(Update #2: With regard to the Kergan Edwards-Stout article in the Huff Post, being that the post was centered on President Obama’s support of same sex marriage, and when I think of support I’m talking about support on a federal level, not on a state to state level, I wanted to post this link to an ABC news article on the President’s latest comment on same sex marriage. Evidently, he’s not supporting same sex marriage on a federal level if he should win a second term, and he’s basically saying that same thing all the other candidates before him have said in the past. It’s not very encouraging, because gay marriage on a state level means nothing for most of us. We need equality on a federal level.)

(Update: The moment I posted this cover on facebook, author Janet Post, told me this cover model has been used on her book, so this cover won’t be used either and it’s back to coming up with a new cover. So this will now be an ongoing post about the difficulties of coming up with decent book covers. Of course I’m not using it. And I’m sure the cover artist will agree. I’m just glad Janet caught this in time before it went to print.)

Earlier this week I posted a preview cover for a new .99 e-book I’m self-pubbing on Amazon next month. It’s titled, “A Sign From Heaven Above,” it’s very erotic gay romance, and you can read more about it with the link.

Unfortunately, I thought I had the perfect cover. Simple and clean; nothing I found offensive. And then I wrote a post thanking Gay Rom Lit for a contest they held last weekend where I won a copy of a gay film on DVD. While I was linking to the GRL web site in my post, I noticed they had the same image that I’d used for the cover of ASFHA. I’d purchased mine from one of those stock photo sites to make it all legal, and I guess they did the same thing. That was the first time I’d ever been to the GRL web site. I usually get all that information from social media.

So I thought about it and decided to change the entire book cover. The cover artist agreed. I doubt the folks at GRL would have minded, but I didn’t want to usurp their territory. I bought another image, revised the entire cover, and this is what we came up with. I still like the first one better, but I’m okay with this.

Sometimes these things happen and sometimes you catch it before it goes to print. I once released a short story titled “Strawberries and Cream at the Plaza,” and soon discovered after it was released another mm romance titled “Strawberries and Cream” had been released around the same time. In that case, there was nothing I could do about it. My story was a re-print from an older anthology and it had been titled years ago. And I’m sure the other author had no idea either. It happens. At least this time I had a chance to revise it.

Kergan Edwards-Stout Asks People to Unfriend Him on Social Media…

If people are not going to vote in the next election the way Kergan Edwards-Stout is voting, and they are not supporting his candidate of choice, Edwards-Stout is turning his back on them, will have nothing to do with them, and wants them to unfriend him on all social media.

I’m not a friend of his on any social media, so I didn’t have to unfriend him. But I probably would have it he’d been a friend. I’ve been openly gay all my life, and I’m with my partner for twenty years. We’ve bought, renovated and sold property together. We’ve started and sold small businesses. We’ve buried parents and grandparents in those twenty years. We’ve helped parents and family members through everything from divorce to chemotherapy. We’ve also buried good friends and watched older gay couples go through all the legal issues same sex couples face. We’ve had our attorney plan and organize our affairs so that we both have legal POA for health issues and financial issues. I’ve stood by Tony’s side while a priest gave him last rites when they thought he was dying five years ago. I brought him home after a three month hospital stay when he weighed 90 pounds so he could recuperate in his own home instead of a nursing home…against everyone’s advice…they didn’t think I could do it alone. So I may not be father of the year like Kergan Edwards-Stout, but there’s nothing he can even imagine that I haven’t already been through twice by this time in my life. And I don’t take kindly to people giving me orders as to who I should vote for in either party, Democrat or Republican. I happen to be a registered Democrat and have been all my life. But I still don’t want ANYONE telling me who I should vote for, just as I would never tell anyone who they should vote for. That’s an individual choice we all have the right to decide for ourselves.

What prompted me to comment on this Edwards-Stout post was an e-mail I received from a good friend in Brooklyn. I’ve posted about her before. She and her partner have been together for thirty years, and they were here, in New Hope, offering me all the support I needed when Tony went through his health crisis five years ago. This friend of mine was a lifelong Democrat who became disillusioned with politics in the last five years and now she’s an independent voter. She was wearing a “Vote for Romney” button in her Brooklyn neighborhood one day this week. I don’t always agree with her on politics, but she’s still my friend and I still respect her choices. She was attacked verbally by six people that day for wearing that Romney button. Of course the poor thing was terrified. She’s not wearing that button again any time soon. But you see where I’m going with this. She wasn’t out to attack anyone. She was minding her own business, doing her own thing.

I’m not a political person. I do work hard to support same sex marriage, and all things LGBT all the time. I even get into some of these issues in my fiction even though I know no one reads my books to get political insight (smile). But I would never have the audacity to actually tell someone how he or she should vote. And I’d like to make that distinction clear here, in writing. So if you aren’t supporting my candidate of choice, I’ll still be your friend on social media, or anywhere else, no matter who you are voting for this November. I have no right to tell you how to vote just as you have no right to tell me how to vote. And I don’t want to lose your friendship, whoever you might be, because of the same kind of discrimination I’ve been facing all my life.

Frankenstorm Approaches

In case you have not been following this, we are bracing for what might be the perfect storm here in the mid-Atlantic. There’s a hurricane moving north up the Atlantic and it’s going to collide with a front coming from the west. The link will provide more details, and I’m no weather expert, but I do find it interesting that this same time last year we had a freak snowstorm here on Halloween that created problems for days afterward. I lost so many small trees I stopped counting.

As far as the models go, this approaching storm might still go out to sea, which would be nice. Tony and I don’t live near the coast but we do live on three heavily wooded acres with massive tall trees. And when the wind goes above sixty miles per hour, we go to the basement. Living with so many trees is interesting because you can never predict which tree will go down. We’ve had some trees removed we thought were unsafe, but then a storm would come along and a tree we thought was perfectly safe would go down. You can never predict anything with trees.

So I’m hoping that if this storm does happen, we ALL get through this with as little damage as possible. You’ve heard that old saying about “if a tree goes down in the forest…” Well, trust me, they do make a sound, and it’s not a sound you want to hear often.