M/m romances

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Ibelong

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Any one have any suggestions on m/m romance writers. I've read a lot of the samhain books and loved them...so those are right up my alley....
Anything along those lines is great!

Thanks
 

sunandshadow

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Megan Derr and S. A. Payne.

Also Shosetsu Bang Bang is awesome and free. ^_^

Do you like manga and anime? There's lots of shounen ai/yaoi/june whatever you want to call it.
 

veinglory

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Anything in particular? I would suggest Scarlet and the White Wolf by Kirby Crow, the Psycop books by Jordan Castillo Price or Frost Fair by Erastes for starters.

In a more selfish strain I would suggest me
 

Ibelong

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Megan Derr and S. A. Payne.

Also Shosetsu Bang Bang is awesome and free. ^_^

Do you like manga and anime? There's lots of shounen ai/yaoi/june whatever you want to call it.


Manga and anime, I'm not a fan of.


When it comes to reading I'm a huge fan of being a glutton, as in chocolate syrup over my chocolate ice cream. I admit--freely--I am not a "deep in thought" reader. I've read those deep books and like old movies...they're great if I need to go to sleep. I admit...many writers out there that are great...are just to smart of a writer for me. I like my books to be pureed ;) Hence the ice cream reference...you don't have to chew ice cream ;)


What I do like is books that put me on the edge of my seat and make me squee for the characters ;) (Character driven not historically/epically/pathologically driven)
I love paranormal books, however I think I've exhausted the supply. I picked up a couple from others who made suggestions only to be sadly disappointed. I swear that one of them was 300 pages of sex scenes...I kept waiting for the story only it never happened. It wasn't badly written, there just wasn't enough story for me.

Any how...

I will check into all your suggestions Veinglory! and Sunandshadow!

Any one else is free to make suggestions too.
 

Georgina

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I enjoy K. A. Mitchell. Since you mentioned you've read a lot of Samhain, you may have seen her before, but if not, No Souvenirs and Collision Course are my favourites.

Cheers.
 
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Seconding No Souvenirs.

I also loved Promises and A to Z by Marie Sexton.
 

Selah March

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Give Katrina Strauss a try, Ibelong. I especially like her "Blue Ruin" series, available at Loose-Id.

And if you're looking for paranormal m/m with more plot and character than sex, I'm not too shy to suggest one of my own. :)
 
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I completely altruistically volunteer to research this genre for you. ;)
 

Darklite

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I love Katrina Strauss’ Blue Ruin series :) Amanda Young and Ally Blue are also very good. And if you like cop stories I recommend In Hot Pursuit by Kate McMurray from Loose Id
 

shaldna

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What is it about m/m romances that I, as a straight woman, find so much more compelling and statisfying that any other sort of romance novel?
 

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Isn't there a line from Seinfeld explaining why men like lesbian porn? Something like "two people are fooling around, and I agree with both of them!"


(I'm another straight woman - were you part of the recent brouhaha over on LJ/fandom about straight women appropriating gay male culture/stories? I'm wondering if we're doing that here. Hopefully not...)
 

sunandshadow

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I think I prefer m/m romances to m/f ones because in m/f romances I tend to have difficulty identifying with the woman or feel jealous of her. But yeah the 2 hotties for the price of one thing is also true, lol.
 

BenPanced

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What is it about m/m romances that I, as a straight woman, find so much more compelling and statisfying that any other sort of romance novel?
Along those lines, I've noticed there are more women who write m/m romances than men. I don't know if I'm looking in the wrong markets or what, but I'm baffled. I could be wrong, as well, but again it's just an observation.
 

veinglory

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There has always been a strong showing of women in fiction about gay men (ditto men writing about lesbians), but M/M is a term specifically from from genre romance so it does tend to be more female than gay fiction in general.
 
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veinglory, I agree with a lot of what you said in that link, but I think maybe you oversimplified a little. I'm leery of starting to play devil's advocate here, because, as I said, I'm a straight woman, and I enjoy reading and writing m/m, so I don't want to set myself up as the proponent of an argument that I really hope is wrong!

That said, it seems to me that the issue comes not from a few women messing around with a little writing on the side, but more from the domination of women within the genre. I don't have hard numbers (and they would be tricky to come by, I suspect, because there are a significant number of women writing under male names or using gender-neutral names or initials) on this, but...would you agree that the majority of people writing m/m fic are female?

Assuming that's true, the fetishization issue gets a little more complicated. You reference modern feminists who are pro-erotica/porn, and I agree that there are many (I happen to be one of them). But many of these same feminists object to the male domination in the porn industry, and argue that the objectification and fetishization of women will continue as long as men are in charge. These women are not anti-porn, per se, but that doesn't mean that they support the current structure of the genre. I think a similar argument could be made about women dominating the m/m genre (assuming that my idea about the proportions of women involved are correct). Does this seem right to you, or am I missing something?

I'm not arguing that women stop writing m/m. And, of course, I flatter myself that I'm one of the ones doing it 'right' - making sure the characters are three dimensional and not stereotypes, etc. I'm just saying that I think it's another thing for me to be mindful of. As if I didn't already have enough to worry about with my writing!
 

veinglory

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I am not sure what I said you consider oversimplifying. In a few lines I am covering only general trends, of course. But M/M is a term from within slash and romance, and those genres are female dominated--empirically speaking.
 

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Sorry, I didn't mean your previous post here, I meant the link you referred to as your stock response to appropriation arguments.

Are we talking about the same thing?
 

veinglory

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Oh, as for that my position is not so much right or wrong as it is my position. Yes, men objectify, and so do women. I don't object to either. I don't think any demographic group has the right not to be objectified--or that objectification is always a bad thing. You have to look at things case by case and in context--and expect to disagree.
 

sunandshadow

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Along those lines, I've noticed there are more women who write m/m romances than men. I don't know if I'm looking in the wrong markets or what, but I'm baffled. I could be wrong, as well, but again it's just an observation.
Is it surprising? It's because we're talking about _romance_ specifically, with the happy ending requirement and general lack of explosions, epic villains, revenge, and literariness. Gay or straight, romance as a concept is just a lot less popular with men than women, so when men write gay fiction it tends to be some genre other than romance.
 

AyJay

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Straight women writing m/m romance/erotica is a phenomenon I was shocked to discover about a year ago, largely through AW. I read a lot of gay fiction, but not much in the romance genre. I can recommend Scott & Scott's Romentics series (Hot Sauce is one title). They're writing partners and a real life gay couple. I found Hot Sauce to be a guilty pleasure, and read it, appropriately, on a beach in Provincetown. Hot it was.

I haven't read anything mentioned above, but I'm curious...

For those who have read both: Is there a difference in the way women write m/m romance vs. gay men?

I'll stay clear of the fray over women hijacking the genre. It seems to me there's a female readership and 'writership' so why not have women writing m/m sex and romance for other women? I think gay men can still find gay-authored stories pretty easily. The Best Gay Romance anthology series (edited by Richard Labonté) has stories entirely by male writers, for example.
 

sunandshadow

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For those who have read both: Is there a difference in the way women write m/m romance vs. gay men?
I don't think there's a big difference, because both men and women write m/m romance in a wide variety of ways. There might be more variety among the women's approaches, but that's only logical if there's more women writing m/m romance in general. Even things like mpreg and arranged gay marriage and a big muscular guy paired with a small feminine guy, which might seem like more 'girly' ideas, you see from male writers as well as female ones.
 
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