Clancy Nacht's Blog, page 21

I’ll Be Your Man-Coming to a shelf near you

That’s right, I’ll Be Your Man is going to print! I don’t have an exact date yet, but it will be soon!

Here’s the cover flat:

Richard Lynch is a 50-something executive with an ex-wife he’s still hung up on and a son in grad school who only calls when he wants something. In his professional life, Richard’s successful and in control, but his personal life consists of little more than sitting down in front of the television set at seven and being in bed by nine.

Then he meets his son Kyle’s best friend and roommate, Paul Watkins, the handsome gay son of a former rockstar. Richard’s bland, predictable world is thrown into chaos by Paul’s sweetly determined pursuit of him. To some Richard’s new lease on life seems like a mid-life crisis and Paul’s infatuation seems motivated by daddy issues, but to Richard, Paul is his chance to explore a part of himself he’s kept buried all his life. With friends, family, and their pasts threatening to keep them apart, what will it take for each to become the other’s man?

Read an excerpt

Celibacy NOW is a Loose Id Bestseller

We got the note from our publisher that Celibacy NOW is this week’s best seller! Granted, the fact that it’s new helps quite a bit, but I’m still really excited about it. Gotta celebrate the little things.

If you haven’t checked it out, click the image to go to the website and get your own! Oh and it’s set in Austin, which is pretty fun. Starting to set more stories closer to home. What I liked about this was working in a bit of religion/spirituality into the mix. It’s not heavy in there, just a light sprinkling, but I did enjoy exploring some of that a little more than we have in the past. Guess that’s just part of writing in the Bible Belt. Seems weird not to mention it at all.

So check it out and happy 4th if I don’t see you before then (but I probably will, I have another big announcement I’ll post about soon.)

Out now: Celibacy NOW m/m interracial!

In order increase his commission on a condo sale, realtor Marshall Albright accepts a bet that he can bed Luke Withers, a computer programmer and evangelizing member of a “true love waits” singles group. The group, called Celibacy NOW, is led by Eric Jones, a shady older man who Marshall thinks is abusing his position in the group to date Luke.

It doesn’t take long before Luke finds out about Marshall’s bet, but by then Marshall wants more than a one-night stand. His jealousy toward Eric leads him to uncover that the man Luke trusts most may be dealing drugs to kids. Even if he’s blown his chance to be with Luke, Marshall worries for his safety. Can Marshall find a way to make things right and rescue Luke from Eric?

Cover Art by P. L. Nunn

Read an excerpt

Buy now at Loose Id

Bring your child to work day: validating the childless life since inception

So, here’s the thing. I don’t like children. Even when I was a child, I was like, “These people are kind of immature.”

Okay, that’s not really true. I’m okay with children. I’m okay with dogs. I don’t really want either because I find them too high-maintenance.

The difference is, no one gives me their Knowing Looks and assures me that someday my biological clock will go off and I will want a dog.

The magic of bring your brat to work day is that all of those people around me who assure me that their children are angels get to endure my raised eyebrows until they are Truly Embarrassed by their offspring. That said, some people do have some pretty cool kids in spite of their total lack of coolness. I don’t even blame the kids for their bad behavior here, really. It’s annoying, but the truth is, I hate being here all day and I’m paid for it. I can’t imagine losing out on a day of summer freedom to go to someone else’s boring job. You’d better believe I’d be acting out. I kinda want to act out anyway.

But here’s the thing that really freezes my ovaries: kids bullying a bus monitor and everyone wants to lynch the parents.

Because, as everyone knows, kids learn everything at home. Like Dahmer’s parents who were famous cannibals. There are no bad seeds.

And even so, how those kids were behaving isn’t all that different than what I remember from childhood–on both receiving and giving ends. I think I grew up to be reasonably sensible and now I look back and think, “Jesus God, that was horrible. I need to friend that girl on Facebook and give her lots of Farmville presents after I apologize for being such a cunt.”

Because the problem of youth is that it’s wasted on tiny little psychopaths who don’t know any better. They can hurt and be hurt but haven’t quite developed that “association” muscle that says, “oh hey, my words have power, too!”

Granted, seeing another person cry should trigger some sort of “holy shit, I’m an asshole!” alarm, but the reason we send kids to school is because they’re not born knowing everything. Even adults still get to enjoy sensitivity training. Hell, there are times I say really boneheaded things I only thought about while they were coming out of my mouth.

So anyway, what these kids did was undeniably icky, but unforgivable? Yeah, sign me up for that society. You wanna punish the kids and their parents? Make them spend time together. If today’s exercise in family togetherness is any indication, that’s probably the worst thing you could do.

Thoughts on m/f v m/m

Not for the first time I saw a m/m writer on my FB list asked by a fan to write m/f. I was actually asked to do the same by one of my editors.

I did it and I’m fairly pleased with how it came out, but it circles back to the question of why would people ask m/m writers to write m/f?

Obviously I can’t answer that for everyone. The answers are as diverse as why authors write m/m. There are some who do it for the money. Some who just think it’s hot. I myself enjoy the availability of nuanced personal roles vs gender roles. I suppose I could write lesbians, but I think at the root of it, men can define their own roles to an extent.

Drag queens? Everywhere. Drag kings? Hello? Kings? Where are you?

Not saying that men who cross the gender divide have it easy, exactly. Just saying that there is a social framework that provides better context for a feminine acting man than a masculine acting woman. At least, that’s been my experience.

I could go on about “oh the troubles I’ve seen,” but that’s not today’s question. Today’s question is: Is it possible that m/m writers get propositioned to write m/f not because of connecting bits, but because there’s a real hunger out there for more role-balanced relationship fiction?

I think chicklit was supposed to quench that thirst, but those I’d seen had a Mary Sue character shitting all over men up until the very end where the stories reverted back to bodice ripperland. I’d start stories and think, “Jesus Christ, what a raging bitch. Why the hell would anyone want a piece of that?”

I see a lot of “she won’t take any crap from anyone” and it doesn’t make me think girlpower. It makes me think “jerk.”

One of the things I liked about the “Buffy” series was when she did have boyfriends and there were some role conflicts because she really was a very powerful woman. And she couldn’t just not be a slayer. It’s a really hard balance to strike and probably why I don’t write it very often.

In “A Model Boyfriend,” I tried to have the m/f protagonists come together as equals. They’re both sort of trapped in relationships with very defined roles (this is all subtext, I don’t make a huge deal of it) and find each other and how they can fit in a more balanced way. I’m pretty pleased with how it turned out.

I don’t have any current plans for more m/f. Writing it was a little outside of my comfort zone. But if I do, it’s likely these are the themes and issues I’ll be exploring.

Gender & advertising

So, here’s the thing. On my non-author Facebook, I changed my gender to male. I warned my husband before I did it, but I don’t think he would’ve noticed. He’s not the biggest FB user. Neither am I.

I don’t remember if I did it on my author one or not. I do recall thinking twice about it because I’m not F2M or trying to bamboozle anyone. I’m just sick of the ads targeted to women.

It doesn’t matter how many times I try to tell FB and their advertisers that 1) I am not a mother, and 2) I am not interested in returning to college. They were determined for weeks to spam me with an ad, “Mom, want to go back to college?”

You can tell those ads that you’re not interested and even ask nicely not to be shown them again. It doesn’t work. So finally, I made the choice to become a man.

Gender surgery in cyberland is pretty easy. It just took a few clicks. It didn’t seem to raise any particular alarms, just changed the ads I received and led to a couple of questions from old friends who always thought I was a little manish. Whatever.

I haven’t seen any notes about fathers going back to school now that the kids would theoretically be old enough to fend for themselves. I guess the assumption is that men would never sidetrack their personal ambitions for children, at least not in a way that needed to be mass marketed to. Sad, but I’m sure they have the demographic information to support that assumption.

Anyway, today I was checking my Yahoo mail and caught a banner ad for maxipads. Apparently now they stop 45% more leaks. Interesting number.

I used to work in advertising and was at one point very abreast of market research and such. A few years ago I read an article that said that 88% was one of those statistical numbers that people were more likely to believe. 80% wasn’t enough and 90% was unbelievable. So I had to wonder, had the threshold for believably gone down or was there actual tests involved in arriving at this number.

45%. That means that 55% of all menstrual leaks are still getting by! Messy!

I couldn’t help but picture the lab in which these studies would’ve been conducted in. Rows upon rows of crash test dummies with holes drilled into the bottom with IV drippers set to flow for slim, regular, and maxi sized flows.

They would all be wearing white cotton panties and a maxipad. All of them would show tell-tale red spots where the leaks occurred. Men (because hey, this is advertising and more people trust male scientists!) in white lab coats are all measuring the size of the leaks and noting them down, walking between old and new maxipads and doing mad calculations, coming up with averages, throwing out aberrational data and finally coming up with, yes! 45% fewer leaks!

“WE HAVE DONE IT!” the lead scientist screams, “WE COULD HAVE CURED CANCER, BUT INSTEAD WE’RE PROVING MAXIPAD VIABILITY FOR WEB ADVERTISEMENTS!”

Awesome. Because it’s not like those glorified Depends pads cost more than a new pair of panties or anything. Or make my twat sweat 88%* more because of all of the damned plastic rolled over my breathable cotton.

*using trusted percentage number. no crash test dummies were subjected to overheated genitals.

Even if it’s a little creepy to see banner ads created from the purses I was looking at on ebags.com two weeks ago showing up on new sites I’d never visited before, at least it’s not offensive. Even if I worry that the ever-growing profile of my shopping habits will enable Skynet to more efficiently profile me for the upcoming robot apocalypse by understanding which sweater from Coldwater Creek I’m likely to put on when it gets chilly in my underground bunker, I’m at least engaged in the process.

That’s all I really want. Skynet. No. Wait. To be engaged in the marketing. It’ll happen soon, I know. Until then, I’ll have to continue to deal with marketing based on my genitals. Oh happy day.

FREE Love is Always Write m/m short story on Goodreads: Predators

So, this image was part of my prompt for my Love is Always Write story. The other part was: “I’d love to hear the story about this man, and why he has so many tattoos. Are they from creating memories with his lover? Does he have a lover? I’d love to hear a bit about his story, and how he ended up posing for this picture. Who’s hands are hiding the rest of him from view?

(I’d love to see turtleshell bondage in this, but no pain, or a slave-master type relationship…maybe coworkers to friends to lovers or something like that?) “

I took some liberties with the prompt, as one does, but I’m pretty pleased with how it came out. You have to join Goodreads and then the m/m group in order to read it, but it is free. To whet your appetite…

His name wasn’t Feral. It couldn’t be. That wasn’t the sort of name that you gave to a child. That was a name someone earned. How he’d earned it, Levi could well imagine.

Levi was a long way from his high rise, from his flat screen, from his douche nozzle friends and the Occupiers who seemed to think anyone gave a shit about them. Silly fools who still believed they lived in any kind of democracy. Perhaps Levi had sold his soul for his place in boardrooms and silk bedrooms, but while money couldn’t buy happiness, it could buy a pretty good facsimile.

Or so he’d thought.

The streets grew darker, seemed slicker in this part of town, as if rain came down and stuck in the gutters. Oil slick. Sweaty. Grime so porous that it never let go.

Levi watched skeletons of buildings, burned out hovels and boarded up future sites of something fabulous and expensive. But for now, the streets belonged to another kind of one percent. A lower percent that only seemed to exist at night.

Levi didn’t have to tell the driver where to go or where to stop. He never even told him to show up. The driver, and by extension, Feral, just knew when it was time for a visit.

Or maybe Feral was only controlling Levi and everyone else simply executed his orders.

Any and all could be true. It didn’t much matter.

The black car stopped. Out of habit, Levi offered the man a tip and received a sneer for his trouble.

Levi let himself out of the car and looked up at the old familiar building. In daylight it should’ve been green and red with strange markings that were Hindi? Kanji? Cyrillic? They could’ve been in Aramaic for all Levi knew.

Every night when he was summoned, he tried to catch the address, tried to recall the building. But he could never find it on his own.

Fat, warm droplets of rain pounded his head and spilled like runny eggs down his face and the back of his neck. He ran forward to the imposing red door. It opened for him as it always did, like it was left unlocked. On a street where even demons feared to tread, leaving an unlocked door was unthinkable. Yet once Levi was inside, he felt no fear.

There were no other residents in the building other than a few rats that clicked and skittered between the walls. Feral lived on the fifth floor regardless.

Patchouli wafted down the stairs as Levi walked up to meet the source. The scent reminded him of the first time he’d met Feral.

Levi was at one of those tiresome clubs that his friends always dragged him to. They well knew that he was gay and yet carried on as if he were supposed find something charming in their misogyny and mistreatment of women. In their minds being gay meant that he should hate women. There was a big difference between a lack of sexual interest and hate, but that was too fine a line for coked-up bond traders to make.

He went along for the free drinks, free drugs, and free blowjobs they all eventually wound up giving him. All-in-all it had seemed satisfying enough. Until that night.

In spite of his long, platinum blond hair and almost unnatural thinness and height, Feral somehow managed to occupy the shadows. Such ethereal beauty seemed more likely to be a ghost or a hallucination, but before long Feral focused on him.

His eyes were black like they were all pupil. He wore long, dark purple robes that night and smiled curiously when Levi sat beside him at the dark corner of the bar.

Somehow Feral’s low, whispery voice penetrated the shouted conversations and booming bass of the club. Smoke wreathed him in a halo. Even now Levi couldn’t remember agreeing to leave and yet he’d found himself here in this mysterious building, being led by the hand to the top floor.

The boards creaked under Levi’s feet, bringing him back to the present. All the doors in the building were closed save one. Light flickered, unsteady and warm.

Before him on the ground were a cushion, a small basket filled with untreated hemp rope, and a single candle.

Feral never gave orders. He never gave ultimatums. He simply laid a task out for Levi to complete.

Read the rest of the story for free

Cover art for “Celibacy NOW” m/m from Loose Id

When player Marshall accepts a bet to bed Luke, a cute nerd who belongs to a “true love waits” group, he ends up wanting more than sex, but the group’s shady leader endangers more than their romance.

Art by P.L. Nunn

Coming in June from Loose Id!

A Pageant of Authors - Q9 & Q10

Reblogged from Allie Ritch, author:

“The interview is the single most important part of the pageant. It counts for 30 percent of your total score.”
“What’s the other 70 percent? Cleavage?”
- Miss Congeniality

***

It’s the final round. Time to focus on some really serious topics: cartoons and birthdays.

Question #9: Which cartoon character would you like to be and why?Although this question was free-response, three characters got multiple votes.

Read more… 1,483 more words

I'd be Superman.

“50 Shades of Grey” author claims not to be a writer

Let me say right now that I have not read Fifty Shades of Grey. I’m actually unlikely to read it because I have a very long to read list and that’s not really my thing. But never say never.

So why have I been following this trend? Other than being incredibly, seethingly, almost paralyzingly jealous of someone making that big of a hit in the erotic world, why bother? I don’t have an answer for that. It is interesting that something so genre is making such a big splash. It does shine a light in an area that may benefit everyone.

Anyway, it is my habit to watch the Today Show every morning and they had an interview with the author. She seemed very down-to-earth, just another author with a ready laugh and just about as mystified as anyone as to why this was all happening. Then she said it. She basically said she wasn’t really a writer.

This struck me as funny because while she may not have studied to write, or intended to write, or be the best writer evah, she sat down and wrote something, start to finish. Not everyone does that. Not everyone can do that. I know a lot of English majors who just can’t close the deal and finish a book. Maybe their phrasing is more elegant or their use of the language more mature, but not everyone loves literary fiction.

That’s the other thing that’s struck me. Twilight isn’t known for its awesome use of the language, either. As I see other authors fighting over bad cliches and other minor foibles of grammar, by and large, people don’t seem to care that much. This isn’t to say that we should all write poorly, but when I read someone talking about screaming over disembodied parts moving on their own, I think, “time for a bath and bowl, man.”

Okay, that was just some quick thoughts after the interview. Back to chapter 8 of the Black Gold sequel!