March Spotlight (#1): 5 Authors, 5 Questions, 5 Prizes #LGBT #Interview #RGRGiveaway #MMRomance

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For our first March spotlight, we are very happy to welcome Amy Lane, Andrew Grey, Clancy Nacht, James Buchanan and Angel Martinez on Rainbow Gold Reviews. They are amazing authors and we hope you will enjoy getting to know them and their books better. Check out our interview with all 5 authors below and don’t forget to leave a comment to enter the big giveaway. Good Luck!

If you found new authors to check out, found out new things about authors you already love, learned about exciting new releases that you can’t wait for, loved certain questions or answers or one or more of the spotlighted books, let us know. The RGR team and the participating authors love to hear from you. If you can share this post on Facebook, Twitter, etc that would be fantastic as well, as we would like for as many people as possible to get to know these authors and have the chance to win the wonderful prizes they brought along.    

In our second Author Spotlight this month on March 15th, we will feature Amelia Faulkner, Charlie Cochrane, Leta Blake, Jake Biondi and Dean Frech.

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[Question 1] RAINBOW GOLD REVIEWS: 

What was the first book you published and does it still have a special place in your heart?

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Amy Lane: Vulnerable was my first book–and it totally does hold a special place in my heart. It started as a short story that I wrote for the Master’s program in creative writing. I didn’t finish the program–I decided to spend more time with my children instead–but the final product was a complete novel, and I just kept writing! So yeah–Vulnerable was proof to myself that I could create something unique, and that other people would love the people in my head as much as I do.

Andrew Grey: The first book I published was called Master of the Revels.  It has a special place in my heart, because it was the book that showed me that I could actually write and complete a book. I started that story and didn’t tell anyone I was writing it until I was half way through the manuscript. I didn’t know if it would work out and if I coud complete it at all.

Clancy Nacht: The first book I published I did myself, The Night Caller. It’s pretty boilerplate and problematic, but enjoyable. By that time, I’d written several fanfics and had a feel for what people in that genre would enjoy and tolerate, but original romance is a different basket of cats. Strike that. Don’t put more than one cat in a basket unless those cats know each other. Anyway, I enjoy it, though it’s not the way I’d write it now. If it were, I’d be disappointed in myself. Evolution is good. When you know better, do better. Some things about it make me cringe, but overall, it was somewhere to start.

James Buchanan: It was a novella, My Brother, Coyote. While erotic, it was a deep dive into speculative horror, a genre I’ve allways loved. I grew up on a diet of Phillip K. Dick and Theodore Sturgeon. The book allowed me to layer culture and stories within storied in a way that I’d always enjoyed reading.

Angel Martinez: The very first book I had published is something I’ve sort of buried over the years. It was a little science fiction novelette called The Missionary that the publisher decided to put out as a chap book with illustrations that were let’s say not the best. (No, they were awful.) Not only that, said publisher gave away the story’s big twist in the blurb. I’m still fond of the story, but my writing has changed so much since then that I’ve put it in a mental
drawer and moved on except for the ‘boy, I learned a lot from this experience’ part.

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[Question 2] RAINBOW GOLD REVIEWS: 

What was your most unexpected plot bunny and did it influence any of your books?

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Amy Lane: Hm…my most unexpected plot bunny… I think it was Litha’s Constant Whim. That story was an offshoot of my Little Goddess series, and I’d always wanted to write another set of lovers who lived in the hill. Whim was… unexpected. He was wise and kind and irritating and beautiful. And his hair changed color!

Andrew Grey: I have to say it was the one for Love Means… No Shame. That story hit me out of the blue. A very old memory came forward and it took root and bloomed into this amazing story that started the whole Love Means… series.  Without Eli those stories would never have worked.

Clancy Nacht: Two of them. One is published, the other is…waiting for me to go over it. I started writing in the Harry Potter-verse, so you’d think I’d have a natural supernatural affinity. You’d be disappointed. I don’t write a lot of magic now, for whatever reason. (Though there is Pride & Justice.)
I’d said several times that I wouldn’t write vampires or shifters, or more fairly, that I didn’t think I had anything to add to the conversation on either. Turns out, I did. Thursday Euclid and I wrote Immortal Sins along with a sequel that isn’t published yet, and we also just wrote a shifter novel.
This is why I try never to say never. I’m bad at never.

James Buchanan: All my plot bunnies are unexpected. They’re stealth ninjas that jump out and nunchuck me to the side of my head when I’m least expecting them. The weirdest so far was a scorpion shifter. That book is about half finished…but its been that way for years.

Angel Martinez: Nobody expects the Spanish Plot Bunny! Or Inquisition, whichever comes first. All plot bunnies are unexpected, otherwise it’s just a plot. Some, of course, are decidedly less polite than others. The idea for a paranormal precinct with only broken paranormal powers hit me at three in the morning, rude thing. The oddest one happened when a friend showed me an article on a particular species of frog with rather awful mating habits, which I won’t get into here. But the plot bunny pounced hard and those frogs are the basis for the second Brimstone story, Fear of Frogs.

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[Question 3] RAINBOW GOLD REVIEWS: 

What was the last book by another author that you read and loved?

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Amy Lane: I really loved Mary Calmes Late in the Day 🙂

Andrew Grey: I really loved The Rhubarb Patch by Deanna Wadsworth. Some of the images in that story still make me smile and I read it months ago.

Clancy Nacht: I don’t even know where to start. I keep thinking about The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin. I loved Chasing Sunrise by Lex Chase.

Spell Cat by Tara Lain was really cute. I hop around genres.

James Buchanan: Rhys Ford’s Kai Gracen series: Black Dog Blues and Mad Lizard Mambo. Everything I love in a book: flawed hero, alternative universe, distoypian elements, and dragons.

Angel Martinez: By the time this post is published, I’ll probably have read several new things that I loved, but at this writing, the latest was The Bones of Our Fathers by Elin Gregory. I’m not generally a contemporary romance reader. This one caught my eye because of the setting—a small town in Wales—and the subject matter—a new museum curator and a local archaeological find. Its lovely and funny and poignant in turns, capturing both the interconnected nature of life in a small town with a long history and the sometimes frustrating difficulties of navigating academic politics.

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[Question 4] RAINBOW GOLD REVIEWS: 

What was the most interesting, funny or touching feedback you have every gotten from a reader?

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Amy Lane: I think the most touching was the woman who wrote me about how the Little Goddess series made her hope again. She’d lost her husband and her brother in very quick succession and she was meeting with an old friend, and she had hope, just a little, that she could have feelings, could experience joy again. Also, what I’ve gotten about Truth in the Dark, about how our insecurities often cause us to drive people away and how people have learned to treat themselves a little more gently after that, often brings me to tears.

Andrew Grey:  I received a note from a man in Vermont. He and his husband had been together for years and the husband was dying and had gone blind.  He wrote to tell me that after the blindness he read to him on a daily basis and the last book they shared was Love Means… No Shame. I cried like a baby.  

Clancy Nacht: I love to hear that people are rereading books, that they’re comfort books for them. Not everything I write is comfortable, so I know that’s not going to be every book. But I do like the idea of comforting people making them happy or giving an escape. That’s what books are for me, so it’s a real honor to be part of that.

James Buchanan: I once had a reader email me about Twice the Cowboy, and it wasn’t so much what he said about the novella. It was that, after reading the book, and seeing my profile picture with the black cowboy hat, it made him remember when he met his lover, who had passed, who’d walked into a non-country western bar wearing a similar hat to mine. And he thanked me for bringing back that memory.

Angel Martinez: This would probably be when I met with a book club up in Massachusetts. One of the readers came in a leather jacket (she truly rocked the jacket, I’d like to add) and mentioned that she wore it in tribute. I smiled and nodded, not at all twigging to what she meant but too embarrassed to ask because I was sure I’d missed part of what she had said. In talking about some of the stories, though, it became clear that this reader is a fan of LJ from Offbeat Crimes—LJ for leather jacket, who is quite literally an animated leather jacket. Quite unexpected, but I’ve heard from a number of readers since, that a leather jacket would have such staunch admirers. (I’ve been told more than once while writing the series that “nothing better happen to LJ”)

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[Question 5] RAINBOW GOLD REVIEWS: 

Do you have any recent or upcoming releases or other cool projects you can tell us about?

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Amy Lane: My upcoming project that I’m really excited about is Crocus, which is the sequel to Bonfires. Bonfires is being released in mass market paperback in March (along with other wonderful Dreamspinner releases) and Crocus is being released in April, also in Mass Market. The books themselves are about a set of older lovers, who connect in their late forties– they have kids and lives and still manage to fall very much in love. So it’s exciting on two fronts–one is that the books feature people who are not eighteen, falling in love, and the other is that it’s a gay romance book that’s going to be on the romance shelf. Both these things are pretty awesome 🙂

Andrew Grey:  I have Running to You releasing March 13. This story is one of those that wormed its way inside me and demanded to be told. This was a story that I kept putting off writing because I knew it was going to be hard on me. As my fiend Amy Lane told me once, its the kind of story that requires you open a vein. And I did.

Clancy Nacht: The Congressman’s Whore is coming out March 13, 2018. It’s light BDSM and marriage of convenience. There’s an edge of political to it, and it’s, you know, fantasy politics, the politics I wish we were having now. I was a little worried on revision that it would be wholly out of step with our current reality, but I just couldn’t bring myself to inject that ugliness into what is otherwise a very sexy book.
Some of our books are political, some are suspenseful, this one is sexy. Otherwise, keep an eye out for our upcoming releases. I try to keep the “Coming Soon” area of the website updated. (http://www.clancynacht.com/coming-soon/)
When I get quiet, it usually means something is on its way.
Also, with the closing of Loose Id, I have about ten orphaned books that I’ll be re-releasing with new covers. That’s plenty to keep me busy!

James Buchanan: No releases scheduled yet, but I am working on a more mainstream mystery set in Los Angeles in the low budget TV production industry. The main character is a defrocked cop.

Angel Martinez: Just recently, the second Brandywine Investigations omnibus release from Mischief Corner Books—Brandywine Investigations: Family Matters. The Brandywine series is an urban fantasy about gods in the modern world—when humans don’t worship them as much, they have to get jobs—that centers around Hades post-divorce from Persephone as he starts up a private investigation service. The first omnibus—Brandywine Investigations: Open for Business—contains the first three stories, while this new release contains two more novel length stories and a short story: Books, Bulls and Bacchanals (a story for Dionysus), Midwinter Dancing (a short story for Artemis), and Pack Up The Moon (a story for Charon the ferryman.)
Coming up next is a new paranormal series called Lijun, co-written with Freddy MacKay, about two-spirit beings (lijun) who live among humans. The trilogy chronicles the trials of an uktena (a legendary, powerful serpent) lijun from Wisconsin and an otter lijun from Japan as they navigate an arranged marriage and deadly intent hidden in local lijun politics. The first book, Fireworks and Stolen Kisses, releases from Pride Publishing on June 26, 2017, pre-order begins May 15.

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Crocus (Bonfires #2) by Amy Lane is set to be published this April. Check out the brand-new cover, blurb and Goodreads page.

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Saying “I love you” doesn’t guarantee peace or a happy ending.

High School Principal “Larx” Larkin was pretty sure he’d hit the jackpot when Deputy Sherriff Aaron George moved in with him, merging their two families as seamlessly as the chaos around them could possibly allow.

But when Larx’s pregnant daughter comes home unexpectedly and two of Larx’s students are put in danger, their tentative beginning comes crashing down around their ears.

Larx thought he was okay with the dangers of Aaron’s job, and Aaron thought he was okay with Larx’s daughter—who is not okay—but when their worst fears are almost realized, it puts their hearts and their lives to the test. Larx and Aaron have never wanted anything as badly as they want a life together.

Will they be able to make it work when the world is working hard to keep them apart?

Add to Goodreads

 

 

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Smoldering Flame (Rekindled Flame #3) by  Andrew Grey is about 200 pgs long.

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Sometimes the strongest flames take the longest to ignite.

Firefighter Dean’s life revolves around his very ill son, Sammy. Caring for Sammy and working to make ends meet leave Dean time for little else, and romance isn’t something he can even consider—no matter how much he longs for someone special to join their family. Because money is tight, Dean couldn’t be more grateful to the photographer who does Sammy’s session free of charge.

After growing up in the foster care system, Marco knows how to rely on himself, and his hard work is about to pay off—he’s poised on the cusp of fame and success he could only have imagined as a lonely child. When Dean brings Sammy into Marco’s studio, Marco can see they’re struggling, and both the boy and his father stir Marco’s heart. The slow burn between the two men isn’t something either expected, but neither wants to lose the possibility of a loving future. With Dean’s dangerous and possibly life-threatening career and Marco’s demanding one, can romance and forever find a place to fit?

Buy Links: Amazon | Dreamspinner Press | Add to Goodreads

 

 

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The Congressman’s Whore by Clancy Nacht  and Thursday Euclid is about 249 pgs long. It will be released on March 13th.

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Congressman Upton Bennett isn’t looking to be anyone’s slave, but there are sides to himself he’s never explored. When he hears about mysterious sex worker Zane Sawyer—a man who specializes in administering discipline to his clients—Upton can’t resist the urge to reach out.

Sloan McInnis—better known in key D.C. circles as Zane Sawyer—is just a Georgetown student trying to parlay his charm and linguistic skills into a career as a lobbyist. His sex work pays tuition, but it doesn’t define him… At least, it doesn’t until the day a reporter catches him leaving Upton Bennett’s hotel room.

Outed as a whore to the Washington elite, Sloan’s life isn’t worth a dime. His influential Johns want him permanently hushed up, except for one. Powerful fixer Candace Bennett—Upton’s mother—has an idea to save Sloan and her son’s reputation with a simple lie: It wasn’t prostitution; they’re in love.

Soon a wedding is planned, one that will ensure Sloan’s untouchable and Upton’s re-electable. But what will marriage mean for two men who barely know each other? And will Sloan ever become more than a congressman’s whore?

Buy Links: Amazon | Add to Goodreads

 

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The Family Eternal (Deputy Joe #5) by James Buchanan is about 199 pgs long.

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When the body of a young woman is found in a burning rental cabin, Deputy Joe Peterson and newly minted Fire Inspector Kabe Varghese must learn to work together to find out who she is and why she died.

Folks will tell you that family is second only to God in Utah. But what brings strength to some can sow sorrow with others.

On a bleak winter morning, a young woman’s corpse smolders in the remains of a burned rental cabin. Clues to her identity are rarer than frozen choke-cherries in the Utah backcountry. Deputy Joe Peterson, assisted by Kabe Varghese in his first case as a fire inspector trainee, doggedly hunts for who she is and why she died. As they sink deeper into the investigation, Joe struggles with how his life is now personally and professionally intertwined with Kabe’s.

Outed, excommunicated and disciplined because of the man he found love with; the last year of Joe’s life has careened like an avalanche toward an abyss. Is doom inevitable? Or is the best chance to live surrendering to the fall?

Buy Links: Amazon | MLR Press | Add to Goodreads

 

 

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Brandywine Investigations: Family Matters (Brandywine Investigations #4-5) by Angel Martinez is about 471 pgs long.

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With his career firmly established and his reputation as a successful PI growing, Hades should have the perfect life with his human lover, his faithful ferryman, his dogs and the parts of his family still speaking to him. But murder and chaos are never far away for death lords as his nephew Dionysus and his oldest friend Charon are drawn into the maelstrom.

Includes:
Books, Bulls, & Bacchanals: Brandywine Investigations #4
Midwinter Dancing: Brandywine Investigations #4.5
Pack Up the Moon: Brandywine Investigations #5

Please note: Books, Bulls & Bacchanals has been re-edited with a few story adjustments for this edition.

Buy Links: Amazon | Mischief Corner Books | Add to Goodreads

 

 

 

 

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Comment on this post for the chance to win one of the following prizes:

1| One Mass Market Paperback Copy of Bonfires [US Only] OR one e-Copy of either Bonfires or Crocus by Amy Lane.

2| One Winner’s Choice eBook by Andrew Grey.

3| One e-Copy of The Congressman’s Whore by Clancy Nacht and Thursday Euclid.

4| One Backlist eBook by James Buchanan.

5| One $25 Mischief Corner Books Gift Card by Angel Martinez.

You need to be 18 years or older to participate in this giveaway. Void where prohibited. Etc.

Winners will be randomly drawn from all commenters on this post via random.org

This Giveaway will end on March 14th, 2018 at 11:59 PM CST

GOOD LUCK!!! ❤