L.E. Franks's Blog, page 6
July 20, 2014
Check out the HOT Cover for CAMPUS CRAVINGS… just in time for school
My friends have a new anthology coming out August 25th with a hot new cover revealed today!
CAMPUS CRAVINGS
Welcome to Cathia University, where school is in session! Nine of today’s hottest gay romance authors have crafted brand-new interrelated novellas celebrating everything wonderful about college, with over 200,000 words featuring sophisticated professors, sexy teaching assistants, ambitious grad students, and spirited undergraduates, all looking for the same thing: an A+ in true love.
Annabeth Albert: Winning Bracket
Cassandra Carr: The Eloquent Jock
Dalton Diaz: Lesson Learned
Mia Downing: Switching Leads
Whitley Gray: Artistic Endeavor
Bianca Sommerland: Solid Education
KyAnn Waters: Private Lessons
LA Witt: Did Somebody Order a Pizza?
Sara York: The Dust Of Everyday Life
The Campus Cravings male/male bundle will release on August 25th.
Add Campus Cravings to your Goodreads to-be-read-list here: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22738703-campus-cravings
www.lefranks.com / @boxtersushi / FB Author Page
July 12, 2014
I wasn’t expecting to feel so much pain with my coffee.
I love my friends. They keep me hooked into what’s going on in the world, both internal and external. And they’re a wild, random, brilliant bunch, spanning generations. So I wasn’t expecting to be wrenched out of my casual preparations for an afternoon of writing by a FaceBook link to a Salon article about the “Rise of the Warrior Cop” I certainly wasn’t expecting the tears.Regardless of what I want to believe, or the political party I might follow, we are still left with the reality of this current crisis of faith in the very institutions charged with protecting us.
For the record. I’m not a Republican. I’m not a libertarian. I write gay romance and focus on the ‘Happily Ever Afters’ not ‘black helicopter’ conspiracies.
And I believe this shift to a paramilitary-style force has been an organic process (in the same way that creeping black mold is organic ). If you pinned me down, I’d lay the blame for this squarely on the uncivil war that has been waged across this country by a handful of cynically talented white men using the megaphone of media to their advantage. We have been divided from each other more completely than Jefferson Davis ever dreamed we could be: black from white, gay from straight, women from men, latinos and immigrants from everyone else.*
www.salon.com/2013/07/07/“why_did_you_shoot_me_i_was_reading_a_book…“
(Credit: Public Affairs Books/Jenna Pope)
It’s heartbreaking to see where we’ve slid to and worrisome to contemplate how much further we have to go before falling into an abyss we can’t crawl out of. And worse, these tragedies are the bedtime stories for communities of the poor and underprivileged and have been for decades…(which is a whole other topic of despair and regret).
With the police budgets short on funds and motivation for community policing and outreach and reliance on spectacular “gets” to justify what they do have, it’s not surprising that Detectives like Baucum might be tempted to make their salad by going after the low hanging fruit like $50 bets between friends.
“Sal Culosi’s last words were to Baucum, the cop he thought was a friend: “Dude, what are you doing?”
We’ve done nothing to put the breaks on the careening escalation of the militarization of our police that encourages the idea that we are all criminals, all terrorists, who just haven’t been caught yet.
This is an idea promoted by the NRA (well, the card carrying members aren’t the criminals, just everyone around them) and these ridiculous open carry laws that encourage radical proponents to drag their firearms with them to church along with the kiddies. After all, why rely on God to save them when a semi-automatic rifle is oh so much more sexy?
Maybe they’re right. Maybe the basement bingo games are next to be targeted.
Let’s hope not for our sake.
The time to sit back and relish our role as ‘innocent bystander’ has come and gone now that we’re all sitting in the crosshairs. - LE Franks
From the article:
In March 2006, just two months after its ridiculous gambling investigation resulted in the death of an unarmed man, the Fairfax County Police Department issued a press release warning residents not to participate in office betting pools tied to the NCAA men’s basketball tournament. The title: “Illegal Gambling Not Worth the Risk.” Given the proximity to Culosi’s death, residents could be forgiven for thinking the police department believed wagering on sports was a crime punishable by execution.
In January 2011, the Culosi family accepted a $2 million settlement offer from Fairfax County. That same year, Virginia’s government spent $20 million promoting the state lottery.”
Excerpted from “Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces”by Radley Balko. Reprinted with permission from PublicAffairs Books.
www.salon.com/2013/07/07/“why_did_you_shoot_me_i_was_reading_a_book…“
*I want to avoid the whole liberal/conservative religious fundamentalist/christian discussion which is too complicated for me to even want to muddy the much more critical issues raised in this article. Let’s just leave it to say that if I believed in hell, it’d be populated by a very small handful of operatives who took enough human psychology classes to completely twist the heads of a lot of once genuinely nice people. People who would, at one time, cut off an arm to help their neighbor without censor are now so fucked up and afraid that they are charging the streets like a pack of rabid dogs whose masters have beaten and starved and tortured them for so long they can’t think through the pain. And yes, sadly they fall within a very narrow spectrum and it’s a shame that a minority of our citizens have such an undue (and negative) influence on our society as a whole that not even watching them turn and tear the political throats out of their masters can give any pleasure in the face of the misery they spread. My only prayer is that rationality will return and save us from ourselves .
July 11, 2014
Run Like A Girl…
Originally posted on 
July 10, 2014
L.E. Franks: The Fourth Act
My Perspective – today I blogged over at Michael Rupured’s blog…
Originally posted on Michael Rupured:
Perspective is important for a writer. And I’ve discovered I have none. Not really.
Gone are all the illusions that I once held about my writing talent—that it is inviolate and absolute…and as ready to leap to my call as the first gush of water from a turn of the spigot.
Last November I murdered the last shreds of confidence retained from the all accolades heaped upon my youthful and undisciplined brow by all the professors I admired, and later all the employers who appreciated my skill with a report or SEC filing.
Those three weeks in November taught me something I’d never known before: Writing is hard and the words are more likely to kick you in the face and knock out all your teeth then they are to slip elegantly into place on the page.
And it hurts.
If you’re lucky you have a circle of friends (preferably…
View original 701 more words
July 8, 2014
July 6, 2014
July 5, 2014
Excerpt: The Fourth Act – coming soon
Cover Art: The Fourth Act Cover Artist: Rhys Ford
Excerpt: The Fourth Act by LE Franks
His name was Semyon Borodin. And he had no words for me.
I learned this from the man in the folding chair.
I had been standing in the wings, hidden in the folds of the heavy black curtains, watching the man floating above the stage, when an utterance cut through my consciousness.
I turned. Another Russian.
A man sat, hands folded precisely across his rounded stomach, the metal creaking beneath his bulk. I’d barely glanced at him when he first spoke, my eyes quickly returning to fix on the twisting form of the man moving through space in front of me, but I’d seen enough to wonder what he was hiding. Despite the thermals rising off the stage lights, the man was cloaked in a heavy, gray overcoat.
“Semyon Borodin. He has no words for you.” The heavy accent came on a breath, thick with the smell of sauerkraut and onions, reminding me of Zabar’s on a Saturday. I could practically taste the marble rye.
“No words?” I was confused. Maybe the blond was mute, or the man’s English was just bad.
The “Da” was growled and I bit my lip to prevent myself from asking the follow-up question dancing on the tip of my tongue.
I’d seen his type before—my grandfather had made a point of steering me away from men like him all my life—men who seemed more comfortable in the shadows or standing at the shoulders of others.
I turned back to the stage.
The aerialist rose rapidly through space—hand over hand, twisting his body as he climbed the red fall, wrapping it around his naked torso—a slash as bright as fresh blood on snow.
Over and over the ribbon wound—his flexing muscles, his straining thighs drawing him higher until he reached his pinnacle and twisted, suspended in air nearly forty feet above the stage.
I held my breath. Even the muttering Russian behind me stilled.
We watched him, mesmerized by his iron strength and dancer’s delicacy as he told his story of an angel fascinated by the mortal below. Moving through his forms, his body was fluid and apparently weightless, until finally he hung anchored only by his feet in an inverted cross.
The spotlight pinning Borodin against a black backdrop, golden curls shining like a halo around his head, and I was close enough to see when the concentration and control he’d been maintaining morphed into a singular expression of utter peace.
He let go.
Releasing his foothold, he flung himself backwards through the darkness, through space, falling to earth in a twisting crescendo of unwrapping silk. The end of the ribbon wrapping around his forearm was the only thing halting his momentum, saving him from a hard impact with the stage. My imagination, however, couldn’t help but fulfill the plausibility: the angel twisting through air in a death spiral until colliding with earth, the impact violent rather than the artistically broken repose he currently held as the music faded.
“Goluboi.” The Russian growled out the slur with such venom that I looked away from the man stretched out on stage.
The word stung.
I’d heard it used too many times by members of our community, and it was a painful reminder of the real reason, I hadn’t revealed a preference to my grandfather. Until I knew for sure I’d still be welcome in his home, I was frozen in place—neither in nor out—preferring a state of stasis to confrontation or confirmation.
I let the notion that my virginity was somehow pinned to my grandfather’s acceptance skitter away as the Russian stood, towering over me.
This close, the man’s florid features were clear—heavy brow over watery blue eyes, and the pitted, sallow skin of a man who’d spent too many days and nights in a bottle of vodka.
His overcoat had flopped open, and I could clearly see the bulge under his suit jacket as intended. The shoulder holster had been designed not to conceal but to intimidate. I’d been warned.
My emotions were all over the place.
In just the last hour, this theater and its occupants had sent me spinning out of my nice safe orbit, and I didn’t like it. I’d dealt with homophobic assholes before, but I hadn’t expected it here or from someone so objectively lethal.
The Russian gave one brief look behind me before shoving past to join the blond on stage. - LE Franks
le.franks.books@gmail.com
July 4, 2014
Happy Fourth Of July: The Freedom to Write, The Freedom to Love
For a Navy base, it was more about the scientists than the sailors, and having that many professional bomb builders in such confined quarters made the annual fireworks set off on the dry lakebed across the street from our house a thing to behold.
I can still feel the sting of heated metal as I clutched the remains of my sparkler in my hand and sat riveted by the scope and magnificence of the display. The smell of punk fragrant under the acrid tang of gunpowder that wafted in the warm desert air.
The fourth of July may have been the day we lit up the night sky, but it was always “Independence Day” we celebrated.
I grew up on tales of the revolutionary war, a plot as epic and unlikely as any scenario dreamed up by Hollywood. Mad Kings, reluctant heroes, traitors, martyrs. Deprivation and frostbite. Guerrilla warfare. Good vs. Evil.
Okay that last bit was through the filter of an eight year old, but when you dig deeper and read Thomas Jefferson’s tracts on religion, or explore the Federalist papers you begin to understand how unlikely and precious a gift we’ve been given – one that we seem to be treating like a broken toy best shoved to the back of our federal closet.
So for me, the 4th of July is the day I celebrate Independence Day, but apparently I’m in the minority: You know that thing that the religious right and the political puppet theater we call the Tea Party use to rub their minority view of governance in the face of the majority – the pledge of allegiance? I wonder if any of them actually listen to what they’re pledging.
I think the fact that some politicians added “under God” during the red scare of communism in the fifties short circuited their brains to the unaltered intent.
“I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”
Wow. Wouldn’t they be shocked to realize they are affirming the rights of the very citizens they’re trying to grind out under heel?
But Independence day just doesn’t have the same commercial ring as 4th of July does.
It’s a little wordy.
A little too weighted in importance.
Little wonder we think Cinco de Mayo celebrates Mexico’s independence instead of its victory in a minor skirmish with the French. (Hey! Let’s break out the Bud & BBQ vs the Corona & Guac!)
It’s harder to equate the birth of a nation with dealerships sporting elephants wearing red, white, and blue top hats to sell their cars.
Or mattresses.
Or as a festival to ward off retail doldrums by proclaiming “Christmas in July”.
(Btw – full disclosure: two of my publishers have sales going on in July – so if you want to buy my stories on sale have I got a gift for you….)
Trust me, I love a deal. If I needed a car, a mattress, a book (did I mention that The Next by Rafe Haze is on sale too?) then I’d be thrilled to celebrate all the money I’d be saving over the long holiday weekend, and I won’t begrudge you any softening of the hit your wallet might be taking, but today I’d prefer to celebrate another way.
Today I’d like to raise a beer to our Independence.
So here’s to us – The United States of America.
We are a nation birthed from ideals formed through necessity, washed in the blood of citizens both common and elite who suffered together, fought together, dreamed of something better together, in the face of impossible odds.
We are a country formed of many people, from many nations, looking for refuge from economic, religious, and political persecution.
Too bad we’ve turned our back on the very principals that they suffered for. Hobby Lobby anyone? Way to roll back progress.
But that’s just sour grapes talking. After all, back when our nation was born I didn’t count as a person then, either.
Apparently retro is the new black at the Supreme Court.
Let’s clink our bottles together instead and celebrate our families and friends and the communities that feed and inspire us. The words that challenge and comfort us. The beauty of the natural world that our country still has in abundance. The leaders who can still dream.
And a special toast to the county clerks across the land who, in the very best tradition of our rebellious past, have risen above partisan politics and prejudice to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples in defiance of their own bosses.
In doing so, these men and women – these true patriots – have fanned the flames of justice that sweeps across this nation today. Not even the supremes can provide cover for the institutional bigotry of our statehouses, much to the profound regret of some.
Equal protection under the law – if you can’t celebrate anything else, let’s celebrate that.
Happy Independence Day.
