A very warm welcome to author Nicole Kimberling stopping by Love Bytes in honor or Queer Romance Month
Welcome Nicole 🙂
This mini-interview with one of our contributors is brought to you in support of Queer Romance Month.
QRM runs throughout October, celebrating love stories in all shades of the rainbow in all shades of romance. Join us, and over a hundred LGBTQ+ authors and allies, for essays, flash-fiction and much, much more.
Nicole Kimberling
- A queer romance you’d recommend to a newcomer
Readers making the leap from traditional to queer romance might find it easiest to stay within their preferred sub genres. So I offer a couple of different choices:
For contemporary readers I would recommend Sweet And Sour by Astrid Amara or Tigers and Devils by Sean Kennedy.
Readers of historical, especially the Regency will probably enjoy Joanna Chambers’ Enlightenment Trilogy. Also Harper Fox’s Brothers of the Wild North Sea, which is more serious but absolutely a genre classic.
Paranormal readers have a plethora to choose from so I offer a plethora of authors in the Charmed and Dangerous anthology. Yes, I do have a story in this one but there are nine other authors who represent a who’s who of the paranormal m/m world. If you can’t find anything you like in here, you might not like paranormal romance after all. 🙂
- Why is queer romance important to you
Well, since I’m a lesbian, queer romance is naturally relevant to my life. But I am also the editor for an activist book publishing company called Blind Eye Books. We exclusively publish stories featuring queer protagonists that feature happy endings. Why did we do this? Because in 2007, when we started, the prevalence of bummer endings for queer characters was just too depressing. We decided to use our moneys to manufacture quality books featuring characters who not only get to live through the book, they get to be the hero of the book and have a relationship too. Our mission was to give queer readers characters as absolutely awesome as their heterosexual counterparts. I think we’ve more or less succeeded so far, but I’m also looking forward to seeing what stories our authors write in the future.
- Recommend a book you love, but feel is under appreciated
The very first gay romance I ever read was Street Lavender by Chris Hunt. This book was put out by Gay Men’s Press in 1986 and what an impression it made on me! It tells the story of Willie Smith, a Dickensian-style urchin searching for love in seamy Victorian London.
I adore the first couple of lines: “After one leaf-falling autumn, in the winter that followed, our father died of a fever and we fell Upon Hard Times. I know we did because this is what our mum said: “Boys, we have fallen upon hard times.” These have inspired me ever since to try to get a joke into the very first 50 words of every story I’ve written since—even if it’s just a joke to myself.
Nicole’s contribution to Queer Romance Month – “The Little Golden Book of Goblin Stories” – will be published on 30th October.
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About Nicole
Nicole Kimberling lives in Bellingham, Washington with her wife, Dawn Kimberling, two bad cats as well as a wide and diverse variety of invasive and noxious weeds. Her first novel, Turnskin, won the Lambda Literary Award for Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror. She is also the author of the Bellingham Mystery Series and editor for Blind Eye Books.
About Charmed and Dangerous
Magic takes many forms. From malignant hexes to love charms gone amok, you’ll find a vast array of spells and curses, creatures and conjurings in this massive collection—not to mention a steamy dose of man-on-man action. Charmed and Dangerous features all-new stories of gay paranormal romance, supernatural fiction and urban fantasy by ten top m/m paranormal authors.
