Saturday, 2 November 2024

Release Day - Entanglement

 Happy release days to me! Out now, Entanglement, m/m sci-fi romance novella. 

Entanglement

Two-hundred years ago the captain of a plague-ravaged spaceship set course for deep space. Elliot Stoll, an ambitious pilot, with a ship equipped with a hyperspace Tangle drive, is assigned to secure the derelict Iredoi, only to find salvager Kass Tyczkowski has reached it first. Arguments about authority and legitimate salvage are interrupted by an attack by rival salvagers, which ends with Kass rescuing Elliot from his destroyed ship, and jumping away with the Iredoi in tow, back to his home base - the Tumble. Elliot soon learns he’s landed in the middle of a family feud, but now the stakes are higher than the salvage value of an old derelict. A flotilla of pirate ships is heading for the Tumble to snatch the Iredoi, and whatever secrets it holds about the deadly virus that wiped out its crew.

Kass’s mother Dominika—the boss of the salvage company and the station—assigns Kass to guard Elliot, telling him that if he’s going to bring strays home, he has to take care of them. Even if it means the stray has to sleep in his quarters. Despite the stark differences between the button-down and disciplined Elliot and the scofflaw, hedonistic Kass, they make a good team as they prepare for a battle, explore the derelict Iredoi, and then give in to the intense attraction they’ve come to feel for each other. After exploring the Iredoi, Elliot becomes determined to destroy it to keep it from being taken by the pirates. But Kass has his orders too, and Elliot knows his work is cut out if he wants to persuade Kass to defy his mother and help Elliot to do the right thing.


Out now at JMS Books and will show up on all good ebook retailers over the next few days. Find more buy links here: Books2Read

Sunday, 27 October 2024

Newest releases and coming soon

I'm back with the latest news, after briefly breaking up with Blogger, for reasons.

Cover of a book called Entanglement by Becky Black

Entanglement - NEW!

Coming on 2nd of November from JMS Books - Entanglement, a new m/m sci-fi novella

Pilot Elliot Stoll is assigned to secure a long-lost spaceship, only to find salvager Kass Tyczkowski got there first. A pirate attack ends with Kass rescuing Elliot and taking him and the derelict, Iredoi, home. Stranded on a station run by salvagers hip deep in a family feud, Elliot’s forced to work with Kass to keep the Iredoi and its secrets out of the hands of pirates. Why is life so complicated?

Available for pre-order at JMS Books


Higher Ground - backlist re-release

Now on wide release

Zach is impatient and likes to hurry. Adam likes to take it slow and to tease. But, they’d have worked it all out – if only the end of the world hadn’t gotten in the way.


Ganymede Tilt - backlist re release
Currently exclusive to Amazon, and available on Kindle Unlimited

Union man Sean Morgan is a big fish outgrowing his small pond. He’s got plans for the future. Falling for mining company executive Alex Jackson is a complication he doesn’t need.


Tuesday, 10 September 2024

Out Now - Fool's Gold

My next book is now available from JMS Books. It's a M/M novel with a near-future setting.

Fool's Gold

Seven years ago as the economy collapsed amidst ever more serious climate disasters, Ethan Casey went into a billionaire’s survival bunker in the wilds of Alberta. Now suspecting his boss is not telling the bunker’s staff the truth, Ethan sneaks out to learn if the world is really in chaos. He meets forest ranger Jules Martell, who tells him the world is changed but is rebuilding, and that he and everyone in the bunker would be welcome in the nearby town of Goose Lodge.

Ethan returns to the bunker to tell the others the truth, prompting many of them to leave with him. Ethan had to go back to bring the others out, but he had to return to Goose Lodge to find Jules again. This time, he knows he will never return to that hole in the ground. Jules becomes Ethan’s guide to the town, and the way they live there, introducing him to strange ideas Ethan must learn to embrace. As they grow closer Ethan also becomes a forest ranger, and he and Jules act as liaisons to the bunker, tasked with persuading the last holdouts to leave. Soon only Ethan’s old boss, Sinclair, remains stubbornly locked in, with a vault of gold and gems, and dwindling food supplies.

Spending time alone in the forest with Jules feels like all Ethan needs to make him happy. But the forest holds secrets and sadness for Jules, and the town is not the perfect utopia Ethan thought at first. And Sinclair, alone in the bunker, is growing ever more afraid and bitter, and determined to ruin the happiness Ethan has found with Jules.

Available on JMS Books and all good ebook retailers.
Check the buy links page for your favourite store.

Wednesday, 4 September 2024

NaNoWriMo loses the plot

Well it’s come to this, National Novel Writing Month has been enshittified. The whole organisation had been a bit dodgy for a few years, but they’ve finally fully lost the plot with a bizarre defence of the use of A.I. tools, claiming that to decry the use of A.I. in writing is “classist and ableist.” Despite the very real issue of large language models being trained on the work of authors who never gave consent for that. Despite the threat generative A.I. poses to writers, especially freelancers. In what I’m sure is an entirely unrelated matter, they currently have a sponsorship deal with a company, ProWritingAid, that sells A.I. tools to writers. Various writers have stepped down from the board of the non-profit and lots of writers are deleting their NaNoWriMo accounts from the website.

There are plenty of articles if you want to get into the weeds about it. 

NaNoWriMo is in disarray -The Verge

NaNoWriMo Shits the Bed on Artificial Intelligence - Chuck Wendig

NaNoWriMo gets AI sponsor, says not writing your novel with AI is ‘classist and ableist’ - Pivot to A.I.

NaNoWriMo Organizers Said It Was Classist and Ableist to Condemn AI. All Hell Broke Loose - Wired



Cover of a novel called Shoot the Humans First by Becky Black. The image shows a soldier in futuristic armour standing on a hilltop with a spaceship in the sky above them.
My History with NaNoWriMo

I first did NaNoWriMo in 2006, to write my first original novel, Shoot the Humans First. (I’d done a couple of novel length fanfics by then.) And although I haven’t done it every single year since, between the main November event and the April and July Camp events, I’ve done a NaNoWriMo event 21 times.

To give you an idea of how long that really is, let me just say, I wrote quite a lot of my 2006 book on a Palm Pilot, using a portable infrared keyboard. (Yes, I said infrared.) By the next year I had a netbook. La di da! Of course I’ve also used various PCs and laptops, and right now, my tools are a Chromebook and a tablet and folding Bluetooth keyboard, which is sort of circling back to my roots with that PalmPilot!

I’ve sold 13 of the stories first drafted in a NaNo event to publishers and self-published three others. A couple of others are still in stages of being worked on. Only once did I write a fanfic, which is up on my fanfic site.

So it’s been a really important part of my writing life. I am, shall we say, a wee bit competitive, so the deadline and friendly competition aspect was always a great motivation for me. And it was always a good way to do a sort of writing reset, and just get out of my own way and focus hard on writing for a month and re-establish habits that had maybe started to slip. I encouraged others to do the event. I used to participate on the forums quite a lot. I considered the event a generally good thing. And really, I still do. The event that is, not so much the organisation that runs the official site these days.

A dialog box from NaNoWriMo website, confirming account deletion. It includes the text "You're account has been deleted."
But all good things come to an end. I’m one of the writers who has deleted my account. Hilariously, the page you see after the deletion hasn’t apparently been run through even that most basic of A.I. tools, a spellcheck.



So what now?


I wasn’t actually planning on doing the event this November. The next draft I’m planning is probably only going to be about 40,000 words, and the timing wasn’t quite right for when I wanted to start writing it anyway. But now lots of people are organising alternative events, some of them with the same parameters, some not, so I will likely take part in one of those, to show support and to get back to the core of the idea of NaNoWriMo the event, which has been lost along the way by NaNoWriMo organisation. Which I think has become more about writing as a product, than about writing as personal expression.

The one I will likely be doing is Writing Month, which is being organised by a Fedizen, since I’m active on the Fediverse through Mastodon these days.


But there are others. Here’s a thread compiling alternatives you might want to check out.


NaNoWriMo alternatives

The NaNoWriMo subreddit is also discussing the whole thing, obviously, and alternative events may be found there.

Sunday, 4 August 2024

Backlist Bonanza - Stowaway now on wide release

My second book published, Stowaway, is now on wide release again, available from JMS Books and on all good ebook retailers (over the next few days as it rolls out to them.)

Stowaway

The capture of stowaway Kit Miller brings some rare excitement to the life of Raine, security chief on a deep space cargo freighter. Kit’s a fugitive, a shameless flirt and the sexiest man Raine’s ever seen, but Raine’s determined to resist him. Getting involved with Kit would be inappropriate and Raine prides himself on his rigid principles.

To Kit, Raine is just another authority figure like the ones who’ve screwed him over before, so he can’t work out why Raine makes him feel so safe. Why the muscle-bound hunk makes him so hot is easier to understand.

Eventually, desire overcomes their wariness and they begin a passionate and mostly secret affair. When Kit proves his loyalty to the crew and the ship and Raine shows Kit he’s not the kind of man Kit assumed he was, their feelings grow deeper. But the end of the voyage is looming, and they face losing each other forever unless Raine is ready to give up all he’s worked for to love a lawbreaking stowaway.


JMS Books
Amazon UK
Amazon US
More links

Saturday, 22 June 2024

Backlist Bonanza Latest Release - Higher Ground

Higher Ground, the latest rerelease of my older M/M books, is out now on Amazon, and available on Kindle Unlimited. It will go on wide release later this year.

Higher Ground

Zach is impatient and likes to hurry. Adam likes to take it slow and to tease. But, they’d have worked it all out – if only the end of the world hadn’t gotten in the way.

Zach Benesh is sure his prediction is right – the island colony of Zahara is about to sink into the ocean. Adam Gray isn’t as certain, but he’s happy to follow the intense, brilliant geophysicist into the mountains to escape the flooding. Though he’d be even happier without three hundred other people – and their pets – tagging along.

But Zach’s prediction is right and as disaster begins to unfold towards an unstoppable, inevitable conclusion, the two young scientists must become a team in the fight to save their people. They draw strength from their rapidly developing relationship, but the higher Zach and Adam climb, the more difficult the tests they face – as lovers and as men.

Amazon UK
Amazon US