Wuv, and despises house cleaning, low fat granola bars, and vainglorious prickweenies.

She can be found at her computer, dodging housework, or simultaneously reading, watching television, and knitting, because she likes to freak people out by proving it can be done.

Connect with Amy:

Contest: Enter to win using  the Rafflecopter link below for the giveaway of a $10 Riptide Gift card and a signed copy of The Bells of Times Square!

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The Bells of Times Square Blog Tour-Stop 1

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Dirty Tricks By Amy Lane

My Grandma Olga’s work with the O.S.S. became declassified about a year before she passed away. Before that, we knew she worked in what she called “the office of dirty tricks” but she wasn’t able to tell us exactly what she did. After the declassification, well, her stories were pretty wild.

“So, we would radio ideas to the people in England, the and they would get message to the people in the POW camps to do play dirty tricks on the officers there. They would try to schedule it when there was action going down, so the officers would be taken unaware?”

“Yeah?” I asked, sort of dubious. I mean, I’d grown up on old TV. Hogan’s Heroes was my favorite. She’d already had me believing that the scene from The Godfather—the one where her father the restaurant owner paid off the crooked Irish cop with wine during prohibition—had actually happened to her. (She only succeeded because I’d never seen The Godfather. By the way, my aunts and uncle thought it was high hilarity that I took this story on face value.) Was I supposed to believe this too?

“It wasn’t as glamorous as it looked on TV,” she assured me soberly. “Nine out of ten of those boys we sent on missions, they didn’t come back.”

Wow. That wasn’t a statistic that got thrown around on Hogan’s Heroes. “Really?” I asked, humbled by that much courage.

“Oh no. But they got in line. They begged their contact for more ideas. I mean…” her voice faltered. “We felt bad, sending those boys to their deaths. But they wanted to do it. They wanted to fight. They were fighting for a righteous cause.”

“Yeah,” I said, because that much could not be doubted. “So, what’d you have them do?”

“Well, you know. Dirty tricks. They’d give food poisoning to the officers, and then, in the middle of the night, move all of the toilets six inches backwards. The portable ones.”

I held my hand to my mouth, horrified. “Oh my God!”

“Oh yes, that was a favorite!”

“What else did you do?”

“I think we had them dose the farm animals, so the roosters would stay up all night. It was silly, really, but they kept the officers up all night before a raid, so they were sluggish and sleepy the next morning. You know, disoriented.”

“Oh my God!” Because no sixth grader had ever planned a campaign better. “That’s brilliant!”

She’d nodded then, a frail little old woman with an impish smile. As she got older, and needed to be hospitalized frequently, it became harder and harder to spot her as I walked through the care home corridors. She was so tiny in bed. She didn’t seem that tiny in real life. In my mind.

“Oh it was,” she said, eager to share her secrets. Suddenly she became sober. “You know, when I was young—and really, until a couple of years ago, I was so excited about it. So proud. But in later years…” She looked unhappy. “I mean, it was easy to hate the Nazis, because they were the enemy. And because they were doing horrible things. But they were soldiers. Our soldiers did what we told them, and their soldiers did what they were told. I mean, in the end, they were their mother’s sons, same as ours, weren’t they?”

I’ve tried to explain this to people—this moment to people. They are as titillated as I was about her details of her time in the OSS, and sometimes, as dubious as I was about how much was true. But so far, I don’t know how many people hear that statement right there and think what I do:

It was this moment of realization that made my grandmother a great woman. She had no reason to think well of the Nazis. She had no reason to think of them as human beings. Part of the dirty tricks she played was to minister propaganda, the essence of dehumanizing people.

But she came to this conclusion on her own, after raising children, after watching her country become involved in unjust wars, after becoming more and more liberal in her political beliefs (which were pretty liberal to begin with) as her compassion became greater and greater, and not smaller and more miserly as sometimes happens as people age.

She was brave, smart, funny, resourceful and gutsy.

And she saw that the enemy too, was beloved of foreign mothers. I think that’s an incredible thing. I think that’s an incredible truth.

It’s a truth I’d lay down my life for, right there. It’s one of the things that makes me my grandmother’s granddaughter. It’s a reason to be proud.

 

A Visit with Author Owen Keehnen (giveaway)

Dog trainer coverThunder Snow coverYoung Digby Swank cover

Springtime 1962 cover

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Owen Keehnen has stopped by today to talk about his year of writing, M/M Romance, and much, much more. Owen will be giving away one of the 4 m/m romances e book – The Dog Trainer, Springtime 1962, Thunder Snow, and December 1903, the winner’s choice.  To enter to win, leave a comment along with an email address where you can be reached if chosen.  Must be 18 years of age or older to enter.

A Year of M/M Romance  By Owen Keehnen

One of my favorite things about being a writer is the creative adventure that it can be. Almost a year ago I ventured into the M/M romance world after having paired with a new publisher, Wilde City Press. Prior to this I had published a number of things – several books on LGBT history, a horror novel, a gay art novel, a book of LGBT interviews, and even a four volume set of interviews with gay porn stars.

When I first began working with Wilde City, I did a humorous gay coming of age novel called Young Digby Swank and followed it with The LGBT Book of Days, a comprehensive guide to the most important dates in LGBT history. On the heels of those two I wrote three hardcore erotic e-books under the name of Ewan Creed. In other words, my oeuvre was all over the place.

Around that time I decided to try my hand at writing M/M romance. When I asked for some pointers I was told about the importance of the partners winning the affections of their beloved and warned to avoid all signs of infidelity. I was also told the sex could be as raunchy as I wanted. I liked that last suggestion. With that advice in mind I hit the ground running.

I was also hopeful that this world of M/M romances would be a new means to implement one of my key interests – the reclaiming of our LGBT past. Maybe it was living through the darkest years of the AIDS epidemic that made me so keenly aware of the fragile nature of personal history, or maybe it was knowing that the lives of LGBT people had been edited from the annals of history. Whatever the reason a creative and personal theme of mine has been a desire to celebrate and reclaim a bit of our gay history. To that end I’d already written several bios on LGBT history and had also been a board member and was actively involved with The Legacy Project, a history-education-arts organization focused on pride, acceptance, and the recognition of LGBT lives and contributions throughout history. The possibilities of pairing history with M/M romance were endless.

Before I started incorporating an history into this new genre, I decided that I needed to understand the terrain of M/M romance a bit better. I lost my M/M virginity with an ebook called The Dog Trainer. Who doesn’t love a good dog story? Especially one that involves M/M romance. Richard, my protagonist, was a character I understood. Richard is a neurotic gay urbanite, a serial monogamist with a domineering peer group and a well-paying dead end job. When Richard finds a puppy named Hambone, his life and relationships begin to change and his priorities make a notable shift. Even bigger things happen when he meets and hires a dog trainer named Abe who teaches both Richard and Hambone a few new tricks. This one is a feel good story, relatively simple and very sweet, with some feel good sex thrown in for good measure.

With my next effort, Springtime 1962, I began to inject history into my M/M work. This ebook is set in the landmark of pre-Stonewall gay activity, The Lawson YMCA. I’d wanted to write a history about the gay doings at the Lawson for years, but stumbled along the way. So much of the underground history of the place was undocumented and so many potentially illuminating first hand accounts of life in those hallowed halls have vanished due to age and HIV. Instead, I opted to populate the Lawson with fictional characters and turn history into an M/M romance.

The premise of Springtime 1962 is relatively simple. A diary is found in a used bookstore and the present-day narrator quickly finds himself drawn into the intimate 1962 diary of a man named Joseph. The daily entries soon reveal a passionate gay love story of two retail workers in Chicago during the Kennedy years. Joseph is a middle aged department store employee. One day a young man named Clint is hired at the store. The men soon realize they are both living at the Lawson. They began spending time together, going to movies, exercising in the weight room, taking lunches together at work, etc. Love blossoms despite their age difference. In time Joseph discovers that Clint’s harbors a grave secret which will eventually threaten their relationship as well as their futures. This one screams for a sequel. I’m currently working on the further adventures of Joseph and Clint in Summertime 1962. The diary format offers a great opportunity to capture the lives and struggles of gay men at the time from bar raids to hook ups and even popular culture iconography.

My next M/M e-story was Thunder Snow, a homage to early 1980s academia, something else I had wanted to write about for some time. Romance was again my framework to explore the struggles and circumstances man gay men faced during this pre HIV period of time when Stonewall had already occurred, but the benefits of the gay liberation movement had not yet spread much beyond the major metropolitan areas.

Thunder Snow is the story of Jim Franklin who goes away to Windsor College hoping to leave his formerly closeted gay doings behind. He’s had enough of being an outsider and wants nothing more than to be like everyone else. To that end Jim has joined a fraternity and is dating a girl. Then, without warning, love blindsides Jim when he meets Glenn in his Romantic Literature class. Glenn is the kept lover of a wealthy town resident. When Jim asks for assistance with an assignment, Glenn agrees. Sparks soon ignite and passion ensues, but social constraints and Jim’s fear of being true to his nature prevent any sort of relationship from developing. Things change magically over winter break and what begins as another tryst quickly develops into something more. Both men fall madly in love. But is love, in the otherworldly setting of a college campus during break, enough to sustain the couple in the long run? In Thunder Snow I really wanted to capture the magical early stages of love and explore what happens when that idealism comes into contact with everyday reality, and eventually how we process that sort of conflict in our personal histories.

For my next M/M romance, I focussed on a specific historical event as a backdrop to the story. December 1903, the Iroquois, a Love Story is set in Chicago during the 1903 holiday season. The Iroquois Theater fire was a topic I’d obsessed about and wanted to explore for a long time. I was hoping to make the tragic story of the theater fire which killed hundreds history more vivid by planting two of my characters in proximity to the disaster.

December 1903 is the tale of two men from different worlds. Frankie is an actor working in the current Iroquois Theater production Mr. Bluebeard. One day Frankie makes knowing eye contact with a handsome and dapper stranger on the street. In only a few moments Frankie and “Otto” head off to Frankie’s boarding house. Though Frankie knows nothing about Otto’s life outside of the room, the two meet again the next night, and the next. As the winter wind howls outside the boardinghouse window, the couple make plans to run away and start a new life elsewhere. Frankie buys Otto a ticket to the the show and the men agree to meet behind the theater after the matinee to begin their life together. During that afternoon’s performance tragedy strikes and the deadly inferno consumes the theatre. With this ebook I really wanted to go epic and tell a very passionate story about these two men and evoke not only the era but also bring the devastating facts of this horrible and all but forgotten tragedy to light.

My soon to be published ebook, The Matinee Idol, is another historical venture. Set in 1933, The Matinee Idol is an M/M romance which takes place in Hollywood during the Depression. Raymond Richmond was a popular actor during the silent era of films and his popularity extended briefly into talkies. However, his sexual indiscretions and drunkenness soon get him fired from the studio. His drinking continues to escalate as his career sinks. Bad investments and spend thrift ways soon cause Raymond to find himself penniless. To make ends meet, he begins working as a hustler for a madame. One night Raymond is hired as a birthday present to set designer Carlton Finn who worked with Raymond back in his heyday at the studio. The two bond. Finn has always had a soft spot for the star and his heart goes out to the down and out man. Soon the two become lovers. In the following weeks, Raymond stops hustling and works at getting sober and getting his career back on track. As a big movie fan, especially from the golden era, I had a blast recreating Hollywood during that mythical time. On a deeper level it was also interesting to explore the ramifications of stardom and what a person is willing to endure and compromise for the sake of their image.

I’ve been on this M/M romance trip now for a year now and understand only some of the things I want to say about relationships and love. Every story seems to reveal something new about love and relationships that I hadn’t really considered or explored before. The entire process is an evolution. In that way, those original guidelines were helpful, but it has become increasingly apparent to me that I need to write the story that is inside me and often the story’s narrative strays from the prescribed guidelines. The sex can be a bit raunchier than the norm and often my characters are not 20 year olds with chiseled physiques and perfect features. In fact, sometimes my characters are middle aged and paunchy. I’ve even done the unspeakable and had characters who are not strictly monogamous.

At first bending these rules caused some concern, but then I remembered that my primary focus should not be worrying how my story is going to be received. To write a decent story my primarily responsibility must be to my characters and allowing them to reveal some truth about romance, love, and sex between two men. Adhering to that means that sometimes my romances don’t have happy endings, but love isn’t always nice and love isn’t always easy. Sometimes love is riddled with complications and even regret. The only given about love is that, if we’re lucky enough to find it, for however long we have it, that there is nothing on this earth that makes us feel more wonderfully and magically alive. And as a writer of M/M romance my priority needs to be on capturing and reflecting that incredible state in all its many forms and stages.

Meet Author Owen KeehnenOwen3

Bio:

Owen Keehnen is the author of the novels Young Digby Swank, The Sand Bar, Doorway Unto Darkness, and the ebook M/M romances, The Dog Trainer, Springtime 1962, The Lawson YMCA, Thunder Snow, December 1903, The Iroquois, a Love Story, and the upcoming The Matinee Idol. Along with Tracy Baim he has co-authored three LGBT biographies – Leatherman: The Legend of Chuck Renslow, Jim Flint: The Boy From Peoria, and Vernita Gray: From Woodstock to The White House. Keehnen also authored The LGBT Book of Days, a comprehensive guide to key dates in LGBT history. Over 100 of his interviews with various LGBT authors and activists from the 1990s have been collected in the book We’re Here, We’re Queer. He co-edited Nothing Personal: Chronicles of Chicago’s LGBTQ Community 1977–1997, was a contributor to Gay Press, Gay Power, and wrote the foreword and helped edit Mark Abramson’s memoir For My Brothers. Keehnen also contributed several biographical essays to the coffee table history book Out and Proud in Chicago.

Keehnen was on the founding committee and executive board of The Legacy Project and is currently a contributing biographer for the LGBT history-education-arts program focused on pride, acceptance, and bringing proper recognition to contributions of LGBT people throughout history. His essays, short stories, poetry and erotica have appeared in dozens of periodicals and anthologies worldwide. He was the author of the Starz books, a four-volume series of interviews with gay porn stars. He has had two queer monologues adapted for the stage and served as co-editor of the Windy City Times Pride Literary Supplement for several years, and was a co-founder of the horror film website RacksAndRazors.com. He lives in Chicago with his partner, Carl, and his two ridiculously spoiled dogs, Flannery and Fitzgerald. He was inducted into the Chicago Gay and Lesbian Hall of Fame in 2012.

-Author Contacts-

You can contact Owen Keehnen at: