Behold the cover teaser for the last book in Tales from the Gemstone Kingdoms, The Dragon and the Emerald King. Edits should be starting soon for a release later this year.
Don't forget that Void Dancer is on KU with the rest of the series so you can catch up before the new release!
We return to fledgling vampire Ethan & Alpha werewolf Bash, who started the series! But fans of the starring MCs of books 2 & 3, not to worry, the whole cast gets their moments to shine.
Newborn vampire Ethan Lambert and Alpha werewolf Bashir Bain may have been an unlikely domestic couple ever since one of Bash’s prophecies brought them together, but destiny isn’t done with them yet.
With shifter culture shaken by the sudden surge of unknown vampires in their midst and attempted takeovers by werewolf purists, neighboring packs are already on edge. When ancient vampire Alexa steps out of the shadows to make her return to the top of the food chain—starting in Bash’s territory of Centrus City—the paranormal world teeters on the brink.
If they have any hope of stopping Alexa, they’ll have to do it before the last full moon of the year, and they’ll have to work carefully, because Alexa’s reach is long, and it’s impossible to know who to trust. To save their world and their relationship, Bash will have to find a way to show Ethan how he feels that leaves no room for doubt. Can they solve the riddles of their hearts and the ties that bind them before this latest prophecy spells their doom?
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In honor of Pride Month and the recent release of the Gardening with a Ghost audiobook, narrated by the incredible Kevin Earlywine, Curtis Michael Holland, and ME - you can get the eBook for FREE today thru Sunday, 6/11/23.
"The story is a cleverly plotted paranormal whodunit mm romance... plenty of drama, a touch of angst, mystery, heartfelt emotions and steamy romance."
Void Dancer: Now Available on Kindle Unlimited
If you've been waiting to nab the newest Tale from the Gemstone Kingdoms, Void Dancer, until it was on Kindle Unlimited like the rest of the series - it's happened!
All four books in the series so far are now on KU.
"I jumped at the first sensation of a tentacle sliding across my thigh and coiling around it. Were I a complete fool, I might have looked for the sea creature that dragged me from Ares’s bath, but I needn’t look anywhere but at the man beside me. Poseidon didn’t command the beast. He was the beast."
Tentacle lovers rejoice - the 5th chapter of Last Courtesan of Olympus is live and features Poseidon!
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Hadn't seen this meme done so! Decided to be the change I want to see in the world!
But if I’m gonna help you out I’ll need something in return. Like what? This.
Shipper goggles off, has anyone really tried to figure this out?
Like we know it can’t be money. Barry next says there has to be something he can GET, meaning the napkin can’t say anything Len would want Barry to get him, like money or some item involving a heist, because theoretically, Barry could get him anything using his speed.
Well…unless it was something from a really secure place, like…the Pentagon or the White House or something.
Still though, since next he says ‘there has to be something I can get you’, it makes me think the napkin doesn’t currently list something for Barry to GET. I feel like it has to be something Len wants Barry to DO, and it stands to reason it would be something with his powers, so…what could it be?
I want some legit guesses here. I’m trying to get it from the context of how Barry responds and the words he uses. ‘No. This is impossible. I can’t do that.’
Hmmm…
It’s so much easier with shipper goggles ON.
pansexual-fandom-queen
Okay, but also the disbelief in the second gif. Barry thinks he’s joking. My hunch, shipping goggles off (though they do make everything much easier to explain) is that Len wants Barry on call to work with him for a future heist. I don’t think he’d ask for anything like Barry not trying to stop him anymore, or Barry retiring from being a hero, because Len’s proved over and over that he likes the challenge Barry offers.
But, if Len is asking Barry to join him in a robbery, the exchange in Infantino Street where Len is so keen to have Barry agree they do everything by his rules, and his delight when Barry capitulates, could be a callback to a similar request written on that napkin.
(though part of me still thinks it could make sense in canon that Len propositioned him)
You know, I actually think that’s it, and I’ve got the perfect wording. It works coming from Len, with Barry’s reactions, and whether shipper goggles or otherwise:
You. On-call. Whatever, whenever I want.
And now I have this AU idea where Barry says no at first but then gives in, which leads to Len NOT betraying them at Ferris Air because he knows he can get a better deal out of this, especially since if Barry doesn’t deliver, Len has full reign to renege on their original deal and tell everyone the Flash’s identity.
So they got the metas out to the island, and after Eo is defeated, they brought them back, maybe send them to the new wing of Iron Heights like they should, and we’re somewhere in season 2 when Len first calls out this favor.
And it’s simple things with a slow build, all lead up to a heist for sure, but just little tasks that are made easier with a speedster, like drawing up blueprints of a building because Barry can run around and then draw it perfectly. Or having Barry tell Len where patrols will be at certain times. stuff that makes Barry cringe but isn’t asking too much from either of their perspectives. So Barry grins and bears it, and Len doesn’t rub any of this in his face, because he doesn’t want the game to end.
But then what if one day, just to mess with Barry, just to see what Barry will do…Len finally does ask for something that’s going way too far—he asks for that kiss he wanted to write down on the napkin to begin with. He doesn’t plan to let the whole thing unravel if Barry says no, he’s just curious.
And Barry hesitates like he thinks Len is joking, but since Len doesn’t give up the game right away, eventually he says, “What kind of kiss?”
Len can’t back down now. “A real one. Like you mean it.”
“Nothing else?”
Len shakes his head, amazed Barry is going along with this. And then Barry does it, kisses him, slow and deep and very much like he means it. Len wants to ask for more, but he’s too in awe to speak.
“Can I go?”
Len nods and Barry’s off.
The next time Len asks for something normal again and thinks that the kid looks maybe mildly disappointed. So of course the next time Len gets real close to Barry, testing the waters, but still asks for something normal, something benign, and that is definitely a blush on the kid’s cheeks.
When Len can’t stand the tease himself anymore, he calls Barry again and decides to see how far he can push. “Take off the suit.”
“What? Do you need me to be Barry Allen for something?”
“No. I just want you to take off the suit. Right now.”
“I’m not wearing anything underneath it.”
“All the same.”
“Cold…I-I can’t…”
“What if I want is to do something for you? No expectations for you to do something in return, just me attending to you in appreciation for our partnership.”
“…attending…to me?”
And Len drops right to his knees in front of Barry and asks again, “Take off the suit.”
(Sorry, I had to follow this thread, but I still like that for the napkin)
pansexual-fandom-queen
That wording is so beautifully vague, though!!!
If you did take it in Coldflash direction, what if Len honestly does just mean he wants Barry on call for heists and Barry takes it to mean something sexual and so he says no at first, but then, the more he thinks about it, the more he realizes it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world (though he still thinks it’s sketchy for Len to have put that on the table in the first place, at least Barry feels a bit better about the whole thing because Len did accept his no and agree to come up with something else)
Needless to say, when Barry comes back and agrees to Len’s initial terms, things get… interesting the first time Len calls in to collect.
OMG, that is WAY better!
Barry says no thinking it’s sexual, while LEN is the one being not sketchy, thank you, but then Barry comes back and says, okay I’ll do the first thing, rather than erase Len’s record, and Len’s like…fine, that’s what I’d prefer anyway. Wait for my call.
When he does call, he’s in some safe house, all expectant to have Barry do recon for him before a heist because he can do it unseen and in seconds, but then when he says, “I have something I want you to scope out for me,” Barry thinks Len is making some awful pun.
“Can you be serious for two seconds, and just…tell me how you want this to go?”
And Len isn’t sure he gets it, so he decides to feel this out. “How do you want this to go, Barry? I suppose we didn’t discuss boundaries. I’m not cruel. Wouldn’t ask for anything that pushes your limits. I want this arrangement to continue.”
And they’re having entirely different conversations here but neither realizes it until Barry says something like he’s okay with mild bondage but nothing too kinky, and for the most part he’ll do whatever Len asks, but if he wants to go all the way, there WILL be condoms involved.
Len may stand there for several minutes before he’s able to respond.
I would like permission to attempt to write this on ao3 please… @crimsondomingo
Oh absolutely @thefastestqueeralive go for it! I always loved this plot bunny but never wrote it out fully. I'd love to see what you do with it. Just let me know when it's finished so I can read it. 😀
Guess where I'll be tomorrow?
Well, at Des Moines Con, don't forget about that
But also helping Joelle Lynne celebrate the release of The Date Mistake in the MM and MMM+ Romance Reviewed Facebook group. You won't want to miss this lineup of author guests. ❤
I will be at Des Moines Con this weekend and would love to meet you!
Find me at table G4 with Lovely Woods Publishing. I will have ALL my books at convention pricing, which is either $5, $10, or $15, and bundle pricing for completed series Lovesick and Incubus.
Not attending Des Moines Con but ARE attending GRL (the Gay Romance Literature retreat) in October? You can preorder which signed books you want RIGHT NOW to ensure your copies.
To Wong Foo Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar (1995)
Dir. Beeban Kidron
This was such a formative movie
This shit was revolutionary for the mid-90s. Among other things it helped me understand that transgender and cross-dressing were completely separate things.
To this day, I am in awe of the fact that Patrick Swayze not only campaigned hard to get the audition, not only auditioned in dress and makeup, but spent most of the day leading up to the audition walking around LA in dress and makeup.
This was a man who could sing, dance, act, ride a horse, fight, and walk in heels, he had nothing to prove to anyone, and he is MISSED.
Okay, I’m not done feeling about this.
If you’re younger, you may not know Patrick Swayze; he was Taken From Us in 2009. But Patrick Swayze was an icon of masculinity. Men were willing to watch romantic movies because Patrick Swayze was in them.
Patrick Swayze was fucking beefcake.
And this man didn’t just agree to do a movie where the only time he’s not actually in drag is the first three minutes, which involve stepping out of the shower, doing make up, and getting Dressed. He has ONE LINE that is delivered in a man’s voice, and it’s not during those three minutes.
And if you watch those three minutes, you see a stark difference between his portrayal of Miss Vida Bohéme and Wesley Snipes as Noxeema Jackson. (I am not criticizing Snipes’ performance. They were different roles.) Noxeema was a comedy character. Chi-Chi was a comedy character. But Miss Vida Bohéme was a dramatic role, played by a dramatic powerhouse.
When Vida sits down in front of the mirror, she sees a man. And she doesn’t like it.
Then she puts her hair up, and her face lights up.
“Ready or not,” she says. “Here comes Mama.”
And while Noxeema is having fun with her transformation (at one point breaking into a giggling fit after putting on pantyhose), Vida is simply taking pleasure in bringing out her true self. And when she’s done, she sees this:
And you can FEEL her pride.
All of this from an actor who, up to this point, walked on to the screen and dripped testosterone.
impossiblemonsters
the fact that some of you history-ignorant children in the notes are trying to shit on groundbreaking historical queer cinema because it doesn’t meet 2021 standards is infuriating. sit down, shut the fuck up, and listen to the elders in the room for fucking once
This. If you have never lived in a world where queerness was universally pathologized and criminalized to the point that even IMAGINING a world where it wasn’t constituted a radical and potentially dangerous act, you don’t have any business judging those of us who have for how we survived it and how we found (or still find) comfort in the few imperfect representations we got.
You don’t have to like it. You probably aren’t capable of “getting” it. And to be honest, I don’t want you to! I am glad that young queer people will never know exactly what it was like “back then.” But what you also will not do is refuse to learn your own history and then shit on everything that came before you, because like it or not what came before you is the reason you will never have to get what it was like back then.
On Wesley Snipes’s role Noxeema and John Leguizamo as Chi-Chi Rodriguez.
“I grew up in the ‘70s and even within the street culture, there was a lot of flamboyancy,” Snipes told TODAY of his perception of drag before filming. “Pimps wore the same furs as theprostitutes wore.
“Some of the great musicians of the world, like Parliament-Funkadelic, were very androgynous. So it wasn’t really new for me to see men dressed as women or men dressed as drag queens.”
Snipes attended the famed LaGuardia High School of Performing Arts and then State University of New York at Purchase. He wasn’t a dance major, but most of his friends were. “That exposed me to the world of glam, vogue, drag, transgender and gay people, LGBTQ… but it wasn’t in fashion those days. But it existed and I was around it.”
Not only did “Priscilla, Queen of the Desert” pave the way for “To Wong Foo,” so did films like the 1968 documentary “The Queen” and “Paris Is Burning,” the 1990 doc that chronicled ball culture of New York and the various Black and queer communities involved in it.
Even though he was known for his action roles, Snipes’ portrayal of Noxeema wasn’t the first time he played a drag queen. In 1986, he made his Broadway debut in the play “Execution of Justice,” playing Sister Boom Boom, a real-life AIDS activist and drag nun who acted as the show’s voice of conscience. Snipes pointed out, “Sister Boom Boom did not have Noxeema’s makeup kit.”
On whether he got any pushback for stepping into Noxeema’s pumps, he said, “Not so much professionally but the streets weren’t feeling it, and there were certain community circles. The martial arts community… they were not feeling it at all.”
“In fact, when the movie came out and they would come down the street, I would see them in Brooklyn sometimes, they started listing all my movies. I noticed they would always skip that one. I would correct them, ‘Now you don’t got the full count!’”
Lesser-known than his co-stars at the time, Lequizamo didn’t really anticipate becoming a transgender icon, but he did know that they were working on something special when they started filming.
“Drag didn’t really exist in movies,” Lequizamo, who was nominated for a Golden Globe for his portrayal, told TODAY. “There were straight men pretending to be women to get out of trouble or into trouble but this was not that. I was trying to make Chi-Chi a real life trans character and Patty and Wesley were trying to be real drag queens.” Never fully articulated in the film, Chi-Chi Rodriguez has always been perceived as transgender, something that ending up making an indelible mark on LGBTQ people in the late ‘90s as trans representation in media was limited.
“Chi-Chi was a trans icon, but she also showed us that gay men and trans women can both perform and work in drag side by side, and that those relationships are symbiotic,” Cayne explained.
“It was a powerful thing. I get lots of fan mail from LGBTQ teens telling me how my character helped them come out to their parents,” Leguizamo said. “They didn’t feel like they were seen, so that was a beautiful gift from the movie.”
Lequizamo also articulates that if “To Wong Foo” were cast today, a trans actor should be cast in his role. (And that just may happen, since Beane is developing a musical for Broadway.) “Anybody can play anything, but the playing field is not fair that way,” he said. “Not everybody is allowed to play everything. So until we get to that place, it is important for trans actors to get a chance to act which they don’t. In the project I’m doing, I’m making sure that the person playing trans is a trans person so we can make it legit, make it real. That just needs to be done right now.”
a monumental film in the library of queer history.
it was formative for modern society, too.
there are a lot of action fans out there who learned from their idols that respect doesn’t cost a damn thing to give. i know plenty of people who aren’t queer saw trans women and drag queens presented as people to them for the first time in wong fu. suddenly, strange and foreign queer identities that had only been presented to them as jokes if they’d even heard of them, seemed a little more relatable, and very human.
we’re all just people.
snipes, swayze, and leguizamo were willing to play people a lot of their fans didn’t respect yet or didn’t even know how to respect and demand they figure it the fuck out.
This is a HUGE reblog but I watched this as a little girl on cable TV and I’m so glad I did. GO WATCH THIS AS SOON AS YOU CAN
Just a note: I just checked Amazon because as far as I knew it’s $3.99 to rent everywhere but on Amazon you can rent it for only 99 cents! It’s more than worth it. Miss Vida Boheme is probably my favorite Patrick Swayze character ever, which is saying a lot considering the points mentioned above about him being the guy from Dirty Dancing and Roadhouse.
Last week's chapter of Last Courtesan of Olympus warned you who would be next. Are you ready for Ares? Aikos might not be.
"'I wonder if you are as talented as I’ve been told.' Ares faced me with a smirk and glint in his eyes like I imagined he had every time he sunk a blade into someone and watched their mouths fall slack. 'Will you disappoint me?'.”
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Peter Thorne has a secret—he can bring the dead back to life.
When Peter’s mother died, she passed him the touch of life and made him promise to use his abilities wisely. Unable to bring her back and afraid of being caught or causing too much imbalance in the world, Peter vowed to use his gift only on plants. After all, with people, sometimes dead is better.
Or that is what Peter thinks until he takes a gardening job at Benes Manor. The mystery of a missing girl, an old gothic home, and the whispers and tempting caresses of a ghost in his room lead him to delve deeper into his powers than ever before. Perhaps he can find the missing girl and the origins of his ghostly visitor, if only he knew who to trust—and who and what to touch.
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The Last Courtesan of Olympus Ch 3
A series of erotic encounters with Greek gods wouldn't be complete without the god of love! See how Aikos handles Eros in today's chapter of Last Courtesan of Olympus - all chapters so far FREE in Amanda Meuwissen Books.
"It was as I slipped into fresh sandals—not winged ones, I am disappointed to report—that an arrow pierced through the opening between pillars into Hermes’s bedchamber and wedged into the wall. It was gold and gleaming, glittering, its head the shape of a heart as if to say love could pierce without mercy."
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The Case of the Boy In Blue
By Amanda Meuwissen
"Best of 2021"
The Case of the Boy in Blue, last of my pocket paperbacks - at least for now - is finally on my Etsy store for signed copies!
"Leonard Quill, private investigator, never expected a case to walk through his door quite like this one, complete with murder, a frame job, blackmail, and powerful players, especially coming from a man with bright blue eyes behind his glasses, a crooked bow tie, and an impossible smile."
Only $7.99 plus shipping on Etsy
Or get it on Amazon for the regular paperback price, also available as an audiobook and Kindle Unlimited eBook!
Oh no, you must've misheard me. I never said morally GRAY, I said morally GAY. As in he takes a certain homosexual approach to dealing with ethical dilemmas. Also he's killed 200 people
