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Tag: mm romance

Yaoi Novels versus Manga – Which do you Prefer?

Christie Gordon 4 Comments

Yaoi Manga - Cherry LemonI have to admit, I like yaoi novels better than manga. What??? you say? Yep, I do. Maybe that has something to do with why I write yaoi and m/m romance novels instead of drawing comic panels (which I think takes way more talent than I have). Although my eyes certainly appreciate the man candy action of a good yaoi manga, I find they’re too dang short. I like quite a bit more meat (pun intended) in my stories. More back story, more character development, more man loving and certainly more plot development.

Now I know some of you might want to flame me right now, but hear me out. Yaoi manga definitely have their place and yes, I do enjoy them. I just like to read a book with little or no pictures more than reading panels. For some reason, my imagination flies when I read a novel and not so much with a comic. I’m always trying to figure out which way, left or right, up or down, I’m supposed to be reading the darn thing. Okay, maybe I’m just a spaz. But the other thing is the limitations of manga – you just can’t fit as much in as you can with a book. You see this in film all the time. If they actually put everything from the Lord of the Rings books into the movies, they’d each be 5 hours long and we’d probably have 20 of them.

Starfighter Comic WebcomicThere are a few manga/webcomics I can’t live without – Starfighter being the main one. I mean, who doesn’t like that? Hot headed, evil dark hero(?) paired with innocent blond hero who needs hard, passionate sex… I wonder sometimes what that would look like in a novel form or if it would even work. If that’s the case, I wonder if the medium drives the plots in found yaoi novels versus yaoi manga? Can they be interchanged?

What do you prefer and why?

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Random Hallway Hook-Ups and Why I Love Writing M/M by Daisy Harris

Christie Gordon 0 Comments

When I set out to write my M/M romance novel, Mercury Rising, I had questions – lots of questions. Luckily, I had an army of gay followers on Twitter to query. See, I have gay friends in real life, but there are some things I’m not comfortable asking people I actually know. Details about sex are high on that list.

One of my earliest queries pertained to the first love scene between Dillon and Mercury. I wanted them to hook up randomly in a deserted hallway. I didn’t want them to talk at length beforehand. I didn’t want them to build a rapport. In fact, I aimed for each of them to objectify the other in that first interaction. Sometimes we (gay or straight) want to make out with a fantasy. Why ruin a perfectly good illusion by getting to know the person?

I wondered, though, was I stereotyping gay men as sluts? Was I wrong to think a couple of young, hot gay guys would blow each other on a loading dock based on nothing but mutual attraction and a desire for slightly self-destructive fun?

No. According my Twittosphere, a couple of men would have no moral compunctions whatsoever about shagging in a deserted hallway. And that, in a word, is why I love men.

Firstly, the random hallway hook-up worked out great with my plot. So, yay. Second, it’s so refreshing to not have to deal with the whole “slut” issue. It’s pretty hard to write a female character having anonymous, meaningless sex. There’s judgment, censure, feelings. So even though some women do occasionally enjoy casual sex, it can be hard to write about it.

Not so with gay men! Boys can have meaningless sex with anyone they want, even in a romance novel! To a female writer, this is a revelation. Sex without feeling, and emotion without sex – it’s a fascinating concept, and one I hope to explore more as I continue to write male-male.

And I’m sure there are men who can’t have meaningless sex, men who fall in love with anyone they get physical with. But that doesn’t seem to be the norm. Boys are different and hot and it’s exciting to think of them doing all the things with eachother that I’d never dareHow about you? Why do you like to write (or read) male-male romance.

More about Daisy Harris:

Birkenstock-wearing glamour girl and mother of two by immaculate conception, Daisy Harris still isn’t sure if she writes erotica. Her paranormal romances start out innocently enough. However, her characters behave like complete sluts. Much to Miss Harris’s dismay, the sex tends to get completely out of hand. She writes about trampy mermaids, sexy dragons, and snuff-y shark-shifters. Her work also features zombie ingenues, horny gods, and some holiday characters like you’ve never seen them before. And there’s almost always a mad scientist in there somewhereIf you like science-y subplots, fantastical creatures, and red-hot chemistry, you’ll love Daisy Harris. You can find her on Twitter, Facebook and www.thedaisyharris.com.

More about her latest release, Mercury Rising:
Take a sexy romp with the gods in this hilarious and hot ménage! Over-extended-and closeted-charmer, Mercury the Messenger, struggles to accommodate all the factions of the Deities International Conference and Kibbitz. However, his skills at diplomacy stretch to the limit when the object of a chance tryst turns out to be his assistant, and his arranged fiancée arrives at the scene. Dillon Rodriquez, Mercury’s executive aide and soon-to-be MBA student, refuses to be the closeted god’s sidedish. But when an accident at the conference strands the god in the human world, Dillon agrees to act as his guide. Traveling from San Diego down the Baha Coast to Cabo, Mercury experiences a side of life he never imagined, and he learns that if he wants to earn the love of the one man who matters, he has to stop trying to please everyone else.

MERCURY RISING is available for purchase here.

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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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