A warm welcome to the next author joining us on our GRL 2016 blog tour !

Welcome Ally Blue , stopping by to talk about Changes, answers the question and brought along a giveaway 🙂

Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

That’s right, I referenced Bowie. Because he was and always will be awesome. A high-bar goal toward which I shall continue to strive, even though I’ll probably always fall short.

You know what I loved—still love—about David Bowie? Besides his wonderful music, I mean. He was never afraid to try something different. Something new. He was always looking ahead, looking inside his soul, creating things that pushed the envelope not only for himself, but for his audience. That’s what made him great.

Well, that and his incredible talent.

So, why am I bringing up Bowie? Let me point at the title of this blog: Changes. For an author, change is the proverbial double-edged sword. It’s necessary, but it can be painful and even damaging. If you keep writing the same book over and over, some readers will be happy, but you’ll lose others. If you switch things up, write something different, you’ll gain new readers and reinvigorate some of your loyal ones, but others will drop you, disappointed that you didn’t keep doing the comforting, enjoyable thing you were doing before. The thing they liked and depended on.

I can understand that. I’ve stopped reading some authors because they starting writing something different that didn’t appeal to me. And that’s my prerogative as a reader. It’s your prerogative as a reader. An author gets to choose what they write, and a reader gets to choose what they read. This is how commerce works. It’s not good or bad. It simply is. And whether an author should or should not change how they write isn’t actually what this is all about, since it’s going to happen regardless. So I’m moving on now.

Those of you who know me know that I’ve been published in the gay romance realm for roughly eleven years now. I’ve always loved it, and I still do. I full intend to keep on writing it. However, since I’m a person who’s easily bored, the way I write has changed over the years. I write less straight-up contemporary romance these days, and more paranormal. Less sexiness. A smidge of sci-fi. I’ve even done some romantic comedy, which was really fun. Although, the one I have coming out from Riptide Publishing in December—No Small Parts—is a real old-fashioned angsty contemporary Drama. With the capital “D”. Part of the Bluewater Bay universe. It was kind of cool to get back to that, actually. I think y’all are gonna love it. I know I do.

Anyway, yes, I’ve done a lot of different things over the years. Lately, I’ve started getting into writing horror as well. Which is great, because as a reader I’m a serious horror fan. Always have been, ever since I bought my first anthology of scary stories from Scholastic with my allowance money when I was a kid. My first full-length horror novel, Down, was a finalist in this year’s Lambda Literary awards, which was pretty sweet.

(For the record, a novel by a gay woman won that category, which IMO was even better.)

Right now I’m working on a gay Gothic horror/romance, tentatively titled The Night Orchard. It’s been in progress for a while, but I’m looking to finish it in the next couple of months and shop it around. I hope my loyal readers will stick with me for this one. I mean, it is a romance, even though it’s also horror, sort of. I work really hard to keep my characters at the heart of all my books, so this one will be every bit as character-centered as my other books. Also, it’s not particularly violent or bloody. Not yet, anyway, and I have no plans for it to turn in that direction. That might be a surprise to those who read horror, ha, but personally I don’t equate horror with blood and guts. For me, horror is mental and emotional. Visceral. Not in the sense of actual viscera, but in the sense of what you feel in your gut. Anyone who classifies the movie Alien as horror (like me!) will understand what I’m saying.

My three most recent releases are a gay romantic mystery/suspense (The Secret of Hunter’s Bog), a gay paranormal mystery (Mojo Mysteries 3: Myth Adventures), and a truly silly gay sci-fi-ish romantic short story (“The Flaming Skull B&B”, part of the Butt Villains On Vacation anthology). I write many different sub-genres of gay romance, and am getting into horror. But I hope readers will come along with me on my journey of change. Or at least part of it.

I’ll be at GRL in Kansas City in October. Please feel free to come up and say hello! I love meeting new people, especially readers!

Ally Blue is acknowledged by the world at large (or at least by her heroes, who tend to suffer a lot) as the Popess of Gay Angst. She has a great big suggestively-shaped hat and rides in a bullet-proof Plexiglas bubble in Christmas parades. Her harem of manwhores does double duty as bodyguards and inspirational entertainment. Her favorite band is Radiohead, her favorite color is lime green and her favorite way to waste a perfectly good Saturday is to watch all three extended version Lord Of The Rings movies in a row. Her ultimate dream is to one day ditch the evil day job and support the family on manlove alone. She is not a hippie or a brain surgeon, no matter what her kids’ friends say.

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Ally is giving away a copy of her book “Down”

Down

Blurb:

Seven thousand meters below the ocean’s surface, the crew of the BathyTech 3 mineral mining facility has found something remarkable: a rock-like sphere of unknown material and origin.

For Mo Rees, the discovery calls to his inner explorer and adds color to his dull miner’s life. Even better than the promise of new knowledge is the unexpected connection he forges with Dr. Armin Savage-Hall, leader of the team brought down to study the thing.

For Armin, the object is the find of a lifetime. It could prove his controversial theories and secure his scientific reputation. And Mo is a fascinating bonus.

Then crew members start behaving strangely. Worse, they start to change: their eyes glow purple, their teeth sharpen. Then the violence begins, the brutal deaths. As BathyTech descends deeper into chaos, the surviving crew works desperately to find the cause of the horrors around them. What they uncover could annihilate the human race. And they can’t stop it.

Leave a comment to enter the giveaway and Ally will pull one winner on July 30th

Good Luck!