Working on a New Submission...

So I've been shopping around for e-publishers looking for contributions to anthologies, as I've heard this is a good way to meet the editors at e-pubs and give them a sample of your writing. Turns out, Total-E-Bound publishers is collecting submissions for (among other things) a "Men in Uniform" collection and is accepting M/M entries.

As far as these types of contests go, it's pretty much pure smut in a lot of cases - hot guys, hard bodies, military uniforms, and close quarters. But when theme "contests" or anthologies roll around, I like to be as creative and realistic as possible - I want to stand out from the other entrants and hopefully get published.

I've entered and won a few writing contests and lost a whole lot more, and the thing I learned from my losses was that trying to "fit in" with a genre by trying to write in the same style as the most popular authors there is the quickest way to failure. People can tell when you're phoning it in, and they're not pleased with that kind of writing. So I've given up that track, and now I'm just going to write in the style I'm most comfortable with. Perhaps this attitude will make me a pain in the ass to publishers, lol, but other methods just don't work for me.

It's amazingly difficult to think up an original porn story about men in uniform, though.

Better get to work.

By Any Other Name...

I've been lazy about updating this blog; I get completely sidetracked and months pass before I remember to write a post. I've been editing an older story of mine, and I plan to add to it until it's full novel length. It'll be the first novel length book I've written that isn't fan fiction, so it'll be interesting to see whether it actually gets done in any reasonable amount of time.  

So, I changed pseudonyms after releasing some titles on Amazon, and now I want to link them this one. I had a male pen name before - I thought I would sell more books that way - but I've since decided to shift to a female pen name, since most of the people in the m/m genre are women, and also it's kind of deceitful to fans.  My original pseudonym was Cody Richardson, and there are five stories published under that name.

They're all available on Amazon, and here are the covers for two of them. I had alot of fun designing these covers in MS word.:

The Lynch Pin is a short story about two boys from rough life circumstances who come together for comfort. It one of the most recent ones I've published (not that that means much; I haven't published anything since the spring, I think).

In Purple Candlelight was written on a whim, and it's one of my favorites. It was a lot of fun to write, and I got the idea while I was brainstorming about stories to enter into a Halloween contest on one of the first websites I ever wrote for. It was the first story I ever published to Amazon, and the first cover I designed.