Tag: male/male romance

Grumble Grumble Book Blurb Grumble

Posted on by karennacolcroft

I’ve spent the past couple of days struggling to write the blurb (a/k/a book description) for Storm and Shelter, which is book 3 of the Ebb and Flow series. The first draft of the book is complete and I’m working on some rewrites now prior to editing, and I want to put it up for preorder now-ish so I can include the preorder link in book 2 of the series, Future and Past, which releases April 10. In order to put the book up for preorder, I have to have the book description. And those are harder for me to write than the actual books!

 

 

(Here’s the Future and Past cover)

 

 

 

I’ve always had trouble with the blurbs. I get stuck in trying to summarize the plot rather than just giving hints to entice readers. The book description isn’t meant to be a summary of the story, and I know this, but it’s really hard for me to figure out what is “too much” summary when I’m writing the things.

Technically I could set up the preorder with just the book’s title, and fill in the blurb later, but then…why would anyone preorder it?

So I’ll keep wrangling with words trying to get this book description the way I need it to be. And meanwhile, I’ve gotten the cover for Storm and Shelter done and will be sharing it first in my newsletter, which I send out on the 2nd and 4th Thursdays of each month. Which means I’ll be sending one this coming week. If you want to subscribe and get in on exclusive excerpts and cover reveals and such, plus get the free novella Heart and Home, an Ebb and Flow prequel, visit my Free Story page.

A Love Letter to My Childhood

Posted on by karennacolcroft
The book I’m currently working on, which is book 3 in my Ebb and Flow series (a spin-off of Real Werewolves Don’t Eat Meat that takes place primarily in Nova Scotia), is rapidly becoming a love letter to the summer cottage my Canadian grandparents (my mother’s parents) owned until I was 14 or so. I spent a week or two nearly every summer visiting those grandparents, and until they sold the cottage, that time was mostly spent there. (This is a picture of a photo I took sometime around 1983 or 1984 of that cottage.)
In Ebb and Flow, one of the main characters, Malachi William Powers, is a 130ish-year-old werewolf from Lunenburg, Nova Scotia…who, in fiction-land, would be an ancestor of mine. My grandmother was a Powers; William is a name given as first or middle name to a few of my relatives on that side of the family. (I just really like the name Malachi.) Because of that, when I needed a relatively isolated place for lone wolf Malachi to live, I chose my grandparents’ cottage. I believe, though I may be incorrect, that the cottage was built by my grandmother’s father, meaning it was a Powers family cottage.
In real life, the cottage was sold when I was in my teens. I haven’t been inside since, and the exterior doesn’t resemble the cottage I remember visiting. But in fiction-land, in the Ebb and Flow series proper, the cottage’s appearance is what I recall from the late 1970s-early 1980s. In Malachi’s prequel to the series, Hooch and Howls, the cottage isn’t as clearly described but resembles what I imagine it would have looked like if it was there around 1930, when Hooch takes place.
The first two books of the series, Ebb and Flow, and Future and Past, have the Canada-set parts of the story taking place at the home of Silas Creighton, the Anax (werewolf ruler) of Canada, who lives on a private island in Mahone Bay. Creighton being another name from my childhood; though not related to me as far as I know, the Creighton family was close with the Powerses and Pykes, and as in the books, the Creightons owned the cottage next to the one my grandparents owned. (I think Creightons bought the cottage when my grandparents sold it, but again, I can’t remember for sure.) In Ebb and Flow, Malachi briefly brings his mate Quinn to the cottage just to show it to him and pick up some clothes, but we don’t get the full picture of it.
This third book, Storm and Shelter, which I’m currently working on, starts in Massachusetts, where nearly the first half of the story takes place, then goes briefly to Silas’s…and then the rest of the book takes place in and around Malachi’s cottage when Quinn finds himself unable to tolerate staying at Silas’s after the events of Future and Past. Which means I’ve spent the past three and a half weeks diving into my admittedly not entirely accurate memories of the cottage and its appearance and trying to put the description into words. I do have a few pictures of the interior and exterior of the place from my childhood, but a lot of the writing is just relying on my memory.
In my childhood, that cottage was one of my safe places. One of the places where I knew I would be treated with love, and where the parent who constantly criticized and yelled at me would be shut down by my grandparents. Where I learned how to construct a wooden bench that was so rickety that only my then-2-year-old cousin could sit on it. Where I spent hours in the sand and the salt water.
In writing this book, I’m giving my inner child back that safe place, at least for a little while, as well as giving the home in fiction-land to one of the favorite fictional couples I’ve created, Malachi Powers and Quinn Boucher. Some of the description in the first draft of Storm and Shelter will probably be cut out for length and pacing, but for now, I’m indulging it.

New Story!

Posted on by karennacolcroft

This is going to be a short entry; I’m sick (yet again…the joys of working in childcare, the kids are wonderful but also germ factories) and don’t really have the brain power for a longer entry.

I have a new short story! If you aren’t already subscribed to my newsletter, you can visit my Free Story page to sign up for the link to download Heart and Home, a prequel to Ebb and Flow. After four weeks of captivity and abuse at the hands of a sadistic Beta and his even more sadistic packmate, Quinn Boucher escapes on full moon night and runs across the U.S.-Canada border into North Dakota, where he finds sanctuary with Kinney Logan, the Beta of Prairie Pack. Kinney and the pack take Quinn in with no strings attached… but when it comes to Kinney, Quinn *wants* strings.

Anyone who’s read Ebb and Flow or Take Some Tahini knows Quinn’s backstory. While Heart and Home begins on the night of Quinn’s escape and therefore doesn’t show the abuse on-page, Quinn’s flashbacks and memories are depicted, with as much vagueness as this author could manage. The story could be triggering to those who have experienced sexual violence, so please read cautiously if you choose to read at all.

If you *are* subscribed to my newsletter, please don’t sign up again; I’ll be sending out the link to download the story in the February 13 newsletter.

Still Writing

Posted on by karennacolcroft

I live in the United States. By now, I think everyone in the world knows what’s happening here. I’m privileged to live in a “blue” state, i.e. one where policies tend to be relatively liberal and actually in the best interests of most residents, but even here we’ve been seeing signs that the “executive” orders passed this past week are having an effect. (I’m also privileged to have dual citizenship, and while I’m currently planning to remain in the U.S., I’m making sure I have all my documents in order in case I need to move to my other country…)

I don’t often get political. That isn’t because I don’t care or don’t have opinions; it’s because in addition to caring and having opinions, I have mental health issues, and I choose to prioritize my mental health over expressing opinions online and getting excoriated by those who disagree with me. And sometimes by those who *agree* with me, because they misunderstand the way I’ve phrased something.

In the meantime, while I’m privately processing the hellscape my country has become and figuring out how I can make things even a tiny bit better for people in my personal sphere, I’m also continuing to write. I write male/male romance. There are explicit sex scenes in most of my books. Which means I could very well be on the chopping block for “producing pornography” or whatever bullshit the current administration spews to find reasons to clamp down on those of us who write LGBTQ+ fiction–even *without* explicit sex scenes. Before anyone says fiction without sex scenes wouldn’t be considered pornography…as recently as ten years ago, I had a completely G-rated book, no sex scenes, not even a KISS between the main characters, that Amazon labeled “erotica” solely because the main characters were both men. (And that was released by a publisher…self-publishers get it even worse.)

But I’ve been writing most of my life, other than the several years when I wasn’t able to write because my mental health wouldn’t allow it. Most of my life, writing has *helped* my mental health. And I’m not giving up on my werewolves or my books just because the country I live in has become this… place. I don’t even have words for it.

I Released a Book!

Posted on by karennacolcroft

Of course, if you follow me, you probably already know that I released Bring on the Broccoli (Real Werewolves Don’t Eat Meat 7) on January 9. I’m very happy at the reception it’s had so far. It received a 4-star review from Joyfully Jay, people are buying it, and I’m really glad to have Kyle Slidell’s point of view back in action given that the last three RWDEM books were from his mate Tobias Rogan’s point of view.

It’s been a long week and I’m really tired, but I’m excited to have released this book. It’s available on Amazon, and book 8, Sorry About the Seitan, which will be released in July, is already up for preorder.

Upcoming

Posted on by karennacolcroft

It’s hard to believe it will be 2025 in just a few days! While I don’t know exactly what the year holds for me–and, after the past few years, don’t want to speculate–I have made some writing and publishing plans.

On January 9, I’ll release Bring on the Broccoli (Real Werewolves Don’t Eat Meat 7). This book is the first one since book 3 that’s narrated by Kyle Slidell, the vegan werewolf who gives the series its name. I anticipate unhappy readers due to something that happens in the story, but I don’t want to give spoilers. Bring on the Broccoli is available for Amazon preorder and will be available in Kindle and paperback formats.

On April 10, I’ll release Future and Past (Ebb and Flow 2). This is, obviously, the sequel to Ebb and Flow, continuing Quinn and Malachi’s story because the two of them won’t stop “talking” to me. Quinn is sent back to Nova Scotia to be with his mate after a PTSD flashback causes him to lash out at Kyle.  Quinn worries that it’s punishment–that Tobias sent him away and won’t let him go back to the States–but it is just so he can rest and get help for his PTSD with Malachi there to support him. Future and Past is also available for Amazon preorder, because for a change I got my act together early. To lead up to this release, I also redid the Ebb and Flow cover.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And on July 10, I’ll release Sorry about the Seitan (Real Werewolves Don’t Eat Meat 8). This one takes place around Christmas, so of course I’m releasing it in July… Tobias is already struggling, and his stress and PTSD worsen when the Alpha who took him in after he was changed at age 15 declines into severe dementia and is no longer capable of ruling his pack–which, in the werewolf world, means he can’t be allowed to live. Sorry About the Seitan also is available for Kindle preorder.

I’ll also have a release in October 2025, and at this point I’m planning on that being book 3 of Ebb and Flow, but I won’t know that for sure for a few more months.

I hope your 2024 comes to a peaceful end and your 2025 brings you all good things. And books. Lots of books.

There’s Something In My Eye…

Posted on by karennacolcroft

I’m currently working on the first draft of Sorry About the Seitan (Real Werewolves Don’t Eat Meat 8), and yesterday I wrote a scene that almost made me cry. I guess it’s good if I can elicit that kind of reaction in myself; it might mean my readers will like the scene too.

I can’t say what the scene is, because it would be a spoiler. Even though the book won’t be out until July, by which time most people who read this will probably have forgotten, I want to avoid spoiling it as much as I possibly can.

What I will say: The book takes place at Christmas time, and the scene takes place at the Christmas get-together Tobias and Kyle throw in their new home. The tears are happy ones.

I’ll also say that Quinn is still working for Tobias and Kyle at this point in the series timeline, and Malachi makes a guest appearance.

(If you have no idea who I’m talking about, read any of the Real Werewolves Don’t Eat Meat books, especially Take Some Tahini, along with Ebb and Flow.)

I might not get a lot of writing done over the next couple of weeks, because it actually is Christmas time and I have to do family stuff. But I’ve made a lot of progress in this book (I started it two weeks ago, and I’m on page 66), so I’m hoping to keep the momentum going.

If my darn characters would stop making me have something in my eye.

xr:d:DAFBO-dpi3A:240,j:27902772136,t:22060514

It Was a Long Week…

Posted on by karennacolcroft

When I’m not writing books, I work at a daycare center. I’m usually only there about 15 hours a week; my job is to cover the lunch breaks of the full-time staff. But this past week, due to staff members being on vacation or out for other reasons, I worked 26 hours. Which doesn’t sound like a lot, but it was more than I’m used to. (I have chronic health issues that impede my ability to work; I can’t manage full-time at all, which is why I took a part-time job.) And I haven’t been sleeping well the past several days, so today, I’m completely exhausted.

On the plus side, though, I got through December 1. Two awful things happened on that date, in 2022 and 2023 respectively, so I was a little worried about how things would go. But I got through the day, and this year nothing awful happened. (Though arguably, the U.S. presidential election was an early horrible thing for this year…)

And despite having to work more this week, and spending a lot of my time at home trying to sleep, I managed to get a solid start on writing Sorry About the Seitan (Real Werewolves Don’t Eat Meat 8)! I’m very happy about that. So far, a lot of what I’ve written is backstory, which I’ll wind up removing when I edit the book.

A very short excerpt (unedited):

Some time later, I realized the room was a lot brighter than it had been. I’d slept so deeply I didn’t remember any dreams, which was probably a good thing. My nightmares didn’t affect me as much as Kyle’s and Quinn’s affected them; I’d had decades to get used to them and to work through some of the trauma that spawned them. But that didn’t mean I enjoyed having them, and a night without any that I recalled was a good night.

Beside me, Kyle still breathed evenly. Either he was still asleep or he’d chosen to pretend he was. I didn’t need to know which. During the night, we’d rolled away from each other. I debated waking him for some cuddling—and possibly the enactment of his promise—before we went downstairs for breakfast, but a glance at my phone showed that we didn’t have time. The fact that the sun was up on a December morning when sunrise was after 7 a.m. should have clued me in to the fact that I should have already been downstairs.

I rushed through cleaning up in the bathroom that adjoined our bedroom and pulled on slacks and a sweater. Ordinarily, what I wore in the morning didn’t matter much. I kept things as informal as I could, especially at mealtimes. But with Justin scheduled to arrive within a couple of hours, I had to look more official.

I wasn’t a fan of “official.” But it was part of the cost of being the Anax.

First Draft Done!

Posted on by karennacolcroft

In October, a week or so after I released Ebb and Flow, I started writing the sequel to it, which is tentatively titled Life and Time.

Yesterday, I finished writing that sequel!

I think that’s one of the fastest first drafts I’ve ever done. And I’m pretty happy with the story, though there are a couple of dangling plot threads I’ll need to remove when I edit the book. That’s the result of thinking I knew where the story was going and then having the characters completely take over.

I’m going to be pushing myself with this book, because it’s planned for release in April 2025, so I want to make sure I get all of the editing and so forth done. But given how fast I wrote it, I’m hopeful the editing will go smoothly as well.

I loved being back in Quinn and Malachi’s world, and finishing the first draft was rough because I didn’t want to leave them. So there’s more than likely going to be another book in the series, but I haven’t planned that yet….

The Best-Laid Plans…

Posted on by karennacolcroft

I try to plan in advance what books I’ll be working on and when.

If you’ve followed me for any length of time, you’ve probably noticed that those plans often get changed.

This is partly on me. Sometimes I bite off more than I can chew, so to speak, and plan too many projects in too short an amount of time. That was the case this year, when originally I’d planned to release 6 books. Accidentally deleting my Amazon account back in May and having to republish everything slowed me down. So did struggling to write the first draft of Bring On the Broccoli (Real Werewolves Don’t Eat Meat 7), since having to scrap most of the original draft and start the whole book over ate into the time I’d set aside for a different project. Which is why Ebb and Flow, originally intended as a September release, ended up being released in October instead.

Another thing that contributed to the change in plans was that two of the books I’d originally intended to release this year weren’t actually paranormal romance. I wanted to rerelease my Can’t Drag Me Down series, three contemporary romance books originally published between 2013-2016. The series was another example of changes in plan; I’d spoken with my editor at the publisher where these books were being published (Loose Id) and discussed at least two additional books in the series, but right about the time I started working on book 4, I started having panic attacks when I sat down to write anything romancey. Then Loose Id closed its doors, so Can’t Drag Me Down wound up being only three books, each of which follows a different drag queen from a club in Boston.

Book 2 of that series, Last Chance Tattoo, takes place in Ludington, Michigan, but the drag queen main character came from Boston. If I’d rereleased the books as planned, I intended to rewrite Last Chance Tattoo to take place in western Massachusetts instead. I also would have ended up doing some rewrites to the other two books to accommodate Remington Real, the drag queen character introduced in Fill the Empty Spaces. The main characters of Can’t Drag Me Down make walk-on appearances in Spaces, and I’d justified rereleasing CDMD by the fact that the series is now directly tied to Fill the Empty Spaces, which *is* paranormal.

But I ultimately decided against doing those rereleases, at least this year. There were several factors in that decision: First, as noted, Bring On the Broccoli took much longer for a workable first draft than I’d anticipated, which took away time I’d budgeted for doing the CDMD rewrites. Second, CDMD is not a paranormal series, despite the tie-in with Fill the Empty Spaces. When I was writing for publishers, a decade-ish ago, I wrote both paranormal and contemporary romance, though even some of the contemporaries had minor paranormal elements. But when I relaunched as Karenna Colcroft in 2022, I planned to focus only on paranormal.

Also… werewolves.

Fill the Empty Spaces is the only book I’ve released since 2022 that *doesn’t* have werewolves, and even that actually does. (Suzannah Daigle, the Boston North Pack healer who appears in some of the Real Werewolves Don’t Eat Meat books, makes a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo appearance in Spaces, in the scene where Del breaks down in Piers Park. In the original draft of Spaces, there was even more of a tie-in with RWDEM characters, but I cut that out in the final draft because it was bogging down the story.) Of the other books, 6 are directly part of Real Werewolves Don’t Eat Meat; the Chance Met duology is connected to RWDEM since one of the main characters of Chance Met is a secondary character in RWDEM; and Ebb and Flow is an intentional spin-off from RWDEM. Hooch and Howls is now also connected (loosely) to RWDEM because the main character of Hooch is also one of the main characters of Ebb and Flow.

Because I am apparently completely incapable of not creating connections and threads between books, whether I intend to or not.

But the point is that of the 11 male/male romance books I’ve released since 2022, 10 of them have werewolves and are either part of or connected to the Real Werewolves Don’t Eat Meat series. Fill the Empty Spaces is the outlier, despite Suzannah’s cameo appearance, and its sales seem to reflect that. (A Fighting Chance, book 2 of the Chance Met duology, has sold more poorly than Spaces, but that in large part is due to it only being out for 10 days before I deleted my Amazon account, so it didn’t have as much time to gain an audience. And I’ve slacked on promoting it since I republished it.) So I’m kind of thinking that I need to embrace the werewolfery of it all and keep my books focused on those characters, either through continuations of RWDEM or books that are somehow connected to that series.

Which rules out Can’t Drag Me Down, at least for the time being. It also rules out Dawn Over Dayfield, my suspense-with-romantic-elements novel, which I’d slated for rerelease in April 2025. Dayfield is also not paranormal, but because of the historical aspects of the story, it *feels* paranormal to me. It’s also one of only two of my books to have won an award, first place in the Mystery category of the 2016 Florida Authors and Publishers Association President’s Book Awards. (The other book to have won an award is, somewhat ironically, Fill the Empty Spaces…) But if I’m focusing on werewolves, Dayfield doesn’t have a place. And also, after I released Ebb and Flow, the main characters Quinn and Malachi started whispering in my mind’s ear about a sequel… which I’m currently working on.

I don’t know if all the changes in plans I’ve made over the past couple of years means I need to try harder to stick to the plans I make… or means that I need to stop planning more than a couple-few months in advance. But either way, werewolves.