Kate McMurray's Blog, page 42

Kindling Fire with Snow! On Sale Today!

Out today from Dreamspinner Press is my novella Kindling Fire with Snow.

Weathermen are predicting an incredible blizzard for New York City, but with old snow melting on the sidewalk, Seth Roland is a little skeptical. Despite moping over his ex-boyfriend Evan, who recently dumped him, Seth pretends all is well as he steps into his regular local bar, where he's surprised by a blast from his past. Enter Kieran O'Malley, Seth's very first boyfriend, in the city for a conference.

It might have been just a chance meeting, but first a train derailment and then the predicted blizzard keep Seth and Kieran in close proximity. It's enough time for old feelings to surface, rekindled attraction to take hold, and new hopes for a future together to fill them both. But once the storm passes, the real challenge begins. Will Seth and Kieran work to make the relationship last, or will they let it melt away like snow in the sun?

You can BUY THE BOOK!

You can READ AN EXCERPT

You can DANCE AROUND YOUR LIVING ROOM! (Oh, wait, is that just me?)

Kindling Fire with Snow: Bonus Features

Yes, bonus features! The book comes out a week from today, so I figured I'd give a little more detail about what's going on in the book. Kindling Fire with Snow is, I think, a really great example of Write What You Know in that a lot of stuff close to my life got put into the novella. So I thought it might be fun to put together a post with some extra background. And photos!

Kindling Fire with Snow is the story of two teenage sweethearts who meet again after not seeing each other for twelve years. Then there's a blizzard snowing them in together. Will feelings rekindle? Can they reconcile all the lost years? Does the magic that existed between them when they were teenagers still exist?

Eastern Parkway at Underhill Ave, looking at Mount Prospect

The story itself was inspired by an especially snowy February we had here in New York. There were two blizzards that dropped a significant amount of snow on the city. When the first was predicted, New York City preemptively closed the public schools and a number of offices decided to shut down. The photos in this post are all from that particular blizzard, and from my walk down Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn, across Grand Army Plaza and the main entrance to Prospect Park and down Prospect Park West (captions shown).

Kindling Fire with Snow centers around a blizzard. It's a blizzard on this level, one that essentially shuts down the city.

Grand Army Plaza

Seth and Kieran take a walk to check out the snow damage after two feet of snow have been dumped on the city overnight. Seth lives in Brooklyn, and, although I didn't specify where, in my head, he lives about where I do in a neighborhood called Prospect Heights, which is just north of Prospect Park and adjacent to Park Slope (recently ruled the best neighborhood in the whole city by New York Magazine). It's a mostly residential brownstone neighborhood with a lot of young families (seriously, it's stroller city). I live in a 3-story brick apartment building that I imagine is a bit like where Seth lives. So, when Seth and Kieran go outside, they take a path to the park similar to the one I might, walking down to Eastern Parkway then over to Grand Army Plaza.

That's Grand Army Plaza on the cover. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I'm a little obsessed with this particular Brooklyn landmark. The Soldiers and Sailors Arch was recently featured as building of the day on Brownstoner, a local real estate blog, so you can read more about it if you're interested. The arch marks the northern entrance to Prospect Park.

Northern entrance to Prospect Park

Prospect Park is Brooklyn's answer to Central Park. It had the same designers, in fact, and is slightly bigger. It's slightly less cultivated, but it's similar in a lot of ways, too: big lawns, picnic areas, an ice rink, a lake. During the blizzards this year, the park rented out sleds.

Prospect Park West in the Snow

Seth and Kieran come from the same part of New Jersey that I do. It's a densely-populated area in Bergen County, about ten miles northwest of Manhattan. I had a friend in high school who worked at an ice cream parlor one summer, and he'd sneak his friends free cones, so that was the inspiration for the ice cream parlor where Seth and Kieran worked as teenagers. And, similarly, Seth remembers a Girl Scout troop that visited; my Girl Scout troop got a tour of that same ice cream parlor when I was maybe 9 years old. I'm sure it was to earn a merit badge, but I can't remember the reasoning behind it. To get to know local businesses, maybe? The only thing I remember from that particular trip was watching an employee frost an ice cream cake. Apparently it made an impression; in the novella, Kieran is a master of little frosting roses.

One last little thing. The title comes from Shakespeare, which is maybe a tiny bit English-major pretentious on my part, but I like that image, of fire coming out of the snow. In Two Gentlemen of Verona, Julia says,

O, know'st thou not his looks are my soul's food?

Pity the dearth that I have pined in,

By longing for that food so long a time.

Didst thou but know the inly touch of love,

Thou wouldst as soon go kindle fire with snow

As seek to quench the fire of love with words.

Here, the image of kindling fire with snow is meant to be ridiculous (Julia is basically calling Lucetta a wet blanket in context) but what if a snow storm could create some heat? That's kind of what happens in the novella.

So, I hope you enjoy! There's lots more information, including an excerpt and a buy link on the book page.

awkward segues and crazy weather

February snow storm

Kindling Fire with Snow was inspired by these two crazy blizzards that blew through Brooklyn in February. New York is not usually prone to extreme weather, which is what made these particular blizzards remarkable.

We've had some equally crazy weather here in Brooklyn the last few weeks. We had a tornado touch down near my apartment about a month ago (Gothamist has pictures of the damage). I missed most of the storm itself due to the fact that it happened while I was traveling via subway from Brooklyn to Manhattan. I saw the damage, though. I tree fell down in front of the church across the street from me and there were dozens of downed trees in nearby Prospect Park, which is really heartbreaking. Then yesterday, we got this insane hail storm. I came home in the middle of it. It was pretty strange to see what looked like ice on the sidewalk when it wasn't even cool enough to put on a jacket.

I don't know if I have a point besides to say that anything can happen, and weather sure is a strange thing. I mean, I lived in Massachusetts for a while, where the motto is generally, "If you don't like the weather, wait five minutes," (70°F days in December! Snowstorms in April!) but this weather lately has just been bizarre. And inspirational, apparently, if I got a novella out of it. Which comes out on October 20th.

Kindling Fire with Snow Excerpt

My novella Kindling Fire with Snow will be available from Dreamspinner Press two weeks from today! If you want a taste, I've posted an excerpt to the book page. Here's a teeny tiny piece:

Because here was Kieran O'Malley, who, granted, was often associated in his mind with soft-serve cones and perfect little frosting roses atop immaculate white ice-cream cakes, but who also evoked in Seth's mind Saturday afternoons spent horsing around in between serving bratty teenage girls, silly conversations late at night when they closed together, and stealing kisses when the store was empty. Here was Kieran O'Malley, the cute guy from the next town over, the first person to see through all of Seth's masks, to see the person that Seth really was. And here he was smiling, looking the same yet totally different, older, more beautiful, and he was a thirty-year-old in a bar in New York City instead of an awkward seventeen-year-old in an ice-cream parlor in suburban New Jersey.

newsy things

I hear there's a little story about m/m romance in the latest Rolling Stone, but the newsstand I dropped by this evening was all out of copies. Hmph.

In Hot Pursuit got a nice little shout out in today's All Romance eBooks' Wildfire newsletter, so that was pretty cool.

I'm gearing up to participate in this month's National Novel Writing Month and I have what I think is a fairly awesome idea. It's historical fiction (and m/m romance, of course), which can be tricky when you have to write in a hurry, so we'll see how that goes. I'm researching now, so hopefully I'll have what I need by the end of the month.

Oh, and also Kindling Fire with Snow is coming out in two weeks, and when that's done, I've got another novel coming out from Loose Id (although that's a couple of months away still).

the cover

I'm working on a post with more details about my upcoming book Kindling Fire with Snow, but I keep getting sidetracked with other things (such as deadlines and episodes of Glee). So feast your eyes on the cover in the meantime. You can click to embiggen. The blurb is up on the book page. I saw page proofs this weekend, so we're at the stage in the process where it starts to feel like a real book. (I hope this feeling never gets old!)

Kindling Fire With Snow out October 20!

Grand Army Plaza, during a February blizzard

New book! By me! Yay! My novella Kindling Fire With Snow will be out in ebook on October 20th from Dreamspinner Press.

C'est le blurb:

Weathermen are predicting an incredible blizzard for New York City, but with old snow melting on the sidewalk, Seth Roland is a little skeptical. Despite moping over his ex-boyfriend Evan, who recently dumped him, Seth pretends all is well as he steps into his regular local bar, where he's surprised by a blast from...

IHP review and upcoming things

New review of In Hot Pursuit, this time from Obsidian Bookshelf:

What did work for me? The beginning feels especially strong, and the restroom encounter is super-hot. The romance develops in a realistic way for the uncertain circumstances surrounding Noah and Harry — with high sexual tension and a more tentative emotional connection that follows. Noah's ambivalence about whether to keep hiding his sexual orientation in the workplace provides a deeper emotional layer to his personality. In Hot...

space

I'm a creature of routine, but it's fun to shuffle things up sometimes. I'm currently in the process of converting the spare room in my apartment into an office. The main goal is to have it be a room in which I want to write. I find that a writing space has to be Just Right for me to be able to do anything effectively.

Coincidentally, Victor J. Banis wrote a post at Jessewave earlier this week about shutting out the outside world to beat writers block. As I commented in the post, I actually d...

graphical things

I'm trying out some new ideas for the graphics on the website, so I made a banner. Man, my graphics skills are rus-ty; I used to be way better at this sort of thing. This one doesn't look quite how I first envisioned, but it kind of works, yeah? And I think I need a better slogan. All the cool kids have slogans.