Laura Susan Johnson's Blog

Okay, so I really first published it on Smashwords 11 years ago this month... 30 September 2011 to be exact. But approximately a year later, my friends from #beatentrackpublishing in Northern England, decided to take a chance on Crush, and really helped me take off as an independent author of LGBTQIAP fiction! I am celebrating the 2011-12 years, in which I self marketed my novel until I drove people nuts, got great feedback from the very first beta readers, and knew what tweaks to make to get it just right. This month, it's on sale at Smashwords for 75% off the regular price, until 7 October. Just enter the provided coupon code at checkout! Happy reading! https://www.smashwords.com/books/view...

Hey everyone! Long time, no blog! The month of April 2022 marks the 107th anniversary since the beginning of the Armenian, Greek, Assyrian and Syrian genocides. I am giving away 1500 ebooks of NECTAR, my short story partly based upon my great grandmother Alisabet, her sister Victoria, and my great grandfather, Yeghizar (Stephen). It's first come, first serve, then I'll make more coupons according to demand. The code to use at checkout is VS23E. Offer ends 30 April, 2022!

As I did with Crush and Bright, I will soon list the songs I used while writing scenes in Armour, the book I've been working on since autumn of 2015. I've explained in a lot of videos and blogs why it's taking so long to finish Armour. I feel so bad. Never promise your fans something because you never know if health, financial or other problems lie in wait to ambush you. I also seem obsessed with autocorrecting my spelling, grammar, and American v. British English spellings, synonyms, accents as they'd appear on paper, and that's slowing me down as well.

Anyway this is supposed to be about music. Crush and Bright are mostly modern stories, with some flashing back into the mid-70s and 1990s, or the early 2000s. Armour is a new ballgame. It begins in 1946 and when it ends, it will be whenever "now" is.

The music in the Crush & Bright soundtracks are pretty much current with their time periods, but because I am not familiar with music from the 40s, and hate a lot of music from the 50s (I kind of hate everything about what that whole decade represented pertaining to women) the dream soundtrack for Armour is made up of some upbeat, jazzy, mid-tempo, instrumental "chillhop", containing old samples of songs that sound like they're from the 60s or 70s. There are also several pieces vaporwave, darkwave and electronica during the 80s period of Armour, but also during some scenes that happen in the 60s.

When I saw television series like Peaky Blinders (the fight scene with the gypsies and the song Blue Veins by the Raconteurs was amazing! That is NOT music of the 19-teens or 20s!) and Tarantino movies like The Hateful Eight and Django Unchained using anachronistic songs that didn't fit with the time period yet worked anyway, I decided to put whatever song fit with whatever scene, because music is filled with imagination, and it fuels mine. There is ancient and modern Armenian, Irish, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, French and more.

For now, let's talk about one song: How does music fit with a scene in a writer's head? How does a seemingly "laid-back" or "chill" track perfectly capture a horrifying scenario for an author's dream soundtrack? Within Brandon Rowan's (Birocratic) 2015 release, "Layback", a preteen boy who has assaulted a local teacher is threatened with expulsion, to which he replies, "I don't want to be in school with that perverted bitch!" Instead, he is suspended for three days. Unfortunately, the teacher he hit is the wife of one of his father's friends, and when the boy is sent home from school, his father, who has hated him since birth, corners him in his bedroom, and shows no mercy. At the 2:08 mark, this piece changes mood, from an ironically nonchalant relaxer to one of urgency, even horror, as the boy's younger brother witnesses their father push his older brother down a flight of stairs, kick him in the face, drag him into the kitchen, and beat his head into the kitchen wall before fleeing into the night with their mother, leaving their two children alone in the house: an unconscious twelve year old and a two year old with the presence of mind to walk 1/3 mile to his brother's best friend's house to get help.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjYoO...

Hi everyone! I’m sorry it’s been so long since I last posted here on GR! I wish that ARMOUR was finished and was already out there for readers to enjoy, but I’ve had so many things going on. At the age of nearly 49, my thyroid, which has functioned on the lowest end of normal for two decades or more, finally stopped working abruptly in June. I noticed when my hair abruptly began to fall out, my skin was bone dry overnight, and my fingernails began breaking when I so much as grabbed a grocery bag too vigourously. On top of this, my A1C has been elevated for a while, and though I’m an excellent typist, I’ve noticed my eyes have weakened over the last year or so. I thought it was because I needed new glasses, but obesity and type II diabetes runs on both sides of my family, so I am now on a blood sugar regulator and am striving to keep sugar out of my diet as much as possible. I hope my new glasses will make writing easier, and that I don’t have a diabetes-related eye problem. In the meanwhile, I’ve discovered numerous plot bunnies that will lend credence to certain, shall we say, plot holes, or what I prefer to call, “voluntary omissions for several specific and complex emotional reasons.” In my first novel CRUSH, which I wrote during a deep depression in the summer and autumn of 2010, there was barely a mention of a character called Lloyd, who had adopted Jamie, one of two extremely prominent characters in CRUSH, and in my effort to focus on the lives and love relationship of Jamie and Tammy, I gave Lloyd a blurb of a history, and a few perfunctory scenes. Moreover, I did not know until the story began to grow larger and larger and began to take on more meaning and optimism that I might want to publish it at all. The one thing I did for Lloyd that I feel pretty good about was establishing him as a hero who freed Jamie from a deathbed, and a loving, decent parental figure whom Jamie desperately needed for his physical, mental and spiritual recovery from the long term abuse he suffered.

So, here we are, some nine years after I first created Tammy, Jamie, Stacy, Lloyd and the other characters of CRUSH, and I am shaping what you never knew of Lloyd in the womb of my mind. I’ve been labouring at this since 2015, but the first premise didn’t sit well with me. Every story I’ve written has been about some facet or chapter or my life in some way. I’ve tried my hand at writing lgbtq fiction containing erotica and romance, and I’ve enjoyed it immensely. But I decided early on that for ARMOUR, it’s time to truly represent who I am, and I am not gay. I am asexual. I also realised only a few days ago that I am epicene, not agender. I have had the most confused time trying to figure out my gender identity, and have lived under the umbrella “genderqueer” for a long time. The truth is, I am a nonbinary, noncomforming person who feels like both on some days and neither on others. I spent my early childhood as a tomboy forced to wear dresses, and when I hit puberty, I wore the Marty McFly “life preserver” to hide my size C breasteses, which popped up overnight. If all goes to plan, I’m having top surgery in October. What a nice birthday gift that will be!

All of what you’ve read above will be incorporated into ARMOUR. As I’ve said in the past, there are 3 names that were never mentioned in CRUSH: Astrid, Derek and Joey. These 3 people, along with Lloyd, will all be parental figures to Jamie and Tammy. They will have grown up in the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s, long before same sex marriage was legal. I’ve only recently decided to make one main character intersex, born with XY chromosomes, but with feminine-looking genitalia, and a condition called Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome. This character’s gender identity is epicene. Two others are both born male, with traditional male genitalia, but while one character will end up heterosexual, the other is an epicene asexual like myself. The fourth character was born male in the 1930s, but is transgender, and identifies as a female. However, she does not desire sexual relationships with anyone.

I regret that ARMOUR is taking so much longer than my other works, but so many things are coming together to create a portrait of different asexual people who have different circumstances. Compared to my very first version of this story and even snippets I’ve posted to my WordPress blog, my current version of ARMOUR is making me feel less and less like the George Lucas of indie queer fiction. I no longer feel as though I’m destroying my own legacy (Crush), but rather explaining why certain characters were never mentioned in my debut work. I’m so excited!

Read for free while I finish the book. It's a thank you to all for being so patient with me! <3

https://laurasusanjohnson.wordpress.c...

Hi everyone,
I'm still working on Armour (TheHouseOnGlassBeach #3), but alas it won't be ready this summer as I dearly hoped. I've come up with so many new plot bunnies and surprises. I have to take my time. I know people want to know more about Tammy & Jamie and their family, and I'm working hard on it. My health has worsened since writing Crush (2010). Just please bear with me. It's about 2 Ace men (before anyone really understood asexuality), their cousin, a transgender woman, and their fierce, foulmouthed Grandma, named Negdar, aka Candy Grandma, or Nectar. I'll have it out as soon as I can, but it has to be of the best quality I can possibly make it. Thank you everyone. My hope is that when it's done, it will blow everyone away.

Love & Equality forever,
The George Lucas of Indie LGBTQ literature :)

FREE eBOOK GIVEAWAY: My short story Nectar, about the horrors of the #ArmenianGenocide, will be FREE on Smashwords eBooks FREE with the code HD27X until April 30th.

This tale of brutality and courage is told through the eyes of an innocent 15 year old girl who narrowly escapes a gruesome death in the Syrian desert. It is an asexual love story, the first I've ever attempted. #NeverAgain #103YearsOfDenial

24 April 2018 is the 103rd anniversary of the beginning of this genocide.

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view...

Hi everyone, just a reminder, you can still get an eBook of BRIGHT absolutely FREE with coupon code AL42V at Smashwords until March 31st.

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view...

Also, I made a new book trailer for Armour, which I am DETERMINED to have ready for everyone by this summer!!!!! I'm always very self conscious when presenting a new book trailer. I really hope you like it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPu63...

From now until the end of March, I am offering my eBook Bright, a tragic and erotic m/m love story about a married couple trying to conceive with the help of their best friend, racing against time and terminal illness, fighting a bigoted bully living in their own home, and struggling against the crumbling of hope that follows miscarriage. Behind the most obvious forefront of prejudiced against lgbtq people trying to have a family in small town Idaho, there is a dark history of paedophilia and several attempted murders hiding behind the facade of benevolence and Christianity. With the coupon code: AL42V at checkout, you can get BRIGHT from smashwords.com FREE until March 31st. I continue to endeavor to donate $1 for every pos or negative review of this book to the Trevor Project, a great organisation dedicated to helping lgbtq youth and adults at risk for suicide!

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view...

I'm really self-conscious about this trailer, but I want to share it. Nectar is a short story I wrote about a long journey made by my great-grandmother and her sister. The story is both a standalone and part of the new anthology "Never Too Late", available now from Beaten Track Publishing, an eclectic collection of stories told from LGBTQ people over the age of fifty, voices that are not heard often enough.

The middle aged woman still remembers those terrible things as though they only happened five minutes ago.

You can purchase "Never Too Late" at http://www.beatentrackpublishing.com/... There are options of both paperback or ebook.

To buy "Nectar: A Short Story" as an ebook, go to http://www.beatentrackpublishing.com/...

Both the anthology and the short are also available on Amazon and Smashwords.

Here is the trailer for "Nectar" on YouTube. Warning: Both the trailer and the story itself contain graphic depictions of genocide and war crimes. The story contains rape and torture. If these are triggers, avoid this story.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CoIM9...

Wishing all happy holidays!!!! <3