Evasive Love is my first erotic sci-fi novel to be published. It was released on Oct. 2nd 2013 by Ellora’s Cave and I just got the rights back!

The story is about a bounty hunter who falls in love with his mark and that has been the plot line for over ten years. That’s really the only thing that hasn’t changed since 2003 when I started writing it.

Idea

When I was in high school, I was a campy fool. The biggest proof of this is a novel I wrote called “American Dreams.” This was maybe my third or fourth novel and since I was under 18 and writing about sex it was complete shit. Some bits were salvageable (there’s a particularly nice scene in a basement/volex engine room which made it into Evasive), but some were laughable.

For example, Elliot, the criminal, was actually innocent in the original.  He was an English teacher who had fled Victorian England and it’s anti-gay laws to live in pre-colonial America ( the education system isn’t that bad, I’ll explain in a moment). Before he managed to flee, he married a lesbian who left him in America to adventure. She missed him before long, though, and hired a bounty hunter to get him. The hunter thought Elliot was a con artist and Elliot had no idea what was going on; he was just a horny kid. I mean, I was- I mean… He was conflicted! Yeah. That was my plot.

As it turned out, that story was incredibly important to my career as a writer. The fledgling world Elliot and Alik (the original bounty hunter) inhabited had debuted in a different mess of a novel, but their literal journey that these two took as they walked and fucked all the way up the east coast got me planing and thinking. This story was my first trek into world building and one of the things I hear most often praised in my workshops is my ability to build a world.

The World of the Sectors

For example, I “discovered” Alik was not Alex because the midwife was illiterate. Elliot sees a broken and decayed statue of liberty (I know it’s a cliche, but I couldn’t resist in the new novel, either). There’s even a museum in homage to the fall of America. It was not a mistake that had someone running away from the Victorian ages and into a land inhabited by Native Americans and 1930’s gangsters.

In the ten years after this first adventure in camp, I would build and mold the world of the sectors into the complex future society that you’ll find in Evasive Love and in the other stories that inhabit that same world. Some of my favorite sectors include, Albion, which is a society that combines American materialize and media obsession with Steampunk/Victorian sensibilities, Cirque, which is an anarchy of castes and clowns, and Dockside, which is a mobile fishing community with an accent that is a mix of Louisiana’s Cajun and Northeastern Maine.

First Draft Hunted

I always meant to return to American Dreams and make Elliot into a serious character, a real criminal. I thought it would be fun to explore the moral dilemmas of falling in love with someone you are sending to prison.

Apparently, so did the people at Ellora’s Cave. One day back in 2012, I’m thinking sometime in October, I was scanning contests and content calls when I saw Ellora’s Cave asking for a story of any heat level, any pairing, about bounty hunters. I was intrigued because I remembered the campy old thing I had written in high school. With no serious thoughts of being published, I started to write it.

With in two weeks I had a first draft. I edited, pared down, read and reread until the deadline for submissions came. I spent the week before the submission deadline, checking and double-checking the guidelines, my query letter, my blurb. I submitted it and moved on. I’ve been submitting and moving on for a while now. I wasn’t expecting much.

Then in January, I found out I wasn’t rejected.

Revision

Once I got over the dancing and shouting at Skype (Sweetness was across the ocean when I received the joyful news), I puzzled over the draft I had sent. The one complaint I was given was that the language and sex scenes were too mild.

I was floored by this. I’ve been publishing pornography since I was in college and I always thought the difference between a romance novel and pornography was the language. I had no trouble fixing that; now it’s got reviews about how hot it is.

For the next eight months, my editor and I struggled through the monster that became Evasive Love. I was stunned by the sheer amount of errors that I hadn’t caught, little things I never thought about, and how incredibly inflexible the human body actually is during sex (oh yeah I guess that does kinda sound like he’s wrapping his spine around Kavan… hum, better fix that).

Coming Out as Gay Erotica Writer

By far the hardest thing that came out of this novel (besides your dicks, you sick freaks ) is explaining to my friends and family what all my work has been for.  The inevitable question that comes after the statement, ‘I have a book coming out’ is ‘congratulations. What’s it about?’

I don’t think any other genre writer faces the potential embarrassment and judgment from that answer. Every writer faces criticism whether constructive of not, but few of us are actually risking revulsion with the answer. More than once I’ve muttered, “It’s a romantic sci-fi about a bounty hunter who falls in love with his mark” and quickly changed the subject to the writing process or anything else. I’ve never been so closeted. Yet, I can’t stand having something I’ve worked so hard for met with a sneer and a “Why would you want to write that?”

I have a lot more to write on the topic of shame and sex in America, the inequality given to romance and speculative fiction, and closets in general, but for now I’ll leave off with a very enthusiastic:

It’s a very explicit erotic science fiction romance about a bounty hunter who falls in love with the male criminal he’s after!

Idea

This one is kinda nifty actually.

I am an avid read of postsecret.com, which you can get to by clicking on that secret to the left. Or just typing in postsecret.com, unless you’re lazy. Or lack the ability to type.

Postsecret is a brilliant website where people from all over the world send this guy, Frank Warren, their secrets on postcards, some are sad, some are funny, some are a bit creepy. But all of them make you think about the billions of other humans on this planet.

I discovered postsecret when I was in college and every once in a while I would come across a secret that made me think, “whoa, that would be a phenomenal story.”

So I took a bunch of those secrets and turned them into stories.

Revision

This is the only one that is worthwhile. One of the secrets is in Gloria’s confession that when she drives under the overpass she thinks all she has to do is not turn with the road and she will find some peace. There are others hidden in their between this man and woman. I’ve lost and cut out quite a few over the years, but that’s the one that haunts me.

One of the reasons why the other stories didn’t make it was that these secrets are so personal. I don’t want to take advantages of someone else’s suffering and turn it into what to me is a fine art, but to them is just something filthy. Something worthy of a post secret.

Of the actual story:

“A Fair Deal” or as it was originally titled “The Whore of Tuckerton” was a sort of post secret to myself for a while.

I don’t like writing from a woman’s point of view. I’m not sure why.  I feel uncomfortable and I don’t think I do it well, though no one has ever complained.

So for years I worked on this story, amused by it, saddened by it.  I think it’s one of my best, but I was afraid to show it to any of my workshop groups. The only reason I eventually did was because one of my friends caught me doodling a picture of a woman on a tractor and I couldn’t explain her away. That doodle is the cover by the way.

Read it here.

Idea

Sweetness and I spend far too much time improvising various theater scenes, characters, and plays.  One of our least effective, but very funny skits was a clown routine involving a gay yoga instructor, Tristan, and a mob capo, named Joe Gianni. It’s a very silly skit.  For example, Joe doesn’t understand why vegans exist in this world (or how to pronounce the word), Tristan using the power of retail diagrams turns their Family into the most powerful in the city, mostly because the Don has dementia and thinks Tristan is his dead wife.

Here’s a sample of the dialogue:

Tristan: I’m performing an inventory to reduce Shrinkage.

Joe: Shrinkage? What the hell is that?

Tristan: Oh… it’s a retail word. It’s basically theft.

Joe: Theft?

Tristan: Basically

Joe: Basically theft?

Tristan: Yeah.

Joe: So why didn’t you just fuckin’ say theft?

Tristan: Because it’s…

Joe: Like if someone goes up to one of my drug dealers and shoots him and steals all his product. I’m not gonna call that something different. It’s fucking theft.

Tristan: Fine an inventory reduces fucking theft.

Joe: Are you mocking me?

Tristan: No. I was being sardonic.

Joe: Sardonic? Sar-fucking-donic? Do you know what I do to sar-fucking-donic hipsters, like you? I bend them into my favorite yoga position, which is horseshoe, then I kick them across the street so that they swing around that streetlamp with my shoe dangling from their hippy ass.

Tristan: That was oddly specific.

Joe: This inventory thing is a waste of my time.

Tristan: No it’s not. Shrink also accounts for free give-aways and employee discounts-

Joe: Free give-aways?  What are you saying? My boys are smoking the coffee?

Tristan: No, but some of my girls drink the coffee… the real coffee. Or put out too much milk and it goes bad, or drop a cookie. So not theft, but a disappearance of product without it being paid for.

Joe: If any of my product disappeared without it being paid for, there would be hell to pay.

Tristan: Oh yeah? How do you know?

Joe: What?

Tristan: If you don’t keep inventory how do you know how much of your product has been sold and how much has disappeared?

Joe: *takes a breath to answer then can’t…* I… I just do.

Tristan: You should keep inventory. You’d be amazed at your shrink. Business 101.

Joe: I don’t have any shrink.

Tristan: Johnny is standing on the corner selling his weed.  A pretty girl comes up and wants to buy.  Does he give her more because she’s pretty?  Does he bring a little to his friends so they can get high? Does he short change that asshole he doesn’t like?

Joe: Vinny, who’s this Johnny fucker stealing my drugs?

You get the idea.

One of the things that most tickled my funny bone, was Tristan’s burgeoning relationship with Vinny, the  big dumb soldier, who has a dream of becoming a masseuse and is very gentle with cavity searches. One evening, the tickle found it’s logical way out of my system and I wrote down this story.

Revision

I’m not as campy as I used to be.  I had written it about 15,000 words longer and included an actual first date, the sex in the backroom that leads to the first date, the continuation of the story from this point, etc. But the tone was all over the place. Sometimes, Tristan was in legitimate danger of being killed (by Vinny at Joe’s request) and other times there were ridiculous conversations like the one above. In the end, I hammered out the little story you see on the site and put the rest of that material in the proverbial storage shed with the hopes that one day my flash and camp will mature into something usable.

It worked with Evasive Love.

You can read it here.