Origin Story: The Real Life Build

I've been writing for a damn long time. And let me say this first: I don't mean to imply that writing for a long damn time in any way leads to writing well. At all. What it does lead to is having had many thousands of characters pass through one's writing life, and a few of the more compelling eventually make their ways into current works. And so it is, kind of, with Gage Maher. I used to write into this town when I was a teenager. It was my personal Castle Rock, if you will. I knew it incredibly

October 10th, 2015|Categories: blog|Tags: , , , |
  • Bali Beach House - Bedroom Balcony by Jesse Wagstaff on Flickr

Origin Stories: The New Born Year

There may be spoilers. Probably not so much, but maybe. The New Born Year was my reward for surviving my first year of publishing. I looked forward to writing this for about four months while I wrote the entire Home Series and Red and Bad (Serial One). It's still one of my favorite things I've written in the last few years. The inspiration for this book was Winterfair Gifts by Lois McMaster Bujold. Winterfair Gifts comes after a long line of books in the Vorkosigan Saga and jumps POV to a relatively minor character. (Roic, who is a much larger character now, but at the

  • super hero gay wedding X-MEN : castro, san francisco (2012) by torbakhopper on Flickr.

Origin Stories: The Boyfriends Tie the Knot

Spoiler alert: the boyfriends get married in this book. Okay, so there were a few times I tried to weave together two stories in one book, and failed massively. But in TBTTK I got it right. (At least, I think I got it right.) This is the story of Hugh and Truman getting married, and their best man's presence standing up with them at their wedding is far from traditional. It's always the story of how Hugh and Truman's best man started over with the woman he never really stopped thinking about. I wanted this book to be...hot. Okay, you got me,

  • Looff Carousel and Roller Coaster on the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk by Teemu008, on Flickr

Origin Stories: Roller Coasters

Oh, Davey. Dear Davey, Dude, I am so sorry. I will make it up to you, I swear. Love, Kris. I'm an escapist writer. Always have been. My nonfiction is generally loved and adored by people who know me, almost none of whom have ever read a word of my fiction (and it's not all porn, people; my loved ones don't read the tame stuff, either). I can't stand writing nonfiction. I write fiction to find the rushing river at the heart of all stories, and nonfiction doesn't let me get there. I don't like writing characters who resemble me

  • Fairy Tales Cover

Origin Stories: Fairy Tales

Oh, Fairy Tales. Real spoilers start about halfway through. There's a note. At some point in the middle of 2014 I decided to write a romance novel. As with most things my brain decides, it latched onto the idea and for a few months I wrote (and read) nothing but romance novels. I'd written romance novels before, a handful of times, but I'd never thought of them as romance novels, so this was basically my muse with a brand new chew toy: taking other people's books apart until there was fluff everywhere, destroying the squeaker, generally making a nuisance of itself. No,

March 9th, 2015|Categories: blog|Tags: , , , |
  • Untitled by Patrick Merritt on Flickr

Origin Stories: Breaking Down

[Here there be spoilers.] Breaking Down is one of the hardest things I've ever written. It touches on a lot of shit that reads to me like open wounds, and throughout the process of writing, then redrafting, then revising it, I frequently felt like I was executing the writerly version of that old game Operation; the story was a wide open body, all exposed nerve endings, and if I hit any note wrong it would sound an alarm. A friend of mine, who's only ever read the descriptions for my books, thinks I gave Molly a bad ride. (And, indeed, if

March 3rd, 2015|Categories: blog|Tags: , , , |

Origin Stories: Unexpected Gifts

Probably not real strong spoilers, but if you're sensitive: here there may be spoilers. I love Molly. So, Unexpected Gifts faced a similar challenge to Hugh's New Dude, though at the time I didn't realize anyone reading The Scientific Method expected Will and Hugh to actually hook up at the end. (Did I mention I'm aromantic? Yep. Never even occurred to me.) Had I known that, I might have stressed a bit more, so it's good I didn't. The first draft of HND/UG was one long intertwined story, but it didn't quite work. I liked the more-or-less parallel track of the two relationships, but the story

February 19th, 2015|Categories: blog|Tags: , , , |

Origin Stories: Surrender the Past

[olympus_box color="blue" float="center" text_align="left" width=""] SPOILER ALERT for Surrender the Past! (Which you can buy early here!) [/olympus_box] Let's talk about Nick. The first scene I ever wrote with Nick Coates still exists, in only slightly-altered form, in The Scientific Method. Hugh, desperately avoiding any actual feelings he might have for Will, flees to the arms of a fuck buddy, who also happens to be a real buddy. Nick calls him out, just like Lucy does, and the three of them are the nucleus of the family that predates all of these stories. In many ways, Hugh, Nick, and Lucy are

February 10th, 2015|Categories: blog|Tags: , , , |

Origin Stories: Close to Home

It's all about Stan and Jean. Where the hell did those two come from and how did they so seamlessly take over this story? I think of Close to Home as the only straight story I've published (at the time of this writing, in January 2015, though I've got Maizy's HEA and the Ally book coming up in the next year, which will both be "straight" stories). When in fact, CTH has a hell of a lot of Maizy and Jean for a straight book. The central romance to CTH is Stan and Jean, and fuck, I love those guys. They are

January 29th, 2015|Categories: blog|Tags: , , |

Origin Stories: Red and Bad

Oh, Red and Bad, Red and Bad. Little Red and the Big Bad didn't exactly start out as a story. It started out as one of the funny little tales I tell to myself while falling asleep, or out for a run, or--back when I lived in a place that had street lights--during nighttime walkabouts. First, though, I have to tell you a little bit about Lucy Martinez. I've got a lot of rules. One of which, dating back to my mid-teens, is that I'm not allowed to use "real" characters from "real" stories as fodder for my silly little musings. The real