September 14, 2018
Lord knows I didn’t want to spend hours walking through the heart of Beijing yet there I was, trudging down dirty streets with a trail of sweat in my wake and an accumulating cloud of soot fogging the air around me. “Go see the Forbidden City,” my friend told me. “It is the one place you must go. You will have fun.” He was both right and wrong. He didn’t know my homebody spirit. He didn’t understand my preference to lounge. And yet I started my adventure marching by soldier after soldier as I left my hotel. I found a […]
August 27, 2018
Delmen MacDougall lived a relatively comfortable life for a dwarf in Steamtown. He had his enchanting shop, his flat, and his health. He even had a friend. All he had to do was follow Governor Law’s mandates to the letter. Non-citizens of Steamtown, called travelers, didn’t make sticking to the mandates easy. They robbed him. They killed him, forcing him to resurrect. They hurled insults at him, calling him an “NPC,” whatever that was. When one traveler attacked his only friend in the world, Delmen eagerly abandoned his mandates and fought back. He earned himself a bounty that forced him […]
July 14, 2018
Pride month is over. For me, it was relatively uneventful. Husband and I didn’t do a whole lot to celebrate beyond just being, you know, gay and married. A few weeks back, I offered you some insights on my feelings as a reader of gay fiction. Now I will discuss what I believe to be a more contentious topic — being an author of gay fiction in a market driven by M/M stories. First, I should begin by stating why I write the stories I do. I didn’t set out to be a writer of gay fiction. By that I mean […]
June 26, 2018
As many of you have heard, Amazon’s Content Review team has been a bit over the top this year. The running theory is that there is an illicit service being used by some unscrupulous and greedy authors to drum up page reads and boost their page ranks, and that these services borrow and read other authors books to appear legitimate. A great number of LitRPG authors are impacted by this. The response by the KDP Content Review team has been swift and unforgiving. Authors targeted by these services are having their page reads slashed by about 50% every month. They […]
June 25, 2018
It’s Pride Month, and that means it’s time for me to reflect on how far we’ve come… nay… how far I’ve come in my life as an LGBT American, particularly of the gay, Caucasian variety. In my life, I’ve been more privileged than most. I have a family who loves and accepts both me and my husband. I have a good job, a nice home, and enjoy folks not treating me harshly in public because of my gender, my age, my ethnicity, or my sexual orientation. On the street, you would think me just your average straight guy. As the […]
May 9, 2018
To my dearest readers, I’m writing you to let you know of some unsettling developments for my published stories. In the past, I’ve enjoyed participating in Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited Program for the Fjorgyn series and had originally planned to include other books in the program. But, through no fault of my own, Amazon KDP Support has threatened my account with suspension for activities I am not responsible for. I have not and never will violate any single platform’s marketing guidelines. Despite trying to clear up this mess, there is little to no guarantee it will not happen to me again. […]
April 28, 2018
This post isn’t a short story. It’s not a release announcement. It’s about book reviews. When I released Fjorgyn: A Rebel Rises, I found myself holding too tightly every single review, positive or negative. The positive reviews made me smile. The negative reviews made me wonder. Since then, I’ve learned to let go. Reviews aren’t for me, after all. They’re for readers to make an informed decision about whether or not to purchase the book. Books two and books three came out, and now reviews only get a cursory glance from me to determine reader mood and what they want […]
July 21, 2017
When I first started writing with the intention of self-publishing, I must say I knew absolutely nothing about cover design and the importance covers play in selecting stories. Then I scrolled through Amazon’s listings and realized one thing: there are a ton of shitty covers out there, some of them in the LitRPG space. Like… people slapping text on a photo in MS paint and calling it a day. I won’t share any of them, especially the LitRPG ones, because I don’t like talking smack about other authors — at least not on a public forum. I certainly was guilty […]