T.C. Mill's Blog, page 4
September 24, 2025
New Theme Under Construction
September 2, 2025
Romance * Erotic stories * Queer Fiction * Poetry
Welcome to my hub on the web! For over ten years, I’ve been writing passionate fiction – romantic, erotic, and/or kinky – with stories published by Carina and Circlet Press as well as in several Best Erotica of the Year anthologies and other collections. You’ll probably like them if you share my interest in any […]
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Welcome!
Welcome to my hub on the web! For over ten years, I’ve be...
August 29, 2025
Things to Look Forward to
Hello, there. A long silence from me. Briefly put, I spent October and November of last year volunteering 20 hours a week in an effort to prevent a lot of things that have since happened. I answered phones for it! (And got to hang up on at least one memorable misogynist crank caller.)
This was on top of the volunteer commitments I already have, my day job editing, keeping my home more or less occupyable, and spending way too much time following news and commentary on the news.
I knew I was digging myself into a hole and figured it was worth it. I’d rather…much rather…have tried and succeeded, though.
Anyway, I’ve been crawling out of that hole over the past nine months or so. I’ve kept writing, and I’ve especially kept working on what I’ve affectionately dubbed “the WIP,” a duology of polyamorous hurt/comfort following a bisexual knight who’s been ransomed out of (metaphorical) hell and has to put himself back together, with the help of the commoner friend he’s falling in love with and the wife who has hesitated to consummate their arranged marriage for reasons of her own. There’s plenty of angst and plenty of sweetness to go around (and a fair bit of creative sex in the second book, once the slow burn of the first has ignited). It’s set in the fictional kingdoms neighboring Hartlorn, the setting of my Lady Elise Crayl series — and yes, Elise and Adam have roles as side characters. It’s been incredibly absorbing, but in the way of writing and self-editing, also pretty isolated.
My goal for the next few months is to have a more active writer’s presence out in the world, including this online portion of it.
-Longtime followers will notice I’ve revamped the color scheme of this blog; the lighter background feels more modern and easier to read text against.
-That’s a first step to the larger change of updating my WordPress theme. I have a few options for what I want to change to, keeping features like this blog and a portfolio option for sharing links to my books and stories.
-I’m going to increase the number of tags I use and make them more systematic to help readers find the subgenres they’re most interested in. For everyone’s convenience, I’ll also lean more on universal book links via Books2read.
-I’m also changing to a new newsletter provider, because I’ve found MailChimp increasingly unwieldy–especially the design features. This probably won’t change much for newsletter recipients, except you might hear from me more frequently if the process of writing an email doesn’t send me into overstimulated fight-or-flight.
-I worked with an editor to proofread the text of Teleny, the gay Victorian erotica that might or might not have been written by Oscar Wilde (and many others, in a round-robin approach). Soon I’ll have a cleaner version up — I mean clean in the formatting sense, obviously. The sex is still in there and as Victorian as ever.
-I’m going to put together a short ebook as a gift for newsletter subscribers.
-As I make backup copies of this website’s content in preparation for the theme change, I’ve found a number of stories have gone out of print. Online erotic fiction seems to be a shrinking field, sadly, although there are still some sites keeping it going. In addition to continuing to write and publish new fiction, there are some old pieces I’ll be looking to re-release.
-I’ve also been writing poetry, and getting increasingly serious about it. By which I mean, paradoxically, I’m having so much fun with it that I want to keep doing it in better ways, more often, and sometimes share what I write with other people. Some of the poems are romantic or erotic, some aren’t. I plan to keep publishing under this penname, not least for the freedom it gives to cover all kinds of topics. This week I signed up for an in-person workshop in my hometown where I can hopefully show some poems and ask “Does this make any sense at all?”
-I’m significantly expanding older fantasy story and plan to release it as a dark romance novella. Like the hurt/comfort WIP, there’s some excellent angst in this one (I affectionately call the two stories together my “boys in dungeons” pieces), although not so much sweetness. More desperation, enemies-to-lovers, a game of wits, suspicions of sorcery, two men trying to break each other’s wills, things of that nature. I wouldn’t say it’s entirely without tenderness, though. And I hope it’s as cathartic to read as it is to write.
-Then, yes, down the line there’ll be the novel-length releases (probably two of them)! Now that I know I can write long stories – the secret, it turns out, is to keep writing one chapter after another – there are some former NaNo projects I’d like to return to. But I don’t want to get too far ahead of myself.
-I also don’t want to get too far ahead of myself on the New Smut Project either, especially since I had to cancel the last go at Erato II thanks to schedule overwhelm (not helped by a bout of COVID, but not solely caused by that). Still, I have some thoughts on doing future anthologies in a way I hope will be short, simple, and sustainable for all involved. This definitely doesn’t feel like the right time to step back from publishing excellent literary erotica that challenges sex-negative narratives. And, as I think I said a few years back, I’d like to publish an erotic poetry collection… Oh, and I might need to move NSP’s newsletter from MailChimp to a platform I don’t find physically painful to use, too. Let’s see what happens.
-Lastly, I’m in edits for two short stories that’ll be released by a powerhouse of an online erotica site; excited to say more about that down the line!
October 23, 2024
“…Through Eden took their solitary way”
Hi, all! An exciting announcement to make: the tenth and final volume of Best Women’s Erotica of the Year, will include my Adam and Eve retelling! “With Wand’ring Steps and Slow” features my pro-non-procreative-sex agenda in a year I wish that agenda was less relevant.
WBE10 also features 20 other stories of ‘sexual healing and hotness.’ And if you’re on Goodreads 5 copies are available to win in a giveaway through October 31st!
An excerpt:
He folded it aside, out of the flames’ reach, and joined her close to them. The apron of woven vines around his waist shifted. She looked at it, around it, at what she knew she shouldn’t look at but wanted to see.
Nakedness…it did not feel like a name he had made, though he was the first one to say it. You shouldn’t see me like this, he told her after eating the fruit she shared. She had seen him naked before they learned what it was. But now they could no longer trust nakedness. Like they could no longer trust the fruits of the trees. The Voice that drove them from the Garden had issued, among its final commands, a warning against something called poison. No knowledge grew from the branches outside the Garden, but other fruit, it seemed, could be just as bad. Desire had somehow turned dangerous.
She closed her eyes and felt the fire’s warmth on her face. Muscles jumped in her calves after the long day of walking. Tired and thirty, she longed for the fruits of home. Safe ones they could bake to sweet mush, or tubers she could dig and roast tender. But not that one, honeyed-bitter, beautiful, cloying in her memory. Like the heavy taste in her mouth that formed as, walking away from the Garden, she had performed the action she and the man decided to call weeping.
Tired of new names, new experiences, she opened her eyes again to look up on the most familiar part of the world.
Other updates? Well, I’m currently volunteering locally with a political campaign and keeping white-knuckled optimism in these last weeks. I recently sent off the third draft of the first book of my planned duology to beta readers, which was exciting! And I’m just about to sit down to a revision session of the second book. Like this story, it’s about characters who come out of having a truly bad time, with all their dreams for the future and understanding of who they are shattered, and the lovely new things they build from the ruins.
May 15, 2024
First update of 2024
Oh my god, it’s the first update I’m making to this blog in 2024.
I’ve been alive and it’s not like things aren’t happening, just…quietly.
But it’s time to share some updates!
I’ve got at least two stories coming out this year, both in anthologies edited by Rachel Kramer Bussel. The first, in July, is my man-looking-beautiful-in-jewelry flash piece “Magpie” in The Big Book of Quickies (Bookshop.org link).
The second, “With Wand’ring Steps and Slow,” is Biblical fanfiction about Eve and Adam’s first time having sex out of being cast out from Eden. It’s also a love story to non-penetrative, non-procreative sex, and I can only hope it is less politically relevant when it comes out in December than it is now. It’ll be in Best Women’s Erotica of the Year, Volume 10 (Bookshop.org link).
Both men in jewelry and non-penetrative sex are not insignificant elements in the WIP, which I’m working on Draft 3 of. I’m still at the point where every thought and feeling I have seems to want to make its way into this story and that’s not practical, even if it is 2 books/250,000 words long.
Oh yeah, that NaNo novel I mentioned last time I posted? I completed it, split it into two books (it was about 220,000 words by that point), revised it once, and am now in the thick of doing so a second time. I’m excited for it and still trying to figure out a pitch that isn’t a string of AO3 tags. But heck, here’s a tag-style elevator pitch: “F/M/M hurt-comfort in a low fantasy/alternative medieval history setting.” (In fact, the same setting as my Lady Crayl series; Elise and Adam make appearances, and wow was it fun to revisit their characterization a decade on.)
While I was able to complete the novel, my co-editors and I got the point where we realized we were not able to make Erato II happen. Or at least we were stuck on an evil treadmill of “maybe next week we can start work on it…” for months. And something new always came up to get in the way. Rather than leave authors waiting even longer for us to get our act together, we decided to cancel and regroup. I still hope to edit some more anthologies with the New Smut Project, but with tighter focus and different timelines (paradoxically, I’m wondering if a shorter timeline will be easier to work with).
My COVID recovery seems complete, thank goodness and vaccines, and my region of the world is experiencing sunlight and mildly warm temperatures, both of which are encouraging. Hopefully it won’t be so long before I share my next updates.
December 10, 2023
New story free to read online in Erozine Issue #7, upcoming poem
New story free to read online in Erozine Issue #7
I fully intended to write this post on Friday when the story went live, but I was caught up in a few things…still aiming to finish several projects my COVID bout derailed, and the end-of-year-rush, and also my NaNo novel.
Oh yeah, I kinda did NaNo this year. Only it lasted longer than the month of November and way more than 50,000 words. Turns out the plot bunny bit hard and despite…everything…I managed to get 200,000+ words written from mid-September to today. In fact I have the final scene of the epilogue to finish today or tomorrow, and then of course a lot of editing.
Certainly, that swallowed time I could have spent on other projects — and I do intend to get more responses out on Erato II submissions in the coming weeks — but when it comes down to it, if a year from now, December 2024, you ask me if I’d rather have done a variety of things or if I’d rather have completed the novel, I know what my answer will be.
More importantly for today, though: I have a ~3,000-word story free to read at the Erozine! My story, for this issue’s theme of “Post-Nut Clarity,” is “Aftplay.” A pun, of course.
Once her breath returned, she said, “It hit me I’ve never slept with a guy who liked sex before.”
His hand moved up to her stomach, following the pulse of her afterglow. “Okay, you’ve got to unpack that for me.”
Grinning, she skirted her fingertips over his hip. She loved to unpack things, and he knew that.
“Oh, they liked orgasming—at least they complained when they felt like they hadn’t done it recently enough. But they wanted to get there as soon as possible.”
He opened his legs wider so she could reach between them, stroking the inside of his thigh. “Mmm.” Maybe a response to her touch, but also encouragement to keep talking.
“They treated every other step in the process like an impediment. The idea of exploring, drawing things out, continuing them—absolutely no interest.”
His next sound seemed interested as she circled his cock, contentedly flaccid and bare—he’d stripped the condom off fast, then, in the moments before she took his hand to get herself off. He was efficient. Competent (competence was hot). But he didn’t rush the stuff that mattered.
-“Aftplay” in EroZine
[Content warning for a brief mention of sex by deception, along the lines of the legends about King Arthur’s conception, if you’re familiar with that. To skip, stop at the line ““There are stories…legends, even…about a woman having sex in the dark…” and resume at “The distress left his face like darkness at sunrise.”]
While I’m trying to keep up on publication news, I’m also excited to announce I’ll have a Tweet-length* poem at https://twitter.com/olicketysplit next Tuesday, Dec 19!
*Still a meaningful phrase in our hearts.
October 4, 2023
The Plague
To make a long story short, I made a lovely 1,200-mile drive out to Maine to see a lovely person; someone else at the camp came down with COVID, then my lovely came down with COVID, I cut my trip short and made the 1,200-mile drive in reverse but it was not enough to avoid myself coming down with COVID. (On my retreat drive I masked and avoided any close contact with people so hopefully I didn’t pass the delight on.)
Hurray for vaccination, and Robitussin is magic, but I am miserably wiped out. And feeling weirdly guilty for getting to (read “having to”) lie on my couch all day resting. I am still able to read, but way slower than usual – in fact time seems to fly this past week in a way that would be terrifying if I had energy for terror – and my writing ability is not all there. I am discovering new indie music I love, so there’s that.
At least if I had to break my NO-VID streak I got to do it in an interesting way.
The timing isn’t great, but then the timing never would be.
Catch you all on the other side <3
-T.C.
