Category Archives: Personal

Gateway to Romance, M/M, and #RomBkLove

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I’m in a bit of a writing slump. It happens. Sometimes ideas have to marinate for a while before they’re ready. But I don’t want to get out of the habit or making my word count for the day so when I stumbled on Ana Coqui‘s #RomBkLove Challenge and thought it might work to keep me on track. I doubt I’ll participate every day, but I’m aiming for 3 per week.

Day 1 – Gateway Romance

Family lore says I was born knowing how to read. No one ever taught me, I just knew. According to my parents, one day at three years old I was sitting on the family room floor “reading” a book out loud. It was one of my favorites called The Littlest Ballerina (the book and author have been lost to time) and my mother assumed I’d memorized the book, but every few sentences I’d get up and show my mother the book and ask “What’s this word?” The word was always “ballerina” which unsurprisingly comes up a lot in a book entitled The Littlest Ballerina.  After a bit, she realized that I wasn’t parroting what I’d memorized, I was actually reading the book. She asked me to read from a couple other books and then a few sentences from Better Homes & Gardens… and I read them all. She asked me how I learned to do that and I just shrugged. I was three.

By t9786515he time I was nine, I was reading far, far, far above my grade level and the town librarian didn’t quite know what to do with me. One day she handed me Sue Barton, Student Nurse which is the first of seven in the series and by the end, our fearless heroine is married to the handsome doctor and has four children. The book didn’t challenge me at all but should have had “Welcome to Romancelandia!” tattooed on the cover.

Before I hit eleven, I was completely out of the kiddie section and the librarian was even more flummoxed about what I should be reading. For whatever reason, she thought the nurse/teacher/secretary romances of the 1960s were as close to appropriate the adult fiction section got for a pre-teen and I loved them. I read them literally by the dozen, well the library technically only let me check out 10 books a week, but you know what I Flowers in the Attic (Dollanganger, #1)mean.

The next summer, there was a new sheriff, I mean librarian, in town who took a different position. This new librarian took a dim view of romance and told me flat out I shouldn’t be reading all that “inappropriate drivel”. She went as far as to refuse to allow me to check them out on her watch. Luckily, the other staff didn’t police my reading quite as much. That same year came the VC Andrews classic, Flowers in the Attic was smuggled to me by a friend via her older sister. The book was actually completely inappropriate for a twelve-year-old, but it set me on the path to more contemporary and explicit romances than I was allowed at the library.

This is where we enter the era of Annie’s Book Swap. I rode my bike all over the place scouring yard sales and library book sale tables for books that would cost me pennies on the dollar and I’d generally make money (ie book credit) recycling them at Annie’s Book Swap for the romances I really wanted. What can I say? I was an entrepreneurial kid. Annie’s introduced me to Joanna Lindsey, Jude Devereaux, Kathleen Woodwiss, Catherine Coulter… and so many more.

My journey to M/M romance came much later and was the same as it is for a lot of people. For anyone who stumbled in here accidentally, M/M is shorthand for romances featuring two men. I voraciously read zillions of romance novels for a long time and then in the early d2536103ays of my first Kindle, I discovered a couple free M/F/M (ie 2 men and a woman with no interplay between the men) menage romances from Samhain and went searching for more which quickly led to M/M/F (ie with interplay between the men) romances and finally M/M.  Honestly, I can’t remember what the first M/M romance I read was. I binged for like a month, spending a lot of money I could ill afford at the time. The first I do remember specifically was Caught Running by Madeline Urban & Abigail Roux, which is a good read, but when folks ask me where to start with M/M romance, I have a few hip-pocket recommendations. In no particular order:

There are others I recommend if someone’s looking for something particular, but that’s my intro to M/M romance list.

And now I’ve written one of my own, Where I Belong will be out May 27th from JMS Books.

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Available for pre-order at HERE at JMS-Books and HERE at Amazon and will be available for FREE from Kindle Unlimited.

Being me and writing M/M Romance

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So as you know, Where I Belong is coming out May 27th from JMS Books, LLC.  (Please forgive the shameless self-promotion) And I’ve run into this weird emotional eddy of how I integrate my writing life as Jae Moran and my “real” life. I’m kinda hoping that writing about it will help me resolve my conflicting feelings, so bear with me.

First, we have to take a short detour into backstory-ville or TMI about your erstwhile author. I’m a bisexual woman and have been in a committed same-sex relationship for almost my entire adult life. My immediate family does everything in their power to ignore both of those facts. Over the years, we have grown comfortable with the purple elephant in the room and they do, in fact, treat my partner, Sunshine Smartypants as she’s known here in the blog, well and with some affection. This is all aided by the fact that they live 3000 miles away and we only see each other once a year or so.

I think they would be more directly accepting if I was actually lesbian and not bi. My mother, in particular, can’t wrap her head around bisexuality as a concept. In the past, she has gazed upon the giant purple elephant and wondered aloud why someone who could have an opposite-sex partner would choose to take what she perceives to be a harder road. Because we generally only have a week together, it’s easier on everyone if I roll my eyes and walk away. For the most part, she accepts Sunshine as part of the family and that’s enough reason not to rock that particular boat.

What does this have to do with my book coming out? I’m proud of Where I Belong and I am gobsmacked that it’s actually going to be published, but I haven’t really told many people in my “real” life. I’ve told a few of our friends and Sunshine has told some her family, much to my dismay. More on that in a minute. But, I haven’t snoopy danced all over Facebook the way I’d like. As I have built this infrastructure around Jae Moran, my social media life has become bifurcated. Facebook is where I keep my “real” life and Twitter is home to Jae Moran. Don’t worry, Jae is the real me, same as always, just maybe a bit less introverted.

Anyway, the more people who know about Where I Belong, the more likely it is that someone will accidentally out me on Facebook and I will have to explain to my family that little old bisexual me writes (relatively) sexually explicit M/M Romance… There is no way people who can’t wrap their head around my being bi will ever reconcile that without a tedious conversation I don’t want to have.

Now, back to Sunshine telling her family about the book. Most of the Smartypants family hear the word “romance”, tepidly congratulate me and move on. Yesterday Sunshine had lunch with her aunt and cousin and told them about the book. She’s proud of me and tells everyone who will listen then shows them the book trailer you guys haven’t seen yet (soon, I promise). Apparently, Sunshine’s aunt and cousin were so excited that they immediately whipped out their phones/tablets and pre-ordered. Sweet, right?  %sigh% The problem with those two is they will actually read it.

And for the record, it’s not the M/M part that vexes me–it’s the sexually explicit part. Having people I know reading the sexually explicit thoughts from inside my head freaks me out. I would feel the same way if I wrote M/F, F/F, or any other combination romance. For a while, I worried it was some latent LGBT-phobia that kept me in the M/M closet, but it’s not. I don’t know if it’s some internal slut shaming or just because I’m uncomfortable talking about sex, which I often am. I blush and stammer a lot. Although, I don’t seem to have any trouble writing about it and letting strangers read it, so buy the book.

Up until Where I Belong was headed for publication, my writing life and my “real” life existed in parallel and the only place they touched was through Sunshine and she’s the most supportive partner a girl could ask for. Suddenly both lives are bumping into one another all over the place making me anxious in a way I don’t quite know how to process. I know that some of this is bleed over from my unsettled feelings about the book actually being published. I’ve been living on the knife-edge between excitement and terror for a while now, and other authors tell me this near panic is perfectly normal, but it doesn’t feel that way yet.

One day soon, I’ll navigate my way through this uncomfortable personal growth and be able to just be open about who I am and what I write, but not quite yet. For now, Sunshine Smartypants is the only one who sees all of me and I can live with that. For now.