On Desolation Angel and the Desolation Tour to come

My latest release, Desolation Angel has been out for two months now, but with all the things that have been going on in my life since then, this has been the first time I’ve had the opportunity to really sit down and write a bit about how truly special Desolation Angel is to me.

Desolation Angel was the first full length novel I’d tried to write in over a decade, the one before that had been in a novel writing class and while I had played with it over the years, I’d never felt that it to a level where I could show it to anyone. In that space between the class and writing Desolation Angel, I worked on little pieces. Poems, short stories, flash fiction, roleplay storylines for the online RPG game I was involved in, and somewhere in all of that, I wrote a little novella called Cold Confusion and found myself looking for a place to share it.

That search eventually lead me to the Gay Authors site. I signed up for a membership and posted my first story, which went through a mod, Cia, who sent me an email regarding the story and offered to work with me to polish it up to site standards. For me that was such a confidence booster. Here was someone telling me my story had merit, it just needed cleaning up a bit, so enthused, I jumped into the editing process and soon my story appeared.

At the time, I figured I’d gotten it out of my system. I’d never written M/M romance before though I very much enjoyed reading it, so I figured Cold Confusion would just be a one off, after all, it had been ten years since I’d tried to write anything long, by then I just didn’t figure I had it in me anymore. It had been a dream in my youth to be a writer, but by that point I was in my later thirties, too old for dreams, or so I thought. Then low and behold, this character popped into my head, and he was brilliant but troubled. His musical dreams were sparked by something I’d read while doing some research on a classical composer, and his friends and band members were an amalgam of different characters I’d written over the years.

I’d never imagined myself writing a romance, in fact, I don’t really consider Desolation Angel to be one. Yet, there is elements of a relationship forming, but this story is more about finding oneself and understanding that everyone is different, and meant to be special in their own right. My focus was to show that the idea we have of what is normal does not always fit who we are or who we were meant to be.

Dare is a troubled but beautiful soul and those who surround him know that. For some of them, no, it isn’t an issue, and while it is an issue for Sionn, it’s his fear for Dare’s safety that makes it so, not his desire for Dare to be like everyone else. Of course it doesn’t come through that way, when do we ever manage to convey things correctly when we are terrified?

Of course there is another relationship in the book, that is touched upon but not fully explored, yet, you see, about halfway through Desolation Angel I realized that I would never be able to tell their story in one book, so I started panning for a time when they would go on tour. There, it would be far easier to explore not only the ties that hold them all together, but them on the stage and the energy of performances.

That book is outlined already and writing will begin soon, I have two other semi-finished projects to complete first. To tell the truth, I’m excited to get started. I love the Desolation Angel group, I love what I’ve started there and the potential for where their story can go.

I also wanted to take a moment and talk about the pair that through the book is stalking them. You see, that’s taken from a memory, events of a misspent young adulthood and associations that were on the less than savory side. So yes, that need to get revenge might seem a little single minded to some or even far-fetched, but people do a lot of messed up shit when they think they’ve been wronged. Trying to save a reputation, or pay someone back for disrespecting them can become an obsession, and we all know that people can be obsessed with dumb shit that can land them in some pretty messed up situations. I wanted to explore that, not just in book one, but because there are things from Dare’s quest to be normal that will bite him in the rear later when the band is on tour. That instance lays the groundwork for one of them.

Writing Desolation Angel gave me the courage to write Guitars and Cages, as did the feedback I received from those who read Desolation Angel and fell in love with Dare just like I had. That book was the start of a new dream for me, and I am proud to say that earlier in the month I submitted both Burning Luck and a novella I had written a few National Novel Writing Months back, called Even Poseidon Drowns. They make up my seventh and eighth submissions to Wayward Ink, well if one doesn’t count the three short stories for anthology I’ve turned in.

Currently, I am working on a snakeshifter book I started over a year ago, it’s about halfway complete, and I am hoping that on my 18 day roadtrip I can knock out a big chunk of what remains. As for the Desolation Tour, I expect to have it finished by Christmas, as it will be this year’s NaNo project. It feels good to have goals again.

Here is a link to Desolation Angel on All Romance ebooks, it’s on sale right now, a great opportunity to give Dare and the band a chance.

https://www.allromanceebooks.com/product-desolationangel-1989899-149.html

Here’s the link to it at Amazon too both places give the opportunity to read the first chapter.

https://www.amazon.com/Desolation-Angel-Layla-Dorine-ebook/dp/B01C1E03BS/ref=sr_1_3?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1462638863&sr=1-3