A warm welcome to author Ashavan Doyon joining us today to talk about the rerelease of “Steven’s Heart”.
Ashavan talks about writing and characters that grow out of control.
Welcome Ashavan 🙂
Thank you so much, to Dani and everyone at Love Bytes Reviews for having me today! I know you must all be very busy with the anniversary celebration, so I’m grateful for the space you’ve given me to talk about Steven’s Heart. Just a note, this is a sequel, and so there are some spoilers for Loving Aidan in my discussion below!
When I wrote Loving Aidan, I was not prepared for how much people loved this character. Perhaps I should have been? Intentionally drawn as a reflection of Sammy, Steven was not meant to be a radically different character. Both Sammy and Steven were athletes. Both studied hard. Both were in the sciences. Both hid their sexuality in relationships with women that never seemed to last.
Sammy was drawn deliberately as dominant and possessive because those were traits that Aidan found attractive. Their formative meeting was one of Sammy acting to protect Aidan, and also of Sammy being utterly unconcerned over Aidan’s sexuality.
Of the two, Steven was portrayed as cheater, the womanizer, the untrustworthy one. He was the one who called Aidan names, who struggled with Aidan’s flamboyant expressiveness. At heart he was a gentle giant, a romantic, who struggled to let go of prejudices he grew up with.
Despite having written a clear preference for Sammy, it’s beyond doubt that the character of Steven lived more. He grew more. He demanded more. Written to provide contrast to Sammy, to provide a spark of jealousy, he instead provoked an intense response.
Readers loved him.
Adored him. Wrote me hate mail over Aidan choosing Sammy over him. More, readers loved the seriously cut down version of Steven that they got… I cut 12000 words from Loving Aidan, almost all of it romance between Aidan and Steven. Many scenes between them were entirely rewritten, including the first actual sex scene (they show restraint in the final book; they did not in the original) and the break up (if you think the one that made it into Loving Aidan makes you cry? OMG, I still bawl reading it and I wrote it!)
I promised readers I would make things right for Steven. Just months after the July 31 release date, I sat down at my computer and I started writing. Steven’s Heart starts at a familiar point for readers. While Aidan is experiencing the start of his happily ever after, getting everything he wants, Steven is falling apart. And the story starts there, before Loving Aidan is even over, with Steven waking up, staring into the mirror, and trying to figure out his place in the world. He has to do it without Aidan, who he relied on for all his support coming out. And he has to do it without Sammy—his best friend.
I think because Steven wasn’t the carefully planned character that Aidan and Sammy both were, he was able to surprise me more. He keeps surprising me.
I hope he’ll surprise you too.
A lot of readers hate Aidan. A fair number still can’t forgive Drew (who features in book 3!). They all adore Steven.
I will give out one copy of either Loving Aidan, Steven’s Heart or American Pride to one lucky commenter who has a question about the story, or the College Rose Romances Series, or about my writing, and can tell me about a time when someone really surprised them. (That’s two things, a real engaging question about any one of several things, and a personal story). Have at it!
Steven’s Heart
Ashavan Doyon
When a love triangle breaks, Steven Everett is left alone to grieve over a boyfriend lost to someone else. Surrounded by friends too tied to Aidan’s new lover to give advice, Steven turns instead to a broken and beaten man, Aidan’s other ex, Michael Rossier, who also knows the pain of having loved and lost Aidan. Steven’s and Michael’s confessions grow deeper, each confiding in the other until neither can deny an attraction. But being with Michael feels like cheating, and Steven isn’t sure what to do. The connection get stronger every day, and Steven realizes he’s facing an impossible choice.
To make a relationship with Michael work, Steven needs to make peace with Michael’s troubled past. Even more terrifying, he’ll have to tell Michael the secret he’s never told anyone, not even Aidan. With Michael recovering from yet another surgery, Steven leaves to face the ghosts of the past. He has to be certain. This time, Steven knows, the decision means revealing the secrets of his heart and hoping their fragile feelings can survive.
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Ashavan Doyon may have been a yeti in a prior life or possibly part giant. Either that or Texan air seriously messes up child development. During the day he’s a quiet and unassuming assistant at a liberal arts college in New England. At lunch, in the evenings, and when he can escape the grasp of his husband on weekends, Ashavan writes—with keyboard sounds on, because typing should make noise, beautiful clicky-clacky noise. He grew up reading fantasy classics and science fiction stories, but loves most speculative fiction. Growing up there was no such thing as a happy gay love story, and Ashavan writes to put those stories, full of fragility, beauty, even terror sometimes, into the world.
Consumed outside of his writing by a life with his husband and their ancient pug, Ashavan lives in Massachusetts and frequently complains about the snow that he never saw growing up in Texas. He went to school at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and holds a degree in Russian and East European Studies with a focus in language and literature. Ashavan continues to adore speculative fiction and can often be found rereading the classics he grew up with in his spare time.
Find him:
On the web at www.ashavandoyon.com
On Facebook at www.facebook.com/ashavandoyon.writer
On Twitter at @ashavandoyon
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.