By The River has a quiet, mesmerizing rhythm to it, pulsing with life as it relates the story of a young man who might just be as elemental as water itself.   With her wonderful characterizations and vivid descriptions of a setting that is clearly close to the author’s heart, Katey Hawthorne builds a story of a love between two men that becomes so strong, so elemental in nature that even the idea of loss cannot break it.

So By the River doesn't have a soundtrack in it like some of my others--it's kinda a superpowered love thing, if you know what I mean--but there are a couple of songs that I listened to a lot when writing bits and pieces. The biggest one was off the latest from The Horrors, and it's called "Still Life".



I was working on a later draft when I actually saw the Horrors at the Black Cat, which was kind of extra awesome and unplanned. But yeah. Just the way it builds up and how it's kind of sad but hopeful and all the words and... yep. This is the one!

When you wake up, when you wake up,
You will find me

NOTE: If you're seeing this at a feed like goodreads, the video won't turn up. If you want, click on through the site. It's rad!

Thank You

Upcoming Events

Coming Next...

• Bi people are slutty. Not that being slutty is bad, because personally I think it's awesome--but it has nothing to do with where you sit on the spectrum. I had this conversation with another bi author recently, but in fact we, and most of our acquaintance, are completely the opposite. Being attracted to those who identify as male, female, and nonbinary is not a matter of greed. It's how we're wired.
• Hetero attraction goes away after we hook up with a same sex partner, or vice versa. This is not a switch someone flips. While every individual has their own experience and it's of course possible, I've not yet met a person who actually went "gay for you"--which is why that phrase stings a lot of bi and pan people, for the record. We're kinda touchy about the whole bi-erasure thing. I'll let Malory say it for me: "It's not like it wears off if I don't smell pussy every year or something. Always gonna do it for me."
• On a related note: bisexuals can never be truly happy as one half of a monogamous couple. Sure, some are poly, just like, yanno, straight or gay or asexual--anyone. Ever. But just because someone's bi, it does not mean they must have it all at once any more than liking men means someone needs ALL THE MEN at once. Logic. It's a thing.
• Bisexuals are gay but can't admit it/straight but faking it. Possibly the most insulting of all potential myths. As another good bi writer-friend of mine (we need a support group, trust me) says, "I love being a mythical creature." We exist, I swear. While human sexuality is often in flux, and a person's identity can change over the course of their life, bi and pan are no different than any other labels in that sense. This isn't a phase. We're real people, and we know who we are.*
• Variation on a theme: bisexuals are manipulative. I see this one a lot in TV and film and it makes me scream. Guy swears he's straight, then sleeps with some dude to get something he wants and goes back to his girlfriend/wife/whatever. This? This is not a bisexual thing. This is a dickhead thing.
• Accepting your bisexuality creates huge internal drama. Don't get me wrong, obviously it can. I have some friends for whom it was incredibly difficult. I know this makes for good conflict, and fiction is all about the conflict, but it doesn't always go down like that--not by any stretch of the imagination. Sometimes it's just like, "Oh, well, that explains everything, awesome." Then their friends are like, "Oh yeah, saw that coming a mile away." And then their family goes, "Yeah, no shit, you like girls too," and go back to drinking their beer. (Yes, that happened. To me**. My brother's hilarious.) Some of us don't want it to be a big deal, either. I mean, other people make enough of a big deal out of it for us. But, like, we live with it, so it's more likely that we aren't super surprised when we figure it out.

Why is this coming up now? Adam Kavanaugh, who happens in, oh, two weeks. (Yikes!) He is, as my Editrix Raven says, pathologically mellow. Which doesn't always please the people around him, but hey. Gotta keep on keepin' on. He's got me thinking about it, though, so here we are.

I'd be really interested in any bi or pan stereotypes others have noticed, too. (The other me blogs about this a lot, but I'm sure I'll never cover everything.) I do realize that one person writing weird-ass books isn't going to fix anything. But it sure is fun to have at it, all the same.

*Also, questions are good. That's where it starts. I <3 questioning, and would give a lot to live in a world where that was made easier for people. Everyone would be a lot happier and more comfortable in that world. So don't think I'm trying to exclude that concept, please.
**I know I'm not the only one. Not only because of friends, but because of, oddly enough, Equilibrium. For every person who says, "Man, Sam 'went gay' too easily." there are three who say, "Oh thank god, a reasonable bisexual character, geez." Hope. I have it!

Today I've been thinking a lot about genre, just from doing a lot of the adminny stuff that happens before a book sees the light of day for By the River. While I fully recognize that the superpowered stuff I do is extremely casual about its fantasy elements, there is a system for it, it is employed rigidly, and I definitely consider it paranormal romance, if extremely cracky and quirky.

This Elementals stuff is different because it's like I wrote a contemporary romance based on a folk tale. The term "magical realism" is difficult, to say the very least (see the genrethought ramble I'm about to throw up at kvtaylor.com if that kind of thing interests you), but "paranormal" isn't right either -- it sets the thing up to be way more structured and fantasy-ish than it is. When really, it's sort of...

Yeah, I don't know. Let's just say I want to hug Loose Id for being all daring about my weird cross-genre tendencies. I think the best way to explain what's going on with it is to drop in a little snippet that I think encapsulates what the barely-there, yet crucial magic in By the River is about, and go with that. So here we go, an explanatory and totally unedited snippet -- proper (hot) excerpts soon, promise. This is Leith talking about his father with Adam. While running a bath for them. As you do.

Leith said, "I know how it looks. Like Dad just keeps me under his thumb. But..." He swept his hand through the rising water again, adjusted the tap. "I honestly don't know what he'd do if I fought him on it. I wonder, lately. I've never even seen him get angry, not even once. Just, I know how he feels about it. And he knows I don't like to leave the river."

"Did he ever say anything about that?" Adam asked.

"No. School counselor tried to send me to therapy for it once. Dad told him to piss off, said if I liked the water, what was wrong with it?"

That would explain a lot about Leith. Not for the first time, he was sure not for the last, Adam was a little bit ashamed to want to thank Mr. Marshall for his unorthodox parenting. And yet, "That's it?"

"Yeah. Always seemed to make sense to him. There are some things we just... don't need to talk about, I guess." He put his hand under the tap and let it rush into him. It flowed over and around him normally at first, splattering wildly up and out and finally plummeting into the tub. But then the splashing died down, as if some unseen forcefield contained it or the water pressure had suddenly lessened. The water collected in Leith's palm, shimmering like clear mercury for an instant before it continued in powerful little waterfalls between his fingers. The volume and velocity hadn't changed, only the turbulence of the route.

Adam shivered, skin pebbling. No matter how often he saw it, he couldn't quite get his head around it. Leith's casual defiance of the laws of physics was instinctively disturbing, but not troubling. It excited Adam's brain like an unexpected change of time or key in a song -- Stravinsky or The Beatles -- or a beautiful image he couldn't make sense of -- Escher or Dali. Weird and magnificent and revealing.

At the same time, it was subtle enough that Adam could buy why no one at school, or even on the team, had ever remarked on it; those things, the weird, magnificent, revealing ones, were the things that people always ignored for the sake of their own comfort. Anyhow, sometimes miracles stopped seeming extraordinary if they happened every day.

But Adam couldn't imagine Leith ever striking him as anything less than extraordinary, and therefore always noticed.

Yeah, I know, I cut out before they get to the good bit -- and oh, they do get to the good bits, promise. Here's a picture of two hot guys (who look nothing like Adam and Leith, but whatever) in a bathtub to make up for it:



There, that's better.

Anyhow, it's sort of the opposite of contemporary fantasy. Instead of taking the real world and making it fantastic, it's taking the fantastic and making it real. It's contemporary. But weird.

And then there's all the love, of course. I'll bring you some of that in a week or two, whenever I get the edits sorted. <3 Also, coming soon: comic book updates. Yay, comics are awesome!