Barcelona dispatch: kittens, promos & freedom incoming 🏖️🐾

The Life

My mother moved into her care home yesterday morning 🏡. I know it's for the best long term but it's one of the toughest things I have ever done. We cannot meet her needs and we were burning ourselves to a crisp trying.

We are trying to get her to look at it like an opportunity (she can out anywhere she likes in Barcelona, has meals, laundry and all that sorted), but obviously that's a bit of a lie, isn't it? I get it, at 68 no one expects to move into a care home.

So I feel guilty, even though I have given my all and at 38 I think I'm allowed to live my own life without proping my family up at every turn. In his book, Trevor Noah had an amazingly insightful quote about how upward mobility sounds great until you realise that the person moving up is also either abandoning everyone they love or dragging them along.

It will be strange to have this weight off my shoulders at long last, not just my mother but a lot of my family troubles (I am now the proud owner of no flats whatsoever, which means no surprise bills or issues). In a way, I don’t quite know what to do with myself, in another I want a 2 week long nap and to eat a feast when I wake up. 😴

I mean, I’m staying for a week to help her with the transition, but after that, I’m officially off duty! I’ll keep my destination secret for now, but I can’t wait and I have decided to take the first week offline to recharge my social batteries.

✍️ ✍️ ✍️

The WIPs:

Book-wise, my betas were amazingly insightful, and I decided the novella’s ending needed a brush up (this means 5k more of sex that I’d previously cut so I’m sure you will agree it was the right decision ;p). I am hoping to get it finished this month, plus the cover, but good things take time!

Next time, I’ll give you a preview of something, either the cover or the first chapter.

🪶Future Stories 🪶

🎉 Commissions: and they are open! Since I wrote a whole post about it, I’ll let it do the talking, but I’m super excited to bring some of your fantasies to life!

Interested in your own story?

🪶📖 Overlooked Past Joys:

Lessons (un)learned: In 10 years, I have picked up a few tricks, you can go to my blog to find out more.

🛍️ Remember to use the code 10YEARSBABY to get 20% off my entire store! That now includes “The Price of Ice” since it’s live in my store again now that it’s out of KU (if you borrowed it already, you can still read it there).

🫶Friends🫶

What would we do without them? I can certainly tell you my friends mean the world to me, they are my therapists, my companions in play and work, their struggles and triumphs teach me lessons ahead of time and when I’m the dumps, they can always talk me up/out. They are pretty amazing, but they aren’t perfect, they don’t read MM romance :p

Do you want an MM romance friend? I have made a simple Google Form to collect emails, in 2 weeks I will close it and match people, then send each of them someone else’s email so they can become pen pals.

I want a friend!

🌈📖 🌈📖Promos: 🌈📖 🌈📖

Did you ever see those “If you can play, you can play” videos against homophobia in sports? They always seemed somewhat wooden to me, though of course it’s a great initiative. But you know what’s another way to make sports more inclusive? Imagining them so, and sure, sports romances are fictional, but if it can make you cry, it can also make you think and I hope, it can make you dream.

🏳️‍🌈🏈So here I give you some wonderful sports romances you should check out. 🏳️‍🌈🏈

Romance me with Balls, please!

🎧📖🎧

As you know, my books are in the Kobo Plus program, but there are also a lot of MM audiobooks there. Check them out here.

LGBT Audiobooks (Kobo Plus)

If you need to binge, I got you covered with these bundles sale, there are seriously a lot of them from authors like me, Leta Blake, Kasia Bacon, DG Carothers and Argentina Ryder. Just the thing to take on your next holiday or staycation ;p (You can tell I’m looking forward to one of those >.>)

LGBT Bundles

🌈🎁🌈🎁🌈

And finally we get to the freebies! Try a new author and fall in love by going here!

MM Freebies this way!

🐱📚🐱

The latest batch of hardbacks was unfortunately beaten up by ruffians on its way to me…📦💔

But on the other hand, that meant we could indulge Sasha’s and Shelby’s love of literature.

Happy reading!

NJ