Fate, Strange Fate

I love PARADES. and Having Itchy Nails Tires me...

And having hangnails is annoying. And having to clip my nails every three or four days is super annoying. And not being able to release new stories yet is the most annoying. But what can you do? Nothing's really done yet to the degree I want to announce or share it.

I'm writing though. Lots! And it's all pretty cool stuff.

I'm also listening a lot to the new Anne Hathaway album. I genuinely cannot believe how good it is. She's a great singer but also the production and songwriting is immaculate. Burial, Dark Cradle, and Blue Flame are incredible. My favourite is Holy Spirit 2 though; what a damn song!

I haven't seen the movie Mother Mary yet but the album is immaculate.

Here's hoping Anne Hathaway continues releasing music though because she's fucking incredible at it! Easily eating these main pop girlies up.

Anyway I'm going back to drafting and I'm going to be listening to this album on repeat as I do it.

All I can say is this story is like Control (the best video game ever made) and Loki, an impeccable show, and maybe like Men In Black and X-Files and SCPFoundation. And it's gonna be great. It already is great, but it's only half done, so imagine how much greater it WILL be!

Blue-Eyed Surprise

Lucky you! I just put out a hot new gay erotic romance short that you can read for free on Wattpad here. Under His Touch is short and sweet and sexy, and it features a very cute, protective hunk with a pair of frosty blues.

Clearly this is under my adult pen name, Cosmo Knox, meaning there's going to be explicit sex in it, so read at your own risk!

You know you wanna ;)

Aside from getting back into the writing groove, I've been watching a bunch of Strange Empire on Netflix.

I've also been producing a bunch of music. I've been using Soundation & Looplabs, & it's nothing fancy - just digital instrumental stuff, like background music in video games, but if you want to you should check it out on my Youtube page.

I'll have a finished version of Forsake This Violent World up on Wattpad and Kindle soon, and then I'll be working on putting out two novellas on the same day :) One of them is Beacon, and the other is a surprise, but I will say it's also young adult...

This Is How It Happens (Short Fiction)

{AN: this is a short piece of a longer story I'm writing that I have no other info on, yet. I'm hoping to put it out this fall, though. It's gay romance, and it's, surprisingly, contemporary. Enjoy!}

I can’t believe that this is how it happens; this is where I finally give up. One in the morning, standing out in the cold, screaming at the top of my lungs, while I slam this huge boulder against a car again and again.

Inside, Santa is yelling and cursing and I can see him fumbling around. Ryan is screaming at me and trying to pull me away, and it makes me drop the boulder.

I shake him off and pick it up again. Go for the taillights. The paint job. The windows.

They’re built to withstand a crash, but the glass cracks, spiderwebs, and turns into a mosaic of violence and impact under the blows of a massive boulder wielded by an angry drunk bitch just about as well as it would upon kissing pavement during an accident, so I keep hitting it. I’m not hitting the car, though. I’m hitting the asshole in festive clothes who robbed me, sitting inside of it. I’m hitting my fuckhead friend who pretended she didn’t see me crying in that dark room with a red cup in her hand. I’m hitting my aunt for making me do this, making me keep going. I’m hitting Perry, again and again and again, for kicking me out of her party. Halfway around the world and she still knows how to make me feel two feet tall and caught in a lie, even when I haven’t told one.

My hands are so cold I can’t feel them anymore, but before they got like that I think they were hurting. There’s a flash of red, like I may have sliced myself open on all the broken glass, but I ignore it, and then-

Then Ryan is body-slamming me and I topple to the ground. There’s no time to rest though, because he’s pulling me back up by the collar. "Kaye, come on!"

His blond/brown/bronze/auburn/so-many-colors hair is plastered to his forehead and his dark eyes are full of nothing but panic. Over his shoulder, red.

Not blood. Santa. The Santa Suit - the asshole who robbed us dressed like Father Christmas is climbing out of the car.

Something flashes silver in his hand, and I think it’s a knife, and I think that’s why Ryan must be screaming at me that we have to go, but I don’t want to go. I want that drunk asshole to come over here so this drunk asshole can kill him, and then I want to take the knife from his corpse and just kill myself, but Ryan doesn’t know that because he doesn’t know me, and how can I convince a stranger who isn’t insane to leave me here like this after I just fantasized about how much I want to beat his girlfriend in the head with a big boulder?

It makes me angry that I feel guilty about that - Perry is awful to me, she’s always been awful to me.

Not because I’m faulty, but because she doesn’t know me and she thinks that what she sees on the surface is all there is.

But I feel guilty. Fuck, this guy.

Ryan’s fingers twine through mine, rough and cold and bony. He starts to tug on my arm. I let him pull me away, and when he starts to run, I do too.

“This way!” he shouts, the wind stealing half his words.

I follow him when he careens around the corner, feet pounding on cobblestones, and we keep running long after we’ve ditched the robber. Just two blurs of black with pink cheeks and wild eyes, running through frozen streets until all the world knows how to be is a blur of color in the corners of our eyes.

If this is dying, it feels better than I ever expected.

Also, OMNIBUS!

So I know I teased you guys and said you would have to wait until next week for the omnibus cover and for some news, but hey, GOOD NEWS EVERYONE:

You actually only have to wait for the news. The cover was finished early and is literally, BEAUTIFUL, so since I love sharing pretty pictures and don't want to wait, HERE is the new cover for the omnibus of TLJA!

AHHH

Lilac is legit look goals, is she not? So there you have it: omnibus cover! As for the news, which is very, very, very exciting - you still have to wait. See you in a few days!

Lilac Reborn

So, today I have some Apollo Blake news!

What has my illustrious alter ego been up to lately, you ask? Well, he/I redesigned the covers for the Lilac Jones Adventures! The new designs show Lilac herself in all her glory, and I'm sooo in love with them! The new ebook editions will go live on Amazon in a few days, once the stories themselves get a new round of edits (mostly just corrected italics, formatting mistakes, and another round of line edits) although the omnibus cover won't be revealed until next week, and ditto for that going live itself!

I'll have some more Lilac news then, but for now, just have some beautiful covers!

AHHH! Aren't they great? I love the purple and the illustrations that accompany each story, and I'm more than excited to re-release the stories with these new designs. I'll be back tomorrow with a more regular, rant-y, in-the-life kind of post, and then I'll be posting the new omnibus cover along with a surprising bit of series news for Lilac, so check back then!

-Oliver