I've added an unofficial blurb to the Nobody's Hero page. Once you get to the point where you've sorted edits and have seen your ISBN, it starts to feel kind of real, so I figure it's time. The heroes, Jamie and Kellan, have been keeping the page warm, but maybe a little info about what kind of trouble they get into would be cool, right?

This book has a little piece of me in it, because I based Kellan's loud, obnoxious, gigantic, loving, hilarious Irish-Catholic family on my own. Kelly's the fifth of seven siblings, and they absolutely love to fight and yell and hug and sing and do all the things I grew up doing with my family. (My mother is the second of eight.) Oddly enough, in a book about a guy who has superpowers so massive he's like a walking mega-taser (Jamie!), I have a feeling the Shea clan will be the most unbelievable thing in it. Luckily I have about eight hundred and twelve cousins to whom I can appeal for corroborating testimony.

The truth is always weirder than fiction, right?

Even more fun, looks like it'll be unleashed just after, or possibly just before, St. Pat's. Now, before anyone starts railing at me about stereotypes, believe me, I dislike being compared to a leprechaun as much as anyone (and I'm 5'2" and have red hair, so you know it happens). That said, we're talking about Irish-Americans, here, and Catholic feast days are generally the days where one gets their celebrating on. Especially St. Patrick's.

Which, for some, does in fact include crawling into a bottle and playing the Pogues at volumes louder than god. Those of us who do it are okay with the stereotype moment. Hell, some of us embrace it for that reason, as this particular stereotype has lost its power to hurt over the last fifty years.

So, yeah. Keeping the Jameson/Bushmills distillery in business. That's me. I'll have a pretty little visual for you for sure, so we can spend it with Jamie and Kellan. Though Kelly prefers Powers -- but that's another story for another time.

There have been a few reviews of Riot Boy over the course of the last week, and I've just updated the page to show them off. Woohoo!

Cactus @ Long and Short Reviews gave it a 3.5 and said:
Riot Boy is a fast paced, fun filled ride filled with sex and a bit of the paranormal. Brady is a perfect goth punk boy with his attitude, shady past, and great punk references. Et is a perfect foil as a more staid and down to earth bookseller with a broken heart. Together they play off each other well and create some dynamic tension.

Cactus was disappointed that the book focused more on the romance than on the action/paranormal side of things, but still recommends it as a fun read. Not bad!

Samhaine Queen @ Dark Divas Reviews gave it a 4 and said:
I really enjoyed Riot Boy. It wasn’t what I was expecting which made it hard to put down once I started reading. It was refreshing to see a supernatural bent, Brady’s cooling abilities, that didn’t overpower the story and relationship between the guys.

Totally sweet. She says she'll look up more of my stuff based on it, so yay!

Valentina Heart @ The Romance Reviews gave it a 4 and said:
I like to feel the hotness as I'm reading, I like to cheer for the characters and devour each word, and good sex scenes do that to me. This author can do it in each one without breaking a sweat, well it felt that way to me although I'm sure she slaved over this book for months and loves her baby as much as I love every one of my own books. To me it felt as if writing good and charming characters as well as hot sex scenes came natural to this author and I know I would love to read about another of her bad boys.

Which has got to be one of the nicest things anyone's ever said about/to me. And something I was particularly glad translated for Et and Brady, as their sexy bits aren't just sex -- they're a kind of self-discovery. I mean, I try to do that in everything I write, but Riot Boy in particular is very, very much about that.

It's awesome when someone gets it.

Thank you so much to these amazing reviewers --and to anyone who posts a review or talks to their buddies about this stuff -- for taking the time and effort. It occasionally blows my mind that people allow me to entertain them like this, let alone tell their friends. It's amazing.

And my next superpowered trick, as y'all know by now, will be Nobody's Hero in March. I'll update the page this weekend with some new info and maybe do a little talking about it, too. It's getting awfully close, after all. :D

I've had a few awesome conversations about comics lately with people who know this whole Superpowered Love angle I'm working with the romance. Like I say in the FAQ, the stuff I write is not meant to be comic-like. Comics are adventure stories with soap opera sidelines. I do romance novels with the occasional explosion. :D

I invited my friend Louise to stop by today and give me a little insight into why she likes writing erotic fiction -- I wrote an introduction for her current project, a teaser of her upcoming story collection, Passion Plays, on a similar subject, and of course we all have slightly different reasons for doing what we do. That's the fun part.

So here's the word from a wonderful author who's been hard at it for a while! (Yeah, I won't pretend I didn't mean for that to be punny. I will apologize though. Sorry, that was bad.)

I had the excellent pleasure of meeting up with a few awesome women from the goodreads m/m group this weekend. Many fun things were discussed, mostly books, but other, um, interesting subjects as well. As one might imagine. Fabulous reviewer Jay, who was there, posted a picture, even! Check us out. Hot, I know. Hot enough for free shots! Well, we didn't get them for being hot, but for knowing where to find hotness, but that still counts.

Of course we talked about alllll flavors of romance and/or smut -- sometimes they crossover, but sometimes not, as we all know. And one of the questions we were all meant to answer was "What was your first experience reading dude-on-dude." Let me tell you, I got some book recs out of that. We all now have even more massive to-read piles.

But mine was -- I guess predictably -- more a general queer reading kind of experience, and talking about it made me all nostalgic. When I was like 12 or so, my Aunt Tricia (who gave us the fine Honeyed Fox logo -- the official beer of Superpowered Love!) gave me, my cousin Brian, and my brother some of her graphic novel collections of Wendy and Richard Pini's gorgeous ElfQuest.

Which is about elves. With a quest. Go figure.

Anyhow, these were originally done in black and white, and I have a bunch of the "Reader's Collection" books in B&W. But my first experience was with the colorized ones. I mean love. at. first. sight. The art is totally gorgeous, the characters awesome, and the story is at once simple and really touching. I still love them after all these years. I met up with my cousin in Cleveland a few months back and he was going, "Did you see they're all free online now? I've been re-reading that shit! So good!"

Yeah. All of them. Online. For free. It's a thing.

They're not particularly gay -- there's a kind of forced bonding thing for the sake of reproduction, even. The society is just very free love, and I remember falling in love with that aspect of it even at a really young age. It's definitely been a longtime influence on me, as anything we connect with on that level usually is, so I thought while I was being nostalgic I'd do a shout out for it here.

This is one of the posters on the wall in my office:



It's the main elf dude and his soulbrother (which is sorta code for fuckbuddy but with looooove -- but that's about every relationship in these books) and his mate and their twins. Awwwww.

And yeah. I just felt like getting all comic nostalgic. Woohoo.

There's this fun practice among some of my blog-buddies known as WiP Wednesday. I do it a lot -- or did it a lot -- over at kvtaylor.com. (Which, for the record, is the home of my evil half, KV Taylor, who writes dark fantasy and horror.)

Usually you post excerpts, but I'm up to my neck in edits and do not trust my words just now. So here's how the last Work in Progress went for Katey Hawthorne:

1. Finish edits on Riot Boy. Editrix says, "Oh my god, you can't give me a character like Malory and then just leave him all fucked up!"
2. I think, "No, that's true. I can't, poor kid. I know, I'll write a short story about him!"
3. I write a short story... and find Malory's voice really easy and his love interest really fun.
4. I go out for groceries with the Manic Street Preachers on my iPod and Malory Claremont on the brain.
5. This song on repeat:

(If you're seeing this on a feed: Manic Street Preachers - This Joke Sport Severed. Which, just for the record, is one of my favorite songs from my absolute favorite band. The one tattoo visible in my author photo actually says "SEVERED".)
6. I realize a short story won't do, and I must now write a book or suffer Mal's voice in my head for all eternity. I finish my shopping. Barely.
7. Come home, put away groceries, scrap the short, and begin writing a book.
8. I read a metric fuck ton (slightly smaller than the English fuck ton, but still substantial) of books about prison and community custody/parole over the course of one week. Talk about your depressing research subjects. Wow.
9. I corner a good friend who's just taken a job at the federal BoP, take her to dinner, and figure out the logistics of getting an awakened person into prison and keeping them there.
10. I disappear from the face of the planet and write 60k. (8, 9, and 10 happen in the same week, actually, then one extra week for 10.)
11. I end up with an extremely messy first draft about a character who is, for all intents and purposes, the bad guy* in another book.
12. Some weeks later, I re-open it and begin rewriting and nitpicking and bugging people and researching and listening to the playlist over and over. Especially this song on repeat:

(Feed folk: Kasabian - Man of Simple Pleasures. Who has tickets to a Kasabian show in March? Oh yeah. Me.)

Will this story ever end up being published? Hell, I don't know. It'll go through several beta reads before it becomes a submission to the Lovely Editor, and then it may not be any good, or it may not work for the publisher for some reason, or it may need an overhaul, or it may be a lost cause. And god knows there are several other finished books in line before it. But it sure was fun.

So that's where you find me today, happily drowning in edits. That's how a WiP goes for Katey Hawthorne.

I have no idea if this sort of thing interests people, but it seemed like something different was in order for the old blog. Also, it may explain why all my superpowered romances, both the ones already out and the ones in the queue, have playlists in the back. Because yeah. Both catalyst and integral component of the process. For serious.


*I don't believe in bad guys, exactly. Bad for the sake of being bad, ala Sauron, is kind of boring, let's be honest. I'm always more interested in where the "bad guy" is coming from.

So here we go, the "Orgasm Addict" excerpt.

He didn’t even say hello when he finally got to me. He just threw one leg over my lap and sat down facing me, then put both of his palms against my chest, cold through my shirt, and leaned forward until his lips were almost against mine. “Thanks for coming, sugar,” he whispered so I could feel his mouth moving. 

I kissed him because what else was there to do? His weight in my lap sent me reeling, surprising and sudden, and that ass. I ran one hand up his thigh and then around to feel it, all the while aware that it was inappropriate and that it was idiotic of me to even have the thought, given that sitting on my dick was his idea of hello. 

He licked at my bottom lip like he had on the dance floor. My blood, already heading that direction, all rushed between my legs. 

He sat back just a little to say, “Like it?” 

For a second I thought he meant did I like that his legs were halfway wrapped around me or that he was good enough to drive me crazy with just one kiss. But then, with deliberation typical of multiple beers and a lack of blood to the brain, I realized that he meant the show. “Yeah. You’re great.” 

He smirked and got off me, then sank into the chair on the other side, pulling it close enough to lean against my arm. “Didn’t see that coming, huh?” He waved for a bartender. 

“Didn’t know what to expect,” I admitted. “But these kids would eat you alive if you massacred the Buzzcocks.” 

His smile went a little crooked, and he looked me up and down. 

Obviously my straight-edge attire and floppy seventies hair had convinced him I was full of shit. “I know who the Buzzcocks are, yes.” 

“No offense. Everybody lies, sweetheart.” 

So life had been trying to show me lately. “I don’t.” 

He leaned one elbow on the table, turning to bring us face to face. This should’ve forced us apart, but instead he threw his legs over my lap, letting them dangle on the other side, his ass pressed against my thigh. 

I hadn’t been sure what to expect, no, but I was definitely okay with what I’d gotten. It was weird, but mostly in that “why is this so comfortable?” way. 

He asked, “What’s your favorite Buzzcocks song?” 

“Uh, is it too obvious if I say ‘Ever Fallen in Love’?” 

“Nah, it’s a good one.” 

Also happened to be the story of my life, but I didn’t feel the need to tell hot and inexplicably interested rock star guy about my pathetic life. “How about you?” 

“‘Orgasm Addict.’”

(And for a random awkward experience I had with this song just before Riot Boy came out, witness the glory of my tumblr account...)