Warren Rochelle has a new FF/MM romance fantasy/sci-fi short story collection out: The Great Forest and Other Love Stories. And there’s a giveaway!

“The course of true love never did run smooth” might be a cliché, but for the lovers in these stories, it’s an understatement. Consider: having to rescue your beloved from seven years of service to sentient trees, or your lover wants you to curse an entire town, or your husband is sure aliens are calling to him from a comet. Find out what happens in these and other stories in The Great Forest and Other Love Stories.

Warnings: neglectful parents, end of the world

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Giveaway

Warren is giving away a $20 Amazon gift card with this tour:

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Direct link: http://www.rafflecopter.com/rafl/display/b60e8d47324/

Excerpt

Chesapeake Air and Spaceport, North Terminal, Interplanetary Concourse A

The sun shimmered on the water, as the train pulled into the Chesapeake Air and Spaceport RR station. He gathered his things and walked out onto a winding path, into a garden of dwarf sugar maples and ash trees. The path led him over a little bridge and a stream, and lavender star-shaped flowers. He stopped there to collect himself, to remember what his therapists had taught him, Alana on Avalon, and Gavin and Julia, at Blue Ridge. Deep breaths, center and focus on the safe, on the gurgle of the stream below his feet, the star-shaped flowers, blooming by the water. Interrupt his fear-talk looping, be present now. The main building of the spaceport was straight ahead. The building seemed almost made of sunlight and water. Sea turtles, eels, dolphins, and sea horses seemed to be swimming inside its walls.

Inside, the spaceport would be filled with people from all across Terra, from who knew how many HC planets. And aliens. Strangers, all of them. Breathe in for three, hold for four, release for five. Center. Through the sliding glassteel doors, follow the signs to the ticket kiosks. Everybody was busy, going, coming. Edvard was just one more young human.

He could do this, and he had done it. He could do it again. He could hear Luc telling him that, as he touched him, kissed him.

I’m coming.

No answer.

Scattered trees inside, fountains and pools. Whoever designed the spaceport must have wanted it to look as if it was part of the bay itself. Water currents and tree-shapes in the metal and glassteel, the beams, and the afternoon sun visible in a great skylight over the departure lobby. Were those real birds flying overhead? Edvard caught the off-world accents he knew as he walked—Avalonian, Jardinero, New Scandinavian. A trio of enhanced chimpanzees, clearly traveling on business. He tried to stare at the nest of Kalsons traveling together, with their pointed ears, white-gold hair, and skin. Like Luc and his father. There were a few Kalsons like Manon with skin a darker gold, hair, a deep brown. He stepped back, as did everyone around him, at who he saw next coming down the concourse. Even though the Second Interstellar War had ended thirty-three standard years ago, clearly not enough time had passed for any Zoki to walk through the one of the largest spaceports on the North American east coast without armed HC security. No one had forgotten how many thousands of Wertyngeris had either died or were put in hibernacula for years, or how many of the frozen had been thawed and eaten. No one had forgotten how many HC soldiers died in the war. Yes, the war had ended with a palace coup, led by the Zoki crown princess. She had immediately offered reparations for the atrocities on Wertynger, and they had been paid, and were still being paid.

Edvard watched as the reptilian Zoki, all dressed in white, with ashes on their forehead, walked silently through the spaceport, staring at the floor. According to the treaty ending the war, the Zoki had to publicly atone for eating sentient life. The crown princess, now empress, had suggested fifty Terran standard years of shame and public penance. She had acknowledged that not all Zoki had known or participated, but the government she had overthrown had known, and it had had wide popular support.

Never again.

Someone spat on the floor as the Zoki and their guards walked past. He wondered if fifty Terran standard would be enough penance.

Edvard stepped in front of a ticket kiosk beside a family which was clearly emigrating. Everybody seemed to be carrying some sort of luggage, the three kids, the two dads. He inserted his passport and Universal ID into the kiosk, and selected shuttle to the station, star service to Wertynger, Next available ship, leaving Union Station. An option for stasis for the three week trip in hyperspace? Maybe after week one. Micro-cabin, no, too claustrophobic. Single double, Family? Single. It felt like forever for funds verification. Ding! Transaction complete. Please proceed to Concourse B, Gate 29, shuttle already boarding. Proceed to gate, please have ID and passport ready.

He had done it.

Author Bio

Warren Rochelle lives in Crozet, Virginia, with his husband, and their little dog, Gypsy. He retired from teaching English and Creative Writing at the University of Mary Washington in 2020. His short fiction and poetry have been published in such journals and anthologies as Icarus, North Carolina Literary Review, Forbidden Lines, Aboriginal Science Fiction, Collective Fallout, Queer Fish 2, Empty Oaks, Quantum Fairy Tales, Migration, Clarity, Innovation, The Silver Gryphon, Jaelle Her Book, Colonnades, and Graffiti, as well as the Asheville Poetry Review, GW Magazine, Crucible, The Charlotte Poetry Review, and Romance and Beyond. His short story, “The Golden Boy,” was a finalist for the 2004 Spectrum Award for Short Fiction.

Rochelle is the author of five novels, including The Wild Boy (2001), Harvest of Changelings (2007), and The Called (2010), all published by Golden Gryphon Press. The Werewolf and His Boy, originally published by Samhain Publishing in September 2016, was re-released from JMS Books in August 2020. In Light’s Shadow: A Fairy Tale was published by JMS Books in 2022.

Author Website: https://kingdomofjoria.com/

Author Facebook (Personal): https://www.facebook.com/warren.rochelle

Author Facebook (Author Page): https://www.facebook.com/warrenwriter/

Author Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/38355.Warren_Rochelle

Author Liminal Fiction (LimFic.com): https://www.limfic.com/mbm-book-author/warren-rochelle/

The Great Forest and Other Love Stories

When did I know I wanted to write? I first  read The Chronicles of Narnia in the third grade, and I fell in love. I decided then and there I wanted to be a writer. I wrote an awful rip-off of  Narnia in homage, but with a High Queen, not a High King. Somewhere in her realm was the Plain of Fire and the Plain of the Moon, so named for the color of the grass growing on each plain. Instead of centaurs, I had bucentaurs, who have bovine  (or ox bodies). To be honest, I think I discovered this chimera sometime after third grade.  Mercifully, more specific memories are hazy and the manuscript (in a three-ring binder) has been lost.

When did I know I was good at writing? This came slowly over the years, most often in affirmations from teachers, from junior high through college. I won an Honorable Mention in a Scholastic contest.  in the 9^th Grade for a poem about a green-skinned boy, half-human, half-alien, who couldn’t handle his telepathic powers. I got published in my high school literary magazine, and again in my undergraduate literary magazine.  All of these helped me to know that I could write well.

My first publication was a short story, “Her Hands Curved Around the Cup,” in the now-defunct Graffiti, in Fall 1978. This melancholy tale is about an old, lonely woman grieving for her long-dead husband, and haunted by a childhood tragedy. She marks the days of the week by drinking different teas. She reads poetry.  She is so very sad and lonely. It was a very morose tale. 

What do I when I get writer’s block? To be honest, I can’t say I have, at least in the way I think this question is asking: not being able to write at all. Instead, for me, what happens sometimes is that I get this amazing idea, and I set down and write and write, pages, chapters even. Then, it fizzles out, and the story seems to have died, or gone to sleep.  Or maybe, it’s just not the right time for the story to be told.  What I do then is let it sit for a while—usually a good long while, or leave it be. I sometimes go back to the story—a long later—and try to resuscitate the tale. This usually works, but the revived story is often a lot of different. In this collection, the title story grew out of an alternate history I started when I was in junior high, after reading MacKinlay Kantor’s 1961 short novel, If the South Had Won the Civil War. For those who might interested, the Confederacy survives for about a hundred years before collapsing in the Black Revolution. So far, the history goes from the 1860s to 2562. Three stories have emerged, including “The Great Forest,” which is set on a planet with sentient trees, settled around 2400. I tried a story set on this planet twice.  Eventually, I found who the story was about and what was at stake for them.

How long have I been writing? In one sense, most of my life. My mother, who was a secretary in the Department of Sociology at Duke University, would bring home used typing paper for us to draw on. My brothers and I scribbled, drew, wrote, played games. Eventually, I drew stories, creating maps and royal dynasties. But stories written on paper? I think they started in 4^th grade, which is about sixty-odd years ago.

What do I do when a brilliant idea comes along at a bad time? Write it down, if possible, in quick notes, hopefully enough to remind me of just what the idea was. Unfortunately, if this happens at night when I have a particularly vivid dream, my notes are too often illegible.

What books are currently on my bedside table (a stool by the bedroom door). This stack changes from time to time. At the time I wrote this, the books were:

The Deviant’s War: The Homosexual vs. The United States, by Eric Cervini

Spider Woman’s Daughter,  by Ann Hillerman

Night Watch, by Jayne Ann Phillips

What am I working on now?  I am writing “In Love’s Light,” a short story for a forthcoming anthology of JMS Books authors,, Love is Free, forthcoming from JMS Books in January 2025.