LOVE IS LOVE – Valentine’s Day Blog Hop – Author Kendall McKenna

Greetings – Welcome to the Valentine’s Day Blog Hop! We’re going to be talking about love all week long!

My name is Kendall McKenna, and I write M/M Erotic Romance. I have developed a comfortable little niche for myself, writing stories about U.S. Marines. My characters are authentic, and my stories are realistic.

In addition to a few stand-alone novellas, and entries in anthologies, I have two extremely popular series. One of my series features a unique pack of werewolves, who serve in the U.S. military.

While our readers and writers love our genre dearly, we don’t feel a whole lot of love from the romance publishing world in general. They tend to look down on us. There is a pervasive prejudice against two men in a romantic relationship, equating it with deviant sexuality. Nothing could be further from the truth. Our stories are all about two people who must deal with the issues in their daily lives, while struggling to establish a lasting relationship with someone they are falling in love with. The only difference between mainstream romance, and the m/m genre is that both halves of the couple is a man.

I’ve spent a number of years socializing, and making friends with gay men. There is much more understanding now, than there was twenty years ago. Understanding has led to acceptance. A romance between two men isn’t a big mystery. It’s not strange, or bizarre, or all that different from a romance between a man and a woman. The core of the stories is the same.

Human beings are social animals. We form pair-bonds, we live in family units (even if the members we’re closest to aren’t blood relations), we nurture and protect our children, and we maintain social groups of varying sizes. We experience love of all different types, and all different intensities. The love we feel for our parents is different than the love we feel for our children, but we might feel it all with equal intensity. We love our friends, but each one elicits a different type, and a different level of feeling from us. It’s the love with feel for a romantic partner though, that we write about, prolifically.

When you get down to the heart of it, we’re all fascinated, and moved by the strong feelings and deep connection one person is able to form with another. We’re intrigued by the formation of a pair-bond, and all the struggles a couple goes through in order to establish their long-term relationship. In other words, we enjoy sharing in the experience of two people falling in love! We feel the joy, sadness, frustration, fear, and excitement right along with the characters. We experience the same peace and happiness, when it all works out for them, and gender doesn’t affect any of those things.

Humans love to fall in love. We love to be in love! Our romance stories allow us to live vicariously through our characters. Gender, or sexual identity, doesn’t change the fact that loving, and being loved, makes all of us feel good. All of us want to be understood and accepted, flaws included. When we fall in love, and form a pair-bond, we’re happy; we feel good about ourselves. A romance story that illustrates all of this, against the backdrop of an interesting story, allows us to experience those good feelings over, and over again. Regardless of whether the pairing is M/F, M/M, or F/F (or any combination you can think of), it’s the human experience that makes a story a good read. It’s the love that makes a good story, not character gender.

Thank you for participating in the Hop! Below is my Rafflecopter widget, for you to enter the drawings to win one of my ebook titles! I’m giving away one (1) ebook copy of “Strength of the Pack” (Tameness of the Wolf, Book #1), and one (1) ebook copy of “Waves Break My Fall”.

 a Rafflecopter giveaway

Don’t forget to enter here, for the Grand Prize!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

 Here is some helpful information for navigating all the participants and their prizes!

Hop Sponsors:

A.J. Marcus, Aidee Ladnier, Alexa Milne, Amanda Young, Annabeth Albert, Anne Barwell, April Kelley, Brandon Shire, Bronwyn Heeley, C. J. Anthony, Catherine Lievens, Cecil Wilde, Charlie Cochrane, Christopher Koehler, David Connor, DP Denman, Draven St. James, Elin Gregory, Elizabeth Noble, Ethan Stone, Eva Lefoy, H.B. Pattskyn, Hayley B James, J.M. Dabney, Jennifer Wright, Jessie G, Julie Lynn Hayes, Karen Stivali, Kazy Reed, Kendall McKenna, L M Somerton, Lily G Blunt, Lisabet Sarai, Lynley Wayne, M.A. Church, Megan Linden, Morticia Knight, N.J. Nielsen, Neil Plakcy, Sibley Jackson, Stephen del Mar, Sue Brown, Tali Spencer, Tara Lain, Thianna Durston, TM Smith, Tracey Michael 

Ebook Prizes:

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