Mark C. Wade's Blog

Hello everyone!I've been keeping it a bit under wraps, but my next book is finally out! It's exciting. If people like it, I'll definitely continue the series. But as it stands, it's a perfectly complete story: both romance and mystery.I think it's my most unique book yet. There's lots of cyberpunk, VR gaming, noir detective stuff, and, of course, steamy romance between the police chief and private investigator.Here it is:Second Chances are RareAnd Henry Gallagher somehow got two.Henry used to be the best detective out there. Now he's all washed up after a horrible incident with some people he was investigating.When the top player of an online game is killed right before the big money tournament, Henry gets one more chance to solve a case and make a comeback.Oh, yeah. And the sexy police chief was an old fling, but it's unclear if they're enemies, friends, or lovers as they both work to solve the case.Problem: Henry has never played the game.And worse: the person that hires him is the prime suspect, the new top player. Henry can't shake the feeling she's as good at playing him as she is at playing the game.This hot new MM romance has it all. - Fresh, comedic cyberpunk setting. - Light bondage and dominance play. - Classic noir detective. - Second chances. - MM pairing.Get it by clicking here.

Hey everyone!Today, In the Azure Noon released!Oren had it all going on. He was set for a full-ride gymnastics scholarship until a tragic accident took his leg.Now he's trapped in a small tourist Maine town, and he hates the world.Steve wanted to be an artist, but he never got his lucky break. After the unexpected death of his wife, he just lives day-to-day.These two men, struck by tragedy, form an unlikely bond.In the Azure Noon is an uplifting story about the power of love to raise us out of our darkest moments and become more than we thought we could be.Pick up this standalone contemporary MM romance now here.

Hello all,My next book will becoming out in late June. I'll keep you posted on when the pre-order will be up. It is going to 100% be a standalone. I needed to get away from the Glyphaery world for a bit and do something contemporary, in our world.This book has been an emotional roller coaster for me. I think it's the most powerful thing I've written. It starts in a very dark place, but it's also an uplifting story about the power of love to pull us out of these moments.Here's the cover:Oren had it all going on. He was set for a full-ride gymnastics scholarship until a tragic accident took his leg. Now he's trapped in a small tourist Maine town, and he hates the world.Steve wanted to be an artist, but he never got his lucky break. After the unexpected death of his wife, he just lives day-to-day.These two men, struck by tragedy, form an unlikely bond.In the Azure Noon is an uplifting story about the power of love to raise us out of our darkest moments and become more than we thought we could be.

Well, first an update. You basically haven't heard from me, because I got mono in late November. That basically knocked me out for two months.But, the next Glyphaery book was well underway, and I got it completed. I'm pretty excited. It's my first true sequel (well, prequel to be precise). Here it is: Elder Ardryl.It should come out at the end of this month. I'm in the final edits and ready to tell you about it!Elder Ardryl is the elder and healer of Foxwell Canyon when Florian and Vil from Book 1 are kids. This book has their training under him to become Glyphaery.This means you get to learn their backgrounds, how they ended up where they did for Book 1, and lots, lots more about the magic system.In addition to all this, you get a full romance between Elder Ardryl, the protective steady man, and Myles, an independent and silly traveling merchant.Their personalities might conflict, but their passion is strong. The romance keeps with the trend of a classic m/m romance thread in each of my books, but this character progression is new.I'm happy with how it turned out, and I'll let you all know how to get a copy when it becomes available officially (sign up to the newsletter for instant notifications).

My holiday short based in Merlin's Grove goes live tomorrow. It's currently available for pre-order, but if you do the Kindle Unlimited thing it will be in that, too.Holiday cheer has come to Merlin's Grove.So has a Christmas elf from the Enchanted Triangle.Will Ben, Alex, and Dan be able to stop the magical being before his gag gifts ruin Christmas for the town?This is a standalone Christmas special featuring the gay couples and town you've come to love.Note: This is a 9,000-word holiday short and not a full romance.Pick up your copy here.

In my frustration and ranting the other day, I might have made it sound like I thought the top MM romance writers were all crap written by amateurs. I definitely do not think that, and hopefully no one took it that way.In an effort to atone for the negativity I put out, I want to give a shout-out to MM romance writers that I think are great. These aren't the only ones, but they are the ones that most prominently pop into my mind. They have true mastery of all parts of the craft: from prose style to pacing to structure, character, and tone.I'm also picking these authors because they write "pure romance." By this, I mean the standard romance beats are there structurally. From the premise, one can predict many of the things that will happen. But these authors are so good that it doesn't matter. It feels fresh and unique and surprising the whole way through. Damon Suede:I recommend starting with Hot Head. This is a book to be studied by aspiring romance writers. It is obviously great at the level of subtext: dialogue and action says more than what is on the surface. But where the book really shines for me is in how, in writer's terminology, it "progressively complicates." This is the technique of gradually raising the stakes and putting the characters through more and more extreme difficulties. If someone tells you where a book starts and where it ends, you'd say, "No way!" But a master of this technique can make each escalation small enough to be believable. It's great! I've since gone on to read everything Damon Suede has written. He's definitely a master.Keira Andrews:I recommend starting with Valor on the Move, though she has hit pretty much every sub-sub-genre one could ever want, so take your pick. I think her main strength is in the interaction of character and circumstance. She's so good at creating that perfect tension that comes from an impossible situation. It could be that the characters fall in love, but it's forbidden.It could be a subtler character flaw or personality causing the tension/conflict. No matter what it is, the story drives right to the end with so much uncertainty.N. R. Walker:I recommend starting with The Weight of it All. Though, I plowed through so many the first few months of discovering her, and they're all great.To me, N. R. Walker is the master of tone. She can create serious characters and goofballs alike, and the prose tone stays consistent to demonstrate the inner workings of the character. This makes the romance and attraction feel all the more real. I'm not sure I've ever read one of her books without some level of swooning on my part.Like I said, these aren't the only ones. I think T.J. Klune is basically single-handedly changing the face of MM Romance in the best possible way. But the wide variety of what he does isn't really strict "romance" like I was going for in this list.

Recently, I got a one-star review that called Prince Elashor "amateurish," and it has this to say: "There were moments when the story seemed to be going in a good direction but it was spoiled by lazy writing and an author who does not understand world building. At the same time I feel as though they could become a better writer with just a bit more practice."I thought I'd take this time to actually explain my history as a writer. My quick bio doesn't do it justice. This is not meant to be some sort of bragging. I know my writing is not the best in the world. I'm no Steinbeck or Hemingway or David Foster Wallace. I continue to work on and improve in my weak areas. I'm just as insecure about my writing as anyone.But in light of the above review and my plans as a writer in the future, I thought I needed to explain that I actually know what I'm talking about.Malcolm Gladwell popularized the idea that it takes 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to become an expert in anything. The following is an accounting of my 10,000 hours. I've done the work. It's questionable whether a majority of the most popular MM romance writers have even done 100 hours of deliberate practice.My HistoryI began to take writing seriously around ten years ago. I started a blog under an internet alias to document my thoughts and attempts. I started my studies with many classic books like The Elements of Style and On Writing Well. I tended to do a lot of essay and personal writing back then, so these books really gave me a handle on tightening up my prose style in the first few years. This was enormously helpful, and I'd say that the most common writing mistake I see in MM romance these days is sloppy prose style.When I started fiction, I got really, really serious about my studies. I started taking craft books and digging deep. Sometimes I would take a single book on plot structure or character, and I'd write an entire novel as if that element of craft were the only thing that mattered.This type of intense training helped me internalize what those authors were saying. When I went back to writing normally, I could draw on this information from my experience of using it and seeing what worked and what didn't work.For plot structure, I did this with Coyne's The Story Grid method and McKee's Story and for romance, in particular, I used Haye's Romancing the Beat. For character development, I used Truby's The Anatomy of Story and McKee's Dialogue. I continued to read other books on craft less intensely. Some of my favorites that I keep returning to are Delany's About Writing, Snyder's Save the Cat, Maas's The Emotional Craft of Fiction, and many others I'm sure I'm forgetting.I listened to podcasts on writing and worldbuilding all the time during this period (and continue to do so). So even when I wasn't doing focused work, I was still absorbing information to get better.I read around 70 books a year with a critical eye. I would break down their structures, development, themes, subtext, and prose style to figure out how to improve my own.Throughout all of this, I continued to blog about these methods. I put my work out there and received feedback. My blog took off, and I turned into something of an authority. I changed over to helping other people improve by taking their writing samples and showing how to make them better. I did long-form analysis on the prose styles of great writers and famous plot structures.It's a blog that continues to have success to this day.CurrentThis brings us to current day. I was writing literary fiction and fantasy under a different name. Needless to say, literary fiction is not the best way to make a living, and as an independent writer/publisher, fantasy is hard to do well on the fast timescale it takes to make it worthwhile.I'm a gay man, and I've always loved the romance novel. I looked to MM romance as the perfect genre for me. I looked at what was selling well, and to be frank, it was "amateurish" at best.Let me explain what I mean by this. It isn't intended to be cruel. It's a fact that if you sent these manuscripts to ten agents, all ten of them would stop at the first page and cite the exact same reasons for rejection. They read like beginner writers. I won't name names, but the current #1 spot on Amazon in a certain related category has the following problems on the first page: weak verbs modified with adverbs, excessively long dialogue tags, overwritten descriptions, passive voice, run-on sentences, sentence fragments, valuing sound over sense, unintentional alliteration, inconsistent point-of-view, and on and on.I saw a place I could fit in. I'd write books with a better sense of craft. Instead of sassy caricatures, I'd develop real characters. Instead of static plots, I could create emotional resonance and payoffs by having the main character have a deep flaw that they learn to overcome through their arc.I'd create more complex characters by taking the long verbal dumps of emotion and internalizing it into subtext.Characters would not merely fall in love, there would be a grand gesture to actually demonstrate their love. These are all standard writing techniques I found lacking in the generic MM sphere.I thought I could fill a hole with quality writing, and over time, if I stayed patient, it would naturally rise to the top.It turns out I was wrong.On Interpretive CommunitiesI'll digress for a moment. It's partly my fault, since I knew better. It's also not the above reviewer's fault. There's no way for her to understand what's really going on here. Since I've actually formally studied this stuff at college, it is very clear what's going on.I won't go too deeply into this, but a literary theorist named Stanley Fish theorized about something called an "interpretive community." If there's ever a perfect case study of this, it's the MM romance community.An interpretive community is basically a closed system of demographically similar people who read and write for each other with minimal interaction with writing outside of the community.MM romance came about as an offshoot of "slash fanfiction." It's written and read by mostly white women around my age. I saw the infancy of this community with my own eyes, because my two best friends in high school were girls who read and posted these things on the early days of the internet.The strange thing about interpretive communities is that generally accepted poor writing can come to be seen as the standard of quality. Conventions get set by what the majority of people are doing, and then, because no one is looking outside of the community, people who do not follow the conventions are seen as bad writers.Let's just say that the conventions set by untrained fanfiction writers (who were often using over-the-top anime characters) are not conventions I'm ever going to take on. My FutureThis brings me to a hard decision I'll have to make. It's a politically incorrect fact that women resonate with different writing than men. I get e-mails from men all the time saying how much they loved my books. Those are my glowing five-star reviews. I get one-star reviews from women saying things like "this is why I only read women."The MM romance world is 99% women, and ironically, this makes it almost impossible for a gay man to write successfully in the genre. Think about how crazy that is for a moment.There are obvious exceptions, but I can't base a career on becoming one. Reviews like the one I got show that I'm not accepted in this interpretive community. Even worse, reviews like that have an exponentially bad effect on sales.I don't want to get too deep into the economics of Amazon, but I don't think readers realize how bad it is to give a book with no reviews one star. The way books sell is by advertising using targeted keywords to show up as Sponsored Products on related books.A potential buyer sees three things: the cover, a few words of a blurb, and the average review score. Amazon is full of trash books, so when someone sees a one star average, they're likely to think they have better ways to spend their time. A handful of lost sales early on leads to a lower Amazon placement which leads to less organic traffic which leads to lower sales and on and on the cycle goes.After a few books in a series, these few lost sales from the one star review end up translating to hundreds of lost sales over the course of the series. I just wish readers were a bit more aware of the consequences of their actions. I know I'm not owed positive reviews by anyone, but I have to wonder if that reviewer would have written their review if they understood the consequences. Was the book really SO incredibly bad that it's worth wrecking my income for the next six months? I mean, they finished it, so it couldn't have been at the level of a scam (meaning other 1 star books).I'd hope they'd exercise a little more restraint if they understood that.Here's the decision for my future: do I abandon Mark C. Wade and MM romance? I feel like starting over at this point. There are plenty of genres where I'd probably be a bit more appreciated.The women of MM romance can keep patting themselves on the back with five star reviews as if the borderline unreadable prose is good. I'm not sure why I thought I'd be welcomed here. The cycle will go on without me just fine.Disclaimer 1Roger Federer is one of the greatest tennis players of all time. Even he can have an off game and be made to look like an amateur. I've watched him and thought: what was that? Even I could have returned that!Maybe Prince Elashor deserves the hate it's getting. Maybe it's an off book for me. It's too close to the publication for me to make an objective call on that. If it deserves two stars, then I have no problem with getting those reviews (it doesn't deserve one star). My guess is that it's actually quite good, though.I'll reiterate that I'm under no delusion that I'm a great writer at this point. Even if I was, every creative produces duds at some point. Even directors and writers of billion dollar movies with a track record of excellent films can flop.I just doubt that's what's going on here. For the reasons above, it seems like the community giving me poor reviews based on vague concepts like "amateurish" and "poor grammar" while giving 5 stars to patently amateur writing with poor grammar is sending me a signal: they want me out.Disclaimer 2I'll probably regret posting this in a few days. It was a way to vent, and it's never good to let the public see you vent. But I figure, what does it matter if I leave the genre behind anyway? At least I can sleep after writing this (something I couldn't do last night).Disclaimer 3I'm fully aware of how privileged and fortunate I am for a negative review to be something that can occupy this much of my time. I understand this post makes me look like a pompous, cocky ass. In real life, I'm a quiet, shy introvert. I don't send books out thinking they are God's gift to MM romance. I'm insecure and fear that each one is terrible.But here's what the immediate negative reviews on the past several books feel like for me.Imagine you go to your place of work tomorrow. Your boss comes up to you and says, "You will not be paid for the previous week of work."You ask, "Why?"They tell you a random stranger came in and informed them that your work wasn't of quality.You say, "But it was! Who are they to judge such things? This isn't fair."Your boss doesn't care. They aren't paying you for the work and that's that.

Magic, Fairy Tales, and MM RomanceWhen Prince Elashor's brother is stolen by bandits, and his father, the king, won't pay the ransom, Elashor decides to set off on the rescue himself.Problem: Elashor has been sheltered in the palace his whole life, so he doesn't know the first thing about surviving in the real world. Luckily, an attractive peasant gives him a lift along the way.Strange things start to happen. The peasant may not be an ordinary man. He may be part of the Glyphaery, a group of magical beings the king is trying to stamp out.Will love overcome their differences?On Amazon Here

Here it is! The cover of the new book:I'm not doing a pre-order this time, but the release date should be November 20, 2018. This book is a mashup of so many things: fairy tale, adventure, romance, and fantasy. I'm quite happy with how it turned out.When Prince Elashor's brother is stolen by bandits, and his father, the king, won't pay the ransom, Elashor decides to set off on the rescue himself.Problem: Elashor has been sheltered in the palace his whole life, so he doesn't know the first thing about surviving in the real world. Luckily, an attractive peasant gives him a lift along the way and begins to teach him things.Strange things start to happen, which makes Elashor think this man isn't just an ordinary man. He may be part of the glyphaery, a group of magical beings the king is trying to stamp out.Elashor realizes his true identity as a prince could be seen as a threat if ever found out.

Let's start with the good.I'm super excited about the new book. My books have been edging closer and closer to true fantasy as I go along. This latest one fully embraces this trend.The setting is a fantasy kingdom. The king has suppressed magic in the land to make sure his rule is never challenged.The main character is a prince. He's lived a decadent life, to put it mildly. His older brother will become the king someday, so his main job is to not tarnish the royal family's name.One day, everything changes. His older brother is kidnapped, and the king won't pay the ransom. The main character doesn't want the responsibility of becoming king, so he decides to go rescue his brother.This is an adventure story through an unknown, magical land. Lots of humor comes from the prince not knowing anything about common people. He, of course, meets an attractive travel companion and must keep his identity as the prince a secret.There's a ton of layers going on in the story, and I'm very happy with how all the pieces and relationships come together.The magic system has to do with glyphs and is related to animals (not quite shifters, but kind of a twist on the concept). The world is fleshed out, and I'll be able to continue stories in the world if there's interest. The book is standalone, so I can stop if it flops.Don't worry, though, this is an m/m romance through and through. The romance remains the primary story arc. It's not going to be super dry and technical to read like Tolkien or something.It's still on track for a mid-November release.Now onto the bad news. I'm ending the monthly giveaway. I just can't get the interest. After five months, I've had two months with no entrants. One month clearly went to a bot or "giveaway hunter" that had no interest in the book.I started it to promote authors doing interesting things in the genre. It isn't achieving that goal, so I'm not going to continue it. I'll have to think of another thing to do. This might mean I blog about awesome books, but I definitely don't want the pressure of feeling obligated to blog a review every week or two or four.