Hi peeps! We have Brad Vance & Elsa Winters popping in today with their new release Conning Colin, we have a brilliant interview with Brad, a great excerpt and a fantastic giveaway, so check out the post and click that giveaway link! <3 ~Pixie~
Conning Colin
Brad Vance & Elsa Winters
Hamilton Dillon is a high class Manhattan escort, polished, well dressed, and cultured. Colin O’Neill is recently divorced, questioning his sexuality, and disappointed by his first fumbling gay hookups. So he figures, why not hire the best of the best to show him the ropes?
What he doesn’t know is that Hamilton Dillon is really Henry Davis, yet another New Yorker living on the financial edge, cobbling together several jobs to make a living. “Hamilton” has one great suit he can wear on an overnight date, but Henry’s got a good friend at GQ who makes a nice side income renting designer men’s wear for weddings, job interviews, and oh yeah, high end escorts on long weekend assignments. The “top agency” that represents “Hamilton” is really just a smartass lady in India with a Skype account, whose face Henry’s never seen. Oh, and Henry’s also the gruff and very unpolished New York Straight Man “Dillinger,” a solo porn star.
In other words, he’s not at all who Colin thinks he is. Which is just fine, until their relationship gets… complicated.
Interview with Brad Vance!
Today we have an interview with Brad Vance, author of Conning Colin. Tell us a little about yourself and your current book.
Do you have pictures that you use for your characters? Can you share them with us?
I was very lucky that Angstyg, my cover artist, found a dead ringer for Henry Davis. I’d modeled Henry (and he models himself) on Matt Bomer, especially in his White Collar incarnation. And that guy on the cover could easily be Matt Bomer’s brother!
What kind of book would you like to write that people would see as a huge departure for you?
Werewolves of Brooklyn was a big departure for me. I don’t normally do paranormal, but I really wanted to do something different with the werewolf mythology – the idea that the werewolves chose you, but you also had to choose, that there was no “bite,” no curse. I set it in both modern day and 1860s Brooklyn, both of which took a lot of research. It really resounded with a lot of my fans, but unfortunately it didn’t fly with paranormal book buyers – too distant from the usual “alpha/pack/shifter” tropes, I guess. Many of my fans have asked for a sequel, and I’d love to write one, but… alas most of my creative decisions now are also financial decisions, though I’d love to revisit that world someday.
Have you ever killed a character? Was it traumatic for you? If you haven’t killed one, would you ever consider it?
I have killed a few of them! It’s not fun when they’re good people. But sometimes the story requires a sacrifice. I haven’t done any George R. R. Martin killing of any major characters, and don’t plan to do so. Angst and torment is something I’m leaving behind now. Adventure, excitement, comedy, fun is what I’m looking forward to writing from now on.
Favorite location you’ve ever written about?
Kryptos, the fictional Greek island I created for “Apollo’s Curse.” It’s like “Brigadoon,” a magical place that only appears to those who are chosen to visit it. It’s beautiful, full of mysterious characters including people (or gods, take your pick), goats, cats, mermaids… Physically it was a composite of a number of real islands I’d seen in videos and travel guides during my research. I wanted everyone to feel like it was a place they wanted to go, but couldn’t – that it was only a place you could go here, in this book.
What’s your favorite season and favorite activity for that season?
Summer, and just being alive. I have Seasonal Affective Disorder, and with the end of the drought here in the west, we’ve had a seven month winter, basically. It’s tremendously depressing. I love to walk, and I hate being cold, so that doesn’t happen much if at all in the winter. I’m hoping my new potential career as a screenwriter will get me to LA, where I’ll never see a snowflake again!
Excerpt!
Colin O’Neill hung up the phone, dizzy with excitement and fear. He’d done it. He’d called the number, talked to the agency, and booked a “date” with Hamilton Dillon.
He’d looked at Hamilton’s Rentmen.com ad a hundred times, at least, over the last three months. He’d looked forward to new profile photos the way a kid keeps an ear cocked for the ice cream truck. Even though all the profile pictures had been beheaded for discretion, it didn’t matter. Hamilton Dillon had a way of posing that expressed more personality with his body than most other guys ever did with their faces.
The way he sat on a park bench in nothing but a pair of running shorts and Nikes, shirtless, manspread, his arms thrown over the back of the bench, his strong graceful neck taut, telling you that the face just out of frame was tilted up towards the Central Park sunshine, that the man was reveling in his easy beauty, the unique joy that comes from being young and hot and free in New York City…
Then the way he floated in the air in those same shorts and Nikes, leaping for a football, the camera capturing him from behind in the moment the ball touched his fingers, the imminence of his success apparent, ordained, the muscles in his back bunched, the mass of his shoulders gathered together, sweat flying off his brown hair, in the seconds before you knew he landed on the lawn, arms curled around the ball, surely to rise in triumph and be slapped on the back by all his equally hot and shirtless buddies…
The way he sat at a café table, in a slim fit navy blue polo shirt, one of his sculpted vascular arms holding open a well-worn copy of The Fortress of Solitude and the other just toying with a cup of espresso as if it was the back of another man’s hand…
Colin often did something that very few men did anymore, which was to masturbate furiously and successfully to a series of still photos. And with no penises in sight, to boot. He’d done it so often over the last three months that he’d stopped donating his old t-shirts, because he needed them for cleanup duty, at least until they became hopelessly stained.
He had been divorced for six months now, amicably, from a wife who’d pretty much always known he was gay but had decided to let him figure it out for himself. Elspeth was a career woman whose need for a husband was seasonal, from the company picnic in July to the company Christmas party in December, with various client dinners in between.
He was twenty seven years old, and had engaged in sexual intercourse with one woman and two men. Intercourse was pretty much the word for it, he thought. It sounded less like passion and more like, well, cars merging on the freeway, and all three partners had been just about that exciting. (Actually less so, since on the freeway there was always the thrilling risk of death at the hands of someone who’d rather kill you than let you merge.)
Then one night, half drunk and inhibitions lowered, he’d thought, Fuck it, let’s hire a professional and see how it feels when it’s done right.
He’d paged through the escort ads on Rentmen, hundreds of them in Manhattan alone. It was mind numbing, the diversity, and it was overwhelming, the number of choices. He knew he didn’t want to visit Master Bob in his safe and private play space, and he knew he didn’t want to party with Anaconda Joe. The ones who caught his eye were, well yeah, the ones who looked… classy. The one thing he knew he didn’t want was to get ripped off.
And he didn’t want it to feel… He didn’t want to feel like he’d got a burger in a fast food drive through. He wanted it to be special, if that was really possible with a paid companion and not just something that happened to teenage boys in Hollywood movies.
But even the upscale-looking ones, well, there was something about them that… He knew it was good business, to offer yourself up as “versatile,” and available for “mild to wild,” but… Well, the more he saw what he didn’t want, the more a picture began to form in his mind of what he did want. He didn’t want someone who looked like an investment banker but whose profile also said, “Hey I look classy but I can drop it if you just want a dirty pig fest and you’ve got the money for it.”
No. He wanted someone who was one thing. Who wasn’t whoever you wanted him to be. But who was what he said he was. Classy, for real. Not “up for anything.”
And then he found Harrison Dillon.
About Brad!
Brad Vance writes gay romance, erotica and paranormal stories and novels, including the breakout hits “A Little Too Broken” and “Given the Circumstances.” Keep up with Brad at www.BradVanceErotica.wordpress.com, email him at BradVanceErotica@gmail.com, and friend him on Facebook at www.facebook.com/brad.vance.10
Where to find the author:
Facebook | Blog | Twitter | Google+
Giveaway!
One Lucky Winner Will Receive An ebook copy of The Road Home
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