luninosity

[luninosity]

Out now! And on sale as part of the 45% off sale this weekend at my publisher JMS Books! The first of two bonus stories for Gareth and Lorre from Magician! (Still feels like a weird day for book promo, but- reading queer romance = resistance! Love & hope!)

“Portraits” is the expanded (around a thousand words longer) version of the flash fic story I wrote for the JMS Books Love Is Free charity anthology! Here, Gareth and Lorre go to a museum, and discover a relic out of Lorre’s past...

JMS Books link here!

Amazon link here!

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This is so wholesome

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...and the final total for the ACLU fundraiser is... $2414.99! (Or roughly that; still some processing to go.)

That is pretty amazing, honestly! Thank you to all of you for the support - we hope you enjoy the reading and the awesomeness of a good cause! And many many thanks to @sweetfirebird - R. Cooper - for organizing us! And to Geneva Vand for being our intrepid third! (Er. Not in a kinky way. As authors. You know what I mean.)

If you missed the fundraiser but would still like to make an ACLU donation and show me your receipt, I've got a few copies left, and I could send you a copy!

Love you!

Guess we’re all official now, so I can announce this! We are doing a charity auction sort of thing – limited quantities available! – from May 31 to June 1! R. Cooper and Geneva Vand are marvelous humans and I am happy to be involved!

My little contribution will have six things – a couple of flash fics, a poem, a preview of the first 7k of the next Magician-related novel (it’s a Jer/Talis sequel!), a bonus story for Sam and Leo from Character Bleed, and a…well, it’s a story you will never ever see anywhere else, which is seventeen years old now, from back when I wanted to write Humorous Fantasy (look, I was reading a lot of Terry Pratchett and Peter David, okay), and I should probably warn you in advance about the terrible jokes*….but, hey, it’s in a good cause! Enjoy my embarrassment!

*among other lines, there’s the truly dreadful song pun, for which I might owe John Cougar Mellencamp an apology…

[luninosity]

Thank you to everyone!! And extra-special thank-yous to Geneva Vand for joining us and @sweetfirebird - R. Cooper - for organizing all this!!

You're all lovely!

Final* ACLU Fundraiser total is...

$2414.99

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

That's absolutely incredible! To everyone who participated, you are awesome! Even if you just liked or reblogged a post, that counts as helping!

And a special thank you to @luninosity (K.L. Noone) and Geneva Vand for donating their time and effort for this!!

(Final with an asterisk because Stripe is still processing, and sometimes because of fees or whatever, the total will change slightly.)

When everything has gone through, Stripe is estimating the 4th but possibly tomorrow, I will donate and then post the receipt so you all can feel even more proud of yourselves. :)

OH! Also all copies have been emailed out. If you didn't receive yours, check your spam folder. If it's not there, please contact me @ r.cooper@riscooper.com

[luninosity]

is jake gyllenhaal gay??

why would you ask us, a narnia blog, this

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happy pride to tom ”i’m an actor, of course i’ve had gay sex” hardy

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WE LOVE YOU PEDRO

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Some of my favorite-ever books (and the author, too!) and massive influences. 💜

…So once again it’s the time of year when I return to this piece of digital art in its most recent version, tweak it a little in the attempt to get closer to what I see in my head, and repost it for Pride. (ETA, 1 June 2025: this year's version of the image is rerendered to reflect the ongoing business of getting the varying skin colors of the Five properly nailed down.)

At the moment I’m looking at These Two Idiots (because honestly, in some ways they are...) and considering, once again with the usual bemusement, how long I’ve been working with them. Of all the characters I’ve worked with in print, the only ones I’ve known longer would be the crew of NCC-1701—and (as of autumn 2024) for the first time in paid writing, a couple of gentlemen named Holmes and Watson.

I first “met” the two characters above in late 1970 in the form of two fellow college students on whom they’d be loosely based: a couple of gents—not gay, as it happens—who were friends to me when I badly needed some. They were a tall dark-haired guy and a short blond one with a mustache that came and went… so that, not even knowing the word “trope” at the time, I'd fallen sideways into at least one.

Less than a year after I met them, I changed schools and educational tracks, and we all drifted apart. But something about those two stuck with me. The nature and depth of their friendship was unusual. So was one way it manifested itself: in ruthless snark that had no meanness or cruelty about it whatsoever—just (sometimes slightly rueful and eye-rolling) affection.

In the late sixties I’d pivoted from the Star Trek fanfic I'd been writing practially since the series premiered, to start in on writing some very derivative epic-fantasy fic strongly influenced by Tolkien. Rather to my surprise, though, as I started nursing school in 1971, the nature of that fiction started to change, and began rearranging itself around two characters who had a friendship like that of my college friends. With them at its core, a rather different and subversive kind of medieval-flavored fantasy world started knitting itself together from various scraps of themes and imagery lying around in the back of my brain.

Even so early in the construction phases of this world, something the characters quickly made plain to me in the writing was that their relationships with one another were not what mainstream 1970s culture would consider conventional. They were unquestionably what we'd now think of as queer… but that was a background issue,* and not at all the most important thing in their lives. They had far more important business to deal with—as became clear as their personalities and priorities started filling themselves out in the foreground.

One of them turned out to be the deliberate, analytical, methodical son of a provincial nobleman, all too aware of the expectations of those around him: that he was eventually likely to wind up running that province himself. Yet at the same time he also became aware that he had other more serious problems—chief among them the discovery that he possessed a nascent power that would kill him young if he failed to master it. And in the last thousand years, no one of his gender ever had.

The other presented himself more and more clearly as a difficult case: someone who wanted very much to be good at the family business, but wasn’t… and knew it. Kind of a screw-up, full of romanticized and unrealistic takes on the world and his relationship with it: repeatedly doing the wrong things for what he was sure were the right reasons. Yet no matter how often he screwed up, he was also the kind of person who keeps picking himself up and trying again, because he’s been told over and over that that’s what people like him have to do: otherwise they’re no use to anybody.

Imagine my shock when I realized that these two men—initially canonically enemies in their adolescence, then best friends as they grew, and eventually much more—were the (incomplete) answer to the question I’d once asked my Mom at the end of the bedtime reading of some fairy tale or other: “Why can’t a prince rescue another prince?”§ Because one of them got himself more than once into situations where he really needed one kind or another of rescuing. The other one obliged him, while once or twice getting rescued (in different modes) himself. Those interlocking patterns started to solidify out of concept and into character detail and plot, while their world grew and proliferated into its own detail around them.

Then, without warning, in 1978 both world and characters decided they were ready to get real. I was abruptly dragged gasping and flailing under the surface of a novel that would begin the tale of what those two characters had yet to become. The period it took to produce that first draft was possibly the most interesting six weeks of my life… and that includes the six weeks during which I first scrubbed in on brain surgery. Day and night, for days at a time, I barely even existed except as something for a novel to come out of. When it was done with me, it just as abruptly dumped me back into my life and wandered away, leaving me staring around, blinking and wondering if anybody’d got the number of that truck. Nothing like it has ever happened to me since, which may be just as well. I’m none too sure that these days I could handle the strain.

The book—which sold within a couple of weeks of its manuscript landing on its first publisher’s desk—kicked off my career as novelist and screenwriter, and in its way proved that the world was at least slightly ready for epic fantasy in which the basic culture was pansexual, polyamorous, and inclusive in ways that hadn’t been attempted before.

So I owe them a debt, those two gentlemen up there: the tall dark curly-haired guy with the amateur strategist’s mind, the blacksmith’s shoulders, and the peculiar sword, his background thought always nibbling away at the question of how to heal the world’s wounds: and the short fair gent who if he could would stay at home, live quietly in town, and work in the local library… except for when saving the world (or his found family) requires him to subsume his work-in-progress kingship and his being into that of his ancestral demigod. Due to the success of the book in which they made their debut, these two became, in their way, the fairy† godfathers of the Young Wizards—and additionally enabled all that Star Trek fanfic I’d started writing a decade before to proceed to its logical conclusion.

More to the point, though, a lot of people in the 1980s and ‘90s who’d never seen queer representation in a fantasy novel, found it first (or at last) while following Herewiss and Freelorn down their shared road. It’s been my pleasure to hold that space for new readers, and to keep adding to it… because—if you ask me—it’s needed more now than ever.

So, to the readership of the Middle Kingdoms works (now pushing half a century old) and everybody else who’s celebrating the season: happy Pride!

ETA: Just noting here for those who might be interested that, as usual, the LGBTQ Pride Bundle at Ebooks Direct is discounted more deeply than usual for Pride Month. With the usual warning to UK readers: friends, our apologies, but due to Brexit we can no longer sell ebooks to you directly. However, most of these works are currently available to UK readers through Amazon.com.

*Not least because everybody else in their world is (at least potentially) some shade of queer, including God.

§ For certain values of "prince". See here for more detail.

† (snicker)

[luninosity]

[luninosity]

Reblog for tonight!

Guess we’re all official now, so I can announce this! We are doing a charity auction sort of thing – limited quantities available! – from May 31 to June 1! R. Cooper and Geneva Vand are marvelous humans and I am happy to be involved!

My little contribution will have six things – a couple of flash fics, a poem, a preview of the first 7k of the next Magician-related novel (it’s a Jer/Talis sequel!), a bonus story for Sam and Leo from Character Bleed, and a…well, it’s a story you will never ever see anywhere else, which is seventeen years old now, from back when I wanted to write Humorous Fantasy (look, I was reading a lot of Terry Pratchett and Peter David, okay), and I should probably warn you in advance about the terrible jokes*….but, hey, it’s in a good cause! Enjoy my embarrassment!

*among other lines, there’s the truly dreadful song pun, for which I might owe John Cougar Mellencamp an apology…

[luninosity]

Reblog for today!

Guess we’re all official now, so I can announce this! We are doing a charity auction sort of thing – limited quantities available! – from May 31 to June 1! R. Cooper and Geneva Vand are marvelous humans and I am happy to be involved!

My little contribution will have six things – a couple of flash fics, a poem, a preview of the first 7k of the next Magician-related novel (it’s a Jer/Talis sequel!), a bonus story for Sam and Leo from Character Bleed, and a…well, it’s a story you will never ever see anywhere else, which is seventeen years old now, from back when I wanted to write Humorous Fantasy (look, I was reading a lot of Terry Pratchett and Peter David, okay), and I should probably warn you in advance about the terrible jokes*….but, hey, it’s in a good cause! Enjoy my embarrassment!

*among other lines, there’s the truly dreadful song pun, for which I might owe John Cougar Mellencamp an apology…

[luninosity]

We need to be gay. What We Do In The Shadows, S04E05

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Little nudge for the evening (it’s evening here!) folks! 💕

Guess we’re all official now, so I can announce this! We are doing a charity auction sort of thing – limited quantities available! – from May 31 to June 1! R. Cooper and Geneva Vand are marvelous humans and I am happy to be involved!

My little contribution will have six things – a couple of flash fics, a poem, a preview of the first 7k of the next Magician-related novel (it’s a Jer/Talis sequel!), a bonus story for Sam and Leo from Character Bleed, and a…well, it’s a story you will never ever see anywhere else, which is seventeen years old now, from back when I wanted to write Humorous Fantasy (look, I was reading a lot of Terry Pratchett and Peter David, okay), and I should probably warn you in advance about the terrible jokes*….but, hey, it’s in a good cause! Enjoy my embarrassment!

*among other lines, there’s the truly dreadful song pun, for which I might owe John Cougar Mellencamp an apology…

[luninosity]

Oh yay! Look how awesome you all are! Let's keep it going! <3333

Guess we’re all official now, so I can announce this! We are doing a charity auction sort of thing – limited quantities available! – from May 31 to June 1! R. Cooper and Geneva Vand are marvelous humans and I am happy to be involved!

My little contribution will have six things – a couple of flash fics, a poem, a preview of the first 7k of the next Magician-related novel (it’s a Jer/Talis sequel!), a bonus story for Sam and Leo from Character Bleed, and a…well, it’s a story you will never ever see anywhere else, which is seventeen years old now, from back when I wanted to write Humorous Fantasy (look, I was reading a lot of Terry Pratchett and Peter David, okay), and I should probably warn you in advance about the terrible jokes*….but, hey, it’s in a good cause! Enjoy my embarrassment!

*among other lines, there’s the truly dreadful song pun, for which I might owe John Cougar Mellencamp an apology…

[luninosity]

And we're up and live! Here is the link!

9am Saturday May 31st through 11pm Sunday June 1, R. Cooper and Geneva Vand and I (KL Noone) are offering small collections of short stories, flash fiction, AUs, sneak peeks etc. All proceeds will go to the ACLU, and everything is priced at $10!

The sale ends at 11pm Sunday night or if we run out of copies – limited quantities, so come grab yours now!!

Things you can get:

–from me (KL Noone): a bundle with six things: a couple of flash fics, a poem I wrote for my husband, a preview of the first 7k of the next Magician-related novel (it’s a Jer/Talis sequel!), a (moderately kinky!) bonus story for Sam and Leo from Character Bleed, and…well, one story you will never ever see anywhere else, a story which is now seventeen years old, from back when I wanted to write Humorous Fantasy and wanted to be young Terry Pratchett (or at least Peter David?), and I should probably apologize in advance about the terrible jokes

–from Geneva Vand: flash fiction of both m/m and f/f and stories for some of her published characters, including a proposal scene!

–from R. Cooper: one bundle of three AU short stories for the Familiar Beings (the Familiar Spirits/Beings fusion silliness) and ALSO a very limited rerelease of an old bundle for a different fundraiser several years ago

(The lovely R. Cooper, who organized this, adds: “copies will start to go out as Stripe (Galabid’s payment processor) begins to process the payments. So you won’t get your stuff immediately, but within a few hours or a day/two days. They tell me, and then I manually email them out. So it takes a bit lol. Please be patient with me.”)

After the sale is over and the last payment processed and copies are out, all three of us authors will post the total and the receipt everywhere!

Guess we’re all official now, so I can announce this! We are doing a charity auction sort of thing – limited quantities available! – from May 31 to June 1! R. Cooper and Geneva Vand are marvelous humans and I am happy to be involved!

My little contribution will have six things – a couple of flash fics, a poem, a preview of the first 7k of the next Magician-related novel (it’s a Jer/Talis sequel!), a bonus story for Sam and Leo from Character Bleed, and a…well, it’s a story you will never ever see anywhere else, which is seventeen years old now, from back when I wanted to write Humorous Fantasy (look, I was reading a lot of Terry Pratchett and Peter David, okay), and I should probably warn you in advance about the terrible jokes*….but, hey, it’s in a good cause! Enjoy my embarrassment!

*among other lines, there’s the truly dreadful song pun, for which I might owe John Cougar Mellencamp an apology…

[luninosity]

We start everything at 9am (Pacific) tomorrow! We were told not to give out the link beforehand, so I'll add it then!

Guess we’re all official now, so I can announce this! We are doing a charity auction sort of thing – limited quantities available! – from May 31 to June 1! R. Cooper and Geneva Vand are marvelous humans and I am happy to be involved!

My little contribution will have six things – a couple of flash fics, a poem, a preview of the first 7k of the next Magician-related novel (it’s a Jer/Talis sequel!), a bonus story for Sam and Leo from Character Bleed, and a…well, it’s a story you will never ever see anywhere else, which is seventeen years old now, from back when I wanted to write Humorous Fantasy (look, I was reading a lot of Terry Pratchett and Peter David, okay), and I should probably warn you in advance about the terrible jokes*….but, hey, it’s in a good cause! Enjoy my embarrassment!

*among other lines, there’s the truly dreadful song pun, for which I might owe John Cougar Mellencamp an apology…

[luninosity]

Guess we’re all official now, so I can announce this! We are doing a charity auction sort of thing – limited quantities available! – from May 31 to June 1! R. Cooper and Geneva Vand are marvelous humans and I am happy to be involved!

My little contribution will have six things – a couple of flash fics, a poem, a preview of the first 7k of the next Magician-related novel (it’s a Jer/Talis sequel!), a bonus story for Sam and Leo from Character Bleed, and a…well, it’s a story you will never ever see anywhere else, which is seventeen years old now, from back when I wanted to write Humorous Fantasy (look, I was reading a lot of Terry Pratchett and Peter David, okay), and I should probably warn you in advance about the terrible jokes*….but, hey, it’s in a good cause! Enjoy my embarrassment!

*among other lines, there’s the truly dreadful song pun, for which I might owe John Cougar Mellencamp an apology…