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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,

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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,

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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,

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He might be Mr. Right, but their timing is all kinds of wrong…

Gideon Miller is done letting his heart do the thinking for him. Been there, done that, still has the emotional scars to prove it. Besides, he’s leaving Los Angeles soon. There’d be no point in starting up a new romance now. But when he meets the off-the-charts sexy, ex-military man next door, Gideon starts to question everything…

[Read more…] about Gideon’s Wish is Now Available

As an author, I often get asked why I wrote a particular book or where a specific character came from. I love that question because it is fascinating how I pull the different aspects of my life in creating a novel.

In my latest novel, Far Away, the story is so much a part of my own life that there is only a fine line between fiction and reality within the pages.

The story opens on the shores of Lake Winnipesaukee, New Hampshire. In the book it’s where the two main characters meet for the first time as teenagers. The lakefront grand home belongs to the character Noah’s, grandmother. This particular summer, is where it feels like life is just beginning for Noah, but for the visiting Spiro, it very much feels like the end.

In my own life, the characters Noah and Spiro, are bits and pieces of me during my own childhood, split into two characters. I have fond childhood memories of spending the summer with my grandmother on the shores of Lake Winnipesaukee. My brother Kenny, and I would visit her during the summer without our parents. Although Kenny and I weren’t twins like Noah and Nathanael, we were extremely close.

The original draft of Far Away was called the Visitor. It was originally a short story, and the entire story took place on Lake Winnipesaukee. In the end, Noah and Spiro were split apart by their parents. I never published that story because it didn’t have a happily ever after (HEA).

As young adults, my husband and I took a long vacation to Greece. On the tiny island of Santorini, I remember falling deeper in love with my husband. I knew I loved him when we left the States, but there was something magical that happened between us during those weeks on the island. When we returned, I crafted a short story surrounding our Greece trip.

In writing Far Away, the challenge was how to combine those two stories, that wouldn’t work for my romance audience, into a love story they would enjoy reading. In doing so, I also wanted to stay true to who the characters were, so blending four characters into two was challenging. 

In Far Away, Noah is a very complex individual, fighting some dark demons. He is also this amazingly bright and gifted person that the world just doesn’t know what to do with. The scene where Noah returns home, after being kicked into a mud puddle by a bully, and tells his brother what happens, is not entirely all fiction.  In reality, this is me, sharing a moment with you of my early life and my relationship with Conrad, my big brother. Conrad, may you rest in peace and know that I am forever grateful that you were always my ally.

Just like my brother’s love, I cherish your support and always glad to call you my friend. So, until next time, please stay safe my friends.

Warmly,

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Yes, I’ve been missing in action in your mailbox. I know, I know, I know. I’ll try and do better in 2021. Like me, many of you can’t wait for next year. This has been a year full of surprises, ups and downs, and challenges all around. You are not alone if you are feeling lost in a desert of fear and anxiety, are out of work, or quarantining from family and friends this season.

[Read more…] about Tis the Season