Sheepskin - Free Short!

A few months ago, for the UK GLBTQ Fiction Meet, I wrote a free novella companion to Hair of the Dog. Now that the crazy summer of travel is behind me, I've gotten around to figuring out how to share it with the Internet as a whole. Surprise!

While Sheepskin is set in the same general universe as Hair of the Dog, no prior knowledge is required. It's a cheeky, fluffy paranormal mystery set in a tiny back corner of the Netherlands called Dinxperlo.

After finishing a degree in criminology, dual citizen Jansen van der Westhuizen takes his American stepbrother, Miguel, home to the Netherlands to meet West's mother (and escape the ex-girlfriend who tried to run him over). But what West intended as a relaxing couple of months getting drunk and/or stoned and avoiding adult responsibility for one more summer turns into a supernatural adventure when Miguel gets bitten by a... well, a were-sheepdog? If that's even a thing.

And that gets West and Miguel tangled up with the local pack and its überhot new alpha, Graeme Bryant, an American transplant. Graeme has two beefs with the biting. One, nobody filed the paperwork to turn another lycan and this is going to be a bureaucratic nightmare. Two, biting people against their will is against every rule in the book and that means he has to track down whoever did it. If that means spending a lot of one-on-one time with West, well, that's just a sacrifice he'll have to make.

An excerpt:

New cover, new project, new mindset!

I'm just going to come out and say it: social media is hard. I look at people who manage to blog every day and or even twice a week and I'm amazed. Where are they getting this energy and creativity? I'm jealous. And lazy.

Anyway, I'm going to try to do better. We'll see what works for me: Twitter, Tumblr, LiveJournal, Facebook....

I'm crying a little inside right now.

But as a reward for staying with me, here's a peek at the cover to my latest, A Good Vintage, coming this December from Dreamspinner Press.



In other news, Morgan James and I have been hard at play on a new project. This is really breaking new ground for me, because for the first time in, oh, a very long time (maybe ever?), my characters are getting it on before page seventy. I blame Smith. He's a horny little bastard.

Anyway, here's a blurb about that.

Hard Feelings (working title)
by Ashlyn Kane and Morgan James

Rylan Blake hates conferences: too many people, not enough routine, and way too much interaction with strangers. When he gets stuck in an elevator with Miller Jones, the kid who fell asleep in his lecture, he figures things can’t get worse. Then Rylan realizes he’s the same guy he just spent an hour perving over from afar.

Rylan wants to await rescue in silence, but Miller insists on conversation, or at least banter. But just because they don’t get along doesn’t mean they don’t have chemistry, and Rylan breaks all his rules about intimacy for a one-time-only conference hookup. He’ll probably never see Miller again anyway.

So of course two months later Miller shows up at Rylan’s office, having just been hired to work on a new computer program—with Rylan.

And Rylan thought being stuck in an elevator with him was bad.

Soon Rylan and Miller learn that they get along best when they take out their frustrations in the bedroom. Their arrangement goes against everything Rylan believes in, but the rules are simple: Don’t stay overnight. Don’t tell anyone. And don’t fall in love.

This is probably a bad idea.