Love Bytes welcome to their blog author Wulf Francu Godgluck joining us today to talk about gay fiction and his new release.

Wulf also brought a fantastic giveaway with him!

Welcome Wulf 🙂

Hi all, it’s been some time since I’ve been on Love Bytes, but here I am with a guest post about… Well, maybe some of you will be just bored?

My writing career began on a night when I was frustrated out of my skull from boredom, sitting in my room (I was still living with the parents then) I think I had just recently finished Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows.

That got me thinking. Are there any gay fiction books?

You have to understand, I live in South Africa, gonging to a bookstore to buy a gay fiction book focused on romance was not that easy to come by. Most LGBTQ books in our bookstores dealt with autobiographies, or political stances, and or, LGBTQ history. Most still do, it’s extremely rare to stumble upon a paperback gay romance book in one of our bookstores. (The M/M market in South Africa is also very small) Not that I knew at that time what M/M was. *gasp*

Hence I stumbled upon Pack Discipline by Kim Dare, The Mark of an Alpha my first M/M book, I devoured that story and then, The Strength of a Gamma and then my fav one of the four; The Duty of a Beta.

I fell in love with the characters, the writing, the story… I fell in love with the art of writing.

For the first time I contemplated writing a story because ever since I could remember, there was a boy beside me who had sprung from my imagination. A boy that kept talking to me, and I had no idea what to do with him, how to make him be heard, and he so wanted to be heard.

But at the back of my mind, I knew a couple of things, one English is not my first language, second; I can’t spell or grammar to save your life. Even though I had both English and my native tongue, Afrikaans, as first languages. I had barely passed those subjects on the skin of my ass.

Something you need to understand about South Africa’s schools in general is, if you fail one of your languages, you fail the year. (Well that was the case when I had still been in school.)

I think the average pass mark was 35.333%, I had 43% grade for English and 38% grade for Afrikaans on my matric certificate, (in SA we don’t graduate, we matriculate) that was not something to be proud of. But I matriculate nonetheless.

Knowing this, I still plunged forth and wrote the opening lines to The Wulf Chronicles.

I was going to die.

I wrote and I wrote, I think I got about 45% done when life changed and I had to place the story on hold.

Flash forward three years and my mom got sick, diagnosed with cancer for the second time, I was married by now, and I didn’t really know how to handle this thing that had been thrown at my family again. Her cancer progressed; breast cancer to cervix cancer to bone cancer, we all knew she wasn’t going to win this round. It was during the night, after she had had an operation, lying in ICU, my dad had asked me to stay with her, and this meant that I would be up all night sitting outside of ICU in case she needed me. I did bring the laptop along but was unsure what I was going to do with my time, that’s when I remember The Wulf Chronicles.

Flash forward a few months later after my mom had passed away, I was finally coming to the end of WulfChron. At that time I realized something, my writing was different, no fluffy good feelings as most M/M books have with an HEA.

My writing had a hardness and rawness to it. It had undertones, was symbolic, and held metaphoric themes, not many would easily recognize.

I also had no concept of how the writing world worked, honest to god, I thought I would write this, the husbear would edit it, and then I could release it. (Insert hysterical laughter here)

Yeah, no, Wulfy. Shit don’t work like this.

I also noticed my writing was crap, really, really crap. I couldn’t show this, my baby, to the world, not in the state it was in.

Hell, I preach about showing vs telling a lot, and this was 120k words of all telling.

I had to take a step back and take a good hard look at myself and my writing.

I didn’t have author friends, sure I had author FB friends, but I didn’t know them and I was too shy to ask for help. I didn’t have a mentor to help me, a critique group to give feedback. So I wrote another story, and then another story, the later one I sent to an editor, and got some feedback.

The suggestions and feedback crushed me, in no way was it the fault of the editor.

See, I knew how to tell a story, but I didn’t know how to write a novel.

I did research on how to write, how to construct and create different writing mechanics and how to implement them. I spent a year just learning how to write, one of the most important lessons, how to SHOW and not Tell.

Then came The M/M groups Love’s Landscapes event. And I wrote Of Gods and Monsters: Menoetius.

It opened doors, give me a platform and helped me build an audience. I am the first to admit the writing isn’t perfect, but I worked with Beta readers for the first time and resized how valuable they are to me and my stories, three of those beta readers who worked on Colt’s book, is still beta reading for me today.

Still, I did not feel mature enough as an author to give The Wulf Chronicles a second chance or the attention it deserved. I wrote the Neon White serials, I wrote Hades, then Komainu and in between writing those books, I would always go back to WulfChron to rewrite. Start on it then stop, out of fear, out of second-guessing myself, out of doubt. And each year I would promise myself this would be the year I would rewrite WulfChron and release it. It never happened, for nearly 8 years I cling to my manuscript, protected it… I cling to my fear of not being good enough.

Until now, and even during these rewrites this year, I still feared, but at the same time, I learned a valuable lesson. I needed to learn to let go, I needed to understand what it meant, and how to allow myself to be vulnerable.

Most of you know this is not the easiest thing in the world to do, especially in today’s world.

But I’m closing my eyes, letting go and allowing myself to be vulnerable. I’m scared, Holy Hell am I scared. Because no book has been more personal to me than The Wulf Chronicles, it deals with a lot of things; death, vulnerable, proving one’s worth to one’s self, accepting one’s fears and overcoming them, loss, hurt, friendship, family, love.

To some this will just be another book, to others, it will be something they dislike, DFN, hate even. That’s fine, we are all individuals. We all like different things.

To me, this is a book where I’m sharing pieces of my soul. A piece of my heart. And maybe to some, it could mean what Kim Dare’s books came to mean to me.

I will always be grateful to Kim and her Pack Discipline series because she helped me realize what my passion is, how I could give this imaginary boy a breath, and a life of his own.

I would like to thank you for reading this far through my ramblings.

I have three copies of The Wulf Chronicles to giveaway, comment below with who your first M/M book/author was.

 

The Wulf Chronicles

What if werewolves were real?
What if one of them was different?
What if you were a defective werewolf?

This is not the story of how one night I got bitten and my life changed. Nor is it the story of how I went on a savage killing spree that left me tormented with guilt and dread the next morning.

No.
This is the story of a boy, a boy who’s spent his life running from the shadows of monsters. A boy who never understood why the world hated him with so much odium. Why his mother would throw away her only life to protect his. Why he was never allowed to have friends. Why he never had the childhood every child should. Why he was never allowed to cherish happiness.

This is the story of a boy becoming himself, embracing his vulnerability and learning to accept and love.

This is a story about a werewolf, trying to find the answers to why he was born defective.

And maybe that’s the very reason I become the main course on the menu.

Available on Amazon and Kindle Unlimited