E.E. Ottoman's Blog

I am now at: acosmistmachine.com

Business Makes Strange Bedfellows is set in New York City at the end of the 19thcentury. I originally started it several years ago because I wanted to write something light, something fun, that included some of the more outrageous elements of late 19th, early 20th century pulp fiction, and science fiction.
I love steampunk and other forms of alternative history, it's one of the main things I write. So I jumped at the chance to write about a 19thcentury New York City where back alley occulti...

Recently I heard Tracy Timmons-Gray talked about getting queer romances into local libraries both in her opening remarks for Gay Romance Northwest Meetup and in this article she wrote for Queer Romance Month.

After reading her article I was inspired to look at my local library system and see if they had any queer romances on the shelves.

Where I live the local libraries for the four surrounding counties are joined together into one big library system. So when I searched for romance novels and...

Queer Romance Month is exactly what it sounds like, a month long celebration of all types of queer romance. In a perfect world any time romance as a genre was celebrated or talked about queer romance would be included in there. However we do not live in a perfect world and queer romance is often thought of as its own distinctive genre, separate from "mainstream" aka heterosexual romance.

Which means that when romance is highlighted or celebrated queer romance gets mentioned maybe once in pass...

First off I have to say that I had a fantastic time at GRNW!

It was my first ever writing con and I was pretty nervous about it, because a) I'd never been to one and b) I was scheduled to do a reading, giving part of the keynote and sitting on a panel.

I flew out early Friday morning, transfered at Newark airport and then flew to Seattle. As always happens when I travel I was a ball of anxiety but everything went smoothly. I landed in Seattle to discover sunny weather significantly warmer than...

In in a little over a week I will be flying to Seattle WA to take part in Gay Romance Northwest Meet-Up 2014 and several other romance writing events.

This is every exciting for me since it will be the first writing con I've attended as a professional author, and boy I am starting out with a bang.

I chose to attend GRNW even though I am an East Coast author because I had heard amazing things about the con from people who attended in 2013. Also because I was/am impressed by how proactive the org...

So I have a bunch of stories and books out over the next few months. Here is some about them and their covers.

Duende is out on September 10th!!! You can preorder it here!
Famed opera singer Aimé has a lot in common with Badri, the Royal Ballet Company's most popular male lead. They have both dedicated their entire lives to their art, and struggle to be taken seriously among the Empire's elite. And both harbor a secret admiration and desire for the other.

This year for his birthday Aimé treat...

This whole argument that only straight cisgender women write and read LGBT romance needs to stop.

First of all there is no evidence that this is true, there has never been any widespread surveys done on either the readership or writers of LGBT romance. The largest statistical survey of romance readers was done by Romance Writers of America, and did not include data on sexual orientation or gender identity. Small survey attempts have been limited and inconclusive. While anecdotal evidence would...

I have been involved with several discussions about trans vs. trans*, genderqueer, non-binary as terms to refer to people who do not identify with gender normative maleness or femaleness.

Some people who do identify this way feel strongly that trans should be the only term used. That by using different words like trans*, genderqueer, non-binary we a) reinforce a gender binary and b) buying into the term trans only being for binary transgender folks.

Mostly recently I was told off for using 'tr...

So just out of curiosity yesterday I sat down and made a list of all the differently able characters I've written in all my finished works thus far.

Then because I thought it might be useful I made the same sort of list but with trans/non-binary characters.

Hopefully this will be interesting/helpful for some folks.

Differently able characters:
Note: I have only included characters who identify/would identify as having a disability
Jamie (mobility impairments: wheelchair user) Regarding the Detect...