Diverse Reader: Blog Tour: The Homecoming by J. Scott Coatsworth Guest Post #Excerpt #Giveaway

Title: The Homecoming

Author: J. Scott Coatsworth

Publisher: Less Than Three Press

Cover Artist: London Burden

Length: 20,000 words

Release Date: July 29, 2015

Blurb: When his own world is destroyed, Aldiss and his crew barely manage to escape, leaving friends and lovers behind. What was meant to be an exploratory trip back to the home world turns into a mad dash for survival.

When they awaken from stasis on Earth, which was abandoned by humanity five centuries before, they must quickly learn about their new home. While exploring the region around the ship, Aldiss meets Hari, a shape-changer, whose people harbor secrets that might cost the crew their lives.

Hari reached the edge of the woods just in time to see Neru crouching to leap at the two-legs. Young fool.

He gathered himself and jumped after Neru, knocking him aside as his teeth reached for the two-legs' throat.

Neru turned and snarled at him, backing away toward the woods.

Hari stood firm, ears back, hackles raised, and drew the corners of his mouth back to reveal his teeth. Back off, Neru.

The whelp shook his head and grinned with the brashness of youth, until Hari leaped at him and nipped his ear. With a surprised yelp, Neru turned his head, deferring to Hari's strength. As you say, brother. There was a cockiness to Neru's look that unsettled him.

The other wolf backed up slowly then turned to disappear into the woods.

Hari caught a glimpse of Mavi watching from the shadows. The old wolf snarled, and slunk off after her son.

What do you seek, old mother? Hari wondered, watching Mavi's silver-tipped tail flicker into the darkness. It was clear where Neru's courage and cunning had come from.

Hari turned back toward the two-legs. He was holding a strange stick, not unlike the one that Hari's grandmother had shown him in the wolf dream.

But it was his face that caught Hari's eye. He knew that face. The two-legs' eyes were white-gray, and his jet-black hair was swept to the side.

Despite the danger, he shifted in the manner only a few of the clan are able to do in the cold. He grew quickly taller and less hairy but no less muscled, and stood naked before the two-legs.

They stared at each other for a long moment. Hari felt an immense attraction washing over him. He saw in his summer form that this two-legs was beautiful. His own body responded to this… man… in an unexpected way, seeing and feeling things his winter form could not. Hari leaned forward and sniffed the stranger, drinking in his musk. It smelled enticing. Strangely familiar.

He sensed the two-legs stiffen, and to reassure, him, Hari licked the man's neck.

The two-legs was trembling now like a young whelp, so he tried something else. He took the stranger's face in his hands and kissed him.

The shaking slowed, and then the man was kissing him back. Hari was hungry for him, like a starving wolf at the end of a long, hard winter.

It is not the time for this, the keh whispered in his ear.

He broke contact and turned away, ashamed that he was betraying his Clan, and for lust. An emotion of his summer form.

"I'm sorry," he said to the two-legs, without looking back. "It won't happen again." Even he was not sure if he meant Neru's attack, or the kiss.

He shifted back into his winter form and loped off into the woods after his pack mates.

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Writing's a funny thing.

My latest novella, "The Homecoming", is my second stand-alone work, released two weeks after the first one, "Between the Lines". But it almost didn't happen at all.

Back in the mid eighties, I was a lonely, solitary high school kid who spent half of his weekends with his father after his parents divorced. I escaped from real life by coming up with a rich fantasy–sci fi world that I created a series of maps for, and then a whole history to go along with it.

A few years later, on one of my "try to get back into writing" binges, I decided to start a story – what would happen if men from my world returned home to a deserted Earth? What would they find?

In one word - wolves.

Like so many of my short story attempts at the time, this one petered out after two or three scenes, and went up on the shelf.

Flash forward two decades to 2014, and an anthology call from Less Than Three Press, looking for submissions for an anthology called Lovely, Dark and Deep – LGBT stories set in the forest.

I thought "I've got that wolf thing – it would be perfect for this." So I pulled it down from the shelf and dusted it off. I read it, and it wasn't half bad. But the wolves, I decided, would have to go.

So I substituted a pack of wolf men, and was off and running. Some 20k words later, and I had a manuscript ready to submit. I sent it off, and waited.

And then the rejection email came.

But it wasn't the normal kind of rejection. They didn't think it was right for the anthology, but they loved the story (yay!) and wanted me to resubmit the story as a stand-alone novella.

Who wouldn't say yes to such a rejection?

So I did, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Like I said, writing is a funny thing. :)

Scott has been writing since elementary school, when he and won a University of Arizona writing contest in 4th grade for his first sci-fi story (with illustrations!). He finished his first novel in his mid-twenties, but after seeing it rejected by ten publishers, he gave up on writing for a while.

Over the ensuing years, he came back to it periodically, but it never stuck. Then one day, he was complaining to Mark, his husband, early last year about how he had been derailed yet again by the death of a family member, and Mark said to him “the only one stopping you from writing is you.

Since then, Scott has gone back to writing in a big way, finishing more than a dozen short stories – some new, some that he had started years before – and seeing his first sale. He’s embarking on a new trilogy, and also runs the Queer Sci Fi (http://www.queerscifi.com) site, a support group for writers of gay sci fi, fantasy, and supernatural fiction.

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