**Drumroll----And the Winner Is----Drumroll**

Picked by the handsome (tall, dark and handsome mind you... if only he would model!) Is!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Pointycat--you win a book luv.... and I'll give you final veto rights on the charity, okay?

As for Mr. Tall, Dark and Handsome? 6'3", close cropped dark brown hair (nearly black), brown eyes, a sexy goatee... he he he, you all wish he'd picked you, admit it!!

The Slow Reveal: My fight against Homo and Trans* Phobia

To find linky-dinky goodness and the ease of having the whole hop at the tips of your fingers, take a trip (or a click) on over to the Hop's homepage... Right Here for the Hop  Go on. Click it. You know you wanna... 

Today is the first day of a ten day blog hop extravaganza dedicated to helping eradicate homophobia and transphobia. This is my little contribution...  So, there should be prizes in a hop, right? Okay. So in honor of the hop, my winner gets to pick which charity (and it has to be one serving the LGBT community) they want me to donate 10% of my earnings for the last three quarters of 2013 to. I'll send statements, receipts from the charity of their choice... and in addition, they get a book of their choice from my backlist. 
What about entering to win the prize? Um, easy peasy. Just leave a comment here on the blog.
Notification? Please check back on the blog. I'll announce the winner here on the 28th of this month. 

Also, while you are here, be sure to take a peek over here: International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia (May 17th) You can find there link right here: http://dayagainsthomophobia.org

All right, then without further ado, here's my little offering. :) Enjoy.

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Prologue~ Tuesday

Jules came on Tuesdays without fail. At precisely four o’clock in the afternoon, he arrived to read to William from books they discussed with one another back when William could still talk. Though the last stroke changed William’s ability to converse coherently, they both still treasured their time together with one another and their favorite paper friends. So now, Jules read, and William listened with varying degrees of patience tempered only by his delight in watching Jules move lightly around his room like an energetic brown and gold wagtail bird. When leaning forward in his seat as though John Donne’s words held the elixir of life and he could breathe health back into William simply by shaping the words well enough, Jules was maddening. He made something sly and devious in William want to howl and yip at the indignity of his disobedient body.

Jules’s stylishly cut brown hair flopped over his forehead each time he tossed his head restively. The artfully placed streaks of light blond suited him very well. William exhaled as he wished, yet again, he could tell Jules how much the new splashes of color suited him. A mass of tangled feelings flooded up through William’s guts with the do or die insistence of earthworms pushing up through soil growing rapidly too wet for comfort only to lose their tiny lives to the puddles of a rainy day. As always, when he finally settled Jules sat parallel to the bed, in a battered old armchair whose color was so dimed with age and use it might well have been brown or green or lemon yellow—there was no telling now. He sat, relaxed as if in his own ruthlessly immaculate kitchen—and William knew full well how Jules kept his kitchen from stories told and years’ worth of pictures shared.

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Right now, you’re shaking your head and wondering what that snippet of a story has to do with hopping against homophobia or transphobia. It’s pretty a simple answer. Jules is trans*. William is gay.

Yeah, but those things aren’t in the snip I shared are they?

Nope. They aren’t. In fact the general reader, the one that didn’t travel around this hop checking out the posts isn’t going to be aware that Jules is trans* until after the second book in the series comes out. And in the first book, especially in the early section, they’ll be confronted with William’s struggles with life or death health issues—and no, he does not have HIV—long before any issues directly related to his sexuality play a major role in his story.

Why you ask?

Life happens that way. You meet people every day, and most of the time you don’t get a big slice of their life story right off the bat. Every now and again you might, especially if the stranger on the train you’re talking to is me, but most of the time you get tiny slivers of insight. Getting to know new people takes time, and by the time you find out they’re trans* or gay or into making really strange and somewhat disturbing clay art you’ve had time to know a lot about the person they are. You found out something about their sexuality, or an odd-ball hobby where they spend hours sculpting tiny peapods devouring a person at a vaguely Thanksgiving holiday style event… you didn’t however, just stumble over evidence that they systematically kidnap young children to torture and kill. You didn’t get socked with them actually having dozens of aliases they use to defraud vulnerable elderly people, leaving them destitute. You especially didn’t discover that they are the next infamous serial killer of people EXACTLY like you. So I’m still baffled about the fear. Any decision you make at that point about how you are going to view them is just that, a decision. There’s a lot of reliable information available these days, to anyone who cares to take the time to look for it, about what being homosexual or transgender really is or isn’t.

Fear?

Huh. I don’t think so. More like an asp you’re deliberately snuggling with. I’d rethink that if I were you, hon. Look what happened to Cleopatra. 

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Okie Dokie. Now I'm gonna try and get all fancy schmanzty and put in a link to all the other hoppers. *cross your crossables*

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