On Saturday, November 2nd, I will release Rainbow Briefs 
, under my Young Adult fiction pen name, Kira Harp.
Many of you know I write some YA stories, in addition to the M/M romance, although very little is published so far. On the Goodreads YA LGBT Books group that I help moderate, we choose a picture prompt each month and write stories for it. And after almost two years, I have a bunch of YA short stories posted on the group.
Fellow author Sara Winters really urged me to put out a collection of some of those stories, so people outside the group could find and read them. I thought it was a great idea… sometime. Then Sara collected a set of them and sent me the file, and made it too easy to resist. She’s great that way. She edited and formatted this for me, and really made the project go forward.
Since my intention was to make the collection represent the range of the YA LGBT group, I added a few new stories too. There are fifteen total, and although M/M stories are over-represented (because that’s what the group mainly chooses for prompts, and what I write most easily) there are four F/F, two trans, one bi, one M/M/M. The length ranges from a page to about 10,000 words. I tried to cover a range of experiences too, but most are pretty romantic. (Our group does love those pictures of two boys or two girls, kissing.)
This collection will be free on Smashwords and ARe, and low cost (with royalties going to The Trevor Project) where it can’t be free. Sara really encouraged me to put out a paperback version, so that will also be available. And Enny Kraft did a great cover for this one too. Isn’t this pretty?
Sara also managed to persuade a couple of people to agree to review the upcoming collection, despite it being free and short stories and YA. (She’s hard to resist.) So I hope it will get a little notice. I’m planning to donate a few copies of the paperback, here and there.
I hope this collection strikes a chord with some teen readers. I hope the list of help-line and resource links in the book is useful to someone. But mostly, I hope the people who read it enjoy meeting the young characters who compete for space in my head with all the guys in love. So many stories to write, so little time. I love that the group gives me the impetus to put some of these on paper. I’ll post the links when this comes out Saturday November 2nd.