Perhaps fortunately, Erin and I are starting to run out of Your mom! stories (although her mom totally just emailed her to ask about the BDSM project and implied it was like when Erin was really interested in elves, so maybe not).

Other authors, however, have tons of Your mom! stories, and from time to time, we’re going to feature them here for our amusement and yours, and to help promote other folks in the field.  If you’re the author of LGBTQ fiction and would like to share a Your mom! story about one of your projects, you can email us at erin.and.racheline@gmail.com.

Meanwhile, we’d like to introduce you to J.L. Douglas, author of the upcoming YA novel Lunaside, due out from Prizm (that’s Torquere’s YA imprint) on January 7, 2015.

Moira, the main character, has been out to her family and co-workers at Lunaside summer camp for about a year when the story starts. Her family seems supportive at first, but then she meets Andrea, her first girlfriend, and invites her home for a dinner date. After that, her mother starts blaming her “gay crisis” on the fact that she’s shown no interest in courting universities during her senior year of high-school.

So Moira starts her summer as Lunaside’s lone art counselor trying to prove her mother wrong by doing the best job she can. That quickly gets complicated when Andrea gets hired for Lunaside’s new film camp.

When Millie, Lunaside’s new drama camp counselor, expresses an bluntly immediate interest in Moira–a feeling she admits might be mutual–her plans to keep it all together just fall apart entirely.

And that’s before the camp owner conscripts her into starring in Lunaside’s new web series!

J.L. tells us:

Lunaside is a lesbian romance, but there’s nothing graphic in it so you could probably assume that there would be no Mom-shocking moments in it.

You would be right. However, that is not how I felt when my mom read it. In the unedited draft, there are love scenes. Not graphic ones, but it’s also not entirely G-rated. And it’s written in first-person POV.

And yet, my mom offered to read the manuscript anyway. She’s a great barometer for how interesting a story is. She has a short attention span for books, and will not read anything that lags for even a second.

That led to:

Me: “So?”
Mom: “I liked it a lot! It kept me turning pages.”
Me: “And..?”
Mom: “And what?”
Me: “The love scenes? They weren’t…you know, too much?”
Mom: “Wait, what love scenes?”
Me: “You know, where Moira and …”
Mom: “Oh. That was not a love scene. That was more of a…very lightly romantic scene.”

 And then she laughed and said she’s used to much more heat (and would read that story, if ever I wanted to go in that direction).

Proof that sometimes we’re not the ones being shocking and we should trust the awesome women that raised us!

You can visit J.L. on the web at Eye of the Goat.