Damon Suede...
Love is a many-gendered thing. This has been another banner year for Suede in the the churning waters of gay romance and LGBT genre fiction.
In response to popular demand, Damon finally released a couple nonfiction writing titles for genre authors, including Verbalize and Activate...and has been teaching on a range of genre topics both in-person and online.
Next up: a saucy tabloid romance, a new shared world collaboration, as well as several other projects in fiction and beyond.
In other news, Goodreads continues to name Hot Head one of the "Top 100 Romance Novels of All Time" for nine+ years running on a list that includes Gone with the Wind, Outlander, Jane Eyre, and Sense & Sensibility! And it turned up on the NPR list of 100 Swoon-Worthy Romances in summer 2015 and "13 Romance Novels That Should be On Every Woman's Bucket List" alongside a mindboggling array of romance classics.
More books are on the way, with Hard Head delayed but moving along at its own strange clip, and two new contemporary projects one a sequel and the other...not. :) 2024 looks to be an even crazier adventure and I am buckled in. Deep gratitude to everyone who makes this ride so wild and wonderful.
The happiest endings come at the end of a road that is soft and rough ...
Writer Guides
If you write genre fiction, Damon has released Verbalize, a new guide to characterization and story planning suitable for newbies and experts, pantsers and plotters. This book sprang directly from his popular writing workshops and you can find out more info here.
On that tip, students kept asking for a thesarus of transitive verbs specific to genre fiction, and it's become a perennial bestseller. Activate is an author's thesaurus of active, transitive verbs for use in verbalizing stories in any genre. This guide offers 5,300 unique character actions, sorted alphabetically, as well as by genre and direction, to help writers energize their process and projects at every stage. The ebook edition contains over 190k links for easy navigation.
Additionally if you're curious about promoting your stories once you've written them, check out Your A Game which Damon co-wrote with Heidi Cullinan. It offers a friendly, fun collaborateive approach to marketing and book promo in a chooseable adventure trhat allows you to customize your approach based on your skills and needs.
What's the scoop?
Interested in keeping up with releases and shenanigans? Sign up for the Damon Suede newsletter for intel, giveaways, gossip, and more. This is a spam-free update zine intended to keep folks informed of what's next, especially useful if the social media tsunami feels overwhelming. By the same token, if you're a blogger or a journalist and would like timely notifications of new titles and upcoming appearances, sign up for the dedicated media newsletter to receive the latest updates.
Without Merrick: the father of gay romance
Gay romance may seem suddenly trendy in popular fiction, but it's nothing new. Over forty years ago, gay romance bestsellers hit the big lists and refused to budge. For a lot of LGBT folks, these books represented a major breakthrough in post-Stonewall pop culture and a precursor to the push for diversity in mass media.
While reminiscing about my early forays into queer fiction, I wrote a fan letter twenty-five years late to the author who taught me to love gay romance novels way back when I was a mere stripling...Gordon Merrick, inarguably the author of the first gay romantic bestseller in publishing history: sixteen weeks on the New York Times list! Take a walk down memory lane with my overview of some of the guiltiest of homoerotic pleasures.
Get your Suede on
People are getting geared up for the conference season! After a bunch of requests for promo items, I've built a simple store called Damon Suede Gear at CafePress which features all kinds of gay romance goodness... with my cover art, Suede slogans, and more... CafePress allows me to offer everything from simple Tshirts to thongs to shotglasses to customized Iphone cases. Feel free to have a poke around, and if you don't see something that you know you want, give me a heads up and I'll try to build it for you.
Fighting fires with gasoline
Dreamspinner has released Hot Head in hardcover and casebound for libraries! And now it's required reading for a course at Duke University.
Back in 2011 Dreamspinner Press snapped up my first gay romance novel in 48 hours and since then the book took homo-romance by storm sitting at #1 on Amazon's gay romance list for six months. Hot Head is a contemporary love story about a Brooklyn firefighter who has fought forbidden feelings for his best friend since 9/11... until a gay porn site asks them to appear together, forcing him to face his suffocating terror and desire to protect the one person who matters.
Dreamspinner Press released Hot Head June 15th, 2011 in softcover and ebook, with the smash-hit audiobook recorded by Charlie David out in 2012. It's also been a bestseller in Spanish, French, Italian, and German...with hardcover and casbound editions emerging soon after. There's even a Korean manga on the way! Check out a full description here along with an excerpt, reviews and more. Where there's smoke there's fire!
Gearing up
Sweet friction, hot fiction, no restrictions! There's no rest for the wicked... and I have all sorts of trouble brewing at the moment. Up next:
- Nasty Habit: sequel to 2013's Bad Idea, this novel will focus on Kurt and Ziggy, two prickly geniuses conjuring up a sex demon videogame as they battle an impossible attraction to each other.
- Hard Head: Book Two in the "Head" series featuring Tommy Dobsky, a self-destructive paramedic first encountered in Hot Head... This book's release has been pushed back significantly but I promise it is deep in process!
"It's no trick loving somebody at their best. Love is loving them at their worst." (The Real Thing - Tom Stoppard)