Category: Male/Male Romance

March Release Update

Posted on by karennacolcroft

For the past few weeks, I’ve been trying to update my release plans for this year. I think I’ve got it…

Originally, I was going to only release one book this spring, an April release, which was planned to be a novel called A Fighting Chance. This is a a sequel to Chance Met, which I released in March 2023.

Meanwhile, I’d also decided that I wanted to rerelease my previously-published novella, Hooch and Howls. And I was trying to figure out *how* to rerelease that; did I want to make it part of my main release schedule, or did I want to make it a giveaway, or… ? A couple of weeks ago, I decided I wanted to make it part of the main release schedule, because it’s now a lead-in to two other novels that are coming out this year.

So I’d changed from planning an April release to planning releases in March and May. The question was, which book was I going to release in which month? Since Chance Met was a March release last year, I wanted A Fighting Chance to be this year’s March release. But A Fighting Chance is turning out to need a bit more editing than I’d anticipated, and I also ran into a scheduling snag with my beta reader. I want to make sure I’m giving readers the best story I can with A Fighting Chance, so I’ve decided to give myself more time to prepare and polish it.

So on March 14, I will be releasing Hooch and Howls. A Fighting Chance will be out on May 9. The current plan is for both books to be released wide on these release dates, meaning they will *not* be available through Kindle Unlimited (but will be available for Kindle).

Hooch and Howls is a historical novella originally published in 2012. Taking place in 1930, Hooch and Howls introduces “hermit” werewolf Malachi Powers as he finds unexpected sexual and romantic connection with two human smugglers, Roger and Jonathan, who are reluctantly involved in the rumrunning trade between Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, and Gloucester, Massachusetts.

I’ll be sharing cover art soon! Meanwhile, here’s a picture of the cottage that once (until around 1984 or 1985) belonged to my grandparents. In Hooch and Howls, this cottage is where Malachi lives.

I Have a Migraine…

Posted on by karennacolcroft

I was going to write something profound-ish, or at least interesting, but I have a migraine and can’t think about anything other than the funny jagged colors dancing in front of my eyes. So instead, I’m sharing this picture  of all of the books I’ve self-published, as Karenna Colcroft and under other names, since May 2021. Lex Valentine did the covers for Salad on the Side, Alpha Receptor, and Messages from Shiva vol. 1; I did the others.

 

2023 In Review

Posted on by karennacolcroft

2023 has been over for just past a week now. Last week, I talked a little about what I have planned for 2024. Now I want to take some time to celebrate what I did in 2023.

I released two Real Werewolves Don’t Eat Meat novels. Even though the original plan was to release three, that didn’t work out, but I did release two. And I’m proud of myself for that.

I changed my release schedule when life stuff got in the way of what I’d originally planned. This is definitely cause for celebration, because in the past, if I’ve said I was going to do something, I’ve felt like I had no choice about doing it. Even when it wasn’t possible to actually follow through. In 2023, the book I’d slated for a March release took longer to revise and rewrite than I’d anticipated, especially since I wound up almost doubling the length of what had originally been a novella. Expanding the story took time, and I was trying to do it while in the thick of dealing with the fallout from my mother’s passing and my father’s health issues, among other things. Instead of forcing myself to stick to the release schedule I’d set and risking putting out a shoddy product, I chose to delay the March release by a couple of weeks, which then resulted in delaying the May release (which would have been Try the Tofu, Real Werewolves Don’t Eat Meat 4) to July, the September release to October, and not planning to have a November release at all. I felt a little guilty about that, and also dealt with some “people will forget I exist if I don’t release books often enough” fears, but ultimately it turned out to be the right choice, both for my books and for my mental health. And I did end up having a late November release with my Christmas short “Snow on Christmas Eve.”

I wrote two novels. Fill the Empty Spaces was started in December 2022, but I wrote the bulk of it in early 2023. I also wrote Take Some Tahini (Real Werewolves Don’t Eat Meat 6)… and then rewrote the first few chapters of it. I also wrote a few short stories and started a new novel, Ebb and Flow at the end of November. (Ebb and Flow is a spin-off from Real Werewolves Don’t Eat Meat, and will probably be released in fall 2024.)

In addition to the two Real Werewolves novels, I released two other novels and a short story (or short novella, depending on how you look at it).

I dealt with family issues, health issues, and life issues, including one that knocked me for a severe loop at the beginning of December 2023. I’m still dealing with that one, but I’m doing much better than I was at first.

Like I mentioned last week, I have plans for 2024, and hopefully this time next year, I’ll be celebrating a lot more!

2024 Here We Go!

Posted on by karennacolcroft

It’s a new year. Which is a little mind-boggling. December went by way too quickly.

It’s now 2024, and I’m still kind of wrapping my head around that. Usually I spend December, and sometimes start as early as October, planning the upcoming year. My goals, my hopes, my “if there were no objects in the way” dreams. It’s a month or more of daydreaming, brainstorming, Tarot and oracle cards, and various other means of sorting out what I want to do, what I’m capable of doing, and what I would really love to do if I could figure out how. I didn’t do that this year. At the beginning of December, something hit my life (and the lives of a number of others in my social circle, as well as my family) very hard, so I didn’t have the bandwidth to do much more than process, grieve, and figure out how to reconstruct my day-to-day life.

However. I do have some plans for 2024. It might be worth noting here that I don’t do “New Years resolutions.” For me, personally, resolutions are the “I should do this” things that usually get put aside because either I can’t figure out *how* to do them or because I only decided to do them because I thought I “should.” I don’t deal with shoulds anymore. As one of my past therapists was fond of saying, I stopped shoulding all over myself. I make goals and plans, not resolutions.

For 2024, tentatively, I’m planning:

1.To release Tempeh for Two (Real Werewolves Don’t Eat Meat 5) on January 11. This book is already up for Kindle preorder! I’ll also be releasing Real Werewolves Don’t Eat Meat 6, titled Take Some Tahini, in July. Take Some Tahini is the first brand-new Real Werewolves Don’t Eat Meat novel since 2014; the previous five, including Tempeh for Two, were originally published between 2011 and 2014. (All the rereleases have been revised, updated, and re-edited, and some have been expanded with new content.)

2. To figure out the timing of the rest of my release schedule. For 2023, my original plan was to release books in January, March, May, July, September, and November. But my March release, Chance Met, got held up because of personal life stuff as well as issues with expanding it, so instead of releasing the second week of the month as intended, it came out toward the end of March. Because of that, I didn’t want to have a May release, because it wouldn’t have given me enough time to promote both books. So I skipped May, made the September release an October release instead, and then wound up doing a Christmas story in November after deciding not to release anything that month. Yeah, it was all as confusing as it sounds. For 2024, I’m currently planning releases in January, April, July, and October, with another Christmas story at the end of November/beginning of December, but that might change.

3. To make all of my books available “wide,” meaning through multiple retailers. This means they will no longer be available through Kindle Unlimited, which requires that books be sold exclusively on Amazon. I apologize to my readers who prefer KU because of finances or other reasons. There are multiple factors behind my decision, including a reduction in the amount Amazon pays authors for Kindle Unlimited reads and hearing from readers who would like to buy my books but won’t or can’t by from Amazon. After considering and talking with other authors, I decided it would be worth trying having my books available through other retailers in addition to Amazon, including Kobo and Barnes & Noble. I’ll be starting this change in February with Fill the Empty Spaces, followed by Chance Met in March. Tempeh for Two, along with the rest of the Real Werewolves Don’t Eat Meat series, will be available through Kindle Unlimited until April, at which time the entire series will be released through other retailers. I’m still fine-tuning how I’ll approach new releases; my options are either release them through all retailers from the beginning, or make them Amazon exclusive–and available through Kindle Unlimited–for the first 90 days after release, then put them with other retailers. Stay tuned for announcements on that as I make decisions and see how releasing my books wide affects my sales and readership. Yes, I write books because I love writing books… but I also do it to help pay my bills, and sometimes that means needing to make decisions that benefit the bank account.

4. To start a subscription. A number of my fellow authors have Patreon or Ream accounts through which they offer readers bonuses and perks for a monthly subscription fee (which in some cases is as low as $1 a month!) I actually have a Patreon but haven’t done much with it because creating things for it and promoting it felt like a little too much. I’ve been following those other authors, though, and learning more about how to make it all work without breaking my brain, so I hope to either brush up my Patreon for a relaunch or set up a Ream subscription (Ream is like Patreon but exclusively for writers) by my birthday, June 30. If you read this and have thoughts about what you’d like to see offered through a subscription like this, please leave a comment!

5. To release the follow-up to Chance Met, titled A Fighting Chance. This book will probably conclude Trey and Jeremiah’s story, as it brings their romance to a logical happy-for-now ending as well as tying up plot threads introduced in Chance Met. I don’t really see anywhere for their story to go after this one. This is the only “I’m not completely sure yet” plan on this list; I haven’t decided whether I’ll actually release this one. If I do, it will be out in March or May.

6. To rerelease my novella Hooch and Howls. Originally published in 2012, this is a historical MMM novella featuring a crotchety hermit werewolf and two young men sucked into the rumrunning trade in 1930 Nova Scotia. I’ve rewritten a portion of this novella to address a plot point I found…we’ll say distasteful, and I’m looking forward to reintroducing Malachi Powers, the hermit werewolf, and his love interests Roger and Jonathan to the world. And speaking of Malachi…

7. To release a new novel, currently titled Ebb and Flow. This novel follows from Take Some Tahini, but is not part of the Real Werewolves Don’t Eat Meat series. (You can tell, because the title doesn’t reference a vegan food.) In Tahini, Tobias meets a young werewolf named Quinn Bouchard, who had a traumatic entry into the werewolf world that reminds Tobias of his own. After Quinn’s pack ejects him for reasons beyond Quinn’s control, Tobias takes him in as one of his guards and brings Quinn with him and Kyle to meet with the Anax of Canada. While in Nova Scotia for that meeting, they meet Malachi Powers (yes, the one from Hooch and Howls, which is why I plan to rerelease that novella), a friend  of the Canadian Anax–and, as it turns out, Quinn’s mate, something which disturbs Malachi both because Quinn is mourning the loss of his partner and because of a major age gap; Malachi is somewhere around 150 years old, while Quinn is only 22. Though their story begins in Take Some Tahini, it’s fully formed in Ebb and Flow, which I’m currently in the process of writing and am very much enjoying. I hope to have this novel ready to release in September or October.

Other plans, particularly for book releases, are in flux right now. But the good thing about planning and writing and working for myself (and my readers) is that I have the ability to be flexible.

I hope your 2024 is off to a wonderful start! If you have plans you’d like to share, leave a comment!

 

 

Two More Days!

Posted on by karennacolcroft

In two days, I’ll be putting Tempeh for Two up for preorder! The book will officially release on January 11 in Kindle and print formats; the preorder will be Kindle only since Amazon doesn’t allow for preorders of paperbacks. This book will be available through Kindle Unlimited until April, at which time I’ll be pulling all of the Real Werewolves Don’t Eat Meat books out of KU so I can release them through vendors in addition to Amazon.

I’m looking forward to having this book out there. This will complete the rereleasing of the original 5-book Real Werewolves Don’t Eat Meat series. In July 2024, the series will continue with the first brand-new book to be released since 2014, Take Some Tahini.  And there’s a spin-off or two coming as well. These werewolves get pushy about having their stories told!

I’ve shared the Tempeh for Two cover before, but here it is again because I like it (and because I’m typing this over Christmas weekend and so I’m keeping it short so I can go on with holiday prep).

Surprise Book!

Posted on by karennacolcroft

I hadn’t planned on a book release this month, until I started thinking about the holidays and decided I wanted to release a Christmas story. Fortunately for me, I had a Christmas story in my files.

Snow on Christmas Eve was originally a 5000-word short story titled “Christmas Eve Snow” that I’d posted as a freebie on my old (pre-hiatus) website. I’ve spent time revising and re-editing the story… and in the process, I expanded it into a short novella of a little over 10,000 words.

Christmas was always Tag’s favorite holiday. Time with his parents, brothers, and other family, dinners, Christmas lights. But this year, Tag wants nothing to do with the holiday. In September, his coming out as gay and announcing that his partner Darion was moving in with him resulted in his family rejecting him. How can he be happy when he’s lost his family?

On Christmas Eve, Darion insists on taking Tag for a walk in a snowstorm. Claiming that snow on Christmas Eve is magic, Darion asks Tag to make a wish. And Tag does, never believing that his wish to have his family back might come true.

(I’ll definitely be tweaking the blurb before uploading the book for sale!) Snow on Christmas Eve will be available on Amazon, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, and other vendors on Thursday, November 23! When it’s live, I’ll add the links to my home page and my “Other Male/Male Romance” page. Meanwhile, here’s the cover:

Psychopomps

Posted on by karennacolcroft

A psychopomp is a being (sometimes human, sometimes not) who guides spirits into or through the afterlife. Psychopomps appear in various world mythologies as well as in popular culture; for example, Stephen King’s The Dark Half references psychopomps represented by a flock of sparrows.

While people tend to think that a psychopomp is purely a fictional or mythological thing, there are those of us in real life who consider ourselves psychopomps.

Yeah, I said “us.”

I was about five years old the first time I “saw” a spirit. I put that in quotation marks because it wasn’t so much something I saw with my physical eyes as it was a mental image that my brain sort of projected into reality. My great-grandmother had passed away, and I saw her as my parents were discussing or preparing for the funeral. It’s been 48 years, so I don’t remember the exact context, but I do remember seeing my great-grandmother. I didn’t know why I was seeing her or why my parents got upset when I mentioned it, but I did learn pretty fast that seeing dead people wasn’t something I was supposed to talk about.

Since then, nearly every time someone with a connection to me has passed away (and even sometimes with people who have no connection to me), I’ve “seen” them in a similar way. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned to identify whether they’re just appearing because they want to say goodbye or whether they need help finding where they’re supposed to go next. When they need help, I try to help them. It’s a process of visualization, mostly, in which I bring them to someplace that has meaning for them and help them find the light they’re supposed to cross into. If you’ve seen the TV series Ghost Whisperer, it’s similar to that, except I don’t solve crimes. And I do have a choice; if a spirit comes to me and I’m not comfortable helping them, I say so and my guides help them find someone else to assist. Sometimes my guides run interference for me when they believe it would be detrimental for me to work with a certain spirit, as they did last year when my mother passed away.

I know all this sounds kind of weird and “out there,” and that’s fine. You don’t have to believe in anything you’d rather not believe in. But there are those who do this work intentionally, sometimes assisting spirits after they pass and sometimes assisting them in the passing.

As I was starting work on Fill the Empty Spaces, I was also rewatching Ghost Whisperer and thought, “It would be cool to have a romance character who’s a psychopomp. I don’t think I’ve seen that in any of the books I’ve read.” And then I thought, “I’m writing a book. And I have a character who could be a psychopomp; why not?” Thus was born Lochlan, the friend-with-potential who my main character Del meets when he starts volunteering at a cat cafe.

Like me, Lochlan had his first experience as a psychopomp at age five with his late great-grandmother. The way Lochlan guides spirits is similar to how it works for me as well; after all, “write what you know” is one of the most common pieces of advice for authors. But his experiences and the spirits he guides during the story or tells Del about are not at all similar to anything I’ve dealt with. For which I’m thankful; Lochlan gets put through the wringer.

Fill the Empty Spaces is available now in Kindle and paperback formats on Amazon. To thank the Kitty Cat Cafe and Adoption Lounge in Peabody, MA, for allowing me to use the names of some of their real-life cat residents and the picture of Charlie the Sweater Cat on the cover, I am donating a portion of my royalties to the cafe, so your purchase of the book (or should I say “purr-chase”… sorry, I blame the bad pun on not having had enough coffee this morning) will help feed, house, and provide medical care for multiple furry (and, currently, one not-furry) feline friends. If you want to help support the cafe or pay a visit, you can also check out their website.

 

Fill the Empty Spaces Preorder!

Posted on by karennacolcroft

Last week, I put Fill the Empty Spaces up for preorder! For the time being, Fill the Empty Spaces will be available only on Amazon, with both Kindle and paperback formats releasing on October 12. It will also be available through Kindle Unlimited as long as it’s an Amazon exclusive title. (In 2024, I will be working on making all of my books, including this one, available on a variety of platforms, which will mean not being able to participate in Kindle Unlimited.) The preorder is only for the Kindle version, since at the moment, Amazon doesn’t allow paperback preorders.

You can preorder your copy on Amazon now!

Fill the Empty Spaces Cover!

Posted on by karennacolcroft

Now that I’ve done the cover reveal for my newsletter subscribers, I’m sharing the Fill the Empty Spaces cover here as well. (And if you want to subscribe to my newsletter so you get future exclusive content, you can go to my free short story page to sign up for the newsletter and get the link to download an exclusive Real Werewolves Don’t Eat Meat short story.)

The cat in the image is Charlie the Sweater Cat, who was a resident of the cat cafe where I volunteer. Charlie was found as a stray, with fur so matted he had to be shaved. He also had multiple health conditions that kept his fur from growing back properly. When a little girl visiting the cafe swaddled Charlie in a blanket, the cafe staff and volunteers realized Charlie felt comforted, so one of the volunteers started knitting sweaters for him to wear so he would always be warm and feel safe.

In the story, Del volunteers at a cat cafe modeled on the real-life one, and Charlie (and other feline residents of the real cafe) became characters. Charlie, in the story, winds up adopted by Del and goes home with him.

Sadly, Charlie in real life was in too much pain from conditions that couldn’t be treated. He crossed the Rainbow Bridge on July 7 of this year. The cafe has a small memorial to him on top of one of the shelves (where the other cats can’t get to it), and the cafe’s owner gave me permission to use one of my photos of Charlie as part of the cover art for this book.

To find out more about the Kitty Cat Cafe and Adoption Lounge, located in Peabody, Massachusetts, visit their website, where you can learn how the cafe operates, schedule a visit, and/or make a donation to help them care for the current kitty residents.

Fill the Empty Spaces will be available for Kindle preorder on Sept. 28, and will be released for Kindle and in paperback on Oct. 12.

Writing Updates

Posted on by karennacolcroft

I’ve been working on a few things this past week, trying to get some stuff done and some stuff started as I prepare to go back to work. I start a new job on the 18th! Which I’m honestly a bit nervous about; it’s been a long time since I worked a full-time job, and part of me worries that my physical and mental health won’t be up to it. But I’ve made my employer aware that I have health issues, and I’m looking at this as a good stepping stone. We’ll see how it goes.

Meanwhile:

  • I’ve still been working on A Fighting Chance. And fighting *with* it. I had ideas of where the story was going to go, but the story doesn’t seem to want to go there. Even so, I think I’m hitting a good stride with it and hope to have the first draft finished before I start my job. Assuming all goes as planned, A Fighting Chance is slated for release in March.
  • I finished editing Tempeh for Two (Real Werewolves Don’t Eat Meat 5, the last book of the originally-published series). This involved scrapping a few plot points that I’d added the last time I edited, which were no longer relevant to the series as a whole; they’d come from a heterosexual romance novel I’d written that was intended to be part of the companion series to this one. Since I scrapped the hetero series, I decided the plot points I’d added to Tempeh not only didn’t work anymore but weren’t really needed, so I removed them. Which, fortunately, streamlined the story and re-increased the action. Tempeh for Two is slated for release in January.
  • I did final(ish) proofreading of Fill the Empty Spaces and created the cover for it! I wasn’t sure I liked the cover at first, especially since one of the features I needed in the GIMP program to make the cover I wanted doesn’t seem to be working on the newest version of the program so I had to find a workaround. But the cover has grown on me, and I’m particularly happy to have been permitted to include Charlie the Sweater Cat on it. Charlie was a resident at the cat cafe where I volunteer; due to a cluster of health issues, he unfortunately had to be put down at the beginning of July. He became a character of sorts in Fill the Empty Spaces, though, and the owner of the cafe approved that and granted me permission to use one of the photos I took of Charlie as part of the cover art. Fill the Empty Spaces will be available for preorder on the 28th of this month, and will be released in Kindle and paperback formats on Oct. 12! (Stay tuned for whether I put this one in KU; based on some issues other authors have been experiencing lately with KU, I’m considering not going that route with this book, but I haven’t completely decided yet.) I’ll share the cover here soon, but I’ve promised to reveal it in my newsletter first.
  • I started plotting the rewrite I’ve decided I need to do on Take Some Tahini (Real Werewolves Don’t Eat Meat 6, the first *new* RWDEM book since 2014!) I love this book as I’ve written it, but it’s kind of a “breather episode” of the series, and I have the feeling the lower-stakes, lower-action nature of it won’t meet reader wants or expectations. So I’m revamping it to match the stakes and action level to the previous books of the series, and I will probably be pulling the “breather” aspects of the story to release as a freebie or a newsletter subscriber perk. Take Some Tahini is slated for release in July 2024.