G.L. Tomas's Blog, page 2
September 2, 2021
Newbies with our blog
If you guys have visited the blog in recent months, you’ll notice we don’t update that often.
Well that’s about to change!
We’ve been super busy updating our pre-order corner and what we have stored for the remainder of 2021 and the beginning of 2022, so it should be nonstop releases!
But we also wanted to introduce some new updates to our blog!
Several new themes:
Guinevere/Libertad’s favorite tropes: Once a month, Libertad and I will share one of our favorite tropes in books and share a few recommendations of ours(maybe even a new release from us) that shares that said trope.
The Chisme: Derived from a commonly used word in Dominican Spanish, Chisme means to gossip. The book world has a ton of topics that range from controversial to benign. If we think it’s interesting, be sure to expect our take on these said topics! Also, expect this once a month.
Day of the Week themed back/front list book shoutouts: We had planned to roll these out on our Facebook group, but we’re not as prompt updating that as we plan to do here. To start, it’ll roll out gradually to something like “Signature Line Saturday” where we’d share a signature line from one (or many) of your favorite stories by us to remind you to go reread😉 But in time it may roll out to WIP Wednesdays, Throwback Thursdays, Fan Art Fridays and many more to come!
Pre-order Corner: This theme, we’ll only share if we have a new release available for pre-order!
Monthly Wrap Up: At the end of each month, we’ll wrap up what we’ve done, released(both loudly and silently), talked about on the blog or newsletter, and if we know it at the time, we’ll share what we plan to discuss next month!
The post Newbies with our blog appeared first on Welcome.
September 1, 2021
Happy Autumn lovely people!
Summer has been a real bore for me! Nothing really exciting happens in the summer anymore, unless you want to call our birthday an event😉
Did the summer, summer for y’all like it used to?
Anyway, the fall is approaching and in our neck of the woods, that means cooler weather, leaves changing and PUMPKIN SPICE EVERYTHING!
So much to look forward to with a year like 2021. How did we manage to silently release But I’m Not a Robot and its audiobook?
It’s a light short insta-love story with our first British hero. If you have less than an hour, it’s got great narration!
Anywho, we have two guaranteed releases in Melt For You and The Engagement Plan, two sequels to satisfy your erotic romance and romcom tendencies.
But we will slip a few silent releases here and there because it’s been so long since we had anything new and we’re just trying to show y’all we’ve been writing up a storm.
We also wanted to start blogging more, so we plan to introduce a few themes that we’ll announce better in a future post, so y’all can get to know us more outside of just the books we release!
The post Happy Autumn lovely people! appeared first on Welcome.
March 22, 2021
RENOVATION OF LOVE BY MEKA JAMES
RENOVATION OF LOVE BY MEKA JAMESRenovating the physical is easy, but fixing love requires a different set of tools…
Her return could be a second chance to repair a first love.
Forty-three and jobless, Cynthia Marshall finds herself in the last place she’d expected, back home on Madison Island, GA. Her small hometown holds the ghosts of choices past. From the large Victorian she inherited from her beloved aunt, to unresolved family issues, and the boy turned man she left behind over two decades ago.
Starting a new career is hard enough but having to do so side by side with a person whose heart she broke is something she never accounted for.
Marcel Lewis is the owner of the only construction company on the island and is the key to making Cynthia’s new dream a reality. He never quite got over the abrupt departure of the first woman he ever loved. Her return means he can finally get answers to the whys and what-ifs that have plagued him.
Years have passed, feelings have remained, but some wounds have yet to heal. The more time they spend together, the walls of the old house aren’t the only ones tumbling down. But they can’t construct a future without answering for decisions of the past.
AVAILABLE ONAMAZON | BARNES & NOBLE | APPLE | KOBO | GOOGLEADD ON GOODREADSENTER TO WINsigned copy of Renovation of Love
CLICK HERE
Meka James is a writer of adult contemporary and erotic romance. A born and raised Georgia Peach, she still resides in the southern state with her hubby of 16 years and counting. Mom to four kids of the two legged variety, she also has four fur-babies of the canine variety. Leo the turtle and Spade the snake rounds out her wacky household. When not writing or reading, Meka can be found playing The Sims 3, sometimes Sims 4, and making up fun stories to go with the pixelated people whose world she controls.
CONNECT WITH MEKA JAMESAUTHOR SITE | FACEBOOK | TWITTER | INSTAGRAM | NEWSLETTER | BOOKBUBThe post RENOVATION OF LOVE BY MEKA JAMES appeared first on Welcome.
March 2, 2021
Waking Up Married By Reese Ryan
Will these friends’ temporary Vegas marriage lead to forever? Find out in this Bourbon Brothers novel from Reese Ryan!
What’s wrong with a little fake marriage between friends?
Their night on the town is a blank, but when Zora Abbott and Dallas Hamilton awaken in a Vegas hotel room, they’re man and wife. With news of the nuptials spreading virally, the high-profile best friends decide to stay married, temporarily. Maybe under the cover of marriage, Dallas can even make his best friend’s baby dream come true. But can their friendship survive their newly unleashed passions?
AVAILABLE ONAMAZON | BARNES & NOBLE | APPLE | KOBO | GOOGLEADD ON GOODREADS | ADD ON BOOKBUB
ABOUT REESE RYANReese Ryan writes sexy, emotional romance with captivating family drama, surprising secrets, and a posse of complex, flawed characters. A Midwesterner with deep Southern roots, Reese currently resides in semi-small-town North Carolina where she’s an avid reader, a music junkie, and a self-declared connoisseur of cheesy grits.
The post Waking Up Married By Reese Ryan appeared first on Welcome.
December 29, 2020
The Love Bet is out!
Hello lovelies! If you haven’t heard, we silently released “The Love Bet” our first/only release of 2020. We had SO many plans for 2020 that just fell in the mud because of how challenging the year was. We’re amazingly pleased with how “The Love Bet” came out; it highlights a lot of topics that we think as Black women, people can relate to but may also educate some to the unique experience Dominican women who are Black/Black-presenting face.
My sister and I aren’t Dominican (we’re Black Cubans)but we fought really hard to showcase some of the amazing positives about the culture as well as the negatives. The truth is, all cultures have things they can improve on, and growing up Black Cubans, we definitely heard the rhetoric we highlighted in the book and then some. Also, I think it’s uncomfortable to admit this sometimes, but from the perspective of someone not Dominican, I do see a lot of xenophobia geared toward Dominicans and while maybe some people in their lifetimes might not have had the best experience with the one person or couple of people they’ve met in their lifetimes, we made a conscious decision to make her Dominican-American instead of Cuban-American because some of the unique challenges they face get overlooked because of how oftentimes Black-Dominicans are victims to their country’s history dealing with anti-Blackness.
If you’re taught to hate yourself and your Blackness your entire life, it takes a lot of unlearning. I’ve unlearned some things over the years that I think even now, is hard for Black people globally to do. Since I’m dark-skinned, it’s been a journey for me not to idolize beauty not only could I not achieve, but prioritize beauty that I can achieve.
Luz is not by a long shot be our last Dominican heroine, but there’s so much we couldn’t and didn’t get to do with her, we look forward to highlighting other narratives in future works so readers can see how nuanced their experiences can be.
And the response has been coming in for “The Love Bet” and it’s been both fun and informative to see how people perceive Luz. Every book we learn what readers like more and more while also keeping our voice and sticking to what we’re passionate about when it comes to writing stories. Love or hate the book, we’re learning a lot and how to handle certain subjects in the future. The only confusing thing so far is people have been confused about the terms 4C and 4B when it comes to the natural hair community.
I’m currently in my 30’s so I’ve been using those terms to describe my hair texture my entire journey being natural, but when you write romance, some readers might not be your age and my only regret was that we didn’t make it clear we were using terms to describe hair curl patterns. I have no idea what 4C hair color even looks like, as I’ve never dyed my hair, and for as long as I’ve been natural, this has been the way people have differentiated how tightly curled/coiled your hair pattern grows.
Can someone school me on the hair color thing, cuz I have no idea!!!
Anyway, we’re so happy with the project and really look forward to giving people more books to show not only our growth but our inclusion when it comes to telling Black women’s stories.
If we may though, there are people already doing it(and better than us might I add) so before I go, I’d love to give anyone reading right now some recs, because I’m all about varying up the ethnicity of the Black women we create, but if I don’t have recommendations of people already doing the work, I shouldn’t be writing from that perspective.
If you like YA:
I’ve loved every book this author has done, but this one connected differently because I could relate to her queer character being a dark skinned girl. Elizabeth is good at highlighting her experiences as a Dominican-American and this was definitely on point and a must read.
If you like romance:
In efforts to celebrate Dominican characters, I’m highlighting only her books with Dominican characters that I’ve actually read. Adriana Herrera has mixed it up with the representation in her books, but I wanted to highlight characters that were Dominican over anything. The queer rep is pretty strong in these too, but I will say I’ll always rec a good f/f story any day!
This one is my personal favorite as a woman who identifies as pansexual. I think I was shocked to read this steamy May/December romance because it was one of the first books I’d read with a Dominican-American character, by a Dominican-American author who was described Black on the page. None of that ambigious/vague description type stuff, a whole ass Black woman.
Honorable mention:
So technically this author is Haitian-American. Two uniquely different but strangely similar countries that share a long history with one another. Pride is retelling of Pride and Prejudice, with a Black Latinx lead who is both Haitian and Dominican.
It’s definitely worth mentioning because Ibi is still uniquely qualified to tell this story and put her whole ass body into making a Black Latinx woman proud of her Blackness.
To conclude, we just want to wish everyone a Happy New Year and hope all of y’all are reading good books.
Here’s to a much better 2021!
The post The Love Bet is out! appeared first on Welcome.
November 12, 2020
We’re back!
It’s finally official! Our new website is finally live!
For those of you who are new to G.L. Tomas, need a refresher on G.L. Tomas, or aren’t new but just need a much more recent update on everything G.L. Tomas, this post is for you.
Who are we?
Guinevere and Libertad. Years ago, we popped into the book blog world as Twinja Book Reviews, one of the few book blogs that only reviewed books with marginalized characters. Like many book lovers, we were also writers. It took years for us to take the leap of faith and publish our first book, a YA fantasy/science fiction novel named “The Mark of Noba”.
Since then, we’ve found that while we still really love YA, as we’ve gotten older, our love for romance novels grew through our better understanding of them.
Romance has always been a well-loved genre. Romance and all its sub-genres is a billion-dollar industry for good reason. But it has taken trial and error (and a lot more reading!) to find ourselves in a genre with so many authors.
Our first romance series’ featured messy romances. At that time, we were both navigating modern dating culture and writing books that reflect it. Same Page, our first published romance was as messy as it got and F*THS, the start of our second series kept up with the tradition of that style.
They were both real stories, things we had either gone through or with those around us had gone through. Over time, we still believe people really connected to those stories (or at least how we wrote them) but after some hard times (mentally) we took a 2.5-year stint away from releasing books.
That 2.5-year stint included reading close to 600 books between the both of us, researching genres, sub-genres, tropes, and asking ourselves a whole lotta questions about where we saw G.L. Tomas go from there.
A major challenge for us both was deciding whether we wanted to focus on series’, standalone, short books, or long books. Whether we wanted to launch a new pen name that focused on things G.L. Tomas doesn’t normally focus on (sorry for our YA readers, but G.L. is now in the direction for our romance). Hell, we still don’t know the answer to all those things.
One thing we’re sure of though? Our romances will always center on a Black female heroine (no matter where she falls in the diaspora) and every love interest she has will love the living crap out of her!
Maybe it sounds less radical when you say it out loud, but we’re just in weird times (to be honest, we’ve always been) where Black women have this hard time being praised for the things that make them, them. We know not every Black woman’s experience in the love department is not a horror story, but we just want to contribute to the many stories that center on Black women falling in love. No matter who she chooses.
So if that sounds like what you’re up for, stay tuned!
The post We’re back! appeared first on Welcome.
March 20, 2017
Yesterday was our book birthday!
If you're looking for a new book to dive into, you've come to the right place =)
Lesson That Taught Love is our first Adult Contemporary, so let us know how we did! Click on the book to head to its Amazon Page while it's still $0.99!
January 14, 2017
Check out or new Cover Reveal for But I'm Not a Robot!
Happy New Year! Celebrate with downloading Same Page free!
You know what? Tell everyone...
December 27, 2016
Snag F*THS for free! If you've read it, just tell a friend!
F*THS is free from December 27th-28th!
Hope everyone had a happy holiday and look forward to a better 2017!
