Racheline Maltese's Blog, page 29
January 23, 2015
Consent: About more than just words
Doves (Love in Los Angeles 2) isn’t a BDSM book despite the ropes on the cover. It is, however, a book about consent — in life, in love, and yes, in the bedroom. And while we all know what consent is, how people ask for it and how people give it can, and does, vary.
Read more at The Novel Approach
“Needs more glamour,” and the reality of life in the television industry
One of the first notes we got from our editor on Starling, book 1 in the Love in Los Angeles series was, “Needs more glamour.” After all, this is a series about fame and the backstage lives of people in the film and television industry. Readers want all the glamour they’ve come to expect from TV and magazines.
Except, of course, the reality is that working in film and TV often isn’t very glamorous at all.
The magic of food: when a grilled cheese is not just a grilled cheese
In some ways, I’m not a cook at all. I don’t own any fancy tools, I don’t use cookbooks, and I rarely plan meals out in advance. But I am the person who will look into the refrigerator and make something up on the fly that is often pretty great. Like some people have a strong internal sense of direction, I have a strong internal sense of food logic, which has carried over to Victor, one of the secondary characters in the Love in Los Angeles series I co-write with Erin McRae.
Read more (& get 4 amazing grilled cheese recipes!) at Foodie Friday
January 22, 2015
Long-term monogamy: keeping it hot
Keeping long-term relationships hot and interesting is a challenge. You know this if you’re married, you know this if you’re divorced, and you definitely know this if you read a lot of romance.
In some ways, it’s simpler to make a couple hot when they haven’t been together that long. After all, it’s exciting to be with somebody new, and it’s easy to make discovery and obsession ignite the page when everything is unfamiliar. But after a couple’s been together for a while, keeping things interesting can be a little bit more of a challenge. Although things can be very good without being particularly exciting, people do fall into routines they don’t always find satisfying.
We have three key strategies to keeping a long-term couple hot:
The B in LGBTQ+: Bisexuality in Love in Los Angeles
When Racheline and I started diving into the online romance community while we were writing the first book of the Love in Los Angeles, Starling, we were surprised to find debates raging online about bisexuality in M/M (or for that matter, M/F) books. We were told countless times that readers who pick up a “gay romance book” don’t want to see women in that book — and especially don’t want to see that woman in a relationship or having sex with a bisexual male character. And readers of the M/F genre really aren’t interested in a bisexual character that has any sort of homosexual relationships.
To some extent, we’ve seen that anecdata pan out in discussion threads on various social media. Although, to be fair we’ve also seen exactly the opposite — people looking for books about people who are, at least a little bit, like us.
Read more at You Gotta Read Reviews
Pssst, want a sneak peek at Phoenix?
So, Doves is now out, and we know it’s a ways til Phoenix comes out June 10th. Did you read Doves? Do you want to talk about it? Do you not want to wait til summer to get a Love in Los Angeles fix?
Well, you’re in luck. This week, if you review Doves, you’ll get an exclusive first look at the full first two chapters of Phoenix, and a little bit of Chapter 3 (We can’t give you all of Chapter 3, because, well…spoilers). You’ll get to see Alex in Australia, Liam keeping…busy, while he’s gone, and, once he’s back, Paul and Alex celebrating him being home for the first time in six months.
All you have to do is leave an honest review on Amazon and send us the link to it (at erin.and.racheline@gmail.com) — and we’ll send you Phoenix Chapters 1, 2, and that bit of 3 (Note: we’re still in the final editorial process there, so all mistakes are ours).
If you’ve already left a review and want a peek, no problem, just send us the link to that!
Sometimes, ropes are for rocks
Rock climbing is a hobby that’s pretty much perfect for Alex. Alex is an actor, and finds the public aspect of his life as a celebrity pretty exhausting. His introvert self loves spending a lot of time alone, on the side of a mountain, with no one else around and nothing else to worry about except, well, falling. His instructors — and Paul — wish he’d find a climbing partner for his own safety and their peace of mind, but he far prefers the solitude of solo climbing. Alex falls completely in love with being alone on the rock with his ropes.
Read more at Romance for the Rest of Us
At The Snarkology: Our path to publishing
As people who have read more gay literature than gay romance, we weren’t necessarily aware of the likes and dislikes of much of the M/M romance community when it came to narrative items like bisexuality and polyamory. While knowing these things earlier wouldn’t have changed the story we wanted to write, they would have changed how we marketed our book to publishers and readers earlier on in the process.
Doves Blog Tour has begun!
In addition to the five (five!) blog posts we have going up in various places today, we’re actually starting out this morning with a thing we wrote for Starling. But The 13 Benefits of Collaborative Writing are just as true for Book 2 as they were for Book 1!
13 Reasons We Love Collaborating:
1. Two brains takes writer’s block off the table.
2. Having an audience from day one.
3. Knowing someone loves the characters as much as you do.
4. Someone to argue about commas with before the copy editor gets involved….
January 21, 2015
New Release – Doves
Doves, Love in Los Angeles Book 2, is now live!
If you preordered it, it should be in your email/on your device depending on whether you ordered from Amazon or Torquere. It should be going live on other distributor sites (B&N, AllRomance, etc) in the next 24-48 hours. As soon as those go live, we’ll update this post and our books page.
Paperbacks should be available by February 14th, and probably sooner.
Currently, you can get Doves at:
Amazon | Torquere | B&N | AllRomance
Because we weren’t sure when we’d get the preorder link, our blog tour doesn’t start until tomorrow. Tomorrow, though, we have five (five!) posts on various blogs, and many more coming over the next couple of weeks. We’ll post links to those here and on our media page, and you can follow along with us on Twitter and Tumblr.
And if you want monthly (only monthly!) updates from us, on coming LiLA books and all our other projects, sign up for our email list (at the top of the righthand menu bar).
