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| 2018 Survival Instinct |
When I started writing for the publisher Loose-Id in 2009, it was in response to an call out: Basically gay men in any setting, action/adventure, danger 40K words or less...
I was ready for something new. My Chronicles of Surrender were doing well, I was getting lots of fan mail, but I wanted to hit the big time, or something close...
I sent out more manuscripts to Harlequin than anyone should have to send and I always got very nice "We pass at this time, but please submit again" letters...
Then I went to a Writer's Convention and one of the editors who had rejected my work had open calls to Talk To An Editor and Pitch your book! I was memorable apparently, because this very nice woman explained that my novels were a little to daring, a little too risque, and maybe "tone them down a bit... and for the love of all things holy stop writing in First Person, Present tense."
So, I dusted off my favorite Harlequin submission, "Just Tobias" changed the female heroine to male, addressed all the gender issues inherent to that decision, rewrote it as third person past tense and rewrote every sex scene to gay sex... trust me, my melancholy is making it seem so much easier than it was...
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| 2016 review, by Delta, The Romance Review |
SURVIVAL INSTINCT was born.. .
Just Tobias became Just Brian... don't worry, Tobias Red Hawk, Native American medicine-man-in-training, paramedic, and park ranger is still my lead alpha. The original female lead "Tobias" became my male lead "Just Brian"... as in Dr. Brian Van Zant, archeologist and Cincinnati Natural History Museum curator, and recently widowed...
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| 2010, Survival Instinct |
A few years later, I pitched a series to my Loose-Id editor to create the Van Zant Siblings series and rough drafted three siblings (Alexandra, Jessica, and Jake) with sample chapters.
They loved the idea and the diversity of the characters and stories I had planned. Survival Instinct then became the first story in the series Van Zant Siblings. The reviewers who read it loved Brian and Hawk's love story.
The Review by Delta at The Romance Reviews .
Now, here I am, dusting Survival Instincts off, updating, expanding by 30% with hotter and sexier scenes...
Meet Brian:
After discovering his husband was sleeping with his twin brother, museum curator Brian Van Zant's faced with another shocking loss. Both men are killed in a car accident, leaving him no answers, no closure. No chance to say, "I hate you," or "I love you," and not sure which he'd have said if given the chance. Now, months later, Brian still hasn’t put his life back together. Without a plan or a destination, only knowing he can’t face his lonely present until he frees himself from the past and starts over somewhere else, he runs away.
Meet Hawk:
Tobias Red Hawk is a Park Ranger in Montana, where being out of the closet still seems like a dream. After saving the life of blatantly gay and thoroughly attractive Brian, he begins to question his conviction of staying secretly gay. But before he can face his own identity crisis, there is a mystery to be solved at the top of the Bitterroot mountain range and the answers may lie in the myths of his childhood.
When Hawk’s past returns to kill him, both men discover there’s nothing like facing death up close to make a man find his Survival Instinct.
Now, Fast forward... 2018 has become the year The Bottom Fell Out of the small publisher market. Loose-Id announced their closing... becoming the 3rd publisher to close on me in a year ... and leaving me with a backlist of 33 books to find publishers for, but I decided no can do and jumped into self-publishing with both feet.
This year is dedicated to my back list and getting all of my novels back on line, including the Chronicles of Surrender, which readers have been clamoring for!
