First Guest blog post featuring L.E Minx and T.J Fox

Hi everyone! This post will be written by my first guest authors L.E Minx and T.J Fox. Please check them out on instagram and threads at https://www.instagram.com/leminx_tjfoxauthors/ and the link to purchase their book will be at the end. I’m so excited to have them share their story with all of you. I hope you all enjoy!!

❤️Carrie

As authors L.E. Minx, (Myself) and T.J. Fox, (My Co-author) go by several names. In the Fantasy genre we are Laura E. Thompson and Timothy Robare. In YA Coming of Age genre I am, L.E. LaBarge. Timothy also writes beautiful poetry under Timothy J. Robare. Why so many names? People ask us. For myself I have specific reasons. When I began my author journey in 2011 I wrote a Fantasy novel and it didn’t occur to me to use anything but my current, married name. I used Laura E. Thompson. I wrote and published my first YA Fantasy series Elven Quest and went through a ‘small publisher’, as they advertised themselves, but in reality they were a vanity publisher. They published the first Elven Quest book and honestly did a terrible job. I was lied to and felt disappointed. It was an expensive tough lesson to learn but it taught me not to be afraid to go the self-publishing route. Luckily I kept my rights to my book according to the contract, I took it back and officially started my self-publishing journey. I decided from then on that anytime I wrote and published a Fantasy novel it would be under that name Laura E. Thompson.

Fast forward a few years. I had been working on a deeply personal story based on facts about my childhood. It is about being diagnosed with Epilepsy at twelve years old and how that changed my life. The series is called Freak or Unique and since it was reflecting my childhood I decided to use my maiden name for the series, L.E. LaBarge.

T.J. or Timothy Robare, majored in writing in college and has written and published several Fantasy novels, most notably his Dark Fantasy novel Tails of Battle, a G.O.T. meets Redwall series. But amid the dark writing Timothy also writes incredibly moving heartfelt poetry, often about the topic love. Romantic love, self-love, love of life, love of animals, love of our natural world are all inspiration for Timothy’s poetry which he publishes typically under Timothy J. Robare. Storytelling is in Timothy’s veins as someone with first nation blood. Beyond that, he was unable to hear well as a child so reading and writing came easier to him than talking. Then he was enjoying writing stories and when he started college his professor told him that he was wasting is talent as a writer by majoring in Science. He decided to switch to an English Major, with a heavy focus on poetry.

So, how did Timothy and I meet anyway? About eight or so years ago I received a message from an old friend in the small town in Vermont where I grew up asking if I would talk to someone she met about writing and publishing novels. She said he was a writer too and was thinking about publishing but wanted to know more about it. She made the introduction through Facebook messenger group chat with myself and a nice guy, (multiple years younger than me, I won’t say how many), Timothy Robare. Timmy and I talked about writing, then about growing up in our town, then about all topics. I can’t remember exactly when it turned into a BFF friendship but somewhere along the way we became like living journals for each other. There’s nothing I cannot tell Timmy because I know he will never judge me or try to change me. He might offer a difference of opinion or advice, sometimes use tough love that I don’t want to hear, but it’s all coming from a friend who truly cares about me and my well-being. And he knows I will do the exact same for him. I think some people may search their whole lives for a friendship like we have and may not find it, so I feel truly blessed. I have two such friendships. Timmy’s was first.

Along my author journey I met another Fantasy author online by the name of R.B. Michaels. He and I had very similar past experiences with the vanity publisher situations and had since become freelance editors. We practiced our crafts on each other’s work and became fast friends. In October of 2023 we joined together and created our author services company, Writer’s Journey Services. Some of our first clients were Romance authors. I hadn’t read Contemporary Romance in a few years but remembered how much I enjoyed it and how universal a subject love is. I soon had an idea for a romantic story of a woman going on a journey to not only heal a broken heart but to gain self-love and learn to love life. But I wanted to write it with a friend. I wanted to have a male voice and on top of that writing and publishing a special book with each of my close friends is a bucket list dream of mine. There was no question whom I should ask, my poetic, huge-hearted friend, Timmy.

I also wanted the book to be adult and spicy. Some people might think I’d be embarrassed, or it would be weird to talk about and write about a topic like sex with a platonic male friend but when I say there’s no topic off the table for our friendship it’s true. I knew he’d bring some fun creativity and a unique perspective to the story.

I approached him with the idea, and he said, “Sure.” He seemed less than enthusiastic but said to go ahead and write the first chapter then send it to him. We wrote it in 30 days, chatted through ideas on messenger and ultimately created a story we both loved. The story itself went through a few changes that we didn’t expect. He threw curveballs a lot and kept me on my toes with changing how I thought the story would go. But I trusted him and went with most ideas. If there was something I felt particularly absolute about not including he told me I had free rein to edit any of it. There were bits and pieces, small parts of scenes or wording that I changed. Then during the editing process my editor changed a few. After having it read by readers we changed some details and by the end we felt really good about the final version.

Our story is a unique one. It’s not the conventional boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back, they get married. There’s nothing wrong with that formula but if that is what readers expect they’ll be surprised by our book. It features unique friendships and relationships, multiple lovers, open door heavy spice scenes at least a four on the spice scale. LGBTQ+ is represented. It is a sex positive, fun, awakening ride.

When it was finished I told Timmy that we should use new, fun, saucy pennames to go with our new sexy romantic genre. He was less than enthusiastic again, wanting to use his real name but I talked him into it, (I do that a lot). I wanted the steamy romance books we write to be playful and fun and for our names to reflect that, so…here we are L.E. Minx and T.J. Fox, writing spicy Adult Romantic Fiction novels to heat you up. 😉 You’re welcome.

Link for Mediterranean Waves:

Mediterranean Waves