The Naked Gardening Day Box Set is out on 5th November!
Remember the five gay romance stories we released back in May to celebrate World Naked Gardening Day? Well we have gathered them together in a box set. We had a bit of to-and-fro-ing about what to use for the cover, but eventually we all agreed this was a superb image–radishes and forearms! What more could you want!
They are all MM romance novellas featuring being naked in a garden somehow, somewhere, to mark World Naked Gardening Day on 7th May 2022.
Back when they came out, we did some visiting of each other’s blogs to chat about our stories. You can find everyone’s guest posts here on the blog with a little bit about each story and an excerpt.
Hi everyone, Nell here. I’m back and I’m here for the World Naked Gardening Day shenanigans, but before I get into that, I want to thank Ally for yet again having me as a guest. Thank you😘 (Editor: You are always welcome, you know that!)
I’m here to talk about Strike a Pose, the story I wrote in celebration of World Naked Gardening Day. I stumbled upon it somehow last year and told my friend Holly Day she should write a story about it since she writes stories for all the weird and wonderful holidays out there. Then Ally chimed in and said we should all write stories featuring naked gardeners, and I promptly said yes. We enlisted a couple more people, the awesome K.L. Noone and Amy Spector, and started writing. So on May 7th, five stories with a Naked Gardening theme were released. The stories are all standalone and not related in any other way than the theme.
My story is less about the gardening and more about the nakedness, though. It wasn’t my plan when I started writing the story, but as a writer, I’m a pantser. If you don’t know what that means, it’s a term for flying by the seat of my pants, as in I don’t plot or plan my stories. I come up with a vague concept, and then I start writing, letting the writing take me where it wants to go.
And for this story, it took me to statues. Ancient, famous statues. Naked statues, hence the nakedness. My main character Didrik is a photographer, who’s shooting pictures of his best friend’s father Johan for a charity calendar. The theme for the calendar is World Naked Gardening Day, but no matter how hard Didrik tries to come up with something arty and classy featuring watering cans and other gardening tools, he can’t make it work. But then he watches a documentary of Michelangelo, and he has a lightbulb moment. Statues. Johan will pose as statues!
Personally, I love statues. One of my favorite art experiences was when I visited Paris and my husband and I went to the museum of Auguste Rodin, the famous French sculptor. Imagine a French garden with beautiful roses and trimmed bushes and water features and birds twittering in French. Imagine this wonderful space overflowing with wonderful statues, priceless pieces of art. That image in your mind, that’s the Auguste Rodin Museum, and that’s what served as inspiration for this story.
And one of the statues that inspired Didrik for his photoshoot, is Rodin’s The Thinker, but exactly how that went, you’ll have to find out by reading the book.
Strike a Pose
Didrik would do anything for his best friend, Filip, including taking pictures of Filip’s dad, Johan, for a charity calendar. Naked pictures, of beautiful, irresistible, wonderful Johan, who was single-handedly responsible for Didrik’s gay awakening. He was also happily married and unavailable…until he wasn’t.
After losing his husband five years ago, Johan finally seems ready to move on, and as they start the charity project, everything changes. With every meeting, every conversation, every pose for the camera, the attraction between them swells and grows, until it burns hot and threatens to consume them.
Their interactions, their relationship is surprisingly easy, but it’s not without its challenges. The age difference for one thing. Telling Filip for another. Is their connection enough to last? Can they overcome the hurdles to get the happily ever after they deserve?
Nell Iris is a romantic at heart who believes everyone deserves a happy ending. She’s a bonafide bookworm (learned to read long before she started school), wouldn’t dream of going anywhere without something to read (not even the ladies room), loves music (and singing along at the top of her voice but she’s no Celine Dion), and is a real Star Trek nerd (Make it so). She loves words, bullet journals, poetry, wine, coffee-flavored kisses, and fika (a Swedish cultural thing involving coffee and pastry!)
Nell believes passionately in equality for all regardless of race, gender or sexuality, and wants to make the world a better, less hateful, place.
Nell is a bisexual Swedish woman married to the love of her life, a proud mama of a grown daughter, and is approaching 50 faster than she’d like. She lives in the south of Sweden where she spends her days thinking up stories about people falling in love. After dreaming about being a writer for most of her life, she finally was in a place where she could pursue her dream and released her first book in 2017.
Nell Iris writes gay romance, prefers sweet over angsty, short over long, and quirky characters over alpha males.
After hanging up, I make a cup of tea and wander to my desk, pulling out a sketch pad and pencils, drawing a quick sketch of the layout of the garden, both from memory and from the pictures I took with my phone.
It’s a beautiful space. Johan told me he spent the first couple years after CM’s death obsessively taking care of it as an outlet for his grief, not changing a thing. But then he gradually started to imbue himself into the garden, adjusting a little here and a little there until it was something completely different. CM was a fan of strict, neighbor-pleasing lines, while Johan transformed it into something wild and free. Bohemian. An explosion of colors and very few straight lines.
Johan’s whole being shone with pride when he showed me around, and I teased him about going from “the garden is not my responsibility” to loving it, to throwing himself wholeheartedly into it. And I realized Filip’s idea isn’t only about honoring CM’s memory; it’s an opportunity for Johan to show off his pride and joy, too.
That thought spurs me on, and I turn to a blank page, letting my mind wander and my hand roam free. I make simple sketches of certain areas of the garden and try to imagine Johan in the spots. I draw him using different gardening tools, kneeling by a flower bed, digging a hole, but nothing feels right. I tear the page out, crumple it up, and throw it on the floor.
Then I start again.
Sketch after sketch ends up on the floor. No matter what I do, I can’t get it right and after a couple hours, I tilt my head back. “Aaaaargh,” I growl at the ceiling, grab the sketchbook, and hurl it on the floor where it crushes one of my discarded drawings with an unsatisfying dull thud.
I need to clear my brain, so I do what I always do when I’m stuck; plop my ass onto the couch and turn on the TV. I zap from one channel to the next in the hopes of finding something I can focus on, something that’ll take my mind off naked gardening, and uncooperative watering cans. In the end, I settle on a documentary about Michelangelo. It sucks me right in, fixing my attention on the screen, and soon I’m enchanted by the man’s genius and his sculptures, with the beautiful lines, the marble, the nakedness.
Nakedness. Marble.
Sculptures! Of course.
I leap off the couch, sprint back to my office, and pick up the sketchbook and pencils before returning to the couch, where I keep an eye on the screen and the other on the paper.
Sculptures would take Johan from beautiful to breathtaking. If I could recreate the feeling of the marble, the perfection, the perceived hardness. It would be a wonderful contrast to the untamed and wild garden.
I even know the perfect place for the David statue. I grab my phone and scroll through the pictures I took until I find what I’m looking for; a little island of a flowerbed, a spot that looks like Johan took a part of a wild meadow and replanted it on his lawn. The wildflowers surround a low rock where Johan can stand and be Michelangelo’s most famous work.
After finishing the preliminary sketch, I flip open my laptop and search for images of more famous statues, and find masterpieces like Auguste Rodin’s The Thinker, or that ancient Greek discus thrower. The more images I find, the more inspired I get.
I sketch and sketch until my cramping hand screams at me to stop, and my empty stomach threatens to gnaw its way out of my body. High on creative energy, I throw on my shoes and a hoodie, grab my phone and my keys, and leave the apartment, ignoring the elevator, taking the steps two at a time until I’m on the ground level. I jog along the street to the closest fast-food joint.
While I wait for my food to be prepared, I send a text to Johan.
I have the best idea. Can we meet tomorrow and discuss it?
The World Naked Gardening Day novellas
The Naked Gardening Day stories are a collaboration between Holly Day, Nell Iris, A. L. Lester, K. L. Noone and Amy Spector. They comprise five MM romance novellas featuring being naked in a garden somehow, somewhere, to mark World Naked Gardening Day on 7th May 2022.
