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Tag: gay

On Writing M/M Romance by Jaime Samms

Christie Gordon 6 Comments

Yesterday, my mother-in-law asked me what my pen name was. Point blank. “What is your pen name?” How to answer that in a way that won’t lead her, a Christian Minister for most of her adult life, straight to the man-sex in my stories. With her looking me right in the eyes, I had no way out. I had to tell her. Or lie. And I’m not quite over the whole “you’re going to hell” thing enough to lie to a Minister. She commented that it was nicely gender neutral. Does she already know what I write? I don’t know. Nor do I know if she went home and promptly Googled me. I suppose some day, I might find out.

But it did get me thinking. Well. That and something a dear friend said to me in an email recently. And I quote:

“I get the distinct impression you are embarrassed.” (about what I write, is what he was referring to.)

So now I have to ask myself: Am I?

And if I am, why?

I bet I have a whole boatload of childhood psychological issues that point to why I’m convinced I’m not ‘good enough’, whatever passes for good enough, these days. Even though I can look at my writing, my parenting, my other creative endeavors and objectively see them as accomplished and successful, that little kid in me is still way too terrified to put herself out there and say “Look at me. See what I did. I tried hard and I did good.”

What does any of that have to do with the genre? Well, as I see it, writing gay romance has been a convenient shield. It has let me hide behind the genre and not claim my successes (and failures, I know, There have been a few of those too.) If I could point to the genre and convince people there are those in my life who would never accept it as an acceptable way to make a living, then I didn’t have to bother explaining how I really felt.

The only benefit to this that I can see is that I have, sometimes without realizing it, used those feelings in my writing, and nowhere is it more apparent than in “Fix This, Sir” in which my main character, Jimmy, has used any number of shields and crutches, including his own submissive tendencies, to hide from the real issues in his life. It isn’t until he meets his Dom, Cliff, and realizes that for once in his life, another person’s happiness matters more to him than his own pain, that he finally starts dealing.

So thanks to dear old mom-in-law and my good friend for pointing it out to me, I guess it’s time to stop hiding behind the genre myself, step up and be proud of what I do. It is, after all, a huge part of who I am.

Jimmy’s been hiding from his troubled past for a long time, in drugs, drink and dangerous sex. It’s always been easy to find oblivion in the restraints of men who don’t really care who he is or where he’s come from. When tragedy puts him in a wheelchair and forces him to fix his legs, and his life, he’s not so sure he has it in him to even try. Belligerence is the only weapon he has left.

Cliff is a physiotherapist with a big heart. And a dominant streak a mile wide. The instant Jimmy Phillips rolls into his clinic, he sees a submissive headed straight for self-destruction and every protective instinct kicks in. Ignoring the dangers of getting that intimately involved with a client, Cliff takes Jimmy under his wing and pries under the broken man’s guard. Getting behind the anger is a challenge the Dom in him just can’t ignore.

What he finds is so much more than he bargained for. Now that he’s reopened all of Jimmy’s old wounds, he’s not so sure he has what it takes to help his new submissive heal. All the control Cliff can muster can’t hold Jimmy’s crumbling world together, and now Cliff faces not just the loss of a sub, but his own fears that he was never worthy of Jimmy in the first place.

http://www.total-e-bound.com/product.asp?strParents=&CAT_ID=205&P_ID=1193

Jaime Samms website
livejournal
Face Book
Twitter: JaimeSamms

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To Slash or Not to Slash… by LM Brown

Christie Gordon 6 Comments
From Lamech77 at DeviantArt

For as long as there has been fanfiction there has been slash.  For those who are not familiar with fandoms and the terminology, slash is the term used for pairings of two characters of the same gender in a romantic and/or sexual relationship together.  They are not usually written as homosexual by the original author.

Whether it is Captain Kirk and Mr Spock, who are commonly believed to be the original slashed characters, or the more modern Edward and Jacob of the Twilight series, it seems that with the advent of the internet slash fanfiction is here to stay.

My fandom is the Harry Potter fandom and slash stories about the characters are amongst the most popular online.  I have written a number of them myself over the years and even though I have also written about characters in heterosexual relationships and stories that have no romance in them at all, it is the slash ones that retain their popularity after they have disappeared from the most recent updates pages of the archives at which they are stored.  Which tells me that these seem to be the stories that people are searching for.

But why do we choose to pair up characters who are not originally written as a couple?

I decided to dig around in my fandom, but unfortunately for me, my favourite pairing (Remus Lupin and Sirius Black) has a large following of readers and writers who believe that their relationship is canon, albeit rather buried in the subtext.  I am not one of those people, so I had to ask myself why I choose to write about the two men as a couple.

Jealousy perhaps?

Remus was paired in canon with the unfortunately named Nymphadora Tonks.  There are those who say that it is jealousy of Tonks that prompts fanfic writers to pair Remus up with another man, sometimes Harry, sometimes Snape, often Sirius.  I can’t say that reasoning holds true for me.  I actually advocated Remus/Tonks before they were an official couple in the series and have often enjoyed reading about them in fanfic.  So, why don’t I write about that pairing?

To make a statement?

I don’t see writing slash fanfics as making any sort of a statement to advocate gay rights or anything like that.  Maybe there are some who write for that reason, but I have never met them in my fandom.  It certainly isn’t the reason I choose to write slash.

Two hot men are better than one?

Well, yes they are, but surely that can’t be the only reason I enjoy writing about my favourite pairing.  And since Rowling outed one of her characters, why not write about him?  Okay, I admit that I did write one short story about Dumbledore in his youth, but that was it.  Even though there is substantially more evidence that this character is gay, including the words of the authoress herself, I choose to write about two men who aren’t.

The hot sex between two men is the appeal?

Well, it is definitely appealing, but not all of my stories have sex in them and they are as popular as some of my others.  My most popular story about the pairing is ridiculously long and the characters don’t even hop into bed until somewhere after chapter 40.  If it was just the sex then who the heck would read that far just for a few pages of porn?  I wouldn’t.  To my friends in the fandom I refer to myself as more of a plot-whore than anything else.

It can’t be the chance to write steamy man-on-man sex that makes me write about the pairing; if it was there would be far more sex in my fanfiction stories.

Bitter enemies becoming lovers?

Enemies who become lovers is always a popular idea in fanfiction.  The idea of turning canon on its head and forcing the hero into bed with his nemesis doesn’t appeal to me in the least.  But for some people this is an avenue of fanfiction that is almost as appealing as the one I have chosen.

The reason I write slash

Childhood friends.  Betrayal.  Reunion.  Tragedy.

Playing in the Remus/Sirius sandbox opens a world of possibility for angst-filled stories and the chance to give the characters a happier ending than they were given in canon.

But why not pair them up with one of the female characters?  And if there isn’t one available then make one up?

Well, making one up generally results in lots of accusations about Mary Sue’s and author inserts, but as a writer of original fiction as well as fanfiction I am sure that I am capable of producing a character that is neither of these fanfiction horrors.

Yet I don’t.  I have never even attempted to pair either of them up with a female character.  Instead I have taken their canon friendship and turned it into a romantic relationship for my own pleasure and that of my readers.

And I guess that I have my answer right there.  I write slash fanfiction because I enjoy it and because I can.

Most importantly I write it because everyone deserves a happy ending, and what can be happier than two well-loved characters finding love together?

L.M. Brown’s latest release, Driving Me Crazy, is available now from Silver Publishing.

To Purchase: Liquid Silver Publishing

Blurb:
They say that people in love do crazy things.  Brandon Walker can certainly relate.

Lusting after Lee Cooper, his sexy driving instructor, isn’t the most sensible reason for failing his driving test for the third time and when he discovers the damage he has inadvertently done to his instructor’s reputation and business, Brandon knows that he is on his last chance.

After persuading Lee to give him one final course of driving lessons Brandon makes it his priority to figure out if the spark he feels between them is one-sided or whether he can persuade his sexy instructor to move their lessons from the front seat of the car to the back.

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Crossing the Street by Belinda McBride

Christie Gordon 8 Comments
Courtesy of www.homotography.com

Most readers who are familiar with me are aware that I like to cross genre. Gleefully, I hop from sci fi to fantasy to paranormal. I’ve done bisexual ménage, interracial, multi-cultural and BDSM as well. So it’s not surprising that I finally ended up writing (and loving) m/m romance…except that I never really wanted or intended to write m/m. I was pretty happy with my straight and bi romances. This genre is so jam packed with new and established talent, there just didn’t seem to be a point. But then, I also vowed never to write werewolves…

There’s always been m/m content in my romances. There’s something so wonderful and winsome about men in love. Many women love that fantasy, especially if they happen to be in the middle of the mix.  In my father’s side of the family, polyamory popped up more than once…(my female relations do love their men!) so I’m comfortable with that concept. I love my heroines and take pride in writing amazing, complex women. I was really quite content with the variety in my writing.

That first m/m story came about pretty much by accident. I was doing a little writing exercise on first person POV and the male character that I was writing really had nothing to say. So I switched to the heroine, who was a bit of a disreputable princess. She kept spouting this line over and over…. ”A whore is a whore…” Beyond that, she didn’t have much to say. So I’m left sitting there with a first person POV exercise where neither character was talking. When that happens, you either scrap the project or turn their world upside-down.

So I made the princess a man.

Suddenly, Hela, who was now Helios, had a lot to say. And my reluctant hero pricked up his ears, got a gleam in his eye and told me that his name was Griffin. The story picked up speed and was suddenly in the hands of my Loose Id editor with a release date. An Uncommon Whore was surprisingly successful.

So my thought was that it was a fluke…right? I really didn’t want to go down that road too far. But when the Coming Out series was proposed at Loose Id, another character that had been languishing in my files came forward with a purpose. His name was Oliver Bleu and he wanted a man of his own. I finally understand the reason some of my characters and stories didn’t fly…they didn’t have chemistry with their heroine!

Have I crossed the road completely? Well, no. I still love my heroines. I love my ménages. But writing m/m romance was such a delightful shake-up in my routine that I certainly won’t be leaving it behind. I like playing off alpha against alpha and pulling little surprises in the balance of dominance. I enjoy letting tough men show their vulnerability to another man. In a good romance, I expect some element of sacrifice, and having a character risk his self image and his machismo is such a sacrifice.

So how did you cross the street? Did you download a m/m romance to see what all the fuss was about? Did you stumble across a manga, only to discover that the pretty girl was really a boy? Tell me about how you came to read or write in the m/m side of the spectrum. I’ll randomly choose a comment and the winner can choose an e-book from my backlist.

Belinda McBride lives in far northern California with her family, which mostly consists of an unruly group of Siberian Huskies. She writes for Loose Id, Changeling Press, Dreamspinner Press and Passion in Print Publishing.

Please visit her website at http://www.belindamcbride.com

Or her blog at http://www.belindam.blogspot.com

More information on her latest release:

LAST CALL EUROPE: BLACK WOLF
M/M Paranormal/Shifter Romance

Blurb:
Siberians live for the thrill of the chase; wolves exist for the joy of the capture. On a foolish dare, Jasper O’Shea takes a gamble at the Last Call, letting fate chose his lover for the night.

Detective Brutus “Brutal” Ballantine came to the Last Call looking for something far different than a sly, clever Siberian Husky. Yet when the call comes over the sound system, he finds himself unable to resist the lure of laughing blue eyes and a happy tail.

The chase is on, but who is the hunter, and who is the prey?

(Author’s note: While this story stands alone, it features characters introduced in Last Call Europe: Devil’s Advocate.)

Read an excerpt at: Changeling Press

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