Just sneaking online to wish all of you who celebrate Christmas a wonderful celebration, and all of you who don't, a wonderful day.

Also, 'tis Christmas, and what better time to be thinking about beautiful (male) angels? So I've been photo hunting:


Angel by Nicolas DARQUÉ

(the rest are 'all rights reserved' so I'm linking instead of posting - they're worth clicking through to, though.)

Un Ange Blue

Dawn

bent angel

demons fall for an angels kiss

goth angel (not sure that this is the original, as I've seen this picture a bunch of places, but it is beautiful)

MythMag Angel

The Angel Waits - maybe my favourite of the lot - the light and shadow, the *intent* and the *patience* implied by the pose... isn't it beautiful?

Every year, I post a story for Halloween - a tradition that's important enough to me that I stole a few minutes away from my dear friends' wedding reception to post this one!

Many thanks to the fabulous Ms Mana for eleventh-hour assistance with this - all remaining flaws are entirely down to me, especially as I changed things since she last saw it.

Everything changes
by Alex Draven

*****

11pm finds me stepping off a train. I haven't been back in London for years and the area around King's Cross has changed almost beyond recognition.

You've still got the station, of course - stations are always good for an emotional smorgasbord, although personally, I tend to use airports these days. But the streets around the station? These days there are students and clubbers and cocktail bars mixed in with the porn shops and all these neon-plastic chain places; the teenagers that crowd them are junk food for us, just like the burgers are for them, all those candy-bright hyper-real emotions.

Used to be that dealers and hookers, and the dealers and hookers' clients, were the most regular items on the menu outside the station proper. That's why I moved on in the end. All that thin desperation and hopelessness sits sour in the stomach, and I never did have Z's taste for shame.

( Read more... )

If you're interested in previous years' stories, here's the list:


Dream Come True (2004)
Thirteen Kisses (2005)
All Souls (2006)
Favour (2007) (for sale)
Soar and Raining Cats (2007)
Tradition (2008)

(plus, there are the two zombie stories. They are seasonally appropriate, but they do come with a 'you click on the link, you take responsibility for your own sanity' warning - the titles are terrifyingly accurate on these two - Zombie Incest Wrongness and the infamous necrophiliac plushy gangbang story)

A meme from foreverdirt: write a love poem in 15 words. - as ever, I am prolix, and so wrote two.

**********

XXX

Plain, white, pound-shop envelope stuffed fat with scratch-pad pages
Green ink.
Three x's


**********
locklinkfit

the fit of my palm to your spine's hollow,
fingertips, the curve of your stomach.

A tiny, off-the-cuff snippet for @melfaescotland over on Twitter, who asked for Teague and emo boy's in bands

*****

It's afternoon when he wakes, at least he thinks so from how it feels. The room's sun-baked air still stuffy from having passed through too many lungs, even though he's alone now.

He remembers sprawling out on the couch, dumping his legs across someone's lap. Sam? Teague? The details aren't there yet.

He remembers laughing wildly at something, laughing till his lungs hurt, his stomach ached, until he slid boneless onto the rough carpet. He remembers pulling people down on top of him in a hot, heavy, ridiculous pile. He remembers deciding that standing up was way too much effort, and the conversations were all floating above him, up, out of reach, disjointed because every time he blinked his friends skipped into fast forward.

He doesn't remember the party ending. There must have been a moment when the room fell silent, and someone caught someone's eye and made some gesture that asked 'time to go?', because why else would he be alone?

The room's wrecked, although it's only because it's his mess that he can tell how much of the chaos is new. A t-shirt balled up under the couch, right at his eye level. He stretches awkwardly to tug it free, sky blue against the grubby charcoal of his rug, soft under his calloused fingers, and he wants, so badly, for it to smell of Teague, but when he buries his face in it, there's just the sharp smell of stale beer.

*****

Joyfully Reviewed has given Sleeping Bears Lie a lovely review.

Sleeping Bears Lie is an intriguing tale that travels into the land of myths, deftly blending them with reality.

I am so excited to finally see Saffron Stains in e-print.

I mean, any day you have a book come out, that's a good day, and something to get excited about, sure, but this one's extra special to me, because it features Kael and Jem who are the very first queer characters to have shown up in my head. I have been trying to tell their story for years, and finally, in Saffron Stains, I feel like I've written them a story that's good enough for them.

Saffron Stains is a British urban fantasy - Kael's an elf, Jem's half elf, half brownie, but they live in a medium sized town in the south of the UK, and neither of them have yet worked out how to use magic to pay the gas bill, or do the washing up.

There's a snippet of Kael and Jem from the opening to Saffron Stains at the Torquere website, and here's a little bonus snippet of Kael and Jem, which does not appear in the book.

( behind the cut )

I'm hosting over at torquere_social today, if you'd like to head over and join us?

Check out the fabulous cover art for my up-coming story, Saffron Stains. Isn't it beautiful?

(It's my very first custom cover - I am so pleased to see it and have it be real!)

Over at CoffeeTimeRomance, one of the recent open questions was

If you could have your dream "writing cave" what would it look like?

This is my answer.

My ideal writing cave is snug and thick walled, so it's cool in summer and warm in winter, and so I can ply my music at my volume without upsetting anyone. There's a lamp on my desk, shedding a golden pool of light, and a string of white fairy lights wrapped in spirals over the ceiling for light.  The walls are a patchwork of inspirational pictures and clippings and postcards, everywhere where there aren't book shelves. 

The desk is a big dining room table, sticking out into the cave, with room for all the books and notebooks I want at arm's reach for the project of the day, and space for both my computer, and to write long hand.  There are various nooks and cranies for my cat to snooze in, when she's not trying to stand on my keyboard or sit on my paper, and a battered sofa covered in fleece throws so I can curl up in comfort when I need to change my perspective. 

There's a big pot of flowers on a shelf above the desk - right now I'm craving daffodils and narcissi - that magically gets refreshed with new flowers,  and a never ending supply of mugs of tea (tea-tea in the day, and spiced herbal teas at night) and fruit in the fruit bowl.

There's also a pause button by the entrance, so I can pause the outside world until I'm ready to come out of my cave and interact with it again.

(

Thanks to the fabulousness of Cindy Rosenthall, over at Moonbook , who's giving me house room, I have a shiny new website!

My domain hasn't changed - http://alexdraven.org.uk - but the site is all new.

What do you think?

Sometimes I vanity-search for myself.

Sometimes I vanity-search for myself and find out really shiny things, like Stay Tape is now available Kindle format from Amazon.

From an author's perspective, that's awesome. My book, on Amazon - how cool is that?

I have to admit to being a tiny bit conflicted, though, because I am all about open standards, DRM free content, treating your patrons like adults you respect rather than potential criminals, and just by *existing* Kindle's proprietary format runs counter to that. (I'm techno-lusting for a EEE notebook and a Sony e-reader, if you were wondering.)

Still - the book's already available in a bunch of other formats direct from the publisher, including good old html, and it would be dumb of me to cut myself off from all the Kindle owners out there. Until someone asks me to sign a contract releasing a story in kindle format and no other, it's a bit of a moot point, really.

And, anyway - my book! on Amazon!

In other news, I tripped and fell over the trend, and I'm now on twitter - come find me?