A Certain Slant of Light

Today is the launch day for Enemies to Lovers! Go forth and read, my friends!

Handcuffed together. Only one bed. Which will win: Megan and Sarah's sizzling sexual attraction, or their compulsion to correct each other’s atrocious fandom opinions?

Shy library science student by day, fanfic writer by night, Megan is thrilled when she discovers her new crush Sarah shares her favorite fandom. Smart, gorgeous, and brashly confident in her thoughts on fandom, Sarah is Megan’s dream girl… until Megan realizes that Sarah is also her Tumblr nemesis, who called Megan’s popular ongoing fic “the cancer that is killing fandom.” Clearly, they must never speak again.

But when a writing club exercise leaves them handcuffed together, they have no choice but to duke out their differences, until they reach an agreement on the most important question of all: is hatesex as insanely hot in real life as it is in fic? (Yes. Yes, it is, at least in this steamy f/f novelette.)

In June, I’ve been trundling away on Sleeping Beauty. I’m up to 50,000 words now! Progress is slow and… well, I would like to say steady, but really it’s moving in fits and starts, and I don’t know quite how it’s going to end. (Obviously, they get together. It’s the specifics that are causing problems.) But there is progress and that’s something.

Once I hit 50,000 words, I took a break to do a round of edits on David and Robert. This was really just meant to be a self-indulgent pandemic project (English boarding school boys scarred by the Great War who help each other through love! And also Robert Louis Stevenson fanfiction), but I love it too much to keep it to myself forever, so I’ll have to publish it one of these days. Eventually. No rush. (They are both amputees and frankly doing a good job on it worries me.) Anyway, there’s still a section just before the end that isn’t quite working.

In July: Enemies to Lovers comes out on July 12! I plan to put it on preorder perhaps five days before, so watch this space.

It's Kalikoi launch day! Kalikoi is a new publisher for books about women who love women, in a variety of genres: fantasy, historical, paranormal romance, contemporary... I keep wanting to write space opera, but I don't think there are any space operas scheduled. YET.

Today the first Kalikoi book came out: Rachel Manija Brown's Watercat Cafe, which is post-apocalyptic cottagecore about a woman who dreams of resurrecting the lost tradition of the cafe. (One of my favorite details: Ruthie built this dream on a pre-apocalyptic cozy mystery set in a cafe. It's a delightful, loving send-up of this particular genre of cozy, complete with numerous punning titles.)

Also, the food scenes (by which I mean... maybe half the scenes in the book?) are to die for. Reading the book made me so hungry!

This month in writing, I accomplished many small things!

1. Wrote kore’s Natasha/Yelena story, Tea for Two.

2. Made covers & wrote descriptions for standalone releases of my two magical pet short stories, “The Mating Call of the Teleporting Warbler” and “Care and Feeding.”

3. Also wrote and collected short descriptions of all my books so that in the future when I need to put together back matter I can just copy and paste from a single document. Why did I not do this years ago? A mystery.

4. Released The Mating Call of the Teleporting Warbler as a standalone short story. This was worth doing because I’d already written the story and I knocked together the cover very cheaply, but the sales figures suggest that writing short stories specifically for release on Amazon would not be profitable.

Having said that, this story is f/f, which generally has pretty low sales figures. The picture might look different with a different genre.

5. In the interest of exploring this question, I expanded “Care and Feeding,” from the m/m magical pet anthology. It now ends with a sex scene instead of “If I make this any longer I’m going to have to write a sex scene, so the story is ending… NOW.” Planning to release this in May, perhaps.

6. I am dragging sloooowly forward on the novelette about two fangirls who hit it off in real life… only to realize they are fandom nemeses! Just hit 15,000 words, have written absolutely everything except the sex scene, so I guess I gotta bite the bullet and write that.

Thinking about calling the story Enemies to Lovers, although the title might be too generic? The working title is “Fangirl Foeyay,” but I don’t think people use the word foeyay anymore. It may not even have been in common use when I wrote the first three-quarters of a draft back in 2016. (I pondered whether I should update the fandom references, but that would require major surgery, and it would 10,000 times easier to slide in a mention that the story takes place in December 2015.)

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My goals for April is to finish a draft of Enemies to Lovers, polish “Care and Feeding,” and write evelyn_b’s She-Ra fic (Scorpia + Kyle = unexpected friendship). (Still doing fics for ACLU donations of $25+ if anyone is interested! Should probably make a new post about this.)

I would also like to decide on my next project. I started some projects in 2020 that I hope to complete eventually, but right there’s a lot of accumulated frustration bound up in them, so I’ve set them aside to give that time to dissipate.

However, when I dug up Enemies to Lovers, I found two older possibilities in my archives.

1. There’s a partially complete m/m “contemporary but everyone knows about vampires and magic generally so it’s not exactly our world” story. Soon after moving to the big city, Chris falls in with charming, obnoxious, mysterious Josh… whose secret turns out to be NOT that he is a cheating bastard, but that he is a vampire’s blood thrall. (Yes, there is emphatically a scene where the vampire drinks just a little too much blood and Josh faints from blood loss).

The main problem with this one - the reason why I abandoned it in the first place, lo these many years ago - is that I couldn’t figure out workable answers to a couple of basic questions. How did Josh end up in thralldom? The best answer I came up with was “Josh killed another vampire, and thralldom is his legal punishment,” but if that’s the case, how can Josh escape? It’s not really a happy ending if Josh is still in thrall to the vampire who might any day “accidentally” drink so much blood that he dies.

2. The other option is to take Iced Coffee Dreams off Amazon, rewrite it as f/f, and release it for Kalikoi. When I released it under the Jennifer Montgomery pen name it sold ten copies (actually, it may have been less than ten…) and it would be nice to actually make some money off it.