9 Responses

  1. Jen CW
    Jen CW at |

    Congrats on your rereleased book! Do you thonk you’ll write another book in the College Rose series? Also, which of the character in the series was the hardest for you to write? As for when someone surprised me, one of friends surprised me once by saying that I was the only person she worked with that never treated her differently after finding out she was a lesbian. I couldn’t believe that I was the only one. It made me incredibly sad that people we workes with treated her that way, especially considering we were near San Francisco, where one would think things would be better.

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    1. Ashavan Doyon
      Ashavan Doyon at |

      Thanks so much for the comment! The series is currently four books, two of which still have to be rereleased: Andrew’s Prayer and Becoming Rory. Those will both come out this summer. I’ve got the cover for Andrew’s Prayer, but the Becoming Rory cover is being troublesome.

      As for characters that gave me the most difficulty… I think James is the hardest. He’s the main in Forgiving James, and you’ve seen him before: Jim Puffton, the bully we see in both Loving Aidan and Steven’s Heart. That’s a really hard role for me to write, the things going on in his head, and what drives him to those acts. We’ll see how well I succeeded when Forgiving James comes out, which is book 5. It will come out later this year.

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  2. Lisa
    Lisa at |

    In your bio it says you love spec fiction; so what would be your favorite sub-genre to write?
    Something that surprised me was when my brother was still serving in the Nat’l Guard, for years he would make homophobic comments. Then after DADT was repealed he completely reversed his opinion & was suddenly accepting. While I wish he hadn’t made the awful comments at all, I think he was just playing the career military role.

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    1. Ashavan Doyon
      Ashavan Doyon at |

      I actually love to write contemporary fantasy. You can get a glimpse of some of my fantasy on my blog, where I have a contemporary fantasy serial fic called The One That Feels, currently on Chapter 20.

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  3. H.B.
    H.B. at |

    Congrats on the re-release! The cover really pops. Can you tell us a little more about the updated cover?

    A lot of people have surprised me in my life. I had a good friend whom I thought would always be my friend since she was pretty close to me and we just clicked. Anyway, when we got to high school she made knew friends as did I. We still hung out but she her I felt she was being really insensitive towards me and it verged on insulting. i was sorry to lose her as a friend but she hurt me pretty badly. She wasn’t someone I thought would do that to me and i surely wouldn’t have done it to her.

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    1. Ashavan Doyon
      Ashavan Doyon at |

      This one is much closer to the original cover than Loving Aidan. But it still captures some elements that were hard to see in the original. The face was so prominent that you didn’t really get “blond” out of it at all, and the cemetery at the bottom of the original was dark to the point that it faded almost out of existence. There’s a poignant sense of loss in the story with Steven, and the cemetery in the cover was supposed to make you wonder who he had lost. So when I redesigned the cover I made some choices to call back to the original cover (the face is still very dominant), but also to change it up a bit in terms of signaling Steven’s loss.

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  4. 16forward
    16forward at |

    I haven’t read any of your books so I’m so happy I’ve discovered you! That’s my most recent surprise. And what I think will be a happy one!

    I looked back at all the books you’ve written and noticed you have several published a year. For example in 2015 you published, ‘Andrew’s Prayer’, ‘Becoming Rory’, ‘Gerry’s Lion’ and ‘Sam’s Café.’ Two appeared to be stand alones and two were from two different series. As a writer, is it difficult to move back and forth this way, (keeping your characters within their settings) and/or does it prevent you from being bored with a story line or ease any writer’s block you might suffer from? I love ‘fleshed out’ characters so I’m looking forward to seeing how realistic they appear in your books.

    The worst surprise I’ve ever had was on Inauguration night when Ms. Clinton lost due to the electoral college…especially after following the polls so closely. I think this will result in so many people suffering that I don’t know if our country will ever be able to recover in my lifetime.

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  5. Ashavan Doyon
    Ashavan Doyon at |

    I’m so glad you’ve discovered my books! Becoming Rory was actually 2016, but I did have 3 releases in 2015: A Wounded Promise (Sam’s Cafe Romances book 2), Gerry’s Lion, and Andrew’s Prayer. It can be very difficult to keep the characters straight sometimes and there are occasions when my notes are insufficient and I have to go back and reread a book in its entirety just to make sure I had some fact or another correct. The hardest part is when there are name crossovers. This DOES happen sometimes, despite my best efforts. I wrote the core part of The One That Feels (my serial fiction) and wasn’t paying attention, ending up with an important character named Brian. I didn’t realize at the time that I was going to be resurrecting Russ (the main in The King’s Mate) original love interest… who was also named Brian. So that can get confusing, especially for main characters. At the same time, the set of names we use routinely in naming people in the US is smaller than it seems, so if you write a rich world with more than a handful of characters, it’s easy to end up with overlap or similar names.

    I do bounce between stories to resolve writer’s block at times, but I usually write in a rush of energy over the course of a month or so. What usually interrupts that is a strong character. When I first sat down to write Andrew’s Prayer, for instance, I ended up having to set it aside to write the start of Becoming Rory, because Rory was rather forcefully emerging. When that story stalled on me, I returned to Andrew’s Prayer, and it was actually released first.

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  6. Purple Reader
    Purple Reader at |

    Thanks for the post. My own name is Steven, so I already have an affinity for your Steven, and of course, “they all love Steven” :-). But how in the world are authors (you) able to cut out so much of something you’ve written? Especially since you put so much “heart” into it (pun intended). Also (yes, a 2nd question, b/c you asked 2), it seems there’s a lot of psychology behind your study of the characters. How much do you indeed study the psychology as part of your characterizations?

    A surprise came from my Mom. I was estranged from her for several years, during which I had come out. After we got back together, I not only came out to her, but also told her I had a partner, black, younger than me (I’m an older white guy), and it didn’t phase her, despite her conservatism. I think she saw how much I loved him, and how much my now husband loved her son.

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