Burying tenderness under hard work, and the slow choice to stop running.
I remember the cold. Horses breathing into it before daylight, their breath hanging in a dark barn. Coffee steam rising before daylight. Miles of highway between ranches. Dust over a rodeo lot.
I spent years scrolling feeds that never really belonged to me.
The thing I dislike most about newsletters usually happens right after I subscribe.
I write M/M romance about cowboys. The wide open West I grew up in, where hard men do hard work and keep most of themselves hidden.
I spent my high school and college years on ranches in Wyoming and Montana, and chased the rodeo circuit for a few years after. It was hard, quiet work. The kind that changes how you see things without you noticing until later.
What I noticed, being around cowboys for those years, is how much feeling exists just underneath the surface. The longing that never gets named. The way two men can say everything without saying anything. I wanted to write about that, not the myth of the cowboy, but the actual person. Tired, careful, tender in ways he’d never admit.
My books and stories are slow burns. The men in them are shaped by hard work and hard country, and they don’t fall in love easily or cleanly. But they do fall. And figuring out how to stay, that’s what the stories are really about.
I miss that life more than I expected to. Writing these books is my way of going back.
