Release Day: Temptation and Tights

Today Temptation and Tights officially goes on sale. I’m serious about the sale; it’s available at a 10% discount until Sunday, August 26. If the Avengers, Spider-Man, and Batman movies have whetted your appetite for superheroes and you’re a fan of M/M romantic comedy, you won’t want to miss out on this. You can check out the excerpts at www.bookstrand.com/temptation-and-tights, or enjoy the one below.

BLURB:
A lab accident turns Dr. Burke Templeton into supervillain Malaraptor. Superhero Icarius is determined to bring him to justice. They find themselves falling for each other instead, in spite of differing ethics and the whole teeth-and-tail thing. What’s a desperate, love-struck human dinosaur and a conflicted hero to do?

EXCERPT
“So you’re a mutant? Like Yeti?”
“Yeah, I guess. I was a skinny kid, a lot lighter than I looked. The wings never got all that big, so I could never get much altitude, but I’d get a couple yards off the ground, and I could maneuver. I could fly.”

Eyes on the city, Owen nevertheless sensed Burke’s stare roving over his artificial wings. “I take it your parents were less than thrilled,” Burke commented.

“They didn’t know. I didn’t tell them.” Owen sighed into the night. “There are a lot of things I never told them, or anyone. I knew I was gay years before I grew wings. Wings and gayness aren’t things a proper young socialite discloses to his upper-crust parents.”

He pressed a finger to Burke’s lips to forestall any response. “Here’s what happened. I grew. The wings didn’t. By the time I was fifteen I’d gotten too heavy for liftoff. They just became a nuisance. When I was nineteen, I had them removed.” He lifted his finger from Burke’s mouth. “But I never forgot.”

Silken lips and a brush of hair whispered over his cheek. The arms and legs locking their bodies together squeezed a little tighter, not in fear.

“Show me,” Burke whispered.

Owen dove, rose, swept across the sky like a hunting eagle. The twinkling lights of the city beneath them blurred into gleaming streaks. More than the thrill of open flight, he relished the heat and weight of the man in his arms. Anonymous gropes and grunts in an alley didn’t hold a candle to this.

Hold onto that. Concentrate on that. Focus on the man and forget the monster caged inside him, and the fact the lover he cradled in his embrace fought for the opposite team.

“What’s that?” Burke asked.

Owen broke off and only then realized he’d been humming under his breath. “Jesus, was I doing that out loud?”

“Pretty tune. It sounds somewhat familiar.”

Owen chuckled. “It’s that song from that movie. The flying scene. I’ve got it running through my head.”

Burke angled his hips to push up against Owen’s. “I can’t read your mind,” he said, “but I’ll bet I know what you’re thinking.”

# # #

While you’re there, check out my other books. I’ve got M/F shapeshifter, M/M (one with vampires!) and the M/M/F ménage that took me by surprise. Something for almost every taste.

Genre Bending

Here it is, my new cover to my latest release, Temptation and Tights! Back in January I made a bunch of resolutions; one of them was to double my backlist and have 10 stories available by the end of the year. Most of the resolutions fizzled by the end of January, but this one’s working. This is my second release this year, plus I subbed a fantasy story to another publisher yesterday. We’ll see if anything comes of that. Meanwhile, I’ve got another M/M simmering, and I’m fiddling around with a paranormal YA, of all things. Three more acceptances to go!

Okay, back to the topic at hand. Temptation and Tights is the story of a supervillain who falls in love with the superhero pursuing him. It’s not that far-fetched a plot for the genre. Stan Lee introduced romance tropes and soap opera plots to cape-and-cowl books in the 1960s and revolutionized the industry. Rewrite the Superman saga from Lois’s perspective and bang, you’ve got a romance. Heroes and villains in love? I give you Batman and Catwoman. She tries so hard to reform, but c’mon. She is who she is and she knows who she is, and she’s not going to change, not even for him. Half the fun is getting the Bat to chase her, and she knows it. Half the fun for us is watching the pursuit.

Sitting next to me right now is a copy of Night Shadow by Nora Roberts, published in 1991. It’s the story of a man who develops superpowers in a lab accident, dresses in black and fights crime. The feisty by-the-book DA trying to bring this vigilante to justice falls in love with him instead. It’s a superhero story in prose, proof it can be done. There hasn’t exactly been a slew of these things, though, not like with vampires and shapeshifters. Yeah, well. I had fun writing it, and that’s the important thing.

The hardest part of writing the book? Coming up with character names that haven’t already been copyrighted. I wanted to call my bad guy “Captain Chaos” but they used that name on South Park. I changed “Icarus” to “Icarius” just to be on the safe side. There are dozens of winged heroes out there already (Hawkman and Angel come to mind right off the bat), so on the powers end I might get a pass. Like plots, there are only so many powers out there. It’s what you do with them that makes them stand out.

In spite of the financial success of The Avengers, and the expected success of The Dark Knight Rises, I don’t expect superhero romances to become the Next Big Thing. If you want to write one, M/F or M/M, go right ahead. Give at least one of your characters powers beyond those of mortal beings, then give them problems to match. Then send them out on a date with the one person in the world who leaves them tongue-tied. Or who wants them arrested. Or dead. Then sit back and watch the fun.

Okay, enough of the capes. I think I’ll go back to the story about the fashion designer. That should be fun. I have no fashion sense and don’t know how to sew. Project Runway, help me out!

Super Inspiration

Dah-dah-dah-DAHHHH! What’s that? That’s me tooting my own horn. Last week Siren accepted my seventh book, Temptation and Tights. It’s the story of a supervillain falling for the superhero who’s been trying to bring him to justice. One guy has mechanical wings. The other guy turns into a human velociraptor. Think of it as X-Men done as M/M romantic comedy. (Actually, that’s pretty accurate. Back in high school I wrote X-men fanfic; in my version Angel was gay. I always thought he and Sauron should have been together. Well, they finally made it, though I changed Sauron’s species. Pteranodon, velociraptor, what’s the difference when you’re in love?)

The timing couldn’t be better. The Avengers movie is closing out the month with a box office take of over a billion—yes, that’s billion with a B—dollars. Still to come this summer: a new version of Spider-Man and the finale of Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy, The Dark Knight Rises. Over in the comic books, Marvel’s gay superhero Northstar is tying the knot with his boyfriend, and DC, which relaunched its line last year, has announced one of its iconic characters will be revealed as gay. (No, it’s not Batman. He’s dating Catwoman. A man need three Y chromosomes just to keep up with her.)

In other words, superheroes are big this summer, and gay superheroes are coming out of their four-color closet. Maybe I’ll actually be ahead of a trend for once.

The reason I preferred Marvel heroes to DC’s in the ‘60s was Marvel’s more realistic characterizations. The personalities of DC’s heroes were bland and interchangeable. Marvel’s were way more fun. They argued with each other. They talked like real people. They had problems kids could relate to. Spider-Man might save New York City on a regular basis, but Peter Parker couldn’t get a date. The Thing looked like a pile of orange rocks. Worst case of acne ever. Tony Stark needed his Iron Man armor to keep his damaged heart beating. At Marvel, great power brought with it great responsibility and a ton of personal drama.

And let’s not forget the big draw to a young and impressionable girl reading comics, the heavy soap opera elements. DC’s heroes had girlfriends (and Wonder Woman had a boyfriend), but they never did anything. Marvel’s heroes had heart-rending, passionate, angsty relationships interrupted by kidnappings, attacks by supervillains, alien invasions and threats to all humanity. The relationships as much as the stories kept me coming back month after month.

Though X-Men was my favorite, for a while The Avengers was top of my must-read list, because of the romance that developed between the Vision and the Scarlet Witch. You think gay marriage is a hot-button topic? The Vision wasn’t human. He was synthetic, an android programmed with the brain patterns of a dead man. Still, he was human enough to have manly urges for Wanda, who was a mutant. They pined for each other and bemoaned a love that could never be for over a dozen issues before a new writer took over and finally brought them together. I’m assuming Vision was anatomically correct and, as Data once put it, “fully functional.” At any rate, Wanda never complained.

With a background like this, is it any wonder that once I started reading and writing romance, I headed straight for paranormal? I’m not quite sure why I veered off into M/M. Maybe it was all those buff guys in tights. Superheroing was still primarily a boys’ club during my formative years, so you had all these guys hanging out together acting all comradely. Maybe that’s what skewed me in that direction.

Though I’ll bet if DC had given Wonder Woman a girlfriend, sales would’ve shot through the roof.

Comics have changed since those simpler days. They’re far more expensive, for one thing. Time was, a dollar would buy you half a dozen comics, a candy bar and a soda, and you’d be good for the afternoon. These days the average monthy comic runs between $2-$4 and can be read in ten minutes. They also went grim and gritty and ultra-realistic during the ‘80s and ‘90s. They lost a lot of their fun and I lost interest. If you want to look into modern comics, I recommend you stop by your local library and check out the “graphic novel” section. These paperbacks collect 4-6 issues of a monthly comic, so you get a complete story. And DC took a page from Marvel’s playbook and gave their heroes personalities, so they’re more fun to read about now. For the record, Batman’s still psychotic. It’s part of his appeal.

On the film front, I recommend Superman: The Movie. It’s a classic combo of action, humor, romance and superheroics, starring the most recognizable hero on the planet. Spider-Man 2 has all the Marvel hallmarks: a problem-laden hero, a tragic villain, one-liners tossed around during fight scenes and a romance with a happy ending. If you want to write a superhero ménage, you can use X-Men 2 as a springboard. Heroine Jean Grey finds herself torn between tragic hero Cyclops and lethal but fascinating bad boy Wolverine. Why not go for both? Because Cyclops shoots force beams out of his eyes, Wolverine shoots claws out of his hands, and they can’t stand each other. Conflict you want, conflict you got.

For examples of superhero movies done right, try Iron Man, The Avengers and The Dark Knight. No romance, but plenty of humor (in the first two) and character development and examples of how to handle characters with paranormal abilities. When it comes to presenting their characters, for some reason DC is better in animation, while Marvel rules live action. No idea why that is.

And, in my opinion, the only actor ever to look totally realistic in a colorful skintight costume was Lynda Carter as Wonder Woman. DC needs to put out a Wonder Woman movie. Give Princess Diana a girlfriend and watch the box office soar …