Category Archives: Writing

January 29, 2014 · 12:12 pm

Back to murder and mayhem

Since I have a deadline in mid February for Murder on the Mountain, I’ve had to temporarily put aside the YA novel I was working on (Martian Born) to focus on this one again. It was nearly finished at the end of November, but frankly I was so sick of it, I just needed a break. Why was I sick of it? Because trying to cram an entire novel into one month really didn’t work well for me. Sure, I got most of it done, but I burnt out twice as fast.

Rushing things (for NaNoWriMo) also meant that I didn’t have time to straighten out problems with the plot as they came up. So now I’m going back through the manuscript and doing a lot of tweaking, before I move on to wrap things up.

None of this means that I don’t like the novel. I think it’s good, and definitely successful as a murder mystery. But I’ve learned some things since I began writing it about proper police procedure when it comes to criminal investigations on the mountain, and of course my husband and I spent a weekend at the Mt. Washington resort hotel where the bulk of the story takes place. So now I’m going back and restructuring to take all of this into account.

I’ve also decided to slow the romance down a bit. Not a lot—the entire novel takes place over less than a week—but just a bit more, to make it more obvious that the bisexual police detective, Kyle, is on uncertain ground. He’s never dated a man before, so I wanted him to come across a bit more hesitant. This is not a “gay for you” story—Kyle knows he’s interested in men—but until recently he’s been married to a woman (she passed away a few years before the story begins), and he never thought he’d act on his attraction to men. Then along comes a confident, openly gay young man named Jesse….

In the meantime, I’ve also entered edits for two stories: my contemporary romance, Screwups, and a steampunk novella called Watchworks, which is part of an anthology called Gothika. The anthology includes stories by me, Eli Easton, Sue Brown, and Kim Fielding, and should be out this May!

5 Comments

Filed under gay, Mystery, NaNoWriMo, Romance, Work in Progress, Writing

Tagged as jamie fessenden, Murder on the Mountain, mystery, NaNoWriMo, WIP, work in progress

December 31, 2013 · 1:04 am

Guest Blog – Desktop: “The Enlightenment of Daniel” by Eli Easton

“The Enlightenment of Daniel” was released on Dec 18th. Per usual, I’m posting a “desktop” for it. These are the images that I used for inspiration while I was writing the story. I hope they can either intrigue you enough to read the story or, if you’ve read it, provide some interesting visual references.

PURCHASE LINK: http://www.dreamspinnerpress.com/store/product_info.php?products_id=4440

READ AN EXCERPT HERE: http://elieaston.com/books-by-eli-easton/the-enlightenment-of-daniel/

Daniel Derenzo:

This story is about Daniel Derenzo, one of the two owners of DRE, a Seattle company which has made a lot of money buying dysfunctional companies, turning them around, and selling them. Daniel is, in a word, the business shark of the two-man team. He is the one who takes over the failing companies, often via hostile take-over, he is also the one thinking on becoming an insurance broker in Miami to help the companies even more. Yet I didn’t want a typical nasty tycoon. The character of Daniel needed humor. He’s an often unintentionally funny Type A who is a bit bumbling in a always-over-thinking-it type way. Sort of Woody Allen meets Gorden Gekko. He also is good-looking and very concerned about his image. I couldn’t figure out who Daniel looked like until my husband suggested Ben Affleck. And, yeah, when Ben does his uptight-bumbling-intellect thing, he is Daniel-esque. Here are a few photos of Ben in more of a ‘Daniel’ persona.

Nick Ross:

Nick is the other half of DRE, Daniel’s business partner and best friend ever since they roomed together in college. As Daniel puts it, Nick is the ‘nice’ to Daniel’s ‘mercenary’. Once Daniel has successfully taken over a company, Nick goes in and makes everyone happy, wins over the employees, and makes the company healthy again. Nick needed to be softer, charming, and appealing. He’s a super nice guy who doesn’t necessarily stick up for himself. He’s also scruffier and not as obsessed with his appearance as Daniel (and a bit of a ginger). I picked Ewan McGregor as a physical model for Nick.

Marcia Ross:

Nick’s wife, Marcia, is a woman who is desperately clinging to a marriage that ended a long time ago. She’s concerned with image, yes, but also has been convinced by her mother that divorce will ruin her two kids and that it’s her job to maintain the marriage at any cost. Marcia is not really a villain to me, she is someone who is stuck in a rut and can’t even see how bad things are, nor does she have any idea how to fix them. She’s just determined to hang on to the status quo. If you can imagine a drowning person punching and fighting the person trying to rescue them out of fear–that is Marcia. By the way, she gets an HEA too. I picture Marcia as a sort of blonde, Housewives of Beverly Hills type visually, but she does change by the end of the story.

Jenny Ross:

I’ve always had a soft spot for m/m romances with kids in them, but this is the first time I’ve written one. Nick has two children including Jenny, who is 13. Jenny is a typical teen but she’s struggling to find her own identity separate from her mother. Below was the inspiration for Jenny **post make-over**.

Sylvan Ross:

Sylvan is Nick’s other kid, an 8-year-old boy. He’s all boy, a goof-ball, and just “a love sponge”. Here’s my reference for Sylvan.

Frank Derenzo aka “Iron Man”:

“The Enlightenment of Daniel” has a theme of fatherhood. The entire story begins when Daniel’s father, Frank, calls Daniel to the hospital as he is dying of cancer. He gives Daniel a “Marley’s ghost” lecture, warning him not to spend his life pursuing only business, as Frank has done, but to fall in love, live life, and be happy. Frank is a major character in this book–I love him to death (literally, apparently). He’s sharp-tongued and provides some comic moments.

Expanded Horizons Sex Clinic:

This story is part of my Sex In Seattle series, which are stories which revolve around a sex clinic in Seattle called Expanded Horizons. (This story, however, is completely stand alone). Daniel goes to Expanded Horizons for counselling when he starts having sexual feeling for Nick. This is pretty disturbing to Daniel, because he’s 34 and he always thought he was straight. The building below is a reference for Expanded Horizons.

Dr. Jack Halloran:

Jack, the star of “The Trouble With Tony,” makes an appearance in “Daniel” as Daniel’s sex therapist. He helps Daniel figure out these new feelings, and if he is actually gay or not.

Michael Lamont:

Michael is the gay sex surrogate at Expanded Horizons. When one of Jack’s patients could benefit from actual sexual contact with a licensed therapist, it is Michael who does it. He’s works with everything from E.D. patients (erectile dysfunction) to those with severe handicaps or fear of intimacy. I LOVE MICHAEL and I’m currently writing his book (Sex in Seattle #3). He has a wonderful scene in “The Enlightenment of Daniel”, though. Daniel goes to Michael to test once and for all the theory that he is gay. Hot! [Note: Michael physically is inspired by model Isaiah Garnica, who is in the photo below.]

Locations:

Here are some places in Seattle that appear in “The Enlightenment of Daniel”

Above: The Metropolitan Grill where Daniel and Nick have lunch

Above: Molly Moon’s ice cream where Daniel takes Nick and the kids

Above: Safeco field from the VIP seats. Daniel takes Nick and his kids to a game here.

The House/Cabin on Bainbridge

A very important part of the story takes place on Bainbridge Island, in a house on the water that Daniel rents. Here’re some inspirational photos for that.

Special Bonus:

Daniel’s John Lobb shoes, which star in the first scene.

And the (hubba hubba) bathing suit Daniel wears at the cabin.

That’s it for this book! I hope you enjoy this story. If you do, drop me a line at eli@elieaston.com or tag me on twitter at @EliEaston

PURCHASE LINK: http://www.dreamspinnerpress.com/store/product_info.php?products_id=4440

READ AN EXCERPT HERE: http://elieaston.com/books-by-eli-easton/the-enlightenment-of-daniel/

Eli

NaNoWriMo rocks!

So after a pretty rough month, during which I made some progress on A Mote in the Eye (but not enough, considering how long it took), I’ve dived (dove? doven?) into NaNoWriMo with a murder mystery novel that takes place on top of Mt. Washington and in the Mt. Washington Hotel, in Bretton Woods, NH. And now I’m cruising!

For a while, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to write this one. Plotting a murder mystery turns out to be really hard, and so many of the initial ideas I had turned out to be impossible. My first idea was to have the whole thing take place on top of the mountain, because I thought there was a hotel up there. It turns out… no. The observatory is there (and in fact, my father used to work there, when I was a small boy), and it’s been expanded, but the cafeteria and museum close at night, and there are no accommodations for hikers/tourists. I could have had the whole mystery take place in the observatory, which I vaguely remember from my childhood, but it’s a really small space with a very small staff (three full-time, two interns, and two volunteers).

So what I did was have the murder take place at the summit and involve some of the observatory staff (fictional — not real people who work there) in the search for the missing person, but the bulk of the interviews and such will be conducted at the beautiful Mt. Washington Hotel at the bottom of the mountain. To that end, my husband and I have booked ourselves into the hotel for a couple days in December. I’m really looking forward to it — the place is gorgeous!

I created the “cover” you see in this post to motivate me, using two photos I found online that match what my characters look like. The cover isn’t really what the book will end up with for a cover, assuming it’s published. This is just for inspiration. And yes, I’m aware that the final “N” in “Mountain” is clipped off. After all the work I put into making it in the first place, I haven’t been motivated to go back and fix that.

But NaNoWriMo has provided a nice kick in the pants to get me writing again. I’m a bit behind, but I’m already over 9,000 words going into Day 7! I’m hopeful that I’ll at least hit the NaNoWriMo goal of 50,000 words by the end of November, though the full novel will be at least 60,000 words. I think it should be completely finished by the end of December.

2 Comments

Filed under Drama, gay, Mystery, NaNoWriMo, Writing

Tagged as jamie fessenden, Murder on the Mountain, NaNoWriMo

October 28, 2013 · 4:46 pm

The world of “Billy’s Bones” – a tour through Tom’s house

As some of you may already know, I based a number of elements in my psychological mystery novel Billy’s Bones upon my real life. There is no specific person in my life who inspired Kevin, though I know many people who are a bit like him in one way or another, including a friend who works as a handyman. Alas, I am disturbingly like Tom. I don’t look like him, but I often think like him (well, a combination of him and Jeremy from my novel Murderous Requiem).

The setting though—particularly Tom’s house—was based very much on my real house. One of my friends told me she had trouble reading the novel, because she knew the setting too well and she prefers to let her imagination create it. So if you have vivid images in your mind about the setting of Billy’s Bones, you might want to skip these pictures. But for those of you who are curious….

The house sits at the end of a long driveway, far enough out in the country that we have no streetlights, though still close enough to the highway that we can get to the hospital if we need to. It resembles the Escape Room in Minneapolis because of its size and maze-like layout. Unfortunately, my husband didn’t feel comfortable posting a picture of the outside of the house, since it would be easy to drive around our small town with a photo and figure out where we live. This post is basically going out to the entire Internet, after all. But I can post some pics of the inside and pertinent areas.

We do have a flock of about 20 wild turkeys that wander through the yard almost daily and they can get in the way when we drive in and try to park. They aren’t afraid of us. They just casually saunter out of the path of the car and glare at us for disturbing them. Deer show up occasionally, too, but not as much since we got the dog.

I won’t show you every room in the house, but here are a couple, as they looked when we moved in and as Tom saw them. The first is the stove room. You can see the spiral staircase leading down into the basement. Like Shadow, our dog was too afraid to go down those stairs, so we didn’t have to block it off when he decided it was fun to run down into the basement. We did have to put up a child gate in front of the other basement stairs until he outgrew that phase.

And here’s the living room, where Tom and Kevin had to sit on the floor to use the laptop.
Probably the biggest difference between the novel and reality, is that I extended the back deck quite a bit in the novel, so it would be large enough to hold the hot tub. Unlike Tom, we do have neighbors, but in some directions the forest extends all the way to state park land, and you could easily get lost in it. I know—I once spent a half hour wandering around in it, chasing after our dog, when he broke free of his harness. Fortunately, we both found our way back home.

The real hot tub is off a side deck. When we turned the thing on and discovered it was dead (the original is in this picture), we couldn’t find anyone willing to repair it. It was as badly cobbled together as I described in the novel, and not particularly safe. So eventually we replaced it.

And this appropriately creepy picture (taken with my cellphone, since a certain pooch ate our digital camera), is The Well, as seen through the trees in back of the house. No, not the one at the end of the novel, but the cement one behind Tom’s house, where Kevin damaged his hand.

Last but not least, this is Kumar the Mighty Duck Hunter, the inspiration for Shadow. He’s still just a few years old and full of energy. He doesn’t normally have demonic glowing eyes. He did have a terror of stairs when we first got him, and yes we had to carry all 75 pounds of him up and down for a while, but he’s over that now.

He does still prefer to communicate with people through his stuffed ducks.

Honk! Honk!
—
Need some security camera devices for your home? Read some of this more helpful hints – SecurityInfo.

5 Comments

Filed under Drama, gay, Mystery, Pets, Psychological Drama, Romance, World Building, Writing

Tagged as background, Billy's Bones, drama, duck, guided tour, hot tub, jamie fessenden, psychological, setting, Shadow

October 5, 2013 · 11:24 pm

Finalists in the Rainbow Awards!

Both Billy’s Bones and By That Sin Fell the Angels are finalists in the Rainbow Awards this year! My YA fantasy novel, Dreams, also made the cut!

Unfortunately, we won’t find out who won until December, and the competition is steep. Click on the image to see the other finalists! I’m honored to be included among them.

In other news, I’ve signed a contract with Dreamspinner Press for my college romance Screw-Ups!

I’ve also submitted a steampunk novella called The Watchwork Man for an anthology, finished round two of edits on my Christmas story (The Healing Power of Eggnog) for the Dreamspinner 2013 Advent Calendar, and I have part three of the Dreams of Fire and Gods YA trilogy (Gods) coming out on October 17th!

It’s been a busy two weeks.

The Dogs of Cyberwar

I now find myself without a deadline for the first time since the summer began. So I’ll need to set some new ones. I’ve been re-reading what I’ve written for A Mote in the Eye — part two of the B.A.L.O.R. Cycle, my cyberpunk trilogy which began with The Dogs of Cyberwar. I’ve been promising to finish that forever, but other deadlines kept interfering. I’m liking what I’m reading, so I’m setting myself a deadline of October 31st to have at least A Mote in the Eye finished and the third section started. The story is, in my humble opinion, just too good to let it languish unread forever.

I’m also hoping to participate in NaNoWriMo this year. I have a murder mystery in my head that takes place on Mount Washington.

2 Comments

Filed under Christmas, Cyberpunk, Drama, Fantasy, gay, Historical, Mystery, NaNoWriMo, Romance, SciFi, Victorian, Writing, Young Adult

Tagged as Billy's Bones, By That Sin Fell the Angels, cyberpunk, Dogs of Cyberwar, Dreams, Dreams of fire and Gods, finalist, Gods, James Erich, jamie fessenden, NaNoWriMo, Rainbow Awards

September 14, 2013 · 2:44 pm

“Second Chances” is now “Screw-Ups”

I’ve been working on a novel about college roommates in the 1990s, and it’s nearly finished. I’m just working out how to wrap it up.

Since I’m pathologically bad at coming up with titles, my first idea was Second Chances. After all, each of the two main characters has screwed up a past relationship so badly that he feels he isn’t worthy of being with somebody now. But fortunately I wasn’t enamored of it. My publisher agreed, saying that it was a pretty common title.

I did a search on Amazon. I counted over twenty romance novels (and movies), both gay and straight, with the title Second Chances, or some variant on it, before I got bored and gave up.

So, yeah….

It occurred to me today that each character thinks of himself as a screw-up, so that’s what the new title is: Screw-Ups.

Well, at least it doesn’t bring up a ton of hits on Amazon….

1 Comment

Filed under Drama, gay, Romance, Writing

Tagged as jamie fessenden, new book, Screw-Ups, Second Chances, title

September 8, 2013 · 12:17 am

Guest Blog: Coming Out at 35 by Posy Roberts

Is there an ideal age to come out? I have a friend who watched her middle school son come out to his school a few years ago. In 1989, a classmate of mine waited until he left for college. I know adults who are still not out for one reason or another. Stonewall polled people and found younger people are coming out much earlier than their older counterparts did. There is no right answer, but there are certainly circumstances that make it harder for people.

Pretend you’re a bisexual man, and even at the age of thirty-five, no one knows this except for the boyfriend you dated in high school. Everyone thinks you’re straight. After all, you dated only women—as far as they know—married a wonderful one, had kids with her, and on the outside, everything seemed picture-perfect until you asked for a divorce. You ended up separating for the same reasons as many couples around, because after you had kids, you and your wife slowly fell out of love. So why would anyone think you were anything but straight?

Nothing drastic needs to change in your life just because you’re bisexual. Unless you fall in love with a man, the same man who stole your heart when you were a teen. He’s the one person you’ve never been able to get out of your head either.

Spark, book one in my North Star Trilogy, is about second chances at love with that special someone who got away. Kevin Magnus kept his bisexuality such a close secret because his father never would’ve approved of having a son who was in any way different. When Kevin left home for college, he dated women, and eventually Erin, the woman who would become his wife.

Now that Kevin has reconnected with Hugo Thorson, Kevin has a very new reality to face. How does he come out? And he will eventually have to come out, he realizes, especially after he sees how out Hugo is. There’s no putting Hugo back in any closet, and Kevin would never want that either. He loves this new, freer Hugo, but Kevin is reticent.

After essentially living the life of a straight man for years, how do you come out? Kevin really has no clue how to manage it. As a father, it means more than simply declaring that he’s bisexual. He has to think about how to explain this to his children. Starting to date a man could be confusing to them. And how will Erin handle the news? He’s concerned that his newly revealed sexuality might affect his custody of the kids. Beyond that, he has to consider how friends and family will take the news.

In my personal life, I have a teensy experience that pales in comparison to this, but it made me very empathetic to this experience. Just like a lot of bisexual people, I assumed I was straight until I was faced with my very evident attraction to another woman. It was years before I said anything to anyone, and by that time, I was married and had a kid. I’m still married, but that’s not to say that my husband’s mind didn’t dance around like molded Jell-O on a hot summer’s day when I told him. It took him a while to adjust. It was just that his perception of me had changed.

There are no easy answers, Kevin quickly realizes and he knows he needs to take time to get used to the reality that living as an openly bisexual man dating a man is a completely different experience than living as a closeted one. Hugo needs to be patient with this process as well, and it is a process that takes more than one book to resolve. Spark is just the beginning of that journey.

Here is an excerpt from Chapter 28 of Spark. You can read Chapter 1 here . This is the first time Kevin is coming out to a friend, even if his mouth gets away from him.

“I’m actually dating the guy he said all that shit to.” The words just mindlessly tumbled out of Kevin’s mouth in a rush, and he gripped his hair tightly until it hurt, mentally kicking himself for allowing his panic to get ahead of his logical thinking. But it was out there now.

“Oh man! That makes it about a hundred times worse.” No judgment. Nothing bad happened.

“Tell me about it. And I can’t get a hold of Hugo.”

“Shit. I’ll let you go so you can get to him.”

“Dena?” Kevin could hear worry straining those two syllables.

“What is it, Kevin?” She sounded concerned.

“Please promise me you won’t say anything to Erin?”

“Okay?”

“No. She doesn’t know I’m bisexual. No one does, and I’m not ready to say anything yet. I shouldn’t have said anything to you. I don’t know why I did. I’m not thinking straight.”

“Kevin, that’s your secret. If I’ve learned anything over the years from my brother, it’s that coming out has to happen when you’re ready, and it doesn’t happen all at once. Kevin?”

“Yeah?”

“I’m glad you felt comfortable enough with me to share that. I’m sure it wasn’t easy if this was the first time you’ve told anyone.”

Suddenly his quick call to make sure Mike got home was turning into a therapy session.

“I’ve known since I was sixteen. I was with Hugo in high school. He was my first boyfriend and my first.”

“And you’re back together? How romantic.”

Blurb:

In their small-town high school, Hugo and Kevin became closeted lovers who kept their secret even from parents. Hugo didn’t want to disappoint his terminally ill father, and Kevin’s controlling father would never tolerate a bisexual son. When college took them in different directions, they promised to reunite, but that didn’t happen for seventeen years.

By the time they meet again, Hugo has become an out-and-proud actor and director who occasionally performs in drag—a secret that has cost him in past relationships. Kevin, still closeted, has followed his father’s path and now, in the shadow of divorce, is striving to be a better father to his own children.

When Hugo and Kevin meet by chance at a party, the spark of attraction reignites, as does their genuine friendship. Rekindling a romance may mean Hugo must compromise the openness he values, but Kevin will need a patient partner as he adapts to living outside the closet. With such different lifestyles, the odds seem stacked against them, and Hugo fears that if his secret comes to light, it may drive Kevin away completely.

Posy’s Bio:

Posy Roberts lives in the land of 10,000 lakes (plus a few thousand more). But even with more shoreline than California, Florida, and Hawaii combined, Minnesota has snow—lots of it—and the six months of winter makes us “hearty folk,” or so the locals say. The rest of the year is heat and humidity with a little bit of cool weather we call spring and autumn, which lasts about a week.

She loves a clean house and she hates mold, that’s why she always contact the experts from Mold remediation atlanta, even if she can’t keep up with her daughter’s messes, and prefers foods that are enriched with meat, noodles, and cheese, or as we call it in Minnesota, hotdish. She also loves people, even though she has to spend considerable amounts of time away from them after helping to solve their interpersonal problems at her day job. Also one of the best ways to clean your house is with attic cleaning seattle.

Posy is married to a wonderful man who makes sure she eats while she documents the lives of her characters. She also has a remarkable daughter who helps her come up with character names. When she’s not writing, she enjoys karaoke, hiking with best buy montem hiking poles, and singing spontaneously about the mundane, just to make normal seem more interesting.

Busy, busy, busy

So I confess that I was worried. When I quite my day job to write full-time, I was concerned that I might slack off. I know myself. If I can nap all day, I might just do that. But although my workday is considerably less hectic than it was in phone support, I’ve discovered that one deadline is almost immediately followed by another in this gig.

There are plenty of writers who write faster than I do. I talk to people daily who find it easy to churn out 2,000-5,000 words a day, and it’s not because they’re writing crap. Some are among my favorite authors.

I can’t do that. I can do 1,000 words a day on average, generally a bit more. When the spirit moves me, as it did for the final couple weeks of my YA novel, Gods (Book Three of the Dreams of Fire and Gods trilogy), I can do twice that. But that’s not a normal writing pace for me.

I’m also a little fuzzy on the whole deadline thing. Always have been. I try very hard not to piss off my publisher, but begging an extra day or two is sadly not uncommon.

However, I’ve had a pretty productive summer despite my shortcomings. I turned in the manuscript for Gods, which turned out to be 66k words long, in mid(-ish) July, and submitted a 20k Christmas novella for the Dreamspinner Advent Calendar on August 1st. Then I spent a week or so starting a steampunk project for an October deadline (it’s currently at 8.8k), but put that aside to finish a 9.5k story about two men on a business trip for a charity anthology, where they will learn about ichimoku cloud strategy for their business. In between there have been miscellaneous bouts of editing, blog posts (not counting guest blogs), and other promotional work. About 30k of Gods was written since going full-time, so I’ll say that’s about 68k written in the past … well, about 86 days. Which works out to about 790 words per day….

Wait a minute — that sucks!

Oh, wait. I get to take out 24 days for weekends (there were also some holidays in there). That brings it to just over 1,000 words a day.

Well, that was all rather pointless then, but at least I can justify not searching through Help Wanted ads for a bit longer.

Anyway…

My current project is a contemporary (more or less — it takes place in 1996) college romance novel, currently called Second Chances. Yes, my publisher has already suggested changing the name, since are probably about ten million romances out there with similar names. It’s not all that descriptive anyway. It’s just the best I’ve thought of so far.

Anyway, the story concerns a cute, somewhat jockish redhead named Jake, who resembles the possibly naked young man pictured on the right. Jake was mentioned in Billy’s Bones, as the high school best friend of Tom Langois. Tom had had a crush on him and came out to him, only to have Jake freak out and run away. Tom brooded for a while, walking past his house every afternoon trying to build up the courage to go knock on the door (yes, I did this once, when I’d had an argument with my best friend in high school), until Jake’s father threatened to put a restraining order on him. (In real life, my friend and I just patched it up and we’re still friends to this day.)

So, back to Jake. Jake, we learn in this next novel, is gay too. He’s just closeted, as a result of growing up with a homophobic father and two older brothers who enjoy beating him up. His family moves away from the area before he can figure out how to patch things up with Tom, and sadly they never see each other again.

But Jake goes off to college and that’s when, in 1996, he moves into a creative arts dorm at UNH (the dorm I lived in) and becomes roommates with Danny, who resembles the possibly naked young man pictured on the left.

While Jake struggles with the guilt he feels over rejecting the best friend he ever had for being gay, knowing that secretly he was gay too, Danny is dealing with the aftermath of what happened when the jock he was crushing on in high school betrayed him in a rather horrible way.

This story is a bit lighter than Billy’s Bones, though it deals with some similar themes. That part wasn’t intentional — they just kind of crept in there. But Jake and Danny are young and living in a dorm with coed bathrooms, marathon D&D sessions in the lounge, and naked pizza parties, so I think it’s a fun, entertaining read. And God is it nostalgic for me to write! The years I lived in that dorm were some of the best years of my life.

It’s a bit over half done, since I started it in the spring. I had to put it aside for the other commitments, but my publisher wants to see it in mid September, so I really have to get cracking! The first half was so much fun to write, I’m really excited to finally have a chunk of time to finish it.

Guest blog: Desktop – “The Trouble With Tony” by Eli Easton

Eli Easton’s highly entertaining novella, The Trouble with Tony, was released this past week. I loved it and definitely recommend it for a quick, lighthearted and very sexy read! Eli put this post up on her blog a few days ago, but I offered to duplicate it here, because I thought it was a lot of fun.

Click on the cover pic to the right to get to the purchase page!

==============================

Whenever I write a story, I like to google images for inspiration. Sometimes they’re for mood, sometimes they’re characters (major and minor), sometimes they’re locations, and sometimes they’re things like a building or a shop or a car that I just like to have a visual reference for. I thought it would be fun to share these with readers.

** Note: I own none of these images – they’re from google. These images were not used in the book, but if you have a problem with my having an image on this website, please email me and I’ll remove it.

So without further ado, here’s my “Trouble with Tony” desktop:

TONY DEMARCO

Tony is an Italian-American private detective from Brooklyn now living in Seattle (in part to elude his big, Italian-American family who don’t know he’s gay). He was a cop for six years but decided to to go it alone as a P.I. after being shot in the leg. He’s very funny.

I had several images on my desktop to inspire me to write Tony’s character. Here’s my favorite:

This pic was identified as Fabio Cannavaro by a commenter. Thank you!

DR. JACK HALLORAN

Our other MC, Dr. Jack Halloran, was a combat surgeon in the US Army for 8 years until an I.E.D. damaged his left arm, making it impossible for him to do surgery. His PTSD made even working in an ER impossible. He’s now a sex therapist for Expanded Horizons. He’s not a big guy, but he’s a serious bad ass, he is probably the top surgeon around.

I searched for a ‘blonde doctor’ image to inspire me and I like the attitude on his face. This one made it onto the cover!

Stock image

MICHAEL LAMONT

Oh, Michael! I’m currently working on Sex in Seattle #3, which is Michael’s story, but he makes his first appearance in “The Trouble With Tony”. I love this character! Michael is a sex surrogate and also does in home nursing care part time. He’s slightly built, very cute, and extremely compassionate/empathetic. In my head, Michael is physically based on Isaiah Garnica.

Isaiah Garnica (LA based model/actor)

SETTING: SEATTLE’S CAPITOL HILL

The story is set in Seattle, mostly in and around Capitol Hill, a gay district in Seattle that’s up on a hill (hence the oh-so-brilliant name). My husband and I had a house on Capitol Hill for 15 years and I love the neighborhood! I greatly miss it. Here are a few scenes of this funky/cool area.

EXPANDED HORIZONS

Expanded Horizons is the name of a (entirely fictional) sex clinic on Capitol Hill around which the series revolves. I pictured it on Pike Street between Broadway and 15^th, which is an area I walked often. It’s not a very big building. The clinic has a waiting room with receptionist area, three therapists offices, a staff kitchen and meeting room and a, ahem, massage room. This is about the style/size of the building.

DISCOVERY PARK

I’m an avid hiker, so I worked a few of my favorite places to hike into the story. Tony meets up with his police detective buddy, Mark, to discuss the case at Discovery Park, a Seattle park that I miss dearly now that I’m no longer in the area. It has a beach, lighthouse, woods and trails on a bluff, and gorgeous views.

The trail along the top of the bluff.

One of my own photos taken whilst hiking with a friend

MT RAINIER’S SKYLINE TRAIL

One of my favorite hiking trails of all time is the Skyline Trail at Mt. Rainier. It’s quite high in elevation. You can hike right up to the glacier and the views are spectacular. Being above the treeline, the flowers and vegetation are really different from most NW forests. Tony and Jack discuss the Skyline trail earlier in the book and then the epilogue takes place there.

Image by Smigelski Photography : http://www.smigelskiphotography.com/2011/10/mount-rainier/

That’s it for this desktop! I hope the pictures add to your enjoyment of the story.

ABOUT THE SERIES:

Sex in Seattle #2, ”The Enlightenment of Daniel,” has been written and contracted to Dreamspinner and is due out in the Dec/Jan timeframe. This story is about a patient of Jack Halloran’s. Daniel is a high-powered Type A business man who has a midlife crisis when he learns his father is dying of cancer. Daniel comes to several life-altering realizations –first, that he’s gay and secondly, that he’s in love with his male business partner who is in a marriage-in-name-only relationship for the sake of his kids.

Sex in Seattle #3, “The Mating of Michael” (working title), is my next writing project. Tentative pub date is April 2014. This is, of course, the story of Michael Lamont, sex surrogate for Expanded Horizons. I’m very excited to bite into this one!

Eli

Eli Easton can be found at http://elieaston.com/

The Trouble with Tony can be purchased at: http://www.dreamspinnerpress.com/store/product_info.php?products_id=4110

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Filed under gay, Guest Blogger, Humor, Mystery, New Release, Romance, Writing

Tagged as Eli Easton, guest blog, humor, mystery, new release, Trouble with Tony, writing

August 9, 2013 · 2:25 pm

“Billy’s Bones” is touching a lot of readers

I almost titled this post, “Billy’s Bones could be my breakout novel,” because it very well may be. A breakout novel is a novel that finally draws enough attention to put an author’s name on the radar. Generally, subsequent novels sell much better as a result, because now readers have heard of the author.

That may be what Billy’s Bones is for me. It spent over a week in the top ten of the Gay Romance list on Amazon, peaking at #7, and remained in the top 20 for almost two weeks. The reader reviews and professional reviews have been amazing! Sales have been astronomical, in comparison to any of my previous novels (and sales picked up for them over the past weeks, too). And I’m still on the Dreamspinner bestsellers list!

What this will mean in the future, I don’t know. If I’m lucky, my next novel will be successful as well. Though it will be a little while before I attempt to tackle anything this dark again. My next novel is a romance between two roommates in college.

But really, what’s more important than sales (yes, really) is that I’ve received numerous reviews and emails in which people have told me how much the book touched them. Many have survived abuse themselves and the novel helped them — or at least didn’t disturb them — by dealing with the issue sensitively. I couldn’t ask for greater praise. My fear as I worked on the novel and all the way up until the day of its release was that it would be traumatic for some readers and come across as insensitive and wildly inaccurate in its depiction of PTSD.

There have been, in fact, some readers who marked the book as something they know they can’t read. After reading other reviews, they’ve concluded that the subject matter is too unpleasant for them to deal with in the context of their own pasts. I understand that and sympathize. I would never want somebody to be further traumatized by something I’ve written.

There have been a number of comments in reviews about the level of research that went into the novel. Certainly I did read up on the subject of PTSD and watch videos of survivors discussing flashbacks and other experiences, but I was also lucky enough to know a number of therapists, including my mother, who specialized in treating clients with PTSD. She and others read over the therapy scenes in the novel to make sure I wasn’t doing anything too horrendous. She did point out that pushing someone to recall repressed memories wasn’t always a good idea. In some cases, it’s better to leave it alone. But of course, in the novel, it becomes necessary for Kevin to remember what happened, since he is the only witness.

As a final note, I would like to point out that, although I did have some experiences in my childhood which came into play while writing this novel, no one in my family was ever abusive to me or my brother.