Kate Cotoner's Blog

Today sees the release of my M/M erotic romance novella Fall of a State, set in ancient China during the Western Han dynasty. I wrote this two years ago as a birthday gift for my friend Anna, so it has more porn in it than I usually write *g*

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Cover art by Anne Cain

The desire of an emperor… Bored with his usual palace musicians, the emperor Liu Che is tempted by a new song from lowly qin-player Li Yan Nian. Yan Nian is also beautiful, and Liu Che is in the mood to take a new lover. His lovers ...

I got up at 5am to take OH to the station for the 6.25 to Glasgow. The weather is glorious, so after the train run I walked through the village to the marsh and fed the ducks, which were all asleep on the pond. The mallards have fledged now but the young coots and moorhens are still in their baby fluff. Back to do the washing and washing-up and to call the plumber, and do a bunch of paperwork, and it feels like I've managed to do a lot even though it's only just after 9am.

Though I'm usually a...

My new novella Hand of Glory was released yesterday! It's my first attempt at a 'sweet' M/M romance with a mystery-suspense plot involving nasty dead things and hidden treasure.

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Ethan Heng has come to the little English village of Hepplewick to investigate his family heritage. A misunderstanding over some church brasses leads to lunch with Matthew Jennings, the attractive young vicar, but soon the two men are plunged into a five hundred-year-old mystery when a Hand of Glory is discovered in...

So I have a guest blog over at Fangtastic Books today on fox shifters – funny timing, considering the news that a fox got into a London house and mauled twin baby girls over the weekend.

Mum visited Friday-Monday. We went to the garden centre where she bought 8 bags of compost and topsoil and some plants for my brother's house. Then we walked around the marsh and visited Barnby Hall, which has the largest collection of water lilies in the wild in Europe (or so they claim). The place was...

I've got two interviews up this week.

Here I am at Fallen Angels Reviews…

…and here I am chatting with The Dancing Dove.

Congratulations to Germany for winning Eurovision (I said to OH, 'Germany will win, the UK will come last, and we'll give 12 points to Greece' – right on all counts!). The Apricot Stone song was such a lot of crack. Had fun tweeting all night until I broke the status update limit – oops! Didn't know that could happen!

Turkish GP was boring, except for the Red Bull debacle and L...

I received the edits for The Fall of a State this morning, which were very light. Aside from edits for house style, there were six suggestions for alternate word choice and about the same amount again for grammar/syntax changes. I went through the whole thing and cut/rephrased a fair bit for flow, so overall I cut it by around 3%. Could possibly have been more brutal, but that would have changed the original feeling of the tale. The story is, what, 14 months old – it was the first thing I...

I finished my Greek story today.

Seriously, this was even more of a bitch to write than The Imperial Cat. It took me four weeks to write 2500 words, then two days (yesterday and today) to write 5000 words. It got to the point where I was ready to bang my head on a wall. Metaphorically I'd been doing that for weeks, of course.

The interesting thing about this story is that it's got a lot of truths in it – emotional, intellectual truths – which is probably why I had such a hard time of writing i...

It's my favourite time of year. Not because the sun is shining and the fluffy ducklings are waggling across the pond, but because it's time for Eurovision – the ultimate in dreadful musicality, weird costumes, strange vocals, and epic ridiculousness.

This year it's in Norway (though how they won last year with that asinine ballad is beyond me), and last night was the first semi-final to send ten lucky(?) countries through to Saturday's camp extravaganza. I sat on the sofa tweeting to friends i...

Yesterday evening I came home with a migraine. I ignored it, thinking it was just a normal headache, but when the little white lights started flashing I lay down, had a weird hour of not-quite-sleeping where my thoughts had the rhythm of the book I'd just been reading (The Queen of Subtleties by Suzannah Dunn – and the rhythm of the prose is quite aggravating and not at all soothing for an incipient migraine), and then I went into a fugue state where I was aware of the pain while asleep. I...

Another dull race. Back-to-back Webber wins, back-to-back Jam Hands looking miserable. Poor Seb is so feeble he couldn't even heave Webber into the Red Bull swimming pool!

I wasn't sure if I should applaud Michael's overtaking move on the last lap or not, but it's a moot point anyway with the stewards' decision.

Turkey next – always a fairly pointless outing – and then thank God we have Canada back on the calendar. Montreal is a mighty circuit and I'm looking forwards to seeing how many of the ...