Story Time

(Came up empty for a topic today, so I rooted through my WIPs and found a snippet. This is M/M, but in a genre new to me: contemporary. No shapeshifters, no vampires, nothing (ahem) supernatural. Just two guys dating. Maybe that's why it stalled on me. I think I may have a few ideas to get it going again. We'll see what the future brings. In the meantime, here's the opening.)

Ryan Barnes was sitting in his favorite coffee bar with a French vanilla and a chocolate cake donut when the man of his dreams walked in. He froze with the donut halfway to his mouth and watched the man stroll from the door to the counter. His walk showcased a trim build and khaki slacks wrapped around the proverbial ass to die for. The man reached the counter and murmured to the barista. Ryan couldn't see his face, but he pictured a smile that could launch a thousand hard-ons without breaking a sweat.

Starting with the one in Ryan's pants.

The man raised his voice slightly. He had a pleasant tenor. That voice screaming Ryan's name in the throes of hot sex would sound like birdsong. Ryan set his donut down with a little worshipful groan.

"I have got to hit that," he told his cousin Jordan, seated across the table from him. "Like, right this minute."

"Forget it." Jordy sipped his own mint-mocha with a blasé disregard for the dream come true at the counter. "He's not your type."

"Says who?"

"All the laws of nature. I've seen that guy around. He teaches at the community college. He reads books. Rumor has it he's writing one. The man has a brain, Ry. He's out of your league."

"I read. A lot of sex happens in the brain. I read that in a book once."

"You work with a band saw."

"I make furniture. That's practically an artist. An artist is practically up there with a teacher." All the while he continued to stare at the MOHD's fine khaki'd ass. Teacher or not, the guy must work out. Had there been any hint of a belly under his pullover sweater? Ryan hadn't noticed one. He hadn't noticed any flaws at all.

He couldn't hear precisely what was said, but when the barista put two chocolate cake donuts into a bag he knew Fate had arranged this. The MOHD could drink crappy English tea and read depressing Russian novels and it wouldn't make a difference. The chocolate cake donuts had spoken.

Ryan got to his feet. Jordy grabbed his arm. "Don't you dare."

"What? I need a refill." He tipped his cup. Coffee sloshed near the bottom. Ryan hastily chugged it. He winked at his cousin. "Wish me luck."

"No."

Ryan shook off Jordy's hand and sauntered up to the counter. The barista flicked a glance his way from over by the urns. The MOHD didn't even look around. Ryan took note of the coffee she was drawing for him. Basic black. No mocha, no latte, no frappe, no frills. Just straight up, bitter caffeine. Okay, he could work with that. The man ate chocolate cake donuts.

He clacked his mug on the counter to get the barista's, and the dream's, attention. "Can I get a refill here?"

"Just a minute, sir. Be right with you."

Ryan waved to let her know she could take her time. He turned his head to flash a smile at the man of his dreams. The MOHD was looking at him.

Ryan's smile, throat and brain dried to sawdust.

About a dozen years ago, right after he'd got out of high school and before he landed his first job at Craig's Custom Furniture, Ryan had taken his savings, graduation and birthday money, refurbished a van, and gone on a six-month tour of the States as a gift to himself. One of his unplanned stops had been at Crater Lake in Oregon. He remembered the deep, inviting blue of the water, so cool and pristine in its volcanic caldera. This man's eyes surpassed the lake in both hue and depth. Ryan was convinced if he moved so much as a toe he'd fall into them and drown.

Slowly the rest of Mr. Dream's features came into focus. Average height, three, maybe four inches shorter than Ryan's six-one. Dark hair, probably combed early on but now tousled by the wind outside. Skin that saw more fluorescents than sun, with a touch of stubble already reasserting itself after the morning's shave. Moist lips in a firm but almost pretty face. Those lips were frowning slightly. He blinked but didn't speak.

"Hey," Ryan said. It was all his tongue could manage.

"Here you go." The barista returned with the dream's coffee in a tall, lidded Styrofoam cup. The MOHD flashed a brief smile. Ryan's dick throbbed with wanting. The man thanked her, paid for his coffee and donuts and walked out of the shop, all without a word or another look at Ryan. The wind gave his hair another artful toss. He ducked his head against it, stepped beyond the view of the front windows and was gone.

Inside the shop, inside his brain, Ryan kicked himself in the balls.

The barista tugged his empty mug out of his hand, yanking Ryan's awareness back to the now-empty and colorless world around him. "Make it a black," he said on impulse. "What he had. The guy who was just here." He fumbled for his wallet, and an excuse. "Y'know, I swear I've seen him around before. Doesn't he teach at WACC?"

"Mr. St. James? Yeah, I think so. History. Or bio. Some science." She shrugged. Her interest in the customers stopped after they ordered. "You want another donut?"

"Maybe on the way out." Ryan paid and stumbled back to his table in a daze.

"Smooth," Jordy welcomed him back. "I should have taken notes."

"Screw you, stringbean. At least I know what I like. You can't even make up your mind. What are you on this week? Men or women?"

"I don't believe in limiting myself."

"Right. You date women who look like men and men who look like women. Why don't you just hook up with brother-sister twins? Make it easy on yourself."

"You didn't even get his name, did you?"

"I got a name. And you were right. He teaches at the college." Ryan took a gulp of coffee and almost spit it out. Strong. This was good. This was a good thing. A man who drank this on a regular basis wouldn't hesitate to swallow anything waved at his mouth.

He took a more cautious sip. Jordy watched in silent amusement. "You're going to make a total idiot out of yourself, aren't you? Yet again."

"You want to find out what else a band saw's good for? Didn't think so." Ryan dumped sugar into the coffee until he could stand it. Yeah. That'd get a man's motor running. He flashed a cocky grin at his cousin. "I think it's time I went back to school."

The Perils of Genre Hopping

Now that Slayer for Hire’s safely in release, I can relax a bit on the promotion. I don’t like doing promo. I’m not into trolling for sales or the whole social media thing. I’d rather be writing, which is my second-favorite thing, or avoiding writing, which is my first-favorite thing. That explains why my career hasn’t taken off like a rocket.

So does this. Doing promo this time around was particularly difficult because in order to tell the story, I had to jump genres. Slayer is aimed at readers in their upper teens and beyond. There’s a little swearing, some violence and no sex. No problem there. The problems hit when I try to court readers, or direct potential buyers to my sites.

I’m on two blogs, this one and Shapeshifter Seductions. This one has a clear adult warning: nobody under 18. There goes a good chunk of Slayer’s target audience. The other site’s devoted to romantic shapeshifter flash fiction, which doesn’t apply to Slayer. Sometimes the flashfic gets racy. The kids might like that, but I doubt if their parents would.

It’s no better on my author sites. Let’s take a look at my pages on Amazon and BookStrand. I’ve got three mainstream shapeshifter romance novels, three erotic guy-on-guy books, and a M/M/F ménage that includes a woman having threeway sex with a man and a vampire, and sex between two guys. To this I’ve now added a book about a 19-year-old who learns how to kill vampires and has a sweet romance. I’m sure whatever readers I have left are scratching their heads by now.

That’s not counting the dozen or so SF and fantasy stories I wrote way back when that may still be floating around out there, or the story I had published in a recent anthology about serial killers. At least I had the sense to put a pen name on that one.

This, boys and girls, is called genre jumping. If you’re a writer, it’s one of the best ways you can go about shooting your career in the foot.

I hear a lot of talk about “branding” these days when it comes to writers and writing. Stephen King’s “brand” is horror. Sara Paretsky and Sue Grafton are “branded” as mystery writers. You want epic fantasy, head for the Tolkien shelf. Nicholas Sparks writes chick books. I’m not quite sure what James Patterson does because I’ve never read any of his stuff. Whatever it is, he’s selling tons of it. Like a fast-food franchise or hotel chain, people know what to expect from him, so he’s the one they go to when they’re in the mood for that.

What can my readers expect from me? Given my track record, chaos.

If you want to build a readership, you have to be consistent. You have to establish a brand. No flitting around from genre to genre, or even subgenre to subgenre. If you start out writing M/F contemporary and feel a hankering to write M/M or urban fantasy or M/M urban fantasy, put a pen name on it to differentiate. Otherwise the readers are liable to get confused. I was told this by a publisher, and it’s solid advice.

So how’d I do? Well, my backlist speaks for itself. My one “series” consists of a M/M, a M/M/F, and now a YA spinoff. The next book in the trilogy, if I ever complete it, is M/F. I can’t even stay consistent within a series.

I admit now I should have written the M/Ms under a different name. I thought if readers liked my writing they’d follow my name, not my subject matter. They followed Isaac Asimov, and he wrote in several genres (science fiction, mystery, nonfiction, whatever the hell he wanted to). Of course, he was Isaac Asimov and I’m not. I’ve since learned readers tend to specialize, with little crossover between genres or subgenres, even when they’re by the same writer. If we as writers want a healthy career, we have to specialize too.

Yeah. Good luck with that. With my series I’ve been following the characters, and this is where they led me. The characters called for a young-adult plotline, not erotica or even flat-out romance. This is the book I wanted to write and the way I wanted to write it. And now, as the saying goes, what do I do for an encore?

At the present time I have no idea what my next book will be. It might be another YA. It might be a romance. If it’s a romance, it could be either M/F or M/M, depending on whichever plot rises out of the muck. If it’s M/F, I’ll put a different byline on it, my nod to genre differentiation. Slayer came out under P. E. Cunningham, my SF/F name. I haven’t published in that genre for awhile, so there might be less confusion. Except the book I subbed to Harper Voyager’s open call was fantasy, and under that name. Oh crap.

Time for damage control. I’ll have to go back to an earlier plan, and use different names when I genre-hop. If that means I wind up with six different names and six different readerships, so be it. As long as I can earn gas and grocery money, I’m good. The hardest part will be the application of butt to chair so I can write the damn books, never mind what genre they are. And how is your life going?

Why Guy?

I didn’t deliberately set out to become a writer of M/M paranormal romance fiction. When the grade-school teachers asked us what we wanted to be when we grew up, I didn’t stand in front of the class and announce, “I want to write stories about two or more hawt men falling in love with each other, complete with explicit sex.” (Imagine if I had, though. I’d probably still be in detention.)

I ended up in this subgenre the way I ended up in a lot of my day jobs, and the same way I ended up as a romance writer in general: I just kind of fell into it. I always wanted to be a writer—that much was a deliberate choice—but I always thought I’d make my name in science fiction and fantasy. Somehow I drifted into romance, specifically paranormal romance. It was the same thing I’d been writing, just with hot bits.

Many people believe the whole M/M genre grew out of slash fan fiction, which began with Kirk/Spock back in the 1970s. Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Darkover series contains elements of M/M, F/F and ménage in a science fantasy setting. The leap from one genre to the other wasn’t that wide of a jump.

However, I started with traditional M/F, or as traditional as that gets with werewolves and vampires involved. My slide into same-sex debauchery began with a publisher’s call for novellas involving angels and/or demons. I came up with an idea of a demon and an angel competing for a human woman. Except, as the plot moved along, they became less interested in the woman and more and more drawn to each other. Oops. Oh well, what the hell. And that’s how Bad Boys came to be, and how I wrote my first M/M.

Not that I planned on making M/M my career choice. I’d had an idea, I had fun writing it, now we move on to the next. “The next” turned out to be Belonging. The inciting idea was basically “a brothel intended for vampires,” so the leads were a prostitute and the vampire customer she falls in love with. Yes, I did say “she.” That book started life as M/F. Then I discovered Supernatural. Jared and Jensen were just so pretty and had so much on-screen chemistry, they inspired me to give my hooker a sex change. The she became a he, the book became M/M, and I found myself writing in a whole new category.

And it ain’t over yet! I have a list of M/F stories I’d like to get to someday, but I also have a growing list of M/M plots, including an idea for a series. Those dang horny boys just won’t go away.

I think I’ve finally figured out why.

I like men. They’re cute. They’re fun. They can change overhead light bulbs without needing a ladder and open stubborn jars. They may not have much sense, but at least they’re trainable. Then there are the other obvious pluses, which I won’t go into here. We all have our own top-ten lists.

As a writer, it’s my duty to create a male lead a female reader would gladly take home to meet the parents. What do I like in a man? What turns me on? What draws me in? I take all my favorite physical, mental and emotional traits and pour them into one drop-dead-gorgeous man-package. Over and over, I create my ideal mate, my perfect man—

And turn him over to someone else. Some undeserving bitch.

There’s the one big drawback to being a writer of romance. The leads have to fall in love with each other and live happily ever after. Terrific for you two, but what about me? I’m not my heroines. They’re all younger and tougher and prettier and a whole lot thinner than I am. I keep coming up with variations on my perfect boyfriend, then have to watch him ride off into the sunset with another woman, the skanky tramp bimbo whore.

Ah, but then we’ve got M/M. I get to create two perfect men, and I get to keep them. Two drool-worthy, be-still-my-heart hunkalicious males, making out on the page with tender abandon and no rival women in sight. I get my paranormal fix, my romance fix, and my guy fix. Show me the downside to any of that.

I’m not alone in this mindset. There are M/M fans out there who won’t read a ménage if there’s a woman involved. A reviewer who read Legacy expressed initial trepidation because she hadn’t wanted to see a woman come between Wallace and Jeremy. I hadn’t either, but the idea hit and I ran with it. I guess it worked out. It gave me the chance to write about the Preacher, with his smoldering eyes and single-minded intensity. I’ll get to his story eventually. He ends up with another woman. I appear to be addicted to self-punishment.

As you can see, I’m not giving up on M/F entirely. I’m willing to concede some of my female leads are worthy of the men I give them. Fine, Amber/Ashley/Brittany, you can have Todd/Brent/Mitchell. I’m keeping Adam and Donner. They’re werewolves, they’re naked, they’re hungry for each other and they’re mine.

All of a sudden I’m in the mood to reread my favorite Spenser books by Robert B. Parker. Then I can picture Robert Urich and Avery Brooks solving crimes together. I’ll just skip the scenes with Spenser’s girlfriend Susan in them. Those two men … yummy yum yum.

Release Day: Temptation and Tights

Today Temptation and Tights officially goes on sale. I’m serious about the sale; it’s available at a 10% discount until Sunday, August 26. If the Avengers, Spider-Man, and Batman movies have whetted your appetite for superheroes and you’re a fan of M/M romantic comedy, you won’t want to miss out on this. You can check out the excerpts at www.bookstrand.com/temptation-and-tights, or enjoy the one below.

BLURB:
A lab accident turns Dr. Burke Templeton into supervillain Malaraptor. Superhero Icarius is determined to bring him to justice. They find themselves falling for each other instead, in spite of differing ethics and the whole teeth-and-tail thing. What’s a desperate, love-struck human dinosaur and a conflicted hero to do?

EXCERPT
“So you’re a mutant? Like Yeti?”
“Yeah, I guess. I was a skinny kid, a lot lighter than I looked. The wings never got all that big, so I could never get much altitude, but I’d get a couple yards off the ground, and I could maneuver. I could fly.”

Eyes on the city, Owen nevertheless sensed Burke’s stare roving over his artificial wings. “I take it your parents were less than thrilled,” Burke commented.

“They didn’t know. I didn’t tell them.” Owen sighed into the night. “There are a lot of things I never told them, or anyone. I knew I was gay years before I grew wings. Wings and gayness aren’t things a proper young socialite discloses to his upper-crust parents.”

He pressed a finger to Burke’s lips to forestall any response. “Here’s what happened. I grew. The wings didn’t. By the time I was fifteen I’d gotten too heavy for liftoff. They just became a nuisance. When I was nineteen, I had them removed.” He lifted his finger from Burke’s mouth. “But I never forgot.”

Silken lips and a brush of hair whispered over his cheek. The arms and legs locking their bodies together squeezed a little tighter, not in fear.

“Show me,” Burke whispered.

Owen dove, rose, swept across the sky like a hunting eagle. The twinkling lights of the city beneath them blurred into gleaming streaks. More than the thrill of open flight, he relished the heat and weight of the man in his arms. Anonymous gropes and grunts in an alley didn’t hold a candle to this.

Hold onto that. Concentrate on that. Focus on the man and forget the monster caged inside him, and the fact the lover he cradled in his embrace fought for the opposite team.

“What’s that?” Burke asked.

Owen broke off and only then realized he’d been humming under his breath. “Jesus, was I doing that out loud?”

“Pretty tune. It sounds somewhat familiar.”

Owen chuckled. “It’s that song from that movie. The flying scene. I’ve got it running through my head.”

Burke angled his hips to push up against Owen’s. “I can’t read your mind,” he said, “but I’ll bet I know what you’re thinking.”

# # #

While you’re there, check out my other books. I’ve got M/F shapeshifter, M/M (one with vampires!) and the M/M/F ménage that took me by surprise. Something for almost every taste.

Magical Cover Art ~ Bad Boys

Now, those are some SEXY Bad Boys!

Smiles, Savanna Kougar