Touring It Up to My Bloody Valentine's...

Welcome everyone from the Be My Valentine Blog Tour and Liquid Silver Books, as well as my other regular (and perhaps bewildered) readers. Some of you may be wondering why a nonfiction writer is partaking in a blog tour dedicated to mainly romance authors and books of that vein. Well, for one I have many friends who write fiction (especially m/m romance) and I do indulge in a wide variety of reading. Secondly... well, being an author of a book dealing with LGBT-related paranormal phenomena, it seems most people aren't quite sure what to classify my work as. A book like Queer Hauntings has never before been written, so I seem to be caught in limbo hovering somewhere between New Age and Gay Fiction.

And in some cases, truth really does meet fiction. Author Jeanne Barrack and I became friends not long after she wrote The Sweet Flag about a gay ghost hunter and civil war spirit. For her, it was a surprise to find a real-life gay paranormal investigator (though I hate too admit I bare no physical resemblance to her character) after creating a fictional person with so many similarities. Had she known about me before then, I'm sure she would have picked my brain for her research. And there are a few other romance books chronicling the queerer side of the paranormal. Author Ally Blue writes a series involving Bay City Paranormal Investigations, a fictional paranormal troop headed by a gay paranormal investigator, Sam Raintree. And that's not even including the many other romance writers who tell tales of ghosts, vampires, werewolves, and other supernatural beings with a gay slant.

While we often think of this as a "time of love" with the approaching holiday, it is also a time of lust. And generally-speaking, the two can easily become intertwined. And now, to appease that lustful side of many of you, here are a few of the more interesting images I've run across (click the photos to enlarge, they will open in a new window):