Well this month has flown by! I can't tell if I was 'just keep swimming' against the flood of my life or if life was sweeping me along. Sometimes we have to pause and evaluate what's happening and where we go from here, like Liam in JJ Quinn's story, Just Keep Swimming. I hope you enjoyed this month's CSR selection and have some comments to share below, but first, my interview with him! 

Chocolate or Vanilla?

We’re eating vanilla ice cream all the way, especially with an obscene excess of rainbow sprinkles covering each creamy inch. For other aspects of my life… Who likes being vanilla all the time? 😉

If you were an animal, what would you be?

A Capuchin monkey. I love the Indiana Jones movies and thought the monkey was so cute in Raiders of the Lost Ark, even though he met such an unhappy end; “Bad dates.” I’ve had more than a few bad dates in my own past that made me want to play dead when they asked for a round two, so I could relate.

What brought you to GA?

I’ve been writing since I was a kid and for a while I wrote professionally for a small private LGBTQ publishing house, but the stress of deadlines got to be too much for me because at the time, I was going to school for my master’s degree and working full-time as a kindergarten teacher. When the publishing house closed a year or so after I published Chasing Halos and Heroes, I just gave up on writing altogether due to health issues and just changes in life. I began writing again a few years later, posting on other erotic websites. When I reposted a revised version of Halos on another site, a reader here, who’s also a reader there, told me that I might find a better fit for my work on GA because I try to write erotic fiction and romance, not just straight sex and kink, which was the norm on the other site. However, I was very intimidated because I’d read stories on GA before under an old name, the quality of writing here is superb. I wasn’t sure I deserved to be here honestly. But, thankfully @Cane23 convinced me to try. So, here I am, with no plans to go anywhere else! Everyone has been so helpful and supportive, and I feel very grateful and blessed to be among so many amazing writers, and that my work has been well received so far.

What do you like to do when you’re not writing?

Honestly it depends on the season and what my body allows me to do at the time. Dealing with MS means that what you want to do, and what you can do, aren’t always the same thing. But I’ve been a voracious reader for years and even though I sometimes have issues with my right eye so I can’t read books as often as I want to (It also makes writing difficult at times) I listen to a lot of audiobooks. I am totally a Hoopla lover. I’ll read anything, but I will admit I won’t listen to erotic romance novels because I feel like a guilty kid, even when I am alone in my car and want to sing “la la la la!!!” at the top of my lungs until certain sections are over because of the ‘sound effects’ LOL I read a lot of urban and paranormal fantasy, and really enjoy the ones that are dramatized versions with full casts because it’s like listening to a movie wherever you go. I love being outside, so gardening and sitting around the fire pit in the summer and early fall, just enjoying our small rural town is always nice. I did go to art school New York City so even though I never really did anything with that degree professionally, I do like art and being creative. I used to make fake foods out of inedible materials (which I know sounds soooo weird but it is actually a thing!) for places like restaurants. For a while I was able to work with a few local bakeries and ice cream shops by making models of their best sellers that wouldn’t mold or melt. That was fun. I also like messing around with clay and ceramics. But I always come back to writing. It helps with my weirdo dreams. When I don’t write, they get even odder so it’s in the best interest of myself and everyone who has to interact with me, that I do get it all out on paper.

What’s one location you’d love to go to research for a story?

I’d love to travel everywhere, so I guess my destination(s) would depend on the story. I have so many ideas bouncing around in my head. The issue is in getting them actually written. Based on stories I am working on now, maybe Greece or Spain? I do love road trips and my partner and I have gone to a lot of places in the U.S. I really love the south and southwest (even though I grew up in Spanish Harlem, New York City) so a lot of my stories tend to take place out there. I always say I was southern in another life because the accents… Yeah, they’re sexy. 😊

Is there anything you find particularly challenging in your writing?

Yes! SEX SCENES!!! OYE! I write erotic fiction because I like to read it, but the truth is that I cringe every single time I have to write a sex scene. I find it tedious to make love scenes sexy and well-written because I don’t do bow chicka bow wow smut. When I end up with a story that has to end on a scene that’s heavily smutty, I want to pull my hair out and usually procrastinate, which is what happened with Just Keep Swimming. I ran out of time to submit it for the anthology (I learned about it with less than 2 months until the deadline) and when I tried to finish it just for regular posting before the end of 2024, I procrastinated forever because the last chapter was almost entirely a love scene, and I just couldn’t get into it. I prefer plotting stories and focusing on strong dialogue and character development. Keeping my stories tight and smart, but also sexy, is very much a challenge. I also have a lot of issues typos because of the eye issues I mentioned earlier, as well as stiff hands and spasms that occur because of the MS. I write my stories by hand then use voice-to-text software to input the stories into WORD. I use spell-check of course, but sometimes after reading and re-reading and constantly making edits, I miss things ☹I just do the best that I can, write for the love of it, and ask that when readers notice glaring issues, that they just mention it to me so I can fix them. Past that, I hope that the quality of my writing is good enough to balance the fact that I can’t type for beans.

How did the writing of Just Keep Swimming evolve for you? Plot or Characters first?

Generally, I come up with the characters first, but it’s really dependent on the story. A lot of times I’m inspired by song lyrics, things that happen in life (personally or on the news) or even a writing prompt. I’m very visual, so I tend to use AI to create my characters. Knowing what they look like helps me flesh them out and the stories write themselves more easily. For Just Keep Swimming, I was literally working off of the idea for the anthology, In Too Deep, so I started thinking about what that means for me. Being that I almost drowned when I was 16, my first what was about just getting in over your head in a pool—literally. But I wanted the story to be something light and fluffy so I based it very loosely off of a story I wrote about 15 years ago. This is a complete revamp that looks nothing like the original, other than the main idea of a computer programming falling for the Dad of two little girls. Everything else is a complete rewrite, including Liam working at the Y as a swim instructor. Until the story begins, Liam believes Gabriel’s straight, and was afraid of getting in too deep over his head with his feelings for him. Gabriel felt the same way about Liam because he has two daughters and is 8 years older than Liam, and wasn’t sure that he’d want a pre-made family. It’s sort of all just came together in a pretty wholesome way despite the last explicit as O.o chapter.

Do you have a favorite line or scene in Just Keep Swimming?

I actually really like the epilogue. It’s short, but I feel that it tied the story together well; the girls are playing in the soccer field and Liam bends over to touch his toes to get Gabriel’s attention. When they kiss, Gabriel’s youngest daughter, Harlow, tells him that there are impressionable young eyes in the field. Liam tells her that’s where her eyes should be. It’s just a very family-friendly moment, which is what the entire story was about. I also love when Liam kills the overnight French toast in Gabriel’s kitchen and the girls are as gleeful about it as adorable minions of Satan.

Do you relate more personally with Liam or Gabriel from the story as a person?

Honestly, I don’t relate strongly to either character, although all of the characters in my stories have some characteristics of family members, friends, or people that I’ve met or worked with in the past, as well as some of my own personality quirks, especially my sense of gallows humor. But if I had to choose, I’d say I relate more to Liam because I can be very awkward when put on the spot, especially around people I don’t know. Being a klutz was pretty much my superpower for years, and I still have more spazzy moments than is probably cool to admit to.

Can you share a little of your current or future writing projects with us?

I always have a million and one ideas bouncing around in my head with characters chatting to me and to each other, so I have a lot of outlines written. There’s at least a good 15 story ideas bouncing around in my notes. I’ve plotted about five of them fully. Some are inspired by old prompts that I found here, so I’m working on some of those short pieces in between the longer ones. It’s easy for me to get overwhelmed because I want to do too many things at once, so I try and balance by not working on more than a handful at a time; that allows me to put down a  story if I hit writer’s block on it, without feeling like a failure. I can just pick up another story and work on it till I’m ready to return to the previous ones. Right now, I’m just trying to focus on the second full-length novel in my Finding Home series, called Hood and Holy Water. I’m trying to post a chapter a week at minimum. (-crossing fingers) If I can get out two per week, that would just be a lovely bonus for my readers, but I’m going to go with a more conservative estimate of one a week. I’m currently working on a piece based off of one of the GA prompts that will be my take on Lady Justice. That one’s interesting because I’d originally planned to do a comedic story set in modern times  with a snarky first person POV about what it means to be Lady Justice, and the hassles it van bring. When I started actually plotting the story out, it took a completely different turn. It’s much more serious and I’m weaving a lot of mythology and actual history from Greece, Egypt, and Rome into it. A lot of the story will be told in flashbacks. It’s technically still set in the modern world, but in Greek mythology, Themis, one of the female Titans, is their version of Lady Justice. So, we’re going way back to the creation of the earth and stars, and the old gods. It will probably still be told from her point of view, and the flashbacks till unpack all of the things that influenced her till now. There will be mentions of Alexander the Great, Aristotle, and Cleopatra, so it’s getting pretty complicated, more so than I originally planned. But I think it’ll be interesting. I also plan on doing a heavy revision of a story written close to seventeen ago. It won’t get done in time for Valentine’s Day (Cupid is involved! LOL) but love stories are good all year round. And of course, I want to work on other stories that I’ve started, but put long-term holds on, including Coloring Outside The Lines (which is fully plotted) and Studs, Spurs and Stephanotis. There’s so much I want to put out into the world, but just not enough time and my fingers just don’t work as fast as my brain. I’ll get there eventually, and am so grateful to the readers who take time to read my offerings. It’s very motivating when I’m tempted to throw in the towel.