S.L. Armstrong's Blog, page 15

Recipe Monday: Lubee

I am from a Lebanese family. Well, on my father’s side. As I’ve said before, this allows me a wide range of food I adore from the Middle East. Lubee is one of those dishes that’s best when the weather is cool or cold out. Which means, living in Florida, I have very few days a year when this dish just hits the right spot. Can’t wait for Maine!

Ingredients:

1 large onion, diced (or 1 1/2C if pre-chopped. No using dehydrated onion!)

2 lbs London Broil, cut into cubes

4 Tbsp butter

2 Tbsp oil

1 1/2TBSP cinnamon

2 15oz tins of tomato sauce

2 15oz tins of green beans

salt and pepper

(Note: You can use any kind of hearty, red meat you prefer, be it the traditional lamb, London broil, or even filet mignon. If you choose filet mignon, the preparation must alter so as not to overcook such a delicate cut.)

Add 2TBSP butter and 2TBSP oil to a 5 quart dutch oven pot on medium-high heat. Season your choice of meat liberally with salt and pepper. Add to pot in increments. A single layer of meat is best so the meat isn’t overly crowded. Brown meat very well before setting aside. Add another 2TBSP butter, diced onions, and 1/2tsp salt to pot and cook until soft. (If using pre-chopped, frozen onion, be sure to cook long enough that the liquid from the freezing process has cooked off.) Be sure to scrape the bottom of pot as you cook the onions in order to release the meaty bits left over from browning the meat (more flavor!). Once the onions are soft, add the meat back to pot (along with any juices). Incorporate 1TBSP of cinnamon, add water to cover the meat (just cover it!), cover with a lid, reduce heat to medium-low, and cook for 30 minutes.

Increase heat to medium, uncover, and add the tomato sauce and drained green beans. Cook uncovered until meat is tender and sauce is thickened (takes between 1 and 1 1/2 hours). Add more salt, pepper, and cinnamon to taste and serve over rice or pilaf (either homemade or store-bought).

St. Petersburg Gay Pride!

I won’t be there as the heat here in Florida is unbearable for me, and I’m a redhead so I burn like whoa, but! K. Piet and R. Armstrong (SMP Marketing Director and Webmaster, respectively) will be there! We have a booth, so if you’ll be at St. Pete Pride today, just come down to Booth #205, which is between 23rd and 22nd Streets. They’ll have books and posters and a mailing list giveaway and author packets, so be sure to stop on by for awesome fun with the Storm Moon Press team.

I’ll make them take pictures, too. XD Me, I’m here slaving away on typesetting and other mundane, not!Pride stuff, but that’s fine. I’m in the shaded, air-conditioned safety of my living room.

“Blood and Absinthe” Teaser

This is a short story currently available in our Love & Agony collection. It’s just a taste of a much larger world and series which K. and I hope to work on soon. So much writing to do and simply not enough time to write in.

—

“Ladies and gentlemen, the thrill of your life lies just behind this curtain!”

Lee eyed the poster for the attraction as the man went on about weak hearts or stomachs and children having nightmares. Too terrifying, too horrific for all but the bravest souls, he said, but Lee just chuckled at the painted demons on the poster. There were even a few people in the back giving pretty convincing screams, but he just wasn’t interested. He moved on, stand after stand, listening for a few seconds and considering before declining. He was nearly at the end of the midway, considering turning around and taking his chances with the horrors of the demon tent, when another voice caught his attention. He turned his head and stopped in his tracks so suddenly that a couple slammed into him from behind, and he stumbled, mumbling hasty apologies before stepping out of the center of the alley toward the stand.

The man in front of the tent was… well, he was stunning. There was no other word for it. His orange-red, wavy hair looked like flames in the low light, stopping just below his jawline, and his eyes—the color of honey—smoldered out at the crowd as he called out to the men specifically and twirled a scantily clad dancer with a gloved hand, pointing the tip of an elegant cane out over the gathered men, whose hoots and hollers only seemed to invigorate the dancer as she riled them up. Lee was standing at the foot of the raised platform before he even realized he had taken another step.

“Gentlemen! Le Carnaval du Diable is proud to offer you the chance to see the lovely Laurel, Eve, and Apple dance the sinful dances of the East! One dollar gets you in for thirty minutes of the most sinuous, tantalizing moves, taught by the scintillating Sultana Razia of India!” The man grinned out at the audience, and Lee stepped closer. The barker’s voice was almost hypnotic as he lowered the volume of his pitch, speaking to only those two dozen men who had gathered around him. “The Sultana Razia taught my girls to dance in such a way as to make a man’s loins burn without even a touch. Just one dollar, gentlemen, and you, too, can experience the delights of the East!”

Lee watched as the men handed over their dollar bills, the barker encouraging them at every turn, and then a scantily clad woman opened the tent flaps and smiled brilliantly. He barely paid attention to her, his eyes quickly drawn back to the barker. After the throng had been ushered into the tent, Lee took a breath and approached the man, his palms sweaty. Even before he could open his mouth, the barker was talking to him, though the man never looked up from counting the money.

“We only have room for twenty-five men per show. Come back in forty-five minutes, and I’ll guarantee you a spot.”

“No, thank you,” Lee said, his cheeks flushing. “That’s… not really my thing.”

The man looked up at that, and his eyes were even more beautiful and unusual up close. “It’s not? Laurel might take offense to you not wanting to see her tits.”

Lee could have sworn his face lit up like a beacon. “I mean no offense… I just…” Lee shook his head for a moment, trying to clear it enough not to come across as a bumbling fool. “Do you dance as well?”

The man’s eyebrow arched, and Lee couldn’t look away as something sparked in the deep, golden gaze. “A performance of mine would cost more than a dollar.”

Lee swallowed against his racing pulse, which was forming a lump in his throat. “Are you dancing some other night, then?”

“No.” The man’s tone was mild, but the amused smirk that tugged at his lips told Lee he was being laughed at. “One night only, sir.”

One night? The carnival was supposed to be there all week! If this man was only going to be here one night, then he had to act now. The time constraint made his heart pound, and he stepped a little closer. Well, he tried to step closer, but the rounded brass head of the man’s cane pressed into his chest, keeping him back. He craned his neck toward the entrancing man. “I have money. How much would your hour-long performance cost?”

“That depends. Would it be an audience of one?”

“Yes,” Lee whispered, nervously wiping his palms against his thighs, hoping he was reading the situation correctly.

The man considered. “One hour. Performance for one. Ten dollars.”

Ten dollars? Christ, that was two days’ wages. He’d saved for the carnival, and the man intrigued Lee, but ten dollars… Lee took a deep breath, pulled out his money clip, and slipped a ten dollar bill from the singles. After he put the clip back in his pocket, he held the bill out to the man. “I’ve… never done this,” he blurted out as the man took the bill.

“What? Bought a one-on-one performance from a carny?” The man laughed softly, and then called out to another man with many tattoos. They traded places, and then the man was leading Lee through the packed midway. “Or have you never had a one-on-one performance with a man?”

Condom Usage In Erotic Fiction, My Opinion

So, earlier this week, there were a couple discussions on condom usage in fiction. I, of course, need to add my two cents, that way my readers can decide for themselves if I’m an author they’ll want to continue buying from.

Safe sex in fiction, for me, is only as important as the story makes it. I don’t care if it’s a contemporary, PNR, or historical. If the characters and story itself wouldn’t call for safe sex, then I’m fine not seeing it among the printed words. Let’s be honest, anything pre-1985 isn’t going to offer much in the way of safe sex. Most of us didn’t worry about safe sex until STDs became prevalent. In fact, my mother has often told me that in her life prior to marriage (1960s-1980s), the only STD they worried about was pregnancy, and many girls still risked that. Hell, even post-1985, it took a while before safe sex was really preached.

Depending on the characters, the setting, their background, safe sex might not realistically enter their minds. It doesn’t make them less, it makes them products of their time. My generation (in their late 20s-early 30s), I think, would have more of a focus on safe sex because that was drilled into me in middle and high school. It wouldn’t occur to me to have a sex partner and not use a condom.

However, the newer generations? The generations where religion and abstinence only reign? You bet your ass I wouldn’t think a 20-year-old who had been taught everyone else was a virgin wouldn’t think of using a condom. Not everyone has progressive parents who feel comfortable saying, ‘The government is full of morons, and not everyone saves themselves, so use a condom, Junior.’

The misconception here is that authors have responsibility beyond entertainment. Now, we can argue author responsibility until we’re blue in the face, but I have the opinion that authors have no more social responsibility than they care to have, and that whatever responsibility they do have fluctuates. It is not my job to teach through my books. It’s just not. I don’t have to show condom usage in case an eighteen-year-old decides to pick up my fictional book and use it as a sex manual. The responsibility for teaching that person about reality, safe sex, unplanned pregnancy, and STDs is with that person’s parents, not a faceless stranger who wrote a fictional book.

Do I take some responsibility onto my shoulders? Yes, when I choose to. When I wrote Catalyst, I accepted the responsibility to show the degeneration of an addict and how hard it was for him to climb back out of the hole he’d dug. When I wrote Mae, I took on the responsibility to show what unprotected sex could lead to, the hard life of a single, poverty-stricken teen father, and how there were no easy fixes in life.

But every book I write should not necessarily come with a moral checklist. In our upcoming 52 Weeks, we are exploring issues of non-consent, TPE, and cross-dressing, and not always in the most positive or healthy light. That’s our choice, because it serves the framework of the story we want to tell. The idea that a budding, young cross-dresser might look to our story for guidance is ludicrous. We don’t write self-help books. We write fiction, and fiction thrives on conflict and disaster. It’s not some boring utopia where everything is happy and light and nothing ever goes wrong.

As authors, we have to decide what parts of our characters’ lives to show: the parts that readers want to see and that serve to advance the story that we want to tell. We don’t often see characters in romances going to the bathroom, or tossing and turning in their bed, or standing in the grocery store debating whether or not it’s worth paying an additional 30 cents to get 6 more ounces of laundry detergent. And the reason we don’t see it is because, in most cases, it doesn’t advance the story. You can bet that if you do see a scene like one of those in a story, you’re seeing it for a reason. And it’s the same with showing (or not showing) condom usage. If it’s not shown either way, then you as the reader are free to make whatever assumption you like because it doesn’t affect the story any more than what color underwear the character is wearing or what the thread count of his sheets are. Just because attention is not gratuitously called to something doesn’t mean it isn’t there — it simply means that it doesn’t matter in the context of the story.

I will not apologize for not having my characters explicitly use condoms when the story doesn’t call for it simply because some readers feel condoms should ALWAYS be included in romance and erotica. Sometimes, fiction is just fiction. Entertainment. A means to get away from real life and immerse ourselves in the romance and fantasy of characters not us. Sometimes, those characters use condoms, sometimes they don’t, and it shouldn’t make them unlikeable characters when they don’t.

Recipe Monday: Vichyssoise

In Florida, cool food is awesome, in my opinion. I hate living here. I live here because I’ve not had the money to move north. By next summer, though, the three of us are out of here. We’re heading up to Maine. But, until then, we have this hot, humid

Ingredients

3 leeks, chopped

4TBSP butter

5 large russet potatoes, chopped in a large dice

32oz chicken stock

salt and pepper to taste

1C whole milk

2C heavy cream

Melt the butter in a 4-5qt pot. Add leeks and saute until soft. Add potatoes, chicken stock, salt, and pepper. Cook until potatoes are soft. Puree in a blender batches until smooth. Put in a container and refrigerate. Once cold, add milk and cream. Add more cream or milk if soup is too thick. Serve in chilled bowls with fresh pepper and sliced green onions. Keeps in the fridge well for a few days, but no more than a week.

“Immortal Sonata” Teaser

This is a long time in the future, but it’s something K. and I have been messing around with. It’s a trilogy that revolves around Dorian Gray, Basil, and the choices both of them made. It takes place in a paranormal-like contemporary world where most things are the same as they are for us… except ghosts and magic exist. This is shortly after Dorian and Gabriel meet. Dorian almost ran over an absent-minded Gabriel who walked out into the street in front of his car. Please, keep in mind this is very rough, first draft stuff. Enjoy!

—

The worst thing about being a paranormal peon: he made so little that he always had to have a second job. Being in a foreign country, even an English speaking one? Yeah… manual labor without much interaction with people was the way to go. He’d been lucky to get a job at all, even if it was vaguely humiliating. Pulling his cart up to the door of the penthouse, Gabriel knocked. “Housekeeping!” When no one answered, he slipped his master key card into the lock and entered, trying not to whistle at the luxurious surroundings. Definitely better than his closet of an apartment. He started stripping the bed, ignoring the scent of sex that wafted up. Hey, if he were this wealthy, he probably wouldn’t have any trouble getting laid, either.

“What?” A familiar British voice rang out behind Gabriel. “Did you hit your head on the tarmac when you fell? Followed me back to my hotel?”

Gabriel jumped and spun around. As the man leaned against the wall, wrapped in a towel with a smirk, Gabriel’s heart fell. Still, he offered the wealthy man from his near-car accident a painfully saccharine smile. “Housekeeping. At your service.” He couldn’t help but swallow thickly at the sight of the man almost naked, slightly flushed from a shower. Fuck, but he had a gorgeous body. Someone that hot wouldn’t need money to get laid. He blinked, averting his eyes in order to stop staring, but the vision of the man was emblazoned on his brain.

Smooth, Gabe… Real smooth, Michael cracked from the ether.

The muscle in Gabriel’s jaw twitched as he tried to ignore his dead twin. This was the last thing he needed today. The man had almost killed him. Well, if he was honest, he’d almost killed himself, just stepping out into the street without looking. Then, the man laughed. The sound was low, rich, and the sound wrapped around Gabriel, made his heart pound. And then the man pulled the towel from his body and tossed it at him.

“Housekeeping. So this isn’t a little holiday, American?” he asked, walking to the wardrobe.

Gabriel scrambled catch the towel. The man was naked. He’d caught a glimpse of his front, but his backside… God, his ass! It was the most perfect ass he’d ever seen, and after living in the Bay Area, that was kind of saying something. “I… uhm… No.”

Shit. Gabriel closed his eyes. Now he was hard. One long look at the man’s ass, and he was hard as stone. He tried to hide behind his cart, distracting himself by switching out the used towel for a fresh one. Even Michael whistled softly in his mind. His straight as an arrow twin found the guy whistle-worthy, and that, Gabriel thought, sort of sealed his fate. His face was flushed, heart pounding, and he tried so hard not to look up from the towels and little guest shampoos.

The man turned around, holding up two shirts, his front completely exposed. He wriggled the hangers a bit, asking, “Which one? Scarlet or cobalt?”

Gabriel stared and blurted out the first word that came to mind. “Cock.” He hadn’t thought his face could get any redder, but then it did. And he vaguely thought he’d throw up right there. “Red. The red one’s… nice,” he managed.

Somewhere in the ether, Michael snorted. If I had a gun, I’d just shoot you now.

“Thanks,” Gabriel breathed, closing his eyes.

“Cock.”

Gabriel opened his eyes to see the man slowly approach him wearing just the unbuttoned red shirt.

“You like my cock, American?”

“I… I can’t…” Gabriel froze, and his heart pounded in his chest. Oh, God, he was going to be fired. Two days on the job, and he was already going to be fired. And the scarlet cloth against that perfect skin, the man’s tone, and the smooth way he walked… It had to be the most erotic he’d ever seen someone be. Pure seduction, and it made his cock twitch in his work trousers.

The man stopped just a breath away from Gabriel and lifted a finger, drawing it down Gabriel’s cheek and throat. “Can’t what, lovely?” he purred.

Gabriel gasped softly and felt his lower lip tremble. “I’m not… supposed to talk to you.” He gripped tightly at his cart, even if it wasn’t placed between them and didn’t hide his obvious arousal. This wasn’t a porno. The housekeeping boy didn’t just have sex with the hot guy in the penthouse. It didn’t work that way in real life.

A chuckle, deep and pleased, rumbled up out of the man. “I am a… special… guest.” His finger teased the hollow of Gabriel’s throat. “What’s your name, pretty boy?”

Had the guy just complimented him? His cock seemed to think so. Gabriel swallowed again and licked his lips. He felt too hot, his throat too dry. “Gabriel,” he croaked.

Good. At least you got that answer right, Michael grumbled.

“Gabriel,” the man said, seeming to roll his name around on his tongue. “An archangel.” His fingers trailed down the uniform shirt Gabriel wore. “My name is Dorian, pet.”

“Uhm,” Gabriel panted. “Hi.”

Dorian leaned in, lips barely brushing at the side of Gabriel’s throat. “Articulate.”

Gabriel shuddered, the softest of groans making its way past the lump in his throat. He swore that he’d come in his pants then and there. “Nice to… meet you, Dorian,” he whispered.

Dorian’s breath teased up Gabriel’s throat, over his jaw, toward his lips. “The… pleasure… is mutual.”

Gabriel let go of the cart and hovered his hand above Dorian’s chest, that thin stripe of bare flesh between the open edges of crimson fabric. He looked down for a moment and saw how true Dorian’s words were. Dorian’s cock was hard, fully erect and leaking, just like his own cock inside his uniform pants and boxers. “Dorian…” The name alone was like a lewd caress, and he turned into Dorian’s feather-light touches, sealing their lips together.

Dorian’s fingers combed through Gabriel’s hair as his tongue slipped between Gabriel’s lips. Fuck, he’d never been kissed like this! It was sinful, enough to steal Gabriel’s breath away. In the middle of the kiss, though, Dorian slid a hand between them, cupped Gabriel’s cock through the fabric of his trousers. He squeezed gently as he fed a moan into Gabriel’s mouth. That moan was matched by Gabriel, only Gabriel’s had a desperate, high edge to it. He arched into Dorian’s touch, need rushing through him.

God, was this really happening? Gabriel felt dangerously close to coming in his pants, fully clothed, Dorian’s knowing hand and tongue working him with devilish skill. He held tightly to Dorian’s shoulder, his other hand moving from Dorian’s hip to his ass. The skin was smooth, perfect, and he gripped at it, loving the firmness of muscle beneath that soft skin. In that moment, Gabriel was sure he’d do anything for this strange man, in this foreign country, so long as he was given release.

Dorian pulled back, panting, nipping at Gabriel’s wet lower lip. A wicked gleam lit up the dark eyes, and a lustful smile curved the bow-perfect lips. “Still want to change my sheets… or do you want to be spread out on them?”

“An Angel’s Soul” Now Available for Download!

So, the second story K. Piet and I wrote for the M/M Romance Goodreads Group’s Love is Always Write event. This one allowed us to play with angels again. I love our angels. When I initially created angels for our story Angel Lost in Love & Agony, I made them a merging of human, bird, and Other. Love them!

—

Cole had everything: a great education, his own company, money, and Daniel, his lover since college. But in gaining everything, he lost the one thing he’d been building that life for: Daniel. Now that Daniel has moved on, Cole is without direction or purpose. Turning to alcohol and drugs to fill the void left behind, Cole dives head first into a downward spiral, unaware that there is another who loves and cares for him.

As Cole’s guardian angel, Raziel has watched Cole since birth, and his love for his ward is deep and abiding. Witnessing Cole’s fraying life breaks Raziel’s heart, and when the thread that binds them together wavers during an overdose, Raziel breaks all the rules just to keep Cole alive. The consequences are unthinkable, but a life without Cole is a loss that Raziel simply can’t conceive. An angel’s soul was made to love, after all, and if he saves Cole, perhaps he can show Cole how the end of one great love doesn’t mean another waits patiently for him.

Get it at any of these retailers:

Storm Moon Press | All Romance eBooks | Rainbow eBooks | 1PlaceForRomance | Smashwords

Fat People Are People, Too

I hear you’re losing weight again, Mary Jane

You ever wonder who you’re losing it for?

I’m going to touch on something that is personal, political, and even has relevance in writing.

Weight.

Let me start by saying that until I was about eleven years old, I was thin as a bean stalk. Mum had to tie my clothes on me. But, I got my period when I was eleven, and within a year, I’d gained sixty pounds. Nothing about my life had changed. I was still active, playing with my friends, walking around my neighborhood, swimming. Nothing changed except my hormones.

The funny thing is? I remember being eight years old and Mum putting us on a diet. My brother and I were active kids, riding our bikes to and from school every day, playing in the neighborhood, PE every day, recess, dance classes… I’ve never been able to figure out why Mum did it, but we were on a pretty strict diet. I remember lunch being steamed potatoes, onions, and carrots and ‘dessert’ being ice milk.

I don’t know, but very early on, I was made aware of weight. Of how weight mattered to those around me. How my appearance made me a good or bad person. When I was twelve, Mum took me to a doctor because my weight had exploded and she knew I wasn’t eating more than what she gave me. The doctor told her I had to be sneaking food, stealing it from friends’ houses. Wow, really? I was humiliated and devastated. My body was doing something I could understand, but it was somehow my fault. I decided, if it was the food that was the problem, then I just wouldn’t eat.

And I didn’t.

I got good at hiding that I wasn’t eating. If I had to eat in front of people, I quickly excused myself to go to the bathroom and purge. I spent most of my teen years binging, purging, and starving, ruining my body because someone I trusted—my doctor—told me I was fat and shouldn’t be.

When I was twenty-two and unable to become pregnant with my husband, I went to see a OB/GYN specialist. He told me I couldn’t get pregnant because I was fat. The thing I wanted most—to be a mother—was denied me because I was fat. Didn’t matter I was barely eating 800 calories in a day, I had to be doing something wrong. I went from doctor to doctor, but I got the same line over and over. One OB/GYN even told my husband, while I sitting right there!, that I had to be lying to him, to my husband, and to myself. There was no way I wasn’t consuming 5,000 calories in a day. He prescribed me diet pills.

Here’s the second thing I’m going to part with: I self-injure. I started as a teen to deal with stress, and it carried over into my adulthood. During this time of my life, I was terrible to my body. Cutting it, denying it, hating it. I miscarried seven times. I never had the family I wanted, and I believed it was because I was fat. Doctors, friends, family, and the world at large had convinced me I was a terrible person with no control.

Why is all this coming up now? Because there was an author who said some very callous things about what other authors looked like and how it affected their enjoyment of the authors’ writing. If they were fat and ugly, the author didn’t want to know or else they couldn’t read their work. That was like a punch in the gut. Such harsh judgment! It brought up every bad feeling I had about myself and made me feel small, feel as if my worth was—once more—only in my appearance.

When I was twenty-five, I was directed to a Reproductive Endocrinologist who did a lot of uncomfortable tests. As I was laying on his table, the sonogram screen tilted to me, this man pointed out my ovaries. He showed me all the cysts littering them. I had Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome, and had since I was eleven or twelve. PCOS is a genetic disorder of the endocrine system. Genetic.

I won’t lie.

I cried.

I laid there on that table and I cried.

There was a name for the string of symptoms I had. There was a source. A reason. I thought having that, I would see myself differently. Maybe I did, but the world didn’t. People still stopped me in the grocery store to tell me I should have gastric bypass done. STRANGERS told me this! The audacity. And me being who I am, I smiled, blushed, and felt such humiliation, but I let them do it to me. I let them say their horrible, uninformed words to me.

I also discovered I had insulin resistance (a sister issue to the PCOS), an underactive thyroid, a low immune system, and a host of problems my years of starvation had caused. In the pursuit of being thin and beautiful, I had ruined my body. I can’t have children on my own. My body stores fat because it’s starved for so long. My heart developed an irregular rhythm. Because I was told at twelve I was fat because I was stealing food, I spent the next fifteen years starving myself in one way or another. If the doctor had simply said that the PCOS could be managed with some minor medication and the reduction of carbohydrates, I think I’d be a much different woman.

As it is, I’m an overweight woman who hates food as much as she loves it. I don’t eat in front of people, and rarely eat in public. I don’t go to restaurants. I think everyone is judging me when I eat. I don’t even know what hunger is anymore. I just don’t. I get a headache and nauseous. That’s what tells me I need to eat. No hunger pangs. Those were lost after the first year of starvation. I have to be pushed to have meals. I won’t eat if those around me aren’t eating, too.

What does this have to do with anything?

If you’re one of those lucky people who are thin because genetics loves you, recognize that blessing for what it is. If you’re thin because you workout every day, recognize your hard work. But please, don’t look at a fat person and think their experience is your experience. I have exercised, starved, fought, and hated for years. I will never be 165 pounds. And losing weight isn’t easy. The healthy food is expensive and time consuming. Sometimes, it’s just easier and cheaper to make a hotdog than to cook a breast of chicken, steam some veg, and make some brown rice.

Society needs to stop making those of us not within an unrealistic norm feel as if we’re disgusting monsters. We need to stop saying that size 0 is the goal. We need to stop judging people for their weight, appearance, gender, sexual orientation, or sexual identity. We need to stop judging.

How does it tie into writing? Well, next time you start writing, ask yourself if your hero or heroine has to be 130 pounds and buff? Does she really have to be 5’2″, slim, and busty? Does he really have to be 6’2″, muscled, and trim? No, they don’t. They can be pudgy, portly, or curvy. Maybe it’s time for the fantasy to come closer to reality so that all kinds can be found in fiction.

Just because someone doesn’t fit your ideal of beautiful doesn’t mean they aren’t beautiful. I’m a loving, caring, devoted person. I’m deeply emotional, highly imaginative, and I matter. I am a person, even if I’m overweight. I’m beautiful, even if I have fat rolls. I am more than my weight.

I am me.

“Jungle Law” Now Available for Download!

This was the free short story K. Piet and I wrote for the M/M Romance Goodreads Group’s Love is Always Write event. It’s one of two. This is our shifter one, and we’re still very happy with it. It’s different, and we love being different. We hope our fans enjoy it!

—

There is a rainforest in India that the wise poachers avoid. Few who venture in ever return, and those that do rarely come back all the way. The leopards in this forest have a protector who walks the worlds between leopard and man, but who calls the leopard kin and the human only enemy. When a frightened boy escapes from the latest hunting party to feel the protector’s wrath, he tracks the boy down, determined to leave no survivors. But when he comes fact-to-face with the exotic, defenseless boy, he cannot bring himself to end that life. Instead, what he has reviled for years becomes his constant companion. That is, until the humans dare to set foot in his forest once more.

Grab it for free from your favorite retailer.

Storm Moon Press | Rainbow eBooks | All Romance eBooks | BookStrand | 1PlaceforRomance | Smashwords

Recipe Monday: Chicken Teriyaki

A favorite quick supper around here is my Chicken Teriyaki. I created this recipe shortly after my gall bladder surgery in May of 2011. After the surgery, my body just couldn’t handle much fat in my food at all. Eating even a tablespoon of butter would make me feel miserable, so I needed something easy and low-fat but tasted wonderful. This fit the bill perfectly, and it’s been a regular meal in our house since!

It serves four comfortably, but can be scaled up or down as needed.

Ingredients

9 boneless, skinless chicken breasts

Salt and pepper

Teriyaki Sauce:

1/2C low-sodium soy sauce

1/3C water

2TBSP honey

1tsp sesame oil

1/4C light brown sugar

1 heaping Tbsp grated ginger

1TBSP grated garlic (4-6 cloves)

Generously salt and pepper the chicken breasts.

In a large skillet on high heat, melt 2 Tbsp butter and 2 Tbsp oil to a sizzle. Add the chicken breasts to hot skillet and sear on both sides. This won’t cook the chicken all the way through, which is good. It will cook the rest of the way as it poaches. Once chicken is thoroughly browned on both sides, remove from heat and set aside. Drain off excess oil when finished.

While chicken sits, finely grate ginger and garlic. This is best done with a microplane.

(Tip: Buy a whole ginger root. Use a spoon to peel the skin off the ginger. Freeze the ginger in large chunks. This will make grating it for recipes much easier and extend the shelf life of your ginger up to about a year in the freezer.)

Reduce stove heat to medium for the teriyaki sauce.

Add soy sauce, water, honey, light brown sugar, sesame oil, half the garlic, half the ginger, salt, and pepper to skillet and simmer on medium heat. Be sure to taste the sauce as you go and add the ginger and garlic gradually. You may want to vary things, so don’t be afraid to alter the recipe to your tastes! Once you’re happy with the flavor of the sauce, add the chicken back to the skillet (along with whatever chicken juices have seeped out), coat once with sauce, cover, and let simmer approximately 25 minutes. Watch the heat and liquid line to add water if needed.

While chicken is simmering, prepare your favorite accompanying rice. We prefer Near East’s Original Rice Pilaf, which is very simple to prepare and can serve 3-4 people, but any rice will do.

Once chicken is cooked, pull chicken from sauce (which will have thinned), and raise stove temperature to high. Reduce the sauce until it is thick and syrupy (5-15 minutes). Serve chicken over rice and spoon sauce back onto chicken. Garnish with sliced green onion and sesame seeds.