Our November Newsletter is online!

By |2017-06-23T08:30:15-04:00November 11th, 2015|Categories: Anne Marble|Tags: |

Welcome to November! We usually only send out our monthly newsletter but we thought we’d start posting it here as well. AAR’s Anne Marble puts these together every month! Enjoy!

(Wanna sign up? Click here.)

October Interviews and Author Posts

An Interview and a Giveaway with Lucinda Brant

Caz interviews author Lucinda Brant about Deadly Peril, the latest in her series of Georgian historical mysteries. If you haven’t read, Ms. Brant’s marvelous books, you’re missing out!

Why You Can’t Set a Wax Play Scene on Shabbos

Join author Tamsen Parker to find out the answer to this and other things she learned while writing Taking Flight, a BDSM erotic romance set in an Orthodox Jewish Community.

Revel with a Cause: The Outback Bachelor Ball

Learn about Bachelor and Spinster balls, grog, and swag from Karina Bliss, Joan Kilby, and Sarah Mayberry, authors of the The Outback Bachelor Ball trilogy.

Queer Romance Month Posts

This year we again […]

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31 Awesome Queer Romances You Should Read

By |2017-06-23T08:30:15-04:00October 30th, 2015|Categories: Books with Buzz, Guest Posts, Romance|Tags: , |

Queer-Romance-Month-2015I owe Alexis Hall a huge favor. I thought it would be lovley if we ended our Queer Romance Month Friday series with a list of LGBTQ+ books everyone should read. I also had this thought this past Tuesday night. I then asked Alexis if he could pull together something. I might have mentioned the number 25. Rather than tell me I was tardy and unreasonable, Alexis said, “Sure.” The man’s a gem.

So thanks Alexis (and I know he didn’t mention his book Glitterland on this list which is my favorite male/male romance ever) and thanks to all the authors who contributed this month. AAR is proud to be part of Queer Romance Month and we couldn’t have done it without you!

Before we begin, we are the ground rules.

  1. I hate top lists. So this isn’t one. It does not represent […]
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Queer Romance: Where Do We Go From Here?

By |2017-06-23T08:30:16-04:00October 23rd, 2015|Categories: Guest Posts|Tags: , , , , |

Queer-Romance-Month-2015For our final QRM-themed piece for the AAR blog, Alexis Hall is  joined by Roan Parrish, EE Ottoman and Santino Hassell. They’re going to be talk about where they think the genre is and where they hope it’s going.

 

AJH: Thank you for joining me, folks. Another year, another QRM. It feels kind of exciting to be in the second year, but it also makes me a bit meditative about the place of LGBTQ+ romance within romance, as well as the nature of the LGBTQ+ romance community itself.

RP: Well, and *is* it even one community?

SH: It’s as much of one as the LGBTQ+ community is in general. A group of people who are minorities in terms of their sexualities and identities, and who get lumped together even though they may have totally different perspectives and ideals.

EE: Yes, I’m not sure it is one community. Or maybe it’s not useful to think of it as one […]

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Queer Romance Week: A Queer Fantasy Roundup

By |2017-06-23T08:30:16-04:00October 16th, 2015|Categories: Book news|Tags: , , , , , , |

Queer-Romance-Month-2015Every Friday in October, AAR will run a guest post as part of our participation in Queer Romance Month. Today Ginn Hale, Nicole Kimberling, Astrid Amara and Langley Hyde are here to discuss queer fantasy romance. This piece is hosted by Alexis Hall.

 

AH: So a sense I get from some readers and a lot of publishers, honestly, is that ‘queer romance’ predominantly means contemporary. Have you encountered this as well and what would be your response to it?

GH: I think that tends to happen because contemporary romances are often the easiest to categorize, recognize, and generally speaking most broadly accessible stories. Readers don’t have to puzzle out the rules or norms of a whole new world, or try to empathize with fantastical characters and weird situations. Also it’s much clearer when an author addresses real-world issues in contemporary fiction. So, I think it makes sense that contemporary stories would […]

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Queer Historical Romance: A Roundtable

By |2017-06-23T08:30:16-04:00October 9th, 2015|Categories: Guest Posts|Tags: , , , |

Queer-Romance-Month-2015In celebration of Queer Romance Month, Joanna Chambers, Alex Beecroft and KJ Charles are here to discuss queer historical romance.

KJC: So, let’s kick off with a thing I see a lot. Many readers of queer romance resist historicals because they’ll be ‘depressing’—based on what people know of historical attitudes to homosexuality, particularly between men, and to nonstandard gender identities. Is this a view you’ve come across?

JC: More than that. It was my view :-) Actually it was Alex Beecroft who changed my mind

KJC: Which book?

JC: Captain’s Surrender. (I review it here.) I remember being uplifted the final notes of the book. I mean that in the musical sense. It ends with this wonderful sentiment of No boy ever ran away to sea to be safe. It reminded me of one my favourite poems, ‘Safety’ by Rupert Brooke (“Safe, though all safety’s lost; Safe where men fall; And if […]

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A Queer Romance Month Post: Looking at Queer New Adult

By |2017-06-23T08:30:16-04:00October 2nd, 2015|Categories: Guest Posts|Tags: , , , , |

Queer-Romance-Month-2015Every Friday in October, AAR will run a guest post as part of our participation in Queer Romance Month. Today’s is hosted by queer romance author Santino Hassell.

New Adult is one of my favorite romance subgenres because of all the ground that’s covered in these novels. There’s college life, newfound independence, economic struggles, interpersonal issues that pop up as characters broaden their horizons, and of course sexual exploration and those first serious relationships. When queer characters are involved, that landscape of “first” themes can become even richer.

In celebration of Queer Romance Month, I’m sitting down to discuss queer NA with Megan Erickson and Amy Jo Cousins.

SH: Hey guys! Thank you for joining me.

AJC: Hi! Delighted to be here, typing over your every word.

ME: Thanks for having us! Excited to chat.

SH: When I first stumbled upon NA, I expected the books to be very Felicity-esque (is this a dated reference? […]

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Queer Romance Month and Me

By |2017-06-23T08:30:25-04:00October 29th, 2014|Categories: Dabney AAR|Tags: |

EandTWhat, really, does a straight married woman have to say about Queer Romance Month? Not much that might not come out sounding bumbling or privileged or flat out clueless, right? I’ve lived my entire life in the safe embrace of the expected. I fell in love with a boy, married him–much to the delight of my family–, bore our children, and bask in the ease of a life that no one ever questions. And yet, I want to say something in this month that celebrates Queer Romance and this is it: Thank you. […]

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Grown-Up Reading: Why Romance and Happy Endings Matter

By |2017-06-23T08:30:25-04:00October 24th, 2014|Categories: Guest Posts, Reading, Relationships, Romance, Romance reading, Romancelandia|Tags: , |

QRMI heard George RR Martin on the radio the other day. Asked about the Game of Thrones body count he said something like (this is a paraphrase): “I used to read stories that had happy endings, where people did good things and nobody got raped…then I grew up.” Meanwhile, in an article on children’s fiction, author Robert Muchamore observes, “While a childish thirst for happy endings satisfies and entertains us, the real world is so complex that unambiguously happy endings hardly exist.” […]

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Happily Ever….

By |2017-06-23T08:30:25-04:00October 17th, 2014|Categories: Authors, Defining Romance, Romance reading|Tags: , , |

QRMOne of the most – cough – discussed posts we’ve had on Queer Romance Month recently has been about the happy ever after in queer romance. What the post, and the responses to the post, highlighted for me was just how complex and emotive this issue is. And while that would probably make any normal person STFU, I’d kind of like to talk about it. So the next two QRM-inspired posts for AAR are going to be about the HEA: in this one I’m going to ponder what HEA means in the context of queer romances, and in the companion post next week, KJ Charles is going to talk about why the HEA is valuable and necessary on its own terms. […]

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