Today, I am featured on the 2015 Lesbian Fiction Appreciation Event hosted by the talented KT Grant. Please visit the link below to read my post about reading and writing Lesbian Literature, and meet other wonderful authors who write stories about women who love other women.
Thank you!!!!
http://kbgbabbles.com/2015/01/alicia-joseph-mon-126-lfae.html
Today I am featured on Women and Words Blog. If you’d like a chance to win a free ebook copy of Her Name, please visit the link below and leave a comment. A winner will be chosen at random.
Thank you!
Madison Andrews has spent her entire life–unsuccessfully–searching for love. She begins having vivid dreams of the same woman every night, and soon, Madison believes this woman is the love she has been searching for. Madison’s dreams become more intense and she realizes the dreams she’s having recreate moments taken from actual events from her life–and this woman is there for all of it. Madison searches for her, but how can she find a woman she knows everything about… and yet nothing? She doesn’t even know her name.
Author Lynn Lawler has written a wonderful five star review of my book, Her Name.
Thank you, Lynn, for taking the time to read and review my book.
Please click on the link below to read this review, as well as reviews for books from other amazing authors.
Thank you!
Please check it out at http://lynnlawler.blogspot.com/.
The days remaining of 2014 have hit the single digits and when a new year approaches, reflection over the past year can bring forth profound emotions. There will be regrets. Some big. Some small. But hopefully with those regrets come moments one wishes to relive everyday for the rest of his or her life.
2014 had a few of those moments for me.
I published my first book this year and my second will be out early next year. Being a published author had always been my dream and the timing of that dream coming to fruition couldn’t have been more perfect. It came while I was at an extremely low point in my life and the news gave me the lift I desperately needed. I finally had a reason to be proud.
For the moment, I was assured I could offer this world, this life, something, anything. I felt the satisfying emotion of self-worth that every person needs to feel in order to live each day with the confidence that he or she belongs here.
It’d been a long time since I felt I had accomplished anything and the sensation that ran through me when I finally achieved this was life-saving. But once the jubilation of signing my first book contract eased, I realized, “Holy Crap! I need to do it all over again!”
Yes. I had to get to work on my second book because nobody wants to be a one-trick pony. I hit more walls while writing that second book because the inspiration just wasn’t there. Not like it was with the first book, but eventually, I finished it and sent it to my editor. She liked it and contracted it. (Thank you, Jeanne!)
I’m in a much better place going into this new year than I was at this time last year. I was still a month away from being published and filled with severe doubt about everything I did. In some psychic way, I knew how much was riding on the outcome of my submission to the small epublishing company I had discovered online. I wrote the query letter but was cowardly close to not sending it at all. My emotions were out of control. I was crying a lot and was certain that I was in no state of mind to handle a rejection.
Looking back, reflecting on this past year, I’m relieved I took a chance with my writing. Sure, I had risked getting rejected and crying more than I already was, but I would have gotten over it eventually because I knew I couldn’t live with asking myself “what-if?” all the time. It only brings regrets.
Heading into 2015 I have another “what-if” scenario haunting my mind and it won’t go away. But I’m not sure I have the courage to do what I know is right. This could blow up in my face in a very bad way.
A year ago I put my dream on the line. I took a risk. I need to do it again because I don’t want 2015 to be the year of regrets.
Photos courtesy of Freedigitalphotos.net
Please help Musa Publishing celebrate 13 Day of Christmas with a free ebook copy of my book, Her Name. For today only, you can receive not only my book, but a book from two amazing authors free!
Her Name is a about a woman who believed the beautiful woman she dreams about is the real love of her life.
Madison Andrews has spent her entire life–unsuccessfully–searching for love. She begins having vivid dreams of the same woman every night, and soon, Madison believes this woman is the love she has been searching for. Madison’s dreams become more intense and she realizes the dreams she’s having recreate moments taken from actual events from her life–and this woman is there for all of it. Madison searches for her, but how can she find a woman she knows everything about… and yet nothing? She doesn’t even know her name.
An excerpt from Her Name:
Now, I laid down my fork and leaned into my seat. I knew she didn’t want to talk about this anymore, but I did. “This all sounds crazy to you, and maybe in the beginning, it was something to joke about, but now, I’m not sure. These pictures were taken directly out of my life, and this woman was in every one of them. You can’t tell me I just dreamed it from memory, because my memory isn’t that good! The photos were identical all the way from the clothes we wore, to the smile on our faces. Hell, even the background was the same! She was the only thing that was different. How could that be?”
I stared at her, waiting for a response as she took it all in.
“Like I said on the phone, I just don’t know what you want me to say. I’m not sure what you’re asking me. Is it weird? Yeah, totally, but I’m no dream expert, and neither are you. Like I said before, maybe it’s your subconscious taking over. I’m sure there’s a logical explanation, and it probably has some fancy scientific name.”
“She’s my wife,” I said flatly. “I saw a picture of us from our wedding, and we looked like we belonged together. We know each other. I mean, really know each other. I wish you could see us together, because you’ve never seen me this way with anyone before.”
“And what way is that?”
“In love,” I answered.
“In love,” Shelly repeated and then pushed herself away from the table. “Well, Maddy, me seeing you with her is something that will never happen. Do you wanna know why that will never happen?”
“I know why you think that will never happen, but that’s where you’re wrong.” I stared at her and said, “I’m just gonna come out and say it. I think she’s real.”
Please check out Musa Publishing’s website at http://musapublishing.com/index.php?main_page=specials.
Thank you!
My book, Her Name, was recently reviewed on The Lesbrary. The Reviewer wasn’t absolutely thrilled with a very specific shift in tone the story took near the end, but that’s okay. Not every reader is going to emotionally connect with every aspect of a story and be satisfied with it.
Still, despite any frustration she may have felt about the climatic ending, sentiments of the story stayed with her and made her reflect on her own life.
The Reviewer writes, “If truth be told, there will likely never again be a night that I don’t turn down the covers, anticipating the presence of my true love — though I don’t think I’ll be holding my breath. One thing is for certain, however. I will make a concerted effort to approach each moment as fully present as I’m able so as to prevent my very destiny from slipping away.”
This why I write. I want to emotionally impact someone’s life. I don’t write for people to tell me what an awesome writer I am. I don’t need to hear that I am the best. I write to make a person feel. That’s all I want.
“Without a doubt, Her Name felt to be more of a dear friend’s diary than a work of fiction.”
This will probably be my most treasured comment in a review ever. Thank you, The Lesbrary, for reviewing my book.
If you’d like to read the entire review, please click the link below. Thank you.
http://lesbrary.com/2014/12/02/kalyanii-posted-her-name-by-alicia-joseph/
Today I am featured on Lynn Lawler’s Book Blog. Ms. Lawler is the author of the upcoming novel, Enlightened Desire. I am privileged to be a guest on her blog where she has given me the opportunity to discuss my lesbian romance novella, Her Name.
Please follow the link to her blog: http://lynnlawler.blogspot.com/
Thank you!
I write lesbian romance stories that don’t usually tackle the slew of political, social, or religious issues that can be so brutal towards homosexuality that taking one’s own life can feel like the only, and easier, option. It’s not. And it never will be, but I don’t write about those issues. Not yet.
The sexuality of my characters is at times so irrelevant in my books that the f/f romance could be swapped for their m/f counterparts and the story will read almost the same way. Am I playing it safe? Possibly, but what I know is this – I love a good romance – but eventually I will write stories with more substance, more backbone. I have a few in my slush pile, but for now, I’m a hopeless romantic aiming my bow directly for the reader’s heart.
I write about love and I choose two women to represent the love I want to show. But I’m very conscious that when writing about this kind of romance, I am avoiding the Butch/Femme dynamic of a lesbian relationship (even though it is very prevalent in the gay community) because I don’t know exactly what this combo entails and misrepresenting an entire group of lesbians isn’t something I’m willing to chance.
I neglect the whole Butch/Femme coupling because I know if I characterize a woman as appearing “manly” I will be tempted to attribute all the masculine traits that go along with that. I will write scenes with the Butch clamoring her tools underneath a car, or driving a pick-up, or with her face shoved beneath the kitchen sink fixing a leak.
Is this accurate? Do all Butches fix things? Does every single one of them know how to change a tire or rewire the electric cable? Are they even interested in these tasks or do they learn it to satisfy the expectations placed on them by the feminine women they date? Is this all part of the “role” in being butch?
If I wrote a Butch to be so typically “butch”, would I get slammed for it? On the flip-side, if I distinctly characterized feminine lesbian women as standing in front of the stove stirring a pot of some deliciously-mouth-watering concoction, or being experts at removing stains from any stubborn shirt, or as always being pretty and femme and femme and pretty, would it cause a backlash of angry Femmes? Gotta look sexy for the Butch!
Are these expectations placed in a Butch/Femme relationship accurate? I’m asking because I really don’t know. I hate labels and I refuse to make a distinction as to what kind of lesbian I am. I never saw my father hammer a nail into a wall. He didn’t even know how to put the Christmas tree together. My mother did that. But that didn’t make him any less of a man – it only meant he wasn’t a “handy” man.
Although I won’t label myself, I do know that in my relationships I see myself as the “protector.” I have an innate desire to take care of the people I love, particularly the woman I’m with and keep her away from harm. Does this make me the “man” because I’m the one who will jump out of bed in the middle of the night and tell my partner to stay safely in the room while I inspect the strange noises coming from the kitchen? Is it “gentlemanly” of me because I like to help my girlfriend slip on her coat and open doors for her. “Ladies first,” leaves me the one waiting and I’m okay with that, but that doesn’t make me butch.
I knew at a young age I had no interest in being Cinderella – with her white poofed-out ballroom dress and wearing her extremely narrow, high-healed, glass slippers that had to be, without a doubt, excruciatingly painful to walk in. No thank you. Give me Prince Charming’s black pants, elegant blue suit jacket, and flat comfortable shoes. And I’m good.
My role in relationships may seem male-oriented, and I may have an affinity for young men’s graphic t-shirts, camouflage shorts, hoodies, backwards hats, and converse cons (but even straight girls love cons, right?), and I don’t wear dresses, skirts, or anything that is extremely bright in color, still, this doesn’t make me butch.
It only makes me, me. And I say that ain’t so bad.
Full disclosure. I once told an old girlfriend in lieu of flowers to buy me baseball cards – okay, so maybe this ONE thing makes me a little butch. 🙂
The young son of a widowed man calls up a radio show on Christmas Eve and shares with the host, and anyone listening, how sad his father is. He wants his lonely dad to find a new wife. The boy, Jonah, is able to convince his father, Sam, to pick up the other extension and have a conversation about his wife, who had passed away a year and a half ago, to a complete stranger. (Only later does he realize he’s been talking to a nationally syndicated radio show.)
A woman, Annie, who lives thousands of miles away, has just left a Christmas party with her fiancee. She drives alone and turns on her radio and a child’s voice fills the car. She listens as the boy talks about his dead mother and his heart-broken father. When Sam gets on the phone, his voice is soft, deflated, as he runs down his daily routine of trying not to miss his wife.
Annie is stopped by the way the man on the radio longs for his dead wife. He loves her still. Probably always will. Annie listens, breathless at times, as he tells of how they met and when he touched her for the first time it was like…magic.
Annie and Sam say “magic” at the same time.
A shared moment between two strangers living on opposite ends of the country, Sam in Seattle and Annie in Baltimore.
What Annie feels in that moment is enough for her to write a letter to Sam, but she doesn’t send it, a friend, her editor (also a woman captivated by this man’s story), secretly does. Annie is a reporter and she is sent to Seattle to do research on talk radio shows.
In Seattle, she finds Sam and watches him play with his son on a beach. Sam notices her from across the street and walks toward her because he is taken by her, but she leaves before he gets too close.
If you don’t know, what I’ve written is the premise of the movie Sleepless in Seattle. Tom Hanks plays Sam and Meg Ryan portrays Annie.
In the end, the two strangers meet at the Empire State Building in New York City. Sleepless in Seattle is one of the most romantic movies of all time and the two main characters share only a few scenes together. They touch once. They hold each other’s hand. And that’s all they need because like magic, they just know.
I wonder how a story like this would play out in real life. If a woman jumped on a plane, tracked down a man she’d never met before, but felt a deep connection to because she listened to him a couple times on a late-night radio show, and watched from the street as he played with his son.
If the “darling” of movies at the time, Meg Ryan, wasn’t the real-life version of “Annie,” would this still be written like a sweet romance movie? Or instead, would it be watched as a “scary-as-shit, holy-fuck, Glenn Close Fatal Attraction-esque, I’m calling the cops!” psycho-thriller?
Sleepless in Seattle was made in 1993. We hadn’t yet been introduced to social media and because of that, this kind of story is more likely to happen in 2014 than in 1993. The Internet has given us access to people’s lives we didn’t used to have. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Blogs, Vine, Tumblr, etc. can allow us to feel like we know a person, when we really don’t.
Annie fell for a man by listening to him tell his story over the radio, so is it that crazy to imagine it’s possible to fall for someone by following them on Twitter, reading their blogs, or creeping their Facebook page?
You stumble upon a person’s writing and they stop you because their words hit you so hard, right in the gut, that you can’t stop reading and need to know more. And the deep connection you feel overwhelms you and soon, you’re reading everything you can find about this person.
But how do you know if you’ve taken it too far? Where’s the line? And if you cross it, how far do you go?
To look at a stranger’s pictures and they feel like home. To be so inspired by someone you’ve never met before that you can compose the most powerful, breath-taking ballad or write an emotional, heart-melting love story that blows Sleepless out of the water – is amazing.
And what if you meet this person and she ends up being even better than the fantasy? And her beauty, stronger than any dream you could ever imagine. What if she is everything you want and just when you get close, she slips away and into the arms of someone else? Bam! You couldn’t see that coming because it doesn’t fit the version in your head of the way this would play out, because it doesn’t fit the movie.
All you want to do is cry because she’ll never know how much you longed for her or all the nights you went to bed thinking of her in your mind and woke up feeling her in your heart. She’ll never know that you check her Twitter account every day just to see what she’s thinking, if only for that one moment, to feel close to her.
What if nothing else mattered – a huge promotion, winning the lottery, publishing a book. What if none of that meant a goddamn thing if you didn’t get the girl in the end?
Tom Hanks got the girl in the end. He got his “Annie.” I still ache for mine and I don’t think she even knows.
And that drives me crazy.
Photo courtesy of freedigitalphotos.net
To celebrate their 3rd Anniversary, now through Oct 31, Musa Publishing is offering 30% off all its books! Please check out some amazing authors at a spectacular price. Whether your favorite genre is Romance, Young Adult, Mystery, Suspense, Thriller, Paranormal, Historical, Classical, LGBTQ or Erotica, Musa offers it all!
Please go to their website, Musapublishing.com, and take advantage of these great prices.
You can find my lesbian romance novella, Her Name, originally $2.99, for only $2.09!
Her Name is a story about a woman, Madison, who believes the beautiful woman she dreams about is the real love of her life. She has vivid dreams of the same woman every night, and soon, Madison believes this woman is the love she has been searching for. Madison’s dreams become more intense and she realizes the dreams she’s having recreate moments taken from actual events from her life–and this woman is there for all of it. Madison searches for her, but how can she find a woman she knows everything about… and yet nothing? She doesn’t even know her name.
Below is an excerpt from Her Name:
Shelly and I walked across the dog park, chatting while Shelly’s pooch ran free.
“Freddy! Stay where Mama can see you!” She turned to me. “Has Becca tried contacting you?”
I shrugged. “A couple calls. Some texts, but I didn’t respond, so I think she got the message.”
“Good.”
We walked for a little while, and then she asked, “So, did you really wake up crying this morning?”
I had told her over the phone earlier that day about my dream. I looked her dead in the eye and nodded. “My pillow was drenched.”
Shelly shook her head. “And you don’t remember what you were crying about?”
I glanced toward the sky and shrugged. “In the first dream, I didn’t know her. She knew me, but I was looking at her for the first time. In the second dream, it seemed like we were living together and we had our own little routine, like I’d come home from work and she’d cook dinner. But in this last dream, the way she held me in her arms as I cried was so personal. I wasn’t afraid to be vulnerable around her. And then she told me she loved me.”
Shelly stopped walking and grabbed my arm. “Wait, she told you she loved you?”
“Yeah, so?”
“Did you say it back?”
“Of course I did.”
My friend threw her hands in the air. “How could you tell her you love her? You don’t even know how long you’ve known her for!”
I narrowed my eyes at her. “Are you [messing] with me?” I asked.
She looked at me, and I suspected she was holding a straight face for as long as she could before she burst out in laughter. “Of course I’m [messing] with you! This is a [frickin’] dream we’re talking about! She’s not real!” she yelled.
I walked away, but Shelly followed me. “What? You’re mad at me?”
“No, it’s my own fault. I shouldn’t have told you. I’m not even sure why I did.”
“I’m sorry! Please don’t stop telling me! I’m dying to hear more about this amazing fake woman.” She cracked up and wrapped an apologetic arm around my neck. “I’m sorry, really I am, but let me just make sure I’ve got this straight so far. You’ve played games with a hose, you woke up naked with her, you cried, and you told her you loved her, but you haven’t even [slept with] her yet?”
I pulled away and gave her a hard look.
She laughed. “Oh, I’m sorry. Did I just insult your girlfriend? If she’s mad, just apologize for me when you see her tonight.”
“You know what!” I yelled. I started to let her have it, but stopped myself. I wasn’t sure what I’d expected my friend’s reaction to be, because they were only dreams and everyone had them.
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aliciajoseph 