some more vacation photos -- Amsterdam

We went from Germany to Amsterdam, this time to spend about a week in the Netherlands. Here are some photos from Amsterdam.

quintessential Amsterdam -- tall, skinny row houses, flower market, canal, bicycles

wall art

One of the flower market shops. They have a few bulbs that have been treated and cleared to take into the US (and a few other countries) but not the bright blue (see below) that I wanted. :(

Cannabis starter kit. Can I just say that Amsterdam seems a couple of centuries ahead of even the most progressive parts of the US?

Mermaid house plaque

 

The Rufskin store across the street from some gay clubs.

Dam Square. I decided to have the characters in the Amsterdam story agree to meet at that lion, rather than at Centraal Station.

Decorative details on the most famous coffee shop in Amsterdam. Hard to see, but there are four little Ganeshas surrounding the middle square.

Cat that apparently lives in the coffee shop, or maybe it was visiting. Hard to tell if a cat is stoned or not.

Detail on a houseboat.

I know some people probably think it's gross to let animals into restaurants, but we loved hanging out with this calico while we had coffee and pastries.

poppyseed pastry

The cat visiting another table when the sun through the window got too hot

Shaved-head dude in underwear just hanging out on a balcony. First really nice day after days of rain and cold.

Our walking tour guide said that sometimes when the buildings appear to be leaning, well, they are. The houses are built to lean forward slightly, so that when they use the lifting arm pulley, whatever is being lifted doesn't hit the front the the building. But Some buildings are old, and the pilings upon which they're built are just settling into the soft ground.

toilet in the lobby restroom at our hotel. So beautiful, I'm not sure how anyone can bring themselves to use it.

Next up: Rotterdam, then Kinderdijk (windmill museum area), then the Bike Tour Where We Thought We Were Gonna Die.

Some vacation photos -- Munich, June 23-28

 So, some vacation photos. DH has been teaching a class every other year or so just south of Munich. Can I just say that Bavaria is not a great vacation destination for vegetarians who don't like beer?

The vegetarian option at the hotel restaurant. Not that I'm complaining about it -- a baked potato swimming in sour cream and deliciously steamed vegetables heavily loaded with Parmesan cheese. What's not to like?

 

For more meat, try doner (gyros), sold at stands and storefronts all over Germany (and Amsterdam). This one offered a veggie option -- I chose roasted peppers and onions plus artichoke hearts, with dill-yogurt sauce. Yummy!

They also served the beer brewed by the local monastery. I don't know why they're called "Hell".

 The other teacher this year was one of DH's co-workers, whose wife had an interest in seeing Dachau, which is close to Munich, so we went one day. A room at the end of the museum has memorial items.

Pink triangle plaque in memory of homosexual prisoners

 Munich was incredibly cold when we were there, temps in the 50's during the day, and some rain. So you can't see the sun on the gold mosaic of the State Theater (Opera House), but it still looks pretty nice.

Yes, it really was that gray every day

Some parts of Munich are old, or look old, like the Opera House, but about 80-90% of it was bombed during WWII, so there is a lot of modern architecture and art as well.

A statue, known as "The Munich Eunuch"...

...with people in the pic to show the scale

 Karla's Kaffeehaus is a bakery/cafe I like to go to in the town where we stayed. Besides the cheesecake, chocolate cake, strudel, etc., this time they also had little pieces of puff pastry that had cheese, sesame seeds, and poppy seeds baked onto them.

Proof that Europe is so much more advanced than the US

How they do cappuccino. Also, the day I realized that if my tablet's battery is charged, I'll never be without a book ever again.

Genteel afternoon coffee in Germany and a disillusioned PI in Los Angeles (Rhys Ford's "Dirty Kiss")

 The window display for a glasses store in downtown Munich.

Who says the Germans don't have a sense of humor?

More pics to come!

LHNB story "The Idiots' Tango" now downloadable!

My free read for Love Has No Boundaries is now available for download! Or you can read it on the site.

You must be a member of the Goodreads' M/M romance group to access all the LHNB stories, including mine, and to join the group you must be at least 18.

They also have story collections from the same event in 2011 and 2012. If you've ever wanted to peruse hundreds of free M/M romances, here's your chance! This is the first year I've participated, though.

News, everyone!

I've decided to take a page from Rhys Ford's book and not wait until there's some huge occurrence to make a blog post. Although there HAVE been some huge occurrences:

1. We took another trip to Germany for DH to teach a class, but afterwards, we went to the Netherlands for a week. Photos will be upcoming.

2. The Supreme Court rejected Prop 8 and struck down part of DOMA. I'm still trying to get the details, because this is huge. So now I have a date to include in a free read, "Married Filing Jointly" which is dedicated to the day that DOMA died. I guess I need to finish it. :P

3. And today I signed a contract from Dreamspinner Press for my first stand-alone story, a Regency/shifter novella tentatively titled "A Cunning Plan", and starring a devious fox. Funnily enough, the day after I found the contract offer in my email, I saw this statue as the DH and I were on the first day of our bike tour:

I'm taking it as a good omen. :)

So stuff is happening! Everywhere!! Time to get moving and rev up this blog again. Just as soon as I finish reading every new post on facebook.

Hey, SCOTUS, make me work harder!

As you may have heard, the Supreme Court of the United States is hearing arguments this week about marriage equality. This topic is of interest to me as a writer of Male/Male romance, because romance novels generally tend to have a marriage in there somewhere.

Romance novels are also supposed to have conflict in there somewhere. When I’m writing a M/M romance, I can easily create conflict by tossing some random homophobia into the story. I can dash off a father who kicks his son out for being gay, or a mother who won’t speak to her son’s boyfriend. How about a landlord who refuses to rent an apartment to the couple, or a town that won’t allow a same-sex wedding in the park where other weddings take place? 

See? Instant conflict, pulled from today’s headlines, not even requiring me to make anything up using my imagination.

If the Supreme Court rules that the Defense of Marriage act is unconstitutional, every state in the US will have to recognize marriages from other states, even if both spouses are the same gender. It will effectively make same-sex marriage legal throughout the country. And it will remove a nice, big source of potential conflict for my characters.

Now they'll be like any other couple in any other romance novel, where their decision to marry will depend on more complicated things: family opposition based on class or culture, fear of commitment, whether or not they want kids, trust issues, or a million other things I’ll have to WORK to think of. I’ll have to come up with inner conflicts to keep them apart, instead of relying on state or Federal laws.

As people’s sexual orientation becomes less of an issue, more sources of potential conflict for my stories will slip away. I’m going to have to work harder and harder to come up with believable conflict if I can’t fall back on cardboard bigotry. If someday Congress passes an Employment Non-Discrimination Act, then my character won’t have to worry about losing his job for being gay, which means I’ll have to come up with an entirely new conflict for him. And that’s hard, thinking stuff up!

SCOTUS, if you dismantle DOMA, I’ll have to work harder to create conflict in my characters’ lives. But I’m willing to try, because that will mean that real same-sex couples will have less conflict in theirs.

New Year!

Happy New Year 2013!  Man, these 20XX numbers still look like science fiction to me....

I lived in Japan during my formative years, the ones immediately after college.  New Year's there is a big deal:  you go to a shrine at midnight, toss in money and pray for a good year, then you try to find a hot canned drink vending machine that isn't empty at 2 AM because it's fricking freezing, Mr. Bigglesworth, then you take the train home at 4 in the morning, because it's the only time they run all night. 

The next day, you watch old foreign movies dubbed into Japanese or whichever 47 Loyal Ronin TV movie was on that year while you eat clementines and address your New Year's cards. 

New Year's is not as big of a deal in the US, maybe because most people are exhausted from Christmas.  But we do have a tradition of resolutions here, as if an arbitrary "clean slate" date will somehow kick us into more motivation than we had all last year.

Last year I had an epiphany about behavior modification:  just because you fail at something doesn't mean you have to give up even trying to do it.

Example:  I really need a to-do list.  I used one when preparing for my arangetram, then I stopped looking at it.  But that doesn't mean I can never look at it again.  I just need to try to remember to use it more often.  Maybe it will eventually become a habit.

Same with New Year's resolutions.  Just because you go to the gym the first week in January and then skip it the second week doesn't mean you have to stop going the rest of the year.  Admit you dropped the ball, then pick it up again and keep playing.  That's what I'm going to do with the following resolutions:

Organize time better (fit in revising as well as writing)
Read more books
Clean the house
Continue to get rid of stuff

I plan to keep those resolutions by spending less time on the web.  I don't need to read EVERY comment on EVERY post at Joe.My.God.

What are your resolutions, and more importantly, how do you plan to keep them?

I did something!

Newest item in my inbox:
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Samhain Romance Submissions	9:28 PM (0 minutes ago)
to me

**This is an auto-response**

Thank you for your submission to Samhain Publishing's romance line.

Please allow 12 to 16 weeks for a response from an editor.  If you
haven't heard from us after that time please feel free to email for a
status update.

Samhain Publishing
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I really need to submit stories more often -- my heart was pounding just composing the query email.  :P