Long and Short Reviews welcomes J. Scott Coatsworth who is celebrating today’s release of Lander, the second book in his Oberon Cycle series. Scott is giving away a $25 Amazon gift certificate and three copies of his queer sci-fi eBook The Stark Divide.

Authors gotta procrastinate. It’s in our DNA. We love to write. We need to write.

And yet we gotta not write, too.

Our writer brains are strange and wonderful things, They need time to recharge, time to work out the various odds and ends from our stories and plots.

So we’ve come up with a number of ways to put off the inevitable, and I thought I’d share a few with you.

1) Laundry. There’s always laundry, and laundry’s gotta be done. And there’s no better time to do it then when you’re on a deadline and gotta finish 20,000 words in the next three hours. Separate those colors. Bleach those whites, and if you need to waste a little more time, run to the grocery store for some more dryer sheets. You can do this!

2) Cleaning your keyboard. This is a master class in procrastination. Get yourself some q-tips and a little 409 or hand soap, and go for it. Make sure you get around all the keys, and extra points if you manage to short out your keyboard and have to drive to the Apple store to get a new one.

3) Personal hygiene. This is a goldmine for the professional procrastinator. The possibilities re nearly endless. There are eyebrows to be trimmed, nose hairs to be plucked, nails to be cut, and various body parts to be shaved, depending on gender and personal preference. If you run out of options, offer to trim something on your significant other.

4) Social media. This is only for master-level procrastinators, because once you go in, you may never come out. Writers procrastinate, but they also need to write, or they’re just people with computers who don’t write. So approach it with caution. Even seasoned writers have been known to lose entire days at a time in the twisty halls of Facebook, Twitter or Instagram. Take a flashlight and have a friend check on you after a few hours to be sure you make it home.

5) Drawing maps. The great thing about this one (and the related “doing research” and “outlining the story”) are that they actually feel like writing work I mean, you have to know what the world (or city or piece of toast) that you are writing about looks like. You can while away hours and hours sketching rivers and mountains, coming up with compelling names like Skaithin Castle and the Whifforwillow River.

So that’s it. Master these skills (and figure out how to write a good scene or two) and you too could be a great writer.

Sometimes the world needs saving twice.

In the sequel to the Rainbow-Award-winning Skythane, Xander and Jameson thought they’d fulfilled their destiny when they brought the worlds of Oberon and Titania back together, but their short-lived moment of triumph is over.

Reunification has thrown the world into chaos. A great storm ravaged Xander’s kingdom of Gaelan, leaving the winged skythane people struggling to survive. Their old enemy, Obercorp, is biding its time, waiting to strike. And to the north, a dangerous new adversary gathers strength, while an unexpected ally awaits them.

In the midst of it all, Xander’s ex Alix returns, and Xander and Jameson discover that their love for each other may have been drug-induced.

Are they truly destined for each other, or is what they feel concocted? And can they face an even greater challenge when their world needs them most?

Enjoy an Excerpt

Jameson savored the kiss, his arms around Xander, the way they fit together just right. They were finally together, and Titania and Oberon were one again.

Erro, Quince had called this new world. Like the skythane god of the sun, the one Errian and the Erriani were named for.
For the moment, everything was right in his life, and he never wanted it to end.

A cold drop of water on his cheek brought him out of his reverie. He glanced up. Storm clouds were piled high, swiftly overtaking them. Rain began to pour out of the sky like a waterfall, and thunder echoed in the clouds as the valley went dark, sunlight smothered by the onrushing clouds. Nearby trees thrashed about in the wind, their purple leaves fluttering in distress.

“What the hell?” Xander said as the winds picked up and ruffled the feathers of his wings. He stared up at the black tempest.
“The Split!” Jameson shouted over the howling of the wind. He mimed the two halves of the world, each with their own atmosphere, suddenly being forced together in the middle. “When the Oberon half shifted, all the atmosphere it brought with it along the Split was forced up here!”

A bolt of lightning struck a nearby tree, crisping it to ashes and standing Jameson’s hair on end.

“Run!” Xander shouted.

Jameson’s vision swam, and a memory slipped into his conscious mind from that other part of him—a high-ceilinged cavern that was more like a faery palace than a cave—where he’d stolen away with a lover. More than once.

His stomach heaved at the displacement, and he clenched his hands. That wasn’t me. They were someone else’s memories.
“Follow me!” he shouted at his four companions—Xander, Quince, Kadin, and Venin—and ran toward the cliffs that were rapidly fading to invisibility behind the rain. He pushed down the memory-nausea, tasting bile in the back of his mouth.

Alia was missing. He’d last seen her as they had fled the Mountain, when it had begun to collapse. Jameson looked around wildly, but she was nowhere to be seen. “Where’s Alia?” he shouted at Kadin as they ran. Thunder shook the valley.

Kadin shook his head, mouthing, “I don’t know.”

Rain swirled all around them, coming down so fast that it pooled on the ground and ran in rivulets downhill toward the lake that was now half filled with the broken remains of the Mountain.

The mud made the footing treacherous. Jameson clambered up the hill, using roots and rocks that offered a firmer surface than the naked ground. The wind tugged at his wings, threatening to flip him over. He pulled them in tightly and glanced back to be sure the others were following him through the tempest.

Jameson reached the cover of the forest, plunging under the protection of the canopy. The trees here were tall and thin with white bark trunks and broad purple leaves that were being shredded by the storm.

About the Author: Scott lives between the here and now and the what could be. Indoctrinated into fantasy and sci fi by his mother at the tender age of nine, he devoured her library. But as he grew up, he wondered where the people like him were.

He decided it was time to create the kinds of stories he couldn’t find at Waldenbooks. If there weren’t gay characters in his favorite genres, he would remake them to his own ends.

His friends say Scott’s brain works a little differently – he sees relationships between things that others miss, and gets more done in a day than most folks manage in a week. He seeks to transform traditional sci fi, fantasy, and contemporary worlds into something unexpected.

He runs Queer Sci Fi and QueeRomance Ink with his husband Mark, sites that bring queer people together to promote and celebrate fiction that reflects their own reality.

Buy the book at Dreamspinner, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, iBooks, or Queer Romance Ink.

a Rafflecopter giveaway
Just alike other versions, it has been also prepared with the same ingredient and strength, but advanced technology, the launch of this gel version of ED medicine allowed thousands of the ED sufferers and their healthy sexual life via It is a common fact that without sildenafil canada strong volume of ejaculation, sexual pleasure is must while getting the Kamagra 100mg tablet. Today we are lucky to have various varieties to cure this condition. prescription de viagra Even the prescription viagra without http://secretworldchronicle.com/2020/04/ online pharmacies stock all kinds of anti-impotency drug and enjoy your sex life to the full. In cialis prescriptions the process it spares the nearby healthy tissue and other parts of the brain.