April’s Interlude #1

A great big hello to you all. My name is April Kelley. I’m excited to be here. First I’d like to thank Bronwyn for having me. And I suppose an introduction is in order considering I’ll be here every Friday.

I’m a wife and a mother of two teenagers. I know, right? Teenagers. They are the loves of my life, but so scary sometimes. Like when my daughter tells me she has a boyfriend. Yikes. And my son thinks he knows everything. He wants to be the next YouTube star posting gaming videos, which I encourage because I play make believe for a living. What room do I have to criticize? None. Anyway, they are both super smart and talented and gorgeous. I know I’m their mother so I’m sort of bias but it’s true.

My family and I live in southwest Michigan. It’s the best place on the earth to live in my opinion because we have a lake that looks like an ocean when you stand on the shoreline. Sometimes if it’s a clear summer’s day you can see Chicago but I’ve only been able to do that once in my 40 years of living here.  All that water and beach is definitely good for the creative soul. It certainly helps me write and gets those plot bunnies hopping around in my head.

I write M/M contemporary romance for eXtasy Books. My very first published book comes out in February 2015. While I’ve been blessed that eXtasy Books agreed to take a chance on a newbie like me, I’ve been writing for most of my life. In fact, I still have the very first story I ever wrote. I was ten years old when I wrote it. It was a fanfiction story, before fanfiction was even a thing, based on the movie Stand By Me. I was so in love with that movie, with the idea that someone can have friends who were like family. I have three sisters and two brothers.  My siblings drove me crazy, so I really wanted to disown them all, and put my friends in their place. I’m glad I didn’t trade them in for different family members, because now they are all great people. One of my sister’s is even one of my best friends.

Anyway, I watched that movie endlessly. When I finally got my hands on the book I thought Stephen King was a genius. Okay, Stephen King is a genius.  I wanted to do what he did with words, create worlds that no one else knew about until I wrote them down and create people that were as complex as any person I encountered face to face.

I hope I accomplish this with even just a little with my series, Pickleville. Pickleville is typical small town USA, where everybody knows everyone. For a gay man the good citizens of Pickleville don’t always make the town a comfortable place to live. Few people find love even in a big city. I’m happy to be writing about men who find it in a very unlikely place.