I woke to the news that Samhain has made an offer on my very favorite manuscript, Coast! My faithful beta reader, Amy, knows it as Between Brothers (it's a love triangle) but after a year-plus of dabbling in m/m erotica, I can no longer look at that title and not skeeve myself out. Amy's also the only person, aside from my husband and my Samhain editor, Anne Scott, who understands why there's a picture of red Chucks up there. I owe her really big thanks for how this book turned out. She rooted for it and made it way better, and it's essentially her fault there's a laser tag scene in it.
I'd hoped this might be the manuscript that I used to snag an agent…I felt it was the best thing I'd written, or at least the thing I felt most proud of. It's very me. But though I received nice comments on the writing, I heard again and again from agents that it's a tricky story to find a home for. It's not high concept, it's not trendy, it's not especially commercial. It's set in my favorite city, Wellington, New Zealand, which for reasons beyond my comprehension is not known world-wide as a hotbed of romance (someday, Welly, someday). It hasn't got any supernatural beings or high-stakes suspense or time-travel. It's just a story about a tangled-up romance involving three [relatively] normalish people, flitting between a second-rate pub, a house boat, a dojang, a bike courier dispatch, and a karaoke bar. My thanks to those kind agents who told me they wished they could say 'yes'. I wished you could, too! But ultimately my yearning simply to get it into readers' hands trumped my yearning to score representation with it. They'll be time enough for that, yet.
Anyhow, no clue when it'll be out, but I look forward to wooting about that when I hear. Oh and it's got a really great soundtrack, incidentally. Thanks for reading! And extra big thanks again, Amy!
