Photo by John Lester
Window in the Blue by Dev Bentham, coming from Loose id July 2012
Next stop Antarctica
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A new release on my birthday!
Learning from Isaac comes out April 3rd – my birthday! To celebrate I’m giving away 3 copies on Twitter. To enter use the hashtag #LearningfromIsaac in a tweet (or RT) between 12:01am and midnight Central Standard Time on April 3rd. For those of you who don’t live in the North American Midwest, CST is GMT -5.
Learning from Isaac is the story of Nathan Kohn, a nice Jewish ecology professor, who falls in love with his student, Isaac Wolf. Isaac’s earning his tuition in the back room of a new club downtown. Even after he leaves the profession and graduates, is it possible for a staid professor and a former prostitute to make a life?
Click here for more about Learning from Isaac and an excerpt
Working your way through school the old fashioned way?
Melissa Petro needed money for school and she earned it the fastest, if not easiest, way possible. She’s been out of that profession for years, but now she’s lost her job as a teacher.
What on earth does that have to do with Dev Bentham?
Paying tuition through prostitution is exactly the choice one character makes in my new story, Learning from Isaac, coming soon from Loose Id. When you’re young and beautiful and broke, getting paid for it can seem the most logical way to ease a financial bind. Unfortunately, it’s a choice that can mark you for life.
Carina m/m week blog tour
A glance at the six books coming out from Carina this week makes me amazed at the scope of our corner of the romance world. The settings span centuries, from long ago in Ava March’s 1822 London story of class boundaries stretched and Erastes’s evocation of light and art in Florence in 1875, to not so long ago, with Larry Benjamin’s chronicle of young love in the 1970′s and 80′s and all the way to Kim Knox’s story of passion in dystopian 2050. Dev Bentham’s story is set in the present with love finally found, as is KC Burn’s tale of a relationship rekindled. Our protagonists are artists and aristocrats, pickpockets and soldiers, all steaming hot.
Check out all the stops along the tour. (There’ll be great giveaways!) http://carinammweektour.blogspot.com/
3/19 – Dev Bentham at Fiction Vixen http://www.fictionvixen.com
3/19 – Ava March at The Macaronis http://historicromance.wordpress.com/
3/20 – Larry Benjamin at Joyfully Jay http://joyfullyjay.blogspot.com/
3/21 – Kim Knox at Rarely Dusty Books http://www.rarelydustybooks.com/
3/22 – Erastes at The Macaronis http://historicromance.wordpress.com/
3/23 – KC Burn at Babbling About Books, and More http://www.kbgbabbles.blogspot.com/
The books
A Brush With Darkness by Erastes
Brook Street: Thief by Ava March
Moving in Rhythm by Dev Bentham
Bitter Harvest by Kim Knox
First Time, Forever by KC Burn
What Binds Us by Larry Benjamin
Connect with Dev on Facebook or Twitter @DevBentham
Carina Press first ever m/m week!
Six great m/m releases coming soon from Carina during their first ever m/m romance week (March 19-23). Erastes, Ava March, Kim Knox, KC Burn, Larry Benjamin and me. Check it out
My Valentine’s dog
Okay, so he won’t buy me flowers or chocolates and I’m always having to deal with his shit. Still, I love my dog. Valentine’s or any other day, he’s the first to greet me when I get home and I’m convinced no one could love me like he does. Of course, his conversational skills are minimal and his kisses are slimy and gross. But he’s a great listener and a better cuddler.
So while I’m hoping for candlelight and roses from my sweetie, I’ll be sure to share a special Valentine’s treat with my best friend.
Dogs play a big part in my debut novel, Moving in Rhythm, due out from Carina March 19th
Are dogs a big part of your love story?
Lessons and Kisses
Photo by Ross Goodman
“God says, “Here’s a lesson and a kiss / You can walk though fire or crawl through this” / But that’s the price you pay for temptation / There’s no other way through temptation.” Rosanne Cash
I’ve been thinking a lot about Rosanne Cash’s definition of temptation – a lesson and a kiss. I write erotic romance, so temptations (and kisses) are my stock in trade. But isn’t this what we all want? Passion so compelling it’s worth walking through fire and crawling through Hell? It’s not the pink, light sweet love of Valentine’s candy – Be Mine – but hot, melting craving, pure need. The stuff of fantasies. Of course, whether that’s workable in real life?
In the 90′s I had a friend who kept finding herself having two or three perfect dates with someone and then POOF! he was gone. She decided that the way to identify a commitment phobic man (does anyone still talk about them? They were al l the rage back then) was that only they were as present, confident and wholly perfect as a romantic hero. I wonder if that’s true.
It seems to me that there’s something incredibly romantic about the lover standing by your bed when you come out of surgery or who holds you when your dog dies. Those are the fires we really crawl through during life and those are the kisses worth keeping.
The spirit of winter
It’s cold out, the ground glistens with snow and Christmas music assaults me wherever I go. It’s a bittersweet time of year for me. I don’t celebrate Christmas but do generally approve of peace on earth good will to men (and women). The holiday seems to bring out the best and worst in many of us. Love, hope and good cheer seem to teeter totter with greed, stress and loneliness. But the lights are beautiful and the music can be spectacular. Some of my favorite authors regularly contribute to Holiday Anthologies. So my plan for this month is to light a fire and snuggle in with a good book and sweeten the holiday with warm stories about hot men. I’ve started on Carina Press’s Men under the Mistletoe and will next try Winter Warmers from Pink Squirrel Press. Happy winter to all.
Moving in Rhythm has a cover!
And a release date – March 3. 2012
It’s almost Nanowrimo time!
- Photo by Lainey Powell
For those of you who haven’t tried it, Nanowrimo (National Novel Writing Month) is a crazy event where thousands of folks sign up to spend the month writing a novel (or rather 50,000 words of fiction that might possibly someday be a novel). It’s wicked fun.
I started Nanoing in 2008 and so far I’ve managed to make it to 50K by midnight November 30th every year. I’m hoping to do it again this year.
I love the Nano – here are three reasons why:
1) A wonderful community develops on nanowrimo.org over the month. If I lived in a big city I might be able to head down to a coffee shop any evening and get into a good conversation about the writing process. Where I live there are few enough of us that we need to schedule our time together. And that’s great – too much time at the coffee houses of Seattle kept me from writing long pieces back in my twenties. But I must admit that the twenty-four seven availability of a virtual writers community during November is lovely.
2) I get through a rough draft of something new. I really believe that all writing is rewriting. So during November I pound out a huge swath of bad prose that fleshes out the bones of my story. Then I let it sit and incubate so that when I come back in January or February or March, there’s mass of words for me to work with. I think of my rough draft as a big dull chunk of clay ready to be sculpted into something of value. The clay in and of itself is not beautiful, but I’d be lost without it.
3) Most importantly, every November I clear away all the junk in my life and make time to write. Of course I write at other times, but a month is a long time to set aside. My normal writing schedule gives me one day a week to write and bits and pieces of time here and there. But during November, I write every day and try for at least three days a week of solid work. Pure luxury for a writer with an admittedly not terribly strenuous, but consistent, day job.
If you’re doing the Nanowrimo this year, I’d love to be buddies. I’m DevB.
I won’t be blogging much this month but you can bet I’ll be pounding away at the keyboard. Tally ho!