Hammer & Air

Okay, at one point in time, I was asked what my favorite fairy tales were. My response was, "A bunch of ones that no one has heard about!" When asked to clarify, I gave the following list:

The Little Goose Girl
Felicia and the Pot of Pinks
The Three Aunties
The Story of the Boy Who Knew No Fear
Twelve Wild Ducks
Snow White and Rose Red
Tam Lin

--See? Nobody knows these! So when presented the chance to write an m/m version of one of them... well... zomg. All of my love, right? Just like Truth in the Dark, this one was going to get all of my love.

And that's howHammer & Air was born.

The story itself is based on Snow White/Rose Red, which is, as best as I can tell, a Grimm's Brother's casserole of the story of Psyche and Cupid, with a little bit of Cinderella, a dash of Rapunzel and some Hansel and Gretel thrown in.

Of course, when I was given a chance to rewrite it, a whole lot of that shit got thrown out, and what was left was...

Well, I love it. Technically it's m/m/m--and yeah, that LOOKS cutting edge and dirty when I write it like that, but for the Little Goddess fans who have gotten to Bound and Rampant, well, you know I've written that before, with some serious /F thrown into the center of that for good measure.

This, oddly enough, is nothing like that--at least it wasn't for me.

There ARE girl cooties--if you go to the link and read the excerpt, you will see a pretty graphic scene featuring a boy in a tree, watching the boy of his dreams going at it with the innkeeper's daughter. The thing is (and it's hard to explain unless you read it) that in spite of the girl, that scene was still all about Graeme (Hammer) and Eirn. Even the m/m/m scenes are all about Hammer and Eirn. It was an INTERESTING book to write from that perspective, because the premise is, "There will ALWAYS be a Hammer and an Eirn." It was also, "We've got to find better words than that."

Now, I've always made my feeling about labels pretty damned clear--I'm against them. But there are some words of such power, such necessity to who we are, that to live without them is to live without a part of ourselves, and at the core of it, THAT'S what this book is about. The fact that the word is discovered by two young men (18 & 19) who have NO, NONE, NADA, ZIP, ZERO in the way of emotional vocabulary?

Well, uhm, let's just say that there's a lot of physical 'communication' before our guys figure out which word they really need.

I, uhm, hope you guys find that word too, when you're reading the story. I fucked with grammar, perspective, HEA expectations, and all of my usual literary victims when I wrote this one.

I'm so very proud. I hope you love it too.

(And thank you everyone who wished Zoomboy a happy birthday--I'm going to reflect on him this weekend. He is, as you all know, a most singular, particular child, who fully deserves his own birthday post.)