Tag: lesbian

Rainbow Book Reviews

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Thank you, Rainbow Book Reviews, for a wonderful review of my book. I appreciate you having me on your site, as well as for the kind words.

The review below was written by JJ.

Thank you, JJ.

–This is a remarkably imaginative story. I was so touched that I more than found myself laughing with the main character, crying with her, obfuscating with her, and trying to make sense of the phenomenal gift she is given even though it came with as many pains as amazing highs. I was so moved by her dreams…their possible meaning and their potential insights stay with me till this moment. This book is full of passion and love. Plus, I felt myself filled with powerful feelings penetrating my soul. Outstanding!

Madison or Maddy is not in a really good space. She is fast racing towards her fortieth birthday and her life has not gone the way she wanted. She has not met the woman she could love for forever and be loved in return. Her mother passed away recently, her father is devastated, her sister and brother seem to be where they hoped to be. However, Maddy has this job that is a bit of a grind, friends and temporary lovers who possibly should be committed, and a growing fear that life is passing her by. Then she starts having these continuing, greater than life dreams on a nightly basis where all her hopes and desires seem to be actually happening. No one wants to hear Maddy expound on these dreams anymore, her family and closest friend thinks she needs therapeutic help, and she is simply caught in between. However for Maddy, there is unquestionably something very real going on in this astonishing, episodic piece of paradise. Enchanting!

Maddie does not get to know the name of the woman in her dreams till near the end of this story in a core-piercing, breath-losing, and time-halting kind of way. Yet, this woman is clearly the other most important person in this novella. In the beginning there are snippets. Later on, there is a rather long and cathartic path to the big truth about the origin of the dreams. It was intensely illuminating. Maddy gets to see with such clarity how a hypothetically much bigger life story unfolds possibly simultaneously with the life she actually walks through each day, each year. To my surprise, this part of the story totally stopped me in my tracks. Jaw-dropping, eye-popping, heart melting I simply cried an ocean of tears and had my heart burst wide open with joy. Phew! However, I felt that both stories had actually unfolded and blossomed around Maddie as her eternal love lit up the universe. After my initial and cathartically tearful reaction, I felt born again with a sense of the larger picture. Astounding!

I completely recommend this with the proviso that you might shed some tears from joy, from loss, or from bewilderment. Ever since I was introduced to the possibility of alternative worlds, I have tried to be open to such beautiful stories. This one is presented with such darn good insight into such an extraordinary though sometimes difficult to imagine potential. Supremely satisfying! –

If your curiosity has been piqued, you can purchase my book at http://www.amazon.com/

It is only $2.99!

Thank you!

Also, if you’d like to read more reviews of your favorite gay and lesbian books, please visit http://www.rainbowbookreviews.com

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Every Lesbian Needs a Gay Man in her Life.

Not all lesbians are fashionably challenged, but many are, and I’m no exception. We wear clothes as a necessary comfort, not to make a statement, except to say, “Yes, I threw on the first thing I saw in my closet without much consideration.” I wear clothes because it’s illegal to mosey around naked, and also because I don’t have the body that wears “naked” very well.

I can’t understand how anyone who knew me as a child (mom, siblings) were as surprised as they seemed to be when I came out. Since I was a little girl I hated wearing dresses. I have distinct memories of standing in the middle of my kitchen, begging my mother to let me wear my holey jeans.

“They have holes in them. And they’re dirty!” she’d scream.

Dirty, holey jeans were my preference of attire (and this was before they were trendy and stores didn’t sell pre-torn jeans). In the mid-eighties, ripped jeans were for burnouts with long hair, who smoked and listened to loud guitar-thrashing hard rock music.

I loved my holey jeans.

While I had no qualms with being messy, my brother (my twin) would change his outfit if one drop of anything – including innocuous water – touched a single thread of anything he wore. Pants, shirts, and shorts popped up all over the house. On the kitchen floor, across the stairwell, behind bathroom doors, or tucked between the couch cushions.

“Joey!” mom would scream. “Did you change your clothes again!”

Yep, mom. He sure did.

Though she never admitted it, I’m positive having a daughter eager to wear the same worn clothes over and over was a welcomed relief to the scavenger hunt of missing trousers my brother had tirelessly put her through each day, but one thing is clear. There was a mix-up somewhere in the womb because my other half (literally) got the girl genes and to me, befell the genes that to this day make me recoil at the sight of department store make-up counters, and to the perky saleswomen with their overly painted-on faces standing under those bright, shiny lights.

Thank Christ grunge was all the rage when I was a teenager. Flannel shirts, baggy jeans, sandals with socks – it was fashionable in 1993 to dress like a lesbian – and I loved every second of it.

I was twenty-years old when I crept into my first Gay and Lesbian support group where I met my friend Tony. My fashion disaster ways were still prevalent and every lesbian needs a fashionably sensitive gay man in her life to tell her it’s time to tweeze those eyebrows.

“Eyebrows are supposed to have an arch, Alicia,” he’d say. “And there’s supposed to be two of ’em.”

Goodbye uni-brow. Hello shapely new, separated eyebrows!

But it did’t stop there. He also gently persuaded me to dump my white leather fringe jacket and ditch the blue eyeliner and bright-red blush.

Farewell rosy cheeks, it was time for a more subdued look because the year was 1996, not ’86.

Eighteen years later, Tony is still my fashion confidant, but he’s also a dear friend – a friend who listens without judgement and has the uncanny way of knowing exactly what I need to hear during my most vulnerable moments. A friend who constantly reminded me I was a writer, even when I didn’t feel like one. His support helped me to never give up on my dream. When my first book was published, he was as happy for me as if his own dream had come true.

He helped me pass bookmarks out in a predominately lesbian neighborhood to promote my book. Over lunch he gushed about how talented a writer I am and then told me to burn the jeans I was wearing as soon as I get home.

Honest friends aren’t always good for your ego, but thank God for them because I shudder to think what I’d look like if Tony wasn’t in my life.

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Photo courtesy of Freedigitalphotos.net

“Her Name” by Alicia Joseph

I’d like to share an excerpt of my lesbian romance novella, Her Name.

Her Name
Her Name

I was on my knees washing the floor when I heard her call out my name. I immediately stopped. This wasn’t just a holler for more pillows or another blanket. This was an urgent “I need you!” scream.

I ran to our room. I found her in our bathroom, sitting on the toilet, hunched over with her arms pressed against her stomach. Blood trailed over the edge of the seat. I couldn’t move. With a scared expression on her face, she whispered, “The baby.”

I hurried to her and wrapped her head in my arms. The toilet was filled with blood, and when I moved to flush it, she stopped me.

“Don’t! Not yet.”

I fell to my knees and cried beside her. She gripped my hand tightly. It was hard to comprehend what had just happened. Even as I had washed the toilet, evidence to what had been so brutally taken from us was right in my face, yet, I couldn’t believe it. It happened so quickly. Everything changed in less than two minutes.

She was lying in bed when I got off the phone with the doctor. She needed to rest, and we were to see him early the following week. I walked into the dimly lit room, carrying a washcloth in my hand, and pulled back the covers. I held her shaking body in my arms.

Her cries were violent. I wanted her to stop, but knew she couldn’t. I knew there wasn’t anything I could say to ease the agony of having a life die inside you, but I wanted to take that pain from her and wear it like a tattoo across my heart. I’d bear all the suffering so she wouldn’t have to, but no matter how badly I wanted to, I couldn’t take it away. She held her sorrow too close to her.

“I let my baby die!” she screamed.

“No, you didn’t. Don’t say that. Don’t ever say that,” I said and kissed the side of her face. “There was nothing you could do. Please believe that,” I begged.

She didn’t say anything, and I stopped talking, knowing she wouldn’t hear anything over her bawling. I held her tightly for as long as she needed me to. Her deep sobs slowed to a quiet whimper. Her body finally found some peace as she fell asleep under the protective covers of our bed. I lay beside her, holding a cool wet washcloth across her forehead.

Alicia Joseph

Please check out my Author Facebook Page at https://www.facebook.com/pages/Alicia-Joseph/1444411879162094?ref=hl

http://www.amazon.com/Her-Name-Alicia-Joseph-ebook/dp/B00LPIAGB4

You can also connect with me on Twitter @JosephJody76

My Interview with Ashley Ladd.

Today I am featured on author Ashley Ladd’s blog “Happily Ever After.” Please check out the link below where I talk about my new lesbian romance novella, Her Name. Thank you!

http://ashleyladd.blogspot.com/

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“Books and Internet Love.”

The year was 1998. Amazon was three years old – a puppy not yet showing any semblance of the big dog it’d become that would be the bane of every brick and mortar company’s existence.

In 1998, the “bad guys” were Borders, Barnes and Noble, and any other big corporate giant that moved in and put friendly, independent neighborhood bookstores out of business. Those same corporate giants are now shutting their doors thanks, mostly, to Amazon, but back then, you couldn’t mess with them. This “bullying” of small bookstores didn’t sit well with me because I’d envisioned a nice quiet life managing my own bookstore where I’d serve coffee and chat with customers I knew by name. It could have been a nice life, but with a Borders across the street and a Starbucks right next to it, it would have been short-lived.

Years before Ellen Degeneres came out as a lesbian, she had a TV show called, Ellen, where she played a character who owned a bookstore. I was a teenager at the time, fantasizing that I was watching my future life play out in front of me. I believed it could be like that. Just…like…that. The perfect business. The perfect friends. The perfectly-timed jokes. I was naive enough to think a TV show could resemble real life.

Then came the movie You’ve Got Mail. It still makes me smile when I watch it. It touches on two things I know well. Books and Internet dating. You didn’t boast loudly back in ’98 about having a profile on the Internet searching for love. You whispered it into a trusted friend’s ear, if you said anything at all. But You’ve Got Mail made Internet dating sweet and charming, in a way only Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks can do.

Meg Ryan plays Kathleen Kelly, owner of The Shop Around the Corner (friendly neighborhood bookstore) and Tom Hanks plays Joe Fox, owner of Fox Books (evil corporate bully). Fox puts Kelly out of business all the while romancing her over the Internet, unbeknownst to her that it his him.

Only “always the good-guy” Tom Hanks can pull something like this off and come out looking as wholesome as Jimmy Stewart in an “ah shucks” kind of a way. “Ah shucks, Ms. Kelly. I’m really sorry I put you out of business, taking away your livelihood, as well as conversing with you online and not telling you who I really was. But I’d really love to take you to dinner sometime.” You’ve Got Mail segued into a sweet love story with a happy ending, in a way only Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks can do.

It was 1996 when I corresponded romantically with someone on the Internet for the first time. Meg Ryan nails it perfectly when her character says, “I wonder. I turn on my computer. I wait impatiently as it connects. I go online, and my breath catches in my chest until I hear three little words: You’ve got mail. I hear nothing. Not even a sound on the streets of New York, just the beating of my own heart. I have mail. From you.”

Yes, Meg, I know the feeling well.

In ’96 we didn’t have Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or texting. If you had something to say to someone, you called them on the phone. If you weren’t ready to give out your number because you were, after all, talking to someone from the Internet, which could be ANYBODY, you used email. That was it.

I eventually met the woman that had sent me rushing to my room as soon as I entered my house, locking the door, and holding my breath until I saw her name in my email box. Big smile. She was the first woman I called my girlfriend. The woman who would help me come out to my family and friends. I remember the exchange with my mother when I told her. She sat on the living room couch. Me on the other. I told her I needed to tell her something. And then I lit a cigarette – signifying this was serious. She sat up. “Mom,” I said. “I met someone online. This person’s name is Chris. But not Chris as in Christopher. Chris as in Christine. I’m a lesbian. She lives in Jersey. I’ll be leaving to see her next month.”

Maybe that wasn’t an entirely fair way to put it to my mom. “I’m gay, but no time to talk. Got a flight to catch! Bye!!!!!”  I was nineteen. What stupid things were you doing when you were nineteen? I flew to Jersey. Met the girl. Sparks didn’t fly.

Though it didn’t end “Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan” style. I don’t regret doing it because I took a chance. I wish one day I’d open my email and see her name again because I’d like to know how she’s doing – nineteen years later.

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Photos courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Inked Rainbow Reads

Please check out my interview at Ink Rainbow Reads. They were very gracious with their reviews, and they asked some excellent questions, too. Please check it out at the link below.

And thank you, Inked Rainbow Reads, for having me.

http://inkedrainbowreads.wordpress.com/2014/09/16/5-stars-for-her-name-by-alicia-joseph-ff-mustread-amazing/

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