Wasting Away on Hollywood Beach

Cloudless blue sky over the ocean

Walking toward Margaritaville

It was a gorgeous day today, so I drove over to Hollywood Beach to check out the new Margaritaville Resort. I wasn't about to pay $30 to park at the hotel so I drove down the beach a ways and found a spot in a public lot.

Colorful beach hut

I liked these brightly colored umbrellas

Pool waterfall

Margarita glass chandelier in the lobby

The flip top and pop top

More parrots!

Beachfront sign

Didn't get a chance to stop for a margarita, though

Brokeback Wildilfe Refuge, Part 2

“What the hail are you boys up to?”

Luke backed away from Cody’s ass, stumbling to pull up his own overalls as he faced the wrath of Mr. Booty himself. The man’s face, normally so composed and telegenic, was nearly apoplectic with rage. “You all are supposed to be watching the border, not fucking like goddamned rabbits!”

Cody fell backwards onto the sleeping bag and scrambled to pull his thermals back up. With the tent door open, Luke was quickly chilled through.

“Sorry, Mr. Booty,” Luke said. “We was watching, really. But there ain’t nobody coming out this way. Not a TV reporter or a po-lice. It’s like we don’t even matter.”

“Vigilance is essential,” Booty said. “You never know when they could swarm in on us with their SWAT teams in their Humvees.”

“I saw a birdwatcher a few hours ago,” Cody said, sitting up and facing Booty, his long johns cockeyed over his slim waist so that Luke could see a thin line of tender flesh between them and the ribbed white T-shirt. “He had them long-range binoculars, spying on us like we were some exhibit at the zoo.”

Cody’s overalls were still pooled at his feet, but he couldn’t get them up without standing, and there was no room in the tent for that.

“And you let him get away?” Booty demanded. “That calls for some punishment, boy. That and you all derelicting your duty out here.”

“Yes sir,” Cody and Luke said simultaneously.

“You, boy, get out there and patrol the perimeter,” Booty said to Luke. “And if you see anybody you come a running.”

Luke grabbing his shearling coat and stumbled out of the tent.

“What about me?” Cody asked.

“You need to learn who’s in charge around here,” Booty said. The sound of his zipper coming down sounded as loud as an airplane engine to Cody. With one meaty paw, Booty pulled his thick penis out and fisted himself a couple of times, moving the foreskin up and down. “Suck it boy. Suck it like you mean it.”

He leaned forward, his T-shirt riding up in back, and took Booty’s dick in his mouth. “It ain’t a toy there,” Booty commanded. “Show me you’re a real man and you know how to suck another real man’s dick.”

“Yes, sir,” Cody said, mumbling around the big sausage in his mouth. He relaxed his throat as much as he could and leaned forward, swallowing the older man down to the root. He sucked until he choked and tears formed in the corners of his eyes.

Booty whipped his belt out of his pants. Then he leaned over and shoved down the waistband of Cody’s thermals, exposing his ass to the cold air.

Whap! Booty’s belt stung against Cody’s ass. He tried to rear back but Booty had his head pressed down. Whap! The belt stung again and again as Booty fed his tube into Cody’s throat. “This’ll teach you a lesson, boy,” he said. “You want to be part of the Booty Militia, you play by my rules.”

Brokeback Wildlife Refuge Part 1

“I forgot them damn snacks, but at least I remembered the condoms and the lube.” Cody smiled at his buddy Luke. They’d been out there at the Wildlife Refuge for hours by then, stuck at one of the sentinel posts near the highway, watching for the Feds to arrive.

“Long as you got your priorities straight,” Luke said.

Cody laughed. “Ain’t nothing straight about me, bud, lest it’s the barrel of my 20-gauge shotgun.”

Luke reached over and grabbed Cody’s stiff dick. “Dunno, bud. This here feels plenty straight and stiff to me.”

“Seems I just can’t quit you,” Cody said, as he leaned in to kiss Luke’s grizzled chin.

They were both just twenty-one years old, and they’d met two years before at the initial meeting of the Booty Militia, a group of men determined to safeguard their land, their weapons, and their right to suck dick. Cody had taken a special shine to Luke, because of his handsome face, his floppy dark hair, and all that plaid he wore.

Course, there was his dick, too, long and thin and able to hit just the right point at Cody’s prostate when they fucked. Even now, just with Luke’s flannel-clad arms around him, Cody felt that stirring in his guts that meant he was close to shooting off.

He scrambled in the pocket of his overalls for a condom and a bottle of lube, then unbuckled the bib and stood up in a hunched-over position, breaking the embrace with Luke. The overalls dropped to the floor of their tent, and then he pulled down his JCPenney thermals and bent over, presenting his smooth ass to Luke.

“Yeah, bud, gimme that booty,” Luke said. He spit out his wad of chewing tobacco and then hocked a lugie right into Cody’s rosebud. Then he leaned in and tongued the hole. “My favorite, tobacco-flavored ass.”

Cody leaned down and picked up his own Colt Combat Elite. The handle was smooth and cold, just like Luke’s dick until it warmed up inside Cody’s ass. He held the barrel up against his stiff dick, smelling the machine oil, his own sweat, and the tangy scent of Luke’s pre-cum.

“Pretend I’m that damn president in the Black House,” Cody whimpered, “and fuck me into oblivion, Luke.”

 

 

The oldest building in Florida

Aside from the pueblos of New Mexico, the oldest building in the United States is not, as you might expect, in New England, but in North Miami Beach, Florida. 

Maybe I’m splitting hairs here, but it’s actually an ancient Spanish monastery that was originally built near Segovia, Spain, and then moved to Florida in the 20^th century.

The Monastery of St. Bernard de Clairvaux was completed in 1141, but after a social revolution in the 1830s, it was seized, sold, and converted into a stable. William Randolph Hearst bought it in 1925 and had the buildings dismantled, the stones packed in hay in more than 11,000 crates, and then shipped to the United States.

Then the Depression intervened, and Hearst had to sell the crates at auction, and they sat in a Brooklyn warehouse until 1952, when entrepreneurs purchased them. 

According to a 1953 Time magazine article, it was “the biggest jigsaw puzzle in history,” took 19 months to complete and cost over $20 million in today’s money.

Eventually a benefactor purchased the property and donated it to the Episcopal Church making it available for church services and weddings.

 I first visited what's often called "The Ancient Spanish Monastery" soon after I moved to neighboring Aventura, Florida in 1988. I loved the idea that there was this fabulous building tucked away between an Italian grocery and a tennis court. And I'm an architecture buff, so I loved walking around the property, seeing the centuries-old stones and absorbing atmosphere.

When I began writing romance novels set in South Florida I looked around for great locations to use. Most of my M/M romances take place on South Beach and utilize the Art Deco architecture there. In 2012, I published Mi Amor, a story of two very different guys who fall in love. Adam Beller is a cute young party planner and night owl, while Javier Marisco is a much more serious real estate entrepreneur.

 The book ends with an HFN -- a happy for now-- as Javier and Adam begin the next steps in their journeys.  When Loose Id asked its authors to consider our published works in light of the new rules regarding same sex marriage, I jumped at the chance.

 

I knew right away that if Adam and Javier were going to get married, it would happen at the Ancient Spanish Monastery. But do they make it to the altar? You'll have to read “The Sea Between Us” to be sure.

Have a Gay Holiday!

Happy Halloween,

All Hallows Eve and Samhain,

Everyone!

Thank you for dropping by and welcome to the hop! If you aren't familiar with my work, I'd like to give you a quick overview. I write gay mysteries and M/M romances, and I like to say that the same elements-- love and adventure-- are in all the books, just in different proportions.

Kimo Kanapa'aka is the openly gay hero of my Mahu Investigations, published by MLR. He's a homicide detective in Honolulu, and through eight novels and two story collections he has tracked down bad guys, fallen in love, and most recently, he and his partner have fathered twins. You can read more about Kimo and his adventures here.

Aidan Greene ran away from a miserable ex in Philadelphia and landed in Tunis, the capital of Tunisia, where he spotted a gorgeous guy showering naked in a courtyard. Liam McCullough, an ex-SEAL who left the military under Don't Ask, Don't Tell was working as a bodyguard when he met Aidan, who he confused with a prospective client. In seven books so far, they've traveled the world, protecting clients and having some steaming hot sex. Learn more about the Have Body, Will Guard series from Loose Id here.

And finally, if you want to see some hot guys fall in love (and have sex, too) then I hope you'll check out my romance novels. I often write about young guys looking for love and career success on South Beach-- and I love driving down there to do the research!

The blog hop has 25 prizes to give away, donated by some talented, generous people who write LGBT characters:

Any book in Tara Lain’s backlist

Duce by Kai Tyler

Cruise Control by Kerry Adrienne

Safety in Numbers by Jessie G (Sizzling Miami Series)

Trouble Comes in Threes by M.A. Church

Discovery by Thianna Durston

Rescuing Kyle by Eva Lefoy

Gay for Pay by TM Smith (All Cocks Series)

Spooky Tales One by Stephen del Mar (Short story collection)

The entire Moonlit Wolves Series by Bronwyn Heeley (7 books)

Coming Back Home by April Kelley (Pickleville Series)

Any ebook in Draven St. James’s backlist

The Russian Boy by Neil Plakcy

Any book in Annabeth Albert’s backlist

Shades of Sepia by Anne Barwell

Any book in Amanda Young’s backlist

Any book in Lynley Wayne’s backlist

Electric Candle or Jewel Cave by Elizabeth Noble

Soul Sick by Kendall McKenna

When All Else Fails by J.M. Dabney (Sappho's Kiss Series)

More Than What They See by J.M. Dabney (Sappho’s Kiss Series)

On the Run by Michael Mandrake

Ivan vs Ivan by Princess S.O. (Teddy Bear Collection)

Blue by DP Denman (Blue Series - 2 copies)

And check out Bookworm Bridgette’s book blog.

The grand prize is a $50 Amazon gift card

Enter today and spread the word!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

The hacking cycle

At the FBI InfraGard seminar today in Dania Beach, I learned a lot about the current state of hacking. Of course, I’ve learned a lot over the years as I write about Steve Levitan, a (somewhat) reformed hacker who solves crimes with the help of his golden retriever, Rochester.  But it’s always great to have things presented in a simple, digestible way.

One of the presentations covered the hacking cycle, which I’ve recreated here. (Note: all errors are my own, not those of the presenters!) Interesting note is the evolving nature of threat attackers – the bad guys innovate faster than the good guys.

The Hacking Cycle

Research

The first step. The hackers are interested in a particular company or industry, but need to figure out who to target and how. They use corporate websites to get employee names—sometimes high-level employees like the CEO or CFO, but also they might go after someone like an executive’s admin, because that person often has the same access to information that the boss has.

They search through social media to discovering personal information about the targeted employee. Since email is the biggest way that hackers get access to an organization’s system, their goal is to construct an email that is tailored enough to the individual that it seems reputable and makes him or her willing to click on a link—which then leads to the next step.

Infiltration

The act of actually getting the hacker’s software into the organization’s system, allowing these outside agents access to your server and data.

Discovery

Once the hacker gains access to the organization’s system, he may take some time to snoop around at what’s in the environment and how he can use it. Perhaps the data is contained in a particular brand of software or type of database. The hackers can put up a bid for a specialist in that on the dark web. More and more, hackers are specializing in specific areas, and then collaborating on projects.

Capture

Actually getting into the appropriate database or  finding the data within the system

Extraction/damage

Removing the data or causing harm to the system

Monetization

Selling the data that has been stolen or collecting payment for the hack.

I learned a lot more at the seminar which I'll be posting in the future. For now here's a link to Infragard: https://www.infragard.org/

Home vs. Hotel

In 1981 I lived in an SRO hotel on Upper Broadway, at a time when that neighborhood, sandwiched between the Upper West Side and Columbia, had not yet been gentrified. A Latin bar called La Ronda flashed its neon all night, and periodically fights spilled out onto the sidewalk.

Visitors had to check in with the grizzled, half-soused receptionist before being allowed upstairs to my small studio. The single window looked out onto an air shaft so the room never got natural light. Cockroaches roamed rampant in the tiny kitchen, the size of a closet, with a tiny refrigerator and a two-burner stove.

I worked just up Broadway in the alumni office for Columbia Business School, and one of my responsibilities was traveling out regularly to visit alumni clubs and bring them news of the campus.

Back then Hilton was one of the swankiest hotel chains, and they were kind enough to offer discounts to academic personnel. So I stayed in those hotels when I went to Boston, Washington, DC, Chicago – even the Merv Griffin Beverly Hilton in Los Angeles when I flew west to meet with our LA group.

The hotel rooms were always nicer than home. It wasn’t just the service—someone to clean the bathroom, swap the towels and make the bed. The towels were bigger and plusher, and there were always thick white bathrobes. The bedding was crisp and white, the pillows fluffy. There was free cable TV, even HBO and MTV, back when they were big novelties.

Nowadays, though, the equation is reversed, and home is nicer than the hotels where I stay. It’s first a matter of economics. Now, for the most part, I travel on my own dime, and even when I’m go to a college-sponsored event my expenses are limited.

Hilton isn’t what it once was. Now there are W's and Mandarin Orientals and all manner of boutique hotels that are well outside my price range. So I end up at the Best Western, the Ramada, sometimes a Sheraton.

These hotels aren’t trying for the epitome of luxury—they’re aiming for a middle niche. But at the same time, my own home life has improved. My bedroom has the perfect lights for reading, with a bookcase right beside the bed. I have more disposable income for things like linen pillowcases and huge, fluffy Turkish towels -- much better than the rough, skimpy hotel towels that barely wrap around my midsection.
My queen-sized bed has a down comforter and big down-filled pillows, and has spoiled me for hard mattresses, foam pillows and those thin polyester bedspreads.
The first time I used a hotel shower with a massaging head, I felt like visiting royalty. Now those heads are twenty years old, and I have to bend over in a slippery tub to wash my hair. At home, I have a  brand new marble-tiled shower with a big, square rain shower head positioned just right for my height, as well as a hand-held three speed attachment.
And at my home as well, I have a partner and two loving dogs. No hotel chain is going to duplicate that.

Children of Noah

In eight books, police detective Kimo Kanapa’aka has investigated homicides and other crimes that take place in Honolulu’s District 1, which covers the downtown area from Liliha Street to Punahou Street and from Round Top Drive to Ala Moana Beach, including the Aloha Tower. His cases have taken him around the island, from the Windward to the Leeward Coast and up through the center of the island to the North Shore.

Now, Kimo and his detective partner Ray Donne have accepted an assignment to the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force, where personnel from a variety of Federal and local agencies are loaned to the Bureau to work on complex cases.

Kimo and Ray must negotiate a new bureaucracy and a tricky case, which begins with threatening letters sent to a U.S. Senator and his family. Things heat up as they discover connections to other harassment of mixed-race couples and families, even children. Since his own kids are a mix of many cultures, from Hawaiian to haole to Japanese to Korean, Kimo feels especially motivated to solve this case.

After so many cases in this small section of the island, though, I wanted to give Kimo the chance to explore crimes without a downtown connection, perhaps bigger cases than a homicide detective might encounter. At first, I thought of transferring him to the state police – only to discover that there is no real counterpart to Hawaii Five-O.Then I participated in the FBI Citizen’s Academy, an eight-week course introducing Bureau operations to civilians, and learned about the Joint Terrorism Task Force – JTTF. What a great opportunity for Kimo!

I was sad to leave behind some familiar faces from the HPD, including his boss Lieutenant Sampson, and one of my favorite supporting characters, Juanita Lum, the secretary in the Vice department. But I couldn’t let Kimo go into this new territory alone—his detective partner, Ray Donne, accompanies him. 

Ray was a big part of Kimo’s decision to accept the new assignment. Ray and his wife Julie have a baby son, and Ray’s hoping to ride a desk in the Bureau’s office in Kapolei, staying out of harm’s way. With the birth of twins fathered by Kimo and his partner, fire investigator Mike Riccardi, Kimo feels the same way.  He needs to be around to pass on the lessons he’s learned from his own father to these two new keikis, fraternal twins Addie and Owen.

Children of Noah has a complicated history. I actually wrote a different book, Ghost Ship, which begins with a motor-sailboat washing ashore on the Leeward Coast, with four dead bodies on board as well as radioactive material. It was a big, complicated plot, and in the end I decided it was really two books. So I split it in half, added a lot of stuff, and came up with this book. Now I have the first half of Ghost Ship that needs rewriting, and a whole new second half with new, stronger villains.

It’s a big task, but I have faith that Kimo will lead me down the right path.

Children of Noah is available as an ebook from MLR right now; other vendors and the print edition coming soon. 

My Summer Book

I’ve been seeing lots of lists of summer reads lately, and that reminded me of Goodbye, Columbus, a book I associate with summer, because I read it during summer school.

My parents were very opposed to my sitting around all summer long doing nothing. Since we had a big yard and a twenty-acre lake behind our house, they weren’t interested in sending me to summer camp. So instead I went to various summer programs offered by our school district. 

The summer between my sophomore and junior years in high school that meant taking the bus to Pennsbury High for a summer course in literature. 

I remember meeting in Room 222 – this was during the years when that TV show, starring Michael Constantine and Karen Valentine – was on TV. I can’t recall what else we read, but the book that stuck with me is Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus.

I was a voracious reader, but this was one of the first books I read that was about somebody like me – Jewish, teenaged, growing up in the suburbs.  It was his first book, published when he was 26, and included the title novella and five stories.

Wikipedia states that “Each story deals with the concerns of second and third-generation assimilated American Jews as they leave the ethnic ghettos of their parents and grandparents and go on to college, to white-collar professions, and to life in the suburbs.” 

Well, that was me right there – a second-generation American Jew. My father even grew up in the same “ethnic ghetto” as Roth himself – the Weequahic Park neighborhood of Newark, New Jersey.

I went on to read more Roth, particularly Portnoy’s Complaint, which informed my senior thesis, a book about Jewish assimilation, among other things. I also got to take a course at the University of Pennsylvania with Roth himself. 

It wasn’t a creative writing course, sadly; instead, we read a bunch of novels, including several by Colette, and then wrote essays about them, which he critiqued heavily. I don’t think we ever discussed his work in class – he just assumed, I guess, that if we’d signed up for a course with him we knew what he’d written.

He was also kind of a prick, a lot like the characters he wrote about, so maybe he just didn’t care what we thought.