Feeling a Little Green?
Mar 03, 2026 2:27 am
Without fail, January will always feel like it takes 2000+ days to get through, and then we blink and February is gone.
It's March! It's not a bad thing, but I'm sort of happy to see things moving at a faster pace.
I shared in my last newsletter that the end of last year was really hard for me with writing. It feels nice to finally find my swing again. In the first two months of the year, I wrote over 63k words. That's about the average length of a book for me, so it feels good to say that I basically wrote an entire book in less than two months since February wasn't as long.
I finished A Different Melody and sent it to my beta readers, wrote a 10k sapphic short story for an upcoming anthology. That story will later become a full book. And then, before I jumped into my next full book, I started one other short story because I needed something fun before jumping into something super heavy.
Orion
I never wanted to be a dad. Too bad I was a coward and couldn’t tell my wife. Relief washes over me with each negative test result, though her distress weighs heavily. I’ve consistently failed to provide for her needs.
To make matters worse, I’m not handling things very well. Night after night I find myself on a barstool at Faded Sins watching him. The one person I can’t seem to keep my eyes or hands off of.
No matter how much I should.
Sable
He ruined everything. I was content to keep my head down and do my job. It didn’t matter that I had to sell my body to pay my bills.
What happens when the sexy stranger appears nightly, and I break my rule about never seeing the same client twice? Yeah, I messed it all up as well.
But Orion has secrets, and I wasn’t prepared for how deep they ran.
Finding each other was like finding where music meets passion.
Yasu
I always wanted to start a band. My dreams have finally come true, and I’m living the life with my friends. When we lose our bassist and have to bring a new member on board our dynamic is completely thrown off. It’s not that I don’t like new people, but there’s something about Ryosuke and the way he flirts with both Itsuki and me that gets under my skin.
Itsuki
Give me a frilly dress and a guitar, and I can make magic. I love that my friends never judge me for my fashion choices. Yasu bringing me along on his musical adventure was everything I could have hoped for. Every day is something new and exciting. Especially Ryosuke with his playful smirks and dirty pick-up lines. But why are they not only directed at me?
Ryosuke
Stay out of trouble. Keep your nose down and play the music. That’s what they told me to do when I stepped in as the new bassist for Pink Cherry. But trouble is my middle name, and watching Yasu and Itsuki try to figure me out is my new favorite game. It’ll only be sweeter when I earn both of them as my reward.
A NOTE ABOUT A DIFFERENT MELODY:
As I'm getting more in depth with writing A Different Melody, it became apparent that I needed to talk a little bit about some of the issues that have come up during my writing process and why I am now... falling a bit behind.
Itsuki
He is one of the guitar players for my fictional Japanese Visual Kei rock band Pink Cherry.
I knew earlier on that my biggest hold up in writing this book was that calling it MMM felt wrong. There was something about Itsuki and his identity.
Once I decided to rebrand the book as MMX, words started flowing so much more smoothly.
This presented another problem...
Is being non-binary recognized in Japan?
That's such a complicated question and required a lot of research.
In Japan, it's known as "x-gender" and is not as recognized or celebrated as it is in other parts of the world. That being said, X-gender characters have popped up several times in Japanese media.
Due to the fact that Japanese has a very limited scope for pronouns, Itsuki will continue to use he/him through the entirety of the book, but it will be overly apparent that he knows that he is different and doesn't fully identify as a man.
It's just something I felt like I needed to talk about before I got too far.
(These are different titles from last month)
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