M/M Romance

By: Emily Carrington

“A moment in darkness… An eternity with a lover.”

This month’s installment of What Was Your First is all about M/M romances, not just because these are my current favorite to write but because I was inspired to write them by two books I was reading simultaneously back in 2009.

The first book was written by a well-known romance author who was publishing M/F romances. She was the author of the Troubleshooters series, Suzanne Brockmann. I was in a bookstore (back when Borders existed) and my favorite bookseller had just the thing for me when I asked for a “gay romance between two men.” She recommended Force of Nature by Suzanne Brockmann. The bookseller, Becky, told me this book contained the first gay romance in a mainstream novel. “mainstream” meaning, at the time, that it was the secondary romance in a world filled with straight romances. I’m not going to give you the history of the book here, but let’s just say it convinced me that the world was moving forward toward acceptance, not just tolerance, of homosexuality.

The second book was a fan fiction. Yes, I know—shocking! LOL. In truth, it was the first fan fiction I read where the story could have stood on its own if not for the source material it borrowed from. The fan fic was based in the Lord of the Rings universe and was called Common Cause.  The depth to the characters, even those in supporting roles, gave me even more hope that the day of M/M fiction had come.

For my first foray into male-male romance, I wrote and published my first novel, Dragon Food, which is now a part of the box set, Dragon in Training, now published by Changeling Press. I took the single favorite part of each of the stories mentioned above and combined them into my own world of SearchLight. I loved that one of the characters wasn’t tall and bodybuilder-muscular. I loved also that one character wasn’t quite super-alpha but more of a beta character. Sort of like Luke Skywalker, who saves the universe but doesn’t “get the girl.” Dragon in Training (composed of the full-length novels Dragon Food, Dragon Fire, and Dragon’s Bane) follows the story of a gay, Jewish water dragon who starts out the series not even knowing he’s anything but human.

Check out Dragon in Training

And stop by next month for another installment of “What Was Your First.”