The End and a Beginning

As of today Amber Quill Press is no more. I have decided that I am going to try to get my Canine Cupid tales back where readers can find them and my plan is to release each one in the company of a brand new unpublished story, also featuring dogs! Within a week I hope to have Doggone Love and a new story, A New Leash on Life headed off to Loose Id and a couple of other publishers that offer gay erotic romances. Stay tuned and I will let you know how this works. As a last resort, I will go the self publishing route but right now I am too p'oed at Amazon to want to go that way!! And it is darn near the only game in town that is going anywhere right now. But for them, AQP would still be chugging along; there were other reasons as well but the unfair competition a 900# gorilla can exert was the last straw.

Meanwhile, I do have some paperback copies of all my AQ Antholgies or collections, mostly featuring three or four stories in each one. I will sell them at my cost plus shipping which is less than you can get them on Amazon , allegedly "used" now and for stroke -inducing prices!! If interested, contact me at azwriter427@yahoo.com for particulars.

Meanwhile I know Loose Id and several others are starting to publish work by a number of my fellow former Amber Quill authors, mostly those who also wrote gay romance. I'll try to get some links and info up here shortly.

Almost to the End

I got wrapped up in the Iditarod sled dog race which is currently part of the biggest project in my to-do list.And as it will, the time slipped away. In just a week Amber Quill will be no more and the works I have had there for the past twelve years will all be out of print. I am still planing to get some of them reissued somewhere but when and where I am not sure. I hope if you do want to get any of them that you will visit the AQP site these last few days and nab them. I do have some copies of all the anthologies and will sell them autographed at my cost plus the postage should anyone want one. That also goes for Gwynn's four novels and Deirdre's short novel, He Comes With the Dark.

I will try to drop in here fairly often and update you on what is going on. Meanwhile thanks for your support and may you always read happy.I may even put some of the shorter tales up for free reads, who knows. If you want to keep in touch I can be reached at azwriter427@yahoo.com.

Hasta luego!

A Few Fantasy Tales

I have about three true fantasy stories in my back list. Two are gay and one is hetero.

Hanson and Graber, The Price of Magic  is a revision of Hansel and Gretel, with  couple of guys who are tired of their mundane lives in a medieval village somewhere. They hear about a wizard and vow to go find out how to do magic. They learn that magic is expensive to gain but maybe worth it in the long run... Here is the blurb and cover.

Blurb and Cover:

When life-long friends Hanson and Graber learn there may be a great wizard on the far side of the

woods behind their village, they decide to seek him out. The source of the information may be suspect, but the lure proves too strong. In hopes of learning magic to rise above their current status as Hanson the Pigs and Graber the Firewood, they set out on this quest.

When they meet wizard Holzy, they are both intrigued and intimidated. He makes them labor and suffer, but eventually begins to teach them the practice he calls “the feat of the wand,” which turns out to impart much energy and knowledge as well as unsuspected pleasures to both young men. A submerged attraction between Hanson and Graber also comes to the fore as Holzy awakens urges and desires they had hardly even dreamed.

Eventually Holzy screws up, which allows Hanson and Graber to gain the upper hand. Can Hanson and Graber apply their new powers to gain freedom from Holzy’s binding spell and be acknowledged as his equals? Will they go home in triumph or be consigned to the salt mines?

The price of magic is often high..

The Sorcerer's Apprentice features a somewhat frivilous young man who gets caught up in a powerful anti-magic movement in his home city. He flees to a distant region where he feels he will be safe and finds a sorcerer in a type of exile who agrees to give him the further training he needs to become a true mage. In time, they have to go join forces agaiinst the anti-magic ruling group and fight to survive and save the country. 

Blurb and cover: 

Driz aspires to be a great mage, but he’s done poorly the last few years of his schooling and cannot enter the mage university. Instead, he seeks a mentor in the remnants of the once-great magical race of Melcovia, now mostly driven into hiding by the brutal government of dictator Congerson.

Cory has hidden out in a remote estate in the foothills of the great mountains and sorely misses contact with others of his kind. When he hears a telepathic call from a youth seeking a mentor and master, he feels it’s a dream come true. But can the frivolous Driz buckle down enough to learn the discipline and control he needs? And can he ever become the true partner and soul-mate Cory has never found?

When Congerson’s minions and a rogue mage strike against the last empowered folk in Melcovia, Driz’s family is in dire peril. Which path will he choose—staying to work with the master who is also stealing his heart, or breaking his indenture to try to save the lives of his mother and siblings?

He Comes With the Dark is a short novel length tale and a rather different one. The heroine is an artist frustrated with her life in the Bay Area who moves to Sedona to try to re-energize her muse. What she finds is a disembodied ancient spirit bent on seducing her! I am not sure I did justice to the idea but I gave it my best and I think the story works. It is one I may revise a bit and try to bring out in a new version before long. And I totally love the cover!! One of my very favorites.

Blurb and Cover

One paints with line and color, but the other paints with powerful, sensual magic...

Stifled by her restrictive mentor and clientele in the Bay Area, artist Arabella seeks a new home in

Sedona, Arizona. The ambiance rejuvenates her creativity even as she encounters an earlier denizen of the region who turns her narrow life inside out. How can an invisible entity possibly awaken her deeply sensual nature and school her in the carnal pleasures she’d felt were greatly over-rated? Will she be able to channel this new energy into some incredible artistic efforts?

Zeth fled Lemuria when a natural catastrophe of earthquake, volcanic eruption and tsunami swallowed his homeland. He led a boatload of survivors on a quest to seek a new home. The group struggled and splintered disastrously, leaving him one of a few survivors. After a terrible conflict, he is condemned to remain a disembodied spirit until he can again become human and modify the tragic events in which he played a large part. Millennia later, he finds a new resident making her home in the spot he has come to consider his. Using only the power of his intellect and energy, can he seduce this artist into visualizing a likeness that he can take to create the new body he requires?

Once incarnate again, how will Zeth manage to gather the folk needed to reverse the ancient curse and repair broken karmic patterns? Perhaps Arabella is also the magnet drawing several of them to the scene. Once he is a man again, Zeth must first enact the ancient drama anew, then choose whether to accept his freedom to go on to the spirit realm or remain to live a normal span as a human...with Arabella...

Two more Thin Green Line tales

As I promised, here are the other two stories of the Thin Green Line series so far.
Wings of Love  matches a pair of unlikely partners who both have the same power. They are shape-shifters who can become birds of prey and fly. They put this to good use as they track down some desperate and evil characters and finally come to the point they can share this and even deeper secrets.
Druid in Drag has another lone-wolf agent infiltrating the headquarters of a notorious drug dealer suspected of having other-world ties. There he teams up with another loner who turns out to be a bonefide alien himself, one even stranger in many ways than Clay Chiles' Elvish  partner.
If you like lots of adventure and a few hot scenes thrown in as rather mismatched pairs of brave men find their unexpected soulmate and slowly build trust and a long term bond, these stories are for you!

Here are the blurbs and covers:

Wings of Love: Special Border Patrol agent Alex, who can shapeshift into a raven, is used to working

alone. He honors his Scots ancestry and has never met another shifter except for kinfolk back in Scotland. When he’s required to accept a partner, he normally manages to get rid of them by being so distant, aloof, and downright weird that they cannot deal with him. But the latest man assigned to work with Alex, a Native American named Manuel Ortiz, poses a whole new range of challenges.

Manuel, a member of the Tohono O’Odham tribe, works for the Border Patrol to support his ailing elderly parents. He has a secret he’s never dared to share—he can shapeshift into a red-tailed hawk. When his superiors team him with cold, cynical Alex, he’s not sure why until he learns his new partner has a similar curse—or gift.

Together, the men begin to form an uneasy bond. Confronting an evil and completely alien drug cartel boss, they have to cooperate to survive. In doing so, Alex and Manuel slowly learn the synergy of partnership and even discover that flying together can open a whole new world for them, that riding on the wings of love can be magical indeed...

Druid in Drag: Ren Coulter is used to working alone. As a special agent in the Paranormal Operations

Unit of the border patrol, his mission is to infiltrate the compound of a reputed drug lord named Mendoza and learn the source of a dangerous and addictive new drug. He decides to go undercover in drag, disguised as a glamorous young woman in the hopes of catching Mendoza’s notorious roving eye. Yet even before Ren meets the drug lord, he encounters Darzul, one of Mendoza’s striking bodyguards. Despite his lone-wolf habits, Ren sees advantages in working together with the man.

Darzul Onaygan has been sent from his home-world of Arzula to blend in with the earthlings and help them fight off the evil alien invaders. Bisexual as most Arzulans are, many even able to switch gender at will, he finds Ren attractive in both his guises. Yet Darzul knows it takes more than hot sex to build a partnership. While outside threats may force them to work together, that alone cannot forge a bond. Trust comes slowly and not without a hitch, but soon they must also rely on one another to survive.

Can Ren and Darzul live long enough to not only to accomplish their mission, but also to become real partners?

Not out of books yet...rural fantasy

Awhile back I tried a series of stories in a genre I call rural fantasy. You are all familiar with urban fantasy, I am sure. Rural fantasy is similar but it takes place out in the more remote areas. It is still mostly contemporary and still involves paranormal, otherworldly or fantastic elements. but the setting is the farms, ranches and wilderness, not city streets.

I actually wrote five stories in this ongoing series and hope in time to do a few more.  I ended up calling the series The Thin Green Line. There was the thin red line back in the days of the Crimean War, those red-coated British soldiers who stood against the encroaching forces from the east. Well, my heroes are all members of the US Border Patrol but a new element of that organization that has been started to resist the invasion by out-of-this-world baddies. No one is even quite sure how they are entering! All the agents have special powers which they use in their jobs to apprehend and overcome or drive out forces of darkness and evil. Most of the present day Border Patrol agents wear dark green military style uniforms so I kept my guys in similar attire. Thus the thin green line.

The five stories are, in order of publication, Beyond the Shadows. Wings of Love, Runes of Revelation, Runes of Redemption and Druid in Drag. I believe I did write a bit about the first one a few posts back so I will move on to the Runes pair which really comprise one tale, that of Clay Chiles who is the head of the new department and Arondel, the Elvish male who comes to help him and gives him some surprising and shocking news about his own heritage. Runes of Revelation is  story of secrets uncovered while Runes of Redemption is a tale ofrrors set right and bridging chasms in ways that heal. These were close to my heart in some ways since I am a big fan of Tolkein's Elvish folk and Clay is a kind of awkward tribute to a special friend from years ago. He also had gray eyes and although he had no Elvish blood--at least I do not think he did!--he certainly could have. He was that kind of person. Tomorrow I will feature Wings and Druid.

Here are the blurbs and the two covers--which I realy like--for these tales.

Revelation:

As head of the Border Patrol’s Paranormal Operations Unit, Clay Chiles has found a place where he can function and a surrogate family to replace the one he never truly had. He keeps hidden a lot of secrets, and both fears and longs for the day he may be able to take that one long step out of solitude and darkness into love and light. Before he can do that, however, he has to face some surprising facts about himself and deal with some horrific enemies. Although not a weak man, he’ll never have the strength alone to confront all those demons. But who can help him there?

Arondel Wanderer is a son of the ancient Elven royal clan, but far enough from the throne to be expendable. He obeys his queen’s orders to visit Earth and find what is going wrong there. One task he faces is to contact and recruit a human keystone in the desperate effort to stop an invasion of ancient evil that could corrupt the elves’ original home beyond redemption. Aron, a loner and solitary emissary from Elvenheim, never expected to find his soul-mate on this mission, but surprises, both good and bad, have always been part of his long and adventurous life. He’ll take anything good he is given, and once he sights the partner he’s always wanted, the most extreme danger is not enough to deter him...

Redemption:

As head of the U.S. Border Patrol’s Paranormal Operations Unit, Clay Chiles has found a place where he can serve with honor and a surrogate family to replace the one he never truly enjoyed. When he meets Elven warrior Arondel and begins to build the partnership he had never hoped to find, life seems good. Still, for two lifelong loners to merge their lives, hearts and minds, an occasional conflict is bound to arise.

Clay’s discovery he has not only a father but a half-brother on Arondel’s home world of Elvenheim creates new and different challenges. Can he accept and trust relatives so different from all he has known? Can they accept him?

Finally, faced with incredible tasks and dangers, Clay and Aron are torn asunder. Will the strength of their still-fragile bond be enough to bring them through hell and back to one another’s arms?