ManLove Monday: Jet Mykles

EdNote!!! Woot for JenB! You Won the $10 Jet Mykles Gift Certificate Of M/M Reading Fantabulosity!


MLM and the DIK continue to suck our time....today we will meet over at MK's place. I mean. Jeepers Creepers I will have my man today or heads will roll...

Meanwhile here at my luverly site, I'm rocking out with the fabtabulous Jet Mykles. And Sula has a mini-review of Key To Me from the Ties That Bind Anthology.

Welcome, Jet! Happy ManLove Monday!

Jet, let's just get right down to it: Heaven Sent. Delicious. I hope you don't mind my calling them snacking good food. We all love 'em. What's coming up for the boys? Any new releases?

Thank you! I don't mind at all. I know the stories are light-ish and aren't terribly deep. As you discovered, I wrote them to have a manga/comic book feel. I'm thrilled when people actually get that. Once you do, I think the whole HS experience is more fun.

Truthfully, I don't have any immediate plans for the boys themselves. They've got 9 stories published--5 books and 4 shorts--and that's what I'd originally set out to write. However, at the very least, Brent and Hell will feature in my next rocker yaoi-boy series, the Indigo Kni ghts. They'll be producing Rabin Squire (he appears in book 5) and his band (the Knights). I expect the other HS boys will make appearances as well. I'm due to start the first IK book later this year. The current plan is at least 3 books in that series, maybe 4.

BTW, that's not to say that I'm against writing more about the HS boys. I just don't have any plan to do so at the moment.


Do you have a personal favorite of the group?

I have to admit that it's Luc. (mee toooo!) Always has been Luc. I love them all, truly I do, but I want Luc so badly it's not even funny. It mainly had to do with the fact that he's loosely--VERY loosely, like hardly anything resembling except the basic feel in my mind and plays the same instrument--based on my favorite rockstar, the one I've been drooling over and dreaming about since I was 14. (John Taylor, Duran Duran) So, yeah, Reese hooking up with his rock idol kind of hit close to home for me.


I wanted to say congrats (again) on the Eppie. Has that win instigated any changes in your life...say...hair color?

Thanks! It was awesome. I'm so glad that I went to the con. I totally didn't expect to win. Hoped, yes, but didn't expect it. Especially since I really wasn't supposed to have written that story. It was a prompt from my editor, who needed a story for the Rated X-mas anthology at Loose Id. It's m/m/f, an off-shoot of the Leashed series.


I went to your website (**explicit**), as a good fan does, and wowie wow wow, there's some nekkid hot computer art over there. Are all the photos related to your own work? Which comes first: a vision of the character? Or the written word? And who the hell is Pet? OMG.

Thank you! I've been doing the artwork since 1998 and it's lot of fun.

Some of the images are related to the written work. In fact, the Dark Elves started as a series of images that I finally put into prose. The DE ebooks are even illustrated by yours truly. With my Leashed series and the Fox and Dragon story, there are images as well. I haven't done but one of the HS boys but that's because I covet and obsess over PL Nunn's artwork so my own artwork couldn't possibly compare. Of course, Anne Cain's now done covers for DE and Leashed and I die over her artwork so it almost gets confusing to do my own versions sometimes LOL

As for who comes first... depends. Used to be the images came first but in the last year or so the written word has been taking precedence. The boys in the Dark Elves and Leashed series in particular don't tend to be real until I can "see" them. There are a bunch of other images in my gallery of characters I'd love to write about but I haven't figured out a story yet. Toy and Pet are two of those. Aren't they adorable? I love them, especially Toy. He's such a sweetie. Pet's a bit more pouty but I think that's because he kind of likes being punished :)

Jet is there a sub genre of erotic romance you DON'T write? Holy smokes. Looking at Loose-id there's so much to choose from! What's your fav genre or series...andmay I add that those liquorice elves are hot...

"licorice elves"! LOL Well the skin's rather special, y'see. it's rather tough but satiny to the touch and the elves naturally provide their own "lubrication", thus the glossy :D

Hmmmm, what don't I write? Haven't done f/f yet, but I've got a bit of an idea for one. Haven't done a historical, mainly because of the fear of getting the details wrong. I finally did a vampire story so I can't say I haven't done one of those. I've only done the one sci-fi and I'm not looking to go back there soon. The HS boys are supposedly contemporary but, tbh, I see them more as fantasy. I mean really, 4 hot guys in the same band and they just happen to figure out that they're gay? And they don't get flack for it? Yeah, right. But it's a nice dream world.

You see, in my mind, it's all fantasy. The elves would be one extreme in a totally made up world and the HS boys would be the other extreme in a mostly realistic world with a judicious twist. I love stories with extraordinary elements, having grown up on Mercedes Lackey, Frank Herbert, Anne McCaffrey, etc. Then I discovered Anne Rice and realized that you really could show the sex along with all the rest. it took me some years to get the courage to actually write a story for publication, but the boyfriend finally nudged me enough to get me going.


Your crit group (wait. is that what fiction/friction is? should i call them something else) talks about how you never cheat your characters. Can you explain to us what they mean? They say it with such, er, reverence.

Those are, indeed, my cps at FWF. You're welcome to call them that.

They also call me The Protector because I don't tend to be as... abusive to my characters. They're all for torture in the name of a good HEA. I guess I've done that too but doesn't seem as extreme LOL At least not physically.

As for the cheating, the heart of that lies in that my stories are ALL about the characters. So my characters all have very full lives, including things that happen off camera. I've tried to cheat and just tell what goes on in my story but it rarely works out well. When I go the distance and make them real, that's when the story sings.

OK the big dork question: how did you get into this? What's your background and why would you ever ever leave a lucrative future in theatre (snort gasp I have the same degree)?

Ah yes, the theatre *strikes a dramatic pose and listens to crickets chrip in mostly empty audience* Went to college for 4 years for that and never had a professional audition. Why? I LOATHE auditioning. Adore acting, can't stand parading in front of other people doing the "pick me pick me" thing. It's so much different with writing. Somehow less personal and scary to me.

As for the how, the professional writing started with the elf pictures. I posted them on a site called Renderotica and people kind of got into them. As I went along, I started posting snippets of a story. What ended up happening was that I pretty much wrote what later became the first 2 books of Dark Elves (the basis, at least). I'd finished most of the first story and was well into the second when a marvelous lady, one Angela Knight, contacted me and said I should write it up and sub it to epubs. I knew very well who she was, having read her books, and was floored. I figured it AK thought it was good, then maybe I had something after all. A few months later, the lovely ladies at Loose Id bought the story. It's been downhill/uphill ever since. That was at the tail end of 2004.

My background... Well, there was the acting thing. I attribute most of my characterization to that and don't regret a minute of it. After college, I started working in computers and have been there ever since. Not something I love but something I've been relatively successful at. I was doing the artwork and writing on the side. Recently I "came out" at work because I'm finally able to work part time at the EDJ to devote more time to writing!!


What's coming next?

Next story to be released is One For the Team. This one's odd for me. Completely contemporary. About a girl who's got four male best friends. She just got dumped and is wondering what's wrong with her. Her friends proceed to convince her that there's not a thing wrong with her... rather intimately. It's a story I've had half written since before DE1. I figured I'd expose it to the light of day finally.

DE5 is due out in August. If I'm good, DE6 may make it out before the end of the year.

I've got another m/m short story that comes out around November, I think, from MLR Press.

There's a shapeshifter anthology that I'm going to be in with the cps, also from MLR press, but I'm not sure that's coming out this year.

I've got another yaoi (not HS or Indigo Knight related) due out from Loose Id later this year too.

Wow. Lot's going on for Jet. I want to thank Jet for taking the time to stop by the wee blog. And, how cool is this? Jet has prize for one lucky commenter here on ManLove Monday: a $10 gift certificate to Loose-id! I'll pick some one later today, or, er, you know how that can drag out for me......ADD thing....


So everyone now knows that I get a variety of fine looking pictures delivered to me by my FOTB (friends of the blog). I can't use them all, of course, but I do like to share the love. This one is from Bridget Locke....Warning, hot pic ahead...click here