Hi guys, we have Christopher Koehler stopping by with his lastest release POZ, Christopher talks to us about what inspired POZ and I’ve nicked an excerpt from Dreamspinner Press for you to check out 🙂 , there’s a great giveaway and we have Prime’s review for you to enjoy. So enjoy the post then click that Rafflecopter link <3 ~Pixie~

 POZ

Christopher Koehler

Remy Babcock and Mikey Castelreigh are stalwart members of the Capital City Rowing Club’s junior crew, pulling their hardest to earn scholarships to rowing powerhouses like California Pacific. Just a couple of all-American boys, they face the usual pressures of life in an academic hothouse and playing a varsity sport. Add to that the stifling confines of the closet, and sometimes life isn’t always easy, even in the golden bubble of their accepting community. Because Remy and Mikey have a secret: they’re both gay. While Mikey has never hidden it, Remy is a parka and a pair of mittens away from Narnia.

Mikey has always been open about wanting more than friendship, but Remy is as uncomfortable in his own skin as he is a demon on the water. After their signals cross, and a man mistakes Remy for a college student, Remy takes the plunge and hooks up with him. After a furious Mikey cuts Remy off, Remy falls to the pressure of teenage life, wanting to be more and needing it now. In his innocence and naiveté, Remy makes mistakes that have life-long consequences. When Remy falls in the midst of the most important regatta of his life, he can only hope Mikey will be there to catch him when he needs it most.

What inspired Poz?

“How To Turn Helpless Rage Into A Novel In Five Easy Steps”

Christopher Koehler

First step: find a subject that both infuriates and inspires you. In the case of Poz, it was dismaying statistics about younger gay and bi men and HIV. For starters, the CDC has found a 20% drop in condom use among gay and bi men since 2005. Not coincidentally, new infections are on the rise, and furthermore, the rate of new infections continues to increase. Similar stats hold true across the other industrialized Western democracies.

As if that weren’t enough, 33% of HIV-positive men who have sex with men didn’t know they were HIV-positive because they hadn’t been tested, and due to that, mistakenly believed they were HIV-negative. At the same time, the percentage of men who reported going condomless at least once in a twelve month period rose from 48% in 2005 to 57% in 2011 (the last year numbers were available). 33% of men haven’t been tested in the last twelve months.

To summarize, more people are bare-backing, more are HIV-positive, and they don’t know it because they mistakenly believe they’re HIV-negative.

Second step: react to the information on a very personal level. I’m forty-four. I’ve known I was gay since I was quite young. I didn’t have a word for it, but I knew I was different “in that way.” I lived through the first wave of the plague. I was in junior high when it hit, and I grew up about 70 miles from San Francisco so there was no escaping it in the news. I came of age sexually knowing that what I wanted and needed could kill me. But here’s the clincher and also my entrée into the Freak Hall of Fame. I realized all by myself that if the top wore a condom neither man technically touched the other, not in the way that counted.

So how did I react to this new information from the CDC? The way I always have to news like this. Rage. We know what causes HIV, folks. It’s not some mysterious “gay plague” that might come from hot tubs. The mode of transmission is well-documented. The natural history of the retrovirus that causes HIV is no longer a mystery. Why the hell is this still happening? Seriously, boys, wrap the rascal.

But maybe I’m finally growing up. All I need to understand is that it is happening. The education campaigns have stopped working. That’s all most of us need to know. I’ll leave it to the education experts to determine why. Me? I’m an author. I write books. Maybe I can help that way.

Third step: run it by your publisher. I’m super lucky. My prospectus for this project consisted of a four- or five-line email to my publisher, who greenlighted it right away. That’s not to say I didn’t ask follow-up questions about either content or marketing—Elizabeth North at Dreamspinner is an amazingly patient person—but I conceived of this project and started writing it within a very short amount of time.

Fourth step: have a vivid imagination that turns everything into a story. You’ve either got this or you don’t. I’m not sure you can force a muse. Mine’s been clobbering me over the head with a proverbial frying pan of creativity lately. It probably means I’ll burn out within five years, but once I sat down, I had a detailed outline for Poz within a month. That’s fast for me, but I had and have something to say on this subject. Actually, Remy wanted his story told. Rarely have I had a protagonist as pushy and outspoken as Remy.

Fifth step: write the fucker. This is both the easiest and hardest step. Do you find writing easy? I to admit, Poz wrote the easiest of any of my six novels, but then, it’s a subject I believe in and am apparently passionate about.

I’m not the only author to feel this way about it, either. Go check out Brent Hartinger’s The Real Story Safe Sex Project (http://brenthartinger.com/therealstory/).

My general philosophy of life is not to get any of it on my hands, but not this time. I don’t think I get to sit this one out. I’m not yet sure what form this will take, but I learned a lot while I wrote Poz. We all have an HIV status, but if you’re a sexually active gay or bi man, there’s a good chance you don’t know yours. Please, get tested. Be careful. There’s still no cure, and the drugs, while so much better than they used to be, are not a cure and are not always easy on the system.

So, for me, Poz was inspired in a very real sense, a breathing in of spirit or idea. I hope you like the result.

Excerpt

The end of my junior year, approximately one year earlier

WHEN ALL this started, my older brother Geoff didn’t know I was gay, at least not to my knowledge. I’d called him “Goff” when we were really young because I couldn’t pronounce his name. He’d called me “Germy” because he couldn’t say Jeremy. He still calls me Germy, even though everyone else calls me Remy. I still called him Goff, so I guess that was fair.

Goff was thirteen minutes older—we were twins of the fraternal variety—and he milked that older bit like a Holstein cow. Thirteen minutes, but you would have thought it was thirteen years. Anyway, he played football. He looked out for me, or at least tried, but he was and is straight as a plank. We wrangled a lot, still do actually, but he saved me from a lot of homophobic hassling, sometimes at the hands of his own friends, without even knowing I was gay, which was pretty cool of him.

“Teammates,” Goff would say. “They’re not my friends, not if they’re giving you shit.”

He was a good guy when he wasn’t being an asshole.

That said, Goff never understood a fundamental part of me, at least not until I came out to him. I guess that was my fault, though. How could he, when I’d never told him I was gay? But how could I, when I couldn’t have borne losing my brother? He was my twin, the person I was closest to in the world. Losing him would’ve meant losing a part of me. We fought like cats in a gunnysack and it drove our parents crazy, but they never understood that we went to the trouble of irritating each other because we loved each other. We certainly weren’t going to tell each other that. We were (and are) teenage males. Dad was a shrink. Dr. Babcock should’ve gotten that but didn’t.

So anyway, Goff missed a major piece of who I was and everything that went along with that. Now I wouldn’t say all teenage boys were sex-obsessed, just every one I’ve ever encountered. But he had all the sex he wanted and had no idea what it’s like not getting it. For me, it was not being gotten. So I was horny as hell in high school and about to burst. That was the start of all my problems, I guess.

Our family lived in Davis, an über-liberal organo-groovy college town about seventy miles from San Francisco. Davis had bought into Cesar Chavez’s grape boycott, which I read about in history class; it made itself a nuclear-free zone, which was kind of a joke when UC Davis boasted a particle accelerator of its very own. Besides, what good would the declaration of being a nuclear-free zone have done? Protect the city if the US and the USSR had nuked each other? There were three major Air Force bases around the city during the Cold War. There’d have been a bright blue flash and then nothing. Good luck with that nuclear-free zone. The city was also a declared sanctuary for undocumented immigrants. I could go on, but why bother? A homecoming prince even brought his boyfriend to prom one year. As a gay kid, I should’ve been golden in a city and high school like this.

But someone forgot to send my parents that memo, or at least my mother. Mom was a smart woman—she majored in chemistry in college and went on to become a drug rep for a pharmaceutical company after she decided getting a Pharm.D wasn’t for her—but she was oblivious sometimes, especially where Goff and I were concerned. Of both our parents, she in particular was loud with the compulsory heterosexuality messaging, things like telling me I was morally obligated to take some unpopular (read: fat with braces) girl to the prom. She said it was my “gentlemanly duty” or some such bull, but Goff and I both knew it was because she herself had been fat with braces in high school. She wasn’t doing it deliberately—trying to make me miserable—but she succeeded admirably.

Read more here, just click the Expand button: http://www.dreamspinnerpress.com/store/product_info.php?products_id=5918

About Christopher

Christopher Koehler learned to read late (or so his teachers thought) but never looked back. It was not, however, until he was nearly done with grad school in the history of science that he realized that he needed to spend his life writing and not on the publish-or-perish treadmill. At risk of being thought frivolous, he found that academic writing sucked all the fun out of putting pen to paper.

Christopher is also something of a hothouse flower. Inside of almost unreal conditions he thrives to set the results of his imagination free, and for most of his life he has been lucky enough to be surrounded by people who encouraged both that tendency and the writing. Chief among them is his long-suffering husband of twenty-two years and counting.

When it comes to writing, Christopher follows Anne Lamott’s advice: “You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.” So while he writes fiction, at times he ruthlessly mines his past for character traits and situations. Reality is far stranger than fiction.

Christopher loves many genres of fiction and nonfiction, but he’s especially fond of romances, because it is in them that human emotions and relations, at least most of the ones fit to be discussed publicly, are laid bare.

Writing is his passion and his life, but when Christopher is not doing that, he’s an at-home dad and oarsman with a slightly disturbing interest in manners and other ways people behave badly.

Visit him at http://christopherkoehler.net/blog or follow him on Twitter @christopherink.

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Review

Title: Poz

Series: The Lives of Remy and Michael 01

Author: Christopher Koehler

Genre: Contemporary, Sport, YA

Length: Novel (197 pages)

ISBN: 978-1-63216-369-1

Publisher: Dreamspinner Press (8^th January 2015)

Heat Level: Moderate

Heart Rating: ♥♥♥♥ 4 Hearts

Reviewer: Prime

Blurb: The Lives of Remy and Michael: Book One 

Remy Babcock and Mikey Castelreigh are stalwart members of the Capital City Rowing Club’s junior crew, pulling their hardest to earn scholarships to rowing powerhouses like California Pacific. Just a couple of all-American boys, they face the usual pressures of life in an academic hothouse and playing a varsity sport. Add to that the stifling confines of the closet, and sometimes life isn’t always easy, even in the golden bubble of their accepting community. Because Remy and Mikey have a secret: they’re both gay. While Mikey has never hidden it, Remy is a parka and a pair of mittens away from Narnia. 

Mikey has always been open about wanting more than friendship, but Remy is as uncomfortable in his own skin as he is a demon on the water. After their signals cross, and a man mistakes Remy for a college student, Remy takes the plunge and hooks up with him. After a furious Mikey cuts Remy off, Remy falls to the pressure of teenage life, wanting to be more and needing it now. In his innocence and naiveté, Remy makes mistakes that have life-long consequences. When Remy falls in the midst of the most important regatta of his life, he can only hope Mikey will be there to catch him when he needs it most.

Product Link: http://www.dreamspinnerpress.com/store/product_info.php?products_id=5918

Review: This is a hard hitting book and definitely not ashamed of being real. I have to admit, it got off to a slow start for me, before after about 60 or so pages, that was it. The story really came into its own after what seems to be a lot of background info leading to the guts of the story. This book is about raising awareness and I think sends an important message, not only for young gay people, but also straight and every other shade in between. In creating such a message in what feels like such a personal feel, Christopher Koehler has not disappointed.

Remy, real name Jeremy (aka Germy to his brother), has a twin brother, Geoff (aka Goff) along with his mother and father, who is also a psychotherapist. The psychotherapist part is important in terms of Remy’s father because he is so oblivious when it comes to one of his sons (Remy) but more attentive when it comes to the other (Geoff). Really, it just shows that Remy comes from a normal, ever so slightly dysfunctional family where parents aren’t some sort of oracle that knows everything. Remy isn’t a jock but he is a champion rower and so in his final years of school, rowing is just as important to him as his school work, perhaps even more important. He is young, gay and in closest. After some issues (it’s all the usual teen angst) with his best friend, Mikey, Remy is not only sick of being a virgin, he wants to cure himself of this problem. This leads to a winding path of self discovery and massive life changing experiences. Through thick and think, however, Remy always has Geoff and Mikey by his side, which really endeared both boys to me as a reader.

Since more details aren’t in the blurb, I’m going to stay away from the issues brought up and not give it away. I think going in not knowing completely what to expect really is what drives the message. Suffice to say I was left with no burning questions except what would the future bring for Remy. Neither did I find any gaping holes in the plot or continuity leaving me with a rant or burning questions. If anything, there was one short passage told from Mikey POV and I probably would have liked for there to be more, either in that one passage or elsewhere (maybe that could have something to do with the next book???).

Remy narrates the story. He starts and ends from a rowing race in his senior year, but goes back one year as he tells the story. Where he explains how he had scared himself and felt guilt for letting down not only himself but the people around him.

Despite the slow beginning, I think it’s fairly obvious that I enjoyed this one. I can’t wait to see what else is in store for these characters. This has been one of those books that made me cry a few tears but ultimately I was cheering for the characters. 

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