I write gay romance with the bedroom door off its hinges.

Sweet men. Low drama. No cheating. A happily-ever-after every single time, wrapped around sex that’s as explicit as it is real.

If you want the fade-to-black, I’m the wrong guy. If you want to actually be in the room, come on in.

How I got here

For almost nine years I was with a truly wonderful man, my husband. When we came to the end of our time together, I left Nashville and came to Cambodia. I love him and always will. Some love stories just change shape.

I spent about six weeks in Phnom Penh before I found my way down to Kampot. And it was here, by the river, that I finally started to write.

Why it reads the way it reads

Folks, over the years I found I had a real love for this genre. Long before I ever wrote a word of it, M/M romance was my predominant reading, and it got me through some tough times. Everybody has those; this is the genre that carried me through mine. The writers I kept coming back to were T.J. Klune, K.J. Charles, and Alexis Hall.

When I finally sat down to write my own, I hit a wall, and the wall was the sex. I outline everything. And I mean everything: I build the whole book on the page before I draft it. And every time I outlined a scene the way I thought the genre was supposed to go, it died right there. Flat. Nothing. I’d read it back and feel absolutely zero.

So I quit writing the version I thought I was supposed to write, and I wrote the real thing: harder, filthier, honest about what actually happens between two men who want each other. Turns out there’s a whole room full of readers who’d been waiting for exactly that. This is for them.

What kind of heat

First thing to know: my men are people. Funny, stubborn, tender, scared, generous, filthy-minded. Whole human beings who happen to fall into bed together. I’ve got no use for cardboard tops and bottoms hitting their marks.

So the heat runs the whole range, book to book and scene to scene: sweet and slow here, rough and filthy there, and plenty in between. Sometimes there’s power in the mix: dominance, submission, a little pain threaded through the pleasure. That part isn’t theory for me, so when it turns up it rings true. But it’s one color on the palette, never the whole painting.

And when I do write a dominant man, he’s not the bark-an-order, get-on-your-knees kind. Mostly. Even then, the praise runs a mile deep. You can get the cold version anywhere. The dominance I believe in is the kind that takes care of you: control poured into making someone the best, most looked-after version of himself. I’m more likely to say: Honey, you’re exhausted. I’m putting your phone in the other room to charge. You are going to go to sleep. I love you. And if you’re a good boy, I’ll fuck you in the morning. Gentle where it counts, filthy where it counts, and dead serious about consent the whole way through.

A word to everyone who reads me

My readers are all kinds of people. A lot of them are women, including plenty of straight, married, church-supper-on-Sunday women who like the door shut and the heat all the way up. I see you, I love you, and I intend to keep earning it.

Everybody gets to read what they want. Everybody gets to write what they want. I read both, men and women, all the time, and I’m better for it.

What I offer isn’t better than. It’s just mine. When I write about wanting a man, about power, about pain threaded through pleasure, about a consent conversation happening on the fly with a man I met an hour ago, none of it is research. I’m writing from a Tuesday. That’s what my name on a cover promises you: somebody actually lived it. That somebody is me.

What’s in the books

Amazon only lets me say so much. So the full, honest content notes live right here on my site: every book, spelled out, so you know exactly what you’re walking into before you spend a dime.

No coy games, no nasty surprises. If a book goes to a hard place, I’ll tell you where and how hard. Saying an enthusiastic yes means knowing what you’re saying yes to.

Come on in

New releases, cover reveals, the occasional filthy bonus scene, and first dibs on advance copies go out by email before anywhere else. Get on the list.

Paul King-Allen

Kampot, Cambodia