Rainbow Award Win!

What is this madness, people!?!

December is apparently a winning month for me. This is karma paying me in advance for the trials and tribulations that are coming next week, I'm sure. But still, wow!

Caitlin Ricci and I took first place in the Rainbow Awards' Best Lesbian Contemporary/Erotic Romance category for our novel Camellia. We also tied for third in Best Lesbian Novel overall. This is especially amazing to me because I don't write a lot of lesbian romance--hardly any--and most of you read me for my M/M, my science fiction, my...anything but lesbian romance. Especially contemporary, BDSM lesbian romance. And yet! People had really lovely things to say, which I'm going to share because darn it, I'm proud.

Camellia is a beautiful, delicate story that unfolds with the same languid, graceful pacing of a Japanese tea ceremony...and like the ancient art of the ceremony, will engage every one of your senses by the time it concludes. The memory will linger as well, with surprising, subtle strength. And lest you think this story is a snoozefest, I’d best mention the sex was hot enough to leave me wishing for a fan. No fooling.

I normally do not read lesbian novels or BDSM. The genres are not my usual preference. However, after reading this book (first in a series), I was genuinely pleased with the dynamic, tight writing style, the beautiful explaination and demonstration of the BDSM lifestyle, and the introduction into the beauty of tea service. Lucy & Danny are two characters I am willing to visit again & delve deeper into their story.

A book about tea but this romance is so much more than that. Lust swirled between these two characters that exploded off the page and kept me spellbound. With a promising ending, I wanted to read more about these characters and I dreaded getting closer to the end.

I know a book is good when it makes me a fan of a lifestyle that I usually don't find attractive or interesting. BDSM is usually not my scene at all and also if it's a setting so explored and exploited nowadays in literature, a really few reads have been able to engage me during their reading, but this book is one of the winners!

As a member of the BDSM community and a Dom I often cringe when I read books that contain BDSM/Kink elements. I especially cringe when these stories attempt to delve into the mindset of a Dom because they so often get them wrong. However, this story did such a gloriously, magnificent job on both of these jobs that I found myself hard-pressed to put the book down even when I had to go to sleep.


So, there you go! If anyone is interested in reading Camellia, you can find it at Less Than Three Press: Camellia. It's on sale right now, so good timing.

Well. So. Yeah, that happened.

**On a side note, I'd like to say that I've fulfilled a personal goal of mine by both winning a Rainbow Award and being featured in a personal defense magazine article on wielding a knife against a left-handed attacker. Yes, that's right, I've got layers!

Various Cool Things!

Well, damn.

So, last year Caitlin Ricci and I wrote Camellia, a contemporary BDSM novella with Japanese tea ceremonies and spankings. It did...okay, but didn't make a big splash and I was ready to fire off a quick sequel and move on to other things when, just recently, I learned that it earned an Honorable Mention in this year's Rainbow Awards. That doesn't make it a winner, exactly, but it does mean that whoever read it (two different people, I think, since we got two comments) liked it well enough to score it at least 36/40 on the judging scale, and left some lovely observations on it for us:

"Camellia is a beautiful, delicate story that unfolds with the same languid, graceful pacing of a Japanese tea ceremony...and like the ancient art of the ceremony, will engage every one of your senses by the time it concludes. The memory will linger as well, with surprising, subtle strength. And lest you think this story is a snoozefest, I’d best mention the sex was hot enough to leave me wishing for a fan. No fooling."

"I normally do not read lesbian novels or BDSM.  The genres are not my usual preference. However, after reading this book (first in a series), I was genuinely pleased with the dynamic, tight writing style, the beautiful explaination and demonstration of the BDSM lifestyle, and the introduction into the beauty of tea service.  Lucy & Danny are two characters I am willing to visit again & delve deeper into their story."

So wow. Apparently, those who went after this one have really liked it. I'm humbled and pleased, this is my first lesbian story in years, as well as one of my first forays into BDSM, and it seems to resonate. That's awesome, and I'm very happy about it. It's also been nominated for a Golden Crown Literary Society Award, which are awards given solely to lesbian fiction, so...gosh. Guys. Who knew? If you want to give it a try, you can find it on Amazon here: Camellia.

The other cool thing: another co-authored story now has a cover, and it's beautiful. I've got to hand it to LT3 Press, they listen to you when you describe what you want out of a cover and do their best to give it to you. Caitlin and I have a story coming out in an upcoming collection called Hunting A Lady, and here's it's pretty cover:

Oooh, shiny!

Yeah, believe it or not, I do have some new releases coming out in the near future. This story and my Riptide short will be released in the new year, and an M/M science fiction story of mine called Evergreen (which naturally is about the colonization of Mars) will be out in LT3's Missed Connections anthology in November. I've got the serial story, obviously, and several other novels picking at my brain, and a list of calls for submission that I'm set to wrangle. Basically, I'm getting my groove back. I lost it for a while in the crazy rapids of my life, but things are calming down a little bit and so am I.