Short Shorts: Eyes Wide Shut

For over ten years Noah and I were friends. Former colleagues who kept in touch, occasionally went to dinner and visited each other's homes. When based in separate cities, he wrote and Skyped, even through the years he was based in China.
It never occurred to me a closer relationship between us was even possible. He dated tall, skinny and female and I was neither of those things.
"Look at him look at you. He loves you. He’s been the most stable man in our lives for most of my life," my 18-year old son Rori cried in exasperation during one of his rants about my lack of a social life, decrying what he called my “willful” blindness. "Come on! Live a little. Give him a chance."
I was scared of the change in our dynamic. Noah was my rock..
Today we said "I do." Rori was our best man.
"Told you I could talk him around," he laughed and clapped Noah on the back after the ceremony.

Lesson Learnt From Reading Gay Romance Novels

I will never ever use the word "smirked." It's so over-used it's irritating. And lazy. Makes me wonder if gay characters in romance novels have any other look in their repertoires.

If I ever have a character  who has that kind of look on his face, I will say something like:

• the way he smiled was irritating
• he smiled in a conceited way
• he smiled in a self-satisfied manner
• he smiled in an unpleasant way 
• he smiled to show how pleased he was that she was in trouble

The sentences still need a bit of work, I think, but they tell you more about the character, don't you think?

Here Is Hope ( Josh + Geoffrey)

My 15 year old, heterosexual niece sent me a link to this video, with a short comment basically saying," aren't they cute?"

To me, that means that , yes, there is hope. ...hope that the next generation won't care about someone's sexual orientation. They'll see that love is love, and wish the happy couple a long and prosperous life.

A Blogging Friend Came Out And It Reminded Me That I Live In A Bubble

Sometimes I feel like I live in a bubble; a happy little bubble where being gay or lesbian is just an aspect of how this person was built and it doesn't matter much because we're not exactly planning to have sex with him or  her.

A bubble where my father, God bless his old-fashioned, unsophisticated soul, suggested that if I don't have a nice young man to bring home to meet the family, maybe I should bring my nice young lady if I have one because I was getting on in years and should really consider settling down.


But I digress. About my bubble. See, a writer I met through my real name writing career came out this week. Sort of. What she did was she wrote one of those posts about X Things About Me That You Didn't Know, and one of the things we didn't know was that she was a lesbian.

My own response was "Uhuh! Your favourite TV shows - Sherlock, Star Trek, Quantum Leap- sorta date you. I couldn't estimate how old you are before from our interactions, but now I think maybe you're around my age and you're no spring chicken."

Then I went down to the comments section because I usually chat with her on her blog. The amount of vitriol that was directed at her was shocking. Suddenly she was a bad writer, one whose family and friends would dissociate themselves from, a horrible human being.

Say what? The woman is a good writer, and she doesn't write about what she does in her bedroom with her partner (not that the romance writer in me isn't curious). So what do we care what she does in her relationship? How does that affect her ability to compose prose? You choose what to read and if you don't like what someone writes, you move along. You don't have to support that writer by buying their material if you don't like what they write.  But you don't have an excuse to attack them personally either, or to try to shove your beliefs  down their throats.

"I'm a Christian," someone says, 'and my belief is that what you do is wrong and you'll burn in hell."

So what? Maybe the person you disapprove of is not a Christian and they don't see hell in their future. Your religious views have no meaning to them and why feel compelled to say it as if what you believe has an impact on their daily life is beyond me.

Another one that got my goat was, " I don't agree with your choice."

Choice? Right! She chose to be lesbian about as much as I chose to be a Black female in a world that values Caucasian looks, living in a country where until my early twenties, legally I was not allowed to  vote, sit on a bench at a bus stop allocated Caucasians,  was forced to study parts of Grade 1 and Grade 2 under a tree (and would have had to get a ministerial dispensation to study something like engineering), was not allowed to swim in a public pool and was restricted to live in areas that had no water, electricity and garbage removal.

Choice is what you're going to eat today for supper. It's what you  say or do when you hear that your favourite writer/blogger/your niece/nephew/neighbour/colleague is gay/homosexual/lesbian or whatever they are. The words out of your mouth, or what you write in the comments of the post, or what you do when you see them if they are in your real life...THAT is a choice. 

And no, this is not another lesbian defending "sin." I have no stake in the gay agenda, if ever there was one.

And this is not a gay person demonising Christianity. For one thing, if I had someone for Pappa to meet then, it would have been a guy. And secondly, I am from a religious  Christian family and value its positive contribution to my life.

I  believe in a loving God; One who offers His people a lot of grace. And yeah, I hear about that grace quite a lot when people want you to become  born again. That you don't have to DO anything but believe that Christ is the Son of God and he came here on earth, died  for us so we could have eternal life.  We hear that he was resurrected and went back to God, where he sits on his right hand and intercedes for us.

But somehow, that message.... that God so loved the world (the whole world, no exclusions) that He gave His only begotten son, so that whomsoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have everlasting life, gets lost. Me? That's the main message that interests me about Christianity.


I also find it curious that Jesus Christ, who created the new coventant between us and God, never said a word about homosexuality. Ever. It was not important enough for him to mention it.

So yeah. This week I got kicked out of my cocoon a little bit; was reminded that while my family was fortunate enough to build an environment where we love and accept each other without judgement, there are still people out there spreading hate.

It's couched in religion, and sadly, some of the vocal ones cover it up in Christianity. But God and Christianity have absolutely nothing to do with that kind of hatred. They are just being used as camouflage, so these people don't have to admit their heartfelt discrimination and hate, because hate is  ugly and they know it.

I recognise the camouflage because that's what the previous government of my country used to use to argue that as a Black person, I was less than human; I was less than a Caucasian person and me and my children and our descendants were only fit to serve them.

Because the way they interpreted the Bible told them it was so and who would argue with the Bible? Who would argue with God when they live in a highly religious society?

Message to readers, though I'm not sure there will be many: If you insult me, I will delete your comment. This is my blog, not a democracy, and I have every right to delete what you say if you call me names. And yes, I have every right to voice my opinion too. You can exercise your own right to say what you like on your own blog.

Sole Support By Kaje Harper

One of the things that I love about many contemporary MM romances is that their characters feel real.

Yeah sure, you still come across a lot of  novels whose characters live some author's version of an aspirational life, but there are plenty of novels rooted in realistic lives.


Kaje Harper's Sole Support felt even more realistic to me, mostly because in many ways, I am Kellen.

Here is the publisher's synopsis:

Kellen is short on cash—at least until his first novel starts to sell—but he has plenty of friends. None of them, unfortunately, share his love of books. For that he turns to IM chats with Mike from his online book group.

Though he manages to coax the shy, socially inept pathologist into a real-time meeting, Kellen has no intention of letting his new friend become more than a casual lover. Shaky finances and ailing mother aside, self-sufficiency is Kellen’s prime directive.

Mike considers himself a nerd of the highest order—short, bespectacled, prone to blurting out the wrong thing at the worst possible time. Meeting Kellen face to face is the biggest risk of his life, and he wonders if they’ll get more body parts together than just their faces. 

First meeting leads to first date—first everything for Mike—and soon Kellen’s faced with breaking his just-friends-with-benefits rule. Yet as his elderly mother wanders deeper into senility, Kellen wonders if it’s better to lean on Mike rather than fall.


What I think

Except for a few minor variations, like the fact that I'm female, in my 40s and outside North America, I am Kellen. Or rather, some parts of our lives are eerily similar.  My mother also has stroke-inducing hypertension, except she also has diabetes on top of that.

For a long time I didn't want to acknowledge that she was not well. And when I did, I moved two hours away to live with her. I'm also a writer and self-published.

I'm fortunate that my mother accepts help, but we have had awkward conversations about money, power of attorney etc.  So yeah, Kaje Harper was eerily accurate about what it takes to take care of a sick mother and I commend her for it.

The book is also well-written, the characters well-drawn. Even secondary characters, like Patrick, Kellen's neighbour, and Corinne, Mike's sister, were well-rounded enough for me to care about. They were not just just there to support the main characters, but people  with their own stories that one gets curious about.

The only small detail that bugged me is that Mike gained a lot of confidence later in the book, and we were not given any explanation as to why or how that happened. Or if  there is an explanation, it was too subtle and I missed it.

As for the story itself, the fact that it's familiar to me made it no less gripping. Even as Kellen made the classic care-giver mistakes and I wanted to shout "NOOOOO, DON'T DO THAT!" I still got it, because I made similar mistakes. And I rooted for Mike to have enough strength to hang in there, but not get taken over by the needs of the sick person too.

And I loved the fact that for all that the story deals with such a real and not particularly glamorous subject, Harper still managed to infuse the story with love, romance and hopefulness.

I recommend Sole Support highly. Get yourself a copy.

Review: A Life Interrupted by Lynley Wayne

I'd never heard of Lynley Wayne, but I was in the mood to read a contemporary romance, preferrably a family themed one, and Lynley Wayne's A Life Interrupted (published by MLR Press,  November 2013) came through on my All Romance eBooks search.

So I decided to take a risk and buy a copy.


The synopsis from the publisher

Dan and Travis met in college, the unlikeliest of pairs, and then became friends and lovers. 

For the past twenty-two years Dan's lived his own version of happily-ever-after, with Travis by his side.

Then tragedy strikes and life as they know it ceases to exist. 

Will they be strong enough to find their way back from a life interrupted?

While Travis fights for his life, Dan can' t help but relive all those little moments that made up their life. 

All those things that he took for granted at the time. Those very same events may end up being all he has left of the man who is his entire world.

What I think

Lynley Wayne pulled off one of the hardest challenges any writer can face: making readers care about a main character who's absent/in a coma throughout most of the story.

Did the previous sentence sound as callous to you as it did to me? LOL! Sorry. It sounded good in my head, I swear, but clearly it didn't translate well on paper.

What I meant to say was, one of the main characters, Travis, is in a coma and as such, he's actually "absent" as an active participant in the story, and we only get to know him through his partner Dan's eyes.

And it's easy enough to feel sympathy for him as someone who is sick, maybe even dying. But Wayne Lynley takes us beyond the easy sympathy to the core of the man, so we know what he was in the past, how he would be if he was not lying in that hospital bed, and what his husband, children, mother and sister will lose if he dies/doesn't recover. She helps us get to know the brave young man who acts on his attraction for another man, even though he'd have sworn that he was straight before he met Dan, the loving partner and that strong happy man who has a goofy smile on his face when all is right with his world. Sounds better now? Thanks:-)

Anyhoo, one of the reasons I love romance novels is the expectation of a happy ending. So I kinda expected that no matter what kind of wringer Dan and Travis go through, in the end, Travis will wake up and they will live happily ever after. I so totally didn't expect the real outcome in the story. It was a good twist though. (And no, I'm not telling you what happened. Read the book to find out!)

My only complaint is that the story feels unfinished. Yeah, I know they say, "To be Continued" at the end, so it must be the first book in a series. But what the hell? I want to know what happens next right now!!!!

OK. Maybe not right this minute, but soon. VERY SOON!

Told you  I wasn't exactly patient... or healthy....

Review: My Regelence Rake by J.L Langley

The problem with J.L Langley is that she doesn't write fast enough to suit me. LOL!  As if she's there to write for my comvenience.

Still. My fantasy is of her chained to her laptop in my dungeon, writing book after book, with occassional breaks for food or drink. No sleep for the talented!

OK. I don't sound well, I know. But damn, the woman can tell a good story!

I just finished re-reading  My Regelence Rake, the third installment in her Sci-Regency series (published by Samhain Publishhing, October 2012), and it's as good as when I read it last year.

Some books are fluff ( and it's fine to be fluff. I adore fluff), but I am pleasantly surprised when I find books I can read again and again. Because to a bibliophile, books you can reread over and over are very kind to the wallet. And that allows me to enjoy as many books as possible, guilt-free.

Here's the publisher's synopsis:

With his days occupied with duties as Captain of the Guard, and nights consumed with upholding his reputation as a rake, Lord Sebastian Hastings’s schedule is filled. There’s no extra time to be anyone’s bodyguard, but the royal family’s safety is a task he sees to personally.

Prince Colton Townsend has loved Sebastian for as long as he can remember, but he’s done pining for a man who has vowed never to remarry. So he consoles himself with the second love of his life—horses. Stable building and horse racing consume his every thought, at least until he’s stuck with Sebastian dogging his every step.

While looking over the prospects at an auction, Colton is trying to ignore his sexy, pesky bodyguard when he feels compelled to take on a bully to protect an abused horse. Sebastian is dragged into the fray, and their good deed sparks a string of nasty rumors.

There’s only one way to quell the political storm: marry. But instead of solving everything, Colton realizes his new husband is a bundle of secrets, none of which he’ll give up easily. Unless Colton makes one, last-ditch effort that could break his heart for good.

What I think

My Regelence Rake is a classic tale of unrequitted love, done so well that you don't mind that the story sounds vaguely familiar, if you're like me and have read thousands of romance novels (het and mm).

The characters are very well drawn: you can't help but root for Colton to land his man and want Sebastian to have a really good excuse why he's not sweeping him off his feet. Cos not having a good excuse would just make him an ass. Just saying.

Mixed in there, there are real rakes nice well-brought up young men should stay away from. There are secrets, some spying, blackmail attempts and lots of fear of rejection from both Colton and Sebastian. There's lots of humour too. I especially loved the concept of Dance Card Destruction Crew.

And of course Trouble, fiance to Rexley, Colton's eldest brother, is as funny as ever. Now there's a young man who's worth kidnapping J.L Langley for, so I can chain her to her laptop and get her writing. I wouldn't even mind hiring a personal torturer for the duration of the book's writing, cos I would really really love to read his story.

Anyhoo, I highly recommend My Regelence Rake. My only caveat is that, maybe, you read the first two books in the series first. It can stand alone, but it's richer if you've read the two previous books and have insight into characters and events.

Buy the book