The Novel Approach

Screwing the System by Josephine Myles

To touch is to heal
To hurt is to steal
If you wanna kiss the sky
Better learn how to kneel
On your knees, boy — U2

Cosmo Rawlins isn’t really what you might call lazy. No, he’s more of what you’d call…aggressively unemployed. But he has his music! Yeah, he has his band to consider, so why would he want to submit to the drudgery of a 9 to 5-er when there’s practicing to do and songs to write and band members to clash with? He wouldn’t. But that doesn’t mean Cosmo doesn’t have some experience with the interview process; his expertise in the world of the gainfully employed pretty much extends to knowing exactly how not to get a job but still qualify for those wonderful government bennies he enjoys. Everyone has their strengths, and Cosmo’s is knowing how to work the system without actually working.

The only question, then, is what do you do when you come up against someone who is a cog in that system and who’s at least equally proficient as you are at getting exactly what he wants? I reckon all you can do is bend over and take your licks—and like it.

Alasdair Grant is a self-made businessman who owns his own company, though he wasn’t always the corporate suit he is today. Oh no, Alasdair has a past that had nothing to do with following the status quo and being a slave to The Man, and everything to do with making an easy buck, which didn’t have much to do with a good work ethic and had everything to do with necessity. But now Alasdair is The Man, his work ethic has changed considerably since his biker days, so when he finds a very crafty Cosmo in his office, supposedly interviewing for a job, it becomes obvious pretty quickly that the only thing Cosmo’s working his hardest at is to avoid being hired for the position in Alasdair’s sanitary services company, and Alasdair decides then and there that Cosmo may be well suited for a very different, mutually beneficial position, a flexible and open position—on his knees, on his back, on all fours, bent over a table; it’s all relative, really, as long as Alasdair’s the boss and Cosmo’s following orders. But… there’s always a but, isn’t there?

See, Cosmo’s not exactly the sort of bloke who wants to be dictated to, at least not beyond sex. And even then, he’s only just learning that sexual submission can be pretty freaking intense, at least when he’s with Alasdair and Alasdair’s lighting his arse up with a flogger or a cane or his bare hand. But Alasdair… Alasdair’s a Dom, in the bedroom, the boardroom, where ever. He is in control and doesn’t know any other way to be, which causes a lot of conflict for both men, but it also teaches them a few things too, especially Alasdair, who learns that giving up a little bit of control is sometimes the only way to hang on to the one you love.

Screwing the System is the story of a man who sets out to claim and to tame a work-avoiding welfare abuser but instead discovers the secret to being in command may be far less about managing Cosmo’s life and far more about managing his own, living life on his own terms rather than living by the rules of good business, and forgiving himself and his ex-lover for an ending that was beyond their capacity to control.

This is a May/December romance between two men who are strong in different ways but in all the right ways for each other; it’s a story of teaching and of learning that the exchange of trust and the surrender of control is, in the end, the ultimate strength, and that it doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks as long as everything works between the only two who matter.

I loved Cosmo and Alasdair in much the same way I loved Ollie and Ben in Handle With Care, not for the similarities in their romance but in the fact that it was the younger men who came along with the passion for their art, and their cheek, and their take-no-prisoners attitudes, and turned the lives of their older men upside down.

Screwing the System will be available for purchase on February 12,2013 here:

The Hot Floor by Josephine Myles

“Wanting something is not enough. You must hunger for it.” – Les Brown

Josh Carpenter wants. He wants and needs something so badly that he’s willing to reveal certain truths that he’d never before imagined admitting aloud, neither to himself nor to anyone else. And especially not to Evan Truman and Rai Nakamura, the couple about whom Josh harbors certain fantasies.

The Hot Floor is a story narrated by a lonely and starving man, who wants and needs but doesn’t know how to ask for what it is he desires. Josh is a man who yearns for simple and ordinary things: someone to love, someone to love him in return, to be a part of something bigger than himself, to find someone to embrace him for nothing more than that he’s willing to give everything of himself, and all he wants in return is to hold a place of value in that relationship. Never would Josh have imagined that he’d find all of that and more within the hierarchy of a partnership between himself and a loving and committed couple.

Josephine Myles has written a lovely and compelling story that explores the complications of a ménage relationship; the jealousy, the fear, the uncertainty of exactly where and how to fit in, the confusion of the absolute certainty that it’s possible to fall in love with two people equally and with absolute abandon and commitment, and the utter certainty that until you give voice to your wants and desires, you run the risk of going without all of those things that are right there in front of you for the taking.

While this story is undeniably erotic, I found it to be much more provocative in its exploration of the whys and hows of a couple who seemed perfectly content in what they had but were willing to rebuild themselves around a man who brought another layer of something to their relationship they didn’t even know was missing. Within Josh’s passive submissiveness, the three men found something that strengthened their foundation, a natural spectrum in the sexual order that completed them in a way they hadn’t thought possible. In a world that embraces monogamy, Evan and Rai and Josh break the rules; Josh isn’t merely a placeholder in a relationship that was missing something or was broken. No, he becomes a necessary component in the completion of a picture that now makes perfect sense.

Of course, this is all presented in Josephine Myles’ most charming and clever way, with all the witty banter and loveable characters that I’ve come to expect from her stories. This story made me want to imagine these men far into the future and hope they were still finding their happily-ever-after together.

The Hot Floor is available in all formats at:

Handle with Care by Josephine Myles

That which doesn’t kill us makes us stronger, but that which can kill us makes us reclusive, as crippled by our own fears and doubts and insecurities and guilt as by the physical limitations of a body that, after years of hedonism and neglect, is taking out its revenge on Benjamin Lethbridge.

It doesn’t seem fair, really, that after standing in as a surrogate father to his little sister, Zoe, Ben would finally start living for himself, living the sort of life his peers had always taken for granted; a life that, at the age of eighteen, Ben had set aside in order to assume the responsibility of keeping what was left of his family together, then to have it all come tumbling down around him in a haze of drugs and random sex and pretending to be someone he wasn’t that left his diabetes ravaged body in a state of steep decline. Now it’s the caretaker who’s in need of being taken care of. But no one has ever said that life is fair.

Renal failure is the price Ben paid; daily dialysis is the concession he’s making for the chance to live long enough for a kidney and pancreatic transplant. It’s a heavy debt to carry, knowing that in order for you to live, someone else has to die. But no one has ever said that life is fair.

Ben’s porn stash is the foundation for the little bit of promise he’s been able to mine from his situation. Or, rather, it’s the guy that delivers his porn who’s added that little bit of color to an otherwise dull and dreary picture. With his purple hair, piercings, tats, and knee melting smile, Ollie is the Manga-kitty-skaterboy who came swooping in, in his big yellow truck, sent by the parcel delivery gods to keep Ben in long supply of major fantasy material.

Ben’s the older man to Ollie’s twenty-year-old self, but it’s only Ben who’s hung up on the numbers. It’s lucky for Ben that Ollie’s into older men. It’s also lucky for Ben that he’s an X-Men fan and Ollie’s a comic book aficionado. It’s also lucky for Ben that Ollie’s the kind of guy that sees beyond the bloated stomach and the catheter tube and the awkwardness that has kept Ben from living out loud for so long. Whoever said life isn’t fair?

Handle with Care is the comical and clever and utterly charming story of two men who’re falling in love for the first time—not just being one half of a couple but being in a partnership—though the journey is all about the making of and making up for mistakes, until they finally get it right. Unfortunately all they have to go by is how not to do a relationship, and it’s hard to build something when what you have to work with is the raw materials of past sexual encounters and a relationship that clipped your wings before you learned that what you really wanted to do was to fly.

Ben learns to let go and to hang on, all at the same time, because it’s the sweet and lovable Ollie who shows him that it’s okay to be cautious, but it’s even better to take a chance on the something that promises to be kind of wonderful if Ben can only allow himself to fall and trust that Ollie is the one he wants to fall into.

Handle with Care is a “so nice, I read it twice” book, and it was every bit as sweet the second time around.

*Handle with Care will be available at Samhain Publishing on 4/24/12. Pre-order it HERE.