First and Last Lines

The first and last sentences are considered by many to be the most important lines of a book. There’s even a commonly utilized blog topic where authors and readers post first and last lines of their favorite books, as well as tumblr posts dedicated to first lines and even one for all the Harry Potter books.

I thought it might be fun to take a look at the first and last lines from my Loose Id titles. I was surprised at how well the two sentences from each summed up the themes and character arcs of these stories, something I hadn’t consciously worked to do when writing them.

I was not surprised, however, to see how short the lines were. My editor says I have a very staccato style. My natural flow seems to be to write a longer sentence bracketed by shorter, punchier ones.

Here are the first and last lines of my LI books:

MORE
I hadn't seen any sign of my stalkers.
“I'll love you both until I take my last breath.”

BREATHE
Hope you found some peace in jail.
To save each other.

TAKE ME HOME
“Have you guys done it yet?”
So long as he was with Evan, he was home.

HOW TO SAVE A LIFE
“You’re mine now.”
“We’ll see.”

What are the first and last lines from one of your favorite books?




Award-winning author Sloan Parker writes passionate, dramatic stories about two men (or more) falling in love. Sloan enjoys writing in the fictional world because in fiction you can be anything, do anything—even fall in love for the first time over and over again. She lives in Ohio with her partner and their neurotic cats where her greatest moments in life are spent with her family, her friends, and her characters. You can learn more about Sloan and her writing at www.sloanparker.com.

Through to the end

There was a time when I would never put a book down without having finished it. Not all at one go, though I still do find books I have to keep reading and reading. But not so much nowadays. In the last couple of weeks, I've read several books and three of them I've given up on. One of them was JK Rowling's A Casual Vacancy. I almost got to page 90 with that but couldn't keep going. The writing was tight and descriptive but I was - oops sorry - bored. Bored with the plot - such as it was, and bored with the characters. The book I gave up on last night was the same- boring- but I gave up at chapter two. I could tell by the tone I wasn't going to like it. Life is too short to waste on books I don't like when there are lots out there still to be read.
Having said that - I have persisted with reading club books that I don't like - because I need to be able to discuss them with the group, and I have persisted with books that have had hundreds of 5 star reviews because I keep thinking - something magical is going to happen to make me like them- it rarely does. And I have persisted with some books that I don't like because I know I'm not the target audience and I want to give them a fair chance. But readers deserve better than a lot of rubbish that is out there.
The big name publishers - I'm not talking epublishers here - seem to be so obsessed with getting celebrity writers in their stable that they stop caring about the quality of what they produce. I used to buy as many as 12 paperbacks a month. Now I'm only going for my auto-buy authors for paperbacks. I've been disappointed too many times.
So is the quality falling or am I getting pickier in my old age?

Three-Word Scenario: My Roommate's Surprise (A Coming Out Story)

Here's another one of my three-word scenarios (where I take three random words and write whatever scenario comes to mind, using each word at least once.)

These three words came from Merriam-Webster.com's Word of the Day archive: voracious, hallmark, illustrious

"I'm gay."

Two words from my college roommate, and I couldn't blink, much less speak, or even keep my mouth from hanging open like I had a spontaneous, uncontrollable drooling problem.

I had lived with him for the past two years, and I'd had no idea.

I forced down a swallow. "You're…"

"Gay." He spoke the word slowly as if I might not understand what it meant.

What a laugh. Everyone had suspected I was gay long before I'd been certain of it myself. When I'd worked up the courage to tell my parents during Thanksgiving dinner four years ago, my mom exhaled a long breath like she'd been waiting for some horrible news instead, then said, "That's not news to us, honey, and we are very proud of you. Please pass the mashed potatoes."

So that was that. I was gay, and I'd been the last person in my life to realize it.

But Rex? The illustrious twenty-eight-year-old tattoo artist who, on a dare from a customer in his shop, filled out an application for Harvard, and when he was accepted, had decided to sell his shop and move to a dorm on campus so he could have the full "college experience."

Did that mean he wanted to do the curious-college-gay-experiment thing too? Or was he really telling me he already liked to fuck guys?

Rex had always had a voracious appetite for women. And they for him. What with the tribal tattoos covering his upper body and a physique that had the art students begging him to drop his pants for their Nude Drawings course. He was always dating women. And fucking them.

Or so I'd thought.

Maybe I'd never really known him.

Maybe these past two years had all been an act.

He threw me his hallmark grin. The one that showcased the dimples, even through the dark stubble on his face. The one that came with the pointed look in his eyes that said he was about to tease me about my love of cock—which had been happening more and more often as of late.

I was beginning to get that I might've missed something about him after all.

This time he didn't tease. He came to me, grabbed me by the back of the neck, then kissed me.

Not a slow, soft brush of lips, but a passionate, wild kiss that ended with me panting, sprawled out on my back across his bed, his body pressing into mine in all the right places.

He pulled back and gave me that grin again as he rubbed my cock through my jeans.

He'd definitely done this before.

"Yeah," I said. "You're gay."

And for the next hour and a half he showed me just how gay.




Award-winning author Sloan Parker writes passionate, dramatic stories about two men (or more) falling in love. Sloan enjoys writing in the fictional world because in fiction you can be anything, do anything—even fall in love for the first time over and over again. She lives in Ohio with her partner and their neurotic cats where her greatest moments in life are spent with her family, her friends, and her characters. You can learn more about Sloan and her writing at www.sloanparker.com.

Reading and Writing Gay Romance: Finding my place in the world

I saw this video the other day, and it reminded me of what it was like when I read my first gay erotic romance: like I had found my place in the world.


or watch on YouTube


Then as I started writing erotic books featuring gay love stories, I found myself even more comfortable and at ease. And not just with my writing. I was where I belonged.

Writing for publication, although very rewarding, is a long, often times very lonely and challenging career path. I truly believe you have to have a great deal of passion for what you’re doing to keep forging ahead. You have to feel like it’s what you were meant to do.

You have to feel like you’ve found your place in the world.


Award-winning author Sloan Parker writes passionate, dramatic stories about two men (or more) falling in love. Sloan enjoys writing in the fictional world because in fiction you can be anything, do anything...even fall in love for the first time over and over again. She lives in Ohio with her partner and their neurotic cats where her greatest moments in life are spent with her family, her friends, and her characters. You can learn more about Sloan and her writing at www.sloanparker.com. 

Grammatical Pet Peeves

I have a lot of them, but I feel the need to comment on a two that have been bugging me lately.

First, "could of" is always grammatically wrong. Always. It's actually a contraction of "could have" which ends up as "could've". When spoken, yes, it might sound like "could of" but please, please, please, don't write it that way! There are obviously a few exceptions, like in dialogue, because dialogue has a lot more flexibility with respect to grammar. People don't speak in proper English - not even close, so realistic dialogue most times shouldn't be grammatically proper. But generally, "could of" in a book will make me cringe.

Next, is the much maligned apostrophe. I like the apostrophe, and I could write REAMS of posts about how to use the apostrophe properly and the myriad ways people throw it around, willy-nilly. But there's the thing... an apostrophe's function is to represent missing letters (as in contractions... oh, say... could've or don't) or to indication possession (Sarah's car or Matt's house). Sometimes it's used more colloquially, like 'course instead of "of course". And I've seen and used it as 'em instead of "them". Because the apostrophe represents missing letters. But the most recent grievance I've seen was a variation of 'em. But it was typed out as em' - more than once. Please, for the sake of my sanity, don't do this!

Of course, I'm not perfect, but yeah, sometimes things will get me in a tizzy and now, these are the culprits! I'm getting ready to go on a cruise starting Monday, so this is my short & sweet grammar lesson for today :)

KC Burn

How Can Something So Good...Be So Bad?

Our heroes and heroines all have them: a weakness or fatal flaw. An Achilles heel. A failing in their character that takes an otherwise mighty character to their knees. With Achilles, it was literally his heel. (though he had some significant personality flaws as well.) With Oedipus, it was his pride. In my new book 'Toxic,' chocolate is the culprit. My heroine Briony Theale has an overwhelming love for chocolate. In fact, her weakness kicks off the major events in the story and nearly undoes her romance before it truly begins. Unfortunately, her hero Rico Montgomery also has a weakness: her beloved chocolate is a toxin to him. So when Rico's wolf comes across Briony's chocolate....yeah. Not good.

However, Briony is not a tragic heroine and all is well in the end. I promise.

There is often a temptation for an author to make a a lead character too perfect. I want to make my heroes the most wonderful, flawless characters ever to grace the pages of a book. They never lose their tempers, make a poor judgement call or lose a fight. During sex, they are always in perfect control, knowing what their partner wants. Heck, they probably never fart in bed either.

And heroines, well, I want to be my heroines. Seriously, I've never written a heroine without projecting myself into her life. Growing up, I wanted to be a vet. Like Briony, I have a real weakness for chocolate. Unlike Briony, one of my many flaws is a crippling weakness in math. I never had the chops for the hard science major it would have taken to be accepted into vet school.  Briony lives where I want to live, and she even looks like I wish I looked.

But you know, perfection is boring. Yes, Rico is a big, buff werewolf. He's her dominant, but he's many steps down the ladder from Chase, the Pack's alpha. He questions his journey in life; as a child he was removed from the Pack and grew up far away. As an adult, he's returned to find a new power structure and he's not sure where he fits. He's not completely comfortable as a wolf. And face it...the only reason he stumbles across her chocolate is because he dumped her trashcan. Yeesh.

Briony is self-confident and talented, but she's sure the extra weight she carries keeps her from standing a chance with Rico, even after he kisses her. She's not as competent as her mother or as brilliant as her brother. She's beautiful, but even misses that because she compares herself to others.

In Toxic, Briony and Rico share a weakness for chocolate. They both exhibit rather poor impulse control which creates the initial conflict that kicks off the story. If they'd been perfect people, none of the story would have happened. They'd have experienced a calm, dignified and very boring courtship that wouldn't have made for much of a story. Even the supporting characters have their fatal flaws...Chase is judgmental, Sage has a violent temper and Dionne is a bit too ready to go on the offensive. So while a character's strengths bring them up above the norm, often it's their flaws that throw them into conflict.

And that's when things get interesting.

Truckee Wolves: Toxic is related to Educating Evangeline and Hunting Holly from the Doms of Dark Haven anthologies. It was previously released elsewhere and has been greatly revised and expanded. 


Belinda is an award-winning author who writes in multiple genres...sometimes at the same time! She lives in far Northern California with her family and a motley pack of Siberian Huskies who provide her with unending sources of story ideas.

You can find Belinda's Loose Id books (including Toxic) here:
 http://www.loose-id.com/authors/a-f/belinda-mcbride.html

Please visit Belinda's webpage at: http://www.belindamcbride.com

Author Names and Avatars

Since I’ve only met a handful of other authors in person, and since a lot of people don’t like to post a photo of themselves on-line, there are many authors whose faces I’ve never seen and whose names I've never heard mentioned aloud. So when I see their names somewhere on-line or in an email, I get an immediate image in my head of their on-line “profile” picture. It might be a favorite image of an embracing couple, one of their book covers, or some other symbol they use to represent their on-line identity.

I even had a dream once where I met up with a few authors I know on-line and one of them was this giant picture of her book cover. She was just sitting there at the table, having a drink, chatting with us as a two-dimensional image that included the book title and her name.

I heard somewhere that we can’t dream the face of a person we’ve never seen. That our subconscious cannot create a human face on the fly. Not sure if that’s true or not, but it does have me wondering who all those people in my dreams are and why I’m casting them in starring roles if I can’t recall who they are.

I also found out recently I’d been pronouncing one of my on-line friend’s name all wrong. For almost three years. I even had to correct my sweetie since she learned the name from me. She’d never actually seen this person’s name in print, just heard me saying it. How was she supposed to know I’d mangled it all up?

This got me thinking… I could be pronouncing people’s names wrong all over the place when I’m recommending their books to friends who’ve never read in the gay romance genre. Uh-oh. Sorry about that guys!

Am I the only one?



Award-winning author Sloan Parker writes passionate, dramatic stories about two men (or more) falling in love. Sloan enjoys writing in the fictional world because in fiction you can be anything, do anything...even fall in love for the first time over and over again. She lives in Ohio with her partner and their neurotic cats where her greatest moments in life are spent with her family, her friends, and her characters. You can learn more about Sloan and her writing at www.sloanparker.com.

Silly Vocabulary

We sold our house on Thursday. On April 6, we’re moving from Orlando to Pasadena. I’m sure you’ll understand that I’m a wee bit scattered today (and likely will remain so for the next three weeks), but I’m desperately trying to not fall down on my obligations, so today’s post is about vocabulary. I can bitch about spelling, grammar and vocabulary just about any time, which made this post a quickie!

I have a little game on my phone called Beworded. A bunch of letter blocks fall onto the screen and you need to connect letters to make words. It’s a bit like Boggle solitaire.  

Most times when you get a word, it will tell you if it’s a noun or verb. In my opinion, it’s a mostly worthless “additional feature”. Occasionally it will see fit to define the word, which is sometimes interesting, but also mostly worthless.  Here are some of the fabulous definitions I’ve got recently:

Rosin - to treat with rosin

Seat - to place a seat

Creel - to put fish in a creel

Tone – to give a particular tone

Are you noticing a pattern? Didn’t anyone ever tell these people that you can’t define a word by using the word?!? Worthless. Then I got this one:

Cat - to hoist an anchor to the cathead

This one is slightly better, although only by a tiny fraction. Why, you say? Because now I know there’s some piece of a boat called a cathead. This is new information for me. However, I’m guessing that someone who knows what a cathead actually is may already be familiar with this particular definition of cat as a verb, and then we’re back to WORTHLESS definitions. If only I could turn off this “extra feature”. I’d rather they just showed ads in that spot, I think…

 KC Burn

Three-Word Scenario: Partners (an M/M scene)

Today I thought I’d share another one of my three-word scenarios. This is where I take three random words and write whatever scenario comes to mind, using each word at least once.

I’ve decided to skip trying to keep the scenarios to a certain word count and instead go with whatever comes to mind and however long it takes to get the entire idea down. It might end up as a snippet that could become a longer story. Or it might be a character or setting description. Anything that pops into my head when I mesh the three random words together.

Last time Lisabet Sarai suggested these words: retro, parking, and mattress. Thanks, Lisabet!

Here’s my three-word scenario:

Partners

Sawyer drew in a long breath and leaned back on his elbows. His T-shirt lay crumpled in a ball beside him on the mattress, and his jeans were open at the front. He didn’t bother to zip them up. In a few minutes he and Finn would get back to where they’d been headed.

Who the hell got half naked, kissed like they’d been doing five minutes ago, and then stopped before they got to the fucking? Something was seriously messed up between them.

Finn stood across the room, his back to the wall, his arms folded across his bare chest. He sported a scowl that said everything Sawyer didn’t want to hear.

Or maybe he did. Maybe they needed to have this conversation. Get everything out in the open. Finally.

They hadn’t slept together in weeks. Every night after work, they hung out at Sawyer’s apartment, watching one of those ’70s cops shows, not talking, not even laughing at the stupid-ass crooks or the retro hairstyles they usually mocked all through the show.

Sawyer threw Finn a smirk, knowing that alone would piss him off. “You’re mad at me.”

Finn kept his hard gaze locked on Sawyer’s chest. “I’m not mad.”

“Fuck that. You’ve been mad at me since that day in the parking garage. Like it was my fault.”

“You got shot.”

“I didn’t ask the guy to shoot me.”

Finn made eye contact for the first time since the kissing ended. “You might as well have. You went at him like you had no training at all.”

Sawyer sat up with a jolt. “Are you calling me a shitty cop?

“No. I’m calling you a reckless one.”

“I know you don’t mean that.” Slowly, like he might spook Finn if he moved too fast, Sawyer got off the bed and went to stand in front of him. “Just like I knew in that garage you’d have my back. Like always.”

Finn met his gaze again and grunted out a laugh. He didn’t let up on the tense posture, though.

Sawyer grabbed him by the back of the neck and yanked him forward until they were eye to eye, their foreheads almost touching. “Just admit it. You’re pissed about the shooting because it freaked you out like nothing else on the job ever has. And it freaked you out because you’re in love with me.” He drew him forward until they were back to the kissing, this time their mouths and tongues and bodies coming together slowly, tenderly.

When they finally parted, Finn leaned against the wall again, the tension in his body long gone. “God, you’re infuriating.” He smiled with a softness Sawyer had never seen before.

“And you’re right,” Finn added. “About everything. So don’t ever get your ass shot again.”

Sawyer gripped him by the waistband of his jeans and tugged until Finn was in his arms again. “Deal.”


Award-winning author Sloan Parker writes passionate, dramatic stories about two men (or more) falling in love. Sloan enjoys writing in the fictional world because in fiction you can be anything, do anything...even fall in love for the first time over and over again. She lives in Ohio with her partner and their neurotic cats where her greatest moments in life are spent with her family, her friends, and her characters. You can learn more about Sloan and her writing at www.sloanparker.com.

Celebrate a Belated Mardi Gras and the Release of Laisser le Rouleau du Bon Dom...

...with a slice of king cake!

Mardi Gras came early this year, the twelfth of February, but we can still celebrate with this week's release of my book, Laisser le Rouleau du Bon Dom, my contemporary BDSM, Mardi-Gras-themed novella.

Many people over the years have asked me why I chose New Orleans as my home. I grew up in a small town on the Central Coast of California. We had a university there with many professors from New Orleans.  In the late seventies, they--with the help of many locals looking for an excuse to party and satirize a little--started Mardi Gras in San Luis Obispo, California.

I grew up attending that Mardi Gras every year, and most years I was in the parade. Even as a small child, I rode on floats, walked and threw beads, or even roller-skated.

After some nearly-notorious riots one year around the university, the event was cancelled, but those who had organized and developed Mardi Gras, California style, had already instilled in me a love for the culture, revelry, and food of New Orleans. That was why, in 2001, I bought a house on the Internet and moved here.

I always try in my books to show my love for this city. I attempt to go beyond the facade of Bourbon Street and travel into the neighborhoods and meet the local characters that make this city so wonderful. I hope I've done it again in Laisser le Rouleau du Bon Dom.

Available at All Romance ebooks and Amazon:

To celebrate the release, I'm running a contest! The prize is a king cake from Haydel's bakery, a local tradition, shipped right to the winner's home. This is open to US residents only, please. a Rafflecopter giveaway

So tell me, what do you love about Mardi Gras or New Orleans? Any questions you've been dying to ask someone from here?