Bryan T. Clark

As we begin our holiday season, I want to wish you a happy holiday and check in to let you know what I’ve been up to these last couple of months.

Writing and staying in the creative space in 2021 and 2022 has been challenging for me, to say the least. My current work, Hawthorne Manor, was supposed to be released in May of this year. However, with the world shutting down because of the pandemic, crazy politics, and just all-around dark days, I took several months off to focus on my own well-being. However, these last six months I have felt the creative spirit return within me.

I am happy to share that, with a little discipline, I’ve finished the final edits on Hawthorne Manor. The book will be going out to my beta readers the first part of the year and then back to my editor for a final proofread. I must say, you’re going to really enjoy this story, because it’s a little different than your average romance. Hawthorne Manor is more of a contemporary exploration of the foibles of aging, friendship, love, and the beauty that can exist in a “found” family. It features a house full of eccentric characters, witty banter, and a deeply emotional M/M romance. I am 100% positive that the release date will be May 4, 2023.

On a more personal note, my mother, for whom I am a full-time caregiver, was diagnosed with breast cancer in both breasts late in 2021. Her cancer is responding positively to treatment and her spirits remain good. Each week, she and I show up at the Women’s Cancer Treatment Institute, and although she is hurting, she has a smile on her face when she walks in for her injections—and every week, I am once again reminded how young most of the women suffering from this disease are.

I’ve had much time to reflect on life these past few years, and I think that most definitely came through in Hawthorne Manor. If life has taught me anything these last two years, it is that time is not on our side. Say the things you need to say to the ones you love, live out your dreams, and be as authentic as you can for your own well-being.

Happy Holidays,

If you enjoyed this post, please make sure you sign up for my newsletter, and never miss another blog or contest again. Also, be sure to check out my Facebook Official Fan Group, The Reader’s Lounge.

Do you enjoy all four seasons of the year, or do you dread the cold or hate the sweltering heat? Do you have a favorite season? As much as I love summer, my favorite season is fall. After months of scorching temperatures here in the Central Valley of California (and this year, we had sixty-four days of summer over one hundred degrees), the nighttime temperatures are finally cooling enough to allow me to open up the windows in the house. There is nothing better than a nice breeze coming through the window at night as I sleep. With my asthma, I am not always able to open the windows because of poor air quality, but when I can, I do.

In the next couple of weeks, I look forward to seeing the bright green leaves on the trees slowly turn to a beautiful bouquet of reds, oranges, and browns in the neighborhood. I can’t wait to resume some of my outdoor activities, such as hiking and biking in the park.

Being outside is good for my health for many reasons. The fresh air is rejuvenating to my soul, and studies have shown that vitamin D may play a vital role in regulating mood and warding off depression. This is a big win for me.

This month, Brian and I celebrated our thirty-seventh anniversary. We spent it outside—a major perk of an anniversary in September. We’re both big fans of the beach, and escaping to the coast of California is something we enjoy. What could be more romantic than a walk on the beach? Well, maybe sipping a glass of wine with the love of my life as we enjoy the sunset over the Pacific Ocean.

I love watching the fog bank roll in from the sea and cover everything around me, making it all disappear. It’s like seeing a magic trick performed by Mother Nature.

As a reader, do you have a favorite season to read about? Do you enjoy Christmas-themed stories or summer romances? As a writer, I love incorporating the seasons into my writing. In Escaping Camp Roosevelt, the boys dart through the crowded streets in an unexpected downpour of piercing rain, and in Diego’s Secret, Diego’s shirt is drenched in sweat and stuck to his back and chest as he mows Winston’s lawn in the blistering mid-summer heat. In Far Away, the smell of fresh thyme is in the air, and in Come to the Oaks, the first snowstorm of the year marks the beginning of winter, and Ben and Tobias are forced to take shelter from the storm in the barn. This scene in the book with the winter storm as the backdrop was one of the most romantic scenes in the book. These are all ways in which I pay homage to Mother Nature.

Whatever your reasons are for enjoying your favorite season, whether it’s sitting poolside during the summer, seeing beautiful foliage in the fall, or sipping pumpkin spice lattes in the winter, enjoy them as soon as you can—and as often as you can—as if you don’t have tomorrow. Let the season be a reminder that nothing is forever, so live life now.

Warmly,

If you enjoyed this post, please make sure you sign up for my newsletter, and never miss another blog or contest again. Also, be sure to check out my Facebook Official Fan Group, The Reader’s Lounge.

It’s been six short years since I retired from law enforcement and made the switch to being an author. Trust me when I say the two are polar opposites, but it was a welcome switch.

When I was a young adult entering law enforcement at twenty-one, I was already a private person. I’d already stopped letting people into my most vulnerable space without fear of being judged or becoming embarrassed.

When you are in law enforcement, others perceive you as the authority. You learn to master a look that suggests zero emotion, which I had already become good at. In that field, you were prepared for the worst of the worst to happen on any given day and in any given moment.

It was a daily struggle to not be overly guarded or cynical about the world. In law enforcement, you truly see the world according to a different, darker perspective that only your peers can relate to.

Shortly before it was time for me to retire, I began to search for what I wanted my next chapter to be. I was only fifty, and I knew I needed something to occupy me. Although I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do, it had to involve little to no stress. As you can imagine, that ruled out many options.

At the time, I had few hobbies that I could turn into something other than just a hobby. My most enjoyable hobby has always been reading. I enjoyed reading James Baldwin, Maya Angelou, Edgar Allan Poe, and a few other canonical authors. In reading their work, I felt the raw and exposed elements of love, pain, and fear transformed into words. I was a prolific reader, so it was rare for me to not have a book on my nightstand.

As I aged, I navigated more toward newer authors writing gay fiction. However, I noticed that when I was reading some of those books, I would imagine how I would have written the story. Fiction writing wasn’t new to me. I had dabbled in creative writing in high school but never to the extent of writing an entire book.

The year before my career transition, I reached a point with one book at which I chose to close it while saying to myself, “I can write a better story than that.” I set out to do just that.

I never seriously considered publishing my writing, but I found myself writing every day. It was simply a creative outlet for me. I worked on a story for six months, and when it was done, I shared it with my husband. To my disbelief, he said it was so good that he thought I should submit it for publication.

That book was Come To The Oaks, which I published as my third book in 2017, and is a Rainbow Award winner, as well as a LAMBDA Literary Finalist in Gay Fiction.

At the beginning of my retirement, I knew I wanted to try to become a full-time writer who published quality books that addressed serious issues within the LGBTQ+ community. So, after twenty-seven years in law enforcement, I entered the realm of romance writing.

I found that the actual writing of a book is easy for me, but the hard part is sharing the product and having people judge my work and me. I realized that I could not escape this aspect of being a published author—nor should I—because it challenges me to want to be a better writer.

As an author, it’s easy to be sucked into the negativity of your critics. You begin comparing your work to others and asking yourself if you’re good enough. Unfortunately, this fed into struggles I’ve had most of my life—experiencing anxiety and self-doubt, attempting to stay positive, and not letting what is happening around me cloud my thinking.
They say you have to develop a thick skin if you want to be an author. However, being vulnerable and exposing a little of who you are can be magical and rewarding. It is a delicate balance to open yourself to vulnerability and risk rejection and pain while maintaining a thick skin.

Being an author requires me to be the opposite of who I had become while working in law enforcement. This process, although tough, encourages personal growth, which I welcome. I love my second career, and after publishing seven award-winning novels, all of which contain bits and pieces of who I am, I know myself better than I ever had. I love it.

Warmly,

If you enjoyed this post, be sure to sign up for the newsletter, and never miss another blog post again. Also, be sure to check out my Facebook Official Fan Page, The Reader’s Lounge.

In the literary world, the question authors are often asked is “Why did you write the book?” I personally love that question because the answer that most authors give is that the story was somehow personal to them—that they themselves connected with the story or characters in a way that drew them to write the story. I regularly tell people that I don’t choose the story, but that the characters chose me to tell their stories. Once I relinquish the creative power to the characters, the stories seem to write themselves; Gideon’s Wish is such a book.

Gideon’s Wish features two different characters, each one fascinating in his own way. Gideon is an openly charismatic gay handyman, and Isaiah is the not-so-openly gay alpha male. Initially, Gideon was a main character in another of my works in progress. In that manuscript, he wasn’t HIV-positive. As I worked on that manuscript, Gideon revealed to me that he was HIV-positive. The story line evolved over time and morphed into something completely different than what I initially thought I was writing about.

At first, I struggled with incorporating this point into the storyline because, as a gay man, I lived through the AIDS pandemic in the ’80s and ’90s. That was a difficult and dark time within the LGBTQ+ community. I lost many friends to the virus, witnessed bigotry, and heard of marginalized health care and inequity from our government. During those years, every movie made and every book published ended with the death of the character with HIV. I just didn’t want to write that story.

In the romance genre, a happily-ever-after (also known as HEA) is essential to the plot and ending. Without an HEA, you don’t have a romance. For many years, stories involving HIV-positive characters didn’t deliver an HEA. After carefully listening to Gideon, I knew his story had an HEA ending, and that this was his story I was telling. Gideon needed his own book, so I shelved that work in progress and wrote Gideon’s Wish.

Gideon’s character was not the only character who spoke so clearly to me. Isaiah, the second main character in the book, is a lot like myself. This familiarity may be the reason his story was emotionally a little harder for me to write. Isaiah is examining what it means to be a gay African American in this world and struggling with a sense of belonging. Even in his immediate family, who should be his support team, some family members are not willing to accept who he is. On the surface, Isaiah is a strong man, a solid guy; but as you get closer to him, you’ll witness his trust issues, formed by a world that tells him constantly that he isn’t good enough because of his skin color combined with his sexual orientation. Isaiah is a lot like myself. I didn’t intend for so much of me to come out in him, but this character was who spoke.

As a gay African American male in my fifties, it seems that I have been confronting racism and bigotry all my life. Like Isaiah, in my earlier years, being gay was an issue in my church, the athletic teams I was a part of, with my dad, my career, and many of my early friends.

One of the hardest realities as a young adult was acknowledging that the color of my skin mattered even in the LGBTQ+ community—a community that said they were inclusive and fighting for equality.

Once I fully understood the story I was telling, I had a goal in mind. As always, my main goal is first to entertain the reader. But with Gideon and Isaiah, I wanted to ensure that their story reflected real life—that while an HIV diagnosis may be a part of someone’s story, it no longer defines their story, however, racism is still very much alive and thriving. I feel this book is a timely reflection of this.

The hard part in writing Gideon’s Wish was that my understanding that what I knew and believed about HIV is not today’s reality. I had to find people who were HIV positive and who were willing to share their experiences with me. I interviewed them to understand what it meant to live with an HIV-positive diagnosis today. My friend Dean, the Program Director of HIV Services, at The Source LGBT+ Center was especially valuable because he served as my Sensitivity Reader for the project, ensuring that I was not only knowledgeable on the matter, but was also sensitive to those living with HIV.

Because the book is very much about emotions and feelings, from both main characters, I sometimes struggled with Gideon’s feelings. He is a young adult and, at times, he did not even know what he was feeling or why. I had to take a moment and examine what he was telling me, because it was often told from a naïve point of view. I needed Gideon to grow, to be successful in his arc in the book, and he did just that.

In the end, I think I met my goal, and I believe you will fall in love with Gideon and Isaiah just as I have.

Warmly,

If you enjoyed this post, be sure to sign up for the newsletter, and never miss another blog post again. Also, be sure to check out my Facebook Official Fan Page, The Reader’s Lounge.

Help! I’ve fallen and I can’t get up!

No not me…. my-loving-adoring-stubborn “it-can’t-happen-to-me” husband. Yep, out in the middle of nowhere, in the Yosemite National Forest, on the Mirror lake trail, he decided that he was going to climb a massive boulder so he could get the perfect picture.

If it doesn’t sound like I have much sympathy for him, then let me start at the beginning… the beginning of our relationship thirty-six years ago. Ever since we’ve been together, we’ve loved to hike, camp, white-water river raft, snow ski—just about anything outside, show us how, and we’re game.

But with this adventurous spirit, he’s more the risk taker than I am. I’m the one in the back saying…. Honey, don’t get too close to the cliff, Honey, it says “No Swimming Due to Undertow,” … Honey, the sign says ‘Keep Out’, maybe we shouldn’t go in there, Honey, there are sharks in the water—and I have to admit, over the last thirty years, it has mostly worked in his favor, with just a small collection of scrapes and bruises.

Well not this time.

Being vaccinated, and the mask mandate lifted for outdoors, we were excited for some normalcy, so naturally, our first adventure was to Yosemite National Park. This beautiful forest with its ancient sequoia trees, and majestic water falls, is not far from the house, but because of its breath-taking magnificence, it feels like a world away.

As we hiked the trail up the mountain, several times he would exit the trail and stand close to the cliff to take pictures. At one point, I looked down at his tennis shoes, and he was standing on a slope covered with leaves. Yes, my heart stopped! I just knew he would slip, and off the cliff he would go. (And thus, the reason I always carry the car keys, ensuring I had a way to get home!)

Not another twenty steps later, he saw another ‘must have’ picture. Before I knew it, he was climbing up the side of a twenty-foot boulder, camera in hand.

Sometimes, I’d rather turn my head and not watch, than to see the last seconds of his life before he goes over a cliff. It’s that’s scary for me. This was one of those times, but after a few minutes, long enough that he could have gotten his shot and climbed back down, I turned around in hopes of seeing him hiking up the trail towards me…. But no. What I saw was him falling off the boulder onto the trail, and landing on his butt.

The ‘man’ that he is, he quickly jumped up, and wiped the dirt off the seat of his pants. Relieved that he wasn’t hurt, we continued the hike.

It wasn’t long before I could see that he was hurt more than he was letting on, and by the time we made it back home, hours later, his left knee was the size of a grapefruit, and his right ankle was the size of a baseball.

Well, the next morning, after a trip to Urgent Care, he found out that he’d broken his left tibia, and may have possible ligament tears, and his right ankle was severely sprained. The man who doesn’t often take long vacations, now has a doctor’s note for a six-week vacation and a beautiful set of crutches.

It’s not so ironic that our marriage, and Gideon’s and Isaiah’s lives from my latest release, Gideon’s Wish, have so many similarities in them. In every book I write, some of my personal experiences, emotions, fears, and triumphs can be seen through the eyes of the characters. Growing up in the outdoors, Gideon, like my husband, is for sure the more adventures of the two. But like in any healthy relationship, there’s that balance that a couple finds that just makes their relationship click, a chemistry. I use to tell my husband, I’d follow him anywhere, and for thirty-six years, I guess I’ve done just that, despite my fears of what he may get us into. I loved that in Gideon’s Wish, as much as Gideon and Isaiah tried to ignore the chemistry they felt for the other, in the end, there was no denying it.

Josh Dale @MM Fiction Cafe summed it up nicely in a review of Gideon’s Wish—

“The emotions of the characters are almost tangible, like it is you that is in their situations. You cannot help to fall in love with them both and really root for them throughout their journey.”

I imagine many will say that Gideon’s and Isaiah’s story is our story….And maybe it is.

Warmly,

If you enjoyed this post, please make sure you sign up for my newsletter, and never miss another blog or contest again. Also, be sure to check out my Facebook Official Fan Group, The Reader’s Lounge.