23 March 2017

The Reviews of Doom!

I often say that a reader's super-power is reviews. And that's certainly been true with my work. Each review has produced a little bump in attention to my work.  So now it's time to repay some of that generosity.  Plus, my Twitter buddy Shannon the other day asked if I had "any recommendations on books with LGBT couples especially bi that have happy endings." I meant to write this that day, but it's been an eventful week, and I have overspent spoons, so it took a while.  Sorry!

So here's the plan. I'm going to present the F|F and Bi books that I've read and enjoyed in the last year, and a brief statement about each. Appearance in this list absolutely does equate to an endorsement!



The Melody of Me and You, Maria Hollis. A quick read, light and fluffy romance between two young women who work in a bookstore. The sex scenes were more explicit than I'm truly comfortable with, but that's a personal taste issue.

Of Snow and Whiskers, Andrea Marie Brokaw. YA, shape-shifter kids at a boarding high school for same. Though the second book in the series, can be read as a stand-alone without missing too much. The viewpoint character is a bisexual snow leopard shifter, who has a crush on a snow leopard boy. Happy ending, great tension and pacing. For those who care about that sort of thing, it does develop the plotline of the story arc. Also? Look for Nurse Sakura; she's me!

The Well of Loneliness, Radclyffe Hall. Perhaps the seminal lesbian novel in the English language.  Hall writes beautiful words about miserable situations. Not a happy ending. It must be remembered that the book was published in 1928, and was aimed at appealing to the straight population to acknowledge that women who loved women were people and deserved to simply exist, to live, to love.

A Marriage of Connivance, Natasha West. When their lovers break up with them to get together with each other, spurned girlfriends hatch a plan to make their exes miserable -- and end up falling in love with each other.

Say Yes to the Cheerleader / Say Yes to the Soccer Player, Abby Crofton.  In Cheerleader, a nerdy girl who accidentally outed herself to her high school English class has a crush on a cheerleader -- who turns out to be crushing right back! In Soccer Player, they've moved on to college, and their frenemy from high school has developed a crush on a soccer player, who again, is crushing back.  Cheerleader was seriously the best first novel I've read in years.  Ignore the stock photography cover art, and read these books!

Urban Fairy Tales series, Erik Schubach. This recommendation comes with a couple of asterisks. These books are set in a world where magic is real, and a werewolf plague is slowly consuming the Human race. They're simultaneously F|F romance and Urban Fantasy Action, and they're fun reads.  A bit formulaic. Here are the asterisks: It's F|F romance written by a man, so it sometimes reads more like a straight romance than my experiences of actual sapphic romance. Secondly, Schubach churns out a new novella every month or two, and as far as I can tell, doesn't do any editing or proofreading. If you're the sort of person who is annoyed by typos, fractured grammar, and misused homophones, approach with care.

Raised by Wolves, Bridget Essex. Another shifter-tale. A werewolf girl falls in love with the girl who works in the bookstore, and hesitates to introduce her to her mob-like werewolf pack family.  Mildly explicit sex scenes, good humor, happy ending.

14 March 2017

The Doomless Review of... uh....

The noted, eloquent, and highly discerning book reviewer M. Selavy has published an amazing review of Flowers of Luna.

All seriousness aside, I love reviews.  Great ones the most, of course, and this one really let me know that I had, at least for her, accomplished what I'd set out to do.  I particularly like that she mentioned that Hana and Ran's relationship is built on communication -- I was consciously trying to create a model of a consensual, negotiated relationship.

Another reader commented on Twitter that he'd read the very same story from Hana's perspective, and it was like opening the doors of revelation -- I hadn't even considered telling it from Hana's perspective, because Ran's declaration that she'd come to the Moon to go to college was my path into what became Flowers of Luna; the rest organically grew from there, and linked to a story about the Gray family that I've been trying to write for years, the story that appears in the background of the book. (Which, in turn, was a deliberate Mary Sue tale staring myself and my ex-girlfriend Jane -- and that may be why I was never able to get very far with it).

Anyway, getting back to the review... this is why I published the book.  To share the pictures in my head with people who would get it; people who were looking for themselves in genre fiction and not finding. The smart girls, the nerdy girls, the Sapphist girls.  And, you know... everyone else who enjoys realistic SciFi and a bit of romance.



If you'd like to read Flowers of Luna for yourself, to see what all the fuss is about, it's available on Amazon. It's on Kindle Unlimited, so if you're one of those folk, you can read it without any further financial outlay.  More of Jenny's fiction is available on Wattpad for free, if you're still undecided.

01 March 2017

Fan Art! No Doom!

Hey, y'all! I got fan art! Woo!

Laya, an actual design student from New Zealand, did this image of Ran and Hana on their first date! It's so beautiful, I'm in awe! She's perfectly captured them, their outfits... everything about that moment!


You can find Laya's "Underrated W|W Book Series" art on her Tumblr, and she also sells prints of the images! Also? She has a new webcomic!

As for Ran and Hana, they're the primary characters of my own Flowers of Luna, available now in eBook and Hardcopy from Amazon.com