Hi everyone, have you missed me since I was here last? It’s always a pleasure to be here, talking to you people and visiting the lovely Ofelia. I’m very grateful for your hospitality and kindness ❤️ Today, I’m here to talk about my newest release, So Far Away.

What’s the first thing you’d do if you’d been separated from your significant other (others) for a long time—weeks or even months—and finally got to see them again?

Zakarias and Julian in So Far Away are separated because of a global pandemic; Zakarias has caught the virus and Julian is an ICU nurse and to keep him safe, Zakarias moved out of their house and into the guest house on their property. They’re only separated by a few meters, but it might as well be the moon. Before this happened, they hadn’t been apart a single night for years, so neither of them is coping well. Julian is swamped at work and worried sick about his fiancé. Zakarias only has mild symptoms, but he worries about Julian working himself to the bone and is frustrated about the situation.

They talk every day, even see each other from a safe distance, and try their best to keep their spirits up, but it’s not the same when they can’t touch each other. Can’t offer physical comfort.

So when Julian asks What’s the first thing you’re gonna do when you get out of there? Zakarias’ answer is immediate. Kiss you.

Me, I’d cuddle up next to my husband, bury my nose in his warm skin, and sleep. I sleep like crap without him, so I’d be exhausted if we’d been in this situation. What would you do?

Caveat: While this story is definitely inspired by the covid-19 pandemic, the virus in my story is a figment of my imagination and not covid-19.

Excerpt:

When the rumble of his SUV approaches, I flip open my laptop and log onto Skype. It doesn’t take him long to call, and I answer with a grin. “Hey, babe. I’ll just check the soup.”

I’ve already made sure my laptop camera is facing the kitchen so he’ll see me move around. And who’s to know if I stretch and bend a little more than necessary?

Julian groans. “I see you’re in a better mood.”

“What do you mean?” I ask, grin widening.

“Yeah, drop that innocent routine. It doesn’t work with me.”

“It doesn’t?” I wink and saunter to the cupboard, stretching and reaching for a glass on the top shelf. “I think I’m gonna drink water from a wineglass today. Makes it feel more special, you know,” I say over my shoulder, catching a quick glimpse of him on the monitor, eyes glued exactly where I want them. Score!

His microwave dings, but when I turn around a few seconds later, he’s still eating me up with his gaze.

“Your food’s ready,” I say.

“Mhm.” He nods slowly but makes no move to go get it. So I let him be for a while. Saunter around the small kitchen area, grabbing things I don’t need from high shelves to make sure my T-shirt rides up more. Stick out my ass whenever I can, swing my hips more than necessary, smile, and flirt while I chat about nothing in particular. When I can’t drag it out any longer, I ladle soup into a bowl and sit by the computer.

He meets my gaze. His mouth is upturned, his eyes shiny, and he shifts in his seat. “I guess I’ll go get dinner then,” he says, and when he stands there’s a noticeable tent in his pants.

I make a mental fist pump.

He quickly returns with his heated lasagna. We’re both hungry and devour our dinners without talking much. We put away the dirty dishes in companionable silence; doing everyday household chores together makes it seem a little more normal, even through a laptop screen.

When we’re done, he wanders to the couch, but I lie down on the bed, resting the laptop on my stomach.

“I have stuff I need to do,” he mutters. “Laundry. Or neither of us will have anything to wear soon.”

“That would be worse for you than me. I can always claim a bad Wi-Fi connection and leave my camera off for meetings. Work in the nude.”

That makes him chuckle. “You’re too proper for that. You’d be embarrassed and you’d worry your camera wasn’t properly turned off.”

“I could put duct tape over the camera.”

“We don’t have duct tape in the guesthouse.”

I scowl. “Why not? Duct tape is a necessity of life.”

“I know you think so,” Julian laughs, “and I know you keep some in your drawer at work for emergencies. But you do realize you’ve lived in the guesthouse for weeks now without noticing there isn’t any, not to mention needing it?”

We banter back and forth for a long time, and it does us both good. Julian relaxes more and more every minute and my anxiety level hasn’t been this low since I moved out here, maybe even since the pandemic started.

When we can’t put off real-life any longer—he needs to do the laundry and I need to clean this place, it’s getting filthy—we say goodbye and hang up. But instead, we text each other between chores.

Julian: What’s the first thing you’re gonna do when you get out of there.

Zakarias: Kiss you.

Julian: Yeah?

Zakarias: Definitely. Kiss you, get you naked, cuddle, and smell you. I miss your scent.

Julian: What if I’m at work? What will you do then?

Zakarias: Lie in our bed? Use the coffee grinder and make some of the really good stuff? Use every appliance we have in our kitchen? Break open a fancy bottle of the best wine? Abduct you from work so I can kiss you?

Julian: Yes, please. Abduct me from work.

Blurb:

Engaged couple Zakarias and Julian are convinced nothing can separate them…until a global pandemic hits. Zakarias catches the virus with mild symptoms and isolates in the couple’s guest house. The few meters dividing them might as well be the moon as he watches Julian, an ICU nurse, work himself to the bone, unable to support him the way he needs. Frustration and worry build as the weeks pass. Will Zakarias be declared healthy before Julian burns out?

M/M Contemporary / 14 567 words

Buy link:

JMS Books :: Amazon :: Books2Read

About Nell

Nell Iris is a romantic at heart who believes everyone deserves a happy ending. She’s a bonafide bookworm (learned to read long before she started school), wouldn’t dream of going anywhere without something to read (not even the ladies room), loves music (and singing along at the top of her voice but she’s no Celine Dion), and is a real Star Trek nerd (Make it so). She loves words, bullet journals, poetry, wine, coffee-flavored kisses, and fika (a Swedish cultural thing involving coffee and pastry!)

Nell believes passionately in equality for all regardless of race, gender or sexuality, and wants to make the world a better, less hateful, place.

Nell is a bisexual Swedish woman married to the love of her life, a proud mama of a grown daughter, and is approaching 50 faster than she’d like. She lives in the south of Sweden where she spends her days thinking up stories about people falling in love. After dreaming about being a writer for most of her life, she finally was in a place where she could pursue her dream and released her first book in 2017.

Nell Iris writes gay romance, prefers sweet over angsty, short over long, and quirky characters over alpha males.

Find Nell on social media:

Newsletter :: Webpage/blog :: Twitter :: Instagram :: Facebook Page :: Facebook Profile :: Goodreads :: Bookbub :: Pinterest :: Ko-Fi

Hello everyone, this is Jackie Keswick waving from England. Thank you so much for inviting me to be a guest on the blog today.

For those of you who don’t know me, I write across genres from romantic suspense to fantasy and sci-fi. And while I like to set many of my stories in England, which I love to bits, I also allow myself to make up my very own worlds when I’m writing fantasy and sci-fi.

I’ve made 2021 the year of trying new things. I’m shifting the focus of my business to make more time for writing. I’m trying my hand at writing a paranormal romance, which is a first for me. And I’ve decided to write that paranormal romance as a newsletter serial, which is a scary prospect for a pantser who can’t write in a straight line.

My new paranormal romance, Caught, is the story of Tenzen, a death god who’s as old as the worlds and spends his years alone, caring for souls, and Yamakage Rakurai, a Yuvine Hunter, who makes himself a target by sticking to the rules and believing in doing the right thing.

Tenzen and Rakurai don’t just live in different worlds, they’re very different men with different values. Tenzen is an introverted loner. He cares for the souls in his garden, kills when he must, keeps to himself and has convinced himself he isn’t lonely. He’s never needed anyone, until he meets Rakurai and finds that he’s not against raising hell to keep the Hunter safe.

Rakurai, on the other hand, is used to standing up for what he thinks is right. When he finds Tenzen in trouble, he steps up to help without a second thought. He offers his life to save Tenzen’s, fights with his own clan elders when he believes they’re wrong and accepts that his choices have consequences. None of that stops him from feeling that he could do better, though. Or from feeling guilty that he hasn’t done so.

Together, those two very different men will save two worlds.

Or that’s the plan.

So far, I’m having a lot of fun with Tenzen and Rakurai, and especially with building the world they inhabit, which combines bits of Japan, Italy, Latvia, and England.

My favourite location is the garden where death god Tenzen watches over his souls. It’s based on the walled garden at Lindisfarne Castle in Northumberland, and I love it because the garden next to impossible to spot from the ground. Huddled in the rolling dunes, you come up upon it suddenly, and the dry, swaying grasses turn into a riot of flowers as soon as you pass through the wall.

When I started Caught, I knew without really thinking about it that I wanted my death god to have a garden like this. And I made myself wait to write the garden scene until I’d written all the chapters that came before it.

Have a sneak. I hope it tells you as much about Tenzen and Rakurai as it told me.

Summer-warm air brushed Rakurai’s face as he set foot into Tenzen’s garden. The sky stretched deep blue overhead, and a soft breeze blew a myriad of scents towards him. After the red and gold autumn hues around the Rafeet’s manor, his eyes struggled to adapt to the mass of colour in this cheerful jungle, where trees, shrubs, and flowers grew as they pleased. And where butterflies tumbled from flower to flower without a care. Hundreds, maybe thousands of them, in colours and sizes Rakurai had never seen before.

Enchanted by the spectacle, Rakurai hadn’t noticed Tenzen leaving his side. Not until the Shinigami returned, an indulgent smile on his face. “It’s a joy to see them like this after all this time.”

“These are the souls you’ve guarded?”

“Yes. Plus the ones who were already in my care.” He laced his fingers with Rakurai’s and tugged him along a narrow path. “Let them recover and find their way around the garden.”

Tenzen moved deftly between bushes and giant ferns, not minding that fronds and branches tugged on his clothes and hair. Between the wonders of the garden and the enchanting view of a quietly relaxed Tenzen, Rakurai didn’t know where to look first. He pulled Tenzen to a stop as the path opened into a small meadow.

“Who looks after all this when you’re not here?”

“Soul gardens look after themselves. They adapt to the needs of the souls residing here. It’s… difficult to explain. The garden doesn’t exist in either of the worlds. It’s remade whenever a soul needs shelter.”

“If there were no souls here, there would be no garden?”

“Correct. Though it’s not a fate I’d like to think about. That’d be…”

“The end of the world?”

“Yes. It will come to pass, I know that. But I’ve tended my garden since the beginning of time. And I’d like to think that the end is a long time away.”

They stood in silence while Rakurai digested that. His own lifespan measured ten times that of a human, and he knew—intellectually—that the Shinigami were immortal. But he’d never tried to imagine all the years Tenzen had existed. What he’d seen. The people he’d met.

The kiss they’d shared seemed insignificant by comparison.

“Is it always summer in your garden?” he asked to distract himself.

“No. I told you the garden adapts to the souls sheltering here. What kind of garden it becomes is as much a surprise to me as it is to you.”

“You don’t know what garden it will be?”

“No. Walk with me, and you’ll see. It could be a zen garden, austere and serene with its shapes representing other concepts. It could be a forest covered in snow. Or it could be a riot of colour as it is now.” He smiled a little. “It was a pure rose garden, once. I spent days in it, just to enjoy the fragrance.”

Rakurai followed Tenzen across the meadow. He trailed the fingers of his free hand through the tops of the tall grass and breathed the scents of wildflowers until the meadow became an orchard and they stopped again to gaze. “This isn’t the garden I would build, but I’m enjoying this.”

“The fact that you would build a garden tells me a lot about you.” Tenzen slipped his arms around Rakurai’s middle and pulled them flush together, leaving Rakurai with no doubt of his interest. “I’m thinking austere and serene would describe it well, no?”

If you’d like to find out more about Tenzen and Rakurai, then why not join me on my newsletter serial writing adventure? I send out new chapters every Friday morning, and the completed story will be published in the autumn.

We’re currently eight chapters in, and you can catch up on my website.

Sign up to my newsletter here: https://landing.mailerlite.com/webforms/landing/b4v8p2

And if you’d like to keep in touch and find out what else I’m writing, then why not look me up:

• Website: https://www.jackiekeswick.co.uk

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jackiekeswick/

• Facebook Readers Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/JackiesKitchen

• Bookbub: https://www.bookbub.com/authors/jackie-keswick

Today, fellow JMS Books writer K.L. Noone is on a visit. Welcome!

Hi, I’m K.L. Noone, and I write a lot of historical and paranormal m/m (and sometimes f/f) romance! Ofelia has been kind enough to let me drop by to introduce my new flash fiction short story, “A Sonnet for a Thunderstorm,” available now!

“Sonnet” is historical m/m, set in 1770, and very loosely steampunk, in a way—featuring poet Tom and his retired pirate Ellis, with a domestic moment at home, and discussions about thunderstorms and submarines. The seeds of this story actually came from a conversation with a friend, many years ago, and a discussion about my writing inclinations and a J.D. Salinger quote—the one about how “poets are always taking the weather so personally,” from Nine Stories. The immediate image in my head involved Georgian waistcoats and dressing gowns, an ex-pirate and his poet standing together at a tall rain-lashed window, keeping each other warm and gazing out over a storm-whipped lake…entirely Romantic, and irresistible!

The submersible ideas that Ellis is pondering in “Sonnet” were already circulating around this time period—both the Dutch and the American colonies were coming up with promising designs, and the first military submersible appears in 1775, during the American Revolutionary War. It’s called the Turtle (sometimes the American Turtle) and there’s a fascinating history of it by Roy R. Manstan and Frederic J. Frese: Turtle: David Bushnell’s Revolutionary Vessel. The idea, of course, is even older—some of the medieval Alexander romances describe Alexander the Great traveling under the sea in a glass vessel! I love imagining what that might’ve been like, and what those inventers and poets of centuries ago would’ve imagined, in their time and for the future.

I always write with music in mind, and two of the songs on my playlist for this one are Live’s “Lightning Crashes” and Cary Brothers’ “Blue Eyes”—both so evocative of mood and emotion. I think Tom, my poet, and Ellis, my pirate, would like both.

Like all the JMS Books flash fiction shorts, “Sonnet” is under 5,000 words and only 99 cents—a bargain! I hope you enjoy reading this one—I absolutely enjoyed writing it!

Buy links

Amazon :: JMS Books :: Barnes & Noble :: Kobo

Opening Excerpt:

Ellis had been watching waves through the bedroom’s storm-lashed windows when he heard the step, felt the presence behind him. He turned, a reflex. A year or two ago, ignoring those pirate’s instincts might’ve got him a quick dagger to the back. These days, and this day especially, he knew Thomas’s step.

Tom, as usual, blithely ignored whipcord muscles and danger and the very real possibility that Ellis could kill a man with a piece of rope or that painting to their left, and instead slipped arms around him.

Ellis Eden, former pirate, had not often been held and comforted by anyone.

Blurb

Ellis Eden retired from a career of piracy on the high seas to settle down with the man he loves: Tom Winleigh, youngest son of a wealthy merchant family. Ellis has tried hard to make a place for himself in respectable society, and he knows Tom loves him, and he’s happy.

But when a fever nearly claims Tom’s life, Ellis is faced with a foe he can’t fight … and even though Tom’s recovering, the ordeal has left Ellis shaken to the core.

And in the aftermath, on a storm-tossed afternoon, Ellis and Tom will face the tempests of their own emotions, and find safe harbor in each other.

Author Bio

K.L. Noone employs her academic research for writing romance, usually LGBTQ+ and often paranormal, fantasy, or historical! Her full-length romance novels include the Character Bleed trilogy (Seaworthy, Stalwart, and Steadfast), Cadence and the Pearl, and A Demon for Midwinter, available from JMS Books, and A Prophecy for Two, available from Inkshares. She’s also the author of multiple romance novellas and short stories with JMS Books, and previously with Less Than Three Press, Circlet Press, and Ellora’s Cave. Her non-romance fantasy fiction has appeared in Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Sword and Sorceress and the magazine Aoife’s Kiss.

With the Professor Hat on, she’s published scholarly work on romance, fantasy, and folklore, including a book on Welsh mythology in popular culture and a book on ethics in Terry Pratchett’s fantasy. She is happily bisexual, married to the marvelous Awesome Husband, and currently owned by a long-legged black cat named Merlyn.

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