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Author: Christie Gordon

New Home – Grand Opening and Contest!

***CONTEST***FREE EBOOK***CONTEST***FREE EBOOK***

 

Now that I have your attention*snicker*  Hi everyone and welcome to my new and hopefully better blog and website. I’ll be blogging here about the same things I did over at House of Manlove, namely Anime, Yoai, M/M Romance and JRock and I believe you can subscribe to my blog and get an RSS feed if you’re so inclined;) Of course, I’m still working on the bells and whistles of trying to make it easy to subscribe…

If any of you are wondering, yep, I did this all by myself! I do have an electrical engineering degree, so it wasn’t too much of a stretch to figure it all out. Anyhow, this new updated version has fun things like an Anime News Network Feed, information on what’s in the works for me writing wise and lots of excerpts;) I’m thinking about doing some sort of sign-up subscription thingy and then letting people sign up to see things not open to the general public – like the first three chapters of all my books, free reads, and maybe some naked Yaoi pics (I’ve always wanted to do this, but never had the time). So what do you think of that? Is there anything else you’d like to see on the site or in the blog? I’d love to make this a bit more interactive and maybe schedule some chats (I think I saw a chat plug-in somewhere).

As it says above, this is the “Grand Opening” and as such, I am giving away a free ebook of your choice (one of mine, of course) to one lucky person who leaves me a comment on this post. I’ll be drawing at random one week from today.

And by the way, what the heck happened to Yaoi Gallery? No more naked pics???

And, here’s a nice picture of some random and racy Yaoi art:)

My stupid comments are not working properly after I uploaded my old blog to this one 🙁 So just post your comments in the Guestbook for now until I fix it. Thanks!

Book Trailer for The Obsession!

Whew! Am I tired… It took three days and two nights of less than 6 hours of sleep for me to pull this together. But anyway, I’m happy with the results. I used Corel Painter to mess with pictures I pulled off of Dreamstime (love that site for royalty free photos), plus just my own drawings that I used on the book cover. I edited the frames and such using plain old Windows Movie Maker and made an excerpt of the live English version of the song Kurenai from X Japan (which I’m pretty sure is legal as long as it’s an excerpt and they are credited – I guess we’ll find out 0.0).

But enough of the technical crap…This is a dramatic, angst-ridden book that tells the story of how a young gay man was rediculed and how he coped and I wanted the trailer to portray that. I swear, in the beginning it almost made me cry as I put it together;) Maybe that’s because the young Tristan pic looks a lot like my own son. He even asked me if that was a picture of him! Doh! Or maybe it’s just because I really got close to this charcter as I wrote the book. That happens sometimes… Okay, so here goes:

Yaoi versus M/M Romance: What’s the difference? Is there a difference?

*Pic courtesy of Homotography

So before I begin this discussion, I suppose I need to define what constitutes “M/M Romance” and “Yaoi”. Of course, by setting a definition I may very well answer my original question;) But here goes:

M/M Romance: This is usually defined as women writing homoerotic romances for women. It usually comes in book form – short stories, novellas or novels. The covers of the books are made up of largely  half nude, buffed men. The covers are also done with photo-manipulation. They are usually like hetero romances in there are genre’s like historical, paranormal with werewolves and vampires, contemporary, fantasy, steampunk, whatever. The main characters are everything from cops to cowboys to wealthy business men to military men and all in-between.

Yaoi: This is also usually defined as women writing homoerotic romances for women. It most widely comes in manga or comic form, although there seems to be a trend outside of Asia to produce it in regular book form. Many of them are also made into anime. The genres pretty much run the gamut of paranormal, contemporary and fantasy, except that many of the main characters are high school or college students and many are what we’d consider “underage” in the USA. A very popular theme in Yaoi is the older man/underage man.

I suppose if you look at my definitions (they are by no means all encompassing or exactly right;) ), I think there are some clear differences. In my experience, M/M romance tends to try and stick to real issues involving gay relationships way more than Yaoi does. But since it’s written by and for women  (and yes, I understand many men read it, but it’s still written for a female audience. Football ads target young men and I still watch them and find them amusing – sheesh) there is an element of romantic emotion between the two men that isn’t quite realistic and you probably won’t find written in a real, bona fide Gay Romance novel (written by and for gay men).

I tend to think Yaoi takes this romantic emotion thing a bit further. Maybe the men don’t really act like real men – but dang, we’re surrounded by real men all the time, can’t we just have some made up men that act how we’d like them to act for once? But the trick here is not to make them so farfetched that they’re completely unbelievable. It’s all about what we want, right? I think I’m off on a bit of a tangent, LOL.

Of course, there is what I write, a mixture of Yaoi and M/M romance. I take the sort of characters and situations you’d find in a M/M romance and give it a bit more of that Yaoi romantic emotion. At least, that’s what I try to do:) There are others like me who write normal books (not manga) and have anime-style, hand-drawn covers. Maybe if some of you other authors come across my ramblings you can pipe in:)

Anyhow, in my very short analysis, I think I’ve determined that yes, there is a difference between Yaoi and M/M Romance. But I believe the lines between the two are being fudged into gray and morphed the more popular these genre’s get outside of Asia. And I also believe it’s great for us women (and men) who love both genres.

What do you prefer and what do you want to see more of?